Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean 149850163X, 9781498501637

Citation preview

Writing through the Visual and Virtual

After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France Series Editor: Valérie Orlando, University of Maryland Advisory Board Robert Bernasconi, Memphis University; Claire H. Griffiths, University of Chester, UK; Alec Hargreaves, Florida State University; Chima Korieh, Rowan University; Mildred Mortimer, University of Colorado, Boulder; Obioma Nnaemeka, Indiana University; Kamal Salhi, University of Leeds; Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt University; Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Tulane University Recent Titles Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean edited by Renée Larrier and Ousseina D. Alidou State Power, Stigmatization, and Youth Resistance Culture in the French Banlieues: Uncanny Citizenship by Hervé Tchumkam Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories of Stones and Blood by Véronique Maisier Ousmane Sembene and the Politics of Culture edited by Lifongo J. Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean edited by Valérie K. Orlando and Sandra Messinger Cypress Rethinking Reading, Writing, and a Moral Code in Contemporary France: Postcolonializing High Culture in the Schools of the Republic by Michel Laronde The French Colonial Imagination: Writing the Indian Uprisings, 1857–58, from Second Empire to Third Republic by Nicola Frith Shifting Perceptions of Migration in Senegalese Literature, Film, and Social Media by Mahriana Rofheart The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb by Claudia Esposito Narratives of the French Empire: Fiction, Nostalgia, and Imperial Rivalries, 1784 to the Present by Kate Marsh African Pasts, Presents, and Futures: Generational Shifts in African Women’s Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse by Touria Khannous Writing the Nomadic Experience in Contemporary Francophone Literature by Katharine N. Harrington Cave Culture in Maghrebi Literature: Imagining Self and Nation by Christa Jones The Body Besieged: The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar by Helen Vassallo Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond by Laura Reeck France’s Lost Empires: Fragmentation, Nostalgia, and la fracture coloniale edited by Kate Marsh and Nicola Frith Globalizing the Postcolony: Contesting Discourses of Gender and Development in Francophone Africa by Claire H. Griffiths Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History by Alexandre Dauge-Roth The Star, the Cross, and the Crescent: Religions and Conflicts in Francophone Literature from the Arab World by Carine Bourget

Writing through the Visual and Virtual Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean

Edited by Renée Larrier and Ousseina D. Alidou

L e x i n g t o n B oo k s

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015949341 ISBN: 978-1-4985-0163-7 (cloth : alk. paper) eISBN: 978-1-4985-0164-4 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction: Traditions of Literacy Renée Larrier and Ousseina D. Alidou

xi

Part I: Visual and Verbal Artistry: Texts and Text[iles] as Epistemology

1

1 Embodying African Women’s Epistemology: International Women’s Day Pagne in Cameroon Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum and Anne Patricia Rice

3

2 Reading the Téra-tera: Textiles and Transportation in Niger’s First Republic Amanda Gilvin

15

3 Becoming-Griot: Righting within a Minor Literature Oumar Diogoye Diouf 4 Research on Droughts and Famines in the Sahel: The Contribution of Oral Literature Boureima Alpha Gado Translated by Oumar Diogoye Diouf Part II: Body Language/Writing [on] the Body 5 Transgressive Embodied Writings of KAribbean Bodies in Pain  Gladys M. Francis

31

47

55 57

6 Alhaji Roaming the City: Gender, HIV AIDS, and Performing Arts 77 Ousseina D. Alidou v

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7 Writing on the Visual: Lalla Essaydi’s Photographic Tableaux Donna Gustafson 8 Angles of Representation: Photography and the Vision of al-Misriyya [the Egyptian] in Women’s Press of the Early Twentieth Century Fakhri Haghani

95

103

Part III: Inscribing Popular Culture

111

9 Representing Adolescent Sexuality in the Sahel Barbara M. Cooper

113

10 There Is More Than One Way To Make a Ceebu Jën: Narrating African Recipes in Texts Julie Huntington 11 Reclamation of the Arena: Traditional Wrestling in West Africa Bojana Coulibaly 12 Ritual Celebrations: Context of the Development of New African “Hybrid” Cultures Jean-Baptiste Sourou

123 149

161

13 Simmering Exile Edwige Sylvestre-Ceide

169

Part IV: Language, Literacy, and Education

179

14 Writing, Learning, and Teaching Material for Early Childhood Cultures: From Africa to a Global Context Rokhaya Fall Diawara

181

15 Orthographic Diversity in a World of Standards: Graphic Representations of Vernacular Arabics in Morocco Becky Schulthies

187

16 The Polyphonous Classroom: Discourse on Language-in-Education on Réunion Island Meghan Tinsley

203

17 Thundering Poetics/Murmuring Poetics: Doing Things with Words as a Marker of Identity Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo

213

Contents

Part V: Intersections of Text and Image 18 Les Noces de Cana [The Wedding at Cana] by Wilson Bigaud or the Meeting of Colonial Heritage and Ancestral Traditions in Haitian Naive Art Jean Hérald Legagneur

vii

231

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19 Tourist Art: A Tracery of the Visual/Virtual Gabrielle Civil

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20 Religious Iconography in the Everyday Lives of the Senegalese  Abdoulaye Elimane Kane

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21 West African Culture through Animated Film: The Example of Kirikou275 Maha Gad El Hak Part VI: Literature, Gender, and Identity

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22 Power and Patriarchy: Sexual Violence and Sexual Exploitation in the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean as Represented in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, Colère et Folie; Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle; Rosario Ferré’s “La Bella Durmiente”; and Nelly Rosario’s El canto del agua287 Phuong Hoang 23 La Mulâtresse During the Two World Wars: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Suzanne Lacascade’s Claire-Solange, âme africaine and Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise305 Nathan H. Dize 24 Inscriptions of Nature from Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Martinique Annie Rehill

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25 The Politics of Writing as a Space to Shape Identity(ies) Khady Diène

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Index347 About the Contributors

363

Acknowledgments

This book would have not been possible without the presentations and discussions at the Rutgers Center for African Studies March 2013 conference entitled “Writing Through the Visual/Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean,” the idea for which began during a brainstorming session we had in the Center’s office the previous summer. We are grateful for the support of the following departments and units at Rutgers: the Center for African Studies, Department of French (Carole Allamand), Critical Caribbean Studies (Michelle Stephens), RU Wanawake (President Winnie Miroro and models), Department of Visual Arts, Mason Gross Presents Fund, Zimmerli Art Museum (Donna Gustafson), Department of Dance (Julia Ritter), Department of Music, Office of Undergraduate Education (Barry Qualls), Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes, Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (Alamin Mazrui), Centers for Global Advancement and International Affairs, School of Arts and Sciences Office of the Executive Vice Dean (James Masschaele), School of Arts and Sciences Office of the Dean of Humanities (James Swenson), College Avenue Campus Dean (Matt Matsuda), Associate Douglass Campus Dean, Livingston Campus Dean, Academic and Public Partnerships in the Arts and Humanities (Isabel Nazario), Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies (Abena Busia), Office of Multicultural Student Involvement (Cheryl Wilson), Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies (Nelson Maldonado Torres), Institute for Women and Art, Institute for Women’s Leadership, Institute for Research on Women (Yolanda MartinezSan Miguel), Douglass Residential College. These sponsors’ financial support allowed us to put on a first-rate, international, interdisciplinary, bilingual conference with scholars and performers from Africa. ix

x Acknowledgments

The encouragement, support, and participation of the following individuals proved crucial: Atif Akin, Simone Alexander, Yveline Alexis, Enock Aloo, Shikaorsor and Rita Ademu-Johnof Awujoh, Judy Brodsky, Nelson Cheung, Bojana Coulibaly, Rokhaya Fall Diawara (UNESCO BREDA), Fatou Dangoura, Sansousy Gallice, Jr. Diallo, Jeff Friedman, Nadia Guessous, Gnagna Guèye, Malang Jorbateh, Hardo Ka, Amany Shawky Mokhtar, Ferris Olin, Cassandra Olivera, Valerie Orlando, Kim Pernice, Khardiata Pouye, Julia Ritter, Donalene Roberts, Petra Robinson, Usha Rungoo, Chelsea Thompson, Meredeth Turshen, Sonu Varma, Rutgers University Conference Inn Manager Donna Binstein and her staff, and the planning committee Abena Busia, Renee Delancey, Fakhri Haghani, Cheryl Wilson. We are also grateful to Gacirah Diagne, President of Kaay Fecc (Let’s Dance) Senegal and the Office of New Jersey Congressman Russ Holt for facilitating the participation of the artists from Senegal. Most specially, we’d like to thank Renee Delancey, assistant to the director of the Rutgers Center for African Studies, overall logistics expert, transportation coordinator, budget director, international liaison, and creator of the incredible conference website. Without her, the conference would not have taken place nor run as smoothly. Converting the conference presentations into essays was only the first step in a long and complex process, which involved not only extensive updating, expanding, and editing, but figuring out how to incorporate numerous images as well. We have been immensely fortunate to work with editors Lindsey Porambo and Marilyn Ehm and the production team at Lexington Books whose patience, commitment, and enthusiasm throughout the project are greatly appreciated.

Introduction Traditions of Literacy Renée Larrier and Ousseina D. Alidou

Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean is an attempt to highlight the resilience of written modes of conveyance of meanings that existed and continue to be used in many contemporary cultures of Africa and the diaspora that were conquered by Europe, especially in the former French colonies. Through the imposition of literacy practices based on the mastery of the Roman Alphabet, colonizing Europe endeavored to marginalize inscriptional practices and other modes of representation—dance, cuisine, and painting—in the colonized world. The historiography of this intersection between indigenous inscriptional practices and Roman Alphabet literacy practices that evolved as a result of the “alphabetization” of the colonized subjects is amply explored by Adrien Delmas and Nigel Penn in their fascinating collection entitled Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and The Americas, 1500–1900 (2011), and Bárbaro Martinez-Ruiz’s Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign (2013), both of which put in conversation the experiences of Africa with those of Latin America.1 In the former French colonies of the Maghrib and the Sahel, such as Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, Tifinagh literacy among the Tuaregs/Amazigh predates French colonial introduction of French language and Roman Alphabet-based literacy by more than 2000 years. However, through language and script policies, French colonialism managed to marginalize this African-based script and these literacy practices that postcolonial regimes perpetuated until recently, at which time, indigenous linguistic and cultural-rights movements within the cross-border regions of the Sahel-Sahara along with certain governments began to promote the revival of Tifinagh literacy beyond its minimal usage on Tuareg/ Amazigh ornaments and markings on livestock. According to Moha Ennaji, xi

xii Introduction

“On February 11, 2003, King Mohammed VI declared Tifinagh as the script for writing Berber following the recommendation of The Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture. This decree has led to the modern technological adaptation of Tifinagh to word processing and to computer use.”2 Ramadan Elghamis’ dissertation entitled “Le tifinagh au Niger contemporain: Étude sur l’écriture indigène des Touaregs,” on the other hand, is an important contribution to the study of the contemporary use of Tifinagh among the Tuaregs in Niger mainly for record keeping, love letters, poetry, and graffiti. Rissa Ixa is a famous Nigerien Tuareg artist whose aim is to promote Amazigh culture through his stained glass artworks while Ahmed Boudane draws amazing abstract art pieces inspired by his maternal Tifinagh literacy tradition. Scholarly works by Adrien Delmas and Nigel Penn, and Bárbaro MartinezRuiz are not alone in rethinking and valorizing “non-traditional” literacy and modes of writing. Karen Barber’s edited volume African Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and the Making of Self (2006), Abdelkébir Khatibi’s La Blessure du nom propre [the wound of the proper name] (1974) and L’Art calligraphique arabe [Arabic calligraphic art] (1976) on Islamic tattoos and Arabic calligraphy, respectively, Patricia Mohammed’s article and DVD on Haitian vèvè “The Sign of the Loa,” Zola Maseko’s documentary “The Manuscripts of Timbuktu,” (2009), as well as the ground-breaking four-volume series Women Writing Africa are among those studies that clearly demonstrate that colonized subjects did not simply acquiesce to the colonially imposed instrument of their domination.3 The local input sometimes became an instrument of resistance.4 Even when they adopted Roman alphabetic literacy practices, some went on to use them in their struggle for freedom and independence from colonial powers, as revealed through their letters, biographical writings, literary genres and distinctive written rhetorical approaches. Others, like Malik Ag Muxamad Alfaruq, a Nigerien poet, adopted a multi-scriptural approach, writing his anthology of Tuareg poetry entitled Tasayhat onKel-Temajaq; Anthologie Touarègue in three modes— Tifinagh, Latin transcription of Tamajaq, and French translation.5 In other cases, new scripts altogether were “invented in reaction to the introduction of Latin characters.”6 Acts of adopting, adapting, “reinventing,” and using scripts towards resistance and subversive ends were by no means limited to the colonial period. They continue to be enacted in various spaces in creative ways. For one, Ahmadou Kourouma and Patrick Chamoiseau are two of the most prominent fiction authors who can be said to have explored in part Abdelkébir Khabiti’s notion of the bi-langue, that is, negotiating between two languages.7 Also, during the 2011 Arab uprising in Tunisia and Egypt, revolutionary Arab youth revisited the Pharaonic hieroglyphic tradition to critique the persisting social hierarchy of the corrupt autocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak and

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the theocratic regime of Ahmed Morsi.8 The revolutionary mural graffiti in Cairo reflects a syncretic conversation drawing from multiple writing traditions—hieroglyphic, Arabic, Roman and other worlds’ scripts and languages. In Hausaland, young female fiction and film script writers are resorting to Roman script rather than Arabic or Ajami to challenge Islamic religious orthodoxy.9 The Caribbean and the Indian Ocean are other sites of these kinds of appropriations, transformations, and reclamations as local languages, once stigmatized as deformations of French, dialects, patois, or petit-nègre and existing only in the oral domain, are now considered by linguists as fullfledged languages with their own grammar, phonology, morphology, and syntax. Creoles in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion, and French Guiana have achieved legal status, recognized as regional languages by France in 2000, and Kreyòl was designated an official language in Article 5 in Haiti’s 1987 constitution. An academic subject as well as a field of study, Creole has grown over the years to boast not only specialists like Albert Valdman, Jean Bernabé, Marie-Christine Hazaël-Massieux, Marie-José Jolivet, and Robert Chaudenson, but scholarly journals (Journal of Pidgen and Creole Languages, Etudes créoles), research clusters (Groupe d’études et de recherches en espace créolophone et francophone—GEREC-F at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, Groupe européen de recherches en langues créoles), and centers (Lenstiti Kreol Enternasyonal in the Seychelles, the Creole Institute at Indiana University,10 Haitian Creole Language and Culture Summer Language Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Boston) as well. Popular interest can be measured by the numerous websites and blogs dedicated to learning the language, a process that combines the visual, aural, and virtual. All of these sites incorporate a strong advocacy component.11 The essays that comprise this book engage with various kinds of scripts and their relation to language, literature, orature, literacy, culture, and identity. The central theme builds on Renée Larrier’s critical theorization of the overlap in the same space of orality and writing in African and Caribbean women’s expressive culture, a concept inspired by Clémentine Faïk-Nzuji’s Symboles graphiques en Afrique noire. Larrier offers a broader and even more complex understanding of women’s orality, creating the possibility of the transmission of knowledge by women through a wide range of “oralized” domains that include literature, painting, pottery, textile design, and fashion. Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean (2000) embraces practices using graphic representations like ideograms as well, defining writing as not being limited to French-language literature or Latin-based scripts. Bagam, calligraphy, graffiti, Vodou’s vèvè, and body art in the form of henna designs, scarifications, and tattoos are “surface scripts,” articulations that are read and interpreted. Walls, cooking pots,

xiv Introduction

and Haitian taps-taps are other gendered spaces of writing in the domestic and public spheres.12 Orality in African and Caribbean languages targets and facilitates intracultural communication among people who are most often polyglossic rather than monolingual or even bilingual, as Ousseina D. Alidou reminds us.13 Another important contribution of this volume is the continuation of the conversation on the fluidity between orality and literacy as argued in the works of scholars such as Jacqueline Royster, Ousseina D. Alidou, and Lize Kriel.14 For example, Nigerien musician and song writers such as Habsu Garba15 and Abdoul Salam discussed in chapter 6 in this book, state that song composition is a process involving melodic articulations and writing before the performance on stage. According to one of the dancers interviewed, “The electronic media has also added an edge to our dance-song since the visual recording which is available now permits us to revisit our Text. We can simultaneously listen to the dance-song, watch our dance performance and apply revisions until perfection. This is an important dimension of song-dance and dance performance as a Text. This is our form of writing.”16 When transcribed and/or digitized, these texts become visible to an intercultural, global, or virtual audience. In addition, embodied knowledge as articulated through dance17 and dress—cloth and fashion—constitutes, according to Claudia Mitchell and others, “a visual signifier of the construction of a chosen identity and a chosen performance.”18 Senegalese dancer/choreographer Hardo Ka achieves that goal as he slowly wraps his body in a piece of cloth in a number honoring his grandmother and women called “Haala Nam” [tell me in Pulaar]. Articulating and interpreting the relationship between the body, movement, and textiles, he thus expresses and performs important elements of his cultural heritage. In this book writing encompasses embodied knowledge which in most African and African diaspora cultures is a performative practice that blurs the boundaries between the oral and the material. African wrappers or pagnes, for example, are located at the intersection of material and expressive culture. Displaying symbols that speak to and signify social belonging, they can indicate women’s religious affiliation to certain church networks. Proverbs inscribed on pagnes require specialized knowledge to interpret. As political forces, pagnes advertise the wearer’s support of a candidate, while the production, sale, and distribution of cloth participate in the local, national, and global economy. Bogolan, another such example, also functions as a key exemplar of Malian identity,19 while the Malagasy people of Madagascar use silk cloth called lamba akotofahana not only as creative objects, but for other purposes as well: as articles of tribute to the dead, objects for diplomatic overtures, and ethnic, class, and gender identity markers.20

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Comics/bandes dessinées, graphic narratives, and film challenge conventional definitions of literacy, alluded to above, as a corollary of writing. The newer technologies of social media such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, which have text-based content, are also implicated in writing practices in which interaction and exchange are fundamental. According to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o the oral and the written are not antagonistic: Through technology, people can speak in real time face to face. The language of texting and emailing and access to everything including pictures and music in real time is producing a phenomenon that is neither pure speech nor pure writing. The language of cyberspace may borrow the language of orality, twitter, chat rooms, we-have-been-talking when they mean we-have-been-texting, or chatting through writing emails, but it is orality mediated by writing. It is neither one nor the other. It’s both. It’s cyborality. . . . Will this produce cyborature?21

These technologies along with e-readers make possible the dissemination of African and Caribbean texts in more affordable, speedy, and accessible ways. Moreover, Scotland-based Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela argues that mobile phones are “a very good way of reaching points of the world where it’s difficult for books to reach.”22 Furthermore, translation’s transnational dynamic promotes intercultural dialogue as texts move between local, indigenous language communities to global audiences, often with computer assistance. Different languages and cultures in contact promote Creolization and Glissantian relation. All in all, these product(s) of individual creativity and/or collective memory are practical exercises in subjectivity and agency. Erasure, an important part of the writing (and editing) process, is also implicated in the construction of identity in many ways. The practice of women bleaching their skin, in particular the face, hands, and feet, with harsh chemicals in Senegal, is a form of erasure, an issue addressed in Khardiata Pouye’s documentary Cette couleur qui me dérange [this color that upsets me] (2012), and interpreted in the solo dance by Gnagna Guèye Ni blanche ni noire [neither white nor black]. In her award-winning film, Pouye exposes the health dangers associated with and resulting from depigmentation, xessal in Wolof, and makes a plea for intervention by lawmakers who could ban the importation of harmful cosmetic products. Using her body as her canvas, Guèye comments on society’s acceptance of Western-imposed ideals about the correlation between light skin and beauty whereby certain women subscribe to the hierarchy of colorism, a legacy of colonialism in Africa and in the diaspora. The essays in this book are based on presentations given at the international, bilingual conference of the same name held at Rutgers University, March 7–9, 2013, at which these kinds of issues were discussed. The volume aims to contribute to the trans-disciplinary understanding of the complex

xvi Introduction

interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of material and expressive culture in francophone Africa and the Caribbean. The varied patterns of writing practices arising from contemporary and historical forces have impacted on the cultures and peoples of these regions that include countries such as Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Comoro Islands, Congo (Brazzaville), Congo (Kinshasa), Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Haiti, Louisiana (US), Mali, Martinique, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, and the Seychelles. Special attention is paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers as well as writers in the production of material and non-material culture to tell “stories” of great significance, co-mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the urban and the rural, the “classical” and the “popular” in new and exciting ways. Individuals from three continents participated in the conference organized by Ousseina D. Alidou and Renée Larrier, the Director and Associate Director, respectively, of the Rutgers Center for African Studies. Academics from colleges and universities in the US (Boston, Georgia State, Lehman, Maryland, Marymount Manhattan, Mount Holyoke, Nebraska, Seton Hall, St. Catherine, Rutgers, Tulane, and Yale) were joined by their counterparts from Africa (University of Cairo, Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey, Niger, Saint Augustine University of Tanzania, Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal, where the presenter spoke by way of Skype), and Europe (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3). Representing a wide range of departments and disciplines—African and African American studies, anthropology, art history, English, French and francophone studies, history, Middle Eastern studies, philosophy, sociology, and women’s studies—they included eminent professors, junior scholars, advanced graduate students, independent scholars, translators, and an art museum curator. The book is divided into an introduction by the editors Renée Larrier and Ousseina D. Alidou and six thematic parts each producing in their chapters the thematic panel structure of the conference, covering a broad range of topics. In general, the twenty-five essays (constituting the chapters) examine various kinds of visual and virtual scripts, while more specifically, individual essays analyze: textiles and fashion in Niger and Cameroon (Gilvin, Ngo-Ngijol Banoum, and Rice); Haitian and Moroccan art (Civil, Legagneur, Gustafson); gastronomy in Senegal and Haiti (Huntington, Sylvestre-Ceide); a children’s animated film series set in Africa (Gad El Hak); Martinican, Guadeloupean, and Haitian novels (Diène, Dize, Hoang, Rehill); translation and sound poetics in two texts from Côte d’Ivoire (Jay-Rayon); orature in Niger (Gado); intersection of oral and written domains among African writers (Diouf); dance in Guadeloupe (Francis); song as a means of transmitting health information in Niger (Alidou, Cooper); representation of wrestling in two African

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novels (Coulibaly); Islamic iconography in Senegal (Kane); a UNESCO children’s literacy project (Diawara); ritual celebrations in Benin (Sourou); early Egyptian women’s magazines (Haghani); and languages in contact: Moroccan Arabic, standard Arabic and French (Schulthies), and French and Réunionese Creole (Tinsley). That most of the presenters were women and many of the presentations concern women’s writing is highly appropriate in that the conference coincided with International Women’s Day. We, the editors, deliberately opted not to offer a conclusion because each essay ends with an exciting call for further inquiry into the under-researched traditions of literacies in the former colonized worlds of Africa and its diaspora. Part I: Visual and Verbal Artistry: Text and Text[iles] as Epistemology In “Embodying African Women’s Epistemology: International Women’s Day pagnes in Cameroon” Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum and Anne Rice consider the national celebration of International Women’s Day through the practice of wearing clothing made from the official Women’s Day pagnes featuring images from artists across the country that convey information about the year’s global theme. In their individual outfits made from the same cloth, women across generations personalize their styles in a communal expression of unity in multiplicity that subverts official notions of gender. Their celebrations draw on women’s lived experience and express empowerment through embodied identification with many groups, commingling words, text, and performance as women sing, dance, and move exuberantly through public space. The practice of designing and wearing diverse outfits of one cloth to be read by an observing public exemplifies African feminist knowledge formation and praxis, grounded in the lives of women and using indigenous communication practices that boldly speak to women (and men) across ethnic, political, social, and economic lines. Amanda Gilvin analyzes the ethnic origins and national uses of fabric in “Reading the Téra-tera: Textiles, Transportation, and Nationalism in Niger’s First Republic.” Once exclusively used by people of the Djerma ethnicity, the téra-tera textile emerged as a widespread genre especially significant in urban areas in Niger in the 1960s. Women gave téra-tera textiles as wedding gifts, and men and women wore them and used them as blankets. Woven by weavers of the Djerma and Bellah Tuareg ethnicities, téra-tera textiles featured both abstract and representational motifs that weavers and their women patrons used to interpret their experiences as artisans, mothers, brides, travelers, and eaters in a fast-changing Niger. The essay includes analyses of specific motifs on the téra-tera, such as the kulnej gutumo and garbey kopto, as

xviii Introduction

well as the symbolic appropriation of the genre by the state in the contested First Republic of Niger. Oumar Diogoye Diouf in “Becoming-Griot: Righting Within a Minor Literature” proposes a “subjunctive” approach to francophone African-Atlantic literatures that highlights the role of language in the process of writing postcolonial, francophone African Atlantic people into post-postcolonial communities. He argues that the shift from postcoloniality to post-postcoloniality can be achieved by the writer who reclaims the griot’s function. Often looked down upon in contemporary African society, griots—entertainers, diplomats, mediators, storytellers, historians, and pedagogues—constituted the social cement in traditional Africa, however, their important functions in the community must be assumed by contemporary writers. Boureima Alpha Gado in “Research on Droughts and Famines in the Sahel: the Contribution of Oral Literature” contributes a new perspective to the study of catastrophes, some of which are natural. Using written sources, historians, geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists have tried to understand and analyze the chronology, mechanisms, and demographic consequences of the most devastating scourges—droughts, epidemics, diseases, invasions, etc. Gado, on the other hand, brings orature (proverbs, songs, poems) into the discussion, sources that provide an unsuspecting and exhaustive wealth of information on past catastrophes and the strategies populations used to confront them. Part II: Body Language/Writing [on] the Body Gladys Francis’s interdisciplinary study “Transgressive Embodied Writings of KAribbean Bodies in Pain” centers on Gerty Dambury’s novel Les rétifs [A Restive People] and Gisèle Pineau’s Cent vies et des poussières [Hundreds of Lives and Dust]. Through a process of corpomemorial tracing, these transgressive texts capture the marginalized performing body in pain to historicize a collective space of testimonial and female agency. The texts’ movements, rhythms, and sensorial and tactile aesthetics also give opacity and conscientiously subversive subjectivities to the represented bodies in pain. The novels’ corporeal realm disrupts the voyeuristic gaze and re-conceives spectatorship, unearthing the resisting KAribbean bodies of Guadeloupeans in movement— similar to the ka drum, still a major symbol of resistance in Guadeloupe. Ousseina D. Alidou’s article “Alhaji Roaming the City: Gender, HIVAIDS and Performing Arts” offers a critical discourse analysis of dance songs by popular Nigerien singer-musicians that provide a counter-narrative by focusing attention not on the alleged promiscuity of urban poor women, but on the sexual conduct of the “rich” and “mighty” with quasi-religious

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credentials who constantly give the impression of being the custodians of the society’s morality. These songs use HIV-AIDS as a trope to highlight the contradictions in the moral order rooted in the exploitation of the poor, especially women and teenage girls, by “pious” men of means and power. They reveal the inequalities in gender relations leading to social injustice against women. Furthermore, the chapter reveals the role of performing artists in HIV-AIDS education through a cultural paradigm of communication and sensitization about ethics of care in societies such as Niger where Islamic conservatism, poverty, and illiteracy hinder any overt conversation about sex and sexuality. In a sense, then, dance-songs on HIV-AIDS represent a new and creative agent of change. In “Writing on the Visual: Lalla Essaydi’s Photographic Tableaux,” Donna Gustafson focuses on the Moroccan-born/US-based artist who blends photography and performance. Her subjects are a circle of women whose faces, hands, and garments she inscribes with writing in Arabic, texts that reflect the thoughts and conversations that surround her as she prepares her stage set and actors for the moment that will be the culmination and memory of the event, that is, the photograph. As she investigates the properties of written language as visual text from the perspective of an outsider for whom the text is a closed system, Gustafson addresses these questions: what is the artist’s purpose in her use of text? How does this text function in an international art context where “reading” the art does not include reading the text? Fakhri Haghani’s essay “Angles of Representation: Photography and the Vision of al-Misriyya [the Egyptian] in Women’s Press of the Early Twentieth Century” is centered on Egyptian women pioneers who took major social roles through writing, performing, and organizing. Women from francophone educational backgrounds in particular appropriated the power of disseminating images (visual/virtual) to advocate for social reform. Through a mixture of literary, photographic, theatrical, and cinematic images these women articulate a transformative vision of themselves and women which crossed material limitations and went beyond Egypt’s national border. Part III: Inscribing Popular Culture Barbara Cooper in “Representing Adolescent Sexuality in the Sahel” presents various visual materials produced to influence the sexual health behavior of young people in the Sahel. Bandes dessinées [comics] are a medium that health organizations like to use because of their appeal to young literate urbanites due to their lively images, contemporary language, and participation in a “modern” cosmopolitan aesthetic. However, NGOs and other health activists attempt to use such “modern” materials in ways that respect and in

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some way reinscribe local Muslim mores. Radio plays, the audible counterpart to the visual, and board games are two other mediums used to reach youth. Cooper also discusses the heavily illustrated French-language adaptation of Our Bodies Ourselves and its far more combative relationship to “local culture.” In “There’s More Than One Way to Make a Ceebu-Jën: Narrating West African Recipes in Texts,” Julie Huntington examines the collections of recipes by various novelists, musicians, food historians, and professional chefs who have become authors by transcribing their recipes from instruments and oral formats to fixed prescriptive or descriptive sets of written instructions. Storytellers, historians, and social critics, they document meaningful oral and cultural traditions in texted frameworks, while challenging readers to question, confront, and (re)configure complicated dimensions of contemporary social and cultural identities, particularly those associated with genders, generations, and nationalities. Bojana Coulibaly explores wrestling, the sport commonly referred to as kokowa in Hausa or laamb in Wolof, which has become a powerful medium of communication and integration in both francophone and anglophone West Africa, inspiring songs, poems, and novels that have captured and popularized its sociocultural significance. In her essay “Reclamation of the Arena: Traditional Wrestling in West Africa,” she analyzes how Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart (1958) conveys the ways in which wrestling articulates courage and social integrity in traditional Igboland. In addition, she examines the emphasis Aminata Sow Fall places on the oral dimension of the praise poetry, the magic, and the visual creativity associated with laamb in L’Appel des arènes (1982). Focusing on the diachronic, dual function of laamb, she analyzes the ways in which it operated as sociocultural cement in pre-colonial times, and its central role as a medium of social integration and a site of resistance to acculturation during colonial as well as postcolonial times. In “Ritual Celebrations: Context of the Development of New African Hybrid Cultures” Jean-Baptiste Sourou argues that at weddings, funerals, or other major achievements Africans try to conserve and rebuild their cultural and religious identity which is challenged by colonial impositions, Westernization, and globalization. Using Benin as a model, Sourou demonstrates how the combination of the traditional precolonial culture and modern elements helps Africans develop a culture of belonging, as musicians, dancers, and masters of ceremony create new meaning by mixing the old—songs, proverbs, gestures—with the new—gadgets and new media. Edwidge Sylvestre-Ceide, like Huntington, deals with an aspect of gastronomy as a marker of identity. “Simmering Exile” positions the author, who was born in Haiti and grew up in France, coming to terms with the legacy of migration. On the basis of personal experience, the author questions the

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notions of exile and transmission through the journey of her own family. This inquiry relies on the role that cooking plays in the immigrant’s daily life and on the immigrant’s capacity to overcome social hardships faced in the host country. Part IV: Language, Literacy, and Education Rokhaya Fall Diawara’s “Writing, Learning, and Teaching Material for Early Childhood Cultures: from Africa to a Global Context” discusses strategies to combat the low rates of literacy on the continent. She focuses on one initiative, the UNESCO and Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) project “Bouba and Zaza Childhood Cultures,” a series comprised of paperback books and online videos designed to teach values and awareness about current issues. This early intervention series reflects a strong investment in and support of children’s education and brings together the visual and the virtual. Becky Schulthies “Orthographic Diversity in a World of Standards: Graphic Representations of Vernacular Arabics in Morocco” examines the language ideologies underlying the graphic representations of Moroccan ways of speaking in advertising media (print and electronic, especially), which reflects the tensions between state standardization projects and the range of linguistic identities and resources Moroccans deploy in their everyday lives. These forms of writing include Moroccan Arabic in Romanized French-based orthography and modified Modern Standard Arabic orthography. Schulthies also includes in her analysis some conventions for representing phonological features in specific genres, such as texting. Meghan Tinsley’s “The Polyphonous Classroom: Discourse on Languagein-Education on Reunion Island” examines the public discourse on diglossia in the classroom. Using government archives and popular media as data, she considers the ways in which the francophone secondary-school classroom is framed as a site of both domination and resistance to hegemonic colonialism. Policymakers, teachers, administrators, parents, and local writers, and musicians, and artists, who valorize distinctively Réunionnais linguistic and cultural expressions occupy different positions. Tinsley argues, however, that presenting such a dichotomy oversimplifies the polyphony of everyday life on Réunion Island, which transcends policy prescriptions, concluding that several recent attempts to integrate Creole into the classroom, and proposing a heterogeneous, multilingual approach to Reunionnais education reflects the island’s history of encounter and métissage. Laurence Jay-Rayon proposes an intermedial reading of Jean-Marie Adiaffi’s transvernacular sound poetics through his novel La carte d’identité and long

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poem “D’Éclairs et de foudre” in her essay “Thundering Poetics/Murmuring Poetics: Doing Things With Words as a Marker of Identity.” Transgressing Western generic compartmentalization, Adiaffi’s use of language in both texts shows a carefully crafted artistic signature that draws upon his Akan literary heritage, Aimé Césaire’s poetry, and the surrealist movement. While the long poem shows a clear narrative structure, the novel displays a strong melopoetic architecture. Moreover, the narrative thread of La carte—the struggle to prove one’s identity to the colonial powers—is enacted through Adiaffi’s sonic poetics, which point to the idea of performance and audible literary modalities in general. Excerpts from the English translation (The Identity Card) by Brigitte Katiyo illustrate how melopoeia is not necessarily what gets lost in the translation of fiction, enabling the text to continue to relate to Adiaffi’s Akan artistic heritage and the performable in general. Part V: Intersections of Text and Image Jean Hérald Legagneur in “Wilson Bigaud’s Les Noces de Cana [The Wedding at Cana] or the Encounter Between Colonial Heritage and Ancestral Traditions in Haitian Art” analyzes the various icons represented in the painting, one among thirteen frescos that decorated the walls of the Episcopal Cathedral of Sainte Trinité in Port-au-Prince, many of which were destroyed in the January 2010 earthquake. Legagneur tries to understand how Bigaud balances seemingly heterogeneous and incompatible elements—Vodou and Christianity, secular and religious motifs, profane and sacred objects, “high culture” and “popular traditions”—while examining their symbolic and diachronic specificity. In “Tourist Art: A Tracery of the Visual/Virtual,” Gabrielle Civil combines a meditation on mass-produced Haitian paintings with her original poetry and illustrations by visual artist Vladimir Cybil Charlier, her collaborater on their fine arts book Tourist Art. Analyzing and theorizing Haitian artistic production in Haiti and in the diaspora, commercialization, globalization, and border relations, she points out the irony that Haitian art too often receives greater regard, access, and economic mobility than the Haitian people. Abdoulaye Elimane Kane’s “Religious Iconography in the Daily Life of the Senegalese” analyzes the use of Islamic religious figures in the visual arts, as decorative objects, symbols of belonging, and in advertising in the informal economy and by television, which has become the leader in the distribution of this particular iconography. Kane discusses the various stylizations, which aim at universality, the notion of Islamic prohibition of human representation, and the concept of social recognition through the totemic value of these graphic symbols.

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Using a semiotic approach in her essay “West African Culture in Animation: the Example of ‘Kirikou,’” Maha Gad El Hak examines the relationship between the cultural and the visual in Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou animated film trilogy: Kirikou et la sorcière [Kirikou and the witch] (1998), Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages [Kirikou and the wild animals] (2005), and Kirikou et les hommes et les femmes [Kirikou and the men and women] (2012). First, reading and interpreting the films’ colorful posters, she then proceeds to discuss specific characters, the different settings, allusions to religions, and how the films represent African culture. Part VI: Literature, Gender, and Identity Phuong Hoang examines women’s struggle to affirm themselves in their respective male-dominated societies in “Power and Patriarchy: Sexual Violence and Sexual Exploitation in the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean as Represented in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, colère et folie, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Rosario Ferré’s ‘La Bella Durmiente,’ and Nelly Rosario’s El canto del agua.” The texts reveal that sexual violence and sexual exploitation force women into conforming to their role as prescribed by patriarchal society, indicating that sexual exploitation reinforces existing contemporary and historical stereotypes concerning race and class that are deep-rooted in Caribbean history and society. Whether fathers, bosses, or military leaders, these patriarchal figures promote sexual violence to demonstrate their dominance and control. In “Inscriptions of Nature from Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Martinique,” Anne Rehill argues that Joseph Zobel’s La Rue cases-nègres, Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove illustrate a predisposition to perceive nature in a way that appears closer to Amerindian and African ideas than to those originating from European culture. They emphasize the ability to live with nature, not only exploit it as the colonists did in the Caribbean. Nathan H. Dize focuses on Suzanne Lacascade and Mayotte Capécia in “La Mulâtresse During the Two World Wars: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Suzanne Lacascade’s Claire-Solange, âme africaine and Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise.” Their writing about daily life offers a way to critique patriarchy and French colonial discourse. At a basic level, daily life creates a space for women, children, the disabled, and other subalterns who are lost in the dominant discourse. Khady Diène’s “The Politics of Writing As a Space to Shape Identity(ies)” explores the work of Guadeloupean Myriam Warner-Vieyra, author of Juletane (1981). In the form of a diary, Juletane relates the protagonist’s

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experience as she finds herself in a polygamous relationship, sharing a husband’s house with two co-wives in Senegal. Thus, both the author, who has lived in Senegal for many years, and her subject use writing in the quest of their Caribbean identity(ies). As is the case for other female Caribbean and transatlantic artists, writing becomes a way to share historical, gender, political, and physical circumstances and environments. The concept of writing as a space to shape identity(ies) is central to Diène’s inquiry, along with the associated questions about reasons for creating such a space and the implications on consciousness and/or societies. Notes 1. Bárbaro Martinez-Ruiz’s Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign, which links Central African Bakongo people’s writing traditions to traditions in Cuba, was inspired by the pioneering work of Robert Farris Thompson. 2. Moha Ennaji, Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2005), 73–74. 3. Karen Barber, ed., African Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and the Making of Self (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2006); Abdelkébir Khatibi, La Blessure du nom propre (Paris: Denoël, 1974) and L’Art calligraphique arabe: ou la célébration de l’invisible (Paris: Chêne, 1976); Patricia Mohammed, “The Sign of the Loa,” Small Axe 18 (September 2005), 124–49; Zola Maseko, dir. “The Manuscripts of Timbuktu,” DVD, South Arica (2009); Women Writing Africa, 4 vols. (New York: The Feminist Press, 2003–2008). Edouard Glissant has asserted that Haitian painting is a form of writing in Le Discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 269. Karen McCarthy Brown’s 1975 dissertation at Temple University “The Vèvè of Haitian Vodoo: A Structural Analysis of Visual Imagery“ is available online. http://www. scribd.com/doc/99123782/THE-VEVE-OF-HAITIAN-VODOU-A-STRUCTURALANALYSIS-OF-VISUAL-IMAGERY-pdf. Amanda Elizabeth Rogers’ 2013 dissertation at Emory “Politics, Gender and the Art of Religious Authority in North Africa: Moroccan Women’s Henna Practice,” will be available for consultation in 2015. https://etd.library.emory.edu/view/record/pid/emory:d7kpd. For collections of photographs, see Nancy Turnier Ferere Vèvè: l’Art rituel du vodou haïtien (n.pl.: ReMe Art Publishing, 2005), available in French, English, and Spanish, and Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, Painted Bodies of Africa: African Art of Adornment (New York: Rizzoli, 2012). Marie Cipriani-Crauste, Le Tatouage dans tous ses états: à corps, désaccord (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008). 4. Fallou Ngom, “Ahmadou Bamba’s Pedagogy and the Development of Ajami Literature,” African Studies Review 52 no. 1, 99–123. 5. Ag Muxamad Alfaruq, Tasayhat on Kel-Temajaq: Anthologie Tourègue (Niamey: Edition Gashingo, 2003). See also the discussion of the poetry of Nigerborn Tuareg residing in France Mahmoudan Hawad in Georg M. Gugelberger (2001). “Tuareg (Tamazight) Literature and Resistance: The Case of Hawad,” in Christopher

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Wise, The Desert Shore: Literatures of the Sahel (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 101–112. 6. Jean-Loic Le Quellec, “Rock Art, Scripts and Proto-Scripts in Africa: The Libyco-Berber Example,” in Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and the Americas, 1500–1900, edited by Adrien Delmas and Nigel Penn (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011), 3–29. 7. See especially Pierre Soubias, “Modes de présence de la langue africaine dans le texte en français (Sembène Ousmane, Ahmadou Kourouma),” in Littératures africaines, dans quelle(s) langue(s)? edited by René Richard (Paris, France; Silex; 1997), 115–124; Amadou Koné, “Discourse in Kourouma’s Novels: Writing Two Languages to Translate Two Realities,” Research in African Literatures 38, no. 2 (Summer 2007), 109–123; and Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo, “Littérature et diglossie: créer une langue métisse ou la ‘chamoisification’ du français dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau,” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 9, no. 1 (1996), 155–76. 8. Don Karl and Basma Hamdy, ed, Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution, foreword by Ahdaf Soueif (Berlin, Germany: From Here to Fame Publisher, 2014). 9. Yusuf Adamu, “Hausa Literary Movement and the 21st Century”, 2002. www. kanoonline.com/publications/pr_articles_hausa_literary_movement.html. and Abdallah Uba Adamu, “Media Technologies and Literary Transformations in Hausa Oral Literature,” in Joseph McIntyre and Mechthild REH, From Oral Literature to Video: The Case of Hausa (Hamburg: Rudeger Verlag, 2011), 45–80. 10. Albert Valdman et al. Haitian Creole-English Bilingual Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Creole Institute, 2007; Dictionary of Louisiana Creole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), Le créole: structure, statut et origine (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978). 11. (http://sweetcoconuts.blogspot.com/ http://sakpaselearnhaitiancreole.blogspot. com/combine) 12. Renée Larrier, Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), 4–9; 45–68. 13. Ousseina D. Alidou, Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 89. 14. Jacqueline Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Ousseina D. Alidou, Engaging Modernity; Lize Kriel, “‘To my Dear Minister’ – Official Letters of African Wesleyan Evangelists in the Late 19th-century Transvaal,” in Nigel Penn & Adrienne Delmas, ed, Written Culture in a Colonial Context. Africa and the Americas 1500–1900 (Cape Town: Double Storey & UCT Press, 2011). 15. See Alidou, Engaging Modernity, 87–128. 16. Ousseina D. Alidou, interview with artist, Niamey, Niger, 2012. 17. Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 18. Claudia Mitchell, et al. “Reconfiguring Dress,” in Was It Something I Wore?: Dress, Identity and Materiality, edited by R. Moletsane, C. Mitchell, and

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A. Smith (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2012), 3. http://www.academia.edu/3025642/ Mitchell_C._Moletsane_R._and_Pithouse_K._2012_ 19. See Sarah Brett-Smith, The Silence of the Women: Bamana Mud Cloth (Milan: 5 Continent Editions, 2014), and Victoria Rovine, Bogolan: Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 20. Christine Mullen Kreamer and Sarah Fee, ed. Objects as Envoys: Cloth, Imagery, and Diplomacy in Madagascar (Washington DC and Seattle: The Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Arts/University of Washington, 2002). 21. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 84. Alain Mabanckou and Ananda Devi are two prominent fiction writers whose blogs were very popular. See Dominic Thomas, “New Technologies and the Popular: Alain Mabanckou’s Blog,” Research in African Literatures 39, no. 4 (Winter 2008), 58–71. Both Mabanckou and Devi, however, eventually abandoned them. 22. Leila Aboulela quoted in Donna Bryson, “A ‘Novel’ Idea for Spreading Literature in Africa,” csmonitor.com. Web. 9 May 2013. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/ Africa/2013/0509/A-novel-idea-for-spreading-literature-in-Africa-The-cellphone. Accessed June 25, 2014.

Bibliography Aboulela, Leila. Qtd. in Donna Bryson. “A Novel Idea for Spreading Literature in Africa: The Cellphone.” Web. Crmonitor.com. May 9, 2013. Accessed June 25, 2014. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2013/0509/A-novelidea-for-spreading-literature-in-Africa-The-cellphone Adamu, Abdallah Uba. “Media Technologies and Literary Transformations in Hausa Oral Literature.” In Joseph McIntyre and Mechthild REH From Oral Literature to Video: The Case of Hausa. Hamburg: Rudeger Verlag, 2011, 45–80. Adamu, Yusuf. “Hausa literary movement and the 21st Century”, www.kanoonline. com/publications/pr_articles_hausa_literary_movement.html, 2002. Alfaruq, Ag Muxamad. Tasayhat on Kel Temajaq: Anthologie Touarègue. Niamey: Edition Gashingo, 2003. Alidou, Ousseina D. Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. ———. Interviews with artists. Niamey, Niger. 2012. Barber, Karen, ed. African Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and the Making of Self. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2006. Beckwith, Carol and Angela Fisher. Painted Bodies of Africa : African Art of Adornment. New York: Rizzoli, 2012. Brett-Smith, Sarah. The Silence of the Women: Bamana Mud Cloths. Milan: 5 Continen Editions, 2014. Daniel, Yvonne. Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005.

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Delmas, Adrien and Nigel Penn. Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and the Americas, 1500–1900. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011. Elghamis, Ramadan. Le tifinagh au Niger contemporain: Étude sur l’écriture indigène des Touaregs. Leiden: University of Leiden dissertation, 2011. Ennaji, Moha. Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco. New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2005. Faïk-Nzuji, Clémentine. Symboles graphiques en Afrique noire. Paris: Karthala, 1992. Ferere, Nancy Turnier. Vèvè: l’Art rituel du vodou haïtien. ReMe Art Publishing, 2005. Glissant, Edouard. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Seuil, 1981. Gugelberger, Georg M. “Tuareg (Tamazight) Literature and Resistance: The Case of Hawad.” In Christopher Wise, ed. The Desert Shore: Literatures of the Sahel. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001, 101–112. Karl, Don and Basma Hamdy, ed. Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution. Berlin, Germany: From Here to Fame Publishing, 2014. Khatibi, Abdelkébir. L’Art calligraphique arabe: ou la célébration de l’invisible. Paris: Chêne, 1976. ———. La Blessure du nom propre. Paris: Denoël, 1974. Koné, Amadou. “Discourse in Kourouma’s Novels: Writing Two Languages to Translate Two Realities.” Research in African Literatures 38, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 109–123. Kreamer, Christine Mullen and Sarah Fee, ed. Objects as Envoys: Cloth, Imagery, and Diplomacy in Madagascar. Washington DC and Seattle: The Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Arts/University of Washington, 2002. Kriel, Lize. “‘To My Dear Minister’— Official Letters of African Wesleyan Evangelists in the Late 19th-century Transvaal.” In Nigel Penn & Adrienne Delmas (eds), Written Culture ina Colonial Context. Africa and the Americas 1500–1900. Cape Town: Double Storey & UCT Press, 2011. 232–243. Larrier, Renée. Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000. Le Quellec, Jean-Loic. “Rock Art, Scripts and Proto=Scripts in Africa: The Libyco-Berber Example.” In Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and The Americas, 1500–1900. Eds. Adrien Delmas and Nigel Penn. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011. 3–29. Martinez-Ruiz, Bárbaro. Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Maseko, Zola, dir. The Manuscripts of Timbuktu. DVD. South Africa, Mali, Morocco, 2009. Mitchell, Claudia, Relebohile Moletsane, and Kathleen Pithouse. “Reconfiguring Dress.” Was It Something I Wore?: Dress, Identity and Materiality. Ed. 2012. 3–18. http://www.academia.edu/3025642/Mitchell_C._Moletsane_R._and_ Pithouse_K._2012_._Reconfiguring_dress._In_R._Moletsane_C._Mitchell_ and_A._Smith_Eds._Was_it_something_I_wore_Dress_identity_materiality_ pp._3–18_._Cape_Town_HSRC_Press.

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Mohammed, Patricia. “The Sign of the Loa.” Small Axe 18 (September 2005): 124–49. ———. The Sign of the Loa. DVD. 2007. Ngom, Fallou. “Ahmadou Bamba’s Pedagogy and the Development of Ajami Literature.” African Studies Review 52 no. 1: 99–123. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José, “Littérature et diglossie: créer une langue métisse ou la ‘chamoisification’ du français dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau,” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction 9, no. 1 (1996), 155–76. Pouye, Khardiata. Cette couleur qui me derange. Senegal. DVD. 2012. Rogers, Amanda Elizabeth. “Politics, Gender and the Art of Religious Authority in North Africa: Moroccan Women’s Henna Practice.” Diss. Emory University 2013.

Rovine, Victoria. Bogolan: Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Royster, Jacqueline. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Soubias, Pierre. “Modes de présence de la langue africaine dans le texte en français (Sembène Ousmane, Ahmadou Kourouma).” In Littératures africaines, dans quelle(s) langue(s)? Ed René Richard. Paris, France; Silex, 1997. 115–124.. Thomas, Dominic. “New Technologies and the Popular: Alain Mabanckou’s Blog.” Research in African Literatures 39, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 58–71. Women Writing Africa. 4 vols. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003–2008.

Part I

Visual and Verbal Artistry: Texts and Text[iles] as Epistemology

Chapter 1

Embodying African Women’s Epistemology International Women’s Day Pagne in Cameroon Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum and Anne Patricia Rice Introduction A powerful source of women’s knowledge production can be found in the long history of African textile traditions, rich in diversity, adaptability, and versatility. They claim materials ranging from locally handmade fabrics through imported European wax prints to domestic factory-produced cotton cloths and beyond. African societies do not simply view cloth as protection against the elements or a means of personal adornment, but recognize its importance as a mode of expression, communicating information, and celebrating affiliation both personal and political. Factories thus produce not only casual prints and designs but also special runs on request to commemorate historic events and sites, prominent figures and holidays as well as life cycle events such as birth, naming ceremonies, initiations, weddings, graduations, title-takings, and death. Not surprisingly, African women have been extraordinarily creative, imaginative, and resourceful in making their voices heard, particularly through the “talking textile” known in francophone Africa as pagne, a cut of colorful cotton cloth that can be fashioned into different garments usually worn with a matching headdress.1 From anticolonial movements through independence to political rallies and other campaigns, African women have spoken loudly through their collective pagnes. This paper focuses on the phenomenon of International Women’s Day (IWD) pagne in the Republic of Cameroon, located on the west coast of Central Africa. Slightly larger than California, the country is bordered by Nigeria to the west, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic 3

4

Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum and Anne Patricia Rice

to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. From Cameroon’s countryside to her cities, every March 8, women don clothing carefully sewn from the official Women’s Day fabric, which features images from artists across the country that convey information about the year’s global theme. In their individual outfits made from the same cloth, women across generations, regions, and class personalize their styles in a communal expression of unity in multiplicity that subverts official notions of gender. Their celebrations draw on women’s lived experience and express empowerment through embodied identification with many groups, commingling words, text, and performance as they sing, dance, and move exuberantly through public space. The practice of designing and wearing diverse outfits of one cloth to be read by an observing public exemplifies African knowledge formation and praxis, grounded in the lives of the women and using indigenous communication practices that boldly speak to women, girls and some men across ethnic, political, social, and economic lines. We argue that there are rich epistemologies embodied in cloth colors, designs, images, styles, words, and attendant performance. Far from a superficial adornment, IWD pagne functions as a powerful commemorative cloth and advocacy tool. Why International Women’s Day? International Women’s Day (IWD) is celebrated across the world every March 8, a date chosen to commemorate the political protests of 1908, when women marched through New York City demanding better working conditions and voting rights. Held for the first time in 1911, IWD began as an international day of solidarity for women workers, with men and women in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland taking to the streets to celebrate their economic, political, and social achievements and to reclaim their rights to vote and to work without discrimination worldwide. It is noteworthy that the IWD also served as a mechanism for protesting the First World War, with women marching in solidarity for peace. In the early 1970s the women’s movement throughout Europe and North America revived IWD as a feminist holiday, and the United Nations (UN) drew global attention to women’s issues by declaring 1975 as the International Women’s Year and convening the first World Conference on Women. In 1977, the General Assembly officially recognized IWD, adopting a resolution inviting member states to observe the UN Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace to be celebrated in accordance with their historical and national traditions. Since then, celebrations across the globe have served as a rallying point to build support for women’s rights and participation in public decision-making processes.



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In nearly 30 countries, IWD is an official national holiday with government offices, educational institutions, and many businesses closed on March 8.2 Although not a legal day off in Cameroon, IWD has grown in such popularity since first being celebrated in 1986 that it has become a de facto national holiday. Cameroonians put their own stamp on the celebration of women, drawing female revelers from throughout Africa and the world in a celebration at once festive and serious, solemnly reflective and joyful. For a few weeks leading up to March 8, women around the nation weave a rich web of connective programming ranging from business conferences, debates, seminars, capacity-building workshops, networking events, local women’s arts and craft fairs, theater, music and dance performances, political rallies, and commemorative parades. The most visible aspect of IWD across Cameroon’s cities, towns, and villages is the mass mobilization of women, girls, and some men in a dazzling array of outfits made from the official commemorative International Women’s Day pagne. Origin and Evolution of the International Women’s Day Pagne in Cameroon The International Women’s Day pagne is manufactured by the Cotonnière Industrielle du Cameroun (CICAM), which is the main cotton-processing company in the Central African sub-region. Its factories in Garoua and Douala do the spinning and weaving of raw cotton followed by the dyeing, printing, and finishing of the textiles. In her examination of factory-produced pagnes in Africa, Kathleen Bickford aptly describes the elaborate roller print process where “a design is incised onto a series of brass rollers, one for each color to be used. The rollers are then attached to the printing machine one after the next. As the fabric passes under the rollers, dye is applied on a single side in progression from the lightest to the darkest color . . . the technique allows for greater detail, more color variety, and the inclusion of photosilkscreen images.”3 This intricate process makes it possible to design rich fabrics such as the IWD pagne. CICAM’s commercial subsidiary, Laking, has a vast network of wholesale and retail stores throughout the territory. It also puts pick-up trucks on the roads to sell a wide range of fabrics in the most remote weekly markets all around the country. CICAM competes especially against Chinese and Nigerian imitation imports by keeping the pagnes affordable for low-income clients. The idea of an official pagne for International Women’s Day came from the then Ministry of Women’s Affairs (now Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and the Family), which commissioned the first run in 1991. Produced by CICAM, the cloth featured a design of a globe surrounded by women

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that was enhanced through text urging restoration of women’s dignity and promoting gender equality. The first IWD parade in which women wore “the pagne” took place in 1992 in Maroua, North Cameroon, an overwhelmingly Muslim region of the country. The rationale for this inaugural choice was to give Muslim women, traditionally secluded, a chance to get out onto the public stage. The experiment worked, as women from all walks of life mobilized and marched past, displaying the colors and motifs of their plural histories of struggle, strength, and aspiration. In 2000, the women’s ministry institutionalized the adoption of a single pagne for the IWD parade, which is now known as “Pagne Day.” It has been immensely popular and profitable, with sales of IWD pagne now representing 25–30% of CICAM’s overall sales. This pagne popularity has led some observers to wonder if it has overshadowed the goal of the day, which is the promotion of women’s rights, gender justice, and peace. Questions have also been raised regarding the profitability and ultimate beneficiaries of programs focused on womens’ and girls’ advancement. Although factory-produced, each year’s design belongs to a vibrant tradition of craftsmanship that begins with a competition among artists from the country’s ten regions. A committee composed of “members from civil society,” as well as representatives from government ministries and CICAM selects the winning design by evaluating the proposed colors, the “level of creativity” of the design, and messages conveyed that give “value to women in their different domains of work and life.”4 CICAM then produces the winning design in a choice of two different colors, jealously guarding the design to prevent Chinese or Nigerian knock-offs and releasing it only about a month before the celebration takes place. Excitement builds as the day of revelation approaches. Women await with great anticipation the arrival of the fabric, saving throughout the year, placing orders well in advance, and standing in long queues to secure it when it does arrive.5 The wearing of the pagne has become a ritual with rules one dare not violate, as one American student found when she wore her pagne to Douala market a day early only to find herself surrounded by astonished stares and outraged glares. The production process has only begun with the release of the pagne into the marketplace, and women’s hands are busy for an entire month leading to the great event. Seamstresses are commissioned to draw up individual styles or styles chosen by groups; market women prepare less expensive ready-made versions; and women across the land borrow time from their busy lives to sew outfits for themselves and their daughters. Dresses depend on the age and personal style of the wearer, from the grandmas in their kabas to the tight bodices and flounced skirts of younger, more stylish women, to the sweet frocks of little girls.6 In marked contrast



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to pagnes celebrating political parties and institutional affiliations, Women’s Day pagne is not a uniform but an expression of individuality in community, personal style in belonging. The profusion of styles is matched by a plethora of events in which these styles can be seen. Women wearing the fabric attend demonstrations of agricultural techniques and ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies); workshops on violence and reproductive health; legal clinics on women’s rights and peacemaking; breakout sessions on building activist coalitions and monitoring CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women); and, of course, the marches past that take place throughout the nation, most famously on the May 20th Boulevard as the first lady Chantal Biya reviews streams of women from ministries, educational institutions, embassies, international organizations, NGOs, and civic organizations. This hyper-visible mobilization through public spaces thereby makes a statement at once individual, multivalent, and profoundly communal. The often-heard complaint about IWD being “just about the pagne” fails to register the densely symbolic rhetoric of this performative practice. Rhetoric of the Commemorative Cloth: Reading IWD Pagne as Living Text Although the designs differ every year according to Cameroon’s emphasis on the UN theme, we can identify several recurrent themes and motifs.7 Designs typically show women across class, region, and language engaged in a wide range of occupations and activities: mothers, healers, educators, farmers, athletes, artists, dancers, engineers, lawyers, military, police, physicians, and other professions. Women are shown at the center of the nation and the world, with the faces and bodies of women and girls embodying the nation. The global and national futures lie in women’s hands, and they are frequently pictured holding up or bearing the weight of the world. Slogans written in Cameroon’s official languages of French and English emphasize the resilience, resourcefulness, strength, and courage of women within the family, the community, and as nation builders, while identifying important goals. Both celebratory and aspirational, the commemorative cloth encompasses the past, present, and future achievements of women and girls as part of a national fabric into which hardship and inequality remain stubbornly woven. Our textual analysis will focus on a sampling of three IWD pagnes—2010, 2011, and 2012—that aptly represent the many that have been produced since their advent.

