Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora

CHAPTER 12 Nos Ancêtres, les Diallobés: Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure and the Paradoxes of Islamic Négritude

CHAPTER 12 Nos Ancêtres, les Diallobés Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure and the Paradoxes of Islamic Négritude Marc Caplan Though famously home to a variety of diasporic black writers, musicians, and artists, Paris is significant to Black Atlantic thought in an institutional, ideological sense as the birthplace in the 1930s of Négritude. As an aesthetic movement, Négritude was the first effort by black artists, primarily poets, to create an aesthetic that was both explicitly black, pan-African, and at the same time modernist. Négritude aspires to express a specifically black sensibility in terms that derive from cosmopolitan, ostensibly universal sources at the heart of Western, specifically French, culture. It is as such the first effort by a collective of African intellectuals to assert control of the cultural apparatus of colonial modernity, and thus stands as a historically crucial and artistically provocative development in the struggle against colonialism. As an ideological program Négritude offers at the same time the most intense and influential example of how black Atlantic literature has interacted with modernism and the metropole. Though the founders of Négritude intended for their movement to be pan-African, uniting black people from Africa and the Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure 291 New World in a new creative spirit, the ideology in fact developed in parallel directions during the 1940s and 1950s among Caribbean and African intellectuals. It is necessary to acknowledge this divergence because in so doing one comes to understand how Négritude, the primary term in an ostensibly unified Black Atlantic cultural lexicon , came to signify quite distinct aesthetic and political perspectives ; this leads the critical reader in turn to question the notion of the Black Atlantic as a singular historical entity. Moreover, a focus specifically on African Négritude helps to reintegrate African literature into a historical discourse about the Black Atlantic that has tended to focus exclusively on the African diaspora.1 As a fundamentally synthesizing position between traditional Africa and modern France, Négritude articulates an ambivalence toward its simultaneous nationalist and cosmopolitan aspirations, situating its protagonists—whether actual ideologues or fictional characters—between allegiance to their native culture and a supposedly universal humanism. For example, Alioune Diop, founder of the central Négritude journal of the independence era, Présence Africaine, writes, “As for Western civilization, it is definitely murderous —even towards itself. But it is the seat of the most powerful institutions to support democracy, justice, and love . . . We all need the West. We also need it to master . . . an all too powerful appetite on its own part for domination—so that we may live harmoniously . . . with other human civilizations” (Diop xvi). Diop in this statement simultaneously differentiates African culture from the West, yet announces the continued dependence of Africans on the West both in a political sense and in a sense of cultural affiliation; Africa’s interaction with the world at large can only be achieved, according to Diop’s logic, through the mediating intervention of the West. This reasoning is in fact essential to the rhetorical and political strategies of African Négritude generally. Indeed, in the context of Négritude, literature in Western forms becomes for African intellectuals a means to create a separate cultural formulation between the systems of power organized around the polarities of native tradition and colonial modernity; moreover, creating this literature in a colonial language provides a singular opportunity for anti-colonial intellectuals to address a genuinely international audience. The space cleared by this literature is, however, often as much a no-man’s land as a room of one’s own. The author’s autonomy, to the extent that it exists at all, is dependent on the sufferance of social institutions, such as publishing houses, school systems , and political organizations typically controlled by the power structures from which the writer seeks to liberate himself or herself .2 For a Francophone writer, particularly during and immediately 292 Marc Caplan after the colonial era, such institutions were generally located—as Alioune Diop knew firsthand—in Paris rather than Dakar or Bamako. Literary narrative, as opposed to the lyric poetry that characterizes the first flowering of Négritude creativity, provides, among other merits, a means to analyze the complex interaction between African and French cultures, and among these power formations and the individual African subject. To begin this process of analysis, this essay focuses on the...