Morocco - Dans le jardin de l'ogre et. al.

Country: Morocco
Books: Dans le jardin de l'ogre/Chanson douce/ Le diable est dans les details/ Le parfum des fleurs la nuit
Author: Leïla Slimani
Publication Year: 2014/2016/2017/2021
Genre: Fiction/Non-Fiction

Country: Morocco
Book: Last Chapter (الفصل الأخير)
Author: Leila Abouzeid, John Liechety (Translator)
Publication Year: 2010 (2000)
Genre: Fiction

Additional Material

Book: Hideous Kinky
Author: Esther Freud
Publication Year: 1992
Genre: Autobiographical Fiction

Morocco is one of those countries about which we know more than we think. Casablanca is known throughout the world thanks to the Humphrey Bogart film and to the countless parodies that have been made of it over the years. It is still the most populous city in the country with a population of 3.4 million.

Yet there are other Moroccan towns and cities that are almost as well known to the outside world. Rabat, the capital. Marrakesh, with its reputation for attracting hippy types through the writings of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Fez, the cultural capital of Morocco, site of the world’s oldest university, established in 859 by a Tunisian heiress. There is also the port town of Tangier that sits on the opposite side of the Strait of Gibraltar from the British outpost.

We know more of Morocco than we think. More than any other country in North Africa. Even in Egypt, the only cities most people know are Cairo, Alexandria and, maybe, Port Said. Few countries can match Egypt for sheer breadth of history of course. Though Morocco, has been doing quite well for the last millennium or so (file previous sentence under British understatement).

All in, I have read more books by Moroccan authors and about Morocco than any other country so far in this project (spoilers: India will easily eclipse this). Although all of these are quite short works. Nothing much over two hundred pages. It all adds up.

The first book about Morocco is not by a Moroccan at all, but English author, Ether Freud. Hideous Kinky is a semi autobiographical account of Freud’s childhood in the 1960s, when her mother took her and her older sister to live in Marrakesh.

The events of the novel take place when Freud’s alter-ego, Lucy, is between four and six years of age. Which give the lie to the idea that Loung Ung was too young to accurately recall the events of First They Killed My Father (see: Cambodia). Some of the details might be muddied (which is why Hideous Kinky is semi-autobiographical), but the larger details are solid.

Hideous Kinky of course is a rose tinted view of Marrakesh and Morocco for all sorts of reasons; it’s chronology sitting as it does in that No Man’s Land between the end of colonialism and the establishment of independent Arab states. Before the cynicism of the 70s. Before the coming of a whole new kind of authoritarian rule in North Africa.

Burroughs and his contemporaries tried to turn Morocco into a counterculture paradise, though how much of that was always a fantasy is hard to gauge. It was the 60s and a new wave of Orientalism was in progress, personified by the Beatles’ stays in India studying transcendental meditation. Lucy’s mother herself develops an interest in Sufism, though the families dwindling resources soon force them back to England. 

I throw Hideous Kinky into the mix here partly because it is interesting to read books about countries from authors who are neither native nor have any pre-existing connection to the land. Yet it is also illuminating to see these romanticised, even fetishised western notions of the so-called exotic east. Freud’s account has the same innocent childlike view as Ung’s of living through the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Which shines the light all the more brightly on her mother’s hippy notions of what she expects to find in Marrakesh and Morocco at large, and why those dreams will never be realised.

It’s a good book for all that (and because of all that). It is in some ways a North African version of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, complete with the Spiros character in the shape of Bilal. Though with fewer animals cluttering up the house. And unlike Durrell’s books, there is no return from rainy England to facilitate a number of sequels.

Leïla Slimani’s novels, on the other hand, move in the opposite direction. Born in Rabat, Slimani is of dual French/Moroccan nationality. She is both a journalist and a diplomat, serving as the personal representative of the French president to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (the international organisation of French speaking countries). She was arrested in Tunisia reporting on the Arab Spring in 2011. Many of these events are reflected in her fiction.

The two novels under consideration, Dans le jardin de l'ogre (published as Adele in English) and Chanson douce (variously known as Lullaby or The Perfect Nanny in English) are contemporary novels that have the feel of something published in the decades either side of the Second World War. Like the pre-war novels of Satre and de Beauvoir, or 60s new wave French cinema. All of the accouterments of 21^st century life are there, the mobile phone being the most obvious (and ubiquitous). Yet there is something vintage about these books. Perhaps all literature set in Paris is equally timeless.