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2010: Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All In 2010, Cameroon’s subtheme to the UN’s general theme, “Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All” was “Equality in the Millennium Development Goals,” referring to the eight ambitious goals articulated by the UN at the Millennium Summit in 2000 and agreed to by all member states as well as leading development institutions. The goals set the year 2015 as the target to eliminate poverty and hunger, illiteracy, discrimination against women, health crises such as infant mortality and HIV/AIDS, and environmental degradation.8 Both global and local, the goals were intended to be tailored to suit each country’s specific development needs. The winning design for the 2010 IWD pagne reflects this emphasis on the millennium goals by summoning the entire female population from all regions of the country to unite and work together for the advancement of women and to build the nation and the world. The central and largest repetitive motif of the design shows a woman clad in a kaba and headdress in the colors of Cameroon’s flag (and the pan-African movement’s) and bearing aloft a globe with Cameroon at its center (Figure 1.1). Unlike Atlas, this resilient female patriot does not struggle against the unbearable weight of the world, but effortlessly lifts it upwards, her feet planted firmly on the ground. The transnational symbols of Africa and the world are significant as women celebrate locally in unison with women around the continent and the globe. Also interspersed throughout the fabric are figures of women performing agricultural, artistic, mechanical, educational, governmental, scientific, and technological labor. One woman speaks on the phone while sitting at a desk upon which her briefcase and computer prominently feature. Another bends gracefully from her waist, chatting as she braids the hair of a woman who closes her eyes, a relaxed smile of pleasure on her face. Two women police officers behind a desk listen to two female civilians, one of whom gestures as she gives her version of events. A female in a lab coat peers intently into a microscope, while a young athlete soars midair while performing a long jump, and a rural woman industriously milks her cow. An elegantly dressed benefactress bestows gifts on needy children, and a teacher stands in front of a blackboard facing her class, her upraised hand holding a piece of chalk as she offers the gift of knowledge. Market women smile invitingly, the fruits, grains, and vegetables they sell spread tantalizingly about them while a police officer surveys her beat and a seamstress (perhaps stitching this very IWD pagne) bends intently over her sewing machine. The figures of the working women and of the world-bearing mother of the nation alternate with lines of text in both French and English, Cameroon’s two official languages, including: “AIDS is not a female fatality”;



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“Dignity, discretion, efficiency, loyalty”; “Following the path of economic governance”; “Never lonely, always together”; “Positively at the heart of ICTs”; “Health, security, well-being”; “Wisdom, science, excellence”; and “Being the cornerstone of all synergies.” The idea expressed in the last message, that women at the center of interactions and cooperation produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their individual efforts repeats the overall message and effect of the 2010 fabric and of the celebrations in which it is worn. While some of the text refers directly to millennial goals such as the eradication of poverty and halting the spread of AIDS and other diseases, the language of these goals resonates with power when read alongside messages conveying the values crucial for transforming hope into reality. The notions of solidarity and the central role of Cameroonian women in national and global development are repeated at the hem of the cloth, where the provinces form a chain linked together by a stylized female figure bearing the country upon her head. Each provincial segment contains a circle in which hands clasp wrists from the direction of north, south, east, and west, forming a human chain of solidarity (Figure 1.2). The important ideal of national unity is echoed here by the female principle rooted in ancestral core values of cooperation, complementarity, and collaboration as captured in the Bantu concept of “Unbuntu”—I am because you are. The multiplicity of meanings and cumulative effect of these repetitions express a system of signification literally embodied by the women who wear the pagne on March 8. 2011: Equal Access to Education, Training, and Science and Technology: Women are an indispensible part of development The year that followed, Cameroon once again chose to enhance the UN’s theme of “Equal Access to Education, Training and Science and Technology” with a subtheme that proclaimed “Women are an indispensible part of development.” The winning design for 2011 expresses this theme by portraying the Cameroonian woman not as holding up the world, but as boldly occupying its very center. The central repeating motif in this design features the head and shoulders of a Cameroonian woman at the center of a globe marked not by land masses and oceans but meridians and parallels, the bases of measuring time, distance, and direction. Echoing these lines of demarcation are lines of text beneath the globe that ripple in increasing size and distance from its base, proclaiming: “March 8, 2011”; “International Women’s Day”; “Women:

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Unavoidable Partners in Development.” This firmly anchors the woman as center of gravity and primary moving force. She is posed in a three-quarters view, traditionally used in Western portraiture, particularly for white male leaders, to convey power and authority. This iconic Cameroonian woman commands the viewer’s attention. Majestic and elevated in perspective, she looks powerfully intelligent and beautiful. Her chin tilts up, and she gazes resolutely ahead, her eyes steadfastly and proudly confronting the future. She wears a variation of the fabric upon which she appears (again, repetition with a difference), cowrie-shell earrings, and matching necklace with pink beads to complement the fabric in which both she and the wearer of the pagne are clad (the cloth also came in a beautiful green variant). As in the child’s dress shown in Figure 1.3, many dresses cut from the 2011 pagne placed this image at the heart center of the woman or girl wearing it. Whereas the 2010 pagne conveyed the idea of multiplicity and abundance through sheer proliferation of images and text, the 2011 pagne repeats only this image and text, while the background of the fabric boasts a lush profusion of swirling botanical shapes superimposed on a print in which appear abstract images vaguely reminiscent of a map of the country. It is, however, the embodied performance of the 2011 pagne that achieves the greatest effect. The commanding image of the woman’s head repeated over and over brings the viewer’s eye reflexively to the face of the woman who wears the pagne, reminding the observer that this development partner is an indispensable member of the team. 2012: Empower Rural Women—End Poverty and Hunger; Let’s Lead Cameroon Towards Modernity The winning design of 2012 gave prominence to Cameroon’s subtheme, “Let’s Lead Cameroon Towards Modernity” while incorporating the global theme that called for the world to “Empower Rural Women—End Poverty and Hunger.” The central icon of 2012 pagne emphasized rural women as co-authors of their fates who did not wait for the world to issue an imperative for their empowerment. This image (Figure 1.4) features two women, one in a cap and gown, the other wearing an ordinary wrapper and headscarf, as essential agents of national development, each holding up one end of the country. We see two women from two different professional backgrounds driven by the love for their motherland and pooling their energies together to lift it up. Both the country and the women’s hands are on an even keel and mirror the alignment of the two pairs of women’s hands delicately holding the loaded basket below, emphasizing collaboration and complementarity, rather



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than competition. This image reiterates the indigenous belief that many active hands on the plough make work lighter, as encoded in many local proverbs. Foregrounding a theme we have seen before, the 2012 pagne proudly proclaims that the future of Cameroon lies safely in the hands of her women. Beneath the caretakers of the country and a medallion proclaiming “08 Mars 2012” can be seen a figure of women’s hands bearing a basket containing the means by which women will lead: a computer set, the bowl of Hygieia and staff of Aesclpius (symbolizing medicine and pharmacy), bananas, cotton, and other plants. At the very top of the basket load is a hand hoe, an indispensable farming tool used across a continent where most economies are dependent on agriculture. The women are often referred to as the farmers and feeders of their people as they produce most of the crops in their communities using the hand hoe. Significantly, a subsidiary image on the 2012 pagne features a man and a woman, most probably husband and wife, doing farm work in a lush green forest (Figure 1.5). She is using a hoe and he a machete as they work in gender partnership to advance economic development. Here is also a reminder that Cameroon’s rich forests are some of her greatest national assets for nurturing the well-being and future of her families. The 2012 pagne speaks of women’s expertise at healing, producing, reproducing, nourishing, educating, and leading the nation through their labor and expertise, from very low-tech labor-intensive tools like hand hoes to sophisticated information technologies like computers. In the main icon, the hands holding the basket are poised above a highway leading into the future on which has been written: en route to the Emergence: 2035, referring to the government’s long-term development blueprint, introduced in 2009 and known as “Cameroon Vision 2035.” Encircling this richly symbolic image appears a slogan reading in English and French: “Women, Actresses of Great Achievement.” At the hem of the garment lies a repeating motif of medallions with the name of each region ringed by text proclaiming the slogan “On the Road to Emergence: 2035,” once again. Underscored is the long-term development plan for Cameroon, a reference framework for reducing poverty to a socially acceptable level; reaching middle-income-country status; becoming an industrialized country; consolidating the democratic process; and strengthening national unity while respecting the country’s diversity. These goals are well captured by the various messages inscribed on the IWD commemorative cloth as discussed above. The pagnes emerge as sending messages to move beyond women’s concerns and accomplishments to address nation-building challenges and strategies. Like other women across Africa, Cameroonian women are relentlessly navigating feminism and nationalism, reclaiming their rights, but also those of all the people.

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Conclusion In a wonderful example of traveling theory, an elegant grandma on a recent visit from Cameroon took a stroll through the streets of Manhattan wearing her colorful IWD kaba. Ordinarily self-absorbed New Yorkers broke stride to stare after her as she passed, with some even following to read the messages and ask questions about her intriguing outfit. Wherever she may be found, a wearer of pagne serves as a walking billboard, her outfit functioning much like eastern African kanga, brightly colored cloth that incorporates messages in the form of riddles, names, and proverbs. While all clothing utters a statement about those who wear it, our grandmother’s experience illustrates the power of these traditional talking textiles to speak forcefully enough to interrupt and redirect conversation amid the distractions and cacophony of modern urban life. Significantly, in addition to its rich lexicon of symbol, icon, texture, color, form, and text, grandma’s IWD kaba embodies another history of African women’s creativity, vision, and improvisational skill. When strict Protestant missionaries arrived in Central and West Africa in the mid-1800s, they concealed the bodies of young girls (especially their breasts, which the missionaries taught them were objects of shame) within a long cloth called “cover” or as the local people would have it, “kaba.” By the early twentieth century, West African women were designing, cutting, and sewing their own kaba, transforming these shapeless bags into elegant creations that would come to be regarded as quintessentially African. In West Africa, “the term kaba is applied to three different ensemble styles: the three-piece Ghanaian kaba; the kaba cloth dress of Sierra Leone, and the smocked kaba dress style worn in Cameroon,” each style a hybrid “developed through the selective incorporation and local transformation of European elements of female dress.”9 In the same way, the women of Cameroon have taken the IWD celebration, originally conceived of and executed in the West, and made it their own. Cameroon remains a deeply patriarchal society in which women struggle for recognition as full citizens, battling problems of illiteracy, poverty, discrimination, domestic violence, and other violations of their basic human rights and freedoms. Yet women continue to make strides that challenge any notion of their lack of agency or determination. In Cameroon’s elections this year (2014), the World Bank reports, women went from making up 14 percent membership in the national parliament to 31 percent, surpassing for the first time the benchmark of 30 percent for this important world-development indicator. (Tellingly, in 2014, women only made up approximately 20 percent of the US Congress). The jubilant flow of women marching past every March 8 displays the breath of women’s knowledge, expertise, and enthusiasm for transforming the country, the continent, and



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the world. The IWD pagne in which they are clad vibrantly offers witness to their struggles and achievements, with each edition writing a new chapter in the story of the women of Cameroon. As a bearer of memory, history and epistemology, this powerful commemorative cloth will remain a dynamic platform for generating public discourse and debates about women’s lives. The struggle continues, but so does the celebration, and the women of Cameroon will boldly continue to cut their own cloth. Our challenge is how to bring these women’s ways of knowing and theorizing to bear in our feminist academic and activist scholarship. Notes 1. Pagne is a French word which literally means loin-cloth, but refers to a piece of cloth worn as a wrapper. In Cameroon and other francophone countries, the word also means factory-printed textiles as a specific category of cloth, as well as a standard measure by which factory textiles are sold (2.2 by 1.75 yards). 2. For further information, see www.internationalwomensday.com and www. unwomen.org. 3. Kathleen Bickford, “The A.B.C.’s of Cloth and Politics in Cote d’Ivoire,” Africa Today, 41 no. 2 (1994), 8. 4. Brenda Yufeh, “Cameroon: Women’s Day Fabric Design Under Examination,” allAfrica.com (26 Sept. 2012) http://allafrica.com/stories/201209270988.html 5. CICAM has come under fire for profiteering from the sale of the pagne at the expense of poor women who can hardly afford it. The question of this exclusion is significant, but perhaps the question is being asked in the wrong direction. Is it the fault of the pagne that women are impoverished, or should the emphasis (as the day states) be to lift all women from poverty? CICAM management state they contribute to increased job creation, income generation, and social program promotion for women’s and girls’ empowerment. 6. In Cameroon, kaba is a bell-shaped smock flowing freely from the shoulder to the ankles and more recently to the knees. See Figures 1.1 and 1.2. 7. Each year, the UN chooses an official IWD theme which can be modified to fit the particular situation of each country. 8. The eight millennium goals are as follow: 1. Eradicate poverty and hunger; 2. Achieve universal primary education; 3. Promote gender equality and empower women; 4. Reduce child mortality; 5. Improve maternal health; 6. Combat HIV/ AIDS, malaria and other diseases; 7. Ensure environmental sustainability; 8. Develop a global partnership for development. www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shmtl. Last accessed on 7/5/14. 9. Suzanne Gott, “The Ghanaian Kaba: Fashion That Sustains Culture,” Contemporary African Fashion, edited by Suzanne Gott and Kristyne Loughran (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 13. Some of the cloth used to sew the kabas is produced in European factories, yet these manufacturers depend on the wisdom of African market women to choose the themes and motifs that will earn their profits.

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Bibliography Bickford, Kathleen. “The A.B.C.’s of Cloth and Politics in Cote d’Ivoire.” Africa Today 41 no. 2 (1994): 5–24. Gergely, Nicolas. The Cotton Sector of Cameroon, Africa Region Working Paper Series, no 126, World Bank, March 2009 (Last accessed on 5 July 2014). Gott, Suzanne. “The Ghanaian Kaba: Fashion That Sustains Culture.” Contemporary African Fashion. Eds. Suzanne Gott and Kristyne Loughran. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010: 11–28 Hagan, Martha A. “Speaking Out: Women, Pagne, and Politics in the Côte D’Ivoire. Howard Journal of Communications 21, no. 2 (2010): 141–163. Reportage «Actu spécial» à la CICAM, le spécialiste du pagne au Cameroun (2006) on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HKSxxKQ4U0 (Last accessed on 7/5/14). Yufeh, Brenda. “Cameroon: Women’s Day Fabric Design Under Examination.” allAfrica.com (26 Sept. 2012). http://allafrica.com/stories/201209270988.html. (Last accessed on 7/5/14).

Chapter 2

Reading the Téra-tera Textiles and Transportation in Niger’s First Republic Amanda Gilvin

When a young woman married in Niamey, Niger in 1960, her family needed to commission at least two textiles, one for her and one for the groom. Mothers who could afford to do so gave their daughters many more garments and blankets for the occasion, but two téra-tera textiles were imperative. A variety of ethnic groups lived in Niamey, but the exchange of the téra-tera was one of the customs of the Djerma culture that was adopted by many others in the new national capital. The increasing use of this textile reflected the growth in interethnic marriages in Niamey from the 1950s onward, as people had growing contact with diverse populations from across Niger and the region. Sahelian ethnicities have long been porous and elastic, resulting in mixing, or what is often referred to as the Sahelian brassage, but urbanization accelerated this phenomenon.1 Of the marriages she documented in Niamey in the late 1960s, French ethnographer Suzanne Bernus found that half were between two people from different ethnic groups.2 Textiles offer an alternative archive that can shed light on the experiences of people often omitted from other historical accounts. The history of the leaders of the First Republic of Niger has been well documented, and important new scholarship by Klaas van Walraven analyzes the repressed leftist Sawaba opposition party.3 While also drawing on archival research and formal interviews, I analyze the téra-tera in order to highlight the perspectives of weavers and women who actively participated in Nigerien nationalist endeavors in their homes and in public spaces during the First Republic. This work adds to the growing scholarly accounts of women’s perspectives in Nigerien history and contemporary culture, and it heeds John Picton’s call that art historians pay closer attention to women as collaborators in production and owners of textiles, even when weavers are men.4 In this chapter, I offer two key ways to read 15

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the téra-tera. First, I examine themes of transportation in téra-tera designs, which reflected the shifting realities of both weavers and the young people who used the textiles that they wove. Secondly, I interpret the Nigerien nationstate’s appropriation of the téra-tera and other textiles as nationalist symbols. A luxurious textile genre, the téra-tera linked a young couple to their ancestors while orienting them toward a fast-moving modernity. Received at a significant life event, a wedding, the téra-tera represented the couple’s cherished place within their families in the newly formed relationship of their marriage. Though hearkening to past generations’ gifts and performances of textiles, the téra-tera was a relatively recent genre—and even more recently available to a larger portion of the population, thanks to the mid-twentieth century’s expanded supply of industrially produced thread in Niger. The tératera celebrated a young couple’s matrimony, symbolizing the bride’s family’s love for their daughter. It located the couple in their families and in time, and while most strongly associated with the town of Téra and the Djerma ethnicity, its production by both Djerma and Bellah Tuareg weavers and its use by diverse Nigeriens reflected the complex experience of ethnicity in the new nation-state of Niger. Images of the téra-tera have been reproduced in books on African textiles, but there exists little scholarship in French or English on this important genre. It merits further analysis because the changing designs on them reflected changing lives in the newly independent Niger during its First Republic, from 1960 until 1974. Numerous genres of textiles existed in Niger in the mid-twentieth century, but the téra-tera came to be especially prominent. A téra-tera can be composed of fifteen, seventeen, or twenty-one strips. There are contiguous motifs at each short border, and four or five continuous stripes composed of floating weft motifs are also placed in the center. The motifs on most of the work are in small rectangular stripes contained by each strip, which are visually balanced through alternation or through apparently random but evenly distributed placement. All téra-tera blankets have a large central section, the babba, in which more complex motifs are balanced both horizontally and vertically. Symmetry is an important design element, although there is some flexibility with the interspersed motifs outside of the babba, providing that they follow a logical rhythm. They may or may not have warp stripes, and several sub-categories exist. Of these, the most important is the krou-krou, which is identical, except it includes numerous, regularly spaced small black dots in the spaces that would be solid white in the téra-tera. Most téra-tera feature the kulnej gutumo and the garbey kopto motifs (Figure 2.1). Kulnej gutumo represents birds’ eyes, and it relates to widespread practices of eye motifs that ward off the “evil eye” (see Figure 2.2).5 Likewise, garbey kopto can be made from different formations of triangles, which represent the leaves of a kind of acacia tree common in the region (see Figure 2.3).6



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Protective of the person sheltered in it and exuding symbolic vegetational fertility, téra-tera textiles were sumptuous items gifted to a young couple from the bride’s family in an act of ritual beneficence, as well as a statement to the groom’s family and the community at large of the family’s capacity to commission works of great quality. On the first night that the couple would spend together after the wedding, the bride’s friends bring her to her new husband’s room in his family compound wrapped in her téra-tera. The groom and his friends approach the room, shelter under his, and he then embarks on a feigned negotiation with a young woman representing the bride’s family. Once he received permission to join his bride on the conjugal bed, the couple then sat for a while wrapped in their blankets, greeting their guests. Eventually, the guests would leave the couple, cozy in their new téra-tera, alone for the evening. After the wedding, a téra-tera could be kept in storage. Women’s textile collections were sometimes stored visibly in glass-cased shelves holding pots that were also part of their dowries—as the shelves often were, too. In Djerma tradition, women and men retained separate ownership of the textiles given to them. Women could use theirs as garments wrapped around the body lengthwise during the day, and men could use theirs as wraps to wear in the compound at night. Téra-tera textiles could also be used as conjugal blankets during chilly Sahelian nights. Considered too precious for the purpose, they were not intended as wall-hangings.7 These blankets and garments fit into a broad formal category of West African textiles that demonstrate the aesthetic intention of the strip weaving technique, in that motifs across the bands are carefully balanced with a sense of improvisatory rhythm. Art historian Robert Farris Thompson traced most West African stripweaving to the Mende “country cloth” tradition, and he included Senegambian, Djerma, Songhay, Djula, Akan, and Ewe weavers among the inheritors of a textile aesthetic he described in musical terms, a style “surcharged with visual syncopation.”8 By this, he describes the “tendency toward metric play and staggering of accented elements” that can be observed especially in the areas outside of the babba on a téra-tera, such as in the example in Figure 2.1. The motifs do not match or line up exactly, but remain balanced, conveying an unexpected dynamism that suggests but does not wholly deliver symmetry. Even when folded or flat, the textile moved before the eye in time. On the body, the téra-tera enhanced human movement. The Téra-tera and Transportation As itinerant workers seeking patrons or other entrepreneurial opportunities, weavers as a group experienced the social and economic changes in

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the twentieth-century Sahel as or perhaps more intensely than most others. They viewed the gendered spatial configurations of villages, towns, and cities in ways that defied colonial, and later, nationalist, patriarchal assignations of public and domestic control entirely in men’s hands. For weavers wove in “women’s houses,” and recognized that women controlled their employment in these domestic spaces.9 All weavers in Niger were self-consciously part of a wide network of African textile production that stretched from Senegal to Algeria to Nigeria—and that related to an even wider global network encompassing India, Britain, and France. Weavers sometimes permanently migrated, and others temporarily traveled to cities and towns before returning to their rural homes or distant cities. Weavers from Dori in what is now Burkina Faso often came to Niamey from the 1950s until the 1970s.10 Weaving was and is largely a hereditary vocation, with fathers teaching their sons the craft, although interethnic apprenticeships and working relationships between weavers also occurred. In 1968, Boubou Hama emphasized the collegial loyalty among weavers in the region by recounting that “when a weaver quarrels with a patron after having arranged the warp for her commission, the strict rule in the region forbids another weaver from weaving on that warp. The absolute rule, even now, allows no exception. This custom is stronger than Western labor unions.”11 Hama also underlined the fact that a weaver’s patron is “always a woman.”12 In 2010, weaver Dauda Gudi of Bonkoukou explained to me in a mildly impatient tone of stating the obvious, “We are workers for women.”13 In the same work on education in Africa, Hama quoted from an interview with the weaver Djoumari Kindo, who he identified as the most senior weaver in Say, where other Djerma and Fulani weavers were working at that time in 1968. Kindo learned from his grandfather and uncle, explaining that it was only after a very long apprenticeship throughout his childhood of running errands and adolescence of weaving plain white cloth that he learned how to weave more ornate designs, or the suban. He characterized weaving as deeply influenced by magic and spirits, and was evidently a primary source for Hama’s description of solidarity among weavers.14 Although many Fulani and Hausa weavers had long held comparatively high social status as skilled artisans, in other cultures, many weavers were enslaved until the early twentieth century, and later, their descendants often faced discrimination because of their enslaved ancestors. Most weavers were enslaved in precolonial Djerma society, and some weavers were horso, or a kind of enslaved person with some privileges, including the right to own property.15 Bellah Tuareg are descended from people enslaved to elite Tuareg, and after the French dismantled Tuareg systems of patronage and slavery in the early twentieth century, Bellah weavers in the villages of Baleyara and Bonkoukou conducted subsistence agriculture during part of the year, and



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wove during the cool season, often in other villages and towns. In the increasingly standardized patronage system of the twentieth century, when a woman commissioned a textile from a weaver, she provided the yarn, and fed and housed him for the duration of his work. She also provided him with kola nuts and/or cigarettes, depending on his preference. She paid him a small amount at the end, his provisions being considered the bulk of what she owed him for his work. Before the mid-twentieth century, most textiles that were made were plain, white ones and most West Africans owned few garments.16 Beginning with the violent French Voulet-Chanoine expedition in 1898 and 1899, and continuing throughout harsh French colonial taxation and forced labor policies—and then through the accelerating monetization of the economy post-independence, young men in what is now Western Niger had long traveled to coastal regions to find waged labor. Jean Rouch famously depicted some of his Djerma friends “en exode” in the 1950s in his 1967 film, Jaguar. The movement of such young men back and forth transformed the individuals and the communities to which they returned—often to leave again, whether for another trip to Ghana or for a more permanent move to Niamey. Many weavers were among the men seeking waged labor in coastal areas, but it is unclear how much they wove when working other waged jobs there, and although there is evidence for exchange in weaving motifs and techniques, this was not the reason for their travel.17 Weaver Mohamadou Hama, known as Mota, spent two years and three months in Ghana between 1957 and 1960 over the course of three different trips. He saw weavers working, but he explained that “I saw them, but I didn’t do it. I knew I already knew how to do it. I went to look for work, I wasn’t looking for other weavers.”18 The waged labor in Ghana, unlike subsistence farming or weaving, provided much-needed capital, and was a categorically different kind of labor for many weavers. In the 1960s, weavers and their weavings were moving about the region with unprecedented intensity. The possible kinds of transportation multiplied, and this was a theme that weavers embraced. Although most handwoven textiles throughout West Africa contain abstract motifs, representational weaving was popular in the region at least as early as 1928, which was when one Djerma textile was acquired by the Newark Museum (Figure 2.4). Nigeriens would now call this textile a suban, in that it shares many formal characteristics of a téra-tera, but lacks the central babba. Among weft-faced stripes and blocks of abstract floated weft designs are four representational motifs. Three depict three people standing side by side, and in another, two people stand in front of a horse, an animal that represented great wealth, mobility, and military power at the time. In 1930, Françoise Zeltner purchased a similar women’s garment in Mali, which is now in the collections of the Musée du quai Branly.19 Also a suban, this example includes the motif of three people

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side by side, and in other images, shows a greater variety of animals. A man stands between a goat and a cow, and two men stand by a cow. A horse makes an appearance again, and one of the three men sits astride it near his companions. These domestic animals were key resources in the Sahel, where pastoralism and agriculture were equally significant methods of food production. Wild ostriches also run across the warp stripes of this work. These suban textiles should be understood as precedents to the téra-tera. As weavers gained greater autonomy, and both weavers and women had more access to industrially produced thread in the 1940s and 1950s, the téra-tera genre became formalized and more widespread. It was produced by Djerma weavers in Téra, but also in Niamey, Say, and what is now Burkina Faso. Many were exported to what is now Benin, Ghana, and Mali. Other weavers also adopted the genre. Most notably, the formerly enslaved Bellah Tuareg weavers and their children in Bonkoukou and Baleyara included the téra-tera in their repertoire and many women in those communities wore the téra-tera.20 Although it most obviously grows out of the Mende country cloth group of which the suban is a part, art historian Bernhard Gardi has pointed out that it also translated the tapestry and floating weft motifs of the grand wool arkilla furnishing textiles made by Fulani and Songhay weavers for Fulani, Songhay, Tuareg, and other clients into smaller floating weft designs in industrial cotton.21 Furthermore, its motifs like the garbey kopto and kulnej gutumo correspond to Gardi’s observations that those on the arkilla kunta furnishing textiles reflect objects in nature.22 Adaptations of the Fulani motif bidal, which represents a compound of houses on the khaasa and the arkilla kounta are common on the téra-tera, and there are also translations of tapestry sections. Gardi describes the téra-tera and other Djerma weaving as an “off-shoot” of Fulani weaving.23 Supporting this claim, there is little consistency in the names for most other abstract motifs on the téra-tera, outside of the garbey kopto and kulnej gutumo motifs and a few others.24 Most early téra-tera were primarily red, black, and white. Almost all documented téra-tera are made exclusively from industrially spun thread (see Figure 2.5). The strips on this one have five warp stripes, and the weaver has included intricate detail at every opportunity. Blocks of diamonds within diamonds, alternating between red and black make up the horizontal stripes often formed by the kulnej gutumo—these would be vertical when worn. The diamonds on either side of the babba feature different tiny floating weft designs within each one. In the 1950s and 1960s, weavers and women experimented with a wide range of colors. This 1960s era téra-tera from Western Niger demonstrates the flexible color scheme of the genre (See Figure 2.6). The red and black still predominate, but rainbow striped weft-faced blocks combined with single color intricate geometric weft-float designs define the



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babba on this example. Representing the Nigerien flag, many examples had the significant addition of green and orange stripes in the 1960s. Blanket designs were also named after President Hamani Diori, other heads of state, and notable events.25 A 1973 téra-tera made by Abouba Ganda in Dosso includes representational motifs that recall the Newark piece from 1928 and the Musée du quai Branly work from 1930 (Figure 2.7). The babba central section and the alternating rectangular designs of the outer sections include garbey kopto, kulnej gutumo, and other conventional téra-tera motifs. Eight images on either side of the babba explore transportation in Ganda’s Niger. Especially considering the significance of cars in experience and popular imagination by the 1970s, their absence is notable, but this weaving insists on the simultaneity and modernity of the modes of transportation portrayed.26 In one strip, two camels are shown, each with a calf. There are three airplanes, and a man on a horse. There are two more adult camels, each with a man posing beside it. Ganda demonstrates great formal mastery through careful placement of diverse interrelated conventional motifs, in combination with the less common figural images. Camels, horses, and planes were all valuable, animate objects requiring significant wealth to attain, and they represented mobility and power. The people, animals, and machines travel on the textiles that marked a transitional occasion for the man or woman who would receive it. It evoked the potential travel and the changing relationships between people and the objects around them in the 1970s. As they were associated with marriage ceremonies that invoked ancestral traditions and wishes for fertility, téra-tera textiles expressed familial and cultural continuity for many in the First Republic. As the Nigerien nation-state began to take shape and internalize colonial ethnic definitions, the téra-tera and other textile traditions were crucial identifying factors of being Djerma, even as people of other ethnicities began adopting their use. The adoption of Djerma status symbols was especially important in a young nation-state with a government dominated by ethnically Djerma men. For the men making téra-tera textiles and the women commissioning, selling, giving, and using them, they were experimental, modern, and luxurious objects that reflected their status and aspirations in an unpredictable world. In addition to figural motifs, some abstract motifs favored from the 1950s through the 1980s, such as Niameyeze, reflected patrons and artists’ preoccupation with urbanization and their nationalist pride in their growing capital city. Growing in economic and experiential importance, Niamey was reflected in small, neat diamond shapes stacked upon one another. Although smaller and less strictly urban than other cities in the region, Niamey was a city, full of unfamiliar objects, experiences, and people for the women and men migrating there.

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The Téra-tera and Nigerien Nationalism The First Republic of Niger took up hand-woven textiles as central symbols of Nigerien national culture, which was constructed at the national museum, in temporary expositions, and through diplomatic gifts. This national culture was intended as anticolonial, but it introduced additional gendered and class strictures even as others disappeared or became more flexible. With its lack of sculptural traditions among ethnicities that without exception spread across the new national boundaries, representations of textiles and dress asserted both the shared uniqueness of Nigeriens and objectified their ethnic diversity in ways both foreigners and Nigeriens themselves found pleasurable. By bringing women’s domestic objects into state display, especially at the museum, politicians and bureaucrats successfully imbued the state with a sense of familiality, an aura of a home. This was one expression of what Achille Mbembe would call the socialization of state power.27 The Musée National du Niger was founded in 1959, in anticipation of the impending nominal national independence. Ali Mabo, whose cotton kounta was an early acquisition of the museum and whose surname suggests that he was Maabo, or from a casted Fulani family of weavers, was one of the first artisans that museum founder Boubou Hama and director Pablo Toucet invited to work on site.28 A small vitrine featuring a detailed handmade miniature Djerma loom was among the exhibits in the inaugural gallery in 1959.29 Photographs showed weavers at work, and brightly colored industrially spun thread hung above a spindle and undyed handspun thread. Miniature téra-tera strips, perhaps made on the small loom, showed a variety of motifs. Many of the weavers at the museum and throughout Niamey came from the areas around Timbuktu, Dori, and Liptako in what are now Mali and Burkina Faso—and not from the territory that would become the nation-state of Niger. As artists who worked for women across the region, these weavers were nonetheless asked to make weavings to represent the nation-state of Niger once they came to work at the museum, as many of them did, including Ali Mabo, Ali Sinka, Amadou Oumarou (Fin), and Mohamadou Hama (Mota). Some of them wove the téra-tera, but the museum became best known for its production of cotton versions of the grand wool arkilla furnishing textiles, such as the arkilla kunta and arkilla kereka. Simplified and standardized translations of the furnishing textiles, these heavy cotton wall hangings became known as the kounta and tcharka, respectively. In the 1960s and 1970s, as many as twenty weavers worked in the reconstruction of a Songhay village at the Musée National du Niger (Figure 2.9). In this photograph, two weavers pose in the thatched shed where they worked. One of the faux village’s huts is visible at the far left of the photograph. On the left, a weaver sits in front of a téra-tera textile on display. Others like it



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were available for purchase in the museum shop. He wears a stylish print button-down shirt over dark slacks, and his jaunty hat and loafers sit to his right. For weavers frustrated by the small remuneration given by women patrons in an increasingly cash-based economy, the museum provided a unique opportunity to sell their work for better prices. The rules against selling directly to customers troubled few of the artisans in the first decade after the museum opened, for the shop purchased all of their work. The Costume Pavilion, constructed in 1963, was dominated by mannequins in ethnically identifying ensembles and the large hand-woven textiles that were hung on the walls and installed in the vaulted ceiling (Figure 2.10). By naming it the “Costume Pavilion,” Toucet, after whom the gallery is now named, indicated the colonial ethnographic perspective embedded in the exhibition. In both English and French, the word “costume” indicates dress outside of the everyday, and in colonial and postcolonial ethnography, popular journalism, and exhibition, it was conventionally applied to all nonwestern dress to indicate its Otherness.30 The gallery demands a visitor look up to the textiles. In this installation photograph, the téra-tera faces the camera, and the mannequins stand in their vitrines on either side of the image, as well as in the center. A large cotton kounta hangs on the wall in the background. The weavings featured in the pavilion became the canon of weaving for international representation, despite the far greater extant diversity of wall hangings, blankets, and garments. The genres of this canon were the téra-tera, the krou-krou, the munyuure, and the kounta. In his efforts to feature the artists considered most skilled, Toucet recruited Fulani weavers such as Ali Sinka to work at the museum alongside Djerma and Hausa weavers. In addition to other recruited experts such as Ali Mabo and Hamza, other weavers approached Toucet by way of relatives or friends already at the museum, and they were either accepted or not, according to Toucet’s assessment of work samples that they submitted to him. Textiles were among the first and most expensive art objects acquired by the Musée National du Niger. According to its records, in 1959–1960, a new cotton blanket by a Djerma or Bellah weaver with some floating weft designs cost between 2,000 and 2,500 francs, while the museum paid 3,500 for a téra-tera during the same period. A cotton version of an arkilla kounta was purchased from weaver Ali Mabo, who was the first weaver recruited to work at the museum, for 7,500 francs, and the wool arkilla kounta were unsurprisingly the most valuable acquisitions, with two new ones being purchased for 17,000 francs (8,500 each) and an old one for 10,000 francs. According to Bernus, in 1968, a patron paid a weaver between 400 and 700 francs for a simple blanket and several thousand for ones with more complex designs.31 Textiles were predominant at the National Museum for several years after 1963, with the Costume Pavilion being the second of only two galleries and

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the presence of as many as fifteen or twenty weavers in the reconstruction of a Songhay village. The French ambassador to Niger and former governor of the Colony of Niger, Don Jean Colombani, donated a wool arkilla kounta for a reconstruction of a Wogo Songhay home at the museum, and the museum owned at least three others.32 Meanwhile, in an urban space where the Sahelian brassage may have seemed to be intensifying and even the pleasurable aspects of urbanization and consumerism represented real ruptures in modes of life, Nigeriens greatly enjoyed the neat categorizations of indigenous beauty in the Costume Pavilion. Precisely through using European museological methods that conveyed honor for the object, the museum praised African aesthetics of the body. Visitors appreciated this institutional assertion of value. Yet, it also relegated these forms of dress to the realm of the past—of the “costume,” or dress outside of the norm. In fact, in Niamey in 1963, the dress portrayed in the vitrines could be found on the streets outside, along with people dressed in suits and ties, short skirts, and wax-print ensembles. These were not “costumes,” but vibrant dress traditions that linked people to their ethnicities, cultures, and histories just as they represented vast exchange networks, Sahelian brassage, and African modernities. Just as they were used to decorate the walls of homes and the museum, textiles were essential components of Niger’s sections of international expositions and fairs during the 1960s. At Niger’s exhibit at the 1965 International Fair in Niamey, textiles integrally defined the nation, but they simultaneously were treated as backgrounds for other objects.33 This followed conventions of European fairs and museums and their portrayals of Africa, which used textiles as decoration instead of art objects. Paradoxically, this use of textiles as backgrounds also reflected their ubiquity. The Nigerien stalls at the Expo 67 in Montreal also stressed textiles.34 Weavers joined other artisans to travel to expositions. In 1972, Mahamadou Hama, or Mota, won a contest for his tératera and kounta when he traveled to Paris, where he spent a month weaving at the Galeries Lafayette.35 The First Republic also chose textiles as gifts for visiting diplomats and other official gifts. In a photo published in the national newspaper in 1965, South Korean diplomats studied a téra-tera, which was selected as representative of a shared, identifying Nigerien culture.36 It had not been sewn together completely, as was and is conventional when giving a textile in Niger. By only tacking the bands together, a weaver saved time, and either he or his client could hire a tailor to sew the piece by machine. It also indicated that the piece was new and had not yet been used as a blanket or garment. Toucet encouraged innovations that were meant to appeal to the museums’ primary buying market, the French, American, and other foreign diplomats, consultants, and volunteers working in Niger. He asked weavers to make



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tablecloths and napkins that incorporated arkilla and Hausa motifs, which were popular with visitors. While Pablo Toucet worked closely with the artisans at the museum during his tenure as director there, Nigerien men went to prominent businesswomen to purchase textiles, thus conforming to traditional gendered patronage and labor practices, and reaffirming the link between textiles and the Nigerien woman and mother as the atavistic bearer of authentic national identity.37 To many Djerma people, the téra-tera reaffirmed their inherited culture. To other Nigeriens, the téra-tera signified the potential comforts of urbanizing and industrializing life. The Nigerien nation-state treated the téra-tera as a symbol of a shared national culture with fixed forms and meanings, even as its designs and symbols were in flux. Women and weavers both played important artistic and economic roles, but had limited control over how their work was represented or interpreted in governmental nationalist gestures, both for domestic and foreign audiences. Conclusion Yet, even as motifs’ meanings changed from Téra to Say to Niamey and the téra-tera meant different things in the Musée National du Niger; a market in Accra, Ghana; a diplomat’s home in Seoul, Korea; and at a wedding in Niamey, the téra-tera remained legible to the Djerma and Bellah weavers making them, the young couples receiving them, and the women wearing them. To be wrapped in a téra-tera during her wedding linked a young woman to grandmothers who had spun yarn and been cocooned in stripwoven textiles on the way to see their new husbands. The complex geometric beauty reflected the beauty of the young couple, the world of animals, trees, airplanes, and cities that surrounded them—and the children it was hoped that they would have together. At that wedding in 1960, the téra-tera may have evoked the past, but it spoke to the future. Although representing connections to generations of ancestors in countless wedding ceremonies in the 1960s and 1970s, the téra-tera was still a relatively young genre at the time, having been formalized around the 1940s. While it hearkened to the significance of women’s roles in textile production, its proliferation resulted from the exponential growth in access to machine spun thread, which would significantly change women’s roles in textile production, since they no longer needed to spin the thread themselves. The travels depicted on the téra-tera reflected many kinds of migrations familiar to Nigeriens in the new nation-state. Hausa traders might travel to Mali or Ghana with textiles and other goods to sell them. Young men of different ethnicities traveled to the coast of the Gulf of Guinea seeking waged

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labor, in order to return later with cash savings and new experiences. People from small villages moved to towns, and throughout West Africa, people descended upon cities like Niamey for at least part of the year. The téra-tera was also about moving through time. The airplanes flew so much faster than the birds whose eyes gazed out from the kulnej gutumo motifs that repeated across these garments. Although most Nigeriens did not fly in planes, the arrivals and departures of those who did marked journeys conducted with speed previously unimaginable to the men portrayed in the silhouettes next to their camels and horses on Ganda’s work (Figure 2.7). The production of the téra-tera combined industrial and artisanal processes in ways that marked a unique historical conjuncture in Nigerien modernity. Handweaving thrived during this period precisely because of the relatively abundance of machine-spun thread. The téra-tera was a key tool used by government actors, patrons, and weavers alike to imagine the Nigerien nation-state. It provided a tangible symbol of a supposed shared pre-national culture. Its increasing usage and formal innovations were in many ways results of the process of nation formation. The national museum claimed textiles as a primary visual symbol of Nigerien culture, and curators highlighted the téra-tera because of its importance in Djerma customs and its ubiquity in urban weddings. The state also further distributed the téra-tera by giving examples as gifts. Women and weavers also shaped the téra-tera genre with their own nationalist visions, ascribing nationalist names and meanings to motifs and designs. Although the First Republic privileged a very small minority of Nigeriens, many citizens embraced nationalist ideologies, especially in its early years. By the time Garba wove this blanket in Dosso in 1974, there was wide disillusionment with the Diori regime. The themes reflected the uneven technological modernization in which most people walked as their primary form of transportation, while others flew far beyond Niger’s borders on a regular basis. After a military coup inaugurated a new government in Niger in April of 1974, weavers and their patrons again adapted the téra-tera and other textile genres to the new nationalist discourses, but the acacia leaves and birds’ eyes persisted, linking young people to their families and the Nigerien environment, no matter where they traveled. Notes 1. Ousseina D. Alidou, Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 8. 2. Suzanne Bernus, Particularismes Ethniques En Milieu Urbain L’Exemple De Niamey (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1969).



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3. Klaas van Walraven, The Yearning for Relief: A History of the Sawaba Movement in Niger (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa (New York: Routledge, 1995); and William Miles, Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria and Nigeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 4. Barbara Cooper, “The Politics of Difference and Women’s Associations in Niger: Of ‘Prostitutes,’ the Public, and Politics,” in “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth, NY: Heinemann, 2001); Barbara Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 (Portsmouth, NY: Heinemann, 1997); Barbara Cooper, “Cloth, Commodity Production, and Social Capital: Women in Maradi, Niger 1890–1989,” African Economic History 21 (January 1, 1993), 51–71; Adeline Masquelier, Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Alice Kang, “Studying Oil, Islam, and Women as if Political Institutions Mattered,” Politics and Gender 5, no. 4, 560–8; Susan Rasmussen, Those Who Tough: Tuareg Medicine Women in Anthropological Perspective (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006). 5. Allan S. Berger, “The Evil Eye—An Ancient Superstition,” Journal of Religion and Health, 51 (2012): 1098–1103; Alan Dundes, ed. The Evil Eye: A Casebook (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, [1981] 1992). 6. The acacia albida is called garbey in Zarma and kopto is the Zarma word for “leaf.” 7. Gountou Soumana, personal communication, March 10, 2010. 8. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit : African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1983). 9. When discussing working in patrons’ homes in Hausa during interviews in 2009 and 2010, weavers always referred to the gidanmata or the “house of a woman.” 10. Hadjiya Ayissa Ibrahim, personal communication, January 2, 2010. 11. Boubou Hama, Essai d’Analyse de l’Education Africaine (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1968), 184. 12. Ibid. 13. Dauda Gudi, Personal Communication, April 3, 2010. 14. Hama, Essai d’Analayse, 384. 15. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Concepts et Conceptions Songhay-Zarma: Histoire, Culture, Société (Paris: Nubia, 1982). 16. Bernhard Gardi, “The Research Expedition 1973–1975,” in Woven Beauty: the Art of West African Textiles, ed. Bernhard Gardi (Basel: Museum der Kulturen; Christoph Merian Verlag, 2009), 34. Goumer Abdoulwahid and Noura Garba, personal communication, November 16, 2009. 17. More work is needed on this topic. Limited interviews with weavers who emigrated to Ghana in the late twentieth century (from the 1960s until the 1980s) demonstrate a complete lack of interest in aesthetic exchange with Ghanaian weavers. However, Kari Yau Gbinsa cites a specific Djerma weaver, Bio Ourou Gani, who introduced innovations to both Baatombu weavers in Benin and Djerma weavers in Niger, as an example of how textiles demonstrate longstanding intercultural exchange

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there, beginning with nineteenth-century Djerma invasions and most recently, the ongoing presence of Djerma men seeking waged labor. Kari Yau Gbinsa, “Le Tissage, Témoin des Liens Historiques entre Baatombu et Zarma aux 19e et 20e Siècles,” Elisée Akpo Soumonni, et al. eds. Peuplement et Migrations Actes du Premier Colloque International de Parakou (Niamey, Niger: Editions du Centre, 2000), 151. 18. Mohamadou Mota, personal communication, November 16, 2009. 19. Collection of the Musée du quai Branly, Accession Number 71.1930.61.568. 20. Basel Photo (F) IIIg 8571–5; Exp. F. Nr. 15, 15.6.1974. 21. Gardi, “The Research Expedition,” 35. 22. Ibid., 87 23. Ibid., 34. 24. This inconsistency was found in surveys conducted in Niamey, Bonkoukou, Baleyara, Say, Dogondoutchi, Maradi, and Zinder in 2009 and 2010. 25. Bernus, Particularismes Ethniques. 26. Modes of transportation, especially cars, were an important theme in the films of Jean Rouch, and anthropologist Julien Bondaz has explored Rouch’s anxious portrayals of Nigerien modernity and the ambivalent roles of cars. Julien Bondaz, “Crise de Voiture et Panne de Folie: Itinéraire Thérapeutique dans Cocorico! Monsieur Poulet de Jean Rouch,” Psychopathologie Africaine XXXIV.2 (2007–2008), 243–255. 27. J. Achille Mbembé, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 46. 28. For a concise discussion of arkilla textiles, see Bernard Gardi, “Mali: Weaving with Wool and Cotton,” Museum der Kulturen Basel, Bernhard Gardi, ed. Woven Beauty: The Art of West African Textiles (Basel: Museum der Kulturen, 2009), 61–70. Bernard Gardi also provides an extensive analysis of the Mabuube in his dissertation: Bernhard Gardi, Ein Markt Wie Mopti : Handwerkerkasten Und Traditionelle Techniken in Mali (Basel: Ethnologisches Seminar der Universität und Museum für Völkerkunde; In Kommission bei Wepf, 1985), 25. 29. In May 2014, this display was still in situ. 30. See Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins, and Joanne B. Eicher, “Dress and Identity,” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 10, no. 4 (June 1, 1992), 1–8. 31. Bernus, Particularismes Ethniques, 53. 32. None of those textiles remain in the collections of the Musée National Boubou Hama du Niger. 33. T.C., “Premiere Foire Internationale de Niamey: Vingt Pays, Cinq Organismes Rivaliseront D’ingeniosité du 10 au 20 Décembre,” Le Niger, October 4, 1965. Archives National du Niger (AG: 9939). 34. Le Niger, “A L’expo-67 de Montréal, le Stand du Niger.” November 6, 1967. 35. Mohamadou “Mota” Hama, Personal Communication, November 16, 2009. 36. The caption of a photo states, “La Mission en admiration devant une couverture de tissage local (Djerma)” [the mission admiring a locally woven blanket (Djerma)]. Anonymous, “Une Mission de Bonne Volonté de la République de Corée en Visite Officielle au Niger du 22 au 25 Février.” Le Niger, March 1, 1965. 37. Sadou Aichatou Komelo and Cissé Boucano, personal communication, May 7, 2010; See Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and



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Nationalism., in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Bibliography Alidou, Ousseina. Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Anonymous, “A L’expo-67 de Montréal, le Stand du Niger.” Le Niger, November 6, 1967. ———. “Une Mission de Bonne Volonté de la République de Corée en Visite Officielle au Niger du 22 au 25 Février.” Le Niger, March 1, 1965. Berger, Allan S. “The Evil Eye—An Ancient Superstition.” Journal of Religion and Health 51 (2012): 1098–1103. Bernus, Suzanne. Particularismes Ethniques En Milieu Urbain L’Exemple De Niamey. Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1969. Bondaz, Julien. “Crise de Voiture et Panne de Folie: Itinéraire Thérapeutique dans Cocorico! Monsieur Poulet de Jean Rouch,” Psychopathologie Africaine XXXIV.2 (2007–2008): 243–255. C., T. “Première Foire Internationale de Niamey: Vingt Pays, Cinq Organismes Rivaliseront D’ingeniosité du 10 au 20 Décembre,” Le Niger, October 4, 1965. Cooper, Barbara. “Cloth, Commodity Production, and Social Capital: Women in Maradi, Niger 1890–1989.” African Economic History 21 (January 1, 1993): 51–71. ———. Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989. Portsmouth, NY: Heinemann, 1997. ———. “The Politics of Difference and Women’s Associations in Niger: Of ‘Prostitutes,’ the Public, and Politics.” In “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa. Portsmouth, NY: Heinemann, 2001. Dundes, Alan, ed. The Evil Eye: A Casebook. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, [1981] 1992. Gardi, Bernhard. “Mali: Weaving with Wool and Cotton.” In Woven Beauty: the Art of West African Textiles, ed. Bernhard Gardi. Basel: Museum der Kulturen; Christoph Merian Verlag, 2009: 61–70. ———. “The Research Expedition 1973–1975,” in Woven Beauty : the Art of West African Textiles, ed. Bernhard Gardi. Basel: Museum der Kulturen; Christoph Merian Verlag, 2009: 28–39. Ein Markt Wie Mopti : Handwerkerkasten Und Traditionelle Techniken in Mali Basel: Ethnologisches Seminar der Universität und Museum für Völkerkunde; In Kommission bei Wepf, 1985. Gbinsa, Kari Yau. “Le Tissage, Témoin Des Liens Historiques Entre Baatombu Et Zarma Aux 19e Et 20e Siècles.” In Peuplement Et Migrations Actes Du Premier Colloque International De Parakou. Niamey, Niger: Editions du Centre, 2000. 147–160. Hama, Boubou. Essai d’Analyse de l’Education Africaine. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1968.

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Jaguar. Directed by Jean Rouch, 1967. Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 2010. Masquelier, Adeline. Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Mbembé, J. Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. McClintock, Anne. “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism.” In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Miles, William. Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria and Nigeria. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre. Concepts Et Conceptions Songhay-Zarma: Histoire, Culture, Société. Paris: Nubia, 1982. Rasmussen, Susan. Those Who Touch: Tuareg Medicine Women in Anthropological Perspective. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Roach-Higgins, Mary Ellen and Joanne B. Eicher. “Dress and Identity.” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 10, no. 4 (June 1, 1992): 1–8. Stoller, Paul. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge, 1995. Thompson, Robert. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1983. van Walraven, Klaas. The Yearning for Relief: A History of the Sawaba Movement in Niger. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Chapter 3

Becoming-Griot Righting within a Minor Literature Oumar Diogoye Diouf

In Decolonizing the Mind, while explicating his historic decision to shift from writing in English to writing in his native Gĩkũyũ language, the Kenyan novelist and postcolonial critic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, provocatively claimed that the literature hitherto produced by Africans in European languages could not be considered as African literature. Such texts as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir, or Djibril Tamsir Niane’s Sundiata should, as it were, be “defined” as “Afro-European” books—that is, “literature written in European languages in the era of imperialism.”1 The inevitable controversy around Ngũgĩ’s apparent irreverence to predecessors has unfortunately prevented critics from appreciating the actual decolonial2 force of his later, Gĩkũyũ work. Commenting on Ngũgĩ’s first Gĩkũyũ novel, Odun Balogun rightly remarks that “the essence of Devil on the Cross is not that it is composed in an African language, but that its composition is governed by an aesthetic philosophy that is radically different from earlier practices in African-language novels.”3 My subjunctive approach to African Atlantic writings poses three fundamental questions of Ngũgĩ’s Gĩkũyũ, multigenre novels. First, what decolonial force do they carry that either his earlier novels or most “Afro-European” and African-language novels do not convey? Second, in what ways, if any, could their decolonial potential be adopted and adapted by other postcolonial African Atlantic novelists, regardless of their languages of composition? Third, are there, in the African Atlantic literary tradition, similar attempts at constructing a postcolonial language that speaks directly to postcolonial peoples, about their earnest concerns and challenges? Beyond the symbolic decolonizing act of writing in an authentic African linguistic medium—that is, his mother tongue—Ngũgĩ has in reality been experimenting with what Aimé Césaire termed “the secret of great communications”4; that is, great communications between postcolonial writers and 31

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their primary, postcolonial audiences; great communications of the revolutionary spirit of past and present decolonial efforts; great communications which only can help write postcolonial people out of postcoloniality into post-postcoloniality, through the production of effective decolonial literary monuments. Such decolonial literary monuments, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would probably put it, do “not commemorate or celebrate some past event”; instead they capture, foster, and convey to present and future generations the revolutionary force operative in the people’s past and present emancipatory struggles.5 The construction of effective decolonial literary monuments entails two necessary prerequisites, however. On the one hand, it demands that postcolonial authors operate within a minor literature, centering the minoritarian perspectives, concerns, and interests of their peoples. My take on literary minority is indebted to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature as well as to the original lexicalization provided by Frantz Kafka, in his December 25, 1911 diary entry wherein he praises the “benefits” of the “literatures of small nations” like the minoritarian Czech majority of the Prague and the minoritarian Jewish minority of Warsaw.6 African Atlantic polities are in many regards similar to the culturally and linguistically displaced communities that Kafka calls small nations. In this regard, African Atlantic writings either convey or would tremendously benefit from conveying the type creative force inherent in the revolutionary culture of such minoritarian communities as Prague Czechs and Warsaw Jews. Furthermore, in light of Kafka’s as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s views, a minor literature is a form of politically committed, community-centered, and linguistically subversive literature, produced from a minoritarian perspective. In this sense, one can definitely consider that African Atlantic postcolonial literature, which is produced by linguistically displaced and sociopolitically subjugated communities of resistance, functions essentially as a politically committed minor literature. Better, most postcolonial writers, particularly those in the African-Atlantic literary traditions, have essentially been operating within— not working towards—minor literatures. On the other hand, the production of decolonial literary monuments entails re-membering the postcolonial social body by righting from within socio-historical wrongs and injustices conducive for internal divides and oftentimes favorable to (neo)imperial takeovers. Indeed, writing African Atlantic peoples out of postcoloniality entails addressing a series of internal injustices and tensions that either resulted from or fueled European imperial projects. In the West African context, and particularly in francophone West Africa—land of the djeli, the sèrè, and the gawlo—one of the most effective ways in which writers can both operate within a minor literature and address

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appropriately internal sociopolitical tensions and dissentions is through the adoption of griotic rhetoric and language. While they are at times reductively presented as mere storytellers or praise singers, griots fulfill a variety of roles. In Thomas Hale’s words, West African griots acted as “genealogist, historian, adviser, spokesperson, diplomat, mediator, interpreter and translator, musician, composer, teacher, exhorter, warrior, witness, praise-singer, and master or participant in a variety of ceremonies.”7 In short, griots are the masters in “the art of eloquence” who actually detain the language and secret of great communications that Césaire seeks to acquire in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land]. In the opening page of Sundiata, Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté, master griot of the royal Keita family, sums up the social function of griot caste as follows: “we are vessels of speech, we are the repositories which harbour secrets many centuries old. The art of eloquence has no secrets for us . . . we are the memory of mankind; by the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and exploits of kings for younger generations.”8 As holders of centuries-old secrets, “memory of mankind,” masters in “the art of eloquence,” and intergenerational vessels of cultures and traditions, griots aptly acted as sociopolitical cement within and between traditional West African polities. Despite the colonial experience and the concomitant advent of modernity, the griotic tradition still retains much of its pivotal sociocultural function within contemporary West African societies, and to some extent, among the trans-Atlantic African diaspora. Commenting on cultural retentions in the African diaspora, Gay Alden Wilentz, correctly observes that “While exploring the influence of African cultures in the diaspora, it is significant to note that, although we cannot conflate ‘Africa’ into a single identity, coregional groups of West and Central African countries are a base for these retentions and survivalisms.”9 A similar remark can be made of the griotic tradition. While there are variants of the griot in almost every African culture, it is undoubtedly in West Africa that the sociocultural instrumentality of the griot caste is the most pronounced. The centrality of the griotic tradition in West African societies has certainly to do with the influential role griots played as praise singers, entertainers, genealogists, diplomats, and advisors in the aristocratic circles of West African Empires and kingdoms. In any case, the griotic tradition has been so essential to most West African cultures that the construction of decolonial literary monuments that speak effectively to people of (West) African descent depends in a fundamental manner on a constant becoming-griot of the writer—that is, on the writer’s appropriation of griotic rhetoric and poetics, regardless of the linguistic medium in which he or she writes.

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Hurston and Césaire towards a Griotic Language of Great Communications Zora Neale Hurston and Aimé Césaire are assuredly among the first AfricanAtlantic writers who sought to construct a language of great communications through the literary re-appropriation and revalorization of griotic rhetoric. While none of them had actually experienced firsthand the type of real-life griotic performances that punctuate social life in West Africa, they have both tried to turn into literary material elements of the African-based culture of orality, which entailed reterritorializing on the aesthetic level of written literature key deictics of griotic rhetoric and oratory techniques. A “griot,” Eric Atkinson observes, “is culture in the sense that through the collecting and disseminating of stories, genealogies, histories, songs and rituals, a griot creates a shared community, a shared culture.”10 Adopting and adapting to written literature these genres of African orature, as Césaire and Hurston did, necessitates a becoming-griot of the writer, let alone collecting and disseminating retentions of African traditions and folk culture, as Hurston did. As early as the late 1920s, in the height of the Harlem Renaissance, while most of her peers versed in Ethiopianist re-visitations of the (African) land of origin, Hurston set out to collect and disseminate among her African American fellow citizens retentions of African cultural practices she collected in the Americas. “As Gruesser clearly articulates, for Hughes among others of the Renaissance (although not Zora Neale Hurston . . .), there was more comfort in the fantasized Empire of Ethiopia than the ‘primitivism’ associated with the West African cultures clouded by the racism of the slave trade and slavery.”11 Hurston on the contrary, viewed West Africa as the cultural source, a must visit place. “I have applied for a Guggenheim fellowship and I am told by someone in the know that I cannot fail. West Coast of Africa is my objective,” she writes in a 1933 letter to Ruth Benedict.12 Then, a few months later, she confirmed her interest for West African cultures in a letter to her friend Eslanda who specialized in the anthropology of African cultures and was about to visit West Africa. “I am truly happy that you and Paul are going to sources. Of course your learning of the West African languages can mean nothing else but that you are going to Africa to study at firsthand. That is glorious. Just what I have wanted to do for the past four years, but no funds.”13 In the 1920s, however, Hurston had been able to secure funding from both “her faculty advisor Professor Franz Boas and her literary patron ‘Godmother’ Charlotte Osgood Mason” to conduct anthropological or rather auto-ethnographical field work on retentions of African cultures in the southern rural areas of the US as well as in the Bahamas and Haiti.14 Through her auto-ethnographical immersion tours, Hurston managed to

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turn into effective literary and performance-art materials non-literate folk traditions she set out to popularize. Indeed, long before the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) wherein she extensively uses southern black vernacular as both linguistic medium and literary material, Hurston had been dedicating much time and effort to collecting and passing down African-based cultural practices and traditions lest they be totally erased from the African American collective consciousness by the diktat of America’s Anglo-conformism and Euro-centered assimilationism. In addition to scholarly essays like “Dance Songs and Tales from the Bahamas” (1930) and “Hoodoo in America” (1931), she produced a series of performances including The Great Day (1932), her first revue which she presented in various versions “in cities across the country, including Chicago, St. Louis, Washington DC, and Winter Park, Orlando, and Daytona Beach, Florida.”15 While Their Eyes Were Watching God is rightly considered as Hurston’s magnum opus, the popular theater and folk dance tours that arose from her auto-ethnographical research constituted a major achievement not only in the process of conveying African-based folk traditions and cultural practices to blacks in urban centers but also in the popularization and democratization of conventional arts and literature among southern black folks. If griots are “the memory of mankind” and the intergenerational vessel of cultures and traditions as Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté affirms, then Hurston who collected and disseminated among her contemporary black countrymen and countrywomen centuries-old African-based folk traditions is assuredly a modern-day griot of the African Atlantic world. If “griots and griottes” are pedagogues, if they also fulfil the role of teacher, interpreter, and translator as Thomas A. Hale contends, then Hurston excels at griotism. Not only did she disseminate, through theater and folk concerts, retentions of African cultures among blacks in urban centers, but she also published scholarly essays on these retentions in order to share with the academic community the results of her auto-ethnographical field work on African diasporic cultures. Hurston even displayed higher pedagogical skills as she utilized storytelling techniques to make southern black folks identify with and appropriate the poetry of Harlem Renaissance figures like Langston Hughes. In a 1928 letter to Langston Hughes, she passionately describes the ways in which she managed to popularize Hughes’ poems among rural black folks. In every town I hold 1 or 2 story-telling contests, and at each I begin by telling them who you are and all, then I read poems from “Fine Clothes.” Boy! they eat it up. . . . You are being quoted in R.R. camps, phosphate mines, Turpentine stills etc. . . . So you see they are making it so much a part of themselves they go to improvising on it. For some reason they call it “De Party Book.”16

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Hurston’s letter depicts extremely successful popular lessons on the poetry of Hughes. These poetry lessons are all the more unique as they intersect orature and written literature in a way that renders the latter accessible to the masses. The teaching-learning process starts with “story-telling contests,” a very didactic moment in the predominantly oral tradition of African-based cultures. Then, it proceeds through a rather conventional teaching sequence as Hurston provides the learners with background information on the author before introducing them to poems from “Fine Clothes.” Finally, the teachinglearning process ends with the total appropriation of Hughes poetry and its reinvestment in the conventional language of the learners who “are making it so much a part of themselves [and] go to improvising on it”; some quoting it “in R.R. camps, phosphate mines, Turpentine stills, etc.” Beyond the didactic quality of Hurston’s strategy for popularizing Harlem Renaissance poetry among southern black folks, and besides the antiassimilationist motive underlying her dissemination of African-based folk culture both in urban centers and in the academy, her intersection of orature and written literature partakes of a becoming-griot process that entails a two-fold decolonial aesthetic move. On the one hand, it elevates or reterritorializes African-based griotic performances and storytelling techniques on the aesthetic plane of conventional literariness and artistic production. In fact, Hurston and like-minded African American advocates of cultural pan-Africanism have tremendously succeeded in revalorizing and popularizing the virtues of griotism in the Americas at a moment when, paradoxically, the still endogamous caste of griots experiences varied valences of marginalization within West African cultures. Indeed, “the positive connotations associated with griots outside of their continent of origin mask an enormous ambivalence to the term for many West Africans.”17 As the saying goes, no prophet is accepted in his own hometown, and not surprisingly, it was through a displaced, transatlantic sister’s anthropological, immersion tours in the West Indies and in rural southern black communities that griotism would be restored—at least in the Americas—to its multifaceted function as pillar of sociocultural life and vehicle of the people’s memory. On the other hand, the becoming-griot of the writer deterritorializes literariness in a way that puts poetry, one of the most elitist genres of written literature, on the same plane of immanence as both orature and conversational language. By bridging the intellectual gap between Hughes’s (written) poetry, storytelling techniques of African-based orature, and the everyday language and concerns of southern black folks, Hurston has paved the way for the production of intellectually and politically empowering assemblages. Put differently, through her becoming-a-writer-griot, Hurston has fostered the creation of a plane of immanence or body without organs on which written poems, genres of orature, and Harlem Renaissance political discourses mingle with

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and affect the everyday language and concerns of southern black folks to produce discursive assemblages peppering their discussions “in R.R. camps, phosphate mines, Turpentine stills,” and at home. Césaire never conducted the type of auto-ethnographical fieldwork that fueled Hurston’s efforts to disseminate retentions of African cultures in the Americas and triggered the process of her becoming-a-writer-griot. However, he somehow sensed that it was only in a griotic language that one could possibly manage to produce effective decolonial literary monuments in the African Atlantic world. His sustained quest for a griotic language further testifies to the fact that despite their physical and linguistic displacements, and in spite of their subjection to centuries-long racial dictatorships, African Caribbean people had retained much of West African griotic traditions. Through the speaker of Notebook, Césaire strives to “rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions,” which in the African Atlantic context are nothing but the griotic language and rhetoric that would enable him to speak to—and be heard by—his African Atlantic target audience. “I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions,” he wishes. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. . . . I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners.18

The “secret of great communications and great combustions” that Césaire seeks to “rediscover” is the science of griotism, the key to the griot’s verbal art. The mastery of this science of griotism would give his revolutionary message the rhetorical impetus necessary for exhorting the people of “the native land” into undertaking decolonial action. Differently put, the rediscovery and re-appropriation of the griot’s rhetorical skills, social functions, and oratorical genres would enable the poet-speaker’s becoming a griot-exhorter, a communicator who, according to Thomas Hale, has the ability to “prompt people to immediate action by [his] words.”19 In the preface to Sundiata, Niane explains that griotism is a science for the griots, and “any true science,” they believe, “must be a secret.” Thus the traditionist griot “is a master in the art of circumlocution, he speaks in archaic formulas, or else he turns facts into amusing legends for the public, which legends have, however, a secret sense which the vulgar little suspect.”20 To some extent, it is in this sense that Césaire warns his readers that “Whoever would not understand [him] would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.”21 The people of “the native land”—that is, the Martiniquan people—whom the exiled poet-speaker addresses in Notebook should have no trouble

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understanding his revolutionary message for three reasons at least. First, as a colonized people, they understand too well the legitimate anger and desire for freedom that fills his voice with the aggressiveness of a roaring tiger. Second, as people of African descent who have been exposed to retentions of African oral traditions, they are familiar with the griotic “art of circumlocution,” legendary approach to facts, and “archaic formulas” utilized in Notebook. Third, this familiarity with griotic rhetoric puts them in an ideal position to understand that the aggressiveness of the poet-speaker partakes of his becoming a griot-exhorter whose mission is to urge his colonized people to throw off the yoke of colonial subjection. Just like the griots who, on the front lines, would exhort warriors to turn the battlefield into an apocalypse for enemy troops, the exiled poet-speaker sets out to spearhead the decolonial struggle, once back to the native land, by prompting his colonized people to turn the colonial landscape into a nightmare for the colonizer. His words will exhort his subjugated people to render the native land ungovernable for the colonizer. And like “precious stones remote enough to discourage miners,” the resources of the native land will become inaccessible to the colonizer, for the colonial system will undergo an apocalyptic end. Nothing but “vestiges of temples” will remain of the colonial rule after its confrontation with a resisting people that is unrestrained by the sight of bodies covered with blood “clots,” as uncontrollable as “mad horses” and as indomitable as “fresh children.” Beyond his role as griot-exhorter, the poet-speaker of Notebook fulfils a variety of other griotic functions, including that of spokesperson for minoritarian people. Indeed, one of the reasons why he yearns for “the secret of great communications and great combustions” is that it would enable him to unsilence all those who like the colonized people of his native land are subject to one or another form of colonialism. “My mouth,” he resolutely pledges, “shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth,/ my voice the freedom of those who break down/in the prison holes of despair.”22 Being the griot-spokesperson of oppressed peoples and communities entails thus entering various processes of becoming-minoritarian. In the case of the poet-speaker of Notebook, becoming-minoritarian means becominga-poor-beggar, a persecuted Jew, an outcast Hindu, a racially marginalized African American, a religiously oppressed Kaffir, or any of the other minoritarian people that he seeks to reterritorialize on a plane of human equality governed only by a Glissantian poetics of relation.23 Given their shared experience of oppression, none of these minoritarian people will have trouble identifying with the colonized people of the poet-speaker’s native land, let alone understanding his decolonial message or the rage that gives his voice the aggressiveness of a roaring tiger.

