1968: Crisis in African Letters

The year 1968 marks, without doubt, a critical moment in African Francophone literature. Two novels published that year bear testimony that indeed something new might be happening, something we may characterize as a break away from a more "traditional" African writing: annus mirabilis 1968 is the date of publication of two first novels, Malian Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence and Ivoirian Ahmadou Kourouma's Les Soleils des independances. Both Ouologuem and Kourouma made a thunderous entrance into the world of letters: in the very same year 1968, unknown writer Yambo Ouologuem was the winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, and Les Soleils des independances was widely acclaimed. When, in 2000, Ahmadou Kourouma won the Renaudot for his novel Allah n'est pas oblige (the book also won the Goncourt des Lyceens), it certainly can be said that the prize came as a crowning of a trajectory, of a way of writing that first struck the unexpectedly large audience that discovered Les Soleils more than thirty years earlier. With thunder also came sulfur. In the case of Kourouma's Les Soleils, the controversy was about its language. Should what some considered a literary promotion of francais debrouille (broken French) be saluted as innovative writing? What is the merit, they would ask, of a work of literal translation of an African language (Malinke) into French, of an art of speaking Malinke in French? It has to be recalled that at first the French publishers contacted by Amadou Kourouma did not want to publish a text in what they simply perceived as "broken French." It was then published in Canada, precisely a non-French Francophone country, where the idea of working the language in such unexpected ways, from another language, found a warm welcome. Following that first publication, a few months later, Le Seuil in Paris decided to publish the novel which rapidly encountered great success. "Sulfur" is certainly a word to be used to speak of Yambo Ouologuem's novel: after the acclaim came the scandal when the Malian writer was lambasted and his work vilified as he was accused of plagiarizing many passages of it. The very incipit of the novel, it soon appeared, laid the cards on the table: a comparison between the first words of Le Devoir de violence: Nos yeux boivent l'eclat du soleil, et, vaincus, s'etonnent de pleurer, Maschallah ! oua bismillah ![...]. Un recit de l'aventure sanglante The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1-2 (c) The Trustees of Columbia University de la negraille--honte aux hommes de rien !- tiendrait aisement dans la premiere moitie de ce siecle ; mais la veritable histoire des negres commence beaucoup, beaucoup plus tot, avec les Saifs, en l'an 1202 de notre ere, dans l'Empire africain [...]. and the following passage from Andre Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des justes: Nos yeux recoivent la lumiere d'etoiles mortes. Une biographie de mon ami Ernie tiendrait aisement dans le deuxieme quart du XXe siecle ; mais la veritable histoire d'Ernie Levy commence tres tot, dans la vieille cite [...]. shows clearly the presence of Schwartz-Bart text in Ouologuem's writing. In addition to Schwartz-Bart, other writers had also been "visited" by Ouologuem, who borrowed and rewrote from their works: Graham Greene, Maupassant, and others. While a representative for Graham Greene threatened to take legal action, Andre Schwartz-Bart, with great elegance, declared: "I am especially touched, even overwhelmed, to think that a Black writer should have relied on Le Dernier des justes in creating a book like Le Devoir de violence. Thus Mr. Ouologuem is not indebted to me, but rather I to him." Yambo Ouologuem himself protested that in his original manuscript, the "borrowings" from other writers and texts were clearly indicated but that sounded just clumsy as the publisher was very quick to "throw him under the bus" as the saying goes, in order to put away possible legal issues. …