The subject material is likewise timeless. Dans le jardin de l'ogre is a novel about a woman (Adele) addicted to sex, seeking out liaisons (dangerous ones) even as her husband lies recovering in hospital following a motorcycle crash. This is where we see Slimani’s career mingled with those of Adele’s as she hooks up during press junkets to Africa and reports on the revolutions going on in that part of the world. Her father is indentified as Algerian.

Infidelity and promiscuity have been staples of French literature and Parisian set literature from Madame Bovary to Tropic of Cancer. Indeed, Dans le jardin de l'ogre calls back to Flaubert’s novel, not least by Adele’s husband being a surgeon as Emma Bovary’s is a doctor. Both men move to the country for what they believe to be in their wives' best interests.

The middle sections of the novel feel like a Goddard film or Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (which I only mention because Miles Davis’s soundtrack pairs well with the novel). The final acts are more like the denouement of those same pre-war novels, especially Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy. Or de Beauvoir’s L'Invitée (She Came to Stay, published during the war in 1943).

Chanson douce is Slimani’s second novel (although it was published first in English, before Adele). It uses flashback and individual accounts to retell the story of a nanny’s murder of her two wards. It is based on a real incident in Manhattan. The fictional nanny, Louise, is named after Louise Woodward, a British nanny to an American couple, who was convicted of murder of their son, but the charges were later reduced to involuntarily manslaughter and she was allowed to return to England. That is a whole thing in itself that we simply don’t have time to get into here.

Novels like this are always intriguing. The crime or central incident that is revealed in the opening sentences and which is presented as a fait accompli as the narrative cycles towards unavoidable catastrophe like water circling the drain. There is something distinctly Greek tragedy about the whole thing. The deterministic, pre-quantum world view in which none of us can escape the fate the gods have decided for us. The epitome of this type of novel is perhaps Donna Tartt’s, The Secret History, where the fact of Bunny’s murder by his fellow classics students is known in the very opening sentence.Or, like A Christmas Carol:

“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that.”

Slimani’s version is nuanced in its narrative. There are no Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian notions of good and evil. People rarely kill for such abstract reasons. People are complicated. People can snap in all kinds of unexpected reasons. The real life infanticide was apparently triggered by an argument over the nanny asking for more hours to feed her family. She was offered additional work cleaning the house. That was all it took. Senseless. But there is nothing which says life has to make sense. Nothing truthful at least.

Which isn’t to deal with such incidents in the abstract. I don’t have children and reading books like this only makes me more confident in my life choices. I can’t imagine what it must be like to go through something like this or to face the possibility of going through it on a daily basis, and not drive oneself insane. I admire anyone who has children it spite of the risks (while secretly thinking you’re all insane). I simply lack the mental fortitude for raising children. It is far from the only reason.

Chanson douce is a decent novel if you can face reading it in spite of the subject matter. A film has already been made in 2019 (sadly not in the style of French New Wave, but you can’t have everything). A TV version starring Nicole Kidman is reportedly in production.

Slimani followed up these books with Le pays des autres (The Country of Others) in 2020 and Regardez-nous danser (Look at Us Dance) in 2022, the first two books of a trilogy recounting Moroccan decolonisation in the 1950s. I will certainly be reading these books soon enough.

Of course the novels of Leïla Slimani under consideration have little to do with Morocco. I did therefore read a couple of collections of her collected journalism and essays, Le diable est dans les details (The Devil is in the Details) and Le parfum des fleurs la nuit (The Scent of the Flowers at Night). The former is a short collection of six pieces of journalism, which reflect Moroccan life and the events of the Arab spring.

The later work is more abstract: A collection of pieces largely inspired by the Biennale Art Festival in Venice in 2019. Here we hear Slimani reflect on her Moroccan and North African heritage, but also what it is to be of dual heritage and not entirely accepted by either side. She is working on her Moroccan novel at the time and themes seep through from one work and into the other. Tangier as a virtual enclave of Europe (Europe of course has actual enclaves in North Africa). Europe as a fortress, resistant to refugees seeking to cross the Mediterranean for a better life. The friends she left behind in Rabat.