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Griotic Rhetoric as Poetic Material in Francophone West Africa Césaire’s African co-advocates of Négritude had no doubt that their francophone West-African audiences could fully decipher their griotic rhetoric and understand the rage that fills their exhortative voices with aggressiveness. Like the Martiniquan people, francophone West Africans were also experiencing the ill effects of the French colonial rule. Like the Martiniquan people, and even more so, they were familiar with the griots’ verbal art. Their social life was, indeed, punctuated by authentic griotic performances while Martiniquan people were just exposed to retentions of griotic traditions. Birago Diop’s flights of oratory and exhortative, imperative tone in his popular poem “Souffles” are evidence that Négritude poets factored in their audience’s familiarity with griotic rhetoric. Right in the opening lines, he enjoins the audience to “Listen to Things/More often than Beings,” for both “the wind,” and “water” have voices that can and must be heard, and “the sobbing bush” is “the breathing of the ancestors” (l. 1-6).24 The speaker’s injunction to uphold cosmogonic beliefs in the omnipresence of (not-at-all) dead ancestors operates through a griotic social deixis well known to West African audiences. Martial Frindéthié remarks in his analysis of “the paradigm of the griot” that francophone African writing is fueled by “numerous deictics borrowed from the griot’s narrative technique—such as digressions, repetitions, synonymous and climactic parallelisms.”25 In “Souffles,” Birago Diop has masterfully adopted and adapted the paradigms of the griot as he exhorts the addressee to “listen” to “the breathing of the ancestors” through a five-line digression, punctuated by a series of synthetic parallelisms (in lines 3, 4, and 5) and a final climactic parallelism (in line 7). On the communicational level, the utilization of digressions and parallelisms constitute an effective didactic move as it enables the speaker to convey his message through a variety of images and illustrations. It also enables the personification of inanimate beings in a way that intensifies the affective value—and therefore enhances the persuasive force—of the speaker’s discourse. Indeed, the exhortation to listen to things more often than beings is not only reiterated in the claims that the fire, the wind, and water have voices, but it is also emotionally charged as the breathing of the ancestors is equated with the sobbing of the bush. In this regard, the exhortation to listen to things rather than beings is also an invitation to revive and reappropriate precolonial Negro-African pantheist worldviews. As such, it constitutes a decolonial response to Eurocentric tabula rasa discourses on Negro-African cultures and civilizations. On this score, the use of the second-person imperative (“listen” and “hear”) shows that the speaker is intransigent about both the need to challenge the

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Eurocentric devaluation of African cultural beliefs and the need for Africans to rediscover and revalorize these cultural beliefs. While the imperative tone is maintained throughout the stanza, the contrast between the active “listening process” and the passive “hearing process” suggests that, once the African addressee starts paying attention to the “breathing of ancestors” he or she will realize that they “have not gone away,” are “not under earth,” and “are not really dead” (l. 25–27). In other words, any serious effort to rediscover and revalorize lost aspects of African cultures will be successful, for the colonizer’s Eurocentric view of civilization has negatively affected, but not totally erased, Negro-African cultural beliefs and practices. Like Birago Diop, many other francophone West African poets, including Léopold Senghor (in “Joal”) and David Diop (in “Afrique, mon Afrique”), have successfully resorted to griotic aesthetics to exhort their audience into a decolonial stance. The Becoming-Griot of the Novelist: A Pragmatic Move in the Construction of Decolonial Literary Monuments Frindethie’s claim that francophone African writing borrows “numerous deictics” from the “griot’s narrative techniques” is more consistent with poetic works than novels. While most African novelists adapt and insert rhetorical modes and genres of African orature in their writings, very few African novels are modeled on griotic oral performances as thoroughly as Negritude poems like “Souffles,” “Joal,” or “Afrique mon Afrique.” Other than such few exceptions as Kourouma in En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages [Waiting for the Votes of the Wild Animals], Ngũgĩ’ in Devil on the Cross and Matigari, and, to a lesser extent, Niane in Sundiata, very few African novelists have thoroughly experimented with the becoming-griot writing strategy beyond what Ngũgĩ would call the “Afro-European” or “EuroAfrican” adaptation of African orature to the novelistic genre. Becoming—le devenir—means neither being nor having become, and peppering a narrative with proverbs, featuring an authentic griot-figure in a plot, or transcribing a griot’s story are not actual instances of the becoming-griot of the writer. As Deleuze and Guattari clearly explain, “becoming is an extreme contiguity within a coupling of two sensations . . . in the distance that captures both of them in a single reflection. . . . Becoming is not the transformation of one [thing] into the other . . . it is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility.”26 In light of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, a close examination of the use of griotic aesthetics in Sundiata, Waiting for the Votes of the Wild Animals, and Devil on the Cross shows that Ngũgĩ and Kourouma resort more effectively to the decolonial benefits of the becoming-griot of the writer. In each

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of these three novels, the narrative opens with (and is somehow told from the perspective of) a griot—Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté in Sundiata; Bingo, the sèrè in En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, and Giccandi player in Devil on the Cross. All three authors manage to deterritorialize the novelistic genre and adapt it to genres of African orature centered on griotic aesthetics. However, while Niane has become (or turned into) Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté, Ngũgĩ and Kourouma have been becoming-griots. Whereas Niane has simply mediated the narrative of an authentic griot, Ngũgĩ and Kourouma have used griotic poetics to construct decolonial literary monuments. Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals is a satire targeting the tyrannical regime of President Eyadéma of Togo, one of the very few dictators who survived the wind of change that blew in francophone Africa at the end of the Cold War. With the post-Cold War New World order that consecrated the US as the sole global super power, the West left to their fate all the African dictators it had thus far been supporting in the name of their so-called anti-Communist commitment. To remain in power, despite the recurrent social upheavals and pressures from the international community, the superstitious Koyaga, a fictional version of Eyadéma, undertakes his “cathartic donsomona,” a “purificatory epic as master hunter” during which he shall confess all his crimes.27 The donsomona is told by a sèrè, “a hunter’s griot and responder,” accompanied by a koroduwa, “an initiate in his cathartic stage.”28 Once he has revealed and confessed everything, Koyaga will recover “the Qur’an and the meteorite,” two talismans that will guarantee his reelection, for “if by chance men refuse to vote for [him],” the superstition goes, “the wild animals will come out of the bush, seize the ballots, and vote for [him].”29 The sèrè is categorical though, for the donsomona to be effective, nothing should be hidden; everything should be told. “We shall tell the truth,” he warns Koyaga. “The truth about your dictatorship. The truth about your parents and your collaborators. All the truth about your filthy tricks and your bullshit; we shall denounce your lies, your numerous crimes and assassinations.”30 The actual decolonial force of griotic poetics in Waiting for the Votes of the Wild Animals is located, not in mediated presences of authentic griot figures, but in the series of territorializations operative in the mutual affection inherent to the novelist’s becoming-sèrè—that is, a praise-singer for master hunters. On the one hand, the conventional narrative modes of the novel are thoroughly deterritorialized. First, the primary narratees are no longer readers but Koyaga the dictator-master-hunter and the sèrè’s responder, Thiékoura the koroduwa or village buffoon. Second, the numerous digressions, along with Koyaga’s complicit participation in the satirical storytelling process, decenter both the plot and the main characters in a kind of pre-nouveau roman aesthetics. On the other hand, the sèrè’s storytelling modes are also significantly deterritorialized. For one thing, the substance of his discourse

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is no longer praises for a master hunter’s feats he might have witnessed or heard from his father, but highly sociopolitical issues allegorically encoded in digressive stories, punctuated with authoritative proverbs and folktales. For another thing, his real addresses are no longer the actual participants in the “cathartic donsomana” ritual but the postcolonial people struggling against neo-colonialism and post-independence dictatorship. This long series of deterritorializations triggers an equally long series of reterritorializations. First, the sèrè—traditionally a respected praise-singer for revered master hunters, subsequently a despised praise-singer for postindependence dictators—is revalorized as an advocate for sociopolitical justice. At the same time, the performative storytelling tradition of the donsomana reterritorializes and becomes a powerful decolonial literary machine, plugged into such emancipatory machines as the social criticism machine, the colonial discourse analysis machine, and the popular revolutionary machine. A case in point of the connection of the now decolonial donsomana machine into the revolutionary machine is the sèrè’s digressive praise for Vietnamese freedom fighters who, “through their combat, addressed a message, very strong truths, to all the colonized peoples”: A great nation can conquer only the small people unable to come together in order to resist aggression. . . . After the war in Vietnam, there are still some nations on the planet that take delight in colonization, but there is no nation that could not recover its freedom. Let us bow to the Viets.31

The sèrè’s celebration of the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu constitutes an implicit call for all colonized or oppressed peoples to follow the lead of the Vietnamese people. However, Kourouma’s objective is obviously not to exhort post-independence African readers into anticolonial guerilla warfare. The sèrè’s dramatization of the Vietnamese people’s successful resistance against the French colonizer should thus be read as an incentive for African peoples living under dictatorships to not merely “bow to the Viets” but to emulate their popular opposition to oppression by throwing off their tyrannical governments. Like this story about the Vietnam War, the numerous other digressions that punctuate all six sumus [nocturnal vigils] of the donsomana ritual pertain either to Kourouma’s satirical critique of the abusive powers of African dictators or to his denunciation of the complicit role of western (neo-)imperial powers in the rise and perpetuation of their tyrannical regimes. For instance, Koyaga’s initiatory journey across Africa, “the continent of multiple dictators,” gives the sèrè the pretext to expose the arcane secrets of the most totalitarian African regimes. That rhetorical strategy, which helps Kourouma

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plug his literary machine into both the historical and the political-science machines, constitutes a powerful pragmatist move in the sense that it fictionalizes and renders accessible to the average reader important political intricacies that shaped the lives of millions of Africans for decades. During the initiatory tour he undertakes right after his seizure of power, Koyaga is introduced to the rudiments of totalitarianism by each of the master-dictators he visits. His stay at Tiekoroni’s (Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire) is by far the most instructive part of his initiatory journey. Tiekoroni, the sage of “the Republic of the Ebony people” whom “France, America, and the entire Occident [proclaimed] the spearhead of the Cold War and leader of the anti-Communist struggle in West Africa,” gave Koyaga the strategic masterstroke, the ultimate subterfuge that invariably ensured for deceitful dictators both international notoriety and eternal power: pretending to be “a general in the struggle of the West against Red imperialism.” Since “a battle leader on the front must not be sullied,” the Western media would fiercely attack “all those who denounced his system” and make sure that “all criticisms formulated about him [appear] to be partisan.”32 Through his recourse to the griotic genre of the donsomona, Kourouma has managed to fictionalize and render accessible to the masses intricacies of the types of totalitarian rules that negatively affect the continent. More importantly, by having the perpetrators of crimes against their own peoples reveal their diabolical schemes and confess their cynical procedures, the donsomona operates as an eye opener and an incentive to dissent for readers who are or might one day be subject to the rule of deceitful tyrants. As such, Waiting for the Votes of the Wild Animals is an effective decolonial literary monument that is grounded in the past and directed towards the future at the same time. Conclusion One of the most effective ways in which African Atlantic authors can revive and intensify the struggle against what Ngũgĩ calls “the neo-colonial stage of imperialism” is through the production of decolonial literary monuments that center the minoritarian perspective, interests, and concerns of the revolutionary people. Such decolonial literary monuments can only be constructed in a linguistic medium capable of capturing, enhancing, and conveying to future generations the revolutionary spirit of past and present decolonial struggles. In the African Atlantic region, and particularly in West Africa, this linguistic medium is all the more effective as it is fueled by griotic poetics—that is, through the utilization of the griotic oratory techniques and the enactment of the griot’s multifaceted social function.

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On the one hand, the efficacy of a decolonial literary monument depends on its ability to exhort the target audience into further revolutionary action. Such exhortation is all the more appealing as it is voiced through “the language of great communications and great combustions” which, in African-based cultures, is synonymous with griotic rhetoric. On the other hand, the becominggriot of the writer fuels the production of literary monuments as it facilitates the connection of the literary machine into a multitude of machines, including the history machine, the sociocultural machine, and the sociopolitical machine. Notes 1. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford, England: James Currey, 1986), xii, 27. 2. I prefer the adjectives “decolonial,” a neologism I borrow from Driskill et al.’s Queer Indigenous Studies, to both “anti-colonial” and “decolonizing.” 3. Odun Balogun, Ngugi and African Postcolonial Narrative: The Novel as Oral Narrative in Multigenre Performance (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1997), 59. 4. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. Clayton Eshelman and Annette Smith (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001), 12. 5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 167. 6. Frantz Kafka, The Diaries of Frantz Kafka 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Chocken Books, 1965), 191–5. 7. Thomas Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 57. 8. Djibril Tamsir Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G.D. Pickett (London: Longman, 1965), 1. 9. Gay Alden Wilentz, “‘What Is Africa to Me?’: Reading the African Cultural Base of (African) American Literary History,” American Literary History 15 no. 3 (2003): 640, accessed February 24, 2014, doi: 10.1093/alh/ajg030. 10. Eric Atkinson, “The Griot: The Rhetorical Impetus of African American Fiction,” Gnovis Journal of Communication, Culture and Technology 11 (2011), accessed January 12, 2014, http://gnovisjournal.org/2011/08/08/the-griot-therhetorical-impetus-of-african-american-fiction 11. Ibid., 643. 12. Zora Neale Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 284. 13. Ibid., 300. 14. Jason Frydman, “Zora Neale Hurston, Biographical Criticism, and African Diasporic Vernacular Culture,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US 34 no. 4 (2009): 107, accessed December 17, 2013. doi: 10.1353/mel.0.0064. 15. Anthea Kraut, “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham,” Theatre Journal 55 no. 3 (2003): 433–4, accessed February 24, 2014. doi: 10.1353/tj.2003.0125.

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16. Hurston, Zora, 121–122. 17. Thomas Hale, “From the Griot of Roots to the Roots of Griot: A New Look at the Origins of a Controversial African Term for Bard,” Oral Tradition 12 no. 2 (1997): 249, accessed March 25, 2014, http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/12ii/2_hale.pdf. 18. Césaire, Notebook, 12. 19. Hale, Griots and Griottes, 40. 20. Niane, Sundiata, xxiv. 21. Césaire, Notebook, 12. 22. Ibid., 13. 23. Ibid., 12–13. 24. My translation 25. Martial K Frindéthié, The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008), 57. 26. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 173; A Thousand Plateaus, 11. 27. Amadou Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, trans. Carrol F. Coates (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 257. 28. Ibid., 257–258. 29. Ibid., 258. 30. Ibid., 4. 31. Ibid., 19. 32. Ibid., 128–129.

Bibliography Atkinson, Eric. “The Griot: The Rhetorical Impetus of African American Fiction.” Gnovis Journal of Communication, Culture and Technology 11 (2011), accessed January 12, 2014, http://gnovisjournal.org/2011/08/08/the-griot-therhetorical-impetus-of-african-american-fiction Balogun, Fidelis O. Ngugi and African Postcolonial Narrative: The Novel as Oral Narrative in Multigenre Performance. Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1997. Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated by Clayton Eshelman and Annette Smith. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ———. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Diop, Birago. “Souffles.” Leurres et lueurs. 64–6. 1960. Paris: Présence Africaines, 1967. Driskill, Qwo-Li, et al. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2011. Frindéthié, Martial, K. The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008. Frydman, Jason. “Zora Neale Hurston, Biographical Criticism, and African Diasporic Vernacular Culture.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US 34.4 (2009): 99–118, accessed December 17, 2013. doi: 10.1353/mel.0.0064.

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Hale, Thomas. “From the Griot of Roots to the Roots of Griot: A New Look at the Origins of a Controversial African Term for Bard.” Oral Tradition 12.2 (1997): 249–278, accessed March 25, 2014. http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/ articles/12ii/2_hale.pdf. ———. Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Hurston, Zora, Neale. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, Edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Doubleday, 2002. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. Kafka, Frantz. The Diaries of Frantz Kafka 1910–1923. 1948. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Joseph Kresh. New York: Chocken Books, 1965. Kourouma, Ahmadou. Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals. 1998. Translated by Carrol F. Coates. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Kraut, Anthea. “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham.” Theatre Journal 55 no.3 (2003): 433–450, accessed February 24, 2014. doi: 10.1353/tj.2003.0125. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford, England: James Currey, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986. Niane, Djibril Tamsir. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Translated by G.D. Pickett. London: Longman, 1965. Wilentz, Gay Alden. “‘What Is Africa to Me?’: Reading the African Cultural Base of (African) American Literary History.” American Literary History 15 no.3 (2003): 639–653, accessed February 24, 2014. doi: 10.1093/alh/ajg030.

Chapter 4

Research on Droughts and Famines in the Sahel The Contribution of Oral Literature Boureima Alpha Gado Translated by Oumar Diogoye Diouf In the eyes of much of the international public the Sahel refers to the West African countries, which, in the early 1970s, founded the CILSS,1 an antidrought and famine sub-regional institution that has its headquarters in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In reality, the Sahel is a complex geographical region. For the sake of simplicity, one can define the Sahelian domain as a transition zone situated between the completely desert areas where no agricultural activity (more precisely, no rain-fed farming) is possible and the area known as the “Sudanese” zone where precipitations are sufficient to make crops less vulnerable to the vagaries of climate.2 As far as one goes back in time, the Sahelian region has always been known for natural disasters (famines, epidemics, epizootic diseases, locust invasions, etc.). However, the phenomenon was not mediatized until the major crises of the early 1970s and 1980s (famines of 1973–1974 and 1984–1985). Agronomists, climatologists, historians, geographers, and anthropologists, among other experts, have worked on droughts and famines in the Sahel.3 However, for researchers and humanitarians working in the field, the phenomena of drought and famine are still fraught with grey areas. In their attempt to reconstruct past crises, historical and anthropological researches rely on various types of sources. These are generally archeological sources, travel narratives (works of Arab geographers and European explorers and missionaries), colonial archives, local or Sudanese chronicles, oral testimonies, etc. In the Sahelian region, information is essentially transmitted by word of mouth, and remembrances of exceptional events that occurred at the local level are startlingly vivid in the people’s collective memory. That is what makes possible the inventory of historical data on the major crises of the past. The most 47

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common research instrument utilized by social scientists to obtain testimonies on the past is the oral testimony collected through collective or individualized interviews. To further shed light on the peasant perception of these environmental phenomena, it is important to highlight the fact that there is a category of valuable sources that has thus far been used only to a limited extent. That is oral literature, defined as “the ensemble of texts drawn from the culture of orality and transmitted from generation to generation.”4 In Sahelian Africa, information on social behaviors in moments of crisis is conveyed through various genres of oral literature: tales, legends, proverbs, myths, songs, maxims, riddles. A judicious use of that literature will enable the inventory of the local concepts used to designate the types of shortages in a various ethno-linguistic communities, the chronological order of events, the conjectural causes, the structural causes, the types of solutions brought up by the populations, the attitudes of leaders in times of crisis, etc. It is impossible to address all of these aspects in the following essay. The text’s main objective is to show, from a few examples taken from a corpus of literary texts, the important role of oral literature in the research on famines.5 For illustration purposes, I will thus articulate my analysis around a few recurring thematic topics: the chronological order of famine-related events, the solidarity and mutual assistance among famine victims, the management of food resources, group mentalities and social behaviors in periods of crisis, etc. Advantages and Limits of Oral Literature On some level, oral tradition is considered as a reliable source because it is composed of testimonies that are directly collected from the populations involved. Collective memory excels in the domain of the history of events— that is, in relating such historical events as those occurring in the short time of political history which applies only to a superficial crust of human history. On another level, however, oral testimonies are less reliable. It is in this sense that Joseph Ki-Zerbo assimilates oral statements on historical events to a rather fragile Ariane’s Thread for going down the dark corridor of the time maze.6 That fragility seems to be more pronounced when it comes to collecting and interpreting economic and social facts (as in the case of the impact of food crises on the populations). It appears that the discourse transmitted from one generation to the other does not address long-lasting facts that are almost unchanging. As such, in oral reports, references to demographical events (the number of migrants, the number of casualties, the amount of lost crops, etc.) are always allusive and indirect. Oral tradition relates only “major facts such as exceptionally severe



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disasters that are actually likely to have triggered fundamental structural changes. After all, there is no reason why normal accidents would be transmitted to future generations.”7 Oral literature remains a privileged tool for restoring the crisis phenomenon in the historical contexts under consideration in this essay. It is, indeed, of prime importance when there are no written documents. One of the major advantages of oral literature is the fact that it is transmitted unconsciously and stands, therefore, the test of time unlike eye-witnessing. Thus, in songs, poems, proverbs, and other maxims dedicated to famines there is little of the ideological orientations that characterize the formalized historical narratives which constitute one of the most popular data collection methods among historians. That category of sources triggers a prima facie sort of indifference among certain social scientists who wrongly view them as collection tools that are specific to literary critics, ethnologists, or musicologists. Quite often historians are at a loss with the recordings. Contrary to classic oral testimonies, recording a song is not sufficient to have access to the historical information it conveys. One still has to understand the song. To the historians, for instance, the treatment of oral literature genres poses the problems of how to determine the historical background and how to interpret the message conveyed. A further difficulty pertaining to oral texts is the fact that, very often, a people’s collective memory retains crises that occurred in very limited geographic space (geographic space covering a few villages or, at most, one customary community). As J. P. Chrétien correctly observes, “oral tradition may have kept a subjective memory of exceptional events at a local level—not necessarily of those on the wider scale—without allowing an actual assessment of demographic crises that could have occurred.”8 The extensive oral investigation we conducted allowed us to go around that difficulty. The crossanalysis of the data collected in several Sahelian regions enabled us to posit, in a certain number of cases, the hypothesis of a difficult food situation occurring in several literary testimonies. The contribution of oral literature is essential to both our comprehension of social behaviors and the study of the peasant mentalities about which there are very few written sources. Once their message is decoded, the songs and poems dedicated to a famine or food shortage take the researcher into the social, economic, or political context of that time period. The major advantage of these genres of oral literature resides in the fact that they constitute a fixed source that is extremely valuable in the transmission of historical information. In principle, it is very rare that people consciously seek to convey historical data in popular oral texts. For this reason, historians and anthropologists had better collect the maximum number of songs, poems, and proverbs dedicated to famines and food shortages.

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Field Work and Data Production The survey was carried out in the bend of the Niger, an area that stands out as a result of its position as a contact zone between the Sahara and Sudanese regions, and which covers three distinct Sahelian countries (Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger). Even though a great deal of the research pertains to the Niger area, the case studies deal with other Sahelian regions with surveys carried out in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Northern Nigeria. Regarding Niger, we investigated in some twenty localities in the western part of the country. The geographical space represented delineates the maximal extension of the area where the oral literature corpus was collected. Our knowledge of the region and our mastery of its two vehicular languages (Zarma-Songhay and Hausa) constituted a non-negligible asset for accessing much of the information to the local knowledge and to the social and cultural referents. We did not just collect tales that form the basis of the region’s oral history. The field survey included other literary forms, such as historical accounts, personal narratives (personal itineraries and testimonies on people’s experiences of relatively recent crises), songs, proverbs, sayings, and maxims. The sedentary Zarma-Songhay group formed the majority of the survey’s respondents. A few other testimonies were gathered from nomadic groups (Fulani and Tamasheq interlocutors). The analysis and interpretation of the collected data enabled us to contribute to the construction of knowledge on several aspects of past crises. The thematic topics analyzed below are presented for information purposes. The Chronological Order of Events during Famines The most commonly cited disaster in oral literature is famine. The analysis and interpretation of the seven oral texts that form the corpus enabled the elaboration of the order of events of the famines mentioned in the different texts. Traditional Management of Food Reserves The use of the oral literature corpus sheds new light on the social security or risk management system implemented in times of crises, and which was premised on elementary principles of morals and food hygiene instilled in the minds of the youth (respecting the millet, preventing food waste, etc.). Proverbs and maxims on drought, hunger, and famine in Zarma-Songhay, texts reproduced in the Boubou Hama collection L’essence du verbe



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[The Essence of the Verb] highlight the existence of contingency institutions in charge of the rational management of food resources in traditional Sahelian societies. This collection of texts contains numerous passages inviting heads of families to a better management of the food reserves kept in millet granaries called bonbatu, meaning “preventing food waste or thinking of the future” in Zarma-Songhay. Individual and Collective Behaviors in Times of Famine The text titled “Doa jiire” and “Doa ize jiire”—that is, “the year of the locusts” (1931) and “the year of the locust larvae” (1932) puts particular emphasis on the causes of the 1931–32 food crisis: nature’s role (the locust invasion) and human responsibilities (the impact of the colonial power). The testimony also underlines the demographic consequences (human casualties, hunger exoduses). The famine song, “Yollo morou,” meaning “caressing the braids,”9 and sung by the young girls of the Fakara area Zarma, Niger, and the poem “Kakalaba,” meaning “empty stomach” in Hausa, which were dedicated to the 1913–14 famine, show the intensity of the food crisis during which anomalies in individual behavior reached extreme levels: crying men or husbands fighting with one another for food. Famines also factor in the breaking up of social relations and the disruption of the strongest links of solidarity symbolized by marriage ties in this case. Recourse to Mutual Support and Solidarity The poem “Haray Ka” urges mutual support and solidarity as a survival strategy in times of famine. In the Zarma-Songhay terminology, “Care diyan,” which means seeking help or helping each other, refers to the recourse to parents and immediate neighbors. Despite the seriousness on the situation, the poem brings to the fore concerns about how to face hunger with dignity by preserving the maximum of resources for the future. The Consumption of Substitute Foods Many poems and songs recall changes in food habits stemming from the persistence of famines. A case in point is the poem titled “the harvest of cram-cram10 [bur-grass] grains” on the Agerof famine (1941). It essentially

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recalls the consumption of substitute foods and other unusual dietary habits: consumption of wild plants, hunts for food in anthills. The analysis of the content of literary texts shows that despite, its limitations, oral literature constitutes a very useful source for collecting historical data on past food crises. Oral literature complements the different written sources (public archives, local chronicles, historical calendars) that provide a view of phenomena as they are perceived from the standpoint of public authorities (local authorities, colonial administration, etc.). Second-hand accounts of famines are very rare. However, in light of their sociological origin, the information collected through oral literature is about a type of knowledge obtained from people who, given their social status, reported facts they eye-witnessed. Knowledge on famines and other similar crises is transmitted from one generation to the other without any voluntary alteration. That type of knowledge is based on reliable testimonies that are, therefore, of historical interest. Songs, proverbs, and poems convey short-, medium-, and long-lasting facts (occurring in the span of two, three, or more generations). Notes 1. CILSS: Comité Permanent Inter-états de Lutte contre la Sécheresse au Sahel [Permanent Interstates Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel]. 2. Boureima Alpha Gado, Une histoire des famines au Sahel (Paris: L’Harmattann, 1993). 3. Anthropological studies on drought and famine have indeed helped shed new light on the contemporary phenomenon which is fairly known and researched by geographers (Derriennic 1977, Bernus 1986, Watts 1983). From this perspective, De Waal ’s works (1989) on the Sudanese region and G. Spitter’s work (1993) on Nigerien Touaregs constitute references that provide an analysis centering the view of the famine-stricken populations. 4. Jacques Chevrier, Littérature nègre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990). 5. The presented corpus is essentially composed of poems, songs, and proverbs on famine, hunger, and diet. Some of the texts were recorded by the author and others are available in the appendix of Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 515–20. 6. Joseph Ki-Zerbo, “Source orale” in Histoire Générale de l’Afrique. Tome 1. Paris: Unesco, 1980. 7. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Écologie et Histoire en Afrique noire,” Sociétés Africaines et Diaspora, Vol 1, no. 1 (1996): 103–128. 8. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, “Démographie et écologie en Afrique Orientale à la fin du XIXe siècle,” Cahier d’études africaines 105–106 (1987): 43–59.



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9. During the famine of 1913 and 1914, the married young in charge of the millet pounding would from time to time throw a few grains in their mouths. When caught unawares by a passerby, they pretend to caress their braids, hence the phrase “caressing the braids” to designate that food crisis. 10. Cram-cram (Cenchrus biflorus), is a cereal, a wild food plant that indicates the northern boundary of the Sahel.

Bibliography Bernus, E. “Sécheresses et famines chez les Touaregs nigériens: la nourriture de substitution.” Présence Africaine no. 113 (1980–1981): 263–281. Chevrier, Jacques. Littérature nègre. Paris: Armand Colin, 1990. Chrétien, Jean.-Pierre. “Démographie et écologie en Afrique Orientale à la fin du XIXe siècle.” Cahier d’études africaines 105–106 (1987): 43–59. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. “Écologie et Histoire en Afrique noire”, Sociétés Africaines et Diaspora 1.1 (1996): 103–128. Derriennic, Hervé. Famines et dominations en Afrique: paysans et éleveurs du Sahel sous le joug. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1977. De Waal, Alexander. Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984–1985. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Gado, Boureima Alpha. “Ecologie et histoire. ” Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 27, no. 2 (1993): 260–271. ———. Une histoire des famines au Sahel. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993. Hama, Boubou. L’essence du verbe. Niamey, Niger: CELTHO, 1985. Ki-Zerbo, Joseph. “Source orale” in Histoire Générale de l’Afrique. Tome 1. Paris: Unesco, 1980. Spittler, G. Les Touareg face aux sécheresses et aux famines. Paris, Karthala. 1993. Watts, Michael. Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Part II

Body Language/Writing [on] the Body

Chapter 5

Transgressive Embodied Writings of KAribbean Bodies in Pain Gladys M. Francis

Introduction For two centuries, the island of Guadeloupe was a colony in which a forced encounter took place between Europeans and Africans. While it is irrefutable that this “new land” revealed a process of Creolization through the myriad hybrids that emerged from each part, what is perhaps utmost remarkable is that new human products of Creolization took on a life of their own. Creolization is doubtlessly rooted in the traumatic experience of colonialism that will affect enslaved Africans and their descendants culturally, economically, socially, and politically for many generations to come. Caribbean performers and writers have upstretched the intensities of human emotions and possibilities through productions of bodily movements, music, and words. When we examine the works of authors from the French Caribbean who try to capture the dance and music traditions of their island, we do find elements of creolization in the rhythmical aesthetics they nurture as well as in the complex matters they foster (issues of deculturation, assimilation, alienation, conflict, adaptation, survival). The two novels selected for this study offer unique critical inter-relations of scattered-localities/scattered-bodies through an original aesthetic of movement calling forth embodied haptic1 and tactile experiences. Published in 2012, Gerty Dambury’s novel Les rétifs [A Restive People] and Gisèle Pineau’s Cent vies et des poussières [Hundreds of Lives and Dust] create and disclose cartographies of bodily pain within the context of Guadeloupe. Dambury invites us to revisit historical events that took place in the city of Pointe-à-Pitre in 1967. Though a Department of France since Francis, Gladys M. “Guadeloupe’s Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict.” Contemporary Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries. Ed. P. Donatien-Yssa and R. Solbiac. Anglophilia Review. Lyon: Merry World editions, 2014. Print.

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1946, Guadeloupe revealed in various aspects, at that time, the crude realities of Rue Cases-Nègres. It was a plea against salary discrepancies that led construction workers to strike in May 1967, querying for parity on wages and working rights similar to that of their French counterparts based in the France Métropolitaine. The strike led to military brutality when the French authorities sanctioned mobile police units to discharge their firearms at protesters fighting back with bottles and conch shells. Although the diegesis of Cent vies et des poussières takes place more than four decades later, it is however a similar framework of grueling conditions that persist in the text. A modern Guadeloupe is unveiled through the portrayal of a young woman named Gina Bovoir, whose life in the ghetto is punctuated by eight pregnancies and the various challenges that such arduous conditions entail. Both texts unequivocally defy the silencing of suffering. De facto, Les rétifs recalls to light painful passé historical events that have been obscured and disremembered through classified “top-secret defense” status.2 Analogously, Pineau chooses to dualize Gina’s story with that of a pregnant fugitive slave woman who once lived free in what is now Gina’s decadent slum. The author divulges how heroic Maroons’ stories have been divested, forgotten, or replaced by their descendants’ snippets of speculation; descendants who have now become sufferers of a consumerist society. Through a process that I call “corpomemorial tracing,” both texts render representations of the body in pain at the intersection of orality,3 corporeality,4 cultural discourses, and institutions. While contrasting Dambury and Pineau’s approach to representations of bodily pain, I will first examine the roles of rhythm, dance, and music central to the mapping of bodily pain exposed in these texts. I will then analyze the Afra-writing’s transgressive use of orality; and finally conjointly scrutinize wherewith these paroxysmal displays of pain generate a counter discourse to Western paradigms that anchor representations of the island as erotic, exotic, and ecstatic. I argue that through a process of corpomemorial tracing, these transgressive texts capture the marginalized performing body in pain to historicize a collective space of testimonial and female agency. The texts’ movements, rhythms, and sensorial and tactile aesthetics also give opacity and conscientiously subversive subjectivities to the represented bodies in pain. Indeed, their corporeal realm disrupts the voyeuristic gaze and re-conceives spectatorship. The texts unearth the resisting KAribbean bodies of Guadeloupeans in movement—similar to the ka drum,5 still a major symbol of resistance in Guadeloupe. Spaces of Corporeal Fragmentations Interstitiality, Amnesia, and Reverted Esotericism Dimensions of time and space are utterly disjointed and jumbled in both texts. The amalgamation of past, present, and future is combined with the



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maroonage of living bodies and spirits that pervade the main protagonists’ voice and physical space. The main protagonist of Dambury’s novel is a schoolgirl Emilienne, who lingers in the courtyard of her Pointe-à-Pitre house as she expects the return of her father who has not been home for a few days. The text is organized within a three-dimensional space; headmost, the interior private space of Emilienne’s house, then the public space represented by descriptions of the urban city of Pointe-à-Pitre, particularly La Place de la Victoire (where the conflicts and killings will occur) and Emilienne’s school. These public and private spaces swivel on the courtyard of Emilienne’s house that serves as a central paradigm of the three-dimensional structure that it completes. Cent vies et des poussières is constructed on a similar ternary structure with the exception that the private space encloses Gina’s belly (her pregnancies), her private home, and particularly the ghetto of La Ravine claire given as a bubble, an extended symbol of the belly. The public space is l’ailleurs—everything that is exterior to La Ravine claire. The unknown free Maroons’ mass grave located right under Gina’s house rounds off the ternary structure. Dambury’s public space mirrors a prison, a repressive and oppressive locus where workers or pupils who resist unjust conditions are silenced. In opposition, it is the private space that constitutes a prison in Pineau’s text. Indeed, the “belly” swallows plights relative to the ghetto and “births” children that will soon be unwanted, unloved by Gina and left to nurture the degeneration of that space. Both novels make the same innovative use of their centrum axis that is the embodied lieu of the collective. In Les rétifs, we observe a wandering (errance) of souls haunting Emilienne’s courtyard. The spirits are characters presented as authoritative figures leading the “movements” that will unfold the truth, put light on forgotten events, and disinter the unknown. We witness an aesthetic of the haptic and tactile that blurs the boundaries of material and immaterial worlds. The spirits can for instance feel the pain of lost limbs, or they give account to tangible stories such as that of a successful suicide by hanging. This process nourishes their corporeal presence in Emilienne’s physical space. Furthermore, the author deepens the dead’s amorphous nature, making the spirits the main performers of a quadrille square dance, with their voices soon transforming into instruments (violin, chacha, siyak, tambour d’bas). Hence, testimonies from the living and the dead are ubiquitous in creating a unique collective voice that mimics the behemothic mystery surrounding the tragic events of Mé 67. Life and death are synthesized in the texts as the Afra-writings plunge us into the blending of material and immaterial worlds. The multi-vocal story becomes ambiguous, similar to the improvised chanting and dancing that pace the text. Under Gina’s house lays the skeleton of Théophée (and her toddler); a pregnant enslaved woman who ran away to La Ravine claire to save her unborn baby from being sold and forced into slavery on a béké6 plantation.

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The reader is later made aware that the soil of La Ravine claire is in fact the grave of all the Maroons who once lived there free until colonialists found and murdered them all. Akin to Dambury’s embodied spirits, Théophée’s soul wanders with her voice comparable to a chorus pacing the text. Like chanting incantation, her voicing gives rhythm to the diegesis and serves as a heterodiegetic narrator (speaking overtly about Gina’s endeavors, expressing premonitions or obviations, commenting on feelings, actions, characters, or speaking directly to the reader). This atemporal framework bares the depth of the loss of memory from locals across gender, class, and age. Additionally, the authors construct and pervert traditional use of esotericism (through the unveiling of secrecy) in order to initiate the public on rare and unusual events taking place in Guadeloupe. Blending the visible and invisible, they create an alternative textual cosmos. In that fashion, Emilienne and Gina are guided by the presence of spirits, voices, and visions that affect their knowledge, experiences, and their possible transmutation. Within these corporeal and embodied experiences, the voices transmit knowledge and initiate the main protagonists and readers. The atemporal structures actualize a cosmogonal setting while also serving as the creation of a point of origin (the myth of Théophée in Pineau’s case). The atemporal chanting creates cosmic cycles, the writing becomes a chain of initiation, and the text becomes terrain, the locus of secrets. But unlike esoteric practices that keep secret writings from the majority, our authors open these symbolic spaces that testify to the value and tenacity of the peoples of Guadeloupe across centuries. The timeless intervals distort the distance between then and now, as now becomes then and then now. This spatiotemporal errance allows a deconstruction of past events that have been neglected by the mainstream or surmised by historians. The displacement of bodies is necessary, for recalling can only be done through the investment of those who lived, died, witnessed, or were victims of these events. In fact, it generates authenticity to the piecing of voices that were displaced in history. These paroles [words] are now ancrées/encrées [anchored/inked] and participate in the construction of a visibility of noncanonical heroes: The present of postcoloniality can be formulated as a moment of going beyond through a return to the present. Interstitiality can be understood as a temporal paradox in which looking to the future necessarily entails a return. The present, the past, and the future do not keep to their proper places, whether in the continuum or rupture, but haunt each other; making for what Bhabha calls “the unhomely condition of the modern world.”7

Nonetheless, in both texts, this interstitiality also unveils a troubling account of unchanging conditions for Guadeloupeans who seem to endure the same colonialist and imperialist powers from Théophée, to Emilienne, to Gina.



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Pineau’s text demonstrates this point quite explicitly through the linkage of Théophée and Gina; just as it is unmistakable that Dambury’s 1967 diegesis alludes to the violent forty-four days of striking that took place in Guadeloupe in 2009. Embodied Improvisations and Feminine Digenèse Chaos and Maroonage of Movements, Rhythms, and Voices As previously stated, the courtyard in Les rétifs constitutes a space of maroonage of spirits whose words are paced by music and dancing. Their parole is also filled with linguistic stereotypies that are metaphoric or stereotyped. These paremic forms (proverbs, sayings, apothegms) are fixed forms used to symbolically reinforce the characters’ affiliation to the cultural community of Guadeloupe as seen through the characters of Nono and Marga. The stereotyped parole gives an account to the chain of ancestral memory in the feminine. In Les rétifs, Nono, the spirit of an elderly woman who died two years ago, speaks to recall memories “one must start [telling the story] from the beginning.”8 In Cent vies et des poussières, it is a woman (Marga Despigne) who transmits historical facts dating back from 1840, about Théophée, her son Théodor, and Judor the Maroon who finds her in the woods and welcomes her to La Ravine claire—then a “paradise”(30). In Cent vies et des poussières, the transmission of oral histories is always done within the femme-conteur [woman storyteller] figure. Likewise, as a woman, Théophée ruptures with the super-male archetypal figure of the heroic Maroon. If Théophée meets Judor who becomes her companion (and the father of the child she will not live to give birth to), Pineau does not detail their love affair, nor does she focus on a female Maroon figure that would respond to a femme-matador archetype. In fact, Théophée is never envisioned in a weak/strong binary to justify a feminist/masculinist binary. The Afra-writing entails a unique creative potential because the body/text mirrors the hybridity of its sociocultural context. Homi Bhabha considers these nonbinary oppositions to be a strategy that opens new ways to negotiate cultural meaning: The hybrid strategy of discourse opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation may be equivocal. Such negotiation [. . .] makes possible the emergence of an “interstitial” agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism. Hybrid agencies find their voice in a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty. They deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy; the outside of the inside; the part in the whole.9

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This process contrives rhythmic dissonances that mirror the amplitude of displacement of levels of consciousness, knowledge, and discernment of the islanders with regard to their local history because as Maryse Condé states in La Civilisation du bossale, there is no memory in the Caribbean: “No foundation myth, no genealogy of heroes or semi-legendary kings.”10 In this manner, in Pineau’s text, it is Gina’s mother (not a younger protagonist) who links the Guadeloupean ancestry line to that of “the Egyptians, our ancestors,”11 disrupting the false dominant paradigm of “our ancestors the Gauls”—providing a process of historical reparation vocalized by the older generation (the grandmother). Renée Larrier in “‘Crier/Ecrire/Cahier’: Anagrammatic Configurations of Voice in Francophone Caribbean Narratives” examines the importance of the storyteller within the colonial era and its ramification within the writing of French West Indian authors. Larrier makes a correlation between cri/ écriture—conteur/écriture [shout/writing—storyteller/writing] and explores accounts given by the authors of the Créolité movement and Édouard Glissant. She goes on to explain that the conteur uses a parole that hides the camouflaged shout of “protests that surged among the many cries of pain and agony from the hold of the slave ships.”12 In the plantation, the conteur functions as the holder of the collective memory and is a medium that transmits the collective cri, as well as stories of survival and resistance to the slaves: “the conteur’s heir is the écrivain who inscribes the collective Caribbean voice in order to counter the distortions and erasures of official history.”13 The text, as a result, becomes the voicing of the voiceless (the dead, spirits, Maroons). The authors become the portes-paroles [spokes persons] that inscribe the pain and testimonies of the silenced collective. Through this creative process that Glissant calls digenèse14 Dambury and Pineau go back to “the trace” and use the conteur to deliver the paroles of bodies in pain. If the storyteller and marqueur de paroles figures have been represented, praised, and theorized by the creolists, it nonetheless remains a male-gendered space through their lens. Les rétifs and Cent vies et des poussières decentralize this masculinist transmission of oral culture by incorporating the voice of marginalized groups such as children, homosexuals, and prostitutes. In both novels “the desire to speak [and] create history is undeniable”15 while bringing to the center marginalized voices. Yvonne Daniel’s ethnographic research on Caribbean quadrilles posits that quadrille was a dance creolized by Africans and their descendants to assert their human dignity:16 Africans [. . .] replaced the African performance that was abhorred by Europeans with imitations, parodies, and creative extensions of the [European] colonial performances that they could observe [. . .] Across the Caribbean, African



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descendants perfected their versions of European body orientation, dance steps, and dance sequences, stating nonverbally that they, too, could dance socially esteemed dances. They took from the dominant group what the dominant group valued most: their elaborate dance practices. [. . .] African-descended performers signaled good manners and impressive social standing through a variety of contredanse-related performances. Over time, African descendants appropriated European contredanse-derived performance across the entire Caribbean region.17

The courtyard illustrated in Les rétifs is the locus of circles of quadrille performances (transfused with storytelling performances). A brief enumeration of chapter’s titles illustrate the quadrille’s vocabulary or dance formations: “1ère figure pantalon,”18 “2ème figure l’été,”19 “3ème figure la poule,”20 “4ème figure Pastourelle.”21 Dambury does not select the Guadeloupean gwo ka dance or music forms derived solely from African-style performances, in fact, selecting the quadrille as the central axis of her novel merits close attention. Described as a set of dances in line, circles, and square formations, quadrille is the essence of creole creations and stylizations.22 Dambury chooses the quadrille, which is unquestionably the most hybrid dance found in Guadeloupe that links European France to the Creole mien of Guadeloupe. It is this transcultural performance that Dambury uses in the diegesis to voice a conflict that involved France and Guadeloupe; an island that is not quite French from the dominant motherland’s perspective (despite its official and legal status of “French Department”). Most Caribbean quadrilles are European dances performed by Africandescended performers according to European dance values, i.e., “Africanized European” dances or more properly European dance variations. [In] this particular category, Caribbean quadrilles, does not routinely comprise “new” dance creations, which are generally recognized as veritable Creole dances: [. . .] Jamaica’s reggae; Trinidad’s calypso; Guadeloupe’s gwoka; or the French Caribbean’s zouk. The dance forms just named are neither African nor European, but new Caribbean creations or Creole dances; they are not variations.23

In Les rétifs’ courtyard, the spirits perform a quadrille that first seems to follow the rules of the traditional quadrille dance. But as the truths are being contées [recounted], embodied, and performed, the traditional quadrille rules are deviated from when the spirits begin to rupture the essential rule of one lead singer/parolier (formally called commandeur). The quadrille seems to transpose itself into a gwo ka performance as the voices simultaneously ask to enter the circle to lead the rhythm, lead the dance, lead the chanting, lead history, perform disobedience. In quadrille, the European violins and accordions usually carry the song line; Dambury respects the tradition by making each

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parolier an instrument and setting rules for a parolier-lead (je-commandeur). While each je testimony performs, they each become the singularity of a collective space “Nous” [us] that will be transformed into a voix/voie dissidente [dissident voice/path]. I argue that the chaos of rhythm, the unmapping of rules, and the hybrid creole space of encounter between the “other” and “Nous” (in the embodied piecing of truths) symbolize an occupied and rebellious space. Just as the Guadeloupeans on strike, the text becomes body/ text—it rebels. The bodies in movement undertake a maroonage on the page through a visible fragmentation of paragraphs, missing punctuation, and unusual tabs. The writing is in-between genres; it is a hybridization of poetry, prose, and drama. The interstice created by the improvised quadrille corresponds to the storyteller/respondent interaction. It also corresponds to the musical polyrhythm of the quadrille that puts in place, in song form, a call and response structure. Yet, in the novel, the corporeal interplay is plural; it is textual, musical, and physical. These aesthetics of polyphony and polyvocality echo the collective voices in creation of new sets of apparatuses as they are recalling and once more facing the immensities of the conflict generated by la rencontre de l’autre [meeting the other]. Similarly, the aesthetic of improvisation echoes the state of chaos of a constructing space of consciousness. Accordingly, in Pineau’s novel, Gina is portrayed as a talented baker and this exact space of creation prefigures improvisation. She tests new recipes, new ingredients, and remains anxious and excited to uncover the outcome. Pineau pushes the analogy further as both the process of making and discovering the mysterious outcome of the creation, are central to Gina’s pregnancies. Thus, even if she does not have the space and the means to welcome new children into her home and life, each pregnancy provides the thrill similar to the one felt for a new baking recipe. She never knows how the child will “turn out” and when she is unsatisfied with the outcome, she goes on to enjoy the improvising of a new recipe (new pregnancy) with the hopes that this time it will “come out perfect.” The belly (the oven) is the only space in which Gina produces in opposition to her consumerist dispositions. The maroonage is in this instance, articulated inbetween l’en-dedans/l’en-dehors [inside/outside] inside the aller/venir [going/ coming]. If Dambury’s music and dance embody a creative zone of passage to the “other” state, in Cent vies et des poussières, alienation dominates that zone. Body-Landscape Cartographies of Pain L’État français, Commodification, and Politics of Negation Bigotry constantly overhangs Pineau’s text. Indeed, eighty percent of La Ravine claire’s habitants are “femmes seules” [low-income single women with children],24 a reference to the parent isolé law established in 1976



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providing financial assistance to temporary widowed, divorced, separated, abandoned, or single individuals who are left alone to bear the responsibility of at least one child (this social service is also open to single women who are pregnant). The law obligates that the single parent must live alone. Gisèle Pineau raises serious concerns with regard to fathers wanting to be present in their children’s lives but find themselves outcast from their children’s household due to such social welfare constituencies. Marital/companionship relations are represented in the text as penalized under governmental guidelines if a man lives in the household; and love as a consequence, is decimated by materialistic needs and relegated to an exchange value. Textually, the more children a woman has, the more money she gets.25 “Neediness” becomes a valuable asset (and by extension “scarce cities”). The “femme seule” status is described as more appealing to the female protagonists who prioritize a guaranteed welfare check from the government. The boyfriends are portrayed sneaking into their own house, or forced out by the mothers of their children fearing that neighbors will report them to the welfare bureau. The “parent isolé” status is demonized through Gina’s pregnancies and love is supplanted by sexual intercourse with men who serve as breeders26 and perform as fathers or husbands. Gina herself continuously performs the unsatisfied wife to get rid of every single one of her breeders. State money has replaced fathers and everything is “sans pères, sans repères/without fathers, without bearings.”27 Analogously, it is the plantation that has been replaced by the State (l’État). We witness undeclared civil wars: single status for CAF money, out of wedlock births, marriages being called off because of pernicious jealousies, or else the suicides of women like Vivi who still believe in real love and marriage. Cent vies et des poussières explicitly discloses a scandalous vision of transgressive bodies and situations: [An] exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. . . . The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.28

Presented as endangered, women’s bodies evolve in extreme conditions of pain. This is the case of Phyllis, a mother of one, whose spouse attempts to make her a sex slave. The reader also discovers that her motherhood is the result of rape29 in the midst of thirteen abortions.30 Social and sexual economics are paired. Another female character Dollis, described as prostituting herself to survive, reaches financial success that many in La Ravine claire envy. Textually constructed on hyperbolic descriptions, Dollis’ success is tempered since the château she builds at the heart of La Ravine claire31 becomes home

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to her hanged body (possibly the result of a murder), and through time the headquarters of the slum’s bad boys.32 The text fosters descriptions of many young mothers33 and “kids loving kids.”34 Compared to a machine, Gina’s heart can be turned on or off, a procedure that she extensively and effortlessly employs when it comes to loving her children. She is also presented not taking responsibility for her children’s slips through life. For instance, when Steeve receives an eight-year prison sentence, disappointed, Gina wishes he had gotten twenty years instead.35 She stops loving Steeve, declares him dead, hopes that he dies in prison, and does not answer his letters. She also “erases Mona” from her heart;36 Mona started taking crack at the age of 14. Finally, Gina comes to the conclusion that she loves babies, not children37 and chooses to love them as long as they are babies. Dambury’s textual presentation of women’s struggles differs sizably from that of Pineau. Whereas, the hyper-strong matrifocal Matronne/Super Madres images of indestructible and unbreakable women are not present in Pineau’s text, they are however transposed by oppressive structural violence causing women to have no sense of self-determination. This dilatation of stories on pain and suffering stresses a construction of a shared fate of misery and abandonment antipodal to Dambury’s standpoints. Les rétifs places every voice/dancer/parolier at the center, challenging the dichotomist power relations of the “have” and “have nots” seen in Pineau’s novel. Conflict is therefore explored within different strategies; Pineau’s writing focuses on states of homelessness while Dambury explores conflict within agency. In fact, the locals living départenance, in-between appartenance [belonging] and its opposite—are subjects (not objects). Dambury’s agency configuration shows a sense of pride within the Guadeloupean cultural identity, while also expressing gestures of departures from repressive neocolonialist strata (strikes and fights for equality and fairness). Women in Les rétifs are not super strong black female heroes or women doomed by structural violence; they are presented as a web of sisters, neighbors, mothers with their personal share of happiness and trials. Cent vies et des poussières offers forthright accounts of sexuality in the feminine, sex being talked about among women without taboo. For instance, Vivi’s friend masturbates,38 Vivi expresses her jouissance [orgasm] with sexual intercourse with men,39 Gina claims loving when a man ejaculates inside her (which probably correlates to her desire to become pregnant), and her young daughter Sharon masturbates.40 However, the vivid traces of orality visible in these testimonials do not correspond to traditional contexts of teller-respondent. Whereas these are only done among women in Pineau’s text, Dambury for her part includes the voice of a gay man: Hilaire. In fact, Les rétifs disrupts the storyteller’s traditional heteronormative and phallocentric crux by giving presence to a homosexual man in the collective voice. Constituting an integral part of the spirits serving as storytellers, Hilaire voices the taboos surrounding his



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gender, sexual inclinations, and death. Giving him agency, Dambury expresses his cross-dressing rebellious act to provoke his homophobic neighbor and the long bullying and hate that led him to end his life. Issues of complex rapports between inequality/hierarchy, domination/ subalterneity, mastery/servitude, and control/resistance are central to both texts, and it is the collective voice that raises questions on morality and power issues. In Les rétifs, the sociopolitical conflicts reach beyond black/ white/mulatto oppositions as exploitation concerns also black leadership toward “les petits travailleurs noirs” [little black workers] or else the “petit bourgeois” [petty bourgeoisie] vis-à-vis “les petits travailleurs noirs.” This is what we discover through Guy Albert’s description of Emilienne’s father (his boss) presented as a greedy employer. Cent vies et des poussières stands as a hysteria taking place in La Ravine claire once a land of “valiant Maroons” and now that of a different lineage;41 it is a ghetto filled with firearms, gun-trafficking pimps, rapes, sex trade activities, gangs, drugs, poverty, and prostitutes. The inhabitants seem possessed and trapped as seen through (Gina’s sister) Vivi who is financially challenged to purchase daily necessities but compulsively unable to stop buying new pumps regularly. Also, the described high-ceiling buildings have nothing modern or impressive to them but serve merely as suicide sites. This is illustrated when Vivi jumps from the fifteenth floor of La Tour Schoelcher and is compared to the victims of 9/11, trapped in smoke and fire, throwing themselves from the Manhattan World Trade Center out of hopelessness. Underprivileged islanders are also compared to robots pushing their shopping carts that they fill “de manière compulsive” [compulsively].42 Likewise, Gina is also described taking the bus to make her way toward l’ailleurs in order to do the body performance of the wealthy woman who can afford groceries. She is portrayed filling her cart during three long hours “to act rich,” then leaves, abandoning the stuffed cart somewhere in the supermarket. The same cacotopia is visible inside Gina’s household. For example, Steeve (in his early 20’s) gets an eight-year prison sentence for an armed robbery at a gas station; her daughter Mona addicted to crack, wanders in the ghetto, finds herself pregnant, delivers Katy, a crack-baby “with one eye looking toward the left and the other toward the right.”43 Her other daughter Sharon becomes obsessed with her possible “falling in life” when she hears her sister Mona tell their mother that she called evil upon Sharon’s soul by naming her “Sharon”—exactly pronounced “Charongn’” in Creole meaning “carrion” [charogne in French]. None of Gina’s children provide her with any sense of pride, which is illustrated with Junior’s stuttering that becomes a sufficient reason to push him away. Gina’s rationale for not loving her children once they are no longer toddlers (and teething) becomes dubious when she rejects Billy for being an “ugly” kid.44 Likewise, it is only shame that Gina

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feels when she looks at Billy limping after getting shot in the knee when he attempted to take over his brother’s (Steeve) drug empire. To use Françoise Lionnet’s expression, the text is a “phenomenology of pain.” Chaotic and dystopian settings are similar to a fast spreading plague just as is Pineau’s mention of violence, consumerism, gambling, Allocations Familiales, and CAF in one same sentence.45 The sense of the community is broken, there is no comprehensive rehabilitation, no system (familial or governmental) to help increase the educational level of the youth, young men are held in jail, and schools presented as ghettoized milieu “with kids affected based on their zip codes.”46 The children of La Ravine claire are proliferating “pullulaient” [proliferated]47 and appear condemned from the start. The anaphora “passer de vie à trépas” [to move from life to death] is articulated seven times in the novel and reinforces the dystopia of the ghetto. Cent vies et des poussières illustrates modern challenges that poor families face on a daily basis. The island is not an isolated and protected space; it is rather a sponge that absorbs everything that surrounds it. Subsequently, we encounter negrophobia of women toward their black skin, exemplified by Dolly bleaching her skin. Pop stars have replaced the island’s Christian figures, a matter that Pineau stresses when depicting Steeve (the famed “bad boy”) looking at his Bob Marley’s poster as a source of protection, and, when he senses that he would soon be seized by the police and kept away for a while, he reassures Sharon that Bob will always shield her from evil. Another example is Gina’s addiction to sitcoms, Telenovelas, and American soap operas. As a matter of fact, most of her children’s names are American ones: Steeve, Sharon, Billy, and Junior. At times the stories give into a Jerry Springer effect, as Gina appears to wear blinders put in place by a consumerist society. We witness a profound sense of loss in Cent vies et des poussières, extreme behaviors, abusive relationships, children dropping out of school, children under the age of eight selling drugs, young men going to jail, pimps, drinking, etc. The children are in front of the TV watching “séries policières” [police series]48 and reproduce the same havoc in real life. Pineau decisively incriminates the media for reinforcing negative images and pernicious stereotypes for the black youth.

Transgression as Resistance Writing the Contact Zones of the KAribbean Body in Pain After a long frenzied dystopia, Pineau attempts to display a filigree of hope at the end of the novel. When referring for the first time to the novel’s title, she gives emphasis to two women’s testimonies; first, that of Gina’s late



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sister Vivi insisting that she believes in reincarnation and, then, Théophée’s revelations on Gina’s eighth pregnancy. It is therefore Théophée, the novel’s omniscient narrator who discloses to the reader that Gina’s eighth pregnancy is “different” and that this child will “save and heal all of Gina’s children.”49 In opposition, Dambury’s voicing of resistance is a most momentous statement. Les rétifs’ multiple stories create a human web symbolizing solidarity and cultural identity through Creole words, Caribbean music and rhythms, the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre, the traditional home decor, and the everyday runarounds of the population. The leitmotiv of wandering bodies in pain in Dambury’s courtyard recalls that of Abderrahmane Sissako’s movie Bamako. It is in this space that all sociopolitical events are narrated and where the margins put the West on trial. The courtyard allows the voicing of the dominés [dominated] who have never been heard. Their discourse counter-balances Western imageries through which the dominés are constructed as passive and lacking desires to fight for their rights so as to reach better economic stability. In Pineau’s novel, television replaced the courtyard and American TV shows ousted storytellers. This is the exact illustration of Occidentalism that we find in Sissako’s movie: children, their parents, and other family members gathering at night, not to listen to the traditional griot, but to watch an American Western on TV. Like Bamako the novels are similar to a cinéma vérité [true cinema], a style of documentary moviemaking with long takes, and little or no directorial or editing control exerted over the finished product—which is transmitted in writing through the atemporal, the three-dimensional structures, the improvised rhythms, as well as the plurivocal and polyphonic voices. It is quite important to stress that Les rétifs mirrors Dambury’s strong refusal to give into canonical and damaging representations of the subaltern. Indeed, Les rétifs makes a clear attempt to represent the subaltern as an agent of change without falling into disfigurations of gender spaces (hypersexual women, defeminized women, hyper-masculine men, heteronormative relationships, poto-mitan women) or disfigurations of geographical spaces (ghettoized island, stereotyped lazy/happy/poor islanders). To achieve a counter-canonical discourse, Dambury’s restive characters are represented within private/intimate spaces, everyday life and conversations. There is a poignant refusal by Gerty Dambury to adorn pain and to instead recognize what comprises beauty on the island. The cartography of pain is therefore balanced with tangible humanizing of everyday people and their characters: passive personalities (Emilienne’s dad is described as a coward at times), leadership advocacies (the instructor for instance), personal and professional challenges, and neighboring dynamics. The events of May 1967 are portrayed in their inhumanity without taking away from what makes the

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peoples “A Restive People” (within their singularity). The conflict zone is un désordre non-subordonné, a resisting-body that is unified within its differences and challenges. The author finds the term “rétifs” [restive] to be very representative. For Gerty Dambury, the term “restive” used to describe a horse that refuses to move forward is testament to the animality found during slavery. Unlike Pineau’s text, structural violence is not inflated, instead, the restive people are placed right at the center of the circle, they are at the core of the transcultural space of the quadrille, they are non-homogeneous people creating resistance. In both novels, Guadeloupe is a hybrid place caught between tradition and modernization, and overpowered by France. Indeed, we observe the difficult position of the subaltern between alienation and affiliation, and départenance [wanting to belong, to affiliate with the representation of power], evolving (to paraphrase Bhabha) in a third space that remains a space of differentiation.50 Similarly, Pineau’s novel is almost a Manichean mythology in which there are no rules. La Ravine claire is the metaphoric savage space (re)presenting the practices of globalization. Gina’s family watches violent “séries policières” as they are trapped in between mimicry and mockery. This metatextual presentation is quite powerful, since the Guadeloupean family watches on TV its mimetic condition. Observed is the difficult vision of mimicry in between resemblance and menace, the locals’ identity in between assimilation and alienation. The third space is a rhizomic space in which the body in pain seeks identity. The body in pain passes through l’autre [other] in order to “be” itself and (re)passes back through itself in order to be “other” than itself. This process reveals the suffering body as a rhizome. It is through the pain, the utterance of violence that the contact between moi [me] and l’autre [other] becomes possible. Therefore, the suffering body is more than a zone of passage; it is most importantly a zone of contact. Given this characteristic, it transgresses the norms of the mainstream to maintain “it” within boundaries and to separate “it”, alienate “it.” The origin root of the rhizomic suffering conditions the in-between characteristic of the body. The in-between is a point of origin. Consequently, the body in pain (re)presents and (con)textualizes rhizomic strategies and procedures within the end and the beginning (which is the characteristic of the origin). To paraphrase Daniel Sibony, there is more than one origin in a same origin, and identity is a state of shared origin.51 Following this rhizomic distinctiveness, the voicing of Dambury and Pineau uses transgression, the pain is not hidden; psychological, physical, and societal sufferings are expressed also in the reality of their violence. The voicing of the rebellious rhizomic body becomes a transgressional (con)text. Such writing is a mirror to the continuous negotiations of the body in pain.



