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6 The “Marie NDiaye Affair,” or the Coming of a Postcolonial évoluée Conrad portrays a void; Hamidou Kane celebrates a human presence and a heroic if doomed struggle. The difference between the two stories is very clear. You might say that difference was the very reason the African writer came into being. His story had been told for him, and he had found the telling quite unsatisfactory. —Chinua Achebe1 The awarding of the Prix Goncourt to Marie NDiaye on November 2, 2009, for her novel Trois femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women) may at first sight appear to have brought further confirmation of the “Copernican revolution,” which, according to signatories of the manifesto “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français,” has been sweeping through the world of literatures of French expression , casting aside hierarchical distinctions inherited from the colonial era.2 Yet scarcely had the announcement of NDiaye’s triumph been made when it unleashed a public controversy that showed her to be trapped in a web of identity politics which, in the optic of the manifesto, had supposedly been consigned to the trash can of history. Though the word was not publicly used, NDiaye was, I will argue, treated as a latter-day évoluée. While deferring unconditional membership to that privileged club that was Frenchness, the French colonial authorities coined the category of évolués in order to designate certain colonized subjects which, through exposure to colonial educational and assimilationist mechanisms, had internalized French cultural and social norms. The racial advocacy organization founded in 2005 and known as Les Indigènes de la République has emphasized the transcolonial and transhistorical connections inherent in such mechanisms of hierarchization in terms of their representation of “descendants of slaves and deported Africans, daughters and sons of the colonized and of immigrants.”3 140 Africa and France The treatment meted out to the distinguished and critically acclaimed writer Marie NDiaye highlights the complex positions the writer has negotiated in the process of belonging in France as a person of African descent (her mother is a white French woman and her father a black Senegalese man) in a nationstate whose republican ideals and values are supposed to render ethnicity indistinguishable . In practice, NDiaye’s racial differentiation explains the disquieting statements formulated by an elected member of the French National Assembly (Eric Raoult) in response to comments she had made concerning the impact on ethnic minorities and immigrants of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s policies. In Raoult’s view, these statements put into question her allegiance to France. Raoult’s claims betrayed deep-seated expectations concerning the standards to which immigrants—treated in effect as postcolonial incarnations of évolués—should adhere. Wider social tensions on these issues have been heightened since November 2009 when the French government launched the National Identity Debate seeking to define what it means to be French, a debate implicitly structured around outdated notions of a pristine, white Europebound French history.4 At the same time, NDiaye herself has been outspoken concerning the limits of her Africaness and her conceptualizations and paradigms of Africa in her own writings also raise important questions. The complex web of issues makes it particularly challenging to situate NDiaye clearly in relation to existing theorizations of a littérature-monde in French and also highlights the potential pitfalls inherent in seeking to situate writers according to a single identity. The connection between littérature-monde and major literary prizes in France has been foundational to the process of thinking about the parameters of such a literary model. In response to the award of three important prizes in one season to non-natives, Jonathan Littell (Goncourt), Alain Mabanckou (Renaudot ), and Nancy Huston (Femina), the initial manifesto “Pour une ‘littératuremonde ’ en français” (Toward a World Literature in French) published March 16, 2007, in Le Monde proclaimed: “The center, from which supposedly radiated a franco-French literature, is no longer the center. Until now, the center, although less and less frequently, had its absorptive capacity that forced authors who came from elsewhere to rid themselves of their foreign trappings before melting in the crucible of the French language and its national history: the center, these fall prizes tell us, is henceforth everywhere, at the four corners of the world” (“Toward a World Literature in French,” 54). Francophone prize-winning precursors had of course included Tahar Ben Jelloun, Patrick Chamoiseau, Andreï Makine, Amin Maalouf, and Ahmadou Kourouma, and [18.119.135.202] Project MUSE (2024...

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