In many ways, this is the most interesting of Slimani’s books. You will have to excuse me. Writers are a self absorbed lot and writers writing about writing is like catnip to us. Being reassured that even more successful writers go through the same long, dark nighttimes of the soul. That they like the same novels. Auster. Camus. Chekov. But also that any similar writing we have composed over the years is not mere navel gazing and might be of interest to someone else (if only other writers). This is the book I will return to first. It is a book that even with my decidedly average French comprehension, is still short enough to be read in an hour or two.

Leïla Slimani

Finally we alight on a Moroccan writer writing about Moroccan life. Leila Abouzeid’s novel, Last Chapter, like Hideous Kinky, is semi-autobiographical. It also has obvious parallels with Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero (see; Egypt). Though Aisha’s fate is nowhere near as grim as that of Firdaus (though I guess this depends on your point of view).

Last Chapter is a good, old bildungsroman, charting Aisha’s childhood into womanhood as she navigates romance and her burgeoning sexuality against the backdrop of conservative North African values. She faces all of the usual sexism and barriers to career advancement women face in much of the world. It is perhaps no surprise that Abouzeid’s namesake left Morocco to study in France when she was 17.

Like Slimani’s novels, there is an old world feel to the contemporary set pieces (though the novel is set in late 20^th century). Belief in witchcraft, curses and sorcery persist amongst her peers. The ghost of colonialism is ever present, especially in a country that is perhaps closer to Europe than any other in Africa, both geographically and culturally speaking. All of this Aisha must steer around with increasing frustration at the barriers placed in her way.

Unlike Slimani, Abouzeid writes in Arabic rather than French. Which is a deliberate choice. It places her very deliberately in the culture of Maghreb, as the western half of Arabic North Africa is known. By writing in Arabic, Abouzeid’s writing both places her firmly to the south of the Strait of Gibraltar and as an Islamic writer.

For all that she is critical of the opportunities for women in the country, you can tell even by reading this short hundred and sixty page novel that Abouzeid is a proud Moroccan and a proud Muslim to boot. She was the first female Moroccan writer to be translated into English. Being translated in English shouldn’t be a marker of success: Especially for a writer who has avoided writing in the coloniser’s language (and yes, I know Arabic is also a colonial language – you get the point).

The point is, it’s not nothing. It’s a useful shorthand when writing for an English speaking audience. How big of a deal is Leila Abouzeid’ in Morocco? She was the first female Moroccan writer to be translated into English. She is to Moroccan women’s literature what Nawal El Saadawi is to Egyptian women’s literature. Or what Octavia E Butler is to African American women's science fiction. Do you see?

Like Iceland to the north (see: Iceland), Morocco straddles two continents and two worlds. It is closer to Europe than Calais is to Dover (less than half the distance in fact). You can stand on the rock of Gibraltar and see Morocco, You can take a high speed ferry and be in Tangier from Spain in under an hour. I have done these things.

There won’t be many places in this project that I can say I have visited in anything other than an abstract sense (at least partly because most of the counties I have been to are ones from which I have already read their authors), but I have been to Morocco. It was just a day trip. Most of the day spent in Meknes and a flying visit to Tangier. It was pleasant enough. I would like to return some day. This time without a minivan full of other European tourists.

For now, though, we have to live vicariously through the authors we read in this project. We have barely scratched the surface of Africa. 11 from 54 counties (and some, like Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda were countries I had already read). There is an awful lot of the continent still to see. Time to move on.

Leila Abouzeid

 

Vietnam - Monkey Bridge/The Lotus and the Storm

Country: Vietnam
Book: Monkey Bridge/The Lotus and the Storm
Author: Lan Cao
Publication Year: 1997/2014
Genre: Fiction

For many, if not most people in the world, Vietnam and the Vietnam War are inseparable. The plethora of films made about or set during the conflict, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Apocalypse Now, Born on the 4^th of July, Forest Gump, Good Morning Vietnam,  The Deer Hunter, etc., show the deep psychological scar the war left on the American consciousness. As discussed when we looked at South Korea (See: South Korea), even M*A*S*H, the one cultural artifact set during the Korean War, is really about Vietnam.

How many people died in the war remains widely debated with estimates ranging from 1.4 to 3.6 million people across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. What is known is that more tons of TNT were dropped on the countries of Indo-China than were dropped by all sides during World War Two, including both atomic bombs. The use of chemical weapons like Agent Orange cause birth defects in the Vietnamese population to this day.

What few, if any, American films and TV series do is present the Vietnam War as seen from the perspective of the Vietnamese. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s  2017 documentary series, The Vietnam War, frames the 20 year conflict through its various stages as seen from all sides. It is probably the most objective attempt to explain the how, what and why of Vietnam. Although some of its conclusions are perhaps less objective.