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Conclusion The corporeality of bodies and embodied experiences found in these novels are unique. We explored how these representations of the performing body in pain use oral aesthetics paradigms that are richly infused in French Caribbean societies. Dambury’s text establishes the significance of intangible traditions that continue to participate in Caribbean people’s resistance in the face of psychological and physical traumas produced by colonization. Dambury’s “innovation” is to find a dominant voix [voice] for the story that is to be told similar to a quadrille au commandement52 in which all voices become a unique dominant lead. In both novels, the island of Guadeloupe is not conceptualized as feminized terrain,53 rather opinions and beliefs surrounding silenced portions of history are exposed, dissected, and clarified for and by the collective within their singularities (which is why the capitalized “Nous” voiced in Dambury’s courtyard is highly symbolic). There is a sense of solidarity in the construction of history. But most importantly, we explored how the Afra-writing bends (masculinist) traditional oral conventions. The inscription of the femmes-conteurs [women storytellers] defies the phallogocentric conteur/marqueur de parole discourse and theories presented by the creolists, Glissant, or Césaire’s Négritude. Indeed, the music lead is no longer male centered in Dambury’s novel as Nono reverts the norms by playing the accordion, a role traditionally played by men. By decentralizing the woman’s desire from that of men, Gisèle Pineau’s main character is a mother who does not seek to be a man’s lover, nor is she defeminized; she is not in the masculine. When Dambury gives voice to Hilaire, a gay man, he does not fit the male-less, cross-dressing makoumè figure found in various works of the creolists. The makoumè is renamed “ma-commère,”54 meaning my gossiping neighbor, which reinstates the marginalized homosexual into the collective space. Indeed, Hilaire is neither passive nor invisible; he has his own share of dissidence. The texts are resistance; they incorporate the voices of the silenced (the women, the prostitutes, the elderly, the homosexual, the children, the disabled) to a historiography that has tended to be exclusively masculine. The body in pain and in movement fosters a narrative of the tangible that provides unique sensory contexts. These aesthetics of tactility and corpomemorial tracing create cartographies of bodily pain, reimagine and problematize history, while convoking innovative, sensitive, and cognitive feelings to the reader. Bodily decorums can sometimes paradoxically occlude the paroxysmal acts they are engaged in. The embodied movements, rhythms, sensorial and tactile aesthetics employed to present the KAribbean transgressive bodies, give them opacity and consciously subversive subjectivities. Pineau’s poetics of negation serves a productive purpose in

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terms of ethics and epistemology. The text stimulates a new methodology of reading, de-commodifies sexuality and the body, does not seek consolatory distractions, and destroy the regimentation of the “ideal” body. Her Afrawriting works therefore to sabotage the voyeuristic gaze and the sexualized pleasures, it maintains a mechanism of deferral. As they write through the visual, the haptic, the tactile, both authors create alternative ways of seeing/ reading the body, and imagining/imaging the (textual) body. In fact, through their aesthetics of negation, sensation, and corpomemorial tracing, profusions of tropes of infringement, intrusion, disturbance, and invasion—test the endurance of the readers and intrude their subjectivity. The reading of these transgressive bodies re-conceptualizes spectatorship/readership and nourishes an existential burden for the readers who are faced with the possible insufficiency of their own politics. Notes 1. The term “haptic” derives from the Greek word haptikós meaning “able to grasp or perceive.” Therefore an aesthetic of the haptic designates a process of embodied writing through the visual that convokes the tactile, the sense of touch, the perception and manipulation of entities (objects, bodies for instance) using the senses of touch or proprioception (the sense of body position). 2. The dossier containing documents related to the tragic riots of May 67 (or Mé 67 in Creole) has been classified top secret defence until 2017. Destructions of municipal archives and hospitalization records have also contributed to the distorting count of victims (between 8 and 200). As a result, seeking justice from the French government has been extremely difficult for families of victims. 3. Orality is the oral characteristic of language, of the discourse, of a culture. See also Lilyan Kesteloot (1993), Ndiaye (1996), Relouzat (1998). 4. See Julia Kristeva (1982; 1988) on aesthetics of corporeality in speech and writing. 5. Ka is a major part of Guadeloupe’s culture. The term refers to hand drums, the music created with them, and the dances they accompany. There are seven major rhythms in gwo ka played with two types of drums; the larger, the boula, plays the central rhythm and the smaller, the makè, is used by the drummer to embellish the boula rhythm through interplays with the dancer or the singer. 6. The term béké is a Creole word used to describe a descendant of the early European (French) settlers in the French Antilles. Nowadays, the békés represent a small minority in the French Caribbean but they control much of the local industry. The class difference that exists between the békés and the predominantly black majority population of French Caribbean societies is paramount. 7. Jeannie Suk, Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing, Césaire, Glissant, Condé (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 62. 8. Gerty Dambury, Les rétifs (Paris: Les éditions du Manguier, 2012), 27.



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9. Homi Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), 58. 10. Maryse Condé, La Civilisation du bossale (Paris: Edition L’Harmattan, 1978), 7. 11. Gisèle Pineau, Cent vies et des poussières (Paris: Mercure de France, 2012), 14. 12. Renée Larrier, “‘Crier/Ecrire/Cahier’: Anagrammatic Configurations of Voice in Francophone Caribbean Narratives,” The French Review 69, no. 2 (1995): 276. 13. Ibid. 14. Edouard Glissant, “Le différé, la parole,” in Faulkner, Mississippi (Paris: Stock, 1996; Paris: Gallimard Folio Essais n° 326, 1998), 266–267. 15. Michel De Certeau, La prise de parole et autres écrits politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 49. 16. Yvonne Daniel, “An Ethnographic Comparison of Caribbean Quadrilles,” Black Music Research Journal 30, no. 2 (2010), 216. 17. Ibid. 18. Dambury, Les rétifs, 19. 19. Ibid., 65. 20. Ibid., 137. 21. Ibid., 207. 22. Dominique Cyrille, “Sa Ki Ta Nou (This belongs to us): Creole dances of the French Caribbean,” in Caribbean dance from abakuá to zouk, edited by Susanna Sloat (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002), 221–246. 23. Daniel, “An Ethnographic Comparison,” 227. 24. Pineau, Cent vies et des poussières, 45. 25. Ibid., 47. 26. Ibid., 32. 27. Ibid., 26. 28. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 3. 29. Pineau, Cent vies et des poussières, 24. 30. Ibid., 49. 31. Ibid., 48. 32. Ibid., 273. 33. Ibid., 43. 34. Ibid., 24. 35. Ibid., 80. 36. Ibid., 84. 37. Ibid., 171. 38. Ibid., 169. 39. Ibid., 171. 40. Ibid., 224. 41. Ibid., 23. 42. Ibid., 44. 43. Ibid., 92. 44. Ibid., 159. 45. Ibid., 44.

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46. Ibid., 54. 47. Ibid., 24. 48. Ibid., 154. 49. Ibid., 275. 50. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,” 207. 51. Daniel Sibony, Entre Deux. L’origine en partage (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 19. 52. Dambury, Les rétifs, 12. 53. Edward Saïd, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 54. Dambury, Les rétifs, 67.

Bibliography Bamako. Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. Les Films du Losange, 2006. DVD. Bernabé, Jean, et al. Eloge de la créolité. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990. Bhabha, Homi K. “Culture’s In-Between.” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: SAGE Publications, 1996. ———. “The Third Space.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Condé, Maryse. La Civilisation du bossale. Paris: Edition L’Harmattan, 1978. Cyrille, Dominique. “Sa Ki Ta Nou (This belongs to us): Creole dances of the French Caribbean.” In Caribbean dance from abakuá to zouk, edited by Susanna Sloat, 221–246. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002. Dambury, Gerty. Les rétifs. Paris: Les éditions du Manguier, 2012. Daniel, Yvonne. “An Ethnographic Comparison of Caribbean Quadrilles.”  Black Music Research Journal 30, no. 2 (2010): 215–240. De Certeau, Michel. La prise de parole et autres écrits politiques. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Faivre, Antoine. L’ésotérisme, 1992 ed. Paris: PUF, 2003. Francis, Gladys M. “Fonctions et enjeux de la danse et de la musique dans le texte francophone créole.” Nouvelles Études Francophones 26, no. 1 (2011): 179–94. Glissant, Édouard. “Le différé, la parole.” In Faulkner, Mississippi. Paris: Stock, 1996; Paris: Gallimard Folio Essais n° 326, 1998. Kesteloot, Lilyan, ed. “Oral literature, special issue of Research in African Literatures.” Bloomington: Indiana UP, 24.2 (1993). Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Leon S. Roudiez (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. ———. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1988. Larrier, Renée. “‘Crier/Ecrire/Cahier’: Anagrammatic Configurations of Voice in Francophone Caribbean Narratives.” The French Review 69, no. 2 (1995): 275–283. Lionnet, Françoise. “Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts in the Fictions of Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Gayl Jones, and Bessie Head.” Callaloo 16.1 (1993): 132–52.



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Ndiaye, Christiane et Josias Semujanga. De paroles en figures. Essais sur les littératures africaines et antillaises. Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1996. Relouzat, Raymond. Tradition orale et imaginaire créole. Petit Bourg: Ibis rouge, 1998. Pineau, Gisèle. Cent vies et des poussières. Paris: Mercure de France, 2012. Saïd, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Sibony, Daniel. Entre Deux. L’origine en partage. Paris: Seuil, 1990. Suk, Jeannie. Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing, Césaire, Glissant, Condé. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

Chapter 6

Alhaji Roaming the City Gender, HIV AIDS, and Performing Arts Ousseina D. Alidou

This paper offers a critical discourse analysis of the song-dance SIDA by the popular Nigerien singer-musician and song composer Abdoul Salam. The song essentially offers a counter-narrative on HIV AIDS in urban Niger by focusing attention not on the alleged promiscuity of urban poor women, but on the sexual conduct of the “rich” and “mighty” with quasi-religious credentials who constantly give the impression of being the custodians of the society’s morality. In the process the song uses HIV AIDS as a trope to highlight the contradiction in the moral order rooted in the exploitation of the poor, especially women and teenage girls, by “pious” men of means and power. Abdoul Salam’s song SIDA reveals the inequalities in gender relations leading to social injustice against women (Figure 6.1). Furthermore, the paper reveals the crucial role performing artists are playing in HIV AIDS education through a cultural paradigm of communication and sensitization about the ethics of care in societies such as Niger where Islamic conservatism, poverty, and the high rate of illiteracy are major blocks against overt conversation about sex and sexuality. Like in Nigerian Hausa novels and films1 in Niger dance-songs HIV AIDS represents a new transformative agent of change as Carmen McCain2 rightly suggests. In the 1980s when the international media began to cover the HIV-AIDS epidemic in Africa, images from its ravaging effects became associated in the Nigerien imagination to East and Southern African countries such as Uganda, Kenya, the Congos, and South Africa, and to homosexuality in “perverse” western countries. However, when the sensitization campaigns of the World Health Organization and other HIV-AIDS international nongovernmental Salam, Abdoul. “SIDA.” Reprinted by courtesy of Abdoul Salam. Auren Dole. Reprinted by courtesy of Dan Maraya Jos.

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organizations began to report, on television and radio, the spread of the disease in Côte d’Ivoire where a high proportion of seasonal labor migrants, merchants, and students from Niger reside and the death ratio of infected Nigeriens in villages or towns known with large populations of seasonal migrants, local awareness started to shift about the vulnerability of Muslim populations, too, to HIV-AIDS infection. This reality began to erode the myth of Muslims as more responsible in sexual behavior. It is important to point out that generally the studies and media coverage seldom report on how HIVAIDS affects upper- and middle-class populations, leaving the impression that this is exclusively a lower-class affliction. In Uganda and Senegal the political leadership has mobilized the religious bodies to lead an open and aggressive conscientization campaign against HIV-AIDS infection.3 Until the mid-1990s, however, the political authority in Niger remained more timid partly because of the hostility of the Islamic associations towards sex education, especially the use of condoms. As one report from IRIN observed: However activists say that the stigma surrounding AIDS and the lack of a clear government policy on extending treatment to the interior mean there are few takers for the testing, counseling and treatment services recently made available. “We have funds, testing is possible, antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) are available, but people simply don’t turn up at the treatment centers,” said Abdoulaye Bagnou, a doctor who works as HIV/AIDS advisor to the prime minister’s office. All admit that the social stigma attached to AIDS in this staunchly Muslim and socially conservative country is a major obstacle. . . . But AIDS activists also blame the government for failing to implement a proper nationwide treatment strategy. . . . “People don’t take tests because of the stigma which is linked to religion, rising fundamentalism and the social status of women,” said the head of one non-governmental organization who asked not to be identified.4

In Niger, the project of promoting HIV-AIDS education in order to prevent infection became linked, by the Islamic authority and some churches, to the United Nations’ (UN) advocacy for population planning which they saw as population control. This suspicion led many Muslims in Niger and other parts of the world to attack the UN International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, Egypt, in September 1994.5 This global Muslim opposition which characterized the sentiment of the majority of Nigerien Muslim men is well captured by Riffat Hassan, an Aghani feminist theologian who participated in the conference: One of the fundamental issues underlying the deliberations of the Cairo conference was that of “ownership” of a woman’s body. Women’s identification with body rather than with mind and spirit is a common characteristic of the



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dualistic thinking that pervades many religions, cultural and philosophical traditions. Ironically, however, though women have traditionally been identified with body, they have not been seen as owner of their own bodies, and the issue of who controls women’s bodies—men, the state, the church [the mosque], the community, or women—has never been decided in favor of women in patriarchal cultures. Muslim societies are far more concerned with trying to control women’s bodies and sexuality than with granting women their human rights. When Muslims speak of human rights, they either do not speak of women’s rights at all, or they are concerned with how a woman’s chastity may be protected. (They are apparently not worried with how a man’s chastity).6

By 2000, the increasing spread of HIV in the Islamic Sahelian countries such as Niger Republic led international agencies such as German Health Practice (KFW), UNICEF to mobilize young urban performing artists, especially singer-musicians in the capital city of Niamey to contribute to the campaign of sensitization against HIV-AIDS. The organization took advantage of the license that artists usually enjoy in society to enlist them in the campaign in HIV-AIDS prevention and management and destigmatization of the affected. The artistic contribution was not only in the form of songs. It also included visual media posted on anti-HIV/AIDS billboards posted in Niamey public sites. Some of these images tied to the German Health Program (KFW)’s HIV-AIDS education campaign are extremely well conceived and deliver their message in an effective way. In Figure 6.2 we see the cover of Abdoul Salam’s album entitled An Marmake.7 It shows Le Visa [the visa] metaphorically implying that the condom is the passage towards safe sex. The Muslim clergy has long argued that the distribution of condoms especially among married women and teenage girls in predominantly Muslim societies would promote promiscuity of women and girls, following the example of artists from the Southern and East African regions.8 However, the participation of Nigerien performing artists in the HIV-AIDS prevention campaign has been one of the most remarkable contributions to the efforts that defy the opposition of conservative Islamic clergy. In his article regarding strategies for confronting AIDS in Africa, Arvind Singhal rightly observes that: Local, vernacular-based communication art forms are also important tools in addressing HIV/AIDS. Most HIV/AIDS communication campaigns in Africa have undervalued traditional oral communication channels and the strength of aural comprehension. In African countries the oral tradition—proverbs, adages, riddles, folklore, and storytelling—is rich in visual imagery and is the basis on which learning is founded. The narrative tradition offers the potential of cultural expression, particularly words of advice and encouragement, that are often couched in adage, allegory, and metaphor.9

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In the remainder of this paper I discuss how Abdoul Salam resorts to Hausa oral narrative tradition, especially of the imaginative subgenre type in addition to a vernacular understanding of healing as rooted both in indigenous and borrowed traditions to craft a very powerful dance-song aiming to break the silence on AIDS. Abdoul Salam attended the Department of English at Abdou Moumouni in the early 1990s where he first started his musical career and later traveled to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where he studied music at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure, Arts et Lettres at the University. Abdoul Salam is a pan-Hausa artist whose music is widely available on radio, television, and in audiocassettes in Northern Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, and other countries with significant Hausa speakers. As a polyglot in Hausa, Zarma, Tamasheq, and other Nigerien languages in addition to French and English, Abdoul Salam chooses to compose and sing most of his dance-songs in local languages including this one on SIDA due to his sensitivity to the 90% of Nigeriens who are illiterate in the French language. His aim is to engage them about the seriousness of the disease in a medium that they grasp. Moreover, he tackles the theme of his dance-song by adopting a Hausa folk narrative approach relating the ruthless lifestyle of a powerful man in society named Alhaji who thought of himself as invincible to HIV-AIDS. The narrative incorporates also other Hausa folklore genres such as Habaici or Suka [indirectness], call and response, humor and satire, and ululation to achieve both aesthetic and symbolic effects. The deconstruction of the subtext of the dance-song will reveal that what makes Aboul Salam’s HIV-AIDS dance-song very effective for the campaign is its challenge of the conservative ideology of orthodox Islamic ulema regarding sexuality and piety, and his satirical song text that exposes the risky sexual behavior of the powerful men of society embodied by the character of Alhaji. Alhaji personifies men who had performed Hajj, the religious pilgrimage to Mecca to seek “holy” repentance and who are expected to be role models of social piety. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that Abdoul Salam crafted his dance-song entitled SIDA in the Hausa language within the cultural folk-genre commonly known as suka which means an indirectness within a dramatic satirical mode of delivery, recalling the Hausa theatrical tradition commonly referred to as wasan koy-koyo.10 In the process, the stylistic features of the story which constitute the song-dance pattern dramatize Hausa folktale-type narratives.11 In addition, Abdoul Salam creatively exploits other oral stylistic devices such as the dialogic structure of call and response to engage the listener on HIV-AIDS while achieving its didactic function of raising awareness of the deadly consequences of contracting the virus. To circumvent the religious and cultural sensitivities of the Nigerien societies about any overt discussion on sexuality and the intense paranoia regarding this mysterious and fatal disease which has been stigmatized



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Table 6.1 ayulululu . . . . yulululu . . . . yulululu Abun k’warai aka yi ma gud’a

[ululation. . .] ‘Only a joyful event calls for ululations

Daga aihuwa sai aure sai labari mai k’ara mu From a childbirth to marriage to a news that advances us And the chorus repeated the same introduction after him: Chorus Abun k’warai aka yi ma gud’a Daga aihuwa sai aure sai labari mai k’ara mu

as a “Allah’s people’s punishment for sexual misconduct,” Abdoul Salam tackles the subject matter through an antonymic discussion about the types of cultural events that call for ululation in celebration (Table 6.1). The narrator proceeds to tell us that the performance of such folklore genre is appropriate in the case of happy events such as marriage, birth of a child, and any great news. Then the lyrics take a more serious melodic tone that suggests a sad happening for which ululation would be inappropriate, but which rather calls for Allah’s mercy to spare the people from this new disease called “SIDA” (the French rendering of HIV), a disease that can be contracted regardless of one’s age, filial status, or gender. This latter statement sets a challenge against stigmatizing particular social groups with HIV-AIDS (Table 6.2). Table 6.2 Allah raba mu da ciwon SIDA Amin Allah raba mu da ciwon SIDA Don SIDA lalan ciwo ne Bai bar ‘yen yara Bai bar uwayen yara Bai bar mata ba Har mazam ma bay a barinsu Har mazam ma ba ya barinsu

God spare us from the AIDS disease Amen (back voice) God spare us from the AIDS disease Because AIDS is a horrible disease It does not spare children It does not spare children’s mothers It does not spare the women Even the men it does not spare Even the men it does not spare

The call and response rhetoric style is used in order to engage the audience into a participatory exchange with the artist, who takes up the voice of the narrator, while also exposing how very little is known about the HIV-AIDS disease besides the fact that it is currently a death sentence. To explain the seriousness of the disease, Abdoul Salam metaphorically weaves the prevailing cultural ideology and practices of witchcraft in Nigerien societies into his lyrics and states that HIV-AIDS is like the king of witches or sorcerers, deadly blood-sucking human beings, feared and avoided by other “normal” human beings in the society (Table 6.3).

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Table 6.3 Mine ne SIDA? Ku jama’a mine ne SIDA? SIDA lalan ciwo ne

What is HIV-AIDS? Oh you the people what is HIV-AIDS? AIDS is a horrible disease

Mine ne SIDA? Ku jama’a mine ne SIDA?

What is HIV-AIDS? Oh you the people what is HIV-AIDS?

SIDA mayin ciwo ne Shi ne sarkin mayyu In ya kama ki Loktoro bai hidda ka Malam bai hidda ka Du(w) wani boka bai hidda ka

HIV-AIDS is the wicked disease It is the king of witches When it catches you The modern doctor couldn’t save you Malam couldn’t save you Any other traditional healer couldn’t save you

SIDA shi ne sarkin mayyu Shi ne sarkin mayyu In ya kama ka Loktoro bai hidda ka Malam bai hidda ka Du(w) wani boka bai hidda ka

HIV-AIDS is the king of witches It is the king of witches When it catches you (masc) Malam couldn’t save you Any other traditional healer couldn’t save you

The above passage of the song narrative also offers a cultural understanding of how sickness is hierarchically handled first by resorting to both traditional healers or witchcraft doctors known as the Boka (in Hausa language), secondly to the Islamic healer, the Malam (in Hausa language), and, in the last resort, in most cases to the Western-trained medical healer, likita (doctor or nurse in Hausa). Abdoul Salam uses the convergence of these three practices of healing—the indigenous, the Islamic, and Western traditions—to dispel the illusion of a cure in any realm of existing healing systems and therefore advise the people to adopt responsible sexual behavior to prevent contracting HIV. Then Abdoul Salam switches to a dramatic satirical dialogue tale combining the narrative, performative features of both Hausa Tatsuniya [imaginative folktale] and Labari [non-imaginative tale] while still remaining a distinct modern social commentary. The dialogue is between a wealthy Alhaji, that is, a Muslim man who performed the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, and his friend who is warning him against the dangerous consequences of moral deviancy for a man of his social standing. Hajj is one of the religious obligations for Muslims, who can afford it. Yet, for purposes of spiritual renewal and moral purification, Alhaji is an arrogant wealthy “religious” man who indulges in sexual promiscuity with women outside the “Islamically-sanctified” domain of marriage, thereby, violating the Islamic conjugal rights to healthy sexual pleasure of his spouse. Consequently, Abdoul Salam, acting as the narrator, depicts the behavior of this powerful and arrogant Alhaji as a metaphor for the hypocritical behavior of wealthy and powerful men who use their social and economic status to subjugate women, especially the downtrodden teenage girls. Thus, Alhaji’s recklessness is presented as follows (Table 6.4):



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Table 6.4 Akwai wani Alhaji na nan Kullun yana canzawal mata mata mata Kamal yana sakewal rigar

There is an Alhaji here He is always changing women women women Like he is changing shirts

Kullun yana canzawal mata mata mata mata Kamal yana sakewal wando

He is always changing women women women women Like he is changing trousers

Kullun yana canzawal gabdi gabdi gabdi gabdi Kamal yana sake takalmi

He is always changing slut slut slut slut

Na ce mashi Alhaji dibo Alhaji dena hakanga Kar ka je ka d’auko SIDA

I told him look (here) Alhaji Alhaji, stop this matter Don’t go catch HIV-AIDS

Na ce mashi Alhaji dibo Alhaji dena hakanga Kar ka je ka d’auko SIDA

I told him look (here) Alhaji Alhaji, stop this matter Don’t go catch HIV-AIDS

Alhaji sai ya ce min Yunwa ce a SIDA Talauci ne a SIDA Rishin kud’i shi ne a SIDA

Then Alhaji replied to me It is hunger that is HIV-AIDS It is poverty that is HIV-AIDS It is lack of money that is HIV-AIDS

Alhaji sai ya ce min Yunwa ce a SIDA Talauci ne a SIDA Rishin kud’i shi ne a SIDA

Then Alhaji replied to me It is hunger that is HIV-AIDS It is poverty that is HIV-AIDS It is lack of money that is HIV-AIDS

Rishin kud’i shi ne a SIDA

It is lack of money that is HIV-AIDS

Like he is changing shoes

In its analysis of gender inequality and its impacts on (young) women’s vulnerability to HIV-AIDS infection, the United Nations Development Program’s analysts contend that “the ability of young women to protect themselves from infection becomes a direct function of power relations between men and women.”12 The UNDP’s argument is further supported by Paul Farmer, a leading medical anthropologist who demonstrated in his study of HIV-AIDS in other Third World countries such as Haiti how “gender inequality has weakened women’s ability to negotiate safe sexual encounters, and this sapping of agency is especially amplified by poverty”13 In the case of Niger, where the life of women in urban centers is characterized by poverty, a high rate of unemployment in both the public and private sectors, a high rate of illiteracy, high school drop-out rates, and a high divorce rate among young girls forced into early marriages constitute factors that lead women to resort to sexual service in exchange for a little money or in-kind favors from men in society. In his lyrics, Abdoul Salam exposes the awareness of the wealthy and powerful men regarding the vulnerability of the poor in general to HIV infection while also showing their short-sightedness in realizing that once the rich and

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powerful engage in the sexual transaction they become linked to the same risk of lethal infection since HIV-AIDS virus does not discriminate, both groups are vulnerable. The thrust of the Alhaji’s moral decadence as the lyrics above suggest is multifaceted: (a) his socioeconomic status permits him to sexually objectify women as depicted through the metaphors of women-as-shirts, women-as-trousers, women-as-sluts, women-as-shoes; and (b) his contempt for the poor makes Alhaji believe that his socioeconomic class renders him invincible to contract HIV. Alhaji’s arrogant misconception ties HIV-AIDS to hunger and poverty. As an “immune,” well nourished, wealthy man, therefore, Alhaji continues his reckless exploitative behavior towards poor women in the street, lending a deaf ear to his friend’s warning against the risk of contracting HIV. Niamey is as multilingual urban space with the Hausa language being one of the main two local lingua franca, including the Zarma language, especially for the non-francophiles.14 It is also a trans-ethnic language that links the urban with the rural in most parts of Niger. Furthermore, Hausa is a cross-border language spoken in Northern Nigeria, Ghana, Northern Cameroon, Sudan, Chad, Benin, and Togo.15 In the early 2000s the adoption of Islamic law—Shari’a—in some Northern Nigerian states led to the exodus to neighboring Niger Republic of many young Nigerian women. As a result, the border villages and town of Niger such as Firgi, Dan Issa, Maradi, and Birnin Koni have become the main destinations for young Nigerian women and men seeking to escape Shari’a sanctions against adultery and fornication. Many of these women turn to prostitution as an alternative mode of survival in a foreign land.16 Then one day the inevitable in the context of risky behavior happens for HIV catches up with Alhaji and there begins a new battle for Alhaji against an invincible rival that cannot be defeated either by the traditional medicine man, Boka, or the Islamic healer, Malam, and not even the modern doctor, likita. Refusing to own up to his patriarchal and class-irresponsible behavior, Alhaji remains in a state of denial by accusing some imaginary enemies in the bush for casting a bad spell on him. The Boka could not alter the spell despite the sacrifice of chickens and black goats and all the healing rituals to exorcise the ache in him (Table 6.5). Abdoul Salam makes use of Hausa language’s richness in onomatopoeia, such as kacacap, kacacap to produce a humorous dramatic parody of the performance of the Boka by mimicking the sound of his mystifying cowries, which are devoid of any real healing power. Alhaji seeks the assistance of the Islamic healer who failed to cure him in spite of his evocation of the Suratul Yasin—the Sura 36 of the Qur’an commonly used by Muslim teachers and healers as the Sura of miracle, of warning and victory to call upon Allah to grant blessings of power and success



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Table 6.5 Kullun yana ta shagalinshi Yana ta canjin gabdi Wata ran ga Alhaji kwance

All the times he went about his usual business He keeps changing the slut Then one day there was Alhaji laying down

Ashaaaa!

What a pity! (Ooooooooooh!) (inner voice)

Na ce mashi “Alhaji k’ak’a?” Alhaji sai ya ce min “jihwa ce gushe”

I asked him “What is happening Alhaji?” The Alhaji told me “it is a bad spell”

Can a dawa

From the bush

“jihwa ce gushe”

“a bad spell sent”

Ya ce mak’iya sun jihe shi

He said it is from some enemies

An kawo ‘yen bori da su da ‘yen buga goge Da su da ‘yen buga k’orai kacacap kacacap An yanke bak’aken kaji

A spirit healer was brought in with some violinists and calabash drummers Black chickens were slaughtered

Amma Alhaji na nan kwance Amma Alhaji na nan kwance

However Alhaji is still laying down However, Alhaji is still laying down

Bai tashi ba

He did not stand up

Amma Alhaji na nan kwance Amma Alhaji na nan kwance

However Alhaji is still laying down However, Alhaji is still laying down

Bai tashi ba

He did not stand up

An kawo bokaye An kawo bokaye Bak’al akuyya an yanka ta

Traditional healers were brought in Traditional healers were brought in A black goat was slaughtered

Amma Alhaji na nan kwance Amma Alhaji na nan kwance

However Alhaji is still laying down However, Alhaji is still laying down

to Muslims who recite it in the context of adversarial attack, such as that of an envious enemy or the lethal HIV. As the narrator tells us, however, even the evocation of Suratul Yasin could not save Alhaji from this deadly disease (Table 6.6). For Alhaji still remains bedridden. Given the demise of his stubborn and arrogant friend, Alhaji the narrator of the tale further launches an appeal by drawing on Islamic ethos to warn both single and married men, more particularly, of the reality of HIV and reaffirm the urgency for them to resume a more responsible sexual conduct (Table 6.7). If folktales and parables are stories targeting children’s audiences in general in Hausa society, the story of Alhaji and SIDA as crafted by Abdoul Salam is more a parable directed at an adult audience, more particularly the hegemonic men in society, namely, the influential and the rich as well as the Islamic clergy and the medicine men. Given the power of reprimand of such

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Table 6.6 An kawo malam Malam ya ja Yasin Malam ya ja tabzi An yanke rago

They brought in Malam Malam read the Qur’anic Sura Yasin Malam drew on the prayer beads A ram was slaughtered

Amma Alhaji na nan kwance Amma Alhaji na nan kwance

However Alhaji is still laying down However, Alhaji is still laying down

Finally, he turns to the Western-trained modern doctor whose diagnosis was that the powerful Alhaji has contracted the lethal HIV in spite of his wealth and status. Da loktoro ya auna shi Ya ce Alhaji ya d’au SIDA

When the modern doctor examined him He said that Alhaji contracted the HIV AIDS disease (is HIV infected)

Da loktoro ya auna shi Ya ce Alhaji ya d’au SIDA

When the modern doctor examined him He said that Alhaji contracted the HIV AIDS disease (is HIV infected)

Table 6.7 Gwobro koko mai mata Don Allah to a bar yin rates Don Allah to a bar yin rates

Whether single or married man For Allah’s sake stop messing around For Allah’s sake stop messing around

Gwobro koko mai mata Don Allah to a bar yin rates Don Allah to a bar yin rates

Whether single or married man For Allah’s sake stop messing around For Allah’s sake stop messing around

Mun bari Ko mun yi rangad’i

We are stopping Even if we used to mess around

a targeted constituency, the use of humor and indirectness become the most adequate communication strategy for speaking to these men of power for contributing to the spread of HIV through their risky sexual behavior with (economically) dependent girls and women. What Abdoul Salam is denouncing in his dance-song is the new phenomenon that erupted in the 1990s of wealthy or influential (married) men in urban centers sexually preying on young (school) girls and women in spite of all the highly moralistic religious propaganda against prostitution (Figure 6.3). This overt prostitution is blatant at night in public parks, school compounds, and main hotel areas, especially in the capital city and other urban towns while the covert prostitution takes place in a home where a married man financially takes care of a mistress, culturally referred to as gabdi, a female school dropout or young woman who still lives with her parents in exchange for sexual services.17



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One of the most significant impacts of Abdou Salam’s dance song SIDA is the fact that it has the merit of distancing itself from the stereotypical narratives which often blame the “woman” for the transmission of the disease in society. This type of patriarchal depictions of women as being promiscuous is very pervasive in African (oral) narratives including popular songs.18 In SIDA, the narrator seems to suggest that there is a correlation between power (as linked to religious and economic status), sexual rights, and gender in Nigerien society. The fact that patriarchal interpretation of Islam defines the gendered sexual rights of individuals in the society, especially among the urban middle and upper classes, women’s sexual conduct has been subjected to stigmatization more than that of men. Within such understanding, Muslim men in Niger use their patriarchal prerogative to claim the right to women’s bodies in polygyny. But they also extend their patriarchal privileges to indulge in divorce from and serial marriages to young and most often poor and uneducated young women. The negative consequences of such patriarchal misuse of male sexual rights in this era of HIV-AIDS pandemic suggest multiple layers of lethal entanglement mediated through negative cultural values: (a) the promiscuous male partner who becomes the potential transmitter of the deadly virus to both his wives and serial partners outside the marital framework; (b) the infected divorced women who remarry and spread the virus in their new conjugal homes which are often polygamous homes; and (c) the partners outside the conjugal homes such as the gabdi “unmarried women” and young girls are also potential victims of HIV-AIDS infection in their new marital home, etc. In a subtle way, Abdoul Salam exposes the behavior of Alhaji who engages in sexual objectification of women outside marriage, while also inferring the violation of the sexual rights of his wife or wives by infecting them with a lethal virus. Moreover, because of the financial patronage of the wealthy and mighty men such as Alhaji of religious and political authorities, the latter do not speak out against the danger of such masculine sexual behavior in Niger, but are quick to make pronouncements against the danger of female sexual promiscuity. Because of the strong patriarchal hold and the solidarity of men of power in the Nigerien society, the root cause of (young) women’s prostitution leading to exposure to HIV is never addressed beyond the stereotypical conception that “women of bad morality” are responsible for the spread of HIV. The causes of female prostitution in Nigerien society include poverty that often leads to early marriage of adolescent females to older and often rich or mighty men, and the rejection of the young women after birth complications that result in vaginal fistula. The issue of forced marriage of teenage girls and the consequences on their lives and society in both Northern Nigeria and Niger has been the subject of songs by the renowned senior male popular singer Dan Maraya Jos (Nigeria),19 and

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younger female singer Fati Nijar and her Nigerian group Zulayka and Zara Dibissou, entitled Auren Dole. An excerpt from Dan Maraya Jos goes as follows: Father forced me to get married Since it is against my wish I will not be compelled to stay If she marries whom she loves You (parent) will be happy She will be at ease The bridegroom will be happy On the day of naming ceremony, Maraya and his kuntigi will be around Will come and celebrate There will be festivities There will be prosperity (within the family)20

Just as Maraya does in his song, Zara Dibissou, a popular female singer in both Niger and Nigeria, appeals to parents not to give away their young daughters to older men just for the sake of their money because soon they will be thrown out and their future be destroyed. Both Dan Maraya, Fati Nijar and her musical band Zulayka and Zara Dibissou stay away from blaming women as the cause of prostitution in society to confront both greedy parents and the wealthy and powerful older men in the society. Other singers in Hausa society, such as Akilu Aliyu and Alhaji Mamane Shata who are very popular in both Northern Nigeria and Niger and patronized by wealthy Alhaji and other men of power in society, compose highly misogynist lyrics that solely condemn the women prostitutes. For example, in his song entitled ‘Yer Gagara, Aliyu Akilu’s disapproval, on religious grounds, of the character karuwa, that is the prostitute, is presented by Dalhatu Muhammed in the following words: He calls her all sorts of names, e.g: “yar gargara” which suggests her rebellious nature against God’s and societal laws. He describes her as one who is concerned with proving her noble or respectable origins, one who is forced into prostitution allegedly not because of a desire to make money or due to inner flaw in her character but mainly due to the alleged fact that was the victim of forced marriage. . . . In his work, the poet does not let the Karuwa get away with her defense, but caricatures and satirizes her.21

The following is a translation of the prostitute’s own account of the reasons she resorted to prostitution (verse 21–24) which Akilu Aliyu dismisses as relevant in his song, ‘Yer Gagara:



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21. Soon after our parting I was given another one who even surpassed my old father in age. 22. I could not eat, could not drink, could not sleep (but) they refused to part us (so) I just fled. 23. This is what put me into the lewd world, not a profligate nature, nor search for money. 24. It was grief that made me go out and about, not sheer mischief or loose character.22 Contrary to Akilu Aliyu’s perspective, Abdoul Salam’s song, SIDA, offers a subtle, but forceful criticism directed at the powerful Muslim men who patronize prostitution in poor societies. In essence, then, Alhaji’s persona matches the characterization of the Kenyan sugar daddies, the men of affluence in the middle and upper classes whose sexual exploitation of young school girls partly accounts for the high risk of infection of the latter. As Singhal comments: At a 2000 UNAIDS meeting in Geneva, a representative from Kenya talked about how young schoolgirls in his country rendered sexual favors to urban middle class and affluent men for the 3Cs: cash, cell phones, and cars. Sugar daddies initiate the seduction process by asking young girls: “let me buy you chicken and chips” or “let me give you a lift in my car.” Rates of HIV infection among young girls in Kenya are six times higher than for young boys, and exploitation by sugar daddies is largely responsible for this difference23

SIDA is also a counter-narrative that uses satirical humor to parody the limitation of the healing powers of even the most conservative religious clergy who maintain an unrealistic antagonistic position about awareness campaigns against the spread of HIV-AIDS in society, while also exposing the contradictory hypocritical sexual behavior of some of their followers and patrons, such as the mighty promiscuous Alhaji. This demystification is crucial in a culture where the words of the religious authority remain uncontested by the majority of believers. Thus, the message that says even the Malam cannot cure Alhaji, nor the traditional healer Boka or the modern Western-trained doctor likita, carries special weight given the position of power of all the three characters in a conservative male-dominated society like Niger. To sum up this of analysis of Abdoul Salam’s dance-song SIDA reveals the moral ambiguity of the city and urban space. The city, especially the capital city as the center of the power of the nation is a pariah that feeds on the disadvantaged areas of the populations of the country. Like the city, the rich and the powerful like Alhaji also prey on the disadvantaged subjects. It is this reality between the advantaged and the disadvantaged24 that Abdoul Salam seeks to expose as one that ultimately leads to a diseased organism

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that has no redemption. In a context where poverty is increasingly feminized, women become the primary prey in work and leisure to fulfill the whims of men of power. In the process, the women also get objectified as the shirts, the shoes, the trousers and the shoes that Alhaji changes at will. SIDA becomes a metaphor of the destructive result of abusive power by men of means and might in the urban settings. Notes 1. Abdallah Uba Adamu. Media Technologies and Literary Transformations in Hausa Oral Literature Volume 21 of Afrikawissenschaftliche Lehrbücher, edited by Joe McIntyre and Mechthild Rey (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2011), 45–80; Abdallah Uba Adamu, “Islam, Hausa Culture and Censorship in Northern Nigeria Video Film,” in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution edited by Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 63–73; Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino, Littattafan Soyayya: Samuwarsu da Bunkasarsu da kuma Tasirinsu ga Al’ummar Hausawa a Nijeriya [Hausa Love Stories: Origins, Development and their Impact on the Hausa in Nigeria]—Translation by Joe McIntyre vol. 21 of Afrikawissenschaftliche Lehrbücher, edited by Joe McIntyre and Mechthild Rey (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2011), 1–44; Ousseina D. Alidou, “Gender, Narrative Space and Modern Hausa Literature,” Research in African Literatures, vol. 33, no. 2 (2002), 137–153. 2. Carmen McCain, “HIV-AIDS as a Transformative Agent in Hausa Novels and Films,” Paper presented at the 2006 African Studies Association Annual Conference, San Francisco. 3. Louise M. Bourgault, Playing for Life Performance in Africa in the Age of AIDS (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2003); Arvind Singhal and Stephen Howard, eds, The Children of Africa Confront AIDS (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 230–245. 4. IRIN http://www.irinnews.org/printreport.aspx?reportid=38761. 5. Ousseina D. Alidou, Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women in Postcolonial Niger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 168–171. 6. Riffat Hassan, “Muslim Women’s Rights: A Contemporary Debate” in Sunita Mehta, ed. Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future: Women for Afghan Women (New York: New York, 2002), 137–144. 7. Picture from Abdoul Salam’s album An Marmake. 8. Mark Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 9. Arvind Singhal, “Communication Strategies for Confronting AIDS: Empowering the Children of Africa,” in The Children of Africa Confront AIDS, eds. Arvind Singhal and Stephen Howard (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 230–242. 10. Ousseina D. Alidou, “Popular Hausa Drama in Niger and the Politics of Its Appropriation,” in African Vision: Literary Images, Political Change and Social Struggles, edited by Silvia Federici, Cheryl Mwara and Joseph McLaren



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(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2000), 193–209; Janet Beik, Hausa Theater: A Contemporary Oral Art (New York: Garland Publication, 1984); Chaibou Dan Inna, La Théatrilité en Pays Hawsa, Unpublished Master Thesis, Côte d’Ivoire, Université d’Abidjan, 1979. 11. Neil Skinner, Hausa Readings: Selections from Edgar’s “Tatsuniyoyi” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Graham Furniss and Lize Gunner, Power, Marginality and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Priscilla Starrat, “Islamic Influences on Oral Traditions in Hausa Literature,” in The Marabout and the Muse: New Approaches to African Literature, ed. Kenneth W. Harrow (Portsmouth: Heinnemann 1993), 159–75; Ousseina D. Alidou, “Gender, Narrative Space and Modern Hausa Literature,” Research in African Literatures, vol. 33, no. 2 (2002), 137–153. 12. United Nations Development Program. Young Women: Silence, Susceptibility and the HIV Epidemic (New York: UNDP, 1992). 13. Paul Farmer, Infection and Inequality: The Modern Plague (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 141. 14. Jennifer Yanco, “Language Contact and Bilingualism among the Hausa and Zarma of Niamey, Niger,” Dissertation Indiana University, 1984. 15. African Academy of Languages (ACALAN). Terms of Reference., 2011. www.acalan.org/eng/events/tor.pdf 16. Alex Duval Smith, “Niger’s Border Prostitutes and the Profits of Islam,” in The Independent, Saturday 05 May, 2001. 17. Picture source Scott Youngsted 2013. 18. Dalhatu Muhammed, 1989. Gunner, Furnis and Gunner, 1995. 19. See Russell Schuh’s Metrical Studies of Dan Maraya’s Marriage Songs. http:// www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/Metrics/dan_maraya.html. 20. quoted in Habib Ahmed Daba, “The Case of Dan Maraya Jos: A Hausa Poet” in Oral Poetry in Nigeria edited by Uchegbulam N. Abalogu, Garba Ashiwaju and Regina Amadi Tshiwala. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 223. 21. Dalhatu Muhammed, Yer Gagara (1989): 52–53. 22. Ibid. 23. Singhal, “Communication Strategies for Confronting AIDS,” 240. 24. Fraser McNeill, AIDS, Politics and Music in South Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Mark Hunter, “The Materiality of Everyday Sex: Thinking Beyond ‘Prostitution,’” African Studies 61.1 (2002), 99–120; Mark Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS; Carmen McCain, “HIVAIDS as a Transformative Agent in Hausa Novels and Films,” Paul Farmer, Infection and Inequality.

Bibliography Adamu, Abdallah Uba. Media Technologies and Literary Transformations in Hausa Oral Literature Volume 21 of Afrikawissenschaftliche Lehrbücher, edited by Joe McIntyre and Mechthild Rey (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2011), 45–80.

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Adamu, Abdallah Uba. “Islam, Hausa Culture and Censorship in Northern Nigeria Video Film.” In Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution edited by Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010, 63–73. African Academy of Languages (ACALAN). Terms of Reference., 2011. www. acalan.org/eng/events/tor.pdf Alidou, Ousseina. Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women in Postcolonial Niger. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, 168–171. Alidou, Ousseina. “Gender, Narrative Space and Modern Hausa Literature.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 33, no. 2 (2002), 137–153. Alidou, Ousseina. “Popular Hausa Drama in Niger and the Politics of Its Appropriation.” In African Vision: Literary Images, Political Change and Social Struggles, edited by Silvia Federici, Cheryl Mwara and Joseph McLaren. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2000, 193–209. Beik, Janet. Hausa Theater: A Contemporary Oral Art. New York: Garland Publication, 1984. Bourgault, Louise M. Playing for Life Performance in Africa in the Age of AIDS. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2003; Arvind Singhal and Stephen Howard, eds. The Children of Africa Confront AIDS. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003, 230–245. Cooper, Barbara. Reproductive Health in Niger and other Sahelian countries (2012). Daba, Habib Ahmed. “The Case of Dan Maraya Jos: A Hausa Poet.” In Oral Poetry in Nigeria edited by Uchegbulam N. Abalogu, Garba Ashiwaju and Regina Amadi Tshiwala. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 223. Dan Inna, Chaibou. La Théatrilité en Pays Hawsa, Unpublished Master Thesis, Côte d’Ivoire, Université d’Abidjan, 1979. Farmer, Paul. Infection and Inequality: The Modern Plague. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 141. Furniss, Graham and Lize Gunner, Power, Marginality and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Gidan Dabino, Ado Ahmad. Littattafan Soyayya: Samuwarsu da Bunkasarsu da kuma Tasirinsu ga Al’ummar Hausawa a Nijeriya [Hausa Love Stories: Origins, Development and their Impact on the Hausa in Nigeria]—Translation by Joe McIntyre Volume 21 of Afrikawissenschaftliche Lehrbücher, edited by Joe McIntyre and Mechthild Rey. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2011, 1–44. Hassan, Riffat. “Muslim Women’s Rights: A Contemporary Debate.” In Sunita Mehta, (ed). Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future: Women for Afghan Women. New York, 2002, 137–144. Hirsch, Jennifer S., et al. The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010. Hirsch, Jennifer S., and Holly Wardlow, eds. Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship & Companionate Marriage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Hunter, Mark. Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.



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Hunter, Mark, “The Materiality of Everyday Sex: Thinking Beyond ‘Prostitution,’” African Studies 61.1 (2002), 99–120; Mark Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS; McCain, Carmen. “HIV-AIDS as a Transformative Agent in Hausa Novels and Films,” Paper presented at the 2006 African Studies Association Annual Conference, San Francisco. McNeill, Fraser. AIDS, Politics and Music in South Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Mahamane Sériba, “Traditional Wrestling in Niger: Between State Voluntarism and Ancestral Symbolism,” Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde Vol. 42, no.2 (2005), 18–32. Muhammed, Dalhatu. “Individual Talent in the Hausa Poetic Tradition: A Study of Akilu Aliyu and His Art.” Dissertation, London: University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1977. ——— ‘Yer Gagara. 1989, 52–53. Schuh, Russell. Metrical Studies of Dan Maraya’s Marriage Songs. Skinner, Neil. Hausa Readings: Selections from Edgar’s “Tatsuniyoyi.” Madison. University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Smith, Alex Duval. 2001. Niger’s border prostitutes and the Profits of Islam. In The Independent, Saturday 05 May, 2001. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/africa/nigers-border-prostitutes-and-the-profits-of-islam-683723.html Singhal, Arvind. “Communication Strategies for Confronting AIDS: Empowering the Children of Africa.” In The Children of Africa Confront AIDS, eds. Arvind Singhal and Stephen Howard. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003, 230–242. Smith, Alex Duval. “Niger’s Border Prostitutes and the Profits of Islam.” In The Independent, Saturday 05 May, 2001. Starrat, Priscilla. “Islamic Influences on Oral Traditions in Hausa Literature.” In The Marabout and the Muse: New Approaches to African Literature, ed. Kenneth W. Harrow. Portsmouth: Heinnemann, 1993, 159–75. United Nations Development Program. Young Women: Silence, Susceptibility and the HIV Epidemic. New York: UNDP, 1992. Yanco, Jennifer. “Language Contact and Bilingualism among the Hausa and Zarma of Niamey, Niger,” Dissertation Indiana University, 1984.

Chapter 7

Writing on the Visual Lalla Essaydi’s Photographic Tableaux Donna Gustafson

Lalla Essaydi, a Moroccan-born artist who lives and works in New York and Morocco, has established a well-deserved international reputation for her extraordinary large-scale images of women in photographic tableaux. In recent years she has had solo exhibitions at the De Cordova Sculpture Park + Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in 2010 (Figure 7.1), the National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C., and her work has been seen in Azerbaijan, Europe, Hong Kong, Morocco, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. She was recently included in She Who Tells A Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).1 These exhibitions have been accompanied by books, reviews, and curatorial texts. Many of these can be found on the artist’s website, for as she well knows, words and images together secure an artist’s place in history.2 Essaydi’s reputation rests on her photographs, but she has always described herself as an artist, not a photographer. She uses photography to document performances that she painstakingly choreographs with the assistance of a loyal group of women who are not so much models as collaborators in the process. The distinction between artist and photographer is important to her, and I believe it reflects her desire to emphasize her process, which culminates in photography, but includes performance, site-specific sculpture, drawing/ painting, and calligraphy. I would also argue that this position reflects her own understanding of her fluid movement between circles of culture that range from the international art market to the local (which includes a circle of family and friends). Essaydi travels between New York and Morocco; her use of henna, calligraphy, and an iconography that includes the veil, the harem, and the segregation of genders ties her to one culture, while the large-scale color photography and purposeful use of photography as the end product of 95

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a performance aligns her with history of Western photography connected to performance art and to contemporary photographers like Renée Cox, Andres Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall. This chapter focuses on the two bodies of work that have established her reputation, Converging Territories (2003–2005) and Les Femmes du Maroc (2005–2012).3 In both, written texts play a crucial although ambiguous role. In interviews, the artist has described these works as autobiographical4 and she has spoken about her desire in these works to engage with a distant past, her own recent past, and the present. She is often characterized as a woman crossing boundaries; these are not simply spatial, geographic boundaries, but imaginary and temporal boundaries as well. When Western journalists ask if she speaks for all Muslim women, it is often because the journalist is most concerned with the texts that appear in the images (which are rightfully understood as a written text to be deciphered). In answer to such questions, the artist insists that she speaks only for herself. On the other hand, when she is asked to translate the texts in the photographs, she describes them as “universal” and gently declines. While Essaydi writes and speaks eloquently about both her intentions and her process, she describes her approach to writing as being closer to drawing while at the same time speaking of these texts as a diary. There is an added element of obfuscation because the texts are written on fabric which is turned and folded over bodies. Sometimes the texts are superimposed upon each other and layered, “the layering comes from the expanding complexity of my life as an Arab artist living in the U.S.”5 These contradictory and evasive responses to the question of texts in her photographs suggest a complicated connection between text and image. What are the uses of text in Lalla Essaydi’s photographs? What does the writing signify to viewers who cannot read the text? How does language veil and reveal the artist’s meaning? And finally, if the text is silenced because it is indecipherable, what is the role of silence in these works? While the photographs from Converging Territories (Figure 7.2) and Les Femmes du Maroc (Figure 7.3) differ in scope and intention, they share what Amanda Carlson describes as a “poetic tone and visual beauty.”6 All of Essaydi’s photographs are the culmination of many months of effort. The writing of text plays a crucial role in this effort; it is especially important in these two series. In interpreting the meaning of text in images, we must begin by reminding ourselves that reading and looking are two different ways of seeing. Essaydi’s photographs are large pictures that require looking, not reading. Reading is linear, focused on letters, words, sentences, a sequential order from left to right, or right to left, or up or down a vertical line, one line at a time. Reading requires that you see one line at a time, that you disregard the rest of the page in order to follow the line of text. In contrast, seeing a picture requires focusing on the full image, scanning the whole and balancing



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left and right, top and bottom, noting how symmetry and dissymmetry work, how space and depth are constructed, and noticing patterns, colors, and rhythms that unite the picture plane and the depth of field. The patterns, colors, and rhythms that you notice lead you to discover relationships between foreground and background, and also draw your attention to areas of detail. In looking, we start with the whole and find detail; in reading we gather details to build the whole picture. Let me speak first about the question of silence, because this is one source of the poetic tone of the text/image. These photographs are filled with a quietness that I think of as the whispers of a conversation that I can’t quite hear. This sense of silence comes directly from the formal decisions that the artist makes. It comes from the stillness of the women, who are in positions that suggest activity, but they have stopped all movement to “act” in the tableaux, traditionally a sort of silent theater. The subdued color, the predominance of white, the henna tones and the complexions, and the dark hair and eyes of the women expand upon the subdued and quiet monochromatic quality of the photographs. Without color (beyond shades of white, brown, and black) or movement, these pictures seem frozen and silent, but the text brings both language and decorative embellishments to the scene. The text that implies conversation or at least visualized thought that hangs in the very atmosphere around these women creates an elastic and connective overlay or pattern that knits all participants and their backgrounds together. The use of this subdued palette also reminds viewers of photography of the sepia-toned photographs of the past that were taken by ethnographic photographers eager to document cultures different from their own in a similar silence. The memory of these older, sepia-toned images of a past resonates beneath Essaydi’s images and activates the artist’s intentions to move from past to present, from one culture to another, to create a palimpsest that echoes history’s continued presence. The text in the image is also a reminder to the viewer that photography is not a scientific document but a tool used by a person with a point of view. It may also remind us that photographs can capture an image, but not the stream of events that led up to the photograph, or the stream of events that moves on from the single frame captured on film. The production of Lalla Essaydi’s images begins with an invitation to friends and family members, all women, who work with her as collaborators. Before these women come to spend hours and sometimes days in her studio, Essaydi prepares the fabric that will be used as the backgrounds for the photographs, this may take up to six months to complete. For the making of each photograph, the artist writes in a calligraphy that she has taught herself on yards and yards of white cotton cloth that will be wrapped around her models, used as backdrop, floor, and to cover all surfaces within the image. Essaydi writes on the fabric using henna that she mixes into a thin paste and

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packs into a syringe that she has altered to suit her needs. Using the syringe, she extrudes the henna paste onto the fabric. When all the fabric has been prepared, rehearsals with the women begin so that each woman knows her pose and position. Only at that point are the text-laden fabrics draped over women and the space. A henna-like substance that does not stain is applied to the faces of the women and on any parts of their bodies that are visible in the final scene so that they too are covered in text. What role does the text play in the performance? The writing of these texts is important as they are subversions of tradition. They are written in henna, a craft associated with women’s body art and performed by women, but in a calligraphic hand. Calligraphy or “beautiful writing,” is an art reserved for men and high expressions—religious texts and poetry. Henna also signifies the fragility of the word, of language. It flakes off, it distorts the text and fabric as it dries, and it fades with time—creating the need to constantly remake, renew, and revise as Suzanne Denton noted in her review of Essaydi’s Converging Territories.7 In that same review, she described a single poetic fragment repeated throughout the texts found in the photographs. Translated by Essaydi for her reviewer, it read: “Chapter one is in fact the ending; Chapter Two is Missing; Chapter Three builds a reference to the unknown; And the rest of the book is still in progress.”8 Such a text provides little in the way of specific information—telling us nothing except that this book is circular, that the first and last chapters are in process, that the second chapter is missing, and the third is unknowable. What we gain from reading and looking is nearly the same—with the translation, we understand that language is not transparent, meaning is elusive, and the text is unfinished. Without translation of the text, we understand that language is present, but elusive, we imagine that meaning is present but unknowable. Denton continues in her review to describe Essaydi’s text as “thought, speech, work, clothing, shelter, home and world,” likening it to a “transcultural document aligned to cultural nomadism.”9 Reading the text in this way—we literally read the words as thought, speech, work, and we see the words as a visual pattern that acts as a cultural fabric that integrates the women into their environment, that connects woman to woman, and creates for the inhabitants of this world clothing, shelter, and home. The text acts for the artist in the same way. It connects her to a cherished tradition and supports her identification as an Arab woman living in the West. The text is the language of home; it is the home, the past that we carry with us wherever we go. Essaydi herself describes the text as “the world of the subjects—their thoughts, speech, work, clothing, shelter, and nomadic home.”10 The text is culture, heritage, religion, but it is also in constant need of renewal; it connects the private and public realms, the male and female divided spaces, and it also provides a veil—keeping the private private in the public realm. It also signifies the ornament, the tile, color, and beauty that the



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Orientalist painters of the nineteenth century found in their explorations of the Middle East and North Africa. The title of the series, Les Femmes du Maroc, was adapted from Eugene Delacroix’s iconic painting, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement of 1834. The painting by Delacroix, while based on his actual travels in North Africa, is a fictive vision of languorous women in an opulent harem. Paintings like these, as well as the nineteenth-century European occupation of much of the Arab world, fostered a view of the Middle East as a sensual paradise of sexually available women, rich colors and textures, and exotic tastes of all kinds. In the photographs of this series, Essaydi takes these Orientalist paintings as a point of departure. She drains the paintings of color, removes all male figures and drapes the women (who were often presented as nudes) in the protective veil of henna text. Converging Territories had been photographed in one of her family’s homes in Morocco. The photographs of Les Femmes du Maroc were staged in her studio in Boston with Moroccan women who like Essaydi were living in the US. As in the earlier series, the women were draped in the prepared fabrics and their faces, hands, and any visible body parts were written upon with a henna-like substance. As far as I know, the texts in this series have not been translated into English. The artist described the text from Les Femmes du Maroc as “partly autobiographical,” saying, “here I speak of my thoughts and experiences directly, both as a woman caught somewhere between past and present, as well as between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ and also as an artist, exploring the language in which to ‘speak’ from this uncertain space.”11 What does the use of text accomplish in these works? Most evidently it demonstrates female agency, for one of the enduring and fixed anchors of Essaydi’s work is its focus on the female experience. Written language in such a context is a feminine language of high art. It helps to rework the relations among form, language, and power by reclaiming what Johanna Drucker and others have described as the “not-speaking, not-writing place of women”12 and replacing it with an active speaking and writing place. Not only does Essaydi give voice to the women who were stereotyped and silenced by Orientalist painters who saw only the harem, the veil, and the odalisque, she also gives voice to herself, and through these photographs to a world of women. Essaydi was at the Zimmerli Art Museum when her show was on view in the museum in 2010. We walked through the exhibition together and when I asked her to translate some of the texts for me, she politely demurred. She told me that she would not translate the texts; that she did not want people to be able to read them, and that it had been written with a great deal of difficulty because of the henna and that it was difficult to read on purpose—that it was not meant to be read. In the artist’s statement published in the book, Les Femmes du Maroc, published in 2010, she had described the text as

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“incomplete,” stating, “It involves the viewer as well as the writer in a continual process of reading and revising, of losing and finding its multiple and discontinuous threads.”13 What does writing signify if it is not meant to be read? Even for those who can read Arabic, these are not simple texts to be read for content; they are polymorphous texts, layered texts that fold over themselves, exist in light and shadows, disappear behind cushions, or behind the rounded turn of an arm, back, or a cheek. In the process the text becomes an abstraction—it reads as language symbolically without actually being read as language—language as visual metaphor. By that I mean, that I understand that it is writing, that “there is the irrefutable formality of marks which produce the sense of writing.”14 Rather than using language as a communicative tool, these texts are words whispered just beyond the reach of understanding—they take place out of time and they suggest history, memory, and experience across an abyss. I understand that there is communion and conversation and language in and among these groups of women. I assume affection and camaraderie and connections between them all because I see that there is language and cooperation between them, but for me and you who are outside of the event, who did not participate and have only the photographic evidence, much is lost. That to me is one of the solemn beauties of these photographs/texts/documents. Pictures are not stories to be read, they resist translation into words. They remain elusive and evocative like a dream, or a half-remembered scene of the past, or an unknown script. Images suggest meaning but never give it up. Notes 1. She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World was on view at the MFA, Boston from August 2013 to January 2014. The exhibition included Jananne Al-Ani, Boushra Almutawakel, Gohar Dashti, Rana El Nemr, Lalla Essaydi, Shadi Ghadirian, Tanya Habjouqa, Rula Halawani, Nermine Hammam, Rania Matar, Shirin Neshat, and Newsha Tavakolian, all photographers described by the museum as “pioneering.” The exhibition catalogue was authored by Kristen Gresh. 2. Lalla Essaydi is represented by the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York and the Howard Yerzerski Gallery in Boston. Her website, lallaessaydi.com provides artist statement, bio, cv, reviews, and articles and images. 3. Both of these series have publications with full-color illustrations, texts by guest authors, and an artist’s statement. See Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories with an essay and interview by Amanda Carlson (New York: powerHouse Books, 2005) and Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes du Maroc with an essay by Fatema Mernissi (New York: Edwynn Houk Gallery and powerHouse Books, 2009).



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4. For example, in an interview with Amanda Carlson published in 2005, she states unequivocally, “All my work is autobiographical,” “A Conversation with Lalla Essaydi,” Lalla Essaydi, Converging Territories, 8. 5. Lalla Essaydi, “A Conversation with Lalla Essaydi” in Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories, 28. 6. Amanda Carlson, “Leaving One’s Mark: The Photographs of Lalla Essaydi,” in Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories, 5. Converging Territories was the first series of photographs in which Essaydi draped her collaborators and architecture in fabric inscribed with her texts. While the subject of Converging Territories is autobiographical to a large extent, Les Femmes du Maroc takes the Orientalist painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a point of departure and disrupts their voyeuristic tradition. 7. Suzanne Denton, “Review: Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories at the Yezerski Gallery, Boston,” Journal of Contemporary African Art (Summer 2004), 86–87. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Artist statement published on the artist’s website accessed July 1, 2014. http:// lallaessaydi.com/6.html 11. Artist statement published on the artist’s website accessed July 1, 2014. http:// lallaessaydi.com/6.html. 12. Johanna Drucker, “Other Than Linear,” in Johanna Drucker, Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics (New York: Granary Books, 1998), 252. 13. Lalla Essaydi, “Artist Statement,” in Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes du Maroc, 17. 14. Johanna Drucker, “Writing as Inscription,” in Drucker, Figuring the World, 246.

