Writers, Rebels, and Cannibals: Léonora Miano’s Rendering of Africa in L’Intérieur de la nuit

Leonora Miano’s first novel L’Interieur de la nuit received a laudatory critical reception when it was published by the French publishing house Plon in 2005. The novel’s depiction of an act of cannibalism in a village of a fictional African nation provides the turning point and central event of the narrative. The novel’s cannibalism has also been central to its critical reception in the west. While many Francophone works have employed and developed the metaphor of the act of cannibalism, Miano “cannibalizes” in her novel in unique ways that prove simultaneously problematic and productively revealing. This article considers the interviews Miano has made in defense of her novel together with a close reading of the text. The analysis reveals the dilemmas and limitations a Francophone author faces in an act of cannibalizing Africa in literary form and within a western literary and cultural market place invested in trafficking and recycling images of Africa as a dark, backwards continent of unfathomable violence and savagery. This article also examines the close connection between the novel’s fictional rebels who impose cannibalisms on African villagers, the novel’s main protagonist Ayane who witnesses the scene from a distance, and Miano, the western educated author who renders all of this both from within an African “interior of night” and from the west. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol34/iss1/6 Writers, Rebels, and Cannibals: Leonora Miano’s Rendering of Africa in L’Interieur de la nuit Magali Compan College of William and Mary The term “cannibalism,” first coined by Christopher Columbus as he was writing about the Arawaks in the Caribbean, has been used repeatedly by imperial Europe in an effort to distinguish itself from the subjects of its colonial expansion and to justify the colonization of territories. Although this term was in the past used to construct differences between colonizers and colonized, Francophone authors have, in turn, appropriated the trope and produced numerous texts highlighting its potential for resistance. Cannibalism as a Western construct has allowed the Francophone author to construct, exploit, and also question images of exclusion, destruction, regurgitation, and renewed strength. From Negritude’s founding text Cahier d’un retour au pays natal ‘Notebook to a Return to the Native Land’ (Aime Cesaire, 1939) to contemporary texts such as Cannibales ‘Welcome to Paradise’ (Mahi Binebine, 1999), or Histoire de la femme cannibale ‘The Story of the Cannibal Woman’ (Maryse Conde, 2003), Francophone authors have used cannibalism to challenge colonialist delineations between “civilized” and “savage.” In place of such delineations, these authors evoke images of cultural assimilation, alienation, and destructive consumption. While many contemporary Francophone works have employed and developed the metaphor of the act of cannibalism, Leonora Miano “cannibalizes” in her novel L’Interieur de la nuit ‘The Interior of the Night’ in ways that prove simultaneously problematic and productively revealing. She has joined the ranks of Francophone writers living in Paris such as Ahmadou Kourouma, Calixthe Beyala, and Jean-Luc Raharimanana, who, with great success, have emphasized 1 Compan: Writers, Rebels, and Cannibals: Leonora Miano’s Rendering of Afri Published by New Prairie Press 82 ST&TCL, Volume 34, No. 1 (Winter 2010) the need to criticize the “dream of Africa,” bringing the responsibilities of Africa’s contemporary state of decay to Africans themselves, relating histories of nepotism, corruption, oppression, savagery, and, among others, cannibalism. Miano’s trajectory is similar to many African authors living in Paris. She was born in Douala on the coast of Cameroon and left her native land at eighteen years old to settle in France, where she has lived ever since. First enrolled at the university in Valenciennes to study Anglo-American literatures, she soon moved to the University of Nanterre in Paris. Although she began writing at the age of eight, she submitted her first manuscript to a publisher after turning thirty. Since L’Interieur de la nuit, she has also published Contours du jour qui vient (2006) ‘Outline of the Coming Day’ and Tels des astres eteints (2008) ‘Like Dead Stars.’ While her first two novels take place in Africa, Miano sets her latest work in Europe. All three novels explore social, political, and metaphysical questions, including the ways individuals come to perform unbearable acts, African relationships with the European continent and the former colonial powers, and women’s roles in Africa in the twenty-first century. In these novels, Miano develops themes of cannibalism, prostitution, witchcraft, vagrancy, murder, and violence. By writing about such contentious issues and also known facts of the recent history of Africa, authors are, in the words of Suzanne Crosta, “bringing negative forces in the open in order to reflect on possible solutions” (98). This form of literary shock treatment has provided Francophone writers impressive book sales and a means of denouncing situations in Africa while sensitizing, and perhaps even mobilizing, their largely Western readership. But such literary successes come with the problems of perpetuating if not an African dream, a European nightmare image of Africa. Clearly identified as Africans, authors such as Kourouma, Raharimanana, and Miano have come to represent an “authentic” African voice within the Western literary marketplace. As expert witnesses of their culture, these authors are, as Christiane Ndiaye puts it, perceived as the ones “capable of revealing to the world ‘the soul of the black people’” (97). The danger of such writings, Ndiaye explains, is that they can be reduced to a justification of some of these “absolute truths” about Africa. Ndiaye writes that, “some are 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 34, Iss. 1 [2010], Art. 6 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol34/iss1/6 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1713