Lan Cao’s two novels, Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm, concern the war and how it affected those living in South Vietnam. They are in many ways mirror images of one another and, one imagines, largely autobiographical. In both books, a daughter escapes Vietnam with one of her parents (mother in Monkey Bridge, father in The Lotus and The Storm ) and settles in the United States. The ex-pats are haunted by the fate of those left behind in the aftermath of the war.

Cao’s perspective is one which we are perhaps not used to seeingly in western media. In the black and white grayscale through which everything must seeming be portrayed, Vietnam is a war between America and the Vietminh (the Vietcong in American parlance) of the Communist north. What about the Vietnamese who fought with and for the Americans?

 
In The Lotus and the Storm, Minh is a South Vietnamese officer who narrowly escapes execution for refusing to support the attempted military coup of 1965. From there, his story and that of his daughter, Mai, who shares the narrative with her father, becomes entangled with those of two Americans, James and Cliff, a GI and a military adviser respectively.

Monkey Bridge would seem to be the more autobiographical of the two novels. The narrator, also called Mai, takes up the bulk of her story with accounts written by her mother inserted at various points. These accounts parcel out the truth to Mai and to the reader like a slow releasing poison.

In common with both versions of Mai, Cao left Vietnam for the US in 1975 as the Vietminh were on the march to Saigon following the American withdrawal. Like the Monkey Bridge version of Mai, she initially lived with an American officer and his wife, who were personal friends of the family. She went on to become a professor of international law, trade and business.

It is a story we have seen depressingly frequently in this project. The author who is forced to flee their homeland thanks to internal conflict and outside agitation. Most recently, we saw Loung Ung escape the Killing Fields of Cambodia (see: Cambodia) for the United States via Vietnam and Thailand. There she worked for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

In Afghanistan (see: Afghanistan), all three of our authors became refugees thanks to one or more of the Soviet Union, Taliban and the United States (and then the Taliban again). Sulaiman Addonia (see: Eritrea) spent much of his life in refugee camps because of the Ethiopia-Eritrean War before settling in the United Kingdom. Samar Yazbek (see: Syria) had to leave Syria for the sake of her daughter’s and her own safety. There will be many others before we conclude this project. We shall certainly return to the issue when we turn to Zimbabwe.

When the subject of migration and immigration are such hot button topics, exploited by bad faith actors on the right, it is a timely reminder that if we want to quell the waves of migration, we could try interfering less in the internal affairs of other countries. Or be less surprised when people cross seas and deserts to escape economic and ecological wastelands for pastures new. It is, after all, what our ancestors did, Pilgrim and Anglo Saxon alike. Migration and immigrations are facts of life. It prevents societal stagnation. In the words of Bob Dylan: He not busy being born is busy dying

The obvious analogy is to the Monkey Bridge itself. A handmade bridge of wood or bamboo, they are built to cross the waterways of the Mekong Delta. Known as cầu khỉ in the local language, these precarious looking platforms embody the connections across a fragile divide found in Cao’s novels and in Diaspora Fiction in general. The people, often from the same families, who fought on both sides of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese who became refugees and those who remained behind. The émigrés who reconstructed their culture and community in the United States and how they push against the America for which they will always be in conflict, like any immigrant population.

The Vietnam War can never be erased from the minds of the Vietnamese, nor from the American consciousness. Yet Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm are about more than mere war. Historical events are rarely anything but a backdrop to any work of descriptive art. Like the landscape behind Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, they are mere details.

Circumstance does little more than to inform a narrative. Rather it is how characters respond to events. War and Peace is not a book about the Napoleonic Wars, but how its myriad characters, for better or for worse, respond to those conflicts. Family and friendships are at the heart of both of Cao’s novels. Survival and resilience. The power of individuals to lose everything and start again from scratch. Which, like a rickety bridge, is something that connects Vietnam to America and with a hundred other places besides.

Vietnam is one of those places about which the west knows more than it has any practical need or necessity to know. And yet, of course, we know very little. History is not always written by the victors. The Vietnam War is still framed as a disaster for the United States rather than the desolation of three impoverished South East Asian counties for dubious geopolitical reasons. The Vietminh won and yet few people ever really win at war. What level of victory Lan Cao or either version of her alter-ego achieved in emigrating to America is very much a matter of perspective. As with many of our featured writers, wouldn’t it have happened anyway? It is impossible to say.