Bibliography Carlson, Amanda. “A Conversation with Lalla Essaydi” in Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories. New York: powerHouse Books, 2005. Denton, Suzanne. “Review: Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories at the Yezerski Gallery, Boston,” Journal of Contemporary African Art (Summer 2004), 86–87. Drucker, Johanna. “Other Than Linear,” in Johanna Drucker, Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics. New York: Granary Books, 1998. Essaydi, Lalla. Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes du Maroc. New York: Edwynn Houk Gallery and powerHouse Books, 2009. Gresh, Kristen. She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World. Boston: MFA Publications, 2013. Mernissi, Fatema. Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes du Maroc. New York: Edwynn Houk Gallery and powerHouse Books, 2009), http://lallaessaydi.com/6.html

Chapter 8

Angles of Representation Photography and the Vision of al-Misriyya [the Egyptian] in Women’s Press of the Early Twentieth Century Fakhri Haghani Photography is a medium that frames a certain vision of a space. It is able to include and exclude, add and deduct, present and represent, and reveal and conceal. Spaces within a picture are occupied, arranged, and composed by elements that have had their momentary spatial lives at one point or another. Therefore, photographs encourage the viewer to also disintegrate the composition into its smaller spaces and their surroundings and seek the relationships between those spaces inside the frame. At the same time, photographs invite the viewer to go beyond the frame seeking a life of inter-subjectivity between the photo’s spatial boundaries and social spaces outside the frame. Roland Barthes has called this relation the “punctum” as an alternative to the fixed framing of the picture called the “stadium.” The “punctum” intends to make the viewer conscious about realities of the scenes, material objects, and individuals beyond the moment in which the picture was taken.1 The “punctum” finds its most potential in producing the multiple levels of meaning besides the picture in other visual genres such as vignettes, sketches, and cartoons, where the visual joined by the textual code introduces the viewer to the realities of a larger world outside the frame, a world full of stories and lives of their own that are interpreted and represented by the artists to evoke consciousness, emotions, and messages to the viewers. Photographs published in the Egyptian women’s press during the early twentieth century can be analyzed as the best representatives of this intersubjectivity. The popularity of photography among women and its appeal in particular to young women as a way of creating a conversation with their society produced multifaceted genres of visual representations during the first half of the twentieth century. Women’s presses published different 103

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genres in photography from portraits, stage-shouts, and advertisements to scenes captured in public spaces of schools, work, street demonstrations, and international conferences. Moreover, women’s presses went beyond the genre of photography, generating various forms of visual representation such as cartoons, vignettes, sketches, and more. While these genres carved out a space of their own in terms of their medium and compositional framework, the interplay between the visual and its surrounding environment both within and beyond the boundaries of the magazine, created “spaces of one’s own,” which were both public and private, and personal and political. For example, photographs interacting with the text and other illustrative genres on the pages of women’s publications made connections with social spaces such as cafes, theatres, movie halls, city squares, shops, markets, and streets as sites of interaction between heterogeneous people and ideas. According to Lefebvre, these sites were spectacles of the notion of identities and differences where people observed and learned from each other.2 In another way, photographs’ interactions with their environment both on and beyond the pages of the Egyptian women’s print media conveyed the editor’s desire to open personal stories of women up to the more national discourses taking place within the country. One of the earliest art magazines published by a woman in the 1920s and 1930s, Rose al-Youssef, became extremely popular for its many illustrations. The editor, Fatima al-Youssef was of Lebanese origin living in Egypt. The journal’s heavy emphasis on the performing arts and various illustrative genres, coupled with the title, which conveyed a space of her own, was quite unique and daring for its time. However, the journal did not limit itself to art and often featured personalities and stories from different areas of cultural and political life of the country. A number of the covers of Rose al-Youssef were structured in such a way as to frame the photograph of an artist or a well-known personality within a virtual space of a theatrical stage, inviting the reader/viewer to the world of the performing arts and news about events and the public and private life of the personalities covered inside the magazine. The editor herself appeared a few times on this decorative cover page as the leading personality both in the performing arts and journalism. The setting up of a stage, as the creation of a space where events happen, also took other forms within the journal, bringing together words and images in multifaceted ways. The heavy delineation of a stage appearing in the earlier covers was transformed into a loose and sketchy one, making the photograph’s spatial boundaries or “stadium” more transparent. Here, the illustrative medium of photography changed into cartoon, appearing in sharp and extremely bright colors. In almost all of these covers the editor appeared to be taking the central role of a stage performer. The cartoon sketches also appeared inside the magazine in a number of interesting vignettes. Several of these cartoons



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addressed a number of social problems and challenges that Egypt was facing as it struggled through the process of national independence from British colonial interventions since the 1919 Revolution. Rose al-Youssef criticized the government of the time formed by the leader of the Wafd Party Al-Nahas Pasha, as well as the British Prime Minister John Bull. Many of Rose al-Youssef’s criticisms of the Egyptian government were depicted through her representation of Egypt symbolized through the Egyptian flag she carried on her body (Figure 8.1). A strong emphasis on the weak body of Egypt is represented by the figure of the woman journalist censored or under attack, with her mouth and hands tied with a piece of cloth, or being threatened by a dangerous weapon like a knife (Figure 8.2). Long or short descriptions in Arabic calligraphy and script accompanied these illustrations. Her images personified journalism as the most vulnerable profession in Egypt. At times, she is also shown in a strong standing position wearing a crown made up of the Egyptian flag while refuting the material goods including jewelry, flowers, and financial treasures offered to her by the governing officials. The most significant message of Rose al-Youssef in all these illustrations was centered on the issue of independence. In a way, this message was conveyed in a mix of visual and textual forms to emphasize different areas of Egyptian life, supporting Nahda al Nissaiyya’s (women’s movement) mission: political and economic independence from the British and the formation of national industries, including the performing arts, cinema, and cotton. The slogan “British political policies intend to kill Egyptian industry” was virtually inscribed on the pages of Rose al-Youssef and its visual spatial structures in their multifaceted forms. From the heavy photographic depiction of its cover to the loose and sketchy cartoonish style of its interior pages, Rose al-Youssef was able to bring words and images together, moving beyond the pages of the press to allude both to the world of the performing arts as well as to the political culture of Egypt. In fact, the relation between words and images as a message, forming a national symbol through the figure of the journalist, found special appeal during this crucial period. The pioneering work in this regard could be considered in the figure of Nabawiya Musa who transcribed the importance of this vision in the education of girls. Her “battle against the Ministry of Education in the person of the British educational consultant, Douglas Dunlop” has played a significant role in the rewriting of that discourse.3 Nabawiya Musa was featured in Rose al-Youssef numerous times. One illustration shows the solidarity between the two journalists for the cause of the education for girls as Rose al-Youssef goes to support Nabawiya in front of the elementary school where the latter had resumed her cause. A vignette in Rose al-Youssef also depicted the figure of Nabawiya publicizing her own magazine al-Fatat [the young woman] in 1937. Like Rose al-Youssef, Nabawiya placed herself

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at the center of al Fatat’s cartoonish illustrations as al-Misriyya the Egyptian. The illustrative representations of Nabawiya’s emphasis on Egyptian selfvalue and pride were numerous, such as the inscription of Egypt (its symbolic flag) within the title of her magazine al Fatat. Similar illustrations where Nabawiya is shown in a humorous but triumphant gesture against the British representatives and Egyptian Ministers were many. Like Rose al-Youssef, Nabawiya appears in many cases refuting the British offering peace in the image of holding an olive branch in hand while standing in front of a military tank (Figure 8.3). Nabawiya was originally rejected by the ministry to take the exam for her secondary school certificate because of the lack of available secondary schools for women. The process was a long and painful one, but with persistence she was finally allowed to sit for the exam. She passed, challenging the negative opinion espoused by the British educational consultant Douglas Dunlop on her inability to succeed. The certificate made her salary equal to that of male teachers, although no other woman was allowed to sit for the exam until 1928. Nabawiya then went on to obtain a Diploma in TeacherTraining in 1906 which was followed by her appointment as an Arabiclanguage teacher in 1909, the headmistress of a primary school for girls, and finally as the general inspector of the local girls’ schools. In 1926, she was dismissed from her post, which resulted in opening her own school Banat al-Ashraaf [daughters of the highly bred].4 The illustrative interrelationship between the title of the magazine and Egypt’s symbolic icon was therefore a reference to the Arabic language, which Nabawiya considered extremely important in a child’s primary education, girls’ included. She believed that language and, in particular, the proper knowledge of pronunciation and correct sentence structure, would instill in children, in particular girls, a sense of love and pride for Egypt’s land, culture, and values. She was totally against the educational reform system under British supervision and her magazine advocated this significant aspect of Egyptian national culture both visually through image and descriptively through text. John Berger has argued that contrary to the European Renaissance’s emphasis on perspective as the unique center of the world, the emergence of the camera, in particular the movie camera, “demonstrated that there was no center.” “The invention of the camera changed the way men saw.” What the spectator saw “depended upon where s/he were when.” In that sense, space and time became important in the visual experience for the spectator.5 Egyptian women’s press during 1920s and 30s envisioned the narrative of a mobile space by introducing and emphasizing the language of cinema as a significant medium of expression. A vignette composed of four sketches about the opening of the movie theater Fuad on November 2 appeared in the 1933 issue of Rose al-Youssef (Figure 8.4).



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Each sketch contained a scene calling for the public to attend the opening ceremony, from children going to bed early and students rushing home from school to eat prior to the ceremony, to the young lady calling Fuad to make reservations, and an announcement banner asking Egyptians to be present in front of the cinema on that notable day. The words and images conveyed a sense of national duty and pride for Egyptians to celebrate the emergence and development of this important industry, which until then, was in the hands of Europeans and others. Interestingly, the emergence of a national film industry in Egypt also promoted the idea of cinema as a profession for women and girls. Aziza Amir was the producer of the first Egyptian silent feature film in 1927 for which she took the lead acting role as well. She came from the world of the performing arts and became a pioneer in establishing the Egyptian film industry with extensive experience in scriptwriting, production, and acting. She opened the path for other women in Egypt to pursue the art of cinematography.6 The film advertisements and clips promoting Amir’s first silent feature film, Layla, appeared in a number of women’s magazines at the time. Through images and words the multiple vision of al-Misriyya [the Egyptian] as the director, producer and performer was depicted. Aziza Amir in the role of Layla, the country girl, appears as a weak and vulnerable victim of abuse by Ahmed, who betrays and abandons her for a non-Egyptian woman. The words and images taken from the scenes, where the weak boy of Layla (i.e., Egypt) is lying in bed, resonate with the similar vision of a struggling Egypt in the persona of the journalist depicted by Rose al-Youssef and Nabawiya Musa in their own magazines. In an advertisement for the film Binta al Nil [daughter of the Nile], Aziza Amir’s picture appears under the wording of Hub. . .Sidaghat. . . . Vajib [love, friendship, and duty], describing them as characteristics of a woman’s heart for being a mother, keeper of the family, and the nation. Interestingly, following John Berger’s view of the decentering role of the camera and the creation of a mobile space and time, the film advertisement shifts the emphasis from the symbolic imagery of al-Misriyya [the Egyptian] inscribed within one’s body to an image of al-Misriyya [the Egyptian] linguistically described as flesh and body. By the mid-twentieth century the slight shift from image to text, and symbol to concrete, in the metaphor of al-Misriyya [the Egyptian] in women’s publications gained roots. Women journalists from a francophone educational background broadened the extent of their journal’s language by adding another language to their professional work, as Egypt moved towards complete economic and political independence post Second World War. L’Egyptienne written in French and edited by Ceza Nabrawi, a protégée of Huda Sha’raawi, the founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, idealized the vision of the daughter of the Nile in its cover illustration in a more concrete style.

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The photograph of the statue of Bint al Nil created by the Egyptian sculptor Mahmood Mokhtar decorated the cover, while at times similar sketches of the same figure would replace the photograph (Figure 8.5). L’Egyptienne contained illustrative reports on the activity of the Egyptian Feminist Union’s (E.F.U.) House of Women, which was established by Huda Sha’raawi. The E.F.U. established the House of Women or the School of the E.F.U. for girls and women. Pictures showed them at work in different arts and crafts courses. E.F.U. showcased products made by these women and girls, which then were sent to international expositions such as the 15th agricultural and industrial exposition in Paris in 1935. The school also organized events in performing arts and music, both for regional and international audiences. Making language as the multiple component of the representation of al-Misriyya seems to follow Nabawia Musa’s emphasis on language as the space of national identity and makes the body and self for girls another possibility, going beyond Nabawiya’s mere emphasis on Arabic. The showcase for al-Misriyya in its symbolic context now moved beyond national to the international domain, as women’s print media embodied that concept within its title either in French (L’Egyptienne edited by Ceza Nabrawi) or in Arabic (al-Misriyya edited by Huda Sha’raawi). On the cover of al-Misriyya, the figure of a woman—Hoda Sha’raawi—sketched as a pyramid crossing the title of al-Misriyya in Arabic directly (Figure 8.6) connected woman to the Egyptian national heritage, similar to the film advertisement Bint al Nil where the flesh and body of the Egyptian country woman replaced the symbolic icon of al-Misriyya (the Egyptian). The shift from the symbolic and abstract to the concrete and material interestingly happened in other representations as an illustrated article in l’Egyptienne discussed the influence of the Egyptian national heritage, Islamic art and calligraphy, on European architecture, moving the reader’s attention from national to international as well. As the figure of al-Misriyya (the Egyptian) became more sophisticated, materialized, and transnational in women’s press, its appeal as the title of the magazine for Egyptians themselves continued to gain popularity. Another protégée of Huda Sha’raawi, Doria Shafik, edited two journals, Bint al Nil [daughter of the Nile], in 1945 and Femme Nouvelle [the new woman] in 1948. As the titles of the journals convey, Shafik, similar to other journalists mentioned earlier in this article, made language in its multiplicity a major component of her image construction of al-Misriyya (the Egyptian). Doria Shafiq earned her doctorate in the 1940s from the Sorbonne. Similar to Nabawiya Musa, Doria struggled to obtain a teaching position at Cairo University, but ended up as a high school teacher. Contrary to Nabawiya who presented a cartoonish, distorted, and comic image of herself, Doria placed



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her natural beauty and sophistication in the forefront, making her European education and lifestyle and the knowledge of French a major part of her public persona. Her numerous hunger strikes under the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser during the 1950s in opposition to the exclusion of women from the new constitution were spread in pictures both in Egypt and abroad, bringing her international fame and important offers such as the one extended to her by Harper and Brothers Publishers to write her “personal story.”7 Like her image, Shafik’s journals also portrayed Egyptian women as international figures. However, this vision now displayed a shift in imagery: the cover of Bint al Nil depicted women in European attire, while a sketch on the cover of Femme Nouvelle showed a woman dressed in a long outfit standing with her back to the camera and the viewer. Doria’s vision of al-Misriyya now integrated the concepts of time and space with that of the text and image as the major component of the experience of the reader of her journals, as she tried to move away from the symbolic to the concrete, material life of the Egyptian woman in the process of national independence. The image of her mobile rather than static body during a hunger strike was a perfect example of Doria’s journalistic vision in action. Breaking the spatial boundaries of photography and moving beyond its frame into the world of other forms of illustration paralleled the entrance of women into the public world of journalism by creating a national, regional, and international body and self. Photography had of course developed in many genres by the 1940s and 1950s, but Egyptian women’s use of this visual art went beyond the boundaries of the frame and to social and international relationships that this artistic venue could offer. Except for Nabawiya Musa, all of the women mentioned in this paper had some form of official French education, either through home, local private schools, or schools in France. Although Egypt had experienced only a short period of French occupation in 1789, the impact of French on the language and culture of Egypt, especially among elite educated women, was strong. By using various meanings of photography, from its break with the frame and creation of different forms of less-constricted illustrations to connecting the viewer to the events on the ground, women journalists set the path to the exploration of the intersection of self and society. Like photography they discovered the potential of language in expressing their national concerns, but at the same time, they realized the international reach of that medium beyond home. The British colonial intervention since 1882 had devastated Egypt’s path to independence and its national liberation, which also resulted in the strengthening of the Egyptian governments’ restrictions on the advancement of women’s rights and equality. Turning French into a site of contestation, similar to photography and their native language Arabic, by the mid-1950s, these women claimed their identities and differences on many intersectional grounds. For this purpose,

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al-Misriyya, the female denomination of Egypt turned the visual language of protest against gender-based domestic policies and colonial British agendas into a complex site of interaction between culture, language, body, and virtual symbols for change. Al-Misriyya’s transformation from a visual and textual symbol to a material flesh and body site moving beyond the frame of the journals’ photographic depictions tells the untold story of prominent women journalists and activists of the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt. Notes 1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 2. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991). 3. Hoda el Sadda and Emad Abu Ghazi, Significant Moments in the History of Egyptian Women, (Cairo: National Council for Women, 2001), 67–68; 76–77. 4. el Sadda, Significant Moments in the History of Egyptian Women. 5. John Berger, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 18. 6. el Sadda, Significant Moments in the History of Egyptian Women. 7. el Sadda, Significant Moments in the History of Egyptian Women.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991. el Sadda, Hoda, and Emad Abu Ghazi. Significant Moments in the History of Egyptian Women. Cairo: National Council for Women, 2001.

Part III

Inscribing Popular Culture

Chapter 9

Representing Adolescent Sexuality in the Sahel Barbara M. Cooper

This essay will discuss various visual materials produced to influence the sexual health behavior of young people in the Sahel, a predominantly Muslim region. Bandes dessinées (BD), a variety of graphic narrative rather like a comic book geared to readers of all ages that is common in francophone countries, are a medium that health organizations like to use because of their appeal to young literate urbanites. They are engaging to youth because of their lively images, their contemporary language, and their participation in a “modern” cosmopolitan aesthetic. However NGOs and other health activists attempt to use such “modern” materials in ways that respect and in some ways reinscribe local Muslim mores. Reaching youth in these settings is a delicate endeavor that entails balancing an appeal to the contemporary culture of the young against the often-strict sexual mores that encode all public discourse. I will also address a heavily illustrated French language adaptation of Our Bodies Ourselves entitled Notre corps, notre santé—this publication takes a far more militant stance towards “local culture.” It provides the most frank approach to sexuality of the materials the paper will discuss, and yet it is not clear whether the targeted audience would ever be Muslim youth. It nevertheless provides a rather different framing of sexuality than one finds in the older edition generated by the Boston Women’s Health Collective. The chapter will close by considering a particularly effective and visually attractive board game produced for youth in Niger by the Nigerien government. The ambiguity of, and ambivalence towards, youth and female sexuality in the domains of custom and the law emerge in all these different materials. Two BDs created to present in an appealing format information and sensi­ bilization or consciousness-raising for women in francophone West Africa illustrate some of the practical difficulties that emerge from the general approach taken by all of these organizations towards sexuality in Islamic 113

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West Africa. The first, “Le Bon Choix” presents the predicament of Fanta, a married woman in Mali who is unhappily pregnant with her fourth child.1 When her older brother Demba visits he raises the possibility that she and her husband might want to consider family planning in order to space their births better. Demba is only able to persuade her husband Oumar of the virtues of this idea through the intercession of her brother. Fortuitously, Fanta suffers a miscarriage, after which she and Oumar seek out national health center to pursue using the pill. The female health professional addresses her instructions to Oumar, who confirms his understanding of how to use the contraceptive. The couple goes home “happy to have adopted a family planning method.” In this text the prerogative to employ contraception is uniquely depicted as belonging to men, despite the fact that it is Fanta who is most unhappy with her pregnancy. A typical conundrum, at least as understood in reproductive health circles, is that while women are aware of contraception, it is men who have the capacity to act upon that knowledge. Thus the challenge health activists face is to inform husbands and empower wives. Empowering wives, as we have seen, tends to require the intervention of other senior men, who can cajole and inform husbands. The text re-inscribes the perception that contraception is to be employed in the context of marriage for the purpose of spacing births, and that decisions about contraception largely lie with men. There is nothing in “Le Bon Choix” that would open the way for unmarried adolescents to approach the same health center for assistance with their sexual health. Note also that abortion is not even broached by this text as an alternative. Within the Islamic legal tradition that prevails in West Africa, reinforced by colonial-era jurisprudence, abortion is tantamount to infanticide—almost all West African countries with large Muslim populations have highly conservative readings of abortion. This is not typical in all parts of the Muslim world, indeed the right to an abortion until the fourth month for a married couple is rather well protected within other Islamic legal traditions.2 In “Le Bon Choix” adolescents as conventionally understood are virtually invisible—it is as if all sexually active Muslims are by definition married adults. However this is hardly the case and is an increasingly problematic assumption. As schooling for women increases, more and more young women face pressures and desires that legal traditions designed for societies in which girls were married off at or before puberty are ill equipped to handle. In an effort to prevent unwanted pregnancies, parents aim to marry their daughters off as early as possible, which imperils their continued schooling. Thus, in much of the popular discourse the question of adolescent sexuality emerges in the context of debates about le mariage précoce—marrying women off “too young.” A number of interesting questions emerge in the context of this



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oblique dimension of the debate about sexuality. First, how does one determine how young is “too young”? And second, who is empowered to make such a determination? In a BD produced for the book Notre corps, notre santé, a West African rendition of Our Bodies Ourselves, 16-year-old Mimi is proud of passing her exams when she learns that her father and mother have arranged for her to marry her cousin, bringing her studies to an abrupt end.3 She turns desperately to her sympathetic uncle for help. He had not objected to the marriage plans because he was unaware that she did not support them. He persuades her parents to permit her to continue her studies and to marry when she chooses. In this scenario Mimi does not appear to be in a position to represent herself directly, and the intervention of a senior male is once again required, for her mother is unsympathetic. It is her desire, rendered as patriotic, to continue her studies to become a doctor, that appears to justify her resistance to the arranged marriage. Thus her age alone does not appear to be compelling, and one wonders whether a girl who had been less successful in school would have any grounds at all for objecting to such a marriage. The question of sexuality is more or less evaded altogether, although the depiction of Mimi’s dress style suggests that she is a “modern” girl. While it is true that in Niger, for example, the overwhelming majority of sexual activity occurs within the context of marriage, more and more girls aspire to continuing into secondary school and delaying marriage. Young men find it increasingly difficult to obtain the means to set up an independent household. Weddings are extremely expensive in local terms, creating yet another impediment to the marriage of a young couple. Another BD reflects some of the tensions this general denial of adolescent sexuality generates for Muslim youth in West Africa. A graphic text created for UNFPA funded youth clubs in Senegal as part of “Family Life Education” (FLE, or EVF in French), entitled “The Risks Tied to Sexual Behaviour Among Adolescents,” reveals some of the contradictions of the discourses surrounding adolescent sexuality.4 Strikingly, this BD was created to promote family life education (note that in these settings there is no question of referring to sex outside of “family”) in Senegal, a country in which sexuality is addressed far more frankly than would be likely, for example, in Niger. The style of the drawing is very sophisticated, as is the representation of cosmopolitan Dakar. Schoolgirl Bineta has a sexual relationship with her cousin Moussa. Despite the dismay of his male friend, Moussa declines to protect himself from STIs by making use of condoms—the discussion between the young men does not feature the potential pregnancy Bineta might face. Five months later Bineta confides her fear that she is pregnant to her friend Fatou, who is more knowledgeable about the dangers of adolescent sexuality because she has just returned from a Family Life Education summer camp. Fatou advises

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Bineta not to “try to do anything that can worsen your condition” (meaning seek an abortion) and goes with Bineta to the doctor associated with the youth counseling center. When a test confirms Bineta is three months pregnant, the woman doctor rejects Bineta’s unarticulated desire for an abortion saying that it is illegal and “moreover it is dangerous for you. You can become sterile after this operation.” The doctor acknowledges that while childbirth for a young woman who is not fully mature is difficult, she implies (inaccurately, but quite typically for this region) that all forms of abortion are more risky still. All that the doctor can offer Bineta is psychological counseling and the continuation of her pregnancy. When Bineta announces her pregnancy to her parents they fear the shame it will bring upon the family and express regret that they hadn’t broached “family life education” with her earlier. Bineta’s mother and father were too uncomfortable to raise the subject with her, each leaving it to the other to perform. Conspicuously absent in the BD is any attempt to provide Bineta with counseling on contraception. Later we learn in following the two young men, that what FLE consists of is debates in which religious exhortations to remain abstinent until marriage are countered by a grudging suggestion that if one can’t abstain, then one should use a condom. Sex is presented as a profound danger to be avoided at all cost. Nothing in the text offers much hope that a frank and positive assessment of adolescent sexuality is likely to occur in the context of “family life education” as practiced in this case in Senegal, although FLE is presumably a bit more useful than nothing at all or than simply being told to remain abstinent by the religious leader depicted in the text. But nowhere is female contraception addressed and abortion is inaccurately portrayed as universally more dangerous than childbirth. The “risks” portrayed appear to differ by gender. Girls risk pregnancy. Boys risk AIDS. Thus there is little offered to assist Bineta in avoiding HIV, and no suggestion that Moussa should take responsibility for the baby. I suspect that in real life a young woman of Bineta’s family background in a city such as Dakar or Niamey would have a clandestine abortion in a private clinic, which is why the text insists several times that she imperils her future fertility if she pursues an abortion. Furthermore the doctor emphasizes the “psychological trauma” Bineta has experienced in suffering an unwanted pregnancy, as if in the absence of any real bodily remedy for her problems the best that medicine can offer her is psychotherapy. Thus although this text attempts to enter into a productive but non-combative dialogue with the regional Islamic notions of sexuality, the approach taken does not seem particularly promising. Young men discuss condoms and STIs, while young women must endure pregnancy. “Modern” medical settings appear to have very little to offer the “modern” girl.



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One reason for the relative conservatism of many of these kinds of public health materials may be the violent reaction of Islamists, particularly in Niger, to materials they regard as morally degenerate. To get a sense for what a less censorious approach to sexuality might look like, I do have two BDs circulated in Mali in the late 1990s in the context of a competition to produce informative materials about AIDS. It was an unusually open moment for public debate throughout the Sahel at a time of transition to democratic rule; there was an explosion of media outlets and of civil society organizations. Mali’s political culture has in general tended to be more liberal than that of Niger, which may also account for the rather daring graphics in these texts as compared with the ones I have come across elsewhere in the Sahel. However the openness of this moment in the 1990s may be a thing of the past, as a mounting moralistic discourse shuts down open debate. Abandoning the pleasures of narrative altogether, the first prize winner in the contest, Stop SIDA, uses cartoon-like graphics to illustrate the didactic pronouncements of a doctor figure who appears a bit annoyed at the behavior of his poorly informed compatriots.5 With its comprehensive exposition of how HIV is and is not transmitted, it’s graphic illustration of how to use a condom, and its utterly unexpected (and illegal) suggestion that sometimes an infected woman should consider a timely abortion, this is by far the most daring material I have run across. It concludes with a rousing call to arms against AIDS, turning personal risk into a national challenge to be confronted by patriots through a variety of media. However it is the second prize winner, Raicha: Errance fatale by Aly Zorome that takes on more directly the very real social and economic dynamics of adolescent sexuality outside marriage.6 Raicha and her young boyfriend Doudou learn from a nurse that sharing needles in the context of a vaccination campaign could contribute to the spread of HIV. Doudou tentatively suggests to Raicha that they ask the nurse to tell them more about HIV and “other stuff” but Raicha declares that AIDS is just a “western plot to make money or to prevent Africans from multiplying.” Doudou, more cautious, manages to convince Raicha to sleep with him but insists upon using a condom, reflecting to himself that Raicha may be like the beautiful flower that hides the sting of a fatal bee. His precautions prove wise, for Raicha is having another relationship with an older wealthy man who gives her money for sexual favors. Raicha hopes to snare this wealthy older man by getting pregnant, and agrees with him that sex with a condom is practically the same as abstinence from sex altogether. Raicha’s sugar daddy dies of AIDS, and she falls ill herself. The BD closes with the doctor insisting to Raicha’s mother that parents must teach their children about sexual behavior and that such discussions are not contrary to religion but a matter of life or death. The text illustrates the striking way in which the AIDS crisis and the democratic transition opened the

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way for more frank discussions of sexuality in the region than had been possible in the past. Many of the materials I have addressed so far raise the question of parental repugnance towards addressing sexuality directly with their children. Parents in many West African societies find it shameful to speak about sexuality with their children and traditionally such matters would have been left to grannies or older aunts and uncles. With greater mobility and the increasingly nuclear spatial design of housing, youth have fewer opportunities for frank discussions of sexuality with older generations, and as a result, depend upon rumor and other youth for their information—they learn from the media and their “entourage.” In any case it is not clear that their grandparents would have much to offer them in the face of the more complex perils of contemporary life in West Africa. Thus another key theme of the materials is the importance of using media to convey better information, particularly important in the face of a constant rumor mill conveying inaccurate, exaggerated, or downright false information. Youth social clubs offer another important avenue for providing adolescents with information. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, as we can see in these prize-winning BDs, generated a sense of urgency about sexuality that made it more possible to use media to convey public-health messages about sex, but at the same time that urgency has meant that reproductive health concerns have to some degree been conflated with STDs, condom use, and “libertinage” among unfettered youth, particularly girls. Little wonder—given the explosion of media attention to sexuality, the necessary frankness of materials that seriously address AIDS, and the push to encourage parents to leave their moral comfort zones to speak about sexuality with their children—that conservative Muslim leaders have periodically protested against reproductive health programs throughout the Sahelien zone. By couching their messages increasingly in terms acceptable within Maliki reasoning, many reproductive health materials such as the family life education materials discussed above for Senegal appear to be attempting to placate such sensibilities, but at the price of providing information useful in particular to young women. Unlike the cartoons and BD’s described thus far, the text of well-known feminists Fatou Sow and Codou Bop, Notre corps, notre santé, takes a combative tone towards any societal strictures—including those shaped by Islam—that the authors see as imperiling the health of women in sub-Saharan Africa. It is the only text I have come across that explicitly takes up the topic of adolescent sexuality, devoting an entire chapter to decrying the lack of real sexual education in most countries, the misconceptions of teenagers about sex, and the low utilization of contraception resulting from poor communication. The authors rightly point out that even married teens might need contraception—not to space births, but to delay their first pregnancy. Throughout the



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region, discussions of contraception focus relentlessly on birth spacing, not upon the avoidance of pregnancy, even among married couples. The chapter makes a variety of recommendations about the advisability of different methods available to young women, including the morning-after pill. The book is a striking departure from other approaches to sexuality in Muslim contexts in West Africa. Because the book is modeled loosely on the Women’s Health Collective text Our Bodies Ourselves, and because it encompasses the experiences of women in both Muslim and non-Muslim contexts, it arrives at a very different approach to “women’s rights” than many of the cartoons and BDs. However unlike the bandes dessinées this expensive text could only be read and understood by someone with a high degree of fluency in French, and it’s patterning on the western Women’s Health Collective text exposes it to the risk of being seen as having been created by African women who are traitors to African culture or to Islam. Published in France, the book probably does not enjoy wide circulation in Africa. If Notre corps, notre santé is more satisfying from a public health point of view, it is not clear how far the information presented could be made available in the world occupied by Bineta and Moussa. Given the reticence of even the “best case” FLE information in Senegal and its unwillingness to confront either the reality of adolescent pleasure in sex or the need to open a debate about abortion it is unclear whether Sow and Bop’s book will reach an audience beyond those already persuaded of the need for more openness in the realm of reproductive health. So far, unfortunately, I have not encountered a text that draws upon the range of positions within Islamic legal reasoning to push West African debates about sexuality beyond those entrenched in Maliki law. The recognition of sexual pleasure in Islam (unlike Christianity) does open the way for debate about alternatives beyond those taken for granted by Muslims unacquainted with the range of thinking on family, sexuality, and health across the Muslim world. This would at least open the way for married adolescent women to broach their right to use the pill and for the issue of abortion to be revisited in light of the more permissive traditions in other schools of thought.7  Such an approach would not necessarily address the needs of unmarried adolescents, however. If these texts are any indication, such youth may find that Islamic discourse is too confining to make much room for their needs. As I noted in the opening of this chapter, often struggles over Islam in the realm of sexuality are cast as an epic face-off between “feminists” and “Islamists.” But the above discussion suggests that another battle in which both young men and women might join forces is in fact more relevant. Youth may need to stand together to push for a more secular discourse on sexual rights, and given the enormous demographic weight of the young in Africa, it may be that now is the time when their voices will begin to be taken seriously.

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For that to happen, however, young men such as Moussa would need to take as much interest in preventing the pregnancy of Bineta as they take in avoiding contracting AIDS themselves. I would like to close with a brief consideration of an intriguing effort to address youth and sexuality produced in Niger, where as I have suggested, the kinds of visual materials produced for the AIDS information campaign in Mali would certainly provoke a violent outcry among Islamists. The board game Tayizahi [“That’s Dangerous!”] provides an approach to the risks of contracting HIV that eschews narrative conventions altogether and leaves the assessment of risk to the player.8 Players progress towards their home by rolling dice and addressing the challenge presented in the space on which they land. If they land on a Joker space they receive a valuable Joker card—either a condom, rubbing alcohol, or bleach. If they land on a neutral space nothing is required of them, but if they land on a “Question” space they must answer a question related to HIV. If they answer wrong they do not progress. If they answer correctly they progress immediately to the Health Center and benefit from a bonus. If they land on a space representing “Protective behavior” they benefit from a bonus. If they land on a space depicting “Risky behavior” and do not have the appropriate Joker card to protect them they must go back a certain number of spaces. In this game it is advantageous to carry quite a few condoms and to have accurate information about the transmission of HIV. The biggest penalty in the game is reserved for the player who lands on the space in which a sexual partner refuses to use a condom when requested—in that case the player must return to the very beginning. For some risky behaviors, particularly those that impair judgment such as alcohol or drugs, the player must lose a turn to sober up. Obviously this game is focused upon avoiding HIV transmission rather than meeting fertility goals, so it does not really encompass everything one might want to consider in the realm of reproductive health. Certainly a girl such as the ill-fated Raicha who does hope to become pregnant will find little solace in this game, nor does it address Mimi’s desire to delay marriage (and perhaps sexuality). However because it does not use graphic images of sex it is hard to see how it would attract much ire among Islamists. Most appealingly, it is the player who faces risk, not an imagined fashionable gold digger or sexy schoolgirl, so frequently represented in a fashion that does not really resemble the typical conservative dress of young women of the region. The adolescent playing the game is the character, and must imagine what he or she would do in various situations rather than making moral judgments about Bineta, Raicha, or Mimi. Boys and girls or young men and young women face the same questions and are equally virtuous or culpable. The images of “home base” all imply that the winner has a responsibility to



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convey information to others through conversation and media. As a graphic approach to conveying information about sexuality it is highly effective and evidently much sought after by youth associations and NGOs. Given the means, governments, IGOs, and NGOs can be quite creative in generating effective materials to address AIDS. I will close then on this fairly positive note, which places the emphasis on the agency and decision-making of young men and women themselves. Clearly a host of quandaries face anyone intervening to enhance adolescent sexual health in the Sahel region. Locating effective agents without at the same time undermining the agency of women is one; the problem of when and how to determine adulthood when adulthood is linked to marriage is another; finding religiously acceptable approaches to sexuality outside marriage is a third; and addressing the material dimensions driving some sexual behavior, particularly among young women, is yet a fourth. What I admire about Tayizahi is that it makes no judgments about behavior; it merely provides the player with the means to reduce risk. As one of the game questions insists, the answer to the question, “is AIDS a disease that is easy to avoid?” is “yes,” provided one knows which behaviors to avoid and what protective measures to take. Now we just need someone to have the courage to devise a game suitable for all ages that shows the real risks of uncontrolled pregnancy and childbirth (including death, poverty, ill-health, fistula, and infertility), and how to reduce them—which would entail a discussion that went well beyond the safe ground of emphasizing birth-spacing to discuss the more controversial issues of birth control, abortion, and a mandatory minimum age for marriage.

Notes 1. Lilia Benhadji, “Les femmes et l’évolution des pratiques sanitaires au Mali de 1950 à nos jours,” Mémoire d’histoire, Université de Paris I, Appendix, Le Bon Choix. 2000. 2. Abdel Rahm Omran, Family Planning in the Legacy of Islam (New York: United Nations Population Fund/Routledge, 1992), 191–93. 3. Fatou Sow and Codou Bop, Notre Corps, notre santé: La santé et la sexualité des femmes en Afrique subsaharienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 4. “Education à la vie familiale,” Les Risques Liés aux comportements sexuels chez l’adolescent (Dakar: UNFPA, n.d). 5. Nouhoum Madani Traoré, Stop SIDA, Collection ECHOSIDA (Bamako: Fondation Partage, 1998). 6. Aly Zoromé, Raicha: Errance Fatale, Collection ECHOSIDA (Bamako: Fondation Partage, 1998). 7. For discussions of family planning and Islam, particularly vigorous in Nigeria, see Joy Ngozi Ezeilo and Abiola Akiyode Afolabi, eds. Sharia and Women’s Human

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Rights in Nigeria (Lagos: Women Advocates Research and Documentation Center, 2003); Shodipo Mohammed, Women’s Rights under the Shari’a (Enugu: Women’s Aid Collective, 2003); B.F. Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Abdel Rahim Omran, Family Planning in the Legacy of Islam and his Family Planning for Health in Africa (Chapel Hill: Carolina Population Center/USAID, 1984). 8. République du Niger Ministère de la Santé Publique, Tayizahi (Niamey: Lux Development S.A., Projet NIG/012 IEC-Prévention Contre le SIDA, n.d.).

Bibliography Benhadji, Lilia. “Les femmes et l’évolution des pratiques sanitaires au Mali de 1950 à nos jours.” Mémoire d’histoire, Université de Paris I, 2000. “Education à la vie familiale.” Les Risques Liés aux comportements sexuels chez l’adolescent. Dakar: UNFP, n.d. Ezeilo, Joy Ngozi and Abiola Akiyode Afolabi, eds. Sharia and Women’s Human Rights in Nigeria. Lagos: Women Advocates Research and Documentation Center, 2003. Mohammed, Shodipo. Women’s Rights under the Shari’a. Enugu, Nigeria: Women’s Aid Collective, 2003. Musallam, B.F. Sex and Society in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Omran, Abdel Rahim. Family Planning in the Legacy of Islam. New York: United Nations Population Fund/Routledge, 1992. ———. Family Planning for Health in Africa. Chapel Hill: Carolina Population Center/USAID, 1984. République du Niger Ministère de la Santé Publique. Tayizahi. Niamey, Niger: Lux Development S.A., Projet NIG/012 IEC-Prévension Contre le SIDA, n.d. Illustrations by Kadri Hamadou. Sow, Fatou and Codou Bop, eds. Notre corps, notre santé: La santé et la sexualité des femmes en Afrique subsaharienne. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2004. Traoré, Nouhoum Madani. Stop SIDA, Collection ECHOSIDA. Bamako, Mali: Fondation Partage, 1998. Zoromé, Aly. Raicha: Errance Fatale, Collection ECHOSIDA. Bamako, Mali: Fondation Partage, 1998.

Chapter 10

There Is More Than One Way To Make a Ceebu Jën Narrating African Recipes in Texts Julie Huntington Over the course of the past decade, culinary literature aficionados have witnessed an influx of West African-themed cookbooks and food-focused narratives, widely available in print formats. Although the reasons for this increase are subject to speculation, the presentation, organization, and narration of these texts reveal much about the individual experiences of their authors—the novelists, musicians, food historians, and professional chefs living and working in the physical spaces of West Africa and the African diaspora. In framing and chronicling their respective collections of recipes, the authors share their personal philosophies about food, nourishment, and the art of cooking as well as their motivations for sharing West African culinary traditions and innovations with a global cooking community. Innovative and impactful, these collections relate recipes as tales representing individual, familial, and cultural histories as experienced and imagined. As authors transcribe recipes from variable instrumental and oral formats to fixed prescriptive or descriptive sets of written instructions, they serve as both storytellers and historians who document vast and meaningful oral and performance traditions in texted frameworks. While casting the work of West African culinary traditions in written formats, authors often serve as social critics who interweave anecdotes and commentaries, both subtle and provocative, into their collections of recipes and tales. In so doing, they challenge readers to question, confront, and (re)configure complicated dimensions of contemporary social and cultural identities, particularly those associated with genders, generations, locations, and cultures. As readers engage with these texts in a multiplicity of geographic settings and social contexts, they are invited to (re)visit culinary spaces of encounter at home and abroad, to (re)enact meaningful performance traditions as narrated or suggested by the authors, and to (re)produce 123

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the multisensory experiences of preparing and enjoying meals customarily created in West African courtyards and kitchens and passed among families and communities from one generation to the next. Even so, in spite of the increased accessibility and allure of print genres, as the oral and instrumental traditions surrounding West African culinary practices are translated and transcribed in written formats, it is important to consider the challenges of representing the rhythmic, musical, and otherwise noisy phenomena produced in the process of meal preparation within the limits and structure of written pages. At this juncture of oral, instrumental, and written genres, it becomes imperative to ask what is being lost, maintained, invented, and transformed as the melodies of songs, the resonance of stories, and the cadences of meal preparation are transposed in recipes and narrative depictions of meal preparation. This study will focus on two cookbooks and their three authors, namely Youssou N’Dour’s Sénégal: Cuisine intime et gourmande (2011) [Senegal: Intimate and Gourmet Cuisine] and Aminata Sow Fall’s Un Grain de vie et d’espérance with recipes by Margo Harley (2002) [A Speck of life and hope]1 to explore the ways in which West African culinary practices and perspectives are communicated in texted formats. The aim is to determine if and how oral and instrumental aspects of Senegalese culinary conventions are included in mass-market kitchen narratives and cookbooks, and to examine how representations of these sounding elements contribute to the portraits, observations, questions, and commentaries underlying the prescriptions and descriptions of the recipes included in the texts. The published collections of recipes are as diverse as the authors who assemble and relate them. Whereas Harley (a professional chef) is based in Paris, Sow Fall (a novelist) and N’Dour (a musician), both travel frequently but reside in Dakar. Although their individual works display considerable thematic, aesthetic, stylistic, and organizational differences, the collections share many recipes in common. One such recipe is ceebu jën (alternatively spelled thieboudienne, theibou dienn, tiep bou dienn, tiébou dienne, and tiebou dieune, among others),2 a sumptuous stew made with fresh fish stuffed with herbs and spices, accompanied by a variety of colorful vegetables, and served atop a bed of broken rice. Commonly referred to as the “national” dish of Senegal,3 ceebu jën figures prominently in the Senegalese culinary landscape. In spite of the Wolof language designation,4 the dish is prepared and enjoyed by a variety of groups throughout Senegal, particularly in coastal areas where fish is readily available. Food historian Jessica B. Harris makes light of the ubiquity of the recipe, suggesting: “Thiebou dienn . . . shows up on so many lunch tables that the joke goes that the Senegalese version of the Lord’s Prayer should be amended to read, ‘Give us this day our daily thieb,’”5 Although quotidian in nature, the preparation and enjoyment of the dish are rarely taken for granted. Rather, a heaping platter of ceebu jën, whether white



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or red, represents a feast for the senses, an opportunity to celebrate life’s ordinary and extraordinary moments. As Sow Fall explains: Le tiébou dieune s’affiche dans toute sa splendeur: une bonne épaisseur de riz couvre la surface de l’assiette. Un plateau de minuscules graines de rubis qui, selon les amateurs de bonne chère, émet une douce chanson d’amour. Au beau milieu, un kaléidoscope de beaux cadeaux offerts par la Terre à l’oeil et au palais: rouge du piment, blanc du manioc, violet de l’aubergine, jaune du khounligné, ce légume au goût amer en forme de tomate, vert du chou de l’oseille et du gombo; orange vif de la citrouille. Et tant d’autres merveilles. . .6 [Tiébou diuene appears in all its splendor: a thick layer of rice covers the surface of the plate. A platter of minuscule ruby pearls which, according to connoisseurs of good food, emits a sweet love song. Right in the middle, a kaleidoscope of beautiful gifts offered by the Earth to the eye and the palate: red from the pepper, white from the manioc, violet from the aubergine, yellow from the khounligné, that bitter flavored vegetable in the shape of a tomato, green from the cabbage, from the sorrel and from the okra, bright orange from the pumpkin. And so many other marvels. . .]

Beyond the multisensorial delights of the dish and the convivial pleasures of partaking in the meal with family and friends, for many, ceebu jën represents much more than a means of nourishment and enjoyment. Born out of the colonial period during which the inhabitants of Senegal were subject to French governance and authority, the dish, which according to the Parisian-based Cameroonian chef Alexandre Bella Ola “a cent ans à peine” [is barely one hundred years old],7 now bears a special significance in the sovereign nation of Senegal. For Pierre Thiam, a Senegalese chef living and working in New York City, the dish symbolizes Senegal’s history as a space of encounters among nations and cultures. As Thiam explains, ceebu jën exemplifies a necessary appropriation of Senegal’s multicultural past, present, and future: Thieb has come to represent . . . Senegal’s ability to take cuisines from various cultures and put its definitive stamp of ownership on them. The cabbage and carrots were introduced from Europe, and tomatoes, which have become significant in our cuisine, have a New World origin.8

Just as there is more than one way to make a ceebu jën, there are multiple means through which the authors of the cookbooks in this study contextualize and interpret the cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance of this important dish. Before exploring these motifs further, particularly as manifest in

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contemporary written formats, it is important to consider the time-honored modes of transmitting culinary knowledge in West Africa where, in the past, few people consulted printed cookbooks when preparing meals for their families, friends, and communities. Kitchen Wisdom as Performance Historically, culinary practices have been strongly linked to musical and performance traditions in West African and broader African cultural contexts. As James McCann suggests, across the African continent, through the multiple processes of meal preparation, women continue to perform and transmit meaningful oral and instrumental traditions for those who share in the work of cooking but also for those who partake in the enjoyment of their meals. For this reason, he characterizes African cooking practices as “gendered (female) historical oral transcripts”9 and likens the performance of kitchen work to that of jazz music. In McCann’s view, talented chefs respect rhythmic and technical protocols as passed on from one generation to the next and shared among culinary collaborators and contemporaries: Like jazz, what appears to be a free form was actually a deeper structure understood by the performer and by the informed within the audience. Its essential orality was carefully preserved and passed on via performance, practice, and the response of those who appreciated the final result and encouraged the cook to repeat the performance.10

For McCann, the performance of a recipe is comparable in function and form to that of a jazz standard, the structure of which, although allowing for degrees of variation and improvisation, leads to an anticipated overall aesthetic result. There is an art to learning the sequence of ingredients and preparation techniques. As students take the time to listen to the rhythms of the cadenced knife, spoon, and pestlework of their teachers and to imitate the timing and spacing of the requisite tasks, they acquire the equivalent of the basic rhythms and melodies of a set of musical standards. In time, a dedicated student and observer will learn how to prepare the dishes in his or her own way after developing an understanding of which steps must be performed consistently (both rhythmically and sequentially) and which ones allow for variation and creativity. McCann is not the only one to make connections between West African culinary arts and jazz music traditions, both of which blend structured patterns of sounds and movements with personal stylistic flourishes and improvisational elements. In the introduction to their anthology Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel, Esi Sutherland-Addy and Aminata Diaw



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establish the connection between culinary practices and musical traditions, affirming that kitchen utensils—including but not limited to calabashes, spoons, knives, and mortars and pestles—are frequently used to accompany worksongs (which often feature rhythmically or vocally improvised components) as well as the movements that comprise the quotidian performance of meal preparation.11 Although seemingly free-form in nature, the sounds that accompany the physical work of preparing ingredients and performing recipes are born out of familiar structures recognizable to those who spend time in and around the spaces in which recipes are performed. SutherlandAddy and Diaw focus on the worksongs that accompany the completion of women’s everyday tasks, even those that allow for increased improvisation such as cooking in their analysis. They maintain that rules traditionally govern oral categories and genres, including worksongs and recipes, in West African cultural contexts: “[W]hen these oral performances accompany such daily tasks as trade and marketing activities or collecting firewood and cooking, for example, they are often more spontaneous and communal— although every literary genre functions according to precise rules of composition.”12 For Sutherland-Addy and Diaw, the structures that underlie the vocal and instrumental performances linked to cooking practices in West Africa parallel those that dictate the protocols for more formally recognized oral and instrumental genres.13 The interconnected nature of the vocal and instrumental elements inherent to West African culinary traditions poses particular challenges to writers as they attempt to convey recipes in written formats. One of the writers most successful in relating the interdependence of music and gastronomy in contemporary African cultural contexts is Léonora Miano. In her book, Soulfood équatoriale [equatorial soulfood], Miano makes connections between jazz music and African culinary traditions as she celebrates the everyday recipes served on the streets, in gargottes, and in homes throughout Cameroon. Blending the precise terminology of music with the informal lexicons of cooking and eating, Miano describes an urban context in which sandwiches become saxophones when topped with spicy red beans and sauce. In a later passage, she narrates how women perform as soloists in the space of the kitchen, showcasing their talents for loved ones when preparing a homophonically named fish called solo (salt cod).14 For Miano, the constant interplay between orality, musicality, structure, and artistry underscores the performative nature of preparing and partaking in meals, particularly as it pertains to women and their expressive traditions. In Miano’s view, for those who complete the work of making meals, it is not simply a question of being a talented chef. The ability to effortlessly transition between prescribed arrangements—the requisite ingredients and preparation techniques of a particular dish and acceptable variations—the

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delectable embellishments that showcase a chef’s virtuosity in musical and culinary realms, is meaningful in ways beyond the effective execution of a meal. As Miano explains, the combination of rhythms and ingredients is essential, not just for the successful completion of a dish, but also for the negotiation and affirmation of a woman’s identity and place in her community: Être femme, c’était entrer dans la caste des alchimistes du goût, trouver le moyen de se révéler à l’autre à travers les plats qu’on lui présentait. Le tempérament des femmes, disait-on, avait à voir avec la saveur de leur piment. Non pas en raison des ingrédients qu’elles y incorporaient avant de le faire chauffer dans un peu d’huile d’arachide, mais bien de leur façon de l’écraser. Chacune se servait à sa manière de la pierre à écraser. Chacune avait “sa main,” comme on disait.15 [Being a woman, meant entering into the cast of the alchemists of taste, finding the means to reveal herself to the other through the dishes that she presented to him. A woman’s temperament, they said, had to do with the taste of her hot pepper sauce. Not for the ingredients that she incorporated before heating it in a bit of peanut oil, but for her style of grinding. Each woman used the grinding stone in her own way. Each one had “her hand,” as they said.]

For Miano, beyond the functions of nurturing and nourishing others, the polyrhythmic tasks of meal preparation serve as a mode of empowerment which allows women to communicate in ways that transcend the limits of language and the confines of convention. In so doing, they effectively arrange and perform cultural and personal identities while simultaneously (re)configuring and (re)negotiating interpersonal and community relationships, much like musicians do.16 In relating local and global recipes to readers as tales, Miano models an alternative format for communicating African gastronomies in texted formats, one that accentuates the rhythmic and musical components of ordinary and extraordinary culinary rituals while connecting the experiences of sharing and preparing meals to sociocultural, familial, and personal identities and histories. Ousmane Sembene also develops the motif of the percussive and communicative dimensions of West African cooking practices, albeit in a slightly different way. In his novel, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu [God’s Bits of Wood], Sembene evokes what he refers to as “le chant du pilon” [the song of the pestle] as he narrates the experience of waking to the sounds of women pounding ingredients for the main meal of the day.17 Like Miano, Sembene recognizes the meaningful and musical dimensions of cooking processes, in this case, according the mortars and pestles themselves with purposeful aesthetic and



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communicative functions, much like those that drums convey in multiple West African cultural contexts.18 By invoking the song of the pestles in his narrative, Sembene establishes that the mortar and pestle provide more than just a means of pounding blends of grains, vegetables, or spices for a meal: Ainsi se saluaient les travailleuses du matin en un dialogue qu’elles seules comprenaient. Ces échos répétés qui annonçaient la naissance du jour présageaient une heureuse journée. Ils avaient à la fois un sens et une fonction.19 [In this way, the morning workers greeted each other in a dialogue that only they understood. These repeated echoes that announced the birth of the morning predicted a happy day. They had a simultaneous meaning and function.]

As Sembene demonstrates, in certain contexts, the performance of a recipe constitutes more than an assemblage of ingredients and cooking techniques. Rather, the complicated rhythms of the pestles striking mortars operate on one level as a sort of language understood exclusively by the working women that allows them to communicate with a cadenced series of clicks and clacks rather than words. To those unfamiliar with the nuances of their cooking language, the percussive thumps transmit a more general message, one that announces a forthcoming feast for the senses. For Sembene, the rhythmic and musical elements that comprise the base of traditional West African cooking practices add multiple layers of meaning to the processes and products of cooking that extend beyond the realm of the kitchens and courtyards in which they are prepared. The combination of sounding elements intrinsic to West African culinary practices complicates the narration of recipes in written formats. Such elements include the rhythmic sonorities produced by mortars and pestles, water drums made from calabashes, skirts and pagnes pulled tight across the legs to create percussive surfaces, and assorted kitchen utensils like spoons and knives.20 At times, these instruments serve as measured accompaniments to the worksongs performed by women in the spaces of their kitchens and courtyards. At other times, these rhythms stand alone, guiding the pace of the meal production for those participating in the culinary work and providing audible indications about the composition of the meal for those waiting to enjoy the end result. Although many culinary texts and cookbooks integrate elements from interrelated oral traditions such as folktales, songs, and proverbs about ingredients, meals, and the people who prepare them (with varying degrees of success), these purely instrumental components are often neglected, with few notable exceptions. Once such outlier is Sow Fall’s Un Grain de vie et d’espérance.

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Sow Fall’s Feast for the Senses Aminata Sow Fall’s Un Grain de vie et d’espérance is unlike conventional cookbooks that feature lists of ingredients and instructions that guide readers through the multiple steps of preparing a dish. Rather, in the collection of essays and stories that narrate and describe cooking practices, eating habits, and culinary etiquette in contemporary Senegal, Sow Fall presents her discussion as an interweaving series of questions and commentaries on food philosophy, guidelines for meal preparation, and prescriptions for mealtime decorum. Shifting effortlessly between commentary and narrative, Sow Fall also includes proverbs about food, devinettes [riddles] from the kitchen, superstitions about holiday meals, and folktales about the origins of recipes in her text. More importantly, she calls attention to the cadences and sonorities resonant in West African culinary arts. She emphasizes the significance of these sounding elements and the traditions that inform and inspire them in the dedication to her text: “À mes petits-enfants/ Écoutez le chant qui monte/ Du coeur de la graine./ Chant de vie, chant de joie” [To my grandchildren/ Listen to the song that rises/ From the heart of the seed./ Song of life, song of joy]. Bursting forth from the written page like a song, Sow Fall’s dedication sets the tone for her collection, infusing the frame of the text with the musicality of her unique blend of kitchen wisdom while inviting her readers to gather alongside her grandchildren in the spaces of their imaginations as she relates recipes as tales. For Sow Fall, the profusion of musical elements is as integral to Un Grain de vie et d’espérance as the narrations and descriptions of the meals themselves. For example, as Sow Fall tells the story of the origins of baassi salté— a hearty stew which she describes as “une débauche de viandes, légumes, sauces et d’autres onctuosités gisant sur un canapé épais de couscous de mil, semé de haricots blancs et de petites boulettes de viandes, de raisins secs et diverses fantaisies”21 [a profusion of meats, vegetables, sauces, and other creamy textures lying on a thick bed of millet couscous, strewn with white beans and little meatballs, raisins and various whims]—she frames her narration with the sounds of mbalax. A Sahelian musical genre characterized by ethnomusicologist Ruth Stone as “percussion-based music, mixing Cuban rhythms with kora-based traditional melodies, sung in a high-pitched style,”22 mbalax music accentuates the intermingling of Senegalese and global aesthetic influences operating in traditional and contemporary frameworks. Even so, by grounding the listening experience in a private home in SaintLouis, Senegal and framing it with the Wolof language designation mbalax, Sow Fall is careful to situate the preparation and enjoyment of baassi salté in the context of present-day Saint-Louis where “des notes de mbalax, des échos de voix, [et] des vrombissements d’autos”23 [the notes of mbalax, the echoes



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of voices, and the rumblings of cars] resonate around and within the people gathered around a common platter to share a meal. Sow Fall’s emphasis on the importance of the mbalax mealtime soundtrack equally affirms the importance of local rhythmic traditions (in particular, local instrumental and drumming traditions) in relation to culinary preparations and practices in contemporary Senegal. In her rendering of the baassi salté story, Sow Fall describes a scene in which Nogaye, the chef and central figure of her prosaic collection of culinary lore, sits listening to the mbalax. Satisfied with the delicious dish she has prepared and the convivial ambiance shared among family and friends who partake in her meal, Nogaye begins to reminisce about the dances and sonorities of her youth: Le mbalax, toujours. Nogaye aime. L’âge et l’embonpoint—l’embonpoint surtout—ont alourdi ses belles jambes qui jadis faisaient les délices des habitués de la Salle des Fêtes (pour le style toubab) ou du rond-point des pêcheurs, lieu par excellence des séances de tam-tam. C’était au bon vieux temps des percussions bien cadencées par des maîtres qui se donnaient à leur art comme au sacerdoce. . .24 [The mbalax, always. Nogaye loves. Age and fatness—especially fatness—have weighed down her beautiful legs that once delighted the regulars at the town hall {for the toubab style} or at the fisherman’s roundabout, the quintessential site for tam-tam sessions. It was in the good old days of rhythmic drumming by masters who devoted themselves to their art like to the priesthood. . .]

For Sow Fall and her protagonist Nogaye, the collective experiences of cooking and eating parallel those shared by drummers and dancers in both function and form. First and foremost, historically, in traditional West African contexts, those trained in the arts of drumming and cooking often spent their lifetimes learning the language and gestures intrinsic to their respective crafts.25 Moreover, much like the masters of West African drumming traditions who, as Titinga Frédéric Pacere and Georges Niangoran-Bouah have established,26 create bodies of drummed instrumental literature in their own right, the master chefs of West African kitchens communicate meaningful stories and social commentaries through the multiple processes of meal preparation and the communal performance of eating. The social implications of these quotidian feminine oral and instrumental performances are meaningful, particularly since, as Marta Weigle suggests, “[they] redirect attention from the extraordinary, other-time, and otherworldly to the ordinary, present, everyday events and protagonists of this world. They compel a revaluation of the mundane and the considerable arts of daily living.”27 By focusing people’s senses and attention on present realities and imaginaries, master chefs invite their guests to reflect upon and respond to individual,

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interpersonal, and intercultural aspects of everyday life, much like master drummers do. Beyond the narrations and descriptions of the songs and sounds that accompany the activities of cooking and eating, in Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, Sow Fall explicitly likens the art of cooking to that of drumming. Fiercely traditionalist with respect to the culinary arts, in one passage, Sow Fall categorically compares the protocols that dictate recipes and ingredients to those that govern practices surrounding traditional drums and drumming while arguing against the modification of traditional recipes to accommodate the latest trendy ingredients. In the passage, her protagonist Nogaye explains why she refuses to yield to the trend of garnishing classic Senegalese dishes like ceebu jën with raw vegetables, affirming “À chaque genre de tambour, sa baguette”28 [for each type of drum, its drumstick]. Sow Fall’s metaphor connecting drumming customs and the culinary arts is powerful, particularly since strict guidelines customarily dictate multiple aspects of traditional drumming practices, including but not limited to the shapes of drums and drumsticks, the patterns of drummed rhythms, and the social functions of percussive performances.29 As Sow Fall demonstrates, the social performance of meal preparation and the collective experience of eating are directed by women highly skilled in the rhythmic, gestural, and technical aspects of the culinary arts. By linking the culinary arts with local performance traditions, Sow Fall moves to valorize the craft of cooking as a substantive body of instrumental and oral literature performed by women who, in their capacity as chefs, act as artists, musicians, and storytellers. As Sow Fall maintains, the social function of their culinary performances is meaningful, particularly in fostering community solidarity and in promoting shared values among families and communities. Although she also acknowledges the critical capacities of West African performance traditions, Sow Fall is careful to emphasize their power to unite rather than divide communities, particularly when portrayed in quotidian contexts. As she explains in an interview with Ada Uzoamaka Azodo: [T]here were oral history dances, and creative activities, songs that spoke about everyday life, songs that made jests, and songs that condemned. Folktales and songs did everything that literature does in general. At the same time, songs educate, satirize, and castigate behaviors. That is as much as to say that there is need for solidarity in the community; that is the essence of the songs . . . .So, songs did not only sing about chiefs, but also about Mr. And Mrs. Everyone who can see themselves, recognize themselves in them, all those who are able to think of integrating themselves into societal norms.30

For Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance constitutes a continuation of her oeuvre, through which she translates and transcribes meaningful oral



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traditions (such as the bàkk performed by traditional wrestlers in L’Appel des arènes [The Call of the Arenas] and the epic poem recited by the female protagonist Naarou in Le Jujubier du patriarche [The Patriarch’s jujube tree]).31 By representing a multiplicity of voices and performance genres in her body of work, Sow Fall not only bears witness to the richness of West African performance traditions, but also invites readers from a broad spectrum of life experiences to thoughtfully engage with her texts, and in so doing, to reflect on the importance of familial heritage, social customs, and cultural traditions in Senegal and abroad. In addition to Sow Fall’s narrative rendering of philosophies, conventions, tales, and histories that celebrate the heritage and legacy of Senegalese culinary traditions, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance also features a set of Senegalese and West African-inspired recipes by the Paris-based chef Margo Harley. Sow Fall, who has explained that the initiative for the collection was not her own, but rather, that of a journalist,32 seems at odds with the inclusion of an appendix of recipes composed in a conventional written format. Known for her wit and her practice of inserting “winks” to readers who share a common linguistic heritage—or, in this case, mutual culinary sensibilities—into the frames of her narratives,33 Sow Fall includes several commentaries on the recent increase of West African-themed cookbooks in Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, including: “Traditionnellement, [la recette de cuisine] ce n’est jamais écrit chez nous. . . De nos jours, les livres de recettes prolifèrent. Signe des temps. Le monde ‘marche’. . .”34 [Traditionally, {cooking recipes} are never written back home. . . Nowadays, recipe books proliferate. Sign of the times. The world “marches on”. . .]. Another critique pertains to Sow Fall’s insistence on the importance of being rooted in and connected to one’s culinary heritages—not just culturally, but also geographically. Featured in the closing segment of her narrative “La question qui vous démange” [the question that eats at you], which begins with the open-ended question “Y a-til quelque chose dont vous aimeriez parler?”35 Is there something you would like to talk about?], Sow Fall’s two-paragraph response maintains the value of eating local dishes in their appropriate geographic and cultural settings. For Sow Fall, enjoying local dishes in context provides a means of paying tribute to one’s familial, linguistic, religious, regional, and/or national affiliations and histories. Ce qui est dans l’assiette est forcément une histoire parce que, disons-le encore une fois, notre cuisine est le pur produit de notre histoire, de notre vision du monde, de nos rêves, de nos fantaisies et aussi des angoisses que nous voulons chasser en offrant à manger au pauvre. Un tiebou dieune par un Australien authentique au fin fond de son pays serait de l’insolite pour moi parce que ne collant ni à l’histoire ni au patrimoine culturel de ce peuple.36

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[What is on the plate is inevitably a history because, let’s say it again, our cuisine is the pure product of our history, of our world vision, of our dreams, of our imaginativeness, and also of the guilt that we want to rid ourselves of by offering food to the poor. An authentic tiebou dieune by an Australian in the heart of his country would seem out of sorts to me because it adheres neither to the history nor the cultural heritage of this people.]

