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 20th 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.
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