Cao’s novels give a perspective of the war as seen from a side rarely seen in mainstream retrospectives. Not only as someone Vietnamese or South Vietnamese, but as a woman, a survivor and an exile. We can never hope to reveal more than a fraction of the countries we read in this project. We can at least listen to voices that reveal something illuminating. Lan Cao is one such light.

Lan Cao

 

Uruguay - Las venas abiertas de América Latina et. al.

Country: Uruguay
Books: Las venas abiertas de América Latina/Vagamundo y otros relatos/ El fútbol a sol y sombra
Author: Eduardo Galeano
Publication Year: 1970/1987/1995
Genre: Politics/History/Sport/Short Story

Eduardo Galeano was one of the most important political voices to come out of Latin America during the 20^th century. A journalist, essayist, novelist, poet and football aficionado, Galeano’s socialist beliefs informed everything he wrote.

One of Galeano’s earliest works, 1970’s, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (The Open Veins of Latin America) gained a new lease of life in the 21^st century when Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, gave a copy to US President, Barak Obama in 2009. The book, which was out of print in English at the time, was soon issued in a new edition with a forward by Noam Chomsky.

Galeano had long since disowned the book, admitting he wrote it at far too young an age (he was 30 at the time), when he knew too little about business and economics. Despite that, the book holds up reasonably well. Any academic or non-fiction book soon ages, due to changing attitudes and new evidence becoming available, either by digging it out of the ground or rooting it out of the archives. While some of the facts and figures might be inaccurate, the historical details remain the same.

Those details relate to how first Western Europe and then the United States of America exploited Latin America’s natural resources from the time Columbus first landed in Hispaniola in 1492: Since Cortez conquered the Aztec Empire and relieved it of all its gold: Since Spain established its silver mines, most prominently the Polosi mine in Bolivia that enriched the Spanish Empire for more than a century, working thousands of indigenous people to death and bringing in the first Africans as slaves to replace them.

Las venas abiertas de América Latina gives a history from the Spanish Conquistadors up until General Pinochet's military coup in Chile in 1973, which took place 3 years after the book's original publication, but which is touched upon in a new afterword written in 1978. In between, we have all of the usual subjects when dealing with exploitation of the south’s resources by the north. Shell and Standard Oil. The United Fruit Company. Rio Tinto and the International Monetary Fund.

Not to mention the various military coups supported or directly assisted by the United States in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in the 1960s and 70s. Galeano was forced into exile in Spain when the book was quickly banned by the dictatorship ruling his native Uruguay. He wouldn’t return until 1985, when the dictatorship was overthrown. 

By that time, Galeano was already working on a new history of Latin America, the three volume Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire), the first part of which was released in 1982, 3 years before his return from exile. I haven’t read the trilogy, but it is on my reading list. It will be interesting to see how the two works compare, but it is safe to assume the later work is the superior.

Despite the flaws admitted by its author, Las venas abiertas de América Latina was a staple of classrooms and American colleges, north and south. for many years. When writer, Isabel Allende, was forced to flee Chile after her uncle, President Salvador Allende, was assassinated by General Pinochet’s forces, one of the few possessions she took with her was a copy of Galeano’s book. Books hold a currency far in excess of the price printed on their cover.

That Galeano brought his politics into everything is demonstrated by El fútbol a sol y sombra (Football in Sun and Shadow). Published in the mid 90s, it is nominally a history of South American football and the World Cup since the inaugural competition was contested in Uruguay in 1930. Uruaguay beat Argentina 4-2 in the final to lift the trophy.

Galeano weaves into the history of South American football the passions and politics of South American football.  Out of 22 tournaments contested since 1930, South American teams, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina, have won 10 of them. Brazil have won more World Cups (5) than any outer country: Italy and Germany having won 4 each.

It is a testament to the continent’s commitment and talent for turning out world class footballers from Pele to Messi that a relatively impoverished continent like South America has managed to compete with the richer nations of Western Europe for so long. Other than South America and Western Europe (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), no other region of the world has come close to winning the trophy, let alone dominating it. Even the Netherlands have never won the competition, despite the number of finals in which they have played (1974, 1978 and 2010).