Sow Fall’s diplomatic admonishment of the limits of preparing Senegalese dishes with no foundation in regional or cultural heritages reflects her belief in the importance of learning, celebrating, and perpetuating one’s community and family traditions, particularly the oral and instrumental genres—the proverbs, folktales, recipes, and songs that have been transmitted by grandparents and parents to children and grandchildren across the span of generations. She insists on the social significance of these endangered artforms throughout her oeuvre, perhaps most notably in L’Appel des arènes [The Call of the Arenas], a novel in which a young boy reconnects with the music and lore of local wrestling traditions in Louga, Senegal in spite of his parents’ attempts to discourage his efforts in favor of a strictly European style of education.37

The Challenges of Translating and Transcribing Recipes Sow Fall’s acknowledgment of the disconnect that separates geographical and cultural culinary spaces is particularly interesting when read in view of the collection of recipes included in the second segment of Un Grain de vie et d’espérance. Presented by Margo Harley, a chef of Senegalese origin living and working in Paris, the recipes constitute an addendum to Sow Fall’s assemblage of culinary musings and stories. Harley’s contributions, which differ technically, stylistically, and philosophically from Sow Fall’s narrative segments, work in dialogue with them, consequently raising questions about the challenges of writing recipes that, until recently, have been shared through oral and instrumental protocols across generations and communities. Through an examination of the differences and disparities between Sow Fall’s and Harley’s texts as well as that of N’Dour, it becomes apparent that important oral, instrumental, and cultural components of culinary folklore and recipes are being preserved and celebrated in some instances, but also transformed and/or compromised in others. For these writers, the decisions to omit or include oral and instrumental elements in their texts reveal much about their respective philosophies concerning the positioning of Senegalese culinary practices and practitioners in historical, geographical, aesthetic, and sociocultural frameworks. As Colleen Cotter has demonstrated, recipes can



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be viewed as “a form of narrative—a particular kind of storytelling—and viewing it formally and structurally as a narrative enriches our reading of it.”38 By applying techniques from literary analysis to collections of written recipes, one can gain important insights into the culinary realities and imaginaries presented by the author chefs as well as the aesthetic elements, cultural observations, and social commentaries they interweave into the frames of their texts. Harley’s section of the Un Grain de vie et d’espérance entitled “Recettes” [recipes] serves as a supplemental but separate text. At no time does it reference Sow Fall’s prosaic collection of recipes and stories. In considering the challenges of preserving and perpetuating instrumental aspects of culinary traditions in written formats, it is useful to examine the apparent disconnect between the two texts, both in content and in form. In Harley’s section, the recipes are divided into two groups “Petits secrets, variants et remèdes” [little secrets, variations, and remedies] and “Classiques revisités, Créations d’aujourd’hui” [classics revisited, contemporary creations]. As an ensemble, Harley’s recipes include lists of ingredients and possible substitutions, accompanied by step-by-step cooking instructions. For most of the recipes, Harley also provides some type of narrative support, which she uses to situate each dish in spatial, temporal, and situational contexts. In her rendering of the ceebu jën recipe, Harley provides the Wolof name of the dish (Tiebou dieune) and its French translation [riz au poisson] along with a list of ingredients measured in precise quantities—an itemized inventory of whole fish and vegetables, and gram and kilogram portions of herbs and spices. Her list includes onions, crushed tomato, tomato concentrate, green cabbage, carrots, turnips, purple eggplants, bitter eggplants, pumpkin, manioc root, hot pepper, okra, tamarind, grouper, guëdjeu [dried fish], yet (a dried and fermented sea snail often used to give ceebu jën its distinct flavor), peanut oil, and bouillon cubes. The dish is introduced by Harley with a paragraph of narrative support: C’est le plat “national” sénégalais. On l’appelle aussi le “tiebou diuene penda mbaye,” du nom de la femme qui l’aurait inventé ou le “thieb-ou souwère” à Saint-Louis, un thieb royal où rien ne manque. Il y a une unanimité pour considérer ce plat comme étant le troisième emblème du Sénégal après le baobab et le lion. Le plat sur lequel vous avez neuf chances sur dix de tomber en entrant dans un foyer Sénégalais.39 [It is the “national” Senegalese dish. We also call it “tiebou dieune penda mbaye,” from the name of the woman who would have invented it or the “thiebou souwère” in Saint-Louis, a royal thieb {rice dish} where nothing is lacking. There is unanimity in considering this dish as the third emblem of Senegal after the baobab tree and the lion. The dish upon which you have nine chances in ten of falling when entering a Senegalese home.]

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Harley’s description of ceebu jën mentions its widespread popularity in Senegal, but unlike Sow Fall, does little to address the historical origins of the meal or to explain the cultural protocols surrounding the preparation and presentation of the dish. Furthermore, in Harley’s characterization of ceebu jën, the musicality and instrumentality of Sow Fall’s narrative descriptions are lacking. Although Harley hints at culinary oral traditions through her reference to the story of Penda Mbaye, the suggestion lacks contextualization and fails to engage with the sounding elements of the Penda Mbaye story. Another challenge in representing the oral and instrumental elements of Senegalese culinary traditions in the frame of a written page lies in the transcription and/or translation of Senegalese languages. Whereas Sow Fall effectively infuses her narrative with the multilingual sonorities of Senegalese languages, this attention to the resonant interplay between African and European languages, most notably those of Wolof and French, is missing from Harley’s text. Although Harley incorporates Wolof terminology into her recipes, unlike Sow Fall, she fails to engage with or play with the vibrant sounds and multiple meanings of the Wolof elements she includes in her text. Harley’s approach to language and translation is more straightforward which consequently neglects to attend to the dynamic sounding qualities of the Wolof language and its associations with a rich body of oral literature.40 Furthermore, through her stark treatment of Wolof to French translations, Harley misrepresents the Wolof language at times. For example, she translates the title of the recipe for Thieb-ou vermicelles [rice with vermicelli] as Sauté d’agneau aux vermicelles41 [sautéed lamb with vermicelli]. In this case, the French and Wolof translations do not correspond. Whereas the French title suggests a balanced and satisfying meal with meat and carbohydrate fuel, the Wolof title suggests a bland and uninspired dish, weak in nutritional content. Upon further examination of the recipe, which makes no mention of rice in its list of ingredients, it becomes apparent that although Harley is familiar with the basic ingredients and preparation techniques of the dishes she presents, her unfamiliarity with the subtleties of local linguistic and cultural protocols compromises the authenticity of many recipes in her collection, at least from a sounding perspective.42 Another cause for concern is the lack of attention to detail in Harley’s rendering of the ceebu jën recipe. In her preliminary description, she explains that the dish is also called tiebou dieune penda mbaye or thieb-ou souwère, without recognizing that there are multiple distinguishable versions of the ceebu jën dish, or that ceebu jën sauce souwère is a highly regarded regional variant of the dish that typically features fishballs in addition to the copious amounts of fish, rice, and vegetables included in more standard preparations. In this instance, Harley distorts the rich heritage of the dish and the sophisticated nuances of the recipe variations by oversimplifying its presentation.



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In this instance, the sumptuousness of the oral and instrumental traditions underlying the social performance of the ceebu jën recipe and its variants are eclipsed by the misleading written version which by its very nature is bolstered by the problematic authority of print genres in postcolonial frameworks.43 Nevertheless, although it poses a distinct challenge, engaging with culinary oral and instrumental traditions in print formats is not an insurmountable feat. In N’Dour’s cookbook Sénégal: Cuisine intime et gourmande, which showcases a collection of his mother Sokhna’s recipes, he features three different versions of the ceebu jën recipe: Thieboudienne Rouge, Thieboudienne Buer, and Thieboudienne Sauce Souwere. In presenting each of the recipes, N’Dour highlights the popularity and diversity of the dishes from the perspectives of those gathered to prepare and partake in the meal. For example, in his introduction to Thieboudienne Rouge, he affirms: “Le grand débat quotidien, c’est de savoir si on prépare un thieb blanc ou un thieb rouge”44 [the great quotidian debate is to know whether to prepare a white thieb (rice) or a red thieb (rice)]. He is also careful to point out important differences between multiple versions of the Thieboudienne recipes, both in the textual introductions to the dishes and in the narrative sequences that guide readers step by step through the cooking processes for each variant. Another element that N’Dour embraces in presenting his mother’s Thieboudienne recipes is the high degree of flexibility allowed when selecting vegetable ingredients for each dish. Although, like Harley, N’Dour initially presents lists of ingredients in precise quantities of whole fish and vegetables or gram and kilogram portions of herbs and spices, he later explains: Ma mère met toutes sortes de légumes dans son thieb. Mais rien ne vous oblige à mettre tous les légumes qu’elle indique dans le vôtre. Pour un thieb plus simple et plus rapide, vous pouvez par exemple vous contenter de manioc, de chou, de carottes et d’aubergines. Un peu plus du légume que vous aimez, un peu moins de l’autre: faites votre choix selon vos goûts personnels (et adaptez la recette selon ce que vous trouvez—ou pas—en faisant vos courses!)45 [My mother puts all sorts of vegetables in her thieb [rice]. But nothing obliges you to put all of the vegetables that she indicates in yours. For a simpler and faster thieb [rice], you can for example settle for manioc, cabbage, carrots and eggplants. A little more of the vegetable you like and a little less of the other: choose according to your personal tastes (and adapt the recipe according to what you find—or not—while doing your shopping!].

Rather than insisting on specific types of fish and vegetable ingredients, N’Dour provides a series of options, reminding his readers that individual chefs can create signature variations of the dish according to their tastes,

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their means, and the availability of items at the market. He is, however, very insistent on process, much like a composer or a musician. In this respect, he treats utensils like instruments, dictating how they should be used in combination with the ingredients and suggesting the overall aesthetic effect created through multiple movements or culinary processes. In his Thieboudienne Rouge recipe, he prescribes how the fish should be scaled, cleaned, and stuffed; how vegetables should be cut, minced, or ground; how the rice should be rinsed, pre-steamed, and cooked; how and when each ingredient should be added to the pot and for how long everything should simmer; how to test the flavor of the sauce and adjust the seasonings if necessary; and how to properly present the dish on a common platter to those partaking in the meal.46 He follows a similar protocol for the Thieboudienne Buer and Thieboudienne Sauce Souwère variations. By contrast, Harley’s sole version of the ceebu jën recipe includes only two paragraphs of instructions. She entirely omits the step of stuffing the fish with roff (a seasoning blend made with garlic, parsley, and hot peppers), and condenses many of the steps that are detailed in N’Dour’s book. Whereas N’Dour suggests five distinct steps for cooking fish and vegetable ingredients (six for those who decide to include fried mackerel in their dish), Harley prescribes three steps—one for the tomato and onion base, one for the fish and vegetables, and one for the okra and seasonings. A set of concise, printed instructions, Harley’s abridged version of the recipe leaves out the oral and instrumental components that N’Dour diligently includes in his text. Guiding his readers through recipes much like a composer leads his musicians through a musical score, for N’Dour the sounding elements produced in the process of meal preparation are arguably just as important as the recipes themselves. N’Dour’s attention to the rhythmic protocols and aesthetic sensibilities of the ceebu jën recipe and its variants corresponds with Sow Fall’s characterization of the ceebu jën dish as one that “émet une douce chanson d’amour”47 [emits a sweet love song]. Similarly, since Thieboudienne is a rice dish, N’Dour expressly designates how to clean, pre-steam, cook, and serve the rice, including the rohgne, the coveted crispy sweet rice that gets stuck to the bottom of the pot during the heating process. In an earlier section of the book that inventories and details the base ingredients of the Senegalese pantry, N’Dour devotes an entire page of text and a three-page color photo spread to rice. The photos, which feature N’Dour’s mother Sokhna, illustrate the multiple stages of rice selection, washing, cooking, and presentation. One particularly striking photo captures Sokhna, dressed in a beautiful white boubou, pagne, and headwrap, sorting the rice in a large calabash bowl. The calabash rests on her lap on a cushion of white eyelet fabric, supported from the underside by her left hand. Gaze directed toward the contents of the bowl, Sokhna sweeps her right hand



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through the rice, performing the meticulous rice selection technique that N’Dour describes in the accompanying text: Ma mère fait toujours très attention quand elle choisit son riz. Il y a un geste très caractéristique qu’on retrouve chez toutes les Sénégalaises lorsqu’elles trient le riz: sur un plateau ou sur le plat. . . elles dispersent et font rouler du riz par poignées, pour vérifier qu’il est bien homogène, qu’il n’y a pas trop de variétés mélangées, pour retirer les petits cailloux et les insectes, et puis pour s’assurer que tous les grains sont à peu près de la même taille, afin qu’ils cuisent à la même vitesse. J’adorais participer au tri des grains de riz.48 [My mother always takes great care when she chooses her rice. There is a very characteristic gesture found in all Senegalese women’s homes when they sort rice: on a platter or the dish. . . they scatter and roll the rice out in handfuls, to verify that it is consistent, that there are not too many mixed varieties, to remove little pebbles and insects, and then to make sure that all of the grains are roughly the same size, so that they cook at the same speed. I used to love to participate in the sorting of grains of rice.]

Whereas N’Dour is meticulous in detailing the multiple processes surrounding the preparation of rice, devoting multiple pages and paragraphs to the art of achieving the ideal texture, taste, and consistency of this important food staple, Harley’s text is minimal and mechanical: “Dans le bouillon restant, plonger le riz préalablement lavé. Laisser cuire à l’étouffée et à feu doux pendant 30 minutes. Servir et arroser de bouillon à la sauce tamarin”49 [in the remaining bouillon, immerse the rice washed beforehand. Let it simmer covered for 30 minutes. Serve and sprinkle with the tamarind sauce bouillon]. These last three sentences conclude Harley’s version of the ceebu jën recipe. There are no mentions of roghne, no serving suggestions, and no ingredient variations provided in Harley’s presentation of Tiebou dieune. Contrary to N’Dour’s rendering of Thieboudienne Rouge, which includes cues for the successful execution of the multiple processes and performances involved in preparing, displaying, and enjoying the dish, Harley’s version lacks the meaningful audiovisual cues that reference the voluminous body of oral and instrumental protocols which surround and infuse the social performance of the recipe in both traditional and contemporary contexts. Harley’s emphasis on specific ingredients and precise quantities combined with her lack of precision and detail when guiding readers through the cooking and serving process contradicts much of what Sow Fall writes about cultural and culinary practices in Senegal, particularly as they pertain to the social reputations of the women preparing the dish. Like N’Dour, Sow Fall insists that product follows process. In this respect, taking the time to select and prepare quality ingredients and to respect and adhere to traditional

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cooking practices yields an end result worthy of praise, free from unnecessary scorn or admonishment. In a section entitled “Le temps de préparation, le temps de consommation” [preparation time, meal time], Sow Fall explains the gastronomical and social significance of being intentional about traditional culinary practices and processes, specifically while cooking a meal: Avant même de penser à la consommation de son oeuvre, toute Saint-Louisienne qui se respecte (au bon vieux temps, je veux dire) concentre son énergie sur la préparation. L’art culinaire d’abord. Le reste, c’est un luxe, à ne pas dédaigner, bien sûr. Un tiébou dieune pâteux est un déshonneur. C’est une calamité.50 [Before even thinking about eating one’s work, every self-respecting SaintLouisian woman (in the good old days, I mean to say) focuses her energy on preparation. The culinary art first. The rest is a luxury, not to disregard, of course. A mushy tiébou dieune is a dishonor. It is a calamity.]

For Sow Fall, a critical component of teranga—the Senegalese art of welcoming, which she characterizes as “l’art de recevoir les gens, d’être agréable aux autres, pas seulement à ceux qui viennent d’un pays étranger, mais aussi à ceux qui n’habitent pas dans notre maison”51 [the art of receiving people, being pleasant to others, not just to those who come from another country, but also to those who do not live in our house]—involves following the appropriate cultural and culinary protocols, even (and especially) in cases where traditional conventions seem to clash with contemporary trends. In this sense, teranga requires more than simply mastering cooking techniques and performing recipes. It entails creating an ambiance in which guests experience physical, mental, and spiritual nourishment as they gather together to share in a meal. At the same time, cultivating a sense of teranga in one’s home provides a quotidian means of paying homage to the women of one’s family and community by preserving their culinary knowledge and skills, perpetuating their imaginative stories and songs, and sharing memories of their lived experiences and personal histories as recounted and celebrated in and around the space of the kitchen.52 Just as repeated performances of oral and instrumental traditions allow for and even insist on high degrees of variability from one production to the next, the differing renderings of the ceebu jën recipe provide meaningful insight into complicated questions of identity and affiliation in contemporary contexts, specifically in view of categories of gender, location, generation, and culture, even and perhaps especially when translated and transcribed in textual frameworks. Such themes are apparent in each writer’s collection of recipes and stories. Although Sow Fall is intentional in emphasizing the importance of local performance traditions, highlighting their significance throughout her oeuvre as they frame ordinary realities and extraordinary imaginaries,



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she insists on the unique contributions of individual performers—whether chefs, storytellers, teachers, wrestlers, or writers—and the value of their interactions with people from other generations, locations, and cultures. In this respect, she reproduces oral and performance traditions in her texts, not merely as a way of preserving them for future generations, but as a means of challenging readers to consider the values and limits of one’s cultural traditions as performed in contemporary local and global contexts. As she affirms, “[É]crire, c’est un banquet où tout le monde apporte”53 [writing is a banquet to which everyone contributes]. For Sow Fall, the frame of the text represents a space of encounter where individuals confront complex philosophical and cultural dilemmas as a means of (re)negotiating social identities and relationships. Similarly, N’Dour’s text also underscores the value of Senegalese culinary performance traditions. The work itself can be likened to a collection of praise songs dedicated to his mother, the women of his family, and by extension, the women of Senegal. The collection constitutes a celebration of Sokhna’s life, her Toucouleur heritage, her griot lineage, and her superior skills as a storyteller, master chef, and aesthete. Although N’Dour acknowledges the limits of writing, admitting that written formats fail to convey the subtle nuances and details that enhance the multisensorial experiences of cooking and eating, he appreciates the fact that his culinary collection will be read by people living in distant locations and future timeframes: La transmission orale est une tradition magnifique, mais quand je vois les recettes de ma mère consignées par écrit, ça me procure un sentiment de grande joie. L’écriture ne permet pas de traduire toutes les subtilités de sa connaissance et la finesse de sa sensibilité, mais ce qui en est gardé ici va voyager, va atteindre des gens loin dans l’espace et loin dans le temps et je suis très fier de ça.54 [The oral tradition is a magnificent tradition, but when I see my mother’s recipes preserved in writing, it gives me a sense of great pleasure. Writing does not allow the translation of all of the subtleties of her knowledge and the finesse of her sensibilities, but what is preserved therein will travel, will reach people far away in space and far away in time, and I am very proud of that.]

Although representing the full spectrum of resonant musicality produced in his mother’s kitchen poses an impossible challenge, N’Dour endeavors to transcribe and describe an abundance of sounds and sensations connected to the experiences of sharing culinary knowledge and performing recipes in Senegal. Like Sow Fall, by infusing his written text with sounding elements, N’Dour invites his readers to listen for the songs and stories that accompany the sights and savors of West African cuisine and to share in a space of encounter and exchange across geographic spaces and historical epochs.

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By contrast, Harley’s collection fails to engage with the rich lore, resonant musicality, and detailed delineations provided in N’Dour’s and Sow Fall’s renderings. Instead, her recipes feature limited sets of instructions and information peppered with fragmentary anecdotes about dishes and ingredients. The apparent lack of explicit intertextual dialogue among Harley’s sparse presentations of recipes and Sow Fall’s narrative renderings of culinary phenomena is problematic since Harley’s versions of the recipes betray the vibrant oral and instrumental performance traditions that Sow Fall interweaves throughout her collection of tales. In this respect, Harley’s presentation of recipes highlights the challenges of perpetuating familial and cultural traditions from one generation to the next, particularly in alternate geographic contexts and literary formats. Although the recipes in themselves are adequate, in Harley’s rendering, there is a sense that much of the artistry and history of the recipes has gotten lost through the multiple processes of transit, transmission, translation, and transcription. That being said, the challenge for readers of the recipe scripts and etiquette cues contained in culinary literature is to be mindful not only of the variations among multiple versions of a single recipe but also of our own perceptions of, reactions to, and performances of the dishes as prescribed by individual texts. Just as the written renderings of recipes provide insight into the realities and imaginaries of their authors, what we choose to remember, replicate, substitute, and reinvent in our own culinary performances says something about us. In multiple locations throughout Senegal, a platter of ceebu jën represents more than a means of nourishment, conviviality, and delight. To the eyes, the minds, and the bellies of those gathered to partake in the meal, the finished product speaks volumes about the person or people who prepared it. Not only are their skill and artistry displayed for all to see and savor, but subtle glimpses of their character, their spirits, and their intentions are revealed through their attention to olfactory, visual, and resonant details—or lack thereof—in presenting the dish to their guests. Perhaps this is why an exceptional plate of ceebu jën has the power to invite and entice, to welcome and celebrate, and to captivate and seduce; why this recipe is narrated in cookbooks and novels, remembered in folktales and stories, and performed in kitchens and courtyards around the world. Even so, in considering and consuming collections of culinary recipes and tales, it is important for readers to recognize the undeniable connections these publications share with centuries of West African oral and instrumental literary traditions. Although the print formats of these culinary narratives easily lend themselves to literary interpretations, in studying these works and in performing these recipes, it is nonetheless imperative to locate the threads that connect such recipes and tales to the multiple contexts of the oral and instrumental literary traditions that surround and infuse them.



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Notes 1. All translations are my own. 2. Although I respect the variable spellings for ceebu jën as selected by the individual authors throughout this article, the spelling I use is derived from Pape Amadou Gaye’s manual, Practical Course in Wolof: An Audio-Aural Approach. 3. Aminta Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance (Paris: Éditions Françoise Truffaut, 2002), 134. 4. Wolof is widely spoken throughout Senegal, often as a second, third, or fourth language. As Jacques LeClerc affirms: “Bien que le wolof soit la langue maternelle de près de 40% de la population, plus de 90% des Sénégalais parlent et comprennent le wolof, car il sert de langue véhiculaire dans tout le pays.” [Although Wolof is the maternal language of close to 40% of the population, more than 90% of Senegalese speak and understand Wolof, since it serves as the vehicular language for the entire country]. Jacques LeClerc, “L’Aménagement linguistique dans le monde.” Last modified April 28, 2013. 5. Jessica Harris, The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 226. 6. Aminata Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, 29. 7. Alexandre Ola, La Cuisine de Moussa: 80 Recettes Africaines Irrésistibles (Paris: First Gründ, 2010), 138. 8. Pierre Thiam, Yolele! Recipes from the Heart of Senegal (New York: Lake Isle Press, 2008); Marta Weigle, “Women’s Expressive Forms,” Teaching Oral Traditions, edited by John Miles Foley (New York: MLA, 1998), 125. 9. James McCann, Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009), 11. 10. Ibid., 12. 11. Esi Sutherland-Addy and Aminata. Diaw, “Introduction,” Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel, edited by Esi Sutherland-Addy and Aminata Diaw (New York: Feminist Press, 2005), 22. 12. Ibid., 13. 13. Although many scholars view oral and instrumental categories as inherently overlapping, in his book Le langage des tam-tams et des masques en Afrique (bendrologie): Une littérature méconnue, Frédéric Titinga Pacere establishes instrumental or drummed literature as a genre that, at times, exists separately from oral or written literary categories. 14. Léonora Miano, Soulfood équatoriale (Paris: NiL, 2009), 39. 15. Ibid., 41–42. 16. In his book, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology, Paul Stoller also maintains the significance of meal preparation as it relates to personal identities and interpersonal relationships: “Sauce. . . had become the major ingredient in the stew of (Songhay) social relations,” Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 34. 17. Ousmane Sembene, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu: Banty Maam Yall (Paris: Livre Contemporain {Pocket}, 2002), 158.

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18. I further develop the connections between the communicative functions of West African culinary arts and drumming traditions in Sounding Off: Rhythm, Music, and Identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone Novels (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). 19. Sembene, Les Bouts de bois, 158. 20. Sutherland-Addy & Diaw, “Introduction,” Women Writing Africa, 22. 21. Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, 12. 22. Ruth Stone, The Garland Book of African Music (New York: Garland, 2000), 360. 23. Ibid., 14. 24. Ibid., 13. 25. Similarly, in her novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique [The Belly of the Atlantic], Fatou Diome describes the dedication and skill of the women who cook in her family: “Ici, la cuisine est un lieu de vie qui occupe beaucoup d’espace. Un tiers de la maison est clôturé, réservé aux activités culinaires: c’est la retraite des femmes. . . Alchimistes, elles savent vaincre l’insolence de l’oignon, la témérité de l’ail et l’agressivité du piment pour restituer un peu de caractère à un espadon dompté par une huile ardente. Elles réunissent, patiemment, les tomates et les patates dans un ballet finement orchestré pour les débarrasser de leurs rondeurs. Magiciennes surtout, elles transforment les grains de riz en rubis, simplement en demandant au palmier de leur faire don de tout ce qu’il a pris à la terre au soleil,” Fatou Diome, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (Paris: Éditions Ann Carrière 2003), 170. [Here, the kitchen is a social center that occupies a lot of space. A third of the house is confined, reserved to culinary activities: it is the women’s retreat. . . Alchemists, they know how to overcome the insolence of the onion, the temerity of garlic and the aggressiveness of capsicum in order to restore a bit of character to a subdued swordfish with a fiery oil. They join together, patiently, tomatoes and potatoes in a finely orchestrated ballet to free them from their curves. Magicians especially, they transform grains of rice into rubies, simply by asking the palm tree to donate everything it took to the earth and the sun]. 26. Georges Niangoran-Bouah, Introduction à la drummologie. (Abidjan: GNB 1981). Titinga Frédéric Pacere, Le Langage des tam-tams et des masques en Afrique (bendrologie): Une littérature méconnue (Paris: Harmattan, 1991). 27. Weigle, “Women’s Expressive Forms, 306–7. 28. Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, 92. 29. For more information on this subject, see J. H. Kwabena Nketia, “Surrogate Languages of Africa,” Current Trends in Linguistics 7 (1971), 699–732. 30. Ada Uzoamaka Azodo, Emerging Perspectives on Aminata Sow Fall: The Real and the Imaginary in her Novels (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007), 288. 31. For further analysis of these motifs, see Sada Niang, “Modes de contextualization dans Une Si longue lettre et L’Appel des arènes,” Literary Griot, 4.1 no. 1–2 (Spring-Fall 1992), 111–25; and Florence Martin, “Échos et grains de voix dans Le Jujubier du patriarche d’Aminata Sow Fall,” The French Review, 74 no. 2 (December 2000): 296–307. 32. Azodo, Emerging Perspectives, 295.



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33. Samba Gadjigo, “La Comédie humaine sénégalaise: Interview accordée par la romancière sénégalaise Aminata Sow Fall le 14 janvier 1987.” Komparatistische Hefte 15–16 (1987), 224. 34. Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, 62. 35. Ibid., 96. 36. Ibid. 37. In L’Appel des arènes, the young boy Nalla’s tutor, Mr. Niang laments his parents’ (Diattou and Ndiougou) failure to share in the experience of local cultural traditions with their son, suggesting that it provokes an identity crisis across generations: “Le refus de Diattou et Ndiougou, leur obstination à vouloir détourner Nalla des tam-tams, c’est le rejet d’une partie de leurs racines. Peut-être n’en ont-ils pas de conscience. . . Et ils renieront progressivement d’autres parties de leurs racines sans jamais réussir à les compenser par des racines appartenant à d’autres. Ils se trouveront alors dans la position inconfortable de celui qui trébuche éternellement sur un fil suspendu dans le vide, ne pouvant poser le pied ni à droite, ni à gauche. . . C’est cela l’aliénation. . . Déséquilibre physique. . . Déséquilibre spirituel. . . Déséquilibre mental.” Aminata Sow Fall, L’Appel des arènes (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1993), 72–3 [Diattou’s and Ndiougou’s refusal, their obstinancy in wanting to divert Nalla from the tam-tams, it is the rejection of a part of their roots. Perhaps they are not aware of it. . . . And they will progressively deny other parts of their roots without ever succeeding in compensating them with roots belonging to others. They will then find themselves in the awkward position of the one who eternally stumbles on a string suspended in space, unable to set his foot down neither to the right nor to the left. . . That is what alienation is. . . Physical imbalance. . . Spiritual imbalance. . . Mental imbalance]. 38. Colleen Cotter, “Claiming a Piece of the Pie: How the Language of Recipes Defines Community,” Recipes for Reading: Community, Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, edited by Anne Bower (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 52. 39. Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, 134. 40. Sow Fall goes so far as to play with the word tongue and its associations with language and gastronomy. In her discussion of the importance of color palettes in cuisine, in which she explains her distaste for “le tiebou dieune en demi-teinte” [half-stained tiebou dieune], she calls attention to the importance of the connections among proverbs and the senses, creating multiple layers of meaning through the intermingling of distinct linguistic systems and oral traditions: “Quel effet [les couleurs ont-elles sur] la langue, le palais?. . . Le proverbe wolof me reviendrait: ‘Ku yag dokh, yag guis’ (Qui vivra, verra)” (Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, 56 [{What effect} [do colors have on] the tongue, the palate?. . . The Wolof proverb comes back to me: ‘Ku yag dokh, yag guis’ {Who will live, will see}]. In this instance, Sow Fall has opted for an idiomatic rather than literal translation of the Wolof expression, substituting the French verb vivre [to live] for marcher [to walk] in her translation of dokh. 41. Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, 136. 42. In her book, Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean, Mildred

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Mortimer discusses the importance of language in the construction of locations and identities in domestic spheres. See Mildred Mortimer, Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 15. 43. Christopher Miller coined the term “Print Colonialism” to further problematize the prevalence and authority of French language and literacy during the colonial era. “Francophone literacy arrived in colonial Africa like a Trojan Horse, bearing an ideology of collaboration and assimilation, a condition of ‘original sin’ which the Francophone literature of Africa has sought to overcome during the last seventy years,” Christopher Miller, “Nationalism as Resistance and Resistance to Nationalism in the Literature of Francophone Africa,” in Post/colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms, edited by Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman, Yale French Studies, 82 no.1 (1993), 64. 44. Youssou N’Dour, Sénégal: Cuisine intime et gourmande (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2011), 81. 45. Ibid., 85. 46. Ibid., 81–85. 47. Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, 29. 48. N’Dour, Sénégal, 38. 49. Sow Fall, Un Grain de vie et d’espérance, 135. 50. Ibid., 40. 51. Cristina Schiavone, “À propos de Le Jujubier du patriarche; Entretien avec Aminata Sow Fall,” Francofonia 14 no. 27 (Autumn 1994), 88. 52. In her first novel, Le Revenant [the ghost], Sow Fall warns against culinary selfishness while acknowledging the challenges of being perpetually selfless in the name of teranga: “[L]e châtiment le plus terrible pour une épouse est d’être cataloguée de ‘siiskat’. L’égoïsme ne se pardonne pas, mais il est encore plus grave chez une femme qui doit être mère, épouse et soeur de tout le monde] Sow Fall (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines 1982), 17; [The most terrible punishment for a wife is to be labeled as a ‘siiskat’. Selfishness is a fatal flaw, but it is even worse for a woman who must be a mother, wife, and sister for everyone]. In Senegalese cultural contexts, siiskat, which Sow Fall defines as a person “qui n’aime pas partager la nourriture avec ceux qui arrivent à l’improviste” (Ibid.); [who does not like to share food with those who arrive unexpectedly], represents an undesirable social label regardless of one’s gender or social standing. Expanding upon Sow Fall’s work in Le Revenant, Shirin Edwin provides an interesting analysis of the representations of food in Sow Fall’s Le Revenant, Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des Indépendances, and Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre: “[Sow Fall, Kourouma and Bâ] extend the symbolism embedded in food from social conviviality, bonding, and all positive symbols, to lay bare the social ills and excesses of the politics of their societies. The organic function of food within West African societies—its deep-rooted symbolism and significance—empowers the literary and social agenda of the novelists in unraveling the complexities of African societies,” Shirin Edwin, “Subverting Social Customs: The Representation of Food in Three West African Francophone Novels,” Research in African Literatures, 39 no.3 (Fall 2008), 48–9.



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53. Nicole Aas-Rouxparis, “‘Écrire, c’est un banquet où tout le monde apporte.’ Entrevue avec Aminata Sow Fall,” Women in French Studies 8 (2000), 203. 54. N’Dour, Sénégal, 49.

Bibliography Aas-Rouxparis, Nicole. “‘Écrire, c’est un banquet où tout le monde apporte.’ Entrevue avec Aminata Sow Fall.” Women in French Studies 8 (2000): 203–13. Azodo, Ada Uzoamaka. Emerging Perspectives on Aminata Sow Fall: The Real and the Imaginary in her Novels. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007. Bella Ola, Alexandre. La Cuisine de Moussa: 80 Recettes Africaines Irrésistibles. Paris: First Gründ, 2010. Cotter, Colleen. “Claiming a Piece of the Pie: How the Language of Recipes Defines Community.” Recipes for Reading: Community, Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. Ed. Anne Bower. Amherst: UMass Press, 1997. 51–71. Diome, Fatou. Le Ventre de l’Atlantique. Paris: Éditions Ann Carrière, 2003. Edwin, Shirin. “Subverting Social Customs: The Representation of Food in Three West African Francophone Novels.” Research in African Literatures 39 no. 3 (Fall 2008): 39–50. Gadjigo, Samba. “La Comédie humaine sénégalaise: Interview accordée par la romancière sénégalaise Aminata Sow Fall le 14 janvier 1987.” Komparatistische Hefte 15–16 (1987): 219–24. Gaye, Pape Amadou. Practical Course in Wolof: An Audio-Aural Approach. United States Peace Corps, 1980. Harris, Jessica. The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Huntington, Julie. Sounding Off: Rhythm, Music and Identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. Leclerc, Jacques. “L’Aménagement linguistique dans le monde.” Last modified April 28, 2013. http://www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca/afrique/senegal.htm Martin, Florence. “Échos et grains de voix dans Le Jujubier du patriarche d’Aminata Sow Fall.” The French Review 74 no. 2 (December 2000): 296–307. McCann, James. Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009. Miano, Léonora. Soulfood équatoriale. Paris: NiL, 2009. Miller, Christopher. “Nationalism as Resistance and Resistance to Nationalism in the Literature of Francophone Africa.” In Post/colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms edited by Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman. Yale French Studies 82.1 (1993): 62–100. Mortimer, Mildred. Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. N’Dour, Youssou. Sénégal: Cuisine intime et gourmande. Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2011.

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Niang, Sada. “Modes de contextualisation dans Une si longue lettre et L’Appel des arènes.” Literary Griot 4 no. 1–2 (Spring-Fall 1992): 111–25. Niangoran-Bouah, Georges. Introduction à la drummologie. Abidjan: GNB, 1981. Nketia, J. H. Kwabena. “Surrogate Languages of Africa.” Current Trends in Linguistics 7 (1971): 699–732. Pacere, Titinga Frédéric. Le langage des tam-tams et des masques en Afrique (bendrologie): Une littérature méconnue. Paris: Harmattan, 1991. Schiavone, Cristina. “À propos de Le Jujubier du patriarche; Entretien avec Aminata Sow Fall.” Francofonia 14 no. 27 (Autumn 1994): 87–95. Sembene, Ousmane. Les Bouts de bois de Dieu: Banty Maam Yall. Paris: Livre Contemporain (Pocket), 2002. Sow Fall, Aminata. L’Appel des arènes. Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1993. ———. Un Grain de vie et d’espérance. Paris: Éditions Françoise Truffaut, 2002. ———. Le Jujubier du patriarche. Paris: Serpent à Plumes, 1998. ———. Le Revenant. Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1982. Stoller, Paul. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Stone, Ruth. The Garland Book of African Music. New York: Garland, 2000. Sutherland-Addy, Esi, and Aminata.Diaw, ed. Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel. New York: Feminist Press, 2005. Thiam, Pierre. Yolele! Recipes from the Heart of Senegal. New York: Lake Isle Press, 2008. Weigle, Marta. “Women’s Expressive Forms.” Teaching Oral Traditions. Ed. John Miles Foley. New York: MLA, 1998. 298–307.

Chapter 11

Reclamation of the Arena Traditional Wrestling in West Africa Bojana Coulibaly

Modern folk wrestling in West Africa is the continuation of a collectively worshipped ancestral practice that traditionally involved different communities and ethnic groups, and which today gathers several African nations, such as in the context of the CEDEAO (Communauté des Etats de l’Afrique de l’Ouest) tournament in the West African region. More than a sport, it is a sociocultural and economic activity, which has a global impact in the region. Folk wrestling or laamb, in Wolof, kokowa in Hausa, brings indeed together a number of sociocultural figures including the jeli or the griot, marabouts or the religious healer, choreographers, singers, drummers, journalists, and attracts all members of society, that is, from common individuals to government officials. Its practice revolves around rituals, which each ethnic group identifies with, and which are representative of the groups’ values and cultural creativity. It therefore undoubtedly allows members of society to interact, socialize, and share common cultural traits. Traditional wrestling has been the inspiration of innumerable poems, songs, novels and more recently, films. Its visual, kinetic, and choreographic dimensions are highly remarkable, as well as the musicality and rhythm associated with the tam-tam or sabar as it is called in Serer, that consistently accompany this highly popular activity. The omnipresence of magic, the spiritual and the virtual aspects of laamb are unquestionably perceptible and highlight the existence of the ongoing dialogue between the profane and the spiritual levels of life. Hence, the visual, the virtual, and the acoustic senses are equally conveyed through the practice of folk wrestling. During precolonial and colonial times, wrestling in West Africa has been a tool for education, initiation, reconciliation, for building and sustaining peace, but also for the transfer of historical, cultural, and social values to future generations. Since the independences, kokowa has 149

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become illustrative of cultural identification, struggle against acculturation, Western cultural hegemony, as well as an alternative to economic migration and delinquency. This chapter looks at the different aspects of folk wrestling through its everyday practices in West Africa during precolonial and colonial times, as well as today. A close look at references to wrestling in Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe and in L’appel des arènes (1982) by Aminata Sow Fall will allow us to illustrate how laamb has had a paramount function in West African traditional as well as modern-day societies. We will analyze the ways in which laamb operated as sociocultural cement in precolonial times and we will investigate its central role as a medium of social integration and a site of resistance to acculturation during colonial as well as postcolonial times.

Call to the arena The social and cultural dimensions of folk wrestling have been recognized by the different ethnic communities in West Africa on the one hand, and by scholars who have written on the subject on the other. It is practiced across cultures and nations and is believed to be among the most practiced sports around the world. It is widely agreed that folk wrestling is a vast social phenomenon in present-day Senegal and Niger. When a game takes place, whole communities are gathered, as was the case in precolonial and colonial rural Niger and Senegal, but also nowadays in a more urban setting such as Niamey and Dakar. Thanks to the unique creativity and inspiration of local artists, pictures of the contestants are exposed throughout the city, which allows for a colorful and animated atmosphere to take place. Hence, an important aspect of the practice of wrestling is expressed in the notion of call to the arena. It is referred to in the title of Aminata Sow Fall’s famous novel, L’appel des arènes [call to the arenas]1 (1982), and it highly conveys the collective popularity of laamb as well as the way in which all members of the community are summoned to this unique seasonal event. Bernard Dadié in his poem “Le Tam-tam des arènes” [Tam-tam of the arena] (1945) equally conveys the atmosphere created by the call of the tam-tam when he writes in the opening to his poem: Saute, saute, belle djiguène C’est le tam-tam des arènes qui t’appelle ce soir2 [Hop, hop, beautiful djiguène It’s the tam-tam of the arena which is calling you tonight]



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Similarly, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart stresses the importance of the call to the arena. In the novel, wrestling contests take place during what is called the “Feast of the New Yam,”3 which is a three-day celebration of the harvest to come. As it is affirmed by Aboubacar Djirmey et al.,4 in traditional Niger, but also throughout traditional West Africa, kokowa is a seasonal activity designed to celebrate events relevant to each community.5 Mahaman L. Sériba indicates that wrestling contests in Niger took place after the harvest season, that is, from November to April.6 In Things Fall Apart the wrestling game is scheduled on the second day of the festival and the inhabitants of the two neighboring villages to which the two contestants belong are called upon by “the beating of drums:” Just then the distant beating of drums began to reach them. It came from the direction of the ilo, the village play-ground. Every village had its own ilo which was as old as the village itself and where all the great ceremonies and dances took place. The drums beat the unmistakable wrestling dance—quick, light and gay, and it came floating on the wind.7

Okonkwo, the protagonist, is driven to the arena as if by magic, and his whole body and soul seem to react in ecstasy: “Okonkwo (. . .) moved his feat to the beat of the drums. It filled him with fire as it had always done from his youth. He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue. It was like the desire for woman.”8 Likewise, in Fall’s novel, the protagonist named Nalla, a 12-yearold boy, experiences an uncontrollable attraction towards laamb. The beat of the tam-tam transports him into a world of magic: Là-bas, aux arènes, la belle cadence du tam-tam s’étire jusqu’à Nalla, pénètre en Nalla, emplit Nalla d’une douce émotion, occupe tout l’être de Nalla qui en ce moment, entend comme s’il était aux arènes, les accents mélodieux des cantatrices dont les chants exaltants enflamment les lutteurs.9 [Over there, in the arena, the beautiful cadence of the tam-tam reaches out to Nalla, captures Nalla, fills Nalla with a soft emotion, occupies the whole of Nalla’s being who at this moment, hears as if he was in the arena, the melodious accents of the singers, whose exciting songs thrill the wrestlers.]

The notion of call is further emphasized in Nalla’s reaction to the tamtam’s beat, which strongly impacts his concentration at school and awakens his senses: “Le tam-tam aux arènes. Quand il commence à battre, je l’entends ici et ça me donne envie d’aller aux arènes”10 [the tam-tam of the arena. When it begins to beat, I can hear it over here and it gives me the desire to go to the arena]. Nalla’s problem of concentration worries his parents who come to discover their son’s passion for wrestling and for the tam-tam. They believe

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the arena is a place of violence and brutality, but Nalla through the encounter with André, a 30-year-old wrestler, gives us a different perspective on laamb. André is a sensitive, lively, generous man, and among all, a great storyteller. André through his oral narrative makes Nalla discover the meaning of wrestling as it has been practiced traditionally in the Saalum region. He transports him into the past, into a world of wonder and magic, triggering his imagination and allowing him to step away from his modern, French colonial upbringing. Nalla is fully seduced by André’s narrative and keeps asking to hear more each day that they meet. Nalla, like Okonkwo, indeed answers the call of the arena. Spectacle and the Visual Traditional wrestling is accompanied by a long preparation designed to create a great spectacle and memorable effects. Much time is indeed devoted to the choreographic preparation as each team, or each wrestler engages into the arena with a culturally identifiable choreography accompanied by the corresponding rhythm of tam-tam and drums. It also allows wrestlers to warm up and stretch for the game to follow. The notion of visual spectacle is highly emphasized in Fall’s novel. For instance, the Wolof wrestlers in the novel, as it is commonly practiced in the Wolof areas, are seen wearing colorful wrappers during the choreography. Fall describes the visual characteristics of the Wolof choreographers as seen through Nalla’s eyes: [L]es lutteurs (. . .) portaient attachés à leur ceinture une multitude de pagnes aux couleurs éclatantes et variées; lorsqu’ils dansaient en décrivant des demicercles, les pagnes se déployaient comme un éventail et offraient un très beau spectacle à la foule heureuse.11  [The wrestlers (. . .) had, attached to their belts, a multitude of loincloths of vivid and various colors; when they danced making half-circles, the loincloths deployed themselves like fans and offered a beautiful spectacle to the joyous crowd.]

Nalla’s teacher seeks to convince his parents to understand the reasons of their son’s passion and thus further emphasizes the visual importance of laamb: Je crois que votre fils a un certain penchant pour l’esthétique de la forme, de la couleur et des sons, magnifiée par le courage et la force en mouvement. C’est cela qu’il découvre dans la lutte et c’est ce qui l’attire.12



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[I think that your son has a certain fondness for the aesthetics of form, color, and sounds, magnified by courage and strength in movement. That is what he experiences in wrestling and that is what attracts him to it.]

Cheikh Tidiane Wane, Jean-François Robin, and Daniel Bouthier define folk wrestling as equally a “sport and an artistic practice.”13 In both the traditional and the modern environment, the body becomes a tool for cultural and creative expression as well as the representation of physical and mental strength, for each movement is carefully measured for the purpose of defeating the opponent. The creativity of the body-motion is visible in the wrestlers’ imitation of the surrounding natural environment. The lion’s grace and body movements become a source of inspiration, and wrestlers are described as experiencing a near-metamorphosis for they are often compared to lions and tigers, as it is the case in L’appel des arènes.

The spiritual and the profane The preparation for a wrestling contest in traditional and modern West Africa is accompanied by a certain number of rituals, which adds to the visual performance described above. Each competitor wears his lucky-charms (gris-gris). The spiritual aspect of the competition is highly regarded through the rituals performed by the wrestler and the marabout before each game. Aminata Sow Fall highlights the supernatural powers that wrestlers are believed to possess. André describes the wrestler Mahanta Bally to Nalla as having supernatural powers. Mahanta Bally’s rivals when facing him would hear the voice of a mermaid which would bewitch them and lead them to the ground. Music is an intrinsic element of laamb. The griot, musicians, and singers all together engender a magical and mystical effect on the audience. In Things Fall Apart we notice the enchanting power of the drums: “The drums were still beating, persistent and unchanging. Their sound was no longer a separate thing from the living village. It was like the pulsation of its heart.”14 The beat of the drums conveys a highly spiritual atmosphere as it is once again expressed in Things Fall Apart: “the spirit of the drums,”15 “its intoxicating rhythm.”16 The spiritual power of the drummers is similarly emphasized in Achebe’s novel, for, indeed when the beating of drums ceases and the contest begins, “the drummers (. . .) [become] ordinary human beings again, talking and laughing among themselves and with others who [stand] near them.”17 As we previously hinted, the griot has an important function in folk wrestling. In Cheikh Ndiaye’s movie adaptation of Fall’s novel, also entitled L’Appel des arènes, the famous Senegalese wrestler Tyson highlights

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the importance of the griot as the carrier of memory and tradition. Fall, through André and Malaw, shows that wrestlers themselves are sensitive men, storytellers, and teachers from generation to generation. Throughout the novel, Nalla is nurtured by stories told by André, Malaw, his teacher Mr. Niang, his grandmother, and the griot Mapaté. All of these stories teach Nalla to control his fears, learn moral values, and be sensitive about the world. Praise-songs or bakh in Wolof are similarly integral to the wrestling contest which undoubtedly adds to the ritual and the spiritual aspects of traditional wrestling. These praise songs are representative of the high level of creativity associated with the practice. They could, for instance, be composed in a call-and-response form as we read in Things Fall Apart: Who will wrestle for our village? Okafo will wrestle for our village.18

The call-and-response praise-song equally conveys the contestant and the audience. It brings echo and volume to the song leading to highly memorable effects. At other instances, bakh highlights the place of origin of the contestant and his physical qualities as we read in Fall’s novel: Malaw Lo fils de Ndiaga Lo Qui me bravera moi Malaw Lo Lion du Kajoor fils de Ndiaga Lo19 [Malaw Lo the son of Ndiaga Lo Who will stand up to me Malaw Lo The lion of Kajoor son of Ndiaga Lo]

Other examples of bakh in the novel reveal an extensive and highly creative use of onomatopoeia designed to evoke the sound of the drums. As we have pinpointed, the visual, the spiritual, and the acoustic aspects are not the only important features of kokowa. It is a far-reaching activity which occupies an important role within the community itself and between different communities as well. Its integrative function has been and continues to be celebrated in West Africa. The arena: a place of integration Traditionally, it is agreed that laamb has been used to build peace, solve disputes, and reconcile communities, villages, and ethnic groups. Nigeriens’ remarkable love for wrestling is exemplified in a game which took place during the February 2010 military coup. The game continued to the end and was



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certainly not canceled or delayed. It undoubtedly testifies how folk wrestling transcends politics and conflicts in West Africa. Achebe in Things Falls Apart shows that the wrestling contests bring together contestants from a number of villages, which allows for a sense of unity and fraternity between the various communities inhabiting the villages.20 C.T. Wane et al. state that traditional wrestling in the modern setting is above all a means of “socialization” and integration: La lutte simple est avant tout une activité visant par sa pratique à acquérir certaines valeurs allant dans le sens de la socialisation des individus. Elle s’impose presque partout comme un moyen de valorisation de l’honneur à travers le culte de la bravoure et confère à ses champions de village ou de contrée, un important capital social.21 [Wrestling is above all an activity aimed at, by its very practice, helping people acquire certain values leading to the socialization of individuals. It imposes itself almost everywhere as means to celebrate honor through the cult of bravery and confers to its village or regional champions, an important social capital.]

A number of instances of the notion of unity and collective consciousness as related to traditional wrestling are perceptible in Fall’s novel, as the following example demonstrates: “[c]es combats sont une occasion de nouer ou de sceller des amitiés.”22 [these wrestling contests are an opportunity to bond and seal friendships]. Folk wrestling has been practiced before, during, and after colonization. As opposed to sports and other cultural activities imported during colonization by the French in francophone West Africa, it is a purely local activity which has survived through colonization and even through the drastic campaign of cultural and linguistic assimilation developed by the French in their West-African colonies. The notion of wrestling used as a tool for cultural revival in Niger is similarly emphasized by Djirmey et al. They insist that colonization has changed the Nigerien cultural environment and how little by little, although not without difficulty, the revival of traditional wrestling has become a national priority through the introduction of folk wrestling in school, of wrestling as a national sport, and through the organization of regional tournaments: La situation a prévalu ainsi jusqu’à la colonisation qui a introduit auprès des communautés autochtones des valeurs occidentales souvent éloignées des pratiques culturelles locales. Parmi celles-ci, le sport de performance et sa réglementation internationale ont pénétré les milieux urbains. Les pratiques traditionnelles se sont vues affublées d’une réputation de pratiques non sportives. L’avènement des indépendances, au début des années soixante, a peu modifié

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l’attention portée par les pouvoirs nationaux aux coutumes locales. Ce n’est que peu à peu que les peuples africains ont pris conscience de l’importance de leurs traditions sociales et culturelles. Au Niger, la lutte saisonnière, dont la forme était restée peu différente de celle de la période précoloniale, est ainsi redevenue un enjeu national.23 [The situation has thus prevailed until colonization took place, which has introduced, to indigenous communities, Western values often remote from local cultural practices. Among these values, sports involving performance and international regulations have made their way into the urban areas. The traditional practices have, as a result, come to be perceived as mere traditional practices rather than sports. The advent of independences, at the beginning of the 1960’s, has brought little change to the attention given to local customs by the national states. It is only little by little that Africans became aware of the importance of their social and cultural traditions. In Niger, seasonal wrestling, which has little evolved since the precolonial period, has thus become a national concern.]

The practice of wrestling in West Africa, namely in Senegal, Niger, but also in Cameroon or Nigeria, is undoubtedly one of the traditional activities which today allows for a preservation of some features of West-African cultures as opposed to other areas in Africa where cultural colonization has succeeded to a greater extent. It appears therefore that wrestling and other similar traditional practices which did not disappear with colonization, could act as shields to acculturation in Africa. A very interesting metaphor is used by Fall in her novel in her attempt to depict laamb as an important tool of cultural resistance and revival. Indeed, Nalla’s parents are representative of the cultural alienation of which they are victims. They believe that they are civilized because they espouse Western ideals, while to them wrestlers are savages and brutes. Mr. Niang, Nalla’s teacher, reflects on the type of alienation and acculturation that Nalla’s parents experience and practice through their categorical refusal to allow him to wrestle: Le désordre qui bouleverse le monde a pour cause l’aliénation collective. . . (. . .) L’homme perd ses racines et l’homme sans racines est pareil à un arbre sans racines : il se dessèche et meurt. (. . .) Le refus de Diattou et de Ndiogou, leur obstination à vouloir détourner Nalla des tam-tams, c’est le rejet d’une partie de leurs racines (. . .) C’est cela l’aliénation (. . .) Déséquilibre physique. . . Déséquilibre spirituel. . . Déséquilibre mental. . .24 [The cause of the disorder which disrupts the world is cultural alienation. . . (. . .). The people become uprooted and the uprooted individual is similar to a rootless tree: it dries out and dies. (. . .) Diattou’s and Ndiogou’s refusal, their determination in seeking to turn Nalla away from the tam-tams, is their rejection of a part of their roots. (. . .) That is what alienation is (. . .) Psychological disorder. . . Spiritual disorder. . . Mental disorder. . . .]



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Diattou, Nalla’s mother, is indeed described as having metamorphosed to fit Western ideals. It is the metaphor of Diaminar, as depicted in Fall’s novel that allows us to understand the complexity of colonization and the power of the arena as a tool for cultural revival. The story of Diaminar is told to Nalla by Malaw during one of their numerous encounters. He tells him that his 70-year-old great-grandfather—whose heart, as Malaw describes him, has never in his life experienced fear—refused to either be colonized or pushed to exile to a foreign land. Hence, when the colonizers arrived, he went to see the members of the clan under the palaver tree, and told them that he will not submit: Je m’en vais, dit mon aïeul. Mon oncle a choisi l’exil en des terres étrangères. Vous, vous avez opté pour la soumission. Je n’accepte ni l’un ni l’autre. Je veux vivre libre et mourir dans la terre de mes ancêtres. S’il en est parmi vous qui veulent sauver l’honneur, qu’ils viennent avec moi.25 [I am leaving, exclaims my grandfather. My uncle has chosen exile to foreign lands. You, you have opted for submission. I accept neither one nor the other. I want to live free and die in the land of my ancestors. If there are any among you who wish to save their honor, they shall follow me.]

The old man will therefore lead an expedition to a neighboring land. They will walk for 40 days and 40 nights and arrive at a junction in the middle of three baobabs, which the old man saw in his dream, and he will therefore declare that place their new home Diaminar. But Malaw’s twelve brothers and sisters will leave Diaminar, and their father (the lion-man) will express his deep disappointment, as to him the soul of Diaminar was dying. He believed, as it happened to Nalla’s parents, that the people in the city will disintegrate and suffer cultural and moral alienation and the torments that they would have created. He then will ask Malaw to redeem them by opening an arena in Louga and by organizing wrestling contests. The arena, as it is perceived in L’appel des arènes, becomes indeed a mode of restoration of the traditional soul. Diaminar is revived through the arena built by Malaw in the urban modern environment. Nalla’s father’s soul is equally revived through the arena as he finally, after having spent a day in the arena, understands the power of laamb and of the sabar. Fall allows us to understand the impact of the arena in the modern-day world. She conveys the notion that the traditional rituals and the atmosphere surrounding folk wrestling in present-day West Africa represent a tool of resistance to acculturation. The French equivalent for wrestling that is, lutte [struggle, fight] is representative of the cultural struggle and resistance represented in Fall’s novel.

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Arena as an alternative: “they fight to change their country” Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart insists that wrestling in the traditional era was expressive of courage and social integrity. Today, in a more contemporary setting, wrestlers seek to become role models, to provide for their families and avoid engaging in delinquency or flee to Europe. C. T. Wane et al. indeed affirm: “Très populaire, la lutte avec frappe (. . .) offre une profession à des centaines de jeunes ruraux qui viennent chercher une hypothétique insertion sociale.”26 [very popular, wrestling with strikes (. . .) offers a professional career to hundreds of young men from rural areas who come to the city to look for potential social integration.] Wrestling becomes as well an alternative to the phenomenon of the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea from the West African Atlantic Coast using fishing pirogues to seek better economic conditions in Europe, an experience, which very often leads to tragedy for these young men. The documentary Wrestling in Dakar directed by Edward Porembny demonstrates the passion that the businesswoman and politician Ndeye Ndiaye Tyson has put in promoting wrestling in present-day Dakar. The documentary depicts her struggle to build a new generation of wrestlers and therefore to allow them, as the trailer announces, to “fight to change their country.” We follow what is coined as “the group of five”, that is, five young wrestlers with a passion for wrestling, who stand as role-models in their communities. For instance, the wrestler Mamadou Dia, coaching younger wrestlers declares: “There is nothing easy in life. You have to fight all the time. Even if it’s very difficult you must keep going!” To which one of them responds: “We will train like you, Allah is great!” Again another wrestler addressing the group points out: “I have a brother in France. Several friends emigrated by canoes. But we don’t want to do it, our future is here. Next year one of us will be chosen.” Conclusion As we attempted to show, traditional wrestling in West Africa is a practice that has traveled through time and which carries ancient characteristics embedded into the contemporary world. It is a meaningful practice for every member of West African societies. It is one of the best examples of how tradition and modernity are not mutually exclusive and how they contribute to one another in present-day West Africa. Folk wrestling serves as a mode of reconciliation and peace-building, but also as an expression of cultural and national identities. It aligns sacred and profane dimensions, which undoubtedly represents the current-day West-African way of life. It is an activity



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which creates new opportunities for the younger generations, allowing young men to seek a career at home instead of looking towards Europe for survival. It finally gives them an alternative vision of their own existence in a modern, often widely Westernized society, presenting them as role-models to subsequent generations. Notes 1. All translations to English are my own. 2. Bernard B. Dadié, Légendes et poèmes (Paris: Seghers, 1966), 228–229. 3. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 36. 4. Aboubacar Djirmey, et al. “Lutte et identité culturelle au Niger,” Politique Africaine. Sénégal à l’épreuve, 45.1 (1992), 142. They write: “Les cycles des semailles, des moissons et des transhumances y définissent le calendrier des fêtes. Ces dernières obéissent donc à des normes coutumières portées par la mémoire collective.” [The cycle of sowing, of harvesting and of transhumance define the holidays’ calendar. These holidays respond therefore to cultural norms carried by the collective memory.] They add: “Dans cet espace culturel territorialement circoncis, la lutte était une pratique, liée au rythme de la vie locale, qui s’imposait à tous les membres de la communauté. [In that cultural space which is territorially organized, wrestling was a practice, linked to the rhythm of local life, which imposed itself to all members of the community.] 5. In Cameroon for instance, the Duala perform wrestling contests during the Ngondo, a festival which celebrates the beginning of the fishing season. In the Lebou communities in Senegal, wrestling contests used to take place after an abundant fishing season. The Serer in Senegal celebrated the end of the harvest season with wrestling contests. In some of these areas in the present-day West Africa these celebrations are still taking place yearly. 6. L. Mahaman Sériba. “Traditional Wrestling in Niger: Between state voluntarism and ancestral symbolism,” Tyd Vir Letterkunde. 42. 2 (2005), 21. 7. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 42. 8. Ibid. 9. Aminata Sow Fall, L’appel des arènes (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1982), 14. 10. Ibid., 26. 11. Ibid., 37. 12. Ibid., 71. 13. Cheikh Tidiane Wane et al. “Représentations sociales de la lutte sénégalaise : perspectives d’élaboration de contenu” (eJRIEPS 20 (2010), 109. 14. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 44. 15. Ibid., 46. 16. Ibid., 47. 17. Ibid., 48. 18. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 51.

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19. Fall, L’appel des arènes, 14. 20. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 49. 21. Wane et al. “Représentations sociales de la lutte sénégalaise,” 110. 22. Fall, L’appel des arènes, 43. 23. Djirmey et al., “Lutte et identité culturelle au Niger,” 142–3. 24. Fall, L’appel des arènes, 72–3. 25. Ibid., 76. 26. Wane et al.,“Représentations sociales de la lutte sénégalaise,” 112.

Bibliography Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. L’Appel des arènes [Call of the Arena]. Dir. Cheikh Ndiaye. Perf. Aziz Ndiaye, Ibrahima Mbaye, Moustapha Gueye. Cinema Public Films, 2006. Dadié, Bernard B. Légendes et poèmes. Paris: Seghers, 1966. Djirmey, Aboubacar et al. “Lutte et identité culturelle au Niger.” Politique Africaine. Sénégal à l’épreuve. 45.1 (1992): 142–148. Fall, Aminata Sow. L’appel des arènes. Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1982. Sériba, L. Mahaman. “Traditional Wrestling in Niger: Between State Voluntarism and Ancestral Symbolism.” Tyd Vir Letterkunde. 42. 2 (2005): 18–32. Wane, Cheikh Tidiane et al. “Représentations sociales de la lutte sénégalaise: perspectives d’élaboration de contenu” eJRIEPS 20 (2010): 109–132. Wrestling in Dakar. Dir. Edward Porembny. Les Films du Tambour de Soie, 2012. lutte sénégalaise,” 112.

Chapter 12

Ritual Celebrations Context of the Development of New African “Hybrid” Cultures Jean-Baptiste Sourou

In the last two decades, community ritual celebrations—funerals, weddings, and life transitions—have become more spectacular and very fascinating in many parts of Africa. The celebrations are guided by new ministers who perform beside the traditional. On the one hand, some new structures such as mortuaries, funeral services, and funeral houses are spreading everywhere. On the other, ritual celebrations are managed by specialist event-organizers, masters of ceremonies, orators, musical groups, and many other performers. There is an emergence of new religious cultures.1 The ritual celebrations attract both local people and those who have moved to the towns, and those residing abroad. The musical groups and masters of ceremony are able to invent a new “hybrid” form of traditional songs and discourses, mixing new and old languages and symbols to suit their audience.2 They are skilled in adapting the wording and their performance to local events, personalities, and participants, to incorporate people from all backgrounds. They are able to take in events and problems of the community for humorous comments. They employ participatory methodologies which make those rituals very concrete and highly attractive. These ritual celebrations are a major context for developing a new “hybrid” African culture. The Great Creativity of the Organizers To demonstrate what I am writing about I have selected two examples: one from a funeral site and the other from a traditional wedding ceremony.

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Funerals With a Brass Band Brass bands have become very important during funerals these days in countries such as Benin Republic, Togo, and Ghana. At a funeral site in Benin, among the Fon ethnic group, a brass band came with the hearse from the mortuary, and one or two kilometers before arriving at the place for the exposure, it began playing hybrid mixture tunes. Local or traditional mourning songs called Zankpahoun and Avi Zenli were played using Catholic Church tunes, and vice versa. In the first case, words are borrowed from Zankpahoun and tunes are modern; in the latter the words are taken from well-known religious songs and the tunes are traditional. In both cases, some “hybrid songs” were invented on the spur of the moment.3 The performance was so moving; the atmosphere solemn, some danced; many people came out to watch; passersby stopped too. At the funeral site, the band moved from group to group, playing familiar funeral tunes that were a sequence of traditional Fon mourning songs and church songs: hymns in French, English, Latin, and local languages accompanied by Western instruments. There was harmony and strong identity between the musicians and the audience. Their performance was personalized and this made those mentioned shed tears of sadness, which encouraged them, as a result, to give more money to the performers. Wedding With a Cultural Group Traditional wedding ceremonies in Cotonou are fascinating from the beginning to the end. Even though the ceremonies take a long time, the interest of those present is sustained throughout. Masters of ceremony knew, for example, which kind of transitions or slogans to use to make the ceremony more exciting. They could be in local or in western languages. For example, at a wedding, one of the singers made effortless transitions from Fon, other local languages such as Mina, Gun, Yoruba, as well as French and English. Moreover, they staged the engagement of the couple and of their families through music, gestures, and dance and through the use of modern gadgets like mobile phones. For instance, to dramatize how the husband loves his wife, one of the organizers, using a mobile phone, pretended to be the man calling the wife and he at the same time explained to the audience what the two were talking about; the audience was really amused. They created some songs suddenly, combining modern love songs within local traditional tunes. The place of the husband, the role of the wife, the importance of children, and the fidelity of the couple were captured through a sequence of traditional, local, and church songs and dance.