The idea that football is matter of life and death for South Americans is perfectly demonstrated by the 1950 final contested between Uruguay and Brazil in Ro de Janeiro. It was the only year in which the final round took the form of a round robin rather than a knockout, with the four best placed teams playing each other with the winner being the one with the greatest points tally at the end. As the final match between Uruguay and Brazil kicked off, Brazil only needed a draw to lift the trophy.

Brazil took an early lead in the first half, but Uruguay equalised in the 68^th minute. In the 79^th minute, Brazilian goalkeeper, Moacir Barbosa, allowed Alcides Ghiggia to score the winning goal for Uruguay when he came out of his box, expecting a cross. Ghiggia instead dribbled past him.

1950 World Cup final

Barbosa became a pariah in Brazilian footballing circles for the rest of his life. Even in 1993,43 years later, and then in his 70s, the Brazilian Football Confederation would not let him commentate on Brazil’s international matches. Barbosa famously said, "The maximum punishment in Brazil is 30 years' imprisonment, but I have been paying for something I am not even responsible for, by now, for 50 years.” He died in 2000.

You can admire the passion, but you also have to wonder whether a psychiatrist doesn’t need to sit Brazil down as a nation and tell them it’s probably time to let it go. Because Barbosa was right. There are few crimes for which half a century castigation is a fit punishment and none of them involve sport. If he’d been English, he would have been doing self-depreciating adverts for Pizza Hut and all would have been forgotten (hell, they'd probably have made him manageer at some point). In English football there is always a fresh humiliation just around the corner.

El fútbol a sol y sombra is perhaps the best place to start when reading Galeano. It is a perfect encapsulation of all his interweaving talents and interests, incorporating journalism, politics and Latin American life and leisure. It’s not his most serious book to be sure, but it is at least an appetizer before one tackles Memoria del fuego or any of Galeano’s novels, into which I have yet to dive.

That said, finally we turn to Vagamundo y otros relatos, which doesn’t seem to have an English translation. I guess it translates as Wandering and Other Stories. All of these books I read in Spanish, taking my first foray into Spanish language literature for this project. My Spanish is still middling and this book in particular seems to contain a lot of Uruguayan slang, which the dictionary on the palm reader on which I read it could not always translate. Still, I think I understood most of it.

The stories contained in this volume are for the most part quite short and at times more like sketches of Galeano’s early life than they are out and out short stories. Perhaps I have too much of the Joycean in me, but the scenes feel as much like the childhood stories at the beginning of Joyce’s Dubliners, which are certainly heavily autobiographical. They are enjoyable for the most part.

Despite dealing with Vagamundo y otros relatos at the end of this piece, I in fact read it first of the three books under consideration. It very much prepared me for Las venas abiertas de América Latina. Certainly if you are learning Spanish and want quick two or three page pieces with which to practice comprehension, Vagamundo y otros relatos is a good bet.

I have been meaning to read Galeano’s books for years and this is an excellent triptych with which to start. It is also an excellent place to begin reading Latin American writers in Spanish, before moving on to Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gioconda Belli and the many other Spanish speaking writers of Central and South America. Onwards and downwards into the Southern Hemisphere. 

Eduardo Galeano

Mali - Le Devoir de Violence

Country: Mali
Book: Le Devoir de Violence
Author: Yambo Ouologuem
Publication Year: 1968
Genre: Fiction

The controversy surrounding Le Devoir de Violence, Yambo Ouologuem’s only novel, is almost as interesting as the novel itself. It’s also a sadly familiar story of the unequal interplay between western colonial nations and their former colonies.

Le Devoir de Violence (Bound to Violence in the English translation) recounts the history of Nakem, a fictional African country . Although the book has a timeframe covering several centuries, much of this history is dispensed with in a sentence or two. Large chunks of the narrative are then dedicated to more recent history (if we can count the dawn of the 20^th century as recent).

The book was published in 1968, when Ouologuem was just 27. It was initially declared a triumph and a revealation by the French press, especially Le Monde: Albeit it with a patronising veneer towards Ouologuem as an African writer. Translations into English were soon completed and published. Then the furore started.

Ouologuem was accused of plagarising several other writers, particularly English writer, Graham Greene. Greene was apparently annoyed that several passages of his 1934 novel, It’s a Battlefield, had been repurposed, but accepted an assurance that he would be credited in subsequent editions of the novel. However, Harcourt, the publisher of the US edition, demanded $10,000 in damages from the French publishers, Le Seuil.

Passages borrowed from other works were identified, but the whole affair seemed, prima facie, to be something about nothing. Amongst other supposedly plagarised material was the Bible, the Quran and a short story by Guy de Maupassant, none of which would have been copyrighted material in 1968. Ouologuem claimed all of these passages were enclosed in quotation marks in his original manuscript, but Le Seuil removed them from the published text.

The publishers appear to have left Ouologuem to take sole blame for the version of the book as it appeared in print. The backlash in France was so strong that the book was banned. It was removed from sale in America and elsewhere. Existing copies were pulped. Ouologuem returned to Mali from Paris, where he had been living at the time, and became a virtual recluse. He refused to speak about the book or his time as a writer, raising a family and becoming a devout Muslim. He died in 2017.

It is easy to see in all of this a tale of racism and double standards as old as colonialism iteself. Writers borrowing from other writers is nothing new. There are entire sections of Moby Dick, for instance, that Herman Melville copied verbatim from the various scientific textbooks on whaling and oceanography that he had in his possession. One of the writers Ouologuem was accused of plagarising, André Schwarz-Bart, was himself accused of plagiarism without being banned or having his books pulped. As we have seen in previous entries in this project (see: Saudi Arabia et. al.), it is very much a case of one law for ‘us’ and another law for ‘them’.

Another criticism leveled at Le Devoir de Violence came from Africa, with some denouncing the novel as a satire on West African society. And perhaps in this we can see the real reason for the backlash against Ouologuem in France and in the rest of the west. That certain commentators were happy to embrace the novel when they saw it as a black African lampooning his own culture. Yet once they noticed the borrowing from white western writers, a new layer of satire was revealed to them, sending up not only African traditions, but colonialism and the ‘civilising’ mission of which western countries still bafflingly seem proud. The irony is that the white colonial period actually occupies very little of the narrative.

Rather than the ‘Black Rimbaud’ as some labeled Ouologuem (inaccurately, as on the evidence of this one novel he was much more of a modernist writer), instead he was  reclassified as an uppity African, criticising his betters. Especially in Francophone Africa, where France seems to operate somethng akin to a protection racket towards its former colonies. Ouologuem actions could not be allowed to stand and he was effectively ‘disappeared’ from the literary world.

Yet despite the actions of some, the world does get incrementally better and Ouologuem’s only novel has been rediscovered and reappraised in recent years. A new English translation was published last year (2023) by Penguin Books. I read the book in the original with my imperfect knowledge of the French language. 

The question then remains: what is this infamous novel actually like?

The truth is, Le Devoir de Violence is a very good first novel from a first time novelist in his 20s. Like other first novels we have examined on this journey, such as A Grain of Wheat (see: Kenya) or Near to the Wild Heart (see: Brazil), it gives a tantalising glimpse of the novels Ouologuem’s readers could have expected to come. If only.

In fact, Ouologuem did write a number of other works, fiction and non-fiction, some of which were published under an nom-de-plume, Utto Rudolf, with many other manuscripts unread and in the possession of his family. There is a hope that some of these works might see the light of day at some point in the not too distant future.

Ouologuem style is reminiscent of the modernists. How much he knew of Joyce, Woof or TS Eliot is anyone’s guess. Yet French literature is hardly unfamiliar with modernism (Joyce finished writing Ulysses in Paris after all). Satre’s novels are quasi-Modernist. Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series is proto-Modernism.  The school of Modernism has many alumni, advocates and practitioners.

Nakem is a fictional African country, but as with Jacob Ross’s fictional island of Camaho (see: Grenada), the parallels with Ouologuem’s native country of Mali are thinly disguised. Mali, after all, was once the richest and most influential country in Africa. The city of Timbuktu is one of those places that has deeply embedded itself in the western consciousness. When I was growing up it was still used euphemistically to describe somewhere at the opposite ends of the Earth. Its name carried with it the same mystical frisson as Shangri-La, El Dorado or Middle Earth: An unreal place that one would ever actually visit.

I will admit to getting slightly lost in places, mainly as a result of that imperfect French of mine. I suppose the saving grace in there being only one published Yambo Ouologuem novel is the chance to revisit it and read it more than once: get lost in the historical eddies that ripple though the book until they settle upon Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, whose narrative occupies much of the second half of the book. 

Maybe after a few more turns around the history of Nakem, further chapters from Yambo Ouologuem’s curtailed literary career might start to emerge. After fifty years, it is more than time.

Yambo Ouologuem