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On the other hand, the use of contemporary symbols such as imported drinks at the celebration of traditional weddings is increasingly becoming common: Dry gin or Rhum is used instead of the local spirit called Sodabi, because these are more expensive than the latter. The more money you spend for the dowry, the more you demonstrate that you love your wife. Martini is an imported sweet beverage: it means that there is sweetness between the lovers. Dubonnet called also in Fon language “asedekon”—no mouse dares to approach what the cat guards or no mouse can take something from the cat’s hands.4

Rituals and “Hybrid” Cultures I will explain the emergence of these “hybrid cultures” using two considerations. Social and Economic Changes Influence Ritual Celebrations The emergence of new religious cultures is due to the socioeconomic changes on the African continent. In the past, when someone died in the village, they buried him within one or two days. Certain social rules were followed, for example, the participation of all his children, relatives, and members of his clan. All of them had to attend and participate actively because it was an important moment for the whole clan. For the Fon, for example, funerals are the gateway to a new life. Kossou considers them “ceremonies of initiation,” necessary for partaking in the ancestors’ world. He argues: “Without these ceremonies, the dead will not have any stability, any personal place in the other world. The particular status of the dead is due to the funerals the alive do for it.”5 Among the Fon, when you attend the funerals of the dead you help a member of your clan to enter into the new life, which one is expected to access when one dies. The Fon believe also that the dead protect and reward those who take care of them. They, in compensation, facilitate the prosperity of the living. On the other hand, they punish those who ignore them through infertility and sometimes through violent or unexpected deaths.6 That is why the Fon people participate actively in funeral ceremonies.7 In the past, it was easy for all the children, relatives, and masters of ceremonies to attend the funerals of their family members because most of the people used to live in the same

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space. But today, it is becoming difficult, because some members of the family, close relatives, and friends who are expected to attend these ceremonies live abroad or far away.8 Moreover it is expensive to organize these kinds of ceremonies, because the ministers and the tradition request some inputs that are expensive. In addition, people are never ready to face funerals’ challenges in Africa. It is almost prohibited to plan funerals before death occurs. If you do so, people interpret that you are planning the departure of your relative or parent. It is an offence to plan funerals previously. You think about funerals only when the tragic event happens. The bereaved also usually want to welcome their friends and so they will want to raise enough money to cater for them. This means that the period for burial is extended and that is why mortuaries are becoming important and increasing in Benin and beyond. Nowadays, since the tradition is changing the dead must be kept in mortuaries until the funeral, so the question of how to bring the deceased back home from the mortuary and to the funeral site has emerged. “Should we bring him back home without honor as if he were an animal, or should he be brought back with respect and honor?”9 People find that the brass band is the solution to fill a void, thus the emergence of hybrid music to suit the tastes of the audience. It fills the gap created in the traditional funeral structure by contemporary social conditions. Mr. Hountondji, the father of the brass band for funeral purposes, says: The mixture of traditional funeral music with western instruments gives a special pleasure to the audience. You see, people like that we bring the snare drum, cymbals, trumpet and saxophone in playing traditional mourning songs. We walk with the bereaved. This gives honor to the dead. Fanfare gives some importance to the funerals. One of the characteristics of the brass band is to gather people. It attracts crowds: the whole village and everyone knows what is happening, even those who are far. It is also the last tribute we give to the deceased. . . . Our concept is this: the dead will never rise again. . . . For us, this style is like to say to the dead: “bon voyage”, as we say to someone who starts a journey.10

Strength of Identity, Transmission of Common and Social Values Rituals have certain social functions.11 Far from being only a question of adaptation to the contemporary socioeconomic changes in Africa, the new modes people use today to celebrate rituals, are also due to a search for identity among the contemporary context’s cultural challenges. Generally, Africans lay emphasis on the importance of belonging to the clan and family, hence the esteem, for example, of funerals and weddings. In West Africa,



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city dwellers commonly go back to their villages to celebrate those rituals they believe important for their identity. Africans have to maintain all the values which are part of their identity. But how can they manage their own identity among social and economic, political and cultural changes? This is the nucleus of these new forms of ritual celebrations in contemporary Africa. People know that they have to participate in ceremonies, as moments of showing their membership within their family and their clan. A significant portion of the African population is made up of youth. There are many young people who do not understand, clearly, the full meaning of these celebrations. The role of the new “ministers” such as musicians, singers, and fanfare bands, is to try to make known and understandable rituals of the community through a language with which the young are familiar. This is one of the reasons why they take music from every part of the world to explain to all the participants what they are celebrating. Taking songs from every sector (Fon, Christian, French, English, Latin), musicians try an interpretation and a negotiation of the expectations of the participants through their skills without changing the original meaning of the rites.12 They respect the order, the steps and the ingredients of the rituals, but they also explain what is happening through dance, gesture, music and mime. Then, when they find that the rich repertoire of the local funeral songs cannot satisfy the audience, they feel completely free to pick from hymns, from the French, English, and other local languages. That forms hybrid cultures. In that way, everybody can understand what is happening. The ritual context is a free context: “ludic” time.13 This is the reason why rituals are moments of great emotional exploration. Musicians know that very well. Rituals are important, but when there is a good performance, the participation becomes more effective; people understand better what is happening. That is also why people I described above at a funeral were crying, because the performance of the brass band or the local musicians helps them to enter deeply into the celebration and this gives meaning to their lives. To reach this important goal, the new ministers and especially performers have to be aware of the needs of the contemporary audience which lives in a “hybrid” context, which is no longer only traditional. People are fascinated by the innovations because they understand better the meaning, the importance of the celebrations. Without changing the original meaning of the rites, the innovators make them spectacular, actual, real, and deeply shared. Final Considerations In this chapter I demonstrate how and why ritual celebrations are the context of the development of new African hybrid cultures. According to my

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fieldwork, the new ministers, especially the performers are not manipulating the past to legitimate the present. First of all, there is a need to bring the tradition which is the base of Africans’ identity to the present and the contemporary context. How can we celebrate our values today or how should Africans appropriate their traditions? That is the question these hybrid celebrations are trying to find answers to. Without the musical combinations and the use of new symbols, our funeral and wedding traditions would be lifeless, senseless, and boring for the young generations. But bringing them into the contemporary context involves the attention of the participants and explains to them what they should know about traditions. The performers do not change the original meaning of the rites, but their innovations make them memorable. Performers bridge the old times and the contemporary context. Notes 1. Jean-Baptiste Sourou, “L’émergence de nouvelles cultures religieuses: rites, musique et danse. Une étude auprès des Fon du Bénin.” PhD diss. Rome: The Gregorian University, 2007. See also Jean-Baptiste Sourou, Afrique: Rites antiques célébrations modernes. Comment les Africains célèbrent leurs rites aujourd’hui (Paris: Menaibuc, 2010). 2. I am currently working on a new book which concerns music and dance in African contemporary ritual celebrations. The publication describes the new ritual contexts. It systematizes the identity of the different categories of performers and the way each of them use music and especially the techniques they use to create those new and hybrid performances people take delight in attending during ritual celebrations. 3. Hountondji, the inventor of the funeral brass band says: “Zankpahoun’s main content is about the life of the deceased; what he did, the status of his children, his suffering, the care he received from his children. We also talk about the history of his paternal and maternal family; the pain of the void created by his death . . . . I translate all these things in modern music, Gregorian: that is to say, do re mi fa sol la ti do. So it is a universal language. I prefer to translate Fon songs into the universal language of music. I choose to combine Zankpahoun with modern music. I use also the style of Hanyé: these hymns are beautiful songs to praise God. Therefore, I also use religious songs.” Quoted in Sourou, Afrique: Rites antiques célébrations modernes, 97. 4. The groom is telling to the bride that nothing or nobody can break their love; it is protected and kept. 5. Basile Toussaint Kossou, Sè et Gbè: Dynamique de l’existence chez les Fon (Paris: La Pensée Universelle, 1983), 272–273. 6. Jean-Marie Agossou, Gbèto et Gbèdoto, L’homme et le Dieu Créateur, selon les sud-Dahoméens (Paris: Institut Catholique de Paris, 1971), 112–113. 7. Jean-Baptiste Sourou, Afrique: Rites antiques célébrations modernes. 8. Ibid., 175–176.



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9. Kossou argues in Sè et Gbè: Dynamique de l’existence chez les Fon: “The numinous characteristic of the deceased, who constantly oscillate between the human and the divine gives a religious and sacred characteristic to funerals.” 10. Quoted in Jean-Baptiste Sourou, Afrique: Rites antiques célébrations modernes. Comment les Africains célèbrent leurs rites aujourd’hui. (Paris: Menaibuc, 2010), 97. 11. Rituals fix and reinforce the shared values and beliefs of a human community. Rituals generate a sense of certainty and familiarity. They reinforce the personal sense of belonging to a community. They provide continuity and unity among the participants/members. They also play a moral pedagogic role. See Jean-Baptiste Sourou, “African Traditional Religion in the New World of the Media: Contemporary Celebrations of Rituals Among the Fon in Benin,” paper submitted to the Journal of Religion in Africa. There is a wide range of literature about marriage and funerals in Africa that shows the importance of participating in them: See S. John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1969); N. Martin Nkafu, African Vitalogy. A Step Forward in African Thinking (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1999); René Luneau and Vincent Thomas, La terre africaine et ses religions (Paris: Librairie Larousse 1975), Kossou, Sè et Gbè, Agossou Gbèto et Gbèdoto; Sourou, Comment être africain et chrétien? Essai sur l’inculturation du mariage en Afrique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009). 12. See Herbert Blumer, Symbolic interactionism, perspective and method (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969 and Garfinkel 1967) and Harold Garfinkel, What is Ethnomethodology? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 13. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Paj Publications, 1992), 61–66.

Bibliography Agossou, Jean-Marie. Gbèto et Gbèdoto, L’homme et le Dieu Créateur, selon les sudDahoméens. Paris: Institut Catholique de Paris, 1971. Bender, Wolfgang. Sweet Mother Modern African Music. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Blumer, Herbert. Symbolic interactionism, perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969. Garfinkel, Harold. What is Ethnomethodology? Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Kaemmer, E. John. Music in Human Life. Anthropological Perspectives on Music. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1993. Kossou, Basile Toussaint. Sè et Gbè: Dynamique de l’existence chez les Fon. Paris: La Pensée Universelle, 1983. Luneau, Réné and Vincent Thomas. La terre africaine et ses religions. Paris: Librairie Larousse 1975. Mbiti, S. John. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1969.

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———. Introduction to African Religion. Nairobi: East African Educational Publisher Ltd, 1996. Nkafu, N. Martin. (1997). African Vitalogy. A Step Forward in African Thinking. Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1999. Nketia, J.H. Kwabena. The Creative Potential of African Art Music in Ghana: A Personal Testimony. Accra: Afram, 2005. ———. The Music of Africa. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974. Nukunya, Godwin Kwaku. Tradition and Change in Ghana, An Introduction to Sociology. Accra: Ghana University Press, 2003. Olupona K. Jacob. African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society. St Paul (MN): Paragon House, 1991. Sourou, Jean-Baptiste. “Music, Dance in Urban Popular Culture in Africa: The Role and Nature of Music in Embodying New Symbolic Forms.” This is the title of my recent fieldwork in Ghana, Togo and Benin, 2012. ———. “African Traditional Religion in the New World of the Media: Contemporary Celebrations of Rituals Among the Fon in Benin.” Paper submitted to the Journal for Religion in Africa. ———. Afrique: Rites antiques célébrations modernes. Comment les Africains célèbrent leurs rites aujourd’hui. Paris: Menaibuc, 2010. ———. Comment être africain et chrétien? Essai sur l’inculturation du mariage en Afrique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. ———. “L’émergence de nouvelles cultures religieuses: rites, musique et danse. Une étude auprès des Fon du Bénin.” PhD diss. Rome: The Gregorian University, 2007. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PajPublications, 1992. Waterman, A. Christopher. Jùjú: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Chapter 13

Simmering Exile Edwige Sylvestre-Ceide

A Family Recipe to Remember and to Write. . . In 2008, the urge to try a family recipe inspired me to begin a collection of recipes from my family, and eventually led me to envision “Les cinq filles du Père Loriès1 [the five daughters of father Loriès], a family memoir with a focus on Haitian exiles. The memoir would track the history of five women,2 in order to understand what first motivated them to leave their country, and would analyse what is left of their original culture as they built their lives abroad. In 2011, I wrote “Du Crémas à l’idée” [from crémas to the idea] as the foreword of this personal project.3 It was written as an essay on the social and cultural impacts of immigration and on how important it is for immigrants to use the practice of transmission to better understand their own crossculture heritage. “Du Crémas à l’idée” helped me understand that what I was actually doing as I was collecting and writing down my family recipes was creating my family memoir. This project, consequently, is strictly a personal one and is not affiliated with any academic program. After going on several trips specifically for the sake of my project (to Cuba in 2012 and to New York in 2013) and attending several immigration seminars with the Université Populaire de Paris 14e, the project evolved and the cooking aspect became its main backdrop. While inquiring about my mother’s and her sisters’ departures from Haiti, I noticed how they had been planned for a long time (ever since they were young girls) and yet somehow uncertain, hazardous. Most of them left bringing their memories as their most precious luggage. My goal is not to find my family roots but to discover how these women, from the same family, reached their host country and managed to produce a singular identity for their children. What did they take with them when they 169

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left their homeland? It is primarily this journey, through their art of cooking that will comprise the family album called “Les cinq filles du Père Loriès.” In my essay “Du Crémas à l’idée” I explained how the compilation of a family cookbook led me to write a family memoir, however, the current essay is a reflection on how cooking can be the guiding principle of exile as it is a recurrent and relevant aspect in their lives. Exile Tastes Like Nostalgia Two years after beginning the project it was still difficult for me to understand what to do with the mass of precious information I had gathered. I first felt pride and relief with the idea that I was “saving” my family’s recipes. But then I experienced fear and doubt as it was not only about recipes. In essence, interviewing my mother, her sisters, and my family members about exceptional Haitian culinary styles necessarily meant that I was delving into their past, their intimate story about their “exodus,” which is still painful years later. It is important to understand that it is not as if something ceased to exist in these women’s past. They did not forget their childhood, their relationships with friends and family who remained in Haiti, or who migrated elsewhere. They surprisingly managed to keep something from that time, “back then.” It is as if there is no rupture with that past that they cherish and keep alive, all through the years, thousands of kilometers away. Perhaps it is their ability to remain immerged in Haitian folklore, while living in the host country, which allows them to protect their bridges to the past. The importance of migration is too often minimized at the expense of migrants whose skills and individuality are barely acknowledged. The reality is that immigration is often regarded as a constraint or a threat. Economists and politicians in the host countries often manipulate the statistics on immigration, thereby furthering misunderstandings and promoting xenophobia. As objects of discrimination and negative stereotypes, one is led to believe that immigrants only pose problems and do not provide any benefit to states. For that reason it is not uncommon for the immigrant to suffer from several forms of humiliation. In such cases, the immigrant is not even recognized as a citizen. The situation is even more difficult for undocumented immigrants. In France, there are as many derogatory names for immigrants: clandestin, sans-papiers, réfugié, immigré, débarqué, blédard, etc.4 as there are various administrative documents to repress the immigrant: sauf-conduit, récépissé, carte de séjour, etc.5 Unless this newcomer officially receives a government document that puts him into a category (the law), he will be considered as “illegal” by the state in question. Indeed, the law has the power to make an



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individual “absent” or “unidentified.”� Yet in many instances, it is the transgression that identifies someone, that confers humanity to the immigrant. For instance, in France, the “sans-papiers” [the undocumented] whose meetings and protest marches are aimed at gaining recognition in the workplace, housing, etc., make them more visible in a society that otherwise ignores them. Even though they take the risk of being deported, those men and women try to exist by being socially active, by rejecting the status of “phantoms” (invisible to the society) that is imposed upon them. They prefer to be the visible, that is, individuals with an identity. For some immigrants, the status of “refugee” or “stateless” sticks to them for life. They remain excluded from legal administrative existence and consequently have no rights to speak of. Those who are lucky enough to have their situation resolved (after the residency or naturalization process)—which in general happens after long years of administrative burden—still have to face daily pressing issues. Permanent traces remain on their government-issued identification document. For example, in France their place of birth will be forever checked in box “99,” meaning “abroad.” Furthermore, other external markers of difference may remain: clothing, sociocultural background, language, accent, or lifestyle (customs, religion, etc.). From the immigrant’s point of view immigration is a completely different concept. Their arrival and settlement in the new country is experienced as a sort of rupture from the former state and the former condition. It can be quite alienating. Even when the immigrant has willfully chosen to leave his country, he is exposed to new difficulties. In order not to be overwhelmed by the new culture and not to become homesick and depressed, he has to find alternatives in order to live and become an “ordinary” citizen. Thus, every day becomes a struggle because he has to find his way out of an “illegal” or precarious status and find a job (sometimes far different from what he used to do in his country) in order to recreate his world and his habits. That said, I would like to stress the fact that distance might not only be about wandering and losing oneself. For the women of my family, it would be easy to demonstrate that being an adult abroad has been a triumph of self-assertion, self-confidence, inventiveness, and tenacity. Those assets were indeed later shared with their children and with the newcomers that arrived long after them in the host country. This astonishing strength likely comes from having never repressed nor denied their past, nor their ethnicity, nor their social origin. They always keep remembering. To remember means to shorten the time and geographic distance between the host country and the native country. I believe that they survived their new condition as immigrants because their exile was solidly rooted in their nostalgia for their home country, therefore continuing the dream of returning to the home country.

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It is true that it may be fragile to never connect with the reality of the “here and now,” especially when the thin thread stretched between the departure time and the hope of returning has been damaged through years of asylum. I suppose that nostalgia works as a form of resistance to this new life that they have embraced. Among the women that I chose to write about, I noticed that their cultural resistance is anchored in two immaterial elements for which they continuously tried to find equivalents in terms of sense and in terms of ingredients: language and cooking. Vocal Letters to “Write” in Creole My family members left Haiti with barely any tangible souvenir of their past not withstanding their passports. They had photos of their loved ones but not of the landscape, the places they loved, or their houses. The only memory they kept of Haiti was in their heart. They wanted a new life, but that did not mean that they would forget their island. Perhaps they thought that they could retrieve fragments of their homeland through the Haitian people who were already there, in the new country? Or did they think that it was not necessary because they represent Haitian culture anyway? They are Haitian just by speaking Haitian Creole. I am not sure how much language preservation or denial is linked to the effort of integration to or assimilation of a new culture. But I know for a fact that, for the immigrant, speaking the language of the host country is mandatory; at the same time he fears making mistakes, which would cast him out as “the one who is not from here.” And yet, by remaining silent he exposes himself to isolation, absence. For my mother and her sisters, their only mother tongue is Haitian Creole. They learned French in school, back in their village of La Colline7 and they used it to speak “in society.” The same goes for the English language with my aunt who migrated to New York, she uses it with her children or with strangers outside the home. They have been navigating in this manner for more than thirty years—between their mother tongue, Haitian Creole, and the other’s language (French or English). Exile forces one to remain on the edge of the language permanently. Regrettably, it is not commonly envisioned as a remarkable cultural bridge but, on the contrary, as a type of “dead-end” in which the immigrant is only recognized as a minority. Sometimes we forget how much the immigrants who live in big cities are inhabited by multiple languages: theirs, that of the host country and that of the other immigrants. On a daily basis, “in society,” in order to “exist,” he must overcome this linguistic medley, and avoid linguistic mistakes and misunderstanding. Despite having an accent, speaking



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poor French or poor English is better than not speaking at all. It is of considerable importance for making progress and climbing the social ladder. Therein lie the strength, the fight for identity, whereas silence is by default the way to social exclusion. Furthermore, the Haitian Creole spoken by my mother and her sisters has itself become a Creole “made in immigration,” with the introduction of new words derived from French or English (jargon, slang, and regional specificities of the host country). Despite the advent of the internet and satellite television in our lives—which allows us to watch Haitian TV series or news, to chat with friends and family members scattered around the world—those women have lost the use of the “genuine” Haitian Creole that continues to evolve without them on the island. In that respect, many Haitians of the diaspora tell how when they go back to Haiti on vacation they are immediately recognized as “Diaspora” just by speaking their “marinated” Creole. This shift from one language to another introduces a new twist, not in terms of identity but in terms of intercultural aspects. Yet it has always been surprising to me how my mother and aunts were able to keep strong relationships with our family members who were away from us. I remember that they used to receive photos, “By Air” letters, brown envelopes wrapped in meters of brown adhesive tape. They could write in French but not in Creole, especially due to the oral aspects of that language. On some occasions, they would go to the nearest telephone booth, five blocks away to make a quick phone call to Haiti. My mother sometimes took me with her so that I could say “hello” to the remote family member I did not know. But that sort of communication was not enough. There was a time, in the 70s up until the 90s, when life in Haiti was heard on the radio. It was a time when 60 or 90-minute tapes were sent from Haiti to reach us in France or elsewhere, after being passed from hand to hand. It was a great event to receive one of the tapes, that we called cassettes and which we listened to during the weekend. Other members of the family were invited to listen to the message from the homeland. One or several people were the “author” (meaning the speaker) of the tape. The author would start his message with greetings, asking news of the family, then he would give news of himself and of the village, and would end by asking for financial assistance or other things. I remember that it was also a means of reminding women how to prepare certain recipes. Usually along with the tape, we would receive some commissions: products from Haiti such as bottles of Crémas, coconut or peanut tablettes [caramel sweets], spices, medicinal herbs, Haitian coffee, or cocoa. If the speaker had heard previously that somebody was sick (by the time we received the tape, the sick person was already healed), he would give some good tips on how to make the typical Haitian bouillon hardier or recommend a beetroot-based tonic juice against

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anemia. When my grandfather sent us his tape, we could hear the life of the court yard of his house in La Colline in the background: chickens, turkeys, pigs, probably living their last hours before becoming the special meat for the next dish of griot [fried meat with rice, plantains, and vegetables]. It was easier to speak with the cassettes (the telephone fees for Haiti back then were expensive) and a simple letter, more intimate, more suitable for two separated lovers, was not enough to expose such a long message, to explain more or less a recipe. The cassettes were certainly the best media for the whole family to keep the strongest link with the home country insofar as they included the voice of Haiti. It seems to me that there is no rupture in language. It is not a barrier as we may think of it sometimes. The same goes for those women. On the one hand, they “are” the Haitian Creole I grew up with and, on the other hand, they are immersed in the French or English language, which is their children’s mother tongue. It is a large flow of words, of all tides; and yet there is a strange sensation in the transition from one language to another. I feel it myself when I am writing these words in English, which is not my mother tongue, but a working tool. As immigrants, they too manage different languages for different purposes: domestic, social, family, TV, telephone, etc. However, there is no need to say, for example, that the language they mainly use for cooking is Haitian Creole. Roots in Sauce The women call themselves “children of the earth.” They were raised on a vast agricultural property owned and worked on by their parents for years. The land would bear fruits (mango, coconut, etc.), starches (rice, different types of millet, corn, etc.), vegetables, roots (yams, cassava, etc.), and other foodstuff abundantly. It was a nourishing earth that taught them the sense of real cooking, nutrition, and sharing. Despite the distance from their homeland, they kept this habit. For this reason, they cannot trust any food made by other hands: restaurant food, fast food, or ready-to-eat food bought at the supermarket. This relationship with food made it so when I used to watch certain cooking shows on TV, I was surprised by the small portions of socalled organic food made for one or two people (at home my mother would cook for a whole regiment). Even the presentation was different from what I was accustomed to, they always had carefully measured ingredients, the plates were drizzled with balsamic vinegar for decoration, and lettuce leaves were used as a bed for slices of ham. In French restaurants, each dish has a “gourmet” title to highlight each ingredient of the chef’s special. It is an art de vivre.



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For the women of my family, cooking is not a matter of pleasure. It is a necessity. They cook to eat, to gain strength, to recover from disease. The plates are full and there should be no leftovers. It should be honored. To them, cooking is not a hobby, but a ritual similar to an act of love and of hospitality toward the family, the visitor.8 There is always a plate ready for the unexpected guest. By extension, they are always proud to share their cooking with strangers—something they certainly do master. Actually, cooking gives them the opportunity to enhance their talent and know-how, and to “write” their own story. The women go on several errands to several places to get the ingredients that comprise Haitian meals. It is unconceivable to get the cassava, the yams, the calalou [okra], cornmeal, ginger, etc. at the supermarket. No equivalent is found in such a place, or maybe at premium prices. The first place to go for the root-eaters is the grocery store with exotic products. That is where my mother and aunts can be fully supplied with yellow or green plantains, yams, and fruit à pain [bread fruit] that they can cook with cod. It is there that they will purchase part of the original ingredients used to prepare the famous New Year’s Haitian soup that graces every Haitian’s table (from here to there) on January 1. The soup is essentially a broth made with potatoes, vegetables, giromon [variety of pumpkin], and pieces of beef. How can one not start the year without strength after eating the soup? Working on my family’s recipes has shown me that cooking is a key to cultural crossroads. Within it one can find all elements of Haitian culture: history, geography, music, proverbs, religious rituals, tales, mythologies, etc. It is simply a pretext to talk about every family subject and to achieve a complete memoir. Each recipe is unique in its preparation and may be reinvented each time. Thus, in a foreign country the recipes become a challenge to carry out. The lack of certain ingredients and the replacement by local equivalents inspires creativity, and changes slightly or drastically the recipe. Conversely, some Western or Asian recipes have been adopted and modified to my family’s tastes thereby becoming totally different from the original version (pasta, pizza, mashed potatoes and French fries, semolina rearranged for an atypical couscous with Haitian style vegetables), except on Sundays when Haitian homemade food prevails. In this manner, cooking gives depth to the phenomenon of migration by creating a relationship between the homeland and the host country, as well as between other cultural heritages. When I used to bring my lunch box to school or to my nanny’s (a French lady), I wanted to hide so that I could eat in peace what my mother had prepared for me. I thought that if I was seen, I would be exposed to a full cross-examination. Showing that I was eating something out of the ordinary, was like revealing my inner self. Not only did this riz sauce pois not look like

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French cooking—the mix of the two starches (in this case rice and a puree of red beans) is unknown, not to mention the two varieties of meat that may accompany this dish and the extra tomato sauce on top—but the name of the dish itself was not even translatable for me. It could only exist in Creole: Di ri ak sauce pwa, which I would not pronounce since I was prevented from speaking Creole. This rice with red beans recipe could not be translated in French by riz en sauce de pois rouge [rice in red bean sauce]. Of course, I changed my attitude as I grew up. Today, I would be very proud to be able to successfully cook Di ri ak sauce pwa and serve it to my friends and family. Haitian home cooking is of great importance to me, as much as the beverages that go with the food: Crémas, liqueur, corossol juice [soursop juice], etc. The time spent and the effort put into the confection of the dishes are what is significant. The peas, the beans, the fish, the meat are always prepared or marinated a day before the cooking. The gestures and the attention used command respect, especially when they are perpetuated far away from the homeland, many years after one’s departure. For me the only way to save this immaterial heritage is to write down the words that go with it. When I asked my mother for the first time for the recipe of the Crémas, a Haitian coconut punch made with coconut, milk, and other ingredients, it was not only to retrieve the taste of a vague flavor back when somebody coming from Haiti would bring it as a gift—a bottle of Crémas along with news of the faraway island in a 60-minute tape—but mainly because I needed to reclaim part of my family’s identity. I was searching for the delight of Crémas that one fateful evening, but I should I have known that making a family recipe is like delving into a family memoir. The first try failed indubitably. I was thinking too much like a Westerner wanting to get the exact measurements, the right proportions while it is something like exile; it is difficult to share in detail all at once. I knew that I might take the risk of losing forever the savour of the Crémas as well as many other Haitian good cooking, riz sauce pois, griot, pikliz [spicy pickles], Haitian patés [doughnuts filled with cod, meat, or vegetables], etc. if I did not try to go back into the past to understand my family’s journey. It had never occurred to me that I could one day think of cooking as an act of resistance and of resilience to better live the present day.9 The Fragrance of a Return The idea of returning to the home country is as much of an abstract concept as the term exile. As I work on my project, I notice how difficult it is in fact to truly “arrive somewhere.” When we get to the host country, we are confronted with a language, the peculiar bureaucratic vocabulary. So it must be



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the difficulty of arriving, of being elsewhere that forces an immigrant to think continuously about the idea of returning to the homeland. Since writing the essay “Du Crémas à l’idée,” I have gone on several trips, directly linked to this project, to undertake research. For example, in 2012, I went to Cuba, where my grandfather migrated during his youth; and in 2013, I went to New York, where one of my mother’s sisters has lived for more than thirty-five years. During those trips, I interviewed my family and did research in the public libraries (Santa Clara, Santiago, New York). I discovered that my grandfather had left Haiti temporarily at some point in his life to work in the sugarcane fields, probably in Camagüey, Cuba, at a time when the American United Fruit Company was economically active on the island. He cut sugarcane that was destined to be transformed into plain sugar and rum and to be used in cocktails, and delicious desserts that he probably had no access to. Other paths and trajectories still need to be defined in the course of my family memoir. If I had to go to every place where my family migrated, I would need to carry out research in the Dominican Republic, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Canada, and of course undertake an intensive investigation of my own host country (France) and of the one where I was born (Haiti). My project also has me travelling through my memories. I remember my first days at the international French airport Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle, where I worked as a young ad hoc interpreter.10 The border police, for most of the missions, was the main client of the office I worked for, so it was hard to spot profiles that reminded me of my family amongst the people in the waiting zone. However, I did ask myself questions like: What did those “potential” immigrants bring with them as luggage? Did they have recipes to share? How many struggles will they have to go through before they can start the transmission process? Between the departure and the arrival, there is the path, which is fraught with many challenging experiences. Experiences that we usually forget when we ask somebody “where do you come from?” The question should be “How did you get here?” A story was repeating itself in front of me and it made me understand that it should not be unspoken anymore. The idea of delving into this subject was risky11 but thrilling. Today it feels very strange to think that I studied translation and worked for a short while with migrants. After leaving Roissy in 2006, I realized how much, after all those years, I felt like a migrant12 mainly because I longed to go back to Haiti, which I miss dearly (I went only once, in 1997). I join, therefore, my voice to my parents’ and my aunts’ in the dream of returning to the homeland. Today, I know that this return, as virtual as it may be, can only happen with the idea of transmission. And I also now know that sometimes I just might find the answer in my plate of Haitian food.

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Notes 1. “Les cinq filles du Père Loriès” is a temporary title as the writing project is still in progress. All translations in this essay are my own. Special thanks to my friend Charlotte Wiener for her wonderful job in proofreading this text. 2. My maternal grandparents’ daughters: my mother and her four sisters who left Haiti in the 1970s and 1980s and now live in France and the US. 3. Edwige Ceide, “Du Crémas à l’idée,” in Écritures en migration: Histoires d’écrits, Histoires d’exils, ed. by Delphine Leroy (forthcoming Narr, Germany). 4. Suggested translation: illegal, undocumented (used with no substantive), refugee, immigrant, disembarked, blédard (from the Arabic word bled—linked with the French colonial period. Now it is largely used as a synonym for “from migrant backgrounds”). 5. A series of protocol documents. 6. Hannah Arendt, « La Désobéissance civile, » in Du Mensonge à la violence: Essais de politique contemporaine (Paris: Presses Pocket, coll. “Agora”, n° 37, 2002), 53–100. 7. Province of Aquin, southern Haiti. 8. See Como agua para chocolate [like water for chocolate], ed. Laura Esquivel (New York: Anchor Books, 1992) where we learn how cooking (Mexican food style) can be the most effective means of communication between two lovers. 9. Elsie Herberstein and Anne Georget, Les carnets de Minna [Minna’s cook book] (Paris: Seuil, 2008), where a sixty-seven year old woman, Minna Pächter, deported to the Jewish camp Terezin in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War, decides to resist the planned extermination along with her inmates by taking refuge in the remembrances of their past lives and of the good recipes which used to brighten their homes. 10. It was my first real position after graduation. 11. I am still unsure when I will finish this family album. 12. I was born in Port-au-Prince and brought to France at the age of two.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. « La Désobéissance civile, » in Du Mensonge à la violence: Essais de politique contemporaine. Paris: Presses Pocket, coll. “Agora”, n° 37 (2002): 53–100. Ceide, Edwige. “Du Crémas à l’idée,” in Écritures en migration: Histoires d’écrits, Histoires d’exils. Ed. Delphine Leroy (forthcoming Narr, Germany). Herberstein, Elsie and Anne Georget. Les carnets de Minna. Paris: Seuil, 2008.

Part IV

Language, Literacy, and Education

Chapter 14

Writing, Learning, and Teaching Material for Early Childhood Cultures From Africa to a Global Context Rokhaya Fall Diawara It is a great honour for me to join you in this conference on “Writing Through the Visual/Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean.” This is an important occasion for a collective reflection on what lessons could be drawn from the global to the regional, from a sectoral to a multisectoral approach, from an initiative to a policy, all with a unique objective: building a harmonious knowledge society. Today, the world is changing rapidly and learning to understand it requires greater pragmatism in terms of areas of knowledge. In my presentation, I will draw from three perspectives that are mutually inclusive in responding to managing education and human development. This will largely be taken from opportunities through education in calling for paradigm shifts through early child development and family literacy. I will share some practical information and interventions in the African context and will conclude with a presentation of one of our initiatives that we are very proud of: “Bouba and Zaza—Early Childhood Cultures.” In reference to the Human Development Report (2011) Africa is quoted as a continent which has recorded steady economic growth despite the financial crisis.1 This conference is an opportunity to share where Africa is at the count down to 2015, the targeted date for Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the lingering and new challenges it faces in trying to be responsive to the needs of children, youth, and adults. Most countries in Africa have not been able to significantly achieve neither the EFA nor the MDG targets. In my view perhaps there is a need to examine the role that the integrated lifelong learning approach plays in achieving EFA and MDGs and the creation of healthy learning societies. The shift that African governments need to make is to put higher investments in Early Childhood Development (ECD) and family literacy. 181

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A good start in life is well known to be one of the main determinants for childhood survival, early grade reading for later success in school and beyond. The paradigm shift will have to seriously embrace the important approach of intergenerational learning for effective human development, learning outcomes and success in life to end the vicious cycle of intergeneration poverty. Educational issues will be addressed from a life-cycle perspective which spans the period from the womb and cradle through to the grave. The question though is how feasible could this be. African education systems continue to face many serious challenges associated with curricula, teachers, teaching and learning, financing, and systemic capacity which ultimately affect learning outcomes of the children, thus posing many difficulties in making the link between increased investments in education and high economic rates of return. In many countries of Africa the command of language and its effective usage in communication has become a major issue as a result of political preferences for the usage of a colonial language as the language of instruction at most, if not all, levels of learning. At the same time, the value of basic learning in the mother tongue has come to be widely recognized. There is also increasing evidence that, while the choice of the medium of instruction is a major factor affecting learning in schools, a highly relevant additional factor is the extent to which and how the chosen language is used in class. The prevailing teacher-centered pedagogical practices used in African education result in learners getting little chance to raise questions, express their views, and engage in dialogue with their teachers or each other. Proficiency in language facilitates the acquisition of literacy. Thus, when the language of instruction is not the mother tongue literacy tends to be the first casualty. But also in the case of literacy it appears that poor teaching methods exacerbate children’s problems with learning how to read and write. In recent years much evidence has been produced about low levels of learning outcomes, showing how serious the situation has become. Various studies have found that in most low-income and even middle-income countries somewhere between 25 and 75 percent of children in grade 2 cannot read any words at all. Large percentages leave school without being functionally literate. Despite irrefutable evidence generated from educational research and discourse over the decades, of the centrality of the child in the educational process, the practical application of these thoughts in classroom practice remains elusive. The learner, often an onlooker in the educational transaction, drops out of school or completes the cycle with little knowledge and skills sufficient to proceed to higher levels of education or succeed in the world of work or to serve as a basis for lifelong learning. Consequently, breaking the cycle of poverty remains a big challenge especially from marginalized or



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rural populations. International evidence and research support the notion that poverty, just as assets, is passed on from parents to children. The negative loop of parent-child poverty is frequently labeled intergenerational transmission of poverty (ITP). Family functional literacy programs could contribute to a number of short-term effects including (i) better child-rearing (better understanding of children’s needs, and better communication and follow-up during children’s informal and formal educational processes); (ii) improved family health (better awareness of nutritional and hygiene issues) and improvement of adult functional skills; and (iii) greater awareness of the basic values to be espoused and shared within the family and the community at large. This paradigm shift in the system of education which caters to a lesser fragmented education system must also ensure that initial teaching or instruction should be conducted in the national language or mother tongue to ensure higher absorption rates of concepts, knowledge, skills, and values. It should also ensure that learning begins from conception to incorporate fully early childhood segment (0–8) in a perspective of lifelong learning. This approach will have implications for several components of the education systems and educational practice—the curriculum, selection, and organization of learning experiences, language of instruction, assessment of learning, teacher training and pedagogy, financing, and especially partnerships, embraces multiple learning pathways for knowledge transmission skills development and values education. In Africa, the indicators, which are at an extremely low level despite the progress observed, show that childhood is a sector that receives insufficient attention. Less than 17 percent of all children enjoy access to an early childhood development program and over 11 percent repeat years in early schooling. Only 52 percent (approximately) of children reach the end of their primary schooling. A study by the World Bank into education in Ghana reveals that a large proportion of pupils are still illiterate after six years of primary school. This fact calls for urgent action aimed at removing the obstacles and challenges of the education system, such as lack of funding, non-relevant content, ineffective teaching/learning methods, and unsuitable content, in short, ill-suited curricula of limited effectiveness. Although it is possible to find manuals in primary schools (but rarely one per child, admittedly), what is even more surprising is the paucity of teaching materials available to the youngest preschool children. To fill this gap, teachers show no lack of inventiveness, making their own books with what they have to hand. They create spelling books using pictures taken from magazines or newspapers, or copy images from children’s books. They then copy out the accompanying texts in admirable cursive script. To face this situation in Africa, UNESCO, in partnership with the Association for the Development of Education (ADEA) and the well-known publisher Michel Lafon Education, developed a series called “Childhood Cultures”

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involving two young African children Bouba and Zaza as actors. Though specifically designed for the young-age audiences (3–10 years old), it targets all actors directly or indirectly in charge of child care and education that is, parents, siblings, and other family members, communities, schools. It is an example of fostering intergenerational learning through the Bouba and Zaza collection, which freely examines serious subjects made simple for the consumption of children and adults alike. Its stories are set in contemporary society and portray basic education including early childhood and its problems. For example, some of the topics include breaking with the secrecy and silence that go hand in hand with AIDS, the damage caused by those who violate the physical integrity of children, fighting the disaster caused by climate change and sustainable development, water and planet, peace and protection, and war-induced trauma. UNESCO BREDA and the ADEA Working Group on Early Childhood Development (which it presides) have adopted an educational approach, using fiction to examine the questions children may ask themselves and the answers they need. The Bouba and Zaza series is a simple illustration to facilitate education through intergenerational learning and exchange. The “Childhood Cultures” collection introduces universal values. “Childhood” stresses the plurality and diversity of childhood experiences, while the plural of “culture” implies three different things: • a set of conscious and unconscious rules and practices that define a community • a body of knowledge that characterizes an individual • a selection of activities which contributes to development and growth. The ultimate goal of ECD programs is to improve young children’s capacity to develop and learn. A child who is ready for school has a combination of positive characteristics: he or she is socially and emotionally healthy, confident, and friendly; has good peer relationships; tackles challenging tasks and persists with them; has good language skills and communicates well; and listens to instructions and is attentive. The most important role parents can play in ensuring a complete and successful school education for their children is the role they play at home, in the psychological support they provide on a daily basis, in particular through reading. All parents can provide this moral support to their children irrespective of their own level of education, even if they are unable to help their children understand something or if they feel that their own reading skills are too limited. The part they play is fundamental and it is important to combat preconceived ideas. Their attitude and what they say about reading have a major impact on the perception their children will have of it. Parents can help their



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children by both prevention and positive action. Generally speaking, children learn and progress to a large extent by imitation. Reading is no exception to this. Parents are simply the first and important of their role models. If parents express themselves in a given fashion, it is very likely that their children will do likewise. If their parents read, children will want to read. If their parents write, children will want to write. . . . This role as instigator and model can be fulfilled just as effectively by grandparents, brothers, sisters, and indeed the wider community in which the children live. For this reason the “Bouba and Zaza—Childhood Cultures” series should be explored jointly by participants drawn mainly from the extended family unit or the school. The family, including not only the parents and grandparents but also older brothers and sisters and others, can participate in the child’s learning to read. With this in mind, an album has a fundamental role. It can serve as a bridge, encouraging increased involvement by parents in the education of their children. It should lead all concerned to discover or rediscover their own role, and the responsibilities that are specifically their own. To conclude, let me emphasize that where governments, financial, and technical partners and civil society actors revisit the investment patterns for education through embracing a dual focus on family literacy for better parenting practices and increased investments in ECD the outcome of education systems would have a greater impact for economic growth and sustainable development thus ensuring peace and harmonious societies. Breaking the cycle of poverty, improving teaching and learning requires hard choices to prioritise a holistic approach for human development as opposed to the huge focus given to economic growth for human development. Human development will drive economic growth and not the other way round, a situation that has directly or indirectly led to the chaos in society, the environment and financial markets. The road not always taken could lead us to the truth. Intergenerational learning with valorisation of indigenous knowledge could be that road. Let us develop reading and writing culture to improve the education system! Note 1. United Nations Human Development Report 2011 : Sustainability and Equity. A Better Future for All. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/271/hdr_2011_ en_complete.pdf

Figure 1.1  Equality in the Millenium Development Goals. Source: Owned by author.

Figure 1.2  Women Uniting the Nation. Source: Owned by author.

Figure 1.3  The women of Cameroon at the center of the world. Source: Owned by author.

Figure 1.4  Unavoidable Development Partners. Source: Owned by author.

Figure 1.5  The way to modernity lies in the hands of women. Source: Owned by author.

Figure 2.1  Cloth, téra-tera with prominent babba, the central section and defining feature of the téra-tera genre. Cotton, L 176 cm, B 114 cm, purchased in Benin in 1968. III 17600 © Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland. Photo: Peter Horner, III 17600 © Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland. Source: III 17600 © Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland. Photo: Peter Horner, III 17600 © Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland.

Figure 2.2  Example of kulnej gutumo motif. Detail of Krou-krou, Cotton, c. 1960s or 1970s. Collection of the Musée National du Niger. Source: Detail of Krou-krou, Cotton, c. 1960s or 1970s. Collection of the Musée National du Niger.

Figure 2.3  Example of garbey kopto motif. Detail of Krou-krou, Cotton, c. 1960s or 1970s. Collection of the Musée National du Niger. Source: Detail of Krou-krou, Cotton, c. 1960s or 1970s Collection of the Musée National du Niger.

Figure 2.4  Suban, Djerma, Niger/Burkina Faso, cotton, c. 1928. © Newark Museum, 28.838. Source: © Newark Museum, 28.838.

Figure 2.5  Detail of Babba of Téra-tera, cotton, ca. 1950s. Collection of author. Source: Private collection of author.

Figure 2.6  Detail of Babba of Téra-tera, cotton, ca. 1960s. Collection of author. Source: Private collection of author.

Figure 2.7  Detail of a téra-tera cloth. Cotton, L 275 cm, B 145 cm, made by the weaver Abouba Ganda, purchased in Dosso, Niger around 1974. Source: III 20442 © Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland. Photo: Peter Horner, III 20442 © Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland.

Figure 2.8  Vitrine with display on Djerma weaving from Classical Pavillion of the Musée National du Niger. Ca. 1963. Source: Diapositive, ca. 1963. Le métier miniatures dans le Pavillon Classique du Musée National Boubou Hama du Niger. [Slide, circa 1963. The miniature job in the Classical Pavilion of the National Museum of Niger.]

Figure 2.9  Photograph of Weavers at the Musée National du Niger, ca. 1970. Source: Photo historique des tisserands du Musée National du Niger, ca. 1970. Les archives du Musée National Boubou Hama du Niger. [Historical picture of weavers of Museum National of Niger, circa 1970. The archives of the National Museum Boga Hama of Niger.]

Figure 2.10  Interior view of Costume Pavilion, Musée National du Niger, c. 1963. Source: Diapositive, ca. 1963. Le Pavillon du Costume, Musée National Boubou Hama du Niger. [Slide, circa 1963. The Costume Pavilion of the National Museum of Niger.]

Figure 6.1  Abdoul Salam and his musical group Les Tendistes. Source: Reprinted with permission by Abdoul Salam.

Figure 6.2  Abdoul Salam advertising le Visa (the condom also known as Foula sponsored by the German Health Program KFW). Source: Reprinted with permission by Abdoul Salam.

Figure 6.3  Scott Youngsted, 2013. Photo courtesy of Scott Youngsted, 2013.

Figure 7.1  Lalla Essaydi exhibit at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, 2010. Source: Installation shot from previous exhibtion Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes du Maroc, January-June 2010. Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, 2010.

Figure 7.2  Converging Territories #10. Source: Photograph by Lalla Essaydi, courtesy of the artist and of Edwynn Houk gallery, NY.

Figure 7.3  Les Femmes du Maroc: Harem Women Writing. Source: Photograph by Lalla Essaydi, courtesy of the artist and of Edwynn Houk gallery, NY.

Figure 8.1  John Bull and Egypt. Source: Rose al Youssef, No 164, 1931.

Figure 8.2  Journalism in Egypt . . . Freedom of Journalism . . . within the limits of the laws. Source: Rose al-Youssef, No 176, 1933.

Figure 8.3  Nabawiya Musa editor of al-Fatat, 1938.

Figure 8.4  Adverse about the Opening of Cinema Fuad. Source: Rose al-Youssef, 1933.

Figure 8.5  L’Egyptienne, the cover page. Source: Edited by Ceza Nabrawi, 1929.

Figure 8.6  Huda Sha’raawi, the editor of al-Misriyya, 1938.

Figure 9.1  Portion of the game board for Tayizahi with a Joker card for a condom (“capote” in French, which in local slang is referred to as a “hula” or “hat”). Source: Reproduced with permission of LuxDev - Agence luxembourgeoise pour la Coopération au Développement. Illustration by Kadri Hamadou.

Figure 15.1  Dictons marocains by Jihad Eliassa. Source: Courtesy of Jihad Eliassa.

Figure 16.1  References to the language-in-education debate in the Journal de l’Ile de la Réunion between 1998 and 2012, by section

Figure 16.2  References to the language-in-education debate, by year, in the four sections of the Journal de l’Ile de la Réunion that reference the topic most frequently.

Chart 17.1  Recreation of Individual Sound Motifs in the Translation (in percentages).

Figure 19.1  Airplane from Tourist Art. Source: Illustration by Vladimir Cybil Charlier.

Figure 19.2  Cybil Christophe from Tourist Art. Source: Illustration by Vladimir Cybil Charlier.

Figure 19.3  Ship S.S. Rodman from Tourist Art. Source: Illustration by Vladimir Cybil Charlier.

Figure 19.4  Bubble Gum Haitiana (detail). Source: Painting by Vladimir Cybil Charlier.

Figure 19.5  Postcard from Tourist Art. Source: Illustration By Vladimir Cybil Charlier.

Figure 19.6  Postcard detail (return address) from Tourist Art. Source: Illustration by Vladimir Cybil Charlier.

Figure 19.7  La Gabrielle Sirène from Tourist Art. Source: Illustration by Vladimir Cybil Charlier.

Chapter 15

Orthographic Diversity in a World of Standards Graphic Representations of Vernacular Arabics in Morocco Becky Schulthies Public circulation of written texts is a political act, but not just because the composer proffers supportive or subversive content.1 It is useful to focus on the ideas and arguments in order to get at meaning, but the form of writing itself is a graphic inscription of contentious ideologies about authority, morality, and modernity.2 People who write texts, they intend to share publicly make choices about the script they will use to convey their ideas, and that choice, in a postcolonial Moroccan world suffused with French, Arabic, Spanish, English, and Tafinagh representational options (see the official state website: www.maroc.ma) can be a choice to align with state centralizing projects, aspects of those projects, or centrifugal social divisions, what Bakhtin called heteroglossia.3 I draw from linguistic anthropology notions of power, in which “the creation of social realities through the deployment of linguistic structures in discourse is the process through which broader sociohistorical relations are sustained and transformed through time.”4 The type of power these writers deploy is interactional (and thus their meanings are not entirely within their control) and increasingly tactical,5 and presents several uncoordinated challenges to hegemonic institutional structuring of representational economies.6 Morocco’s official languages are Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Tamazight (Berber), with French as a default second language and Moroccan Arabic (known as darija) as the language variety most widely shared and spoken. As suggested by Ennaji, the question of language is a key element of contemporary cultural and political debates in Morocco,7 but while he focused on the metalinguistic discourses surrounding education and identity in Morocco, I want to explore the second-order political and commercial indexical loadings of graphic representational scripts in public media. 187

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In this chapter, I explore some of the ways that Moroccan writers do political work through heterogeneous orthographic sensibilities and graphic representations of Moroccan ways of speaking in advertising media (print and electronic), reflecting the tensions between state standardization/unity projects, and the range of linguistic identities and resources Moroccans deploy in their everyday lives. These graphic inscriptions of Moroccan communication are a mimetic model of the sociolinguistic complexity in Morocco, and illustrate the dynamic currently playing out between state centralizing and social diversity language ideologies and media ideologies. It also demonstrates a metapragmatic awareness about centralizing uses and diversifying practices of language, as well as a willingness to use scriptic forms as metapragmatic attacks to chip away at state-promoted language ideologies.8 This is not just a simple question of Moroccan multilingualism and genre conventions, but reflects a growing analytical trend to view language as a continuum of resources people use to accomplish all kinds of social and political alignment tasks.9 The contestation between state and societal language and media ideologies cuts across many domains and resources, including Morocco’s linguistic diversity, colonial and personal interactional histories, differentiated educational opportunities, dynamic symbolic markets, and sometimes divergent political stances.10 In my research on the intersection between language ideologies (the perspectives and expectations people have about language and what it does or doesn’t do) and media ideologies (their ideas about what specific mediums are and the work they do) there are two questions I seek to explore: What are the overlapping, partial, and fractional language ideologies that permit orthographic heterogeneity in publicly circulated written forms of Moroccan language usage? What do graphic inscriptions of Moroccan Arabic tell us about these practitioners’ locally specific writing models connecting orthographic repertoires to certain kinds of activities, specific mediums, and the types of people who do them? In this chapter I will be focusing primarily on MSA, Moroccan Arabic, French, and English orthographic forms, though there are others. In his highly influential article about the failure of Morocco’s postindependence Arabization policy written in 1973, Abdallah Laroui outlined some indexical (context-reflecting) connections between specific forms and Moroccan publics, the idea that linguistic forms are tied to political ideology: The King was acting in a clearly-defined and bound semantic field, the field of ancient classical Arabic, nearly mummified, paradoxically affecting both the illiterate masses and the old politico-religious elite. Political moderate ideology, with its technocratic tendency, was linked to the use of French, while socializing revolutionism grew out of the use of modernized Arabic. In all this,



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individual psychology mattered little; what counted was the social structure which expressed itself through the linguistic tool.11

Notice how Laroui distinguished sociopolitical categories within a heterogenous Moroccan society (monarchy, illiterate masses, politico-religious elites, technocrats, revolutionary socialists), but viewed the “languages” as homogenous wholes: Classical Arabic, French, MSA (no mention of various forms of darija such as urban unmarked French-Arabic code-mixing, Marrakeshi or Fassi Arabics, polite darija, etc. or even Tamazight, Tarafit, Tachalhit). In this statement, Laroui recognized the pragmatic force of language choice, in which speakers reflected their sociopolitical projects through linguistic signs. However, he did not view these linguistic signs as creating the conditions for those social projects. Instead, he stated that those who pushed for Arabization were dissatisfied groups who often did so using French.12 He seemed to be referring to the graphic forms of these “linguistic tools,” as conveyed through his choice of specific sensorial and institutional framings: clearly defined, bound, semantic, mummified Classical Arabic; technocratic French; social revolutionary [educated] modernized standard Arabic. This is a common assumption about linguistic forms, that they merely reflect political and social ideologies. To write, then, would link a linguistic container (Arabic script) to a particular project (literacy, political transparency, secularism) as a proxy vehicle in furthering the cause. Within that view of language and meaning-making, two possible strategies to stop that cause would be to foster linguistic purity (“self-censorship” encouraged through MSA Arabization in mass education) or to shut down offending mediums. However, if we hold the view of linguistic forms as creating rather than just reflecting contexts for political projects, as being linguistic acts that potentially transform, then we would need to study the ways in which people in those moments (and subsequently) construe, respond to (or not), and add acceleration or allow inertia to slow its force in social life. Bakhtin noted that all instances of observable language use, whether written in novels, spoken in cafes, posted on billboards, or tweeted on a cell phone, simultaneously reflect centripetal and centrifugal forces, standardizing and diversifying ideologies and practices.13 Speakers or writers can highlight or foreground the unity, consistency, and centralizing aspects of linguistic forms at certain moments (its standardness), while other contexts privilege the heteroglossic characteristics of an utterance (its social or geographical “dialectness”). A certain unifying quality is necessary for each graphic inscription to be understandable, the centralizing pull of sharedness. At the same time these forms are “entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, and alien value judgments and accents” because of differences in repertoire command, access, and social indexical values.14

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For example, due to French colonialism and continued economic, political, and educational influence, many French words are part of an unmarked code-mixed variety of urban Moroccan Arabic.15 This is so much the case that Moroccan telecommunications firms in the late 2000s regularly wrote French words in Arabic scripts. Meditel, a major mobile phone company in Morocco, began a recharge campaign offering double minutes during certain times of the month: 100 minutes for 50 Moroccan dirhams (MAD). In 2011, they changed that to an advertisement that claimed they were offering double recharge from that time onward. They advertised this on Moroccan television, in magazines, and on billboards. The basic campaign ad was in white Arabic script on a red background, suggesting the company logo and the Moroccan flag (which are also red). It read ‫ ادب لبوضلا‬ḍ-ḍūbl bida “double begins” in white with the second word scratched out and another Arabic word written in yellow superscript: ‫ اميد‬dīma “always.” The first word written in Arabic is a French term that has now become part of everyday urban Moroccan Arabic, even for those not formally educated in French. The company logo, Meditel, was written in white Latin script on the bottom right hand corner, the Arabic version of the script smaller and in yellow just above in superscript to the left ‫ لتيديملا‬al-mīdītel, suggesting that the romanized French version of the logo was more significant.16 Because we bring different histories and experiences to an interpretive moment, the meaning possibilities of specific linguistic resources and our ways of representing them will vary. This is because we depend on both the larger social context (or co-text, genre, participant frameworks, non-linguistic signs, etc.) in which the linguistic forms occur, as well as our language ideologies and medium expectations (which are often not fully shared) to make sense of it all. In the previous illustration, the size of the Arabic script on the logo may have reflected the initial target and investment market of Meditel: urban, aspiring, French-educated Moroccans. The mixed French in Moroccan Arabic on the same billboard advertisement addressed a public school, Arabic-educated audience (a much larger percentage of the population). While I was doing fieldwork in Morocco in 2011, none of my Moroccan interlocutors found the French-word-in-Arabic scriptic shift (or vice versa) exceptional, but rather viewed the writing of Moroccan Arabic rather than MSA in public spaces as more noteworthy. One of the key language ideologies operating in Morocco that allows for orthographic heterogeneity (many ways of writing the same thing) is a view that the Arabic script, and hence writing in Arabic, is reserved for standard Arabic, whether the Quran or the more simplified MSA.17 By extension, French written in publicly circulated venues and mediums should also be standard French. Spoken forms of communication in Morocco, especially the ones that mix French, English, Spanish, Tachelhit, and nonstandard Arabics,



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are not expected to take written form in formal genres and spaces, and thus there is no push for standardizing the way one writes “the dialects.” In fact, Moroccan producers (and consumers) expect reading Moroccan Arabic to be unfamiliar in scriptic forms such that they often write the diacritics for phrases and sentences to aid comprehension. All other Arabic is written without the short vowels marked unless explicitly a primary school primer. For example, telecommunications company Bayn began an advertising campaign for reduced pricing on recharge in 2012, using Arabic script with the unmarked French-Arabic code-mixed variety on a green background (with an indexical nod toward Islam and Morocco): ‫ ال ُم ِهم ه ُو‬،‫ ْت َح َّكم فيِه الصٍّ ولد ْقليِل وْ ال ْكثيِر‬aṣ-ṣold qlīl wla ktīr, al-muhim huwa thakum fīh “Whether the sale is small or big, the key is to control it.” While the Arabic word for big or lots was written in MSA with the ‫ ث‬thaʾ, most Moroccans pronounce with with Moroccan phonology, as a dental stop instead of a dental fricative, ‫ ت‬taʾ (many Moroccan advertising companies write MSA forms even when Moroccan darija is phonologically distinct). The French word solde was written in Arabic, and most of the initial syllables were written with a sukkun (diacritic for no vowels) instead of the initial short vowels, indicating Moroccan Arabic phonology instead of MSA. Moroccans are not used to reading Moroccan Arabic in Arabic script, but rather speaking, and thus the diacritic marks. They have been writing spoken Arabic forms in romanized characters since the development of mobile phone and internet chat technologies,18 thus reflecting the initial Latin-based affordances of these technologies as well as their own French educational training. Let me provide some historical context for thinking about this. One of the central processes of Moroccan state building after independence in 1956 was unifying the nation through designating an official language and educational language planning. This debate emerged from specific ideologies about what language is and does: Should Morocco capitalize on economic prospects that acquiring French would afford despite its colonial vestiges and at the expense of the Arab and Muslim identity upon which the independence movements built their platforms?19 The state decided initially to Arabize, though that proved difficult to implement immediately and controversial for various publics.20 Elites set up parallel educational systems which extended colonial policies to educate their children in private French schools, while mass public education was mostly Arabized (some subjects at the tertiary level, such as science, math, and engineering were taught in French). I recognize that my characterization of post-independence language questions is a simple dichotomy that does not reflect the full range of perspectives that contributed to the debate.21 However, the issue of national language choice involved centripetal linguistic forces, the process of standardizing language and providing a rationale for the privileging of certain forms of language in specific public domains (such as education, business, government

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transactions), whether it was standard French or MSA. This was not just a question of places and genres where these standardized language forms should be used (like ministries and schools), but also an implicit decision about the ways in which they should be represented. Standard languages have spelling conventions and rules about how to write Arabic or French in different genres, such as a government form, school textbook, building placard, business letter, or street sign. Moroccan state language policy from the 1950s onward empowered the historical ideology that writing was reserved for standardized language forms, MSA or French, to facilitate literacy and national unity, generate a productive sector of society, as well as embody and disseminate a rational orientation (an ideology partially instilled from European language ideologies, and partially refashioned from Arabic educational ideologies).22 Writing a news article, sign, law, public speech, or textbook for the widest possible viewership privileged MSA, since that was the language variety the state imbued with public authority, visibility, and identity. However, mass education in MSA was not realized until well into the 1980s, and thus the political sensibilities of MSA (associations with the Muslim-Arab identity and glorious past) were foregrounded over the actual content meanings. The act of writing Arabic in these publicly approved forms framed the writer as aligning (however loosely) with a standard language ideology and the meanings associated with it, despite the persistent presence of written genres, such as plays, pamphlets, proverb collections, amulets, internet chats, mobile phone texts, advertising signs, and short dialect dialogues within novels in which Moroccan writers employed a mix of local varieties (MSA, regional Arabics, and Tamazights) with a variety of orthographies.23 For example, Moroccan playwright and actor Ahmed Taieb El Alj published several folk stories in voweled Moroccan Arabic with Arabic script and parallel translation in French, a nonstandard orthographic style for Arabic. To write in Morocco was to graphically represent bundled associations of literacy, progress, rationality, public institutions, as well as the complicated tensions between European and Muslim identity aesthetics, not all of which neatly correlated with a specific language variety or scriptic choice.24 For some, French was the preferred modernity medium, for others MSA, and since the 2000s others have argued for Moroccan Arabic or Tamazight.25 In the last few decades the public written visibility of spoken varieties has changed, partially due to the spread of visual-centric mass media technologies, such as television, cell phones, and the internet, and partially to changing language and media ideologies.26 A key point is that those raising the public graphic visibility of Moroccan nonstandard Arabics employ heterogeneous writing systems and are testing the centralizing forces of state projects in specific public domains. These forms include Moroccan Arabic in romanized



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French-based orthography using numbers to represent Arabic letters not found in French or English coming out of early 2000s chat and text messaging practices where 7 represents ‫ ح‬ḥaʾ as in b7ali b7alek “we’re the same”; 9 stands for ‫ ق‬qaf and 3 for ‫ ع‬ʿayn as in 3aqbal shi wa7idin “may you be next”; 2 for ‫ ء‬ʾhamza and 5 for ‫ خ‬khaʾ as in filme dial l5ali3 “horror film” (Figure 15.1, used with permission of Dictons Marocains author Jihad Eliassa). In addition there are modified MSA orthographies used historically for personal writing genres (as discussed previously). Both of these have been used in news, advertising, and internet mediums. While there are some socialized conventions for representing phonological, lexical, and discourse features of Moroccan ways of speaking in personal writing genres (such as texting), there is no call for standardizing the written forms of these interactional styles because of a language ideology that one does not write spoken language forms in the arabophone world. Thus writers on social media utilize many kinds of romanized and Arabic-based orthographic styles. In the 2000s, several groups began publishing periodicals and adult literacy pamphlets using Moroccan Arabics in a darija-modified MSA script with the explicit aim of challenging the centripetal force of state language policies. Some furthered state goals but in the contested form of written darija in simplified and voweled MSA (Elena Prentice’s free weekly paper ‫بالدنا خبار‬ khabār blādnā “Our Country’s News” published from 2002–2006), arguing that darija was more effective educationally due to its “mother tongue” status. Others employed darija in French-based orthography and Arabic-based orthography to challenge state policies, suggesting that MSA was an elite mechanism for undermining civil society and democratization gains (in contradiction to Laroui’s claim that French was the language of elites). Frenchlanguage Moroccan weekly TelQuel’s Ahmed Benchemsi was one of these, publishing ‫ نيشان‬nīshān “Straight Up”, publishing the weekly from 2006–2010. These actors contributed to the contentious reform politics of the last decade by clothing Moroccan ways of speaking with overt and indirect resistance pressure through the moral authority of script. They either espoused media ideologies promoting state projects such as adult literacy (khabār blādnā) but through a divisive language form (darija) or contested official behaviors and actions using written Moroccan Arabic (nīshān, transliterated by Benchemsi as Nichane). The Arabic weekly ‫ نيشان‬nīshān clothed a political ideology in an Arabic orthographic form with Moroccan Arabic context-creating indexes and iconic resonances. Despite repeated claims by the press and public intellectuals that ‫ نيشان‬nīshān was a Moroccan Arabic news magazine, most contributors wrote in MSA with occasional indexical-icons of darija. On the surface it would appear that Benchemsi and his colleagues mobilized darija in nīshān to reflect their oppositional stance, choosing to express critique in a non-standard

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language in order to tear down elite power. While that may be part of the story, a closer look at the magazines’ uses of darija helps us think about the semiotic processes by which the writers rallied the context-creating properties of darija-as-opposition. In nīshān, the bulk of each article was written in MSA, even though darija portions garnered the greatest visibility because of their marked quality. Readers did not expect to see darija written in a news magazine, which potentially gave it prominence and weight in ways that tied it indexically to the historical moment when written darija was outside the norm. Thus darija took on a different iconic quality, one of resistance for the writers (and potentially readers), even as they reproduced the centripetal language practices and ideologies of writing substantive information in the conventions of MSA. Telecommunication scriptic choices in mobile phones, internet, and television in the early 2010s were far more varied and heterogeneous than the newsprint just discussed. Media ideologies about graphic inscriptions in publicly circulated are in an expanding centrifugal phase partially due to a contemporary contention between semiotic orders: linguistic orthography ideologies whereby an Arab writes in Arabic (most often MSA); colonial and cosmopolitan economic ideologies whereby success can and is measured through command of multilingual resources; as well as genre conventions and media ideologies whereby written forms in specific genres such as chat, mobile phone texting, tweets, and YouTube comments reflect the social diversity, divisions, and linguistic technologies of Moroccan ways of speaking.27 The orthographic heterogeneity illustrated in the examples I described does not just reflect individual juxtapositions of two ways of writing the same thing in multilingual contexts, known in the literature as digraphia.28 They are also different from previous ethnography of writing studies discussing orthographic diversity such as grassroots literacy,29 indigenous language revitalization projects,30 and artifacts of individual novelty.31 This graphic diversity reflects and produces a media ideology that written forms of Moroccan spoken varieties in advertising and social media are not domains covered by state standardization projects, and scriptic heterogeneity and hybridity is accepted, expected, and a mark of cosmopolitan Moroccaness, even as advertisers target specific audiences through font sizes, colors, social indexes of politeness, slang, and choice of script. People with a vested interest in the unifying language ideology of standard Arabic promote the centripetal work of gatekeeping and policing boundaries of linguistic technologies within their ascribed purview. Linguistic technologies such as spoken, handwritten, print, and electronic registers have within them genre distinctions that self-appointed centralizing gatekeepers do not feel the need to clarify as assigned to one domain or another. As mentioned, private or non-state genres such as letters, plays, proverb collections,



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amulets, internet chats, mobile phone texts, advertising signs, and short dialect dialogues within novels are often allowed a flexibility in orthographic conventions that textbooks, newspapers, and parliamentary laws are not. However, all of the forms I share in this chapter are publicly circulating, leaking into the domains of standard gatekeepers. Despite that fact, at this historical moment, Arabic language academies and state censors have not included orthographic policing of advertising, private book publishing, or personal communication technologies, such as cell phones and social media within their orbit of concern, leaving a wide range of graphic possibilities for writing Moroccaness. That does not mean that individuals do not take up the centripetal mantel when the state fails to do so, but it does mean that heterogeneity of writing reflects that Moroccans have an unmarked mixing of many different linguistic resources as a communicative norm, using bits of French, Arabic, English, Tachilhit, and other ways of speaking and writing in their everyday lives as an ambivalent response, in some cases, to state centralizing projects. Let me share a few snapshots of everyday graphic representations of language I have encountered in Morocco that have raised the question of scriptic sensibilities. When I first began ethnographic fieldwork in Fez, Morocco I encountered a sign advertising a teleboutique (a small shop with phone booths one could pay to use, as not all families had landlines in their homes) branded “New Génération Teleboutique.” This sign illustrated the everyday juxtapositioning of languages, in this instance French vowel markings and English syntax, that is the hallmark of contemporary Moroccan language use. In this example, the sign designer privileged a commercial cosmopolitan indexical value over orthographic consistency and correctness. A common practice in the advertising domain is the use of parallel French/ Arabic brand name logos as described previously in the Meditel recharge campaign. Sometimes brand names may be more explicitly digraphic, such as the logo for Casablanca catering company Rahal, which created the company name in Arabic from the right and the Latin transliteration from the left.32 A calligraphic capital R was placed in the center between the two scripts to graphically draw out and create a perceptual bivalant quality between the two forms of writing.33 This illustrates the way Moroccan advertisers can capitalize on the writing affordances of Arabic (written from right to left) and French (written from left to write) to create logo symmetry. Telecommunications company Bayn’s logo operates a little differently, writing the company name in larger Arabic script from the right ‫ نياب‬bayn “Clear” and inserting French GSM (Groupe Spéciale Mobile) or Bayn as a smaller superscript over the third and fourth Arabic characters.34 In this way, Bayn privileges the Arabic script and darija content (bayn) especially on the Arabic version of the website, while their advertisements reach out to urban multilingual

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target markets, even if the consumers have truncated repertoires in Arabic or French.35 The French version of the website also has untranslated darija in Arabic script directly under the logo: ‫ كعم فقاو اميد‬dīma wāqf maʿk “Always standing by you,” further suggesting the assumed multilingual target market. This has been so common a practice that the Moroccans I worked among never commented on logo digraphia or orthographic doubling. They would however, notice darija uses in advertising campaigns that indexed local identities and sensibilities.36 For example, MayMouna corporation, which markets flour products, utilized a markedly Fassi (from Fez) politeness formula in an advertisement for patisserie flour. The MayMouna logo includes a larger French script on top with a smaller font Arabic script underneath and a plumb wheat head resting on the second capitalized M in French. In their advertising campaign since 2010, they have ended each television commercial with their logo at the center left and written Arabic script under or over a display of Moroccan breads and patisseries: ‫ ةنوميم اي انيلع كيطخي الهل‬lahla yakhṭīk ʿalaynā yā mīmūna “May we never be deprived from you, O MayMouna.”37 As described to me by a Moroccan interlocutor from Fez while we were watching television one day, while this phrase is used throughout the country, he and his family associate it with the politeness and old elite cultures of Fez.38 Another telecommunications company, INWI, in a 2012 advertising campaign represented how people talk and text in nonstandard ways, via a television/internet commercial announcing a double recharge program on 20 dirham cards called ‫ موي ارو موي‬youm ouara youm “day after day.” A Moroccan performer sang an INWI pop-inspired darija jingle while walking through larger-than-life sized Arabic text of ‫موي ارو موي‬, a quadrupled screenshot of the performer (to signal the double recharge) and a stage with five versions of this same performer talking on her mobile phone signalled by several pop-up balloons with mobile phone graphic signs and written text. The design included MSA standard greetings in Arabic script (‫ الها‬ahlan “welcome”); nonstandard spellings of MSA words used in darija such as ‫ سابل‬labas instead of ‫ ساب ال‬la bās “No problem” (widely used as an initial greeting phrase), and ‫ كربخشا‬ashkhbarak instead of the more MSA mirroring ‫ كرابخ شا‬ash khabārak “What’s up”; as well as French spelling of commonly borrowed spoken terms, such as Allo! and emoticons “;-).” After explaining the details of the program, the video clip ended with the INWI logo written in Latin characters with a brand phrase of darija in Arabic script: ‫ يتيغبك رّبع‬ʿabbr kbghītī “express as you like.”39 Advertisers seek to attract a specific market group, and the mixed use of scripts and unmarked French-Arabic darija forms analyzed in this chapter indexed something about how they viewed that market, but also about their own educational, interactional, and aspirational histories. At some level, these



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are cosmopolitan groups, but ones that are not used to reading written forms of Moroccan Arabic in anything larger that a brief phrase—hence the diacritics in the Bayn advertisements with larger sentences and the pairing of audio and visual channels in the multimedia video commercials used in television, Facebook, and YouTube. In addition, the digraphic use of French and Arabic scripts illustrated how the advertising creators may have viewed the audience as potentially divided along arabophone and francophone educational and interactional lines. What united them as a market were the mixed spoken forms, not necessarily the national standards. This could be seen in a Bayn commercial utilizing a media form of Moroccan Arabic that has Moroccans theoretically located throughout the country linking arms and smiles to demonstrate unity, “from the Sahara to Tangier, the mountains and desert to the ocean,” as well as the widespread wireless coverage of Bayn.40 Erased are the debates about neocolonialism through mixed French-Arabic ways of speaking,41 differential access to privileged French training,42 and the presence of Amazigh languages.43 The centralizing pull of unity for commercial advertising was found in mixed forms of darija rather than state-sponsored MSA. The last examples I want to discuss come from aspiring graphic artist Jihad Eliassa, better known as the creator of Dictions Marocains. Jihad, who trained at an art school in Tetouan, began creating humorous graphic designs in 2012 by foregrounding a literal or homophonic aspect of Moroccan proverbs. In the example of Figure 15.1, filme dial l5ali3 “horror film” showed a DVD cover illustrating a frying pan filled with eggs and a Moroccan preserved meat called khaliʿ. The humor riffs on the darija word for horror, which sounds very similar to the word for the dried meat preserved in fat. Jihad used text messaging forms of writing Moroccan Arabic (5=khaʾ, 3=ʿayn). In this next example, the darija was written in Latin letters.44 Jihad wrote the Arabic in French orthography that was made to look like Arabic short vowel diacritics in bivalent fashion. In addition, he placed an Arabic doubling diacritic over the doubled Latin consonant in a French-based orthography. Some letters were capitalized and others not. The most humorous aspect of the cartoon, the French transliteration with Arabic diacritics, was illustrated in larger font, with Arabic underneath in different font style, size, and thickness: َSAL LmjjArrab LA TSAL Tbibe “Ask those who’ve experienced, don’t ask the doctor.” The image included someone looking ghostly, with a broken arm and a t-shirt that says “I ♡ [ghost].” The content was clearly counter to state modernization projects, as it circulated a discourse of medical corruption and incompetence. However, the scriptic form also challenged the state modernizing project through the mixing of alphabetic styles. Jihad has been a prolific producer and posts most of his creations on his facebook page (https://fr-fr.facebook.com/DictonsMarocains). In good entextualizing fashion, others embed these designs on their web pages, thus furthering his

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visibility and message. As of 2014, Jihad has been producing advertisements for Trident gum based on this digraphia style. These examples of social media circulation demonstrate the idea that cosmopolitan Moroccans can and do draw from a variety of scriptic and sociolinguistic resources. The purity of standardness is implicitly rejected through this humorous multiscriptic sensibility. Unity in this case is reserved for those who share the educational and interactional possibilities of upwardly mobile Moroccans. Graphic utterances illustrate, in a multisensoral, striking way the overlapping centripetal and centrifugal forces in the life of language Bakhtin identified so long ago. The language ideologies underlying orthographic heterogeneity of Moroccan Arabic representations illustrate a range of social work performed in everyday life by different ways of writing the same thing. The tensions between processes of centralizing graphic representations and the heterogeneous everyday linguistic use of hybridization and orthographic heterogeneity demonstrate that forms of writing Moroccan languages are political acts conveying a continuum of alignment or distancing from state projects. To reiterate, to communicate in a specific written graphic form is to align oneself with a political project, even if that alignment involves ambivalence and disregard; agreeing with the principle but not the means; actively resisting centralizing projects through assigning political values to specific graphic forms; and viewing centrifugal forms of language as means to a commercial end.

Notes 1. My thanks to conference organizers Ousseina D. Alidou, Renée Larrier, Abena P. A. Busia, Fakhri Haghani, Cheryl Wilson, Atif Akin, and Renée DeLancey for making my participation possible, and panel chair Nadia Guessous along with panel co-participants for providing a rich environment to think about writing in the visual/ virtual. My transliterations of the Arabic follow conventions of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. 2. Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); W. Flagg Miller, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen. (Cambridge MA: Harvard Center for Middle East Studies, 2007); Mark Sebba, “Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power,” in Orthography as Social Action, ed. Alexandra Jaffe et al. (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012), 1–20. 3. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 67.



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4. Susan Philips, “Power,” in Key Terms in Language and Culture, ed. Alessandro Duranti (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 192. 5. Eric Wolf, Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 5. 6. Alexander E. Elinson, “Dārija and Changing Writing Practices in Morocco,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 715–730; Catherine Miller, “Observations concernant la présence de l’arabe marocain dans la presse marocaine arabophone des années 2009–2010,” in De Los Manuscritos Medievales a Internet: La Presencia del Árabe Vernáculo en Las Fuentes Escritas, ed. Mohamed Meouak et al. (Zaragoza: University of Zaragoza, 2012), 419–40. 7. Moha Ennaji, Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco (New York: Springer, 2005), xi. 8. Marco Jacquemet, “Conflict,” in Key Terms in Language and Culture, ed. Alessandro Duranti (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 38. 9. Jan Blommaert, The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 41–43. 10. Ennaji, Multilingualism, 1. 11. Abdallah Laroui, “Cultural Problems and Social Structure: The Campaign for Arabization in Morocco.” Humaniora Islamica 1 (1973): 35. 12. Ibid, 43. 13. Bakhtin, Dialogic, 270–72. 14. Ibid, 276. 15. Catherine Miller et al. Arabic in the City: Issues in Dialect Contact and Language Variation (New York: Routledge, 2007). 16. “Meditel Facebook,” modified on October 1, 2011, accessed June 28, 2014, https://mbasic.facebook.com/meditel/photos/a.10150201299391256.307120.315483 546255/10150298327266256/?type=1&source=46&refid=17. 17. Elinson, “Dārija,” 716–17. 18. Dominique Caubet, “Génération Darija!” Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí 9 (2005): 233–243; Becky Schulthies, “Scripted Ideologies: Orthographic Heterogeneity in Online Arabics,” Al-Arabiyya 47 (2014): 41–56; Mark Warschauer et al., “Language Choice Online: Globalization and Identity in Egypt,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 7 (2002), accessed March 1, 2013, doi: 10.1111/j.1083–6101.2002.tb00157.x. 19. Laroui, “Cultural Problems,” 33–43. 20. Beverley Seckinger, “Implementing Morocco’s Arabization Policy: Two Problems of Classification,” in With Forked Tongues: What are National Languages Good For? ed. Florian Coulmas (Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1988), 68–90. 21. See also Aomar Boum, “The Political Coherence of Educational Incoherence: The Consequences of Educational Specialization in a Southern Moroccan Community,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39 (2008): 205–223; Spencer D. Segalla, The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 22. Laroui, “Cultural Problems,” 45. 23. Caubet, “Génération Darija!” 240; Deborah Kapchan, Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of

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Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 79–96; Jorge Aguadé, “Writing Dialect in Morocco,” Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí 10 (2006): 253–274. 24. Caubet, “Génération Darija!” 241; Fouad Laroui, Le Drame Linguistique Marocain. (Léchelle France: Zellige, 2011), 153–184; Segalla, Moroccan Soul, 258. 25. Elinson, “Dārija,” 715–730; Miller, “Observations,” 419–40. 26. Elinson, “Dārija,” 716. 27. Schulthies, “Scripted Ideologies,” 41–56. 28. Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer, “Spelling Bilingualism: Script Choice in Russian American Classified Ads and Signage.” Language in Society 34 (2005): 493–531. 29. Jan Blommaert, Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa (New York: Routledge, 2008). 30. Paja Faudree, Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 31. Jannis Androutsopoulos, “Localizing the Global on the Participatory Web,” in The Handbook of Language and Globalization, ed. Nikolas Coupland (New York: Routledge, 2010), 203–26. 32. “Rahal Company,” Accessed March 1, 2013, www.rahalmaitretraiteur.com/. 33. Kathryn Woolard, “Simultaneity and Bivalency as Strategies in Bilingualism,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8 (1998): 3–29. 34. “Bayn Company,” Accessed March 1, 2013, www.bayngsm.ma/ar/. 35. Blommaert, Sociolinguistics of Globalization, 9. 36. Utz Maas and Redoine Hasbane, “‘Dialecte’ et langue en arabe marocain. La leçon de la publicité marocaine.” Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí 9 (2005), 188. 37. “MayMouna Company,” Accessed March 2, 2013, www.maymouna.com/ communication/mediatheque/video 38. See also Atiqa Hachimi, “The Urban and the Urbane: Identities, Language Ideologies, and Arabic Dialects in Morocco,” Language in Society 41 (2012): 321–341, who described the dissemination and transformation of Fassi language styles through migration of elite Fassi families to Casablanca and Rabat. 39. “INWI YouTube Channel,” Accessed March 2, 2013, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=E3NzI-Qrj-w&index=27&list=PLDn9ANVRI8D82pn6PBYz0bbLShJ HoSMmu 40. “Bayn YouTube Channel,” Accessed Feb 21, 2013, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=h-ANTlYIArA 41. Moha Ennaji, “Language Contact, Arabization Policy and Education in Morocco,” in Language Contact and Language Conflict in Arabic, ed. Aleya Rouchdy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 75. 42. Laroui, “Cultural Conflicts,” 39–40. 43. Katherine Hoffman, “Berber Language Ideologies, Maintenance, and Contraction: Gendered Variation in the Indigenous Margins of Morocco,” Language and Communication 26 (2006), 145. 44. “Dicton Marocain Facebook Timeline,” Accessed Feb 20, 2013, https:// scontent-b-lga.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/v/t1.0–9/563039_499887060049663_1081 840995_n.png?oh=e20b31d27a7aae158bae0522f0c5dfdb&oe=54875218



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Bibliography Aguadé, Jorge. “Writing Dialect in Morocco.” Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí 10 (2006): 253–274. Androutsopoulos, Jannis. “Localizing the Global on the Participatory Web.” In The Handbook of Language and Globalization, edited by Nikolas Coupland, 203–26. New York: Routledge, 2010. Angermeyer, Philipp Sebastian. 2005. “Spelling Bilingualism: Script Choice in Russian American Classified Ads and Signage.” Language in Society 34(4): 493–531. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Blommaert, Jan. Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa. New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Boum, Aomar. “The Political Coherence of Educational Incoherence: The Consequences of Educational Specialization in a Southern Moroccan Community.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2008): 205–223. Caubet, Dominique. “Génération Darija!” Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí 9 (2005): 233–243. Elinson, Alexander E. “Dārija and Changing Writing Practices in Morocco.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 4 (2013): 715–730. Ennaji, Moha. “Language Contact, Arabization Policy and Education in Morocco.” In Language Contact and Language Conflict in Arabic, edited by Aleya Rouchdy, 70–89. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco. New York: Springer, 2005. Faudree, Paja. Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Hachimi, Atiqa. “The Urban and the Urbane: Identities, Language Ideologies, and Arabic Dialects in Morocco.” Language in Society 41, no. 3 (2012): 321–341. Hoffman, Katherine. “Berber Language Ideologies, Maintenance, and Contraction: Gendered Variation in the Indigenous Margins of Morocco.” Language and Communication 26, no. 2 (2006): 144–167. Jacquemet, Marco. “Conflict.” In Key Terms in Language and Culture, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 37–40. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001. Kapchan, Deborah Anne. Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Laroui, Abdallah. “Cultural Problems and Social Structure: The Campaign for Arabization in Morocco.” Humaniora Islamica 1 (1973):33–46. Laroui, Fouad. Le Drame Linguistique Marocain. Léchelle France: Zellige, 2011. Maas, Utz and Redoine Hasbane. “‘Dialecte’ et Langue en Arabe Marocain. La leçon de la Publicité Marocaine.” Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí 9 (2005): 181–204.

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Messick, Brinkley. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Miller, Catherine and Enam Al-Wer, Dominique Caubet, Janet C.E. Watson. Arabic in the City: Issues in Dialect Contact and Language Variation. New York: Routledge, 2007. Miller, Catherine. “Observations Concernant la Présence de l’Arabe Marocain dans la Presse Marocaine Arabophone des Années 2009–2010.” In De los Manuscritos Medievales a Internet: la Presencia del Árabe Vernáculo en las Fuentes Escritas, edited by Mohamed Meouak, Pablo Sanchez and Angeles Vicente, 419–40. Zaragoza: University of Zaragoza, 2012. Miller, Flagg. The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen. Cambridge MA: Harvard Center for Middle East Studies, 2007. Philips, Susan. “Power.” In Key Terms in Language and Culture, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 190–192. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001. Schulthies, Becky. “Scripted Ideologies: Orthographic Heterogeneity in Online Arabics.” Al Arabiyya 47 (2014): 41–56. Seckinger, Beverley. “Implementing Morocco’s Arabization Policy: Two Problems of Classification.” In With Forked Tongues: What are National Languages Good For? edited by Florian Coulmas, 68–90. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1988. Sebba, Mark. “Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power.” In Orthography as Social Action, edited by Alexandra Jaffe, Jannis Androutsopolous, Mark Sebba, Sally Johnson, 1–20. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012. Segalla, Spencer D. The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Warschauer, Mark, Ghada El- Said, and Ayman Zohry. “Language Choice Online: Globalization and Identity in Egypt.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 7, no. 4 (2002). Accessed March 1, 2013. doi: 10.1111/j.1083–6101.2002. tb00157.x. Wolf, Eric. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Woolard, Kathryn. “Simultaneity and Bivalency as Strategies in Bilingualism.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8, no. 1 (1998): 3–29.

Chapter 16

The Polyphonous Classroom Discourse on Language-inEducation on Réunion Island Meghan Tinsley

Réunion Island is a land of encounter, contradiction, and blending. It is a place where Muslim crescents adorn the entrances to Hindu temples, where the latest teen icon is a hip-hop reggae artist named Kaf Malbar, and where banana flower curry is served with a baguette. Such everyday phenomena reflect the island’s diverse population and its proud collective identity of métissage. Yet Réunion Island is also a place where primary school classrooms display posters translating common Creole expressions into standard French. The title of the poster: “Dites ceci, pas cela”—say this, not that. On this French overseas department (DOM), situated between Madagascar and Mauritius, administrative decisions are handed down from Paris. This extends to public school curricula, such that students typically are well versed in metropolitan fablist Jean de La Fontaine, but are often unfamiliar with Réunionnais storyteller Leconte de Lisle. The balance between metropolitan and local influences in all aspects of public life has provoked controversy repeatedly since departmentalization in 1946. Among the most recent manifestations of this issue has been the vibrant and polarizing language-ineducation debate, which considers whether French should retain its conventional position as the sole vehicle of classroom instruction, or whether Creole should be permitted in Réunionnais schools. That debate is the subject of the present chapter. The Réunionnais language-in-education debate should be contextualized in the larger academic discourse on language and power in postcolonial societies. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, words have no universal meaning in themselves; rather, speakers and listeners make sense of words based on their own experiences, and new meanings are created through the dialogue of two experiences.1 Michel Foucault introduces the element of power into the process of dialogue, arguing that the elite wield disproportionate influence 203

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in meaning-making and, in turn, use those meanings to entrench their own power.2 Linguistic imperialism thus is a powerful component of, and vehicle for, institutionalized cultural imperialism.3 For Glissant, colonial powerholders entrench their authority by attempting to understand, translate, and qualify the words of the colonized on their own terms; conversely, the colonized attempt to escape the denigrated character of their own language by mastering the colonizer’s language.4 In the postcolonial society, resistance to the colonizer’s language may take on a new fervor, by vilifying the former colonizer’s language and institutionalizing indigenous languages as a component of national identity.5 The dynamics described above are certainly present on Réunion Island; however, its political status as a DOM and the undecided character of its language-in-education policy differentiate it from other case studies of language in postcolonial societies. Given the pertinence of the languagein-education debate to Réunion Island’s creolophone majority, the long and deliberate history of French linguistic and cultural assimilation, and the rapidly changing approach to language-in-education at the local level, this chapter poses the question: What does the language-in-education debate reveal about the symbolic relationship between Réunion Creole and French? This question is both pertinent and puzzling in the current social and political environment of Réunion Island: first, despite a long history of marginalizing Creole in the public sphere, in 2000 the French government accorded it the status of langue régionale, recognizing both the centrality of Creole to Réunionnais collective identity and the unfamiliarity of Réunionnais schoolchildren with French. This policy change has led to several bilingual primary-school classes and a few Creole-language and -literature secondaryschool classes. Second, upwardly mobile creolophone parents conventionally embrace French language-in-education; likewise, they resist exposing their children to Creole in the public sphere, for fear that this will hinder their acquisition of French. Third, diglossia on Réunion Island does not imply that French and Creole are strictly segregated; rather, code-switching is commonplace in verbal exchanges, television and radio news, and print media, creating a linguistic environment of everyday polyphony. All of these factors complicate my approach to the research question. Data collection for this study consisted of archival research, drawing from two key sources. First, legal documents laid out the official language-ineducation policy. Particularly interesting for the purposes of this research were the documents reflecting changes to policy since 2000; these revealed both the growing space afforded to Creole since it was deemed a langue régionale and the persistent fear that the introduction of Creole would handicap students in the public sphere. Given the tension between these two forces, statements of official policy were read as sites where the discourse on



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language, in all its complexity, was made manifest. To complement the use of government archives, data was also drawn from articles and letters to the editor in the Journal de l’Île de La Réunion, Réunion Island’s oldest daily newspaper. Written and published exclusively by local staff on Réunion Island, and targeting an exclusively Reunnionais readership, the newspaper illuminates the popular discourse on language-in-education. The issue of Creole in the classroom is a frequent topic of its editorials, and collective identity at large is often fodder for debate in letters from readers. An analysis of the ways that authors conceptualize French and Creole draws attention to the often unspoken political, cultural, and ideological significance of each language. Data analysis for this chapter consisted of a critical discourse analysis, understanding language as the product of a political and social order that serves to legitimate particular configurations of power.6 Thus, depictions of the Creole and French languages in government documents and newspaper content illuminate the discourse on collective identity on Réunion Island. The goal of data analysis was to determine how the significance of Creole and French is revealed and re-envisioned through the discourse on language-in-education. Laws dictating the specifics of national education policy—including school administration and pedagogy—are recorded in the Code de l’éducation, which is organized into a comprehensive, searchable online database. The Code, in turn, exists within a larger context of written and unwritten practices concerning language, culture, and collective memory. In particular, language-in-education laws should be read in light of the Loi Deixonne of 1951, which establishes the category of regional languages and delineates their place in the public sphere. As of June 2014, twenty-three ordinances in the Code explicitly reference the place of regional languages in education.7 The most pertinent, “The Teaching of Regional Languages and Cultures” (Article L312-10),8 grants explicit permission to teach regional languages and cultures at every level. However, it does not specify how, and under what circumstances, regional languages may be taught. A subsequent ordinance, which grants special status to the Corsican language (Article L312-11-1), suggests that teachers outside of Corsica are not afforded the same right. Yet the law does not state these restrictions explicitly; rather, it specifies the body charged with that oversight. A second key ordinance, Le conseil académique des langues régionales (Article D312-33), lays out a highly detailed description of a consultatory council to be established in each Académie where an officially recognized regional language is spoken. The Conseil, tasked with promoting regional languages and cultures “in all the diversity of their modes of teaching,” partners with official decision-making bodies to develop a comprehensive, region-specific curriculum for teaching regional languages and cultures

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(Articles D312-34, D312-35, and D312-36). This ordinance is striking for the detail it devotes to the composition and responsibilities of the Conseil, alongside its delegation of virtually all the specificities of regional language teaching to each region. A similar appearance of power-sharing is found in other ordinances addressing language-in-education: regional authorities in each DOM are tasked with developing and financing pedagogical activities that reflect the local language and culture (Article L214-17). At an even more local level, teachers are reminded that it is ultimately their responsibility to transmit regional languages and cultures alongside creativity, innovation, respect for republican values, civic responsibility, tolerance for diversity, and physical health (Article L121-1). The initial appearance of a decentralized approach to language-in-education belies the reality of ultimate control at the national level. As indicated above, the explicit statement that regional languages may be used in the classroom in Corsica implies that this is generally not the case elsewhere. Second, the right to use regional languages in education only applies to officially recognized regional languages. Third, while the Code proclaims the state’s support for teaching regional languages and cultures at school, it then clarifies that these activities are optional, and must not interfere with teaching the obligatory traditional subjects (Article L214-17). Finally, while the membership of the Conseil is determined at the regional level, the chair of the Conseil, who is charged with appointing all members not specified in the national law, is the Recteur—the chair of the Académie (Article D312-38). In turn, the Recteur is appointed directly by the President. Frequently, as in the case of Réunion Island, the Recteur is a career academic with no prior personal ties to the region whose educational system he directs. All of these unwritten realities diminish local decision-making power concerning regional languages in education. Given the tension between the appearance of decentralized power and the reality of national control over language-in-education, the question arises of what stake the French state holds in language-in-education policy. A few clues are apparent in the language of the Code. First, regional languages enable students to access the French language, which is a vessel of national unity and republican values. Thus, the state is willing to encourage the use of regional languages if this facilitates a sense of national unity. Viewed in this light, regional languages are valuable not for their own sake, but for their utility in promoting the French language. Second, regional languages must be regulated closely in order to protect the integrity and hegemony of the French language. With few exceptions (including limited space for regional languages), French is to be the sole language of instruction, examinations, and essays. This clear statement demonstrates the high level of importance afforded to the French language; acquiring the regional language is only a



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secondary goal. Finally, the great attention to detail in the description of the Conseil, and the power it retains for the state, serves to allay any fear that regional languages in education will diminish students’ command of, or commitment to, French. On Réunion Island, the intentions underlying the Code are openly asserted and challenged. Certainly, the language-in-education debate in the Journal de l’Île de La Réunion (JIR) reveals a sharp division of opinion regarding the appropriate place of Creole in the public sphere. However, underlying both conceptions is the same understanding of the relationship between Creole and French, and the significance of each for cultural identity. Between January 1998 and December 2012, the JIR published 473 articles that addressed some aspects of language-in-education. Figure 16.1 provides a brief snapshot of the diversity of these articles: language-in-education was mentioned in eleven different sections of the paper, ranging from politics to entertainment. Often, these included only a brief reference to the debate, indicating that the issue of language-in-education pervades a wide variety of other social issues. By far, the largest number of references (178) were contained in letters to the editor. This statistic reveals that the language-ineducation debate is not reserved for the political and cultural elite; rather, the question of which language(s) Réunionnais children should encounter at school is embedded in popular discourse. The distribution of articles by year in the four sections most likely to feature them is displayed in Figure 16.2. Articles on language-in-education peaked between 1999 and 2001, which coincides with the application of the Loi Deixonne to Réunion Creole. In both 1999 and 2001, letters to the editor formed the largest category for this topic, indicating the vibrant popular discourse before and after its implementation. In 2000, the largest number of articles was in the Education section; these detailed the changes to policy that the Loi Deixonne would bring. Two other peaks in the number of articles occurred between 2003–2004 and 2009–2010. The former centered on a discussion of the possibility of standardizing Creole vocabulary and spelling (which varies widely between the highlands and lowlands, and between the North and South of Réunion Island), while the latter consisted largely of responses to an Ipsos-sponsored survey demonstrating that a strong majority of Réunionnais parents supported integrating Creole into the secondaryschool curriculum. Beyond these spikes in attention to the language-in-education debate, other patterns in the discourse are visible across the fourteen-year period: interviews with academics and the leaders of pro-Creole associations frequently triggered a resurgence of the debate in readers’ letters over the following months, as did statements by local and national politicians. The latter often provoked open letters from JIR readers, demonstrating the highly public and

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resonant nature of the language-in-education debate. Additionally, the letters section frequently took on a character of its own, as readers responded to one another’s experiences absent an initial triggering article or event. In their letters and articles, supporters and opponents of Creole languagein-education appeal to divergent aspects of the local language. Opponents of Creole deploy arguments similar to those used at the national level: they express concern that Creole will infringe upon valuable class time that could be used to instruct creolophone students in French. By extension, they fear that Réunionnais students will emerge from secondary school without mastering the national language and incapable of finding employment—a condition which, generalized across Réunionnais youth, will impede the economic prospects of Réunion Island in the future. JIR letters appeal to a local audience and express local concerns, which frequently include anecdotes about interactions with creolophone youth. Even more significantly, opponents of Creole language-in-education sometimes use Creole in their letters and articles, and never translate these expressions into French. Yet Creole, in these contexts, is typically either juxtaposed with standard French in a negative light (e.g., “Soyons dans le débat”, November 26, 2003, which quotes a proposed Creole pedagogical tool and then denounces it as informal and inappropriate for the classroom) or used for humorous effect (e.g. “Créole KK”, November 7, 2010, a tirade against Creole language-in-education, opening with a pun, published shortly after the Rectorat approved greater inclusion of Creole in the classroom). By code-switching, these authors lay claim to Réunionnais linguistic and cultural identity even as they reject the opening of a particular public space to Creole. Supporters of Creole language-in-education appeal much more openly to Réunionnais cultural identity than do opponents. Conversely, the utility of French, while not denied, is virtually absent from their arguments. Such articles integrate Creole into their own writing, using it in different ways from their opponents. First, Creole is used to convey bluntness: authors disavow indirect, flowery speech (associated with French) and proclaim the local people’s right to understand (e.g. “Kosa y vien fèr Claude Thélot?”, December 15, 2003, mocking the chair of a national commission on curriculum reform for knowing nothing of Réunionnais schools). Using Creole also enables authors to demonstrate that language-in-education is a local issue that affects local people (e.g., “Kosa i fé à lékol kann i fé kréol?”, August 13, 2010, the opening question in an article on widespread parental support for Creole languagein-education). Other articles integrate Creole alongside local cultural references, further demonstrating the link between linguistic and cultural identity and—by extension—the inability of French to convey Réunionnais identity (e.g. “Les lointaines tribulations d’un ‘p’tit malbar’”, September 7, 2011, which incorporates local ethnic categories into an article on teaching Creole



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literature at school). Most strikingly, some authors write entire letters to the editor in Creole, a powerful statement that excludes non-creolophones from the discourse on language-in-education and lays claim to a public intellectual forum outside the classroom: that of print media (e.g., “Akoz mi vé koz kréol lékol?”, February 28, 2008, which describes the plight of a child prohibited from speaking Creole at school and incapable of speaking French). The language-in-education debate provokes passion from supporters and opponents alike in the Journal de l’Île de La Réunion. While each side appeals to a different facet of Creole—its informality and lack of utility for opponents, and its authenticity and link to local culture for supporters—both draw from a common set of beliefs about the symbolic value of Creole and French. At the national level, the perspective is reversed: underlying the regional language provisions in the Code de l’éducation is the belief that French is a cultural and intellectual resource, and the unifying language of the nation. Creole, while a vehicle of local culture, is ultimately valued as a means of helping young Réunionnais students transition smoothly into the francophone public sphere. Viewed in this light, Réunionnais supporters of Creole language-ineducation and metropolitan policymakers have much in common, though they take opposing stances in the language-in-education debate. Both link language and culture, viewing their preferred language as both a means of accessing culture and a cultural expression in its own right. Likewise, both view language as key for fostering a sense of collective identity—whether at the regional or national level. Both groups prioritize the perceived unifying power of a language over its more tangible economic and social utility. Conversely, Réunionnais opponents of Creole language-in-education prioritize utility over culture and collective identity. Yet all three groups pit culture and utility against one another and choose between them. Based on this rhetoric, any party seeking to take a stance on language-in-education must choose between abstract culture and economic utility. The irreconcilability of these two forces has led to an impasse in the debate; thus, any way forward must find a way to reconcile these two concerns. Here, Réunion Island serves as an excellent illustration of postcolonial polyphony. An approach to language grounded in the reality of a creolized, postcolonial society would reflect what Booth calls the “irreducible multi-centeredness” of human life.9 Through socialization, every individual becomes a polyglot who encounters a variety of overlapping and contradictory voices in other people. From childhood, she assigns worth to other voices and internalises them to varying degrees as she develops a distinctive voice of her own. Each layer of collective identity plays a role in her interpretation of the voices she encounters. As she comes into contact with voices vastly different from her own, she reassesses ideas she previously had considered universal, gradually

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coming to recognise every voice as the product of experience rather than an objective truth. The more she realises this, the more she is able to develop her own voice, expose it to new influences, and let it evolve. In that sense, Booth argues that polyphony, “the miracle of our ‘dialogical’ lives together”, is a virtue to be cultivated.10 At the societal level, Réunion Creole—an amalgamation of French, Tamil, and a Malgasy, and of colonization, slavery, and coexistence—is, itself, constructed discursively. It is created and recreated on a daily basis, as scholars debate the standardization of Creole spelling and citizens pen letters to the editor. Yet this co-creative relationship is also present between Creole and French in education. The polyphonous child will not have his voice silenced in the classroom. As he encounters the unfamiliar language of education, he filters its words through his own, thoroughly hybrid language, and gives them new meanings based on his own experiences. Even when another language is imposed as the sole language of instruction, it can never transfer its full range of meanings to a society (or an individual) with a different experience of reality. The polyphonous society, fully aware of the other language’s shortcomings, thus resists the claim that the language of education is somehow superior to its own. Rather, the polyphonous society becomes actively engaged in the development of another language, creating an internal dialogue. The languages interact on an equal level, and entirely new meanings emerge from their contact.11 Consequently, the other’s language can never dominate a polyphonous society oppressively. Rather, the language that emerges from such a society is multifaceted, ambivalent, and undecided, the product of multiple languages and of the contact between them. Bakhtin terms this phenomenon “vari-directional discourse”: the would-be colonizer’s words become “double-voiced,” laden with the meanings of the multiple societies that use them.12 In light of everyday polyphony, the current impasse in the language-ineducation debate appears less daunting. An understanding of language—like power—as fluid and discursive frees the postcolonial society from having to choose a single taproot and call it the language of education. In its place is Glissant’s rhizome: it is a series of European, African, and Asian languages, pidgins, and creoles, different for every speaker and listener, ever-changing and ever-growing, with no universal essence.13 A conversation may begin in French and transition into Creole—as is often the case in casual encounters on Réunion Island. The rhizome of language in the postcolonial society is nebulous, loose, and not particularly imposing. But it is inclusive of every history, every experience, and every identity. It permits every speaker to be a co-creator of a constantly evolving language. As Réunion Island opens its classrooms to polyphony, its students will find unity not in a universal collective identity, but in the shared process of exchanging ideas, experiences, and words.



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Notes 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xiv. 2. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, Critical Inquiry 8, 4 (1982): 787. 3. Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 47. 4. Edouard Glissant, Le Discours Antillais (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981), 292. 5. Joshua Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), 225. 6. Nelson Phillips and Cynthia Hardy, Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction (London: Sage, 2002). 7. Legifrance, “Code de l’Education,” accessed June 21, 2014, http://www. legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006071191. 8. Author’s translation. 9. Wayne C. Booth, “Introduction,” in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, by Mikhail Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xx. 10. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, xxi. 11. Ibid., 266. 12. Ibid., 195. 13. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11; Celia M. Britton, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 14.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Booth, Wayne C. Introduction to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, by Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. xiii–xxviii. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Britton, Celia M. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Fishman, Joshua. Language in Sociocultural Change. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8, no, 4 (1982.): 777–795. Glissant, Edouard. Le Discours Antillais. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981. Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997. [1st edn, Poétique de la Relation, Paris: Gallimard, 1990]. Legifrance. “Code de l’Education,” last modified 21 June 2014, http://www. legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006071191. Phillips, Nelson and Cynthia Hardy. Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction. London: Sage, 2002. Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Chapter 17

Thundering Poetics/ Murmuring Poetics Doing Things with Words as a Marker of Identity Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo If the question of genre in African literature is a particularly vexed one, it is not until the stage of translation, however, that generic paradigms really become intelligible.1 Not only does Western generic compartmentalization not necessarily fit African literary arts but the question of genre in translation has been insufficiently examined so far or, at least, not in a way that challenges Western generic paradigms. In this chapter, I propose to address these questions based on Ivory Coast writer Jean-Marie Adiaffi’s novel La carte d’identité and its English translation The Identity Card, and his long poem D’éclairs et de foudres. Adiaffi’s own transgeneric posture—what he termed n’zassa—transpires in a use of language that is informed by his Akan literary heritage, négritude, and surrealist poets—especially Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.2 More specifically, I suggest that Adiaffi’s sound poetics in La carte d’identité shies away from the decorative to allegorically embody the African people’s struggle to prove one’s identity to the colonial powers while pointing to the idea of performance and audible literary modalities at large. A close examination of La carte d’identité and its English translation helps us understand to what extent Brigitte Katiyo allows her translation to relate to the performable in general, and sustain the connections to Adiaffi’s Akan literary heritage in particular. Of Genres, Off Genres: prose and poetry Although Western generic conventions opposing prose to poetry have been challenged by the introduction of prose poems at the end of the 213

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nineteenth century,3 the traditional Aristotelian dichotomy is still alive and kicking.4 As Moore aptly underlines: Because it shapes our understanding of literature so completely and uncritically, the duality between prose and poetry is perhaps the most basic and difficult assumption to question. But early experiments in prose poetry prove that this duality had become arbitrary, and that a formal definition of poetry had become impossible. This undermining of the Aristotelian separation between prose and poetry is one of the least noted revolutions born on the Enlightenment.5

Indeed, this dichotomy is as confusing as it is lasting, with the consequence that meters and verses continue to be more often than not associated with poetry.6 Meschonnic’s innovative works on poetics and translation suggest to radically challenge the damaging opposition between prose and poetry and offers a non-formalist understanding of rhythm.7 More importantly, his propositions prepare the ground for approaching oral literatures outside the falsely universal generic framework designed within Western thought. A number of oral literature scholars point to the fact that this distinction is irrelevant for African oral literatures,8 while others suggest that the distinction between prose and a versed text only becomes intelligible on a printed page since the sole difference lies on their spatial order.9 In a contemporary context, the use of “genre” is fraught with difficulties that are discussed by African writers and critics of African literatures alike. Unsurprisingly, novels appear to be the most problematic literary object10: M. Keith Booker claims that the European origin of the novel explains the uneasy relationship African writers have been experiencing with literary genres in general11 whereas Roger Tro Dého remarks that novels are the only Western genre that is not found in African oral literatures.12 As a matter of fact, writers have been implementing many a creative way to avoid “novel” as a label: Sony Labou Tansi opted for fable, Patrice Nganang for conte citadin [urban tale13], while Were-Were Liking decided on chant-roman (song-novel).14 Adiaffi selected one single Agni word, n’zassa, to qualify the totality of his literary oeuvre. Borrowed from Agni tailors, n’zassa refers to a loincloth made with little pieces of material left over from other loincloths, a sort of patchwork-loincloth displaying different motifs. Adiaffi’s metaphoric use of n’zassa allows him to define his writing as an harmonious blend of literary genres calling upon different forms, poetics, and functions; n’zassa is hence a non-genre or a genre escaping the traditional Western generic triad comprised of novel, poetry, and theater.15 Both published in 1980, La carte d’identité (henceforth La carte)—a fiction labeled in parenthesis “(roman)”16 [novel] by its French publisher Hatier— and D’éclairs et de foudres (henceforth D’éclairs), a text published by



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Abidjan publisher CEDA without any generic label, are two short literary pieces of approximately hundred pages. La carte, although unmistakably exhibiting a still strong Négritude signature, was published in the wake of satirical novels by francophone West African writers, a literary movement initiated by Camara Laye in the 1950s that includes works by Mongo Beti, Bernard Dadié, and Ferdinand Oyono: The change in form and mood suited the temper of the times. Now that colonialism was moribund, one could afford to laugh at colonizer and colonized alike, point out absurd aspects of their interaction. [. . .] The fact that independence was just around the corner made self-confident self-criticism and joking possible. Instead of striving to impress the colonial master, one now had license to tickle him, even if the last laugh was at his own expense. Satirical fiction may have helped to ease social and political tensions in French Africa prior to independence by comically deflating some the issues [sic] that had been blown out of proportion during the Negritude era. The ironic needle now spoke louder than the pistol shot.17

La carte’s narrative, which is about an Agni prince summoned by the local representative of the French colonial power to produce his French identity card so as to prove his identity, is the pretext to explore the larger question of cultural identity. As a matter of fact, its narrative serves as mere canvas for a much broader experimentation with writing.18 Indeed, the power struggle between Prince Mélédouman and Commandant Kakatika is enacted through the prince’s mastery of the French language that he instills with his oral tradition skills: from his display of puns that ridicule the commandant to a formidable, poetic arrangement of words revealing a finely crafted sonic architecture. A similar writing project is sustained in D’éclairs inasmuch as identical audible motifs are implemented. Even more than Césaire’s Cahier, D’éclairs escapes any attempt of categorization, even the very lose definition of prose poem since it includes dialogues and narrative fragments, yet is considered as a poem within the literary institution. Despite Adiaffi’s strong a-generic positions and the remarkable aural stylistic kinship between La carte and D’éclairs, literary critics K. N. Kouadio, Bruno Gnaoulé-Oupoh, and J. T. Kouadio have examined sound structures in D’éclairs, but have paid little attention to them in La carte, except for Madeleine Borgomano who addressed them in her brief, joint review of La carte and D’éclairs.19 As Meschonnic, Dessons, and Moore after them judiciously denounced, labels still continue to orient the critics’ reading. A glimpse into Adiaffi’s personal background and literary inspirations will further highlight the aporia of referring to these conventions when trying to take the full measure of his writerly agenda.

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Adiaffi’s Eclectic Artistic Sources: a N’zassa of Inspirations Born in 1941 in Bettié, Côte d’Ivoire, to Agni20 parents, Jean-Marie Adiaffi started off his career in filmmaking and turned to literature rather late in his life. It can safely be said that La carte and D’éclairs, which together earned Adiaffi the Grand Prix littéraire d’Afrique Noire in 1981, launched his literary career as his early collection of poems Yale Sonan (1969) went relatively unacknowledged. While Adiaffi cannot be considered as a prolific writer— with just eight published works—he was an outspoken and active advocate of all things Akan. To his own account, a variety of arts have shaped his literary project, including sculpture and blacksmithing, both of which lent him a lifelong fascination for the transformation of forms, as well as Akan oral literary arts for whose foundation Adiaffi’s grandmother is to be thanked since she played a major role in shaping his literary expression.21 As a matter of fact, giving a full-fledged “n’zassa” reading of Adiaffi’s texts and understanding what he is doing in terms of what one could qualify as “aural writing” requires a closer examination of Akan literary arts. Proverbs, drum language poetry, funeral dirges, libation poetry, folktales, and folksongs are elements given by Akan oral literature scholar Kwabena Nketia to describe the richness of the Akan heritage.22 Nana Abarry also points to “verse narratives and praise poems” and signals that tonguetwisters, songs, and poems are commonplace in daily life.23 Beyond calling upon traditional patterns of oral poetry such as repetition and syntactic parallelism,24 Akan literary arts rely on a number of stylistic features such as rhymes and alliterations. In the particular case of praise poetry as examined by L.A. Boadi language is characterized by “highly mannered and controlled syntactic and phonological patterns” including puns and play on words.25 An interesting stylistic trademark pertains to word compounding: An inescapable component of the style is the process of word compounding. The highsounding words so common a feature of the poems are the product of a particular technique of stringing words together, probably involving a process peculiar to the strategy of oral poetry in Akan.26

The following example of word compounding in an Akan praise poem show affinities with paronomasia27 in that both devices bring together words pointing to distinct referents while displaying a strong sound similitude: Wó nà wóye nìnkyí-nínkyí Wó nà wóye nànká-nànká28

The poem’s sonic symmetry is carried on in the next three lines—albeit in a decrescendo—with the mirroring pairs formed by “òdúm-fété” and “òdánfété”, and the final “frèdè-fété.”



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Underlining this stylistic device is important, not only because it appears to represent an unavoidable feature amongst Akan poetic strategies, but also or rather because it relates to Adiaffi’s trademark sound motif—paronomasia. Paronomasia is certainly not unique to one particular literary tradition: it has been well documented elsewhere, in Celtic oral literature for instance. Yet what makes this particular device so compelling pertains to its cognitive and affective workings that transcend mere sound kinship: In Celtic Literature—particularly the poetic tradition—as Patrick K. Ford has shown, it is often paronymy that guides or establishes the meaning of the poem: the associations established by sound similarities indicate the central flow of ideas that the poet builds into the verse, channeling both cognitive and affective response to the poem. Sometimes paronymy brings together words with similar or associative meanings, sometimes words with contrasting meanings that startle the reader into new awareness. Thus, paronymy has considerably more power than sound similarities that serve simply as ornamentation or entertainment.29

Tymoczko’s remarks, which echo Boadi’s as he underscores puns and verbal wit in Akan praise poetry,30 are highly relevant for reading Adiaffi’s La carte since they give a framework for reading his text in all it dimensions, urging readers to embrace the paronomastic motif as a powerful tool embedded in the narrative, reinforcing or reorienting it, or even instilling conflicting connotations. In other words, paronomasia makes a perfect case in point for demonstrating that phonic architecture can hardly be divorced from the narrative in that it conditions semantics as will be discussed later. Adiaffi’s Poetics of Identity La carte can roughly be divided into two distinct groups: the first one consists of chapters—the first six chapters and the last one—that are clearly guided by irony as the core working device where the terribly nicknamed Commandant Kakatika confronts Prince Mélédouman; the second group is made up of chapters situated in the middle of the book where Mélédouman, accompanied by his granddaughter, goes for a Kafkaesque search for identity. This latter group is characterized by a more solemn tenor and a structure remindful of West African traditional storytelling. Narration in these chapters borders the mystical, adopting an organization that clearly departs from Western conventions. Chapters in the first group display a wide variety of sound features31 whereas those in the second group implement a narrower selection of devices, mainly ones pertaining to lexical and syntactical repetition. The following excerpts have been selected to illustrate how Adiaffi’s aural devices work from within the narrative and sustain its ideology. While most excerpts are taken from La carte, some selected passages from D’enfers will

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highlight the writerly kinship of both works. In the subsequent section, selections from The Identity Card (henceforth The ID), Brigitte Katiyo’s English translation of La carte, will be presented so as to discuss Katiyo’s translation choices. In turn, her decisions are put into perspective by referring to other translators’ choices in terms of sound motifs. To provide an easier reading, sound features in the selected excerpts are highlighted in bold and an English translation is given immediately after the text in French. While repetition has been identified as one of La carte’s aural devices, one needs to point to its many shades and hues and to how it bolsters the narrative’s ideology: Vous aviez entre vos mains les pouvoirs, tous les pouvoirs, les moyens, tous les moyens. Le pouvoir technique, les moyens techniques. Le pouvoir intellectuel, les moyens intellectuels. Le pouvoir moral, le moyen moral.32 [You have had all the powers in your palms, all power, every possible means. Technical power, technical means. Intellectual power, intellectual means. Moral power, moral means.]33

Lexical repetition is doubled by what can be called syntactic parallelism, where one term is substituted by another (first pouvoir [power] then moyens [means]). In this particular excerpt, repetition devices are put to such use that the whole passage turns into a long formulaic phrase, where ritualized language hammers in pivotal themes. Similar keywords are supported by lexical repetition with the addition of other devices: Que peuvent la technique, la force militaire bestiale, la force brutale, la force policière contre la force de l’homme—vous venez de le reconnaître vousmême—la force de son esprit, la force de son âme, la décision ferme et irrévocable de tout son être [. . .]34 [What can technique, brutal military, or police force do against the fierce willpower of man—you’ve just admitted its existence yourself—against the force of his spirit, the force of its soul, the final and decisive force of his whole being?]35

Here, bestiale rhymes with brutale and finds further echoes in irrevocable, and imperfectly in âme. Derived words represent yet another variation in repetitive techniques— adding a sophistication that will be discussed below. Illustrations abound and include: “Mélédouman savait par expérience ce qu’‘aller au cercle’ veut dire dans cette ‘encerclée’ colonie”36 [Mélédouman knew from experience what ‘going to the district’ meant in that wretched colony];37 “Prince, prince de la principauté ”38; [prince [. . .] prince of the principality];39 “On a vu dans l’histoire de la colonisation des peuples colonisateurs adopter la culture du



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peuple colonisé ”;40 [History shows examples of colonizers who adopted the culture of the people they colonized];41 and “Oui, je vous accuse de trahison et de tricherie et moi je ne joue pas avec les traîtres et les tricheurs”42 [I call that cheating. Yes, you cheated at your own game. Yes, I accuse you of cheating, of treason, and I am not the type who plays around with traitors].43 This last example not only combines two pairs of derived words (trahison/ traîtres and tricherie/tricheurs) but also produces an utterance that is hard to pronounce, tongue-twister-like with its repeated, initial /tr/. This technique represents a powerful sarcasm-conveying tool as exemplified in the following statement staging the problematic nickname given by local children to the commandant: “Ah! Kakatika! Outre la sonorité puante, empuantie, merdière et emmerdante des premières syllabes, cela veut dire « monstre géant »”44 [Ah Kakatika! Apart from being the catastrophic, coprolitic, and cacophonic nickname of the commandant, it means “giant monster”].45 The frequent implementation of paronomasia comes hence as a logical, natural extension of the derivative technique since both devices allow for a similar impact on the narrative, accentuating keywords and bringing sarcasm to yet another level. At some point, exasperated by Mélédouman’s resistance, Commandant Kakatika utters “La loi, la légalité, la légitimité: c’est moi et moi seul. Il n’y a pas plus à Bettié qu’ailleurs deux légalités, deux légitimités, deux cartes d’identité”46 [Here law, legitimacy, legality, it is me, and me alone. In Bettié as anywhere else, there is only one law. Only one legitimacy, only one legality and only one identity card],47 in an effort to persuade Prince Mélédouman that only one type of identity exists—the one recognized by French officials—and that Mélédouman’s attempt to suggest anything else is purely and simply preposterous. The grotesque of Kakatika’s statement is superbly turned into a performative statement worthy of the best stage utterances, with a central, paronomastic pair (légalité/légitimité) repeated in the next sentence and further underscored by assonances (/é/) and alliterations (/l/). In fact, the whole argument between Mélédouman and Kakatika—that takes place in the first six chapters and the last one—is highly performative in that the writing is structured by a remarkable density of aural devices. Mélédouman’s own endeavor to remind Kakatika of the great lengths to which French colonizers went to annihilate up to the last bit of Agni culture gives another interesting illustration of this performative dimension: “Vous piétinez, vous humiliez, vous opprimez, vous réprimez, vous exploitez, vous niez [. . .]”48 [you have crushed, humiliated, oppressed, suppressed, exploited, refused [. . .].49 While a paronomastic association brings together opprimez and réprimez, the scansion of the repeated syntax is highlighted by the final /é/. Adiaffi’s a-generic posture is best understood when reading D’éclairs parallel to La carte. The common thread of both texts is clearly this astonishing, performative writing that brings out their common ideology although

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La carte’s sarcasm gives way to the kind of surrealist writing that was the signature of the Negritude movement. However, the points being made by Adiaffi are enacted through the very same aural devices. One can note, here and there, the occasional pun participating in the gravity of the tone: “Vous petits nègres mercédes-odorisés, merde-sots-odorisés qui maintenez la douloureuse pérennité du fouet du vol du pillage du viol dans nos murs”50 [You young negroes with your malodorous Mercedes, you mephitic-feces-fools who maintain the painful permanence of whipping robbing pillaging raping within our walls].51 The whole passage can be described as a combination of sonic techniques stringing words together (money/stench, money/foolishness), ostensibly assimilating vol (robbing) to viol (raping) through paronomasia, and further connecting pérennité/permanence to pillage/pillaging by way of alliterations. Another powerful case in point of the cognitive workings of the techniques carried out by Adiaffi is found in the following example, this time exploiting a combination of syntactic parallelism and chiasmus,52 and a paronymic pair: Un matin plein de fourmis dans l’air épais qui surplombe le village, des hommes blancs habillés de noir et casqués de mort, des hommes noirs habillés de blanc et masqués de douleur et de honte ensemble ont pendu le vieux nègre pendu au village. . .53 [One morning full of ants in the thick air rising above the village, white men dressed in black and capped with death, black men dressed in white and cloaked in pain and shame together hung the old negro hung in the village. . .]54

Let us turn now to Brigitte Katiyo’s translation so as to understand the translation project framing her own (re)writing.55 The ID was published by Zimbabwe Publishing House in 1983, only three years after La carte came out. Little had been published on Adiaffi’s work by then, which means that Katiyo could not benefit from any critical apparatus to approach Adiaffi’s text and its poetics. Let us also remember that in the early eighties, critics were more inclined to opt for a sociopolitical reading of African fiction and that the larger interest for writing, for its aesthetics, was just about emerging.56 This context needs to be factored in when examining Katiyo’s translation. The two passages from the translation presented below showcase her strategy to recreate the text’s sonic aesthetics. Each excerpt is followed by the French corresponding passage for reference purposes. I am the one in power. I have all the power here, and power means force. How can anyone conceive power which is not force? A feeble power maybe? No, power is forceful, otherwise it is not power.57



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[[C]’est moi qui ait le pouvoir et tout le pouvoir. Et un pouvoir est puissant ou n’est pas. Comment concevoir un pouvoir impuissant, un pouvoir faible? Tout pouvoir est fort ou n’est pas. . .]58

Katiyo succeeded in both reenacting oppositions with the alliterative device carried out by Adiaffi—further reinforcing it with a final rhyme (fort/faible; force(ful)/feeble)—and carrying out the repetitive motif by devising her own pair of derived words (force/forceful). Additional passages fully embracing the sonic entail: The faint light of an old paraffin-lamp made it possible to see the sensual shapes of her body, especially the dark fullness of her breast swollen with all the goodness from heaven and earth.59 [La lumière pâle d’une vieille lampe à pétrole permettait de deviner les formes sensuelles du corps de la nocturne baigneuse, en particulier les rondeurs sombres de ses seins gonflés de tous les sucs de la terre et du ciel.]60

Occasionally however, Katiyo’s translation choices fall short of recreating the facetious, multifaceted writing of Adiaffi by depriving the passage of the sonic devices that activate specific connotations. A compelling illustration is Katiyo’s translation of a passage from La carte quoted earlier: “Kakatika, a nickname he kept. Ah Kakatika! Apart from the nauseating, foul, shitty sound of the first two syllables, it means giant monster.”61 Although the passage opens with a strong, momentum-promising alliterative sequence, her subsequent translation choices focus on referential correspondence, disregarding the formidable, sarcasm-inducing power of the two pairs of derived words in the French corresponding passage that literally enact its meaning (puante/ empuantie, merdière/emmerdante).62 Presented below is another example of translation choices disconnecting the connotations carried out by paronomasia, although resourcefully recreating other sound connections: The sacred time of my lost identity, which has been stolen, destroyed during my sleep. The long sleep of oblivion. The long deadly sleep! O mummy! O mummies’ memory!63 Le temps sacré de mon identité perdue, volée, violée durant mon sommeil. Le long sommeil de l’oubli, le long sommeil mortel! Ô momie! Ô mémoire de momie!64

This paronomastic pair (volée/violée) enjoys a two-pronged significance: a macro perspective brings together two common practices of appropriation in colonial history: theft and rape, whereas as a micro perspective connects

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to D’éclairs where the very same pair is implemented as presented earlier. Alternative options to “stolen”/“destroyed” include the pairs “robbed/raped”, “raided/raped”, and “defrauded/desecrated” (further echoing the preceding “sacred”). To better evaluate in what extent Katiyo embraced Adiaffi’s stylistic sophistication, a sample chapter—selected for its abundance in sonic devices both in La carte and in The ID—has been scrutinized and its respective motifs recorded.65 Results presented in Chart 17.1 will allow for discussion, starting with the notion of density to gradually open to the specific connotations associated with individual motifs. As demonstrated by the excerpts from the translation cited earlier, Katiyo embraced Adiaffi’s sonic practices to embed them in her own (re)writing project. The numbers presented above show that Adiaffi’s motif of repetition, which essentially relied on lexical repetition and syntactic parallelism, was carefully carried out by the translator (with a 80 percent and 75 percent recreation rate, respectively). However, sonic devices as represented by assonances and alliterations on the one hand, and those based on sound substitution on the other hand—such as paronomasia, derived words, and chiasmus—were unevenly incorporated in the translation. This remark mostly applies to the second group since it was sparsely recreated in the translation (33 percent), which prompts a number of comments. First of all, let us remember that paronymy is one of the most sophisticated of all sonic devices because of the cognitive and affective responses it triggers. As such, paronomasia not only constitutes a critical component of La carte’s sarcastic mechanism but it may also be Mélédouman’s most sophisticated weapon to demonstrate his artistic, more specifically poetic and linguistic, mastery to Kakatika. Second, the paronomastic motif appears to be the densest of all devices implemented by Adiaffi, a probably unusual enough phenomenon in “fiction” writing to be worthy of mention. Last but not least, paronymy strongly relates to the Akan stylistic practice of word compounding which chains words together and conveys a similar response. Before expanding on the Akan background of Adiaffi’s paronomastic motif, I suggest to examine other translators’ attitudes towards paronomasia in a similar environment, i.e., when paronomasia appears in a narrative structured by sound motifs. Opening to other translatory practices healthily prevents the discussion from suffering the unavoidable pitfalls of binary comparison between a text and its translation, where the “original” represents, perforce, the only measuring rod available. The ratios presented hereafter were collected during a large-scale study that examined the attitudes of translators towards sound motifs in six fictional works by anglophone and francophone African writers.66 Remarkably, the results showed a wide range in sensitivity towards the sonic dimension of the texts, ranging from one highly



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resistant translator to a translator meticulously reactivating the individual devices carried out in the narrative through to translators eclipsing their writers by overdeveloping one particular device. Paronomasia was incorporated in the translations at varying degrees: recreation rates ranged from 15 percent up to 90 percent—the latter figure demonstrating, if need be, the feasibility of such an enterprise. However, Adiaffi is the only writer in the study who exploits paronomasia to such an extent that it turns into an overarching motif, an überinvested motif, as it were. Motivations underlying Adiaffi’s writerly practice have been tentatively suggested earlier in the discussion; yet the background set by Akan literary arts appears to inform Adiaffi’s rhetoric in the guise of a literary over-awareness.67 Cross-pollinating N’zassa Writing with an Intermedial Translation Studies Paradigm Over a century after Mallarmé’s groundbreaking “Crise de vers”, “which states that poetic language itself—and not the subjectivist space of the lyric—should become the main object of investigation of modern poets,”68 the translation studies community still seems to be encumbered with the problematic Aristotelian dichotomy earlier referred to. Although translation studies scholar Antoine Berman denounced the lack of attention received by the translation of prose in terms of stylistic concerns and consequently the license bestowed upon prose translators, he did not exactly challenge the prose/poetry dichotomy, but rather focused on claiming a higher status for prose.69 African literature scholar and translator Pamela Smith starts from this very same premise to introduce her contention that Nigerian writer D. O. Fagunwa’s highly euphonic prose in fact calls for breaking the tacit generic convention: Concern with sound in translation, usually, is with poetry. Because the translator is too well aware of the “one-language-replacing-another-language” translation process, he or she could perhaps breathe easier when translating prose which, by its very nature, permits a kind of free form fluidity, giving an almost carte blanche “prosaic” license that poetry’s comparatively rigid form would almost consider barbaric. [. . .]Unless, perhaps, the prose text author specifically indicates his or her preoccupation with sound/ rhythm; in which case, sound, as an aesthetic value, would be inextricably tied to cognitive meaning. Such is the case with Yoruba fiction writer, D.O. Fagunwa.70

While Smith’s remark about Fagunwa’s “prose” is perfectly demonstrated in her article and, in fact, highly fitting to Adiaffi, the disturbing element lies in her introductory contention, which in fact merely echoes sentiments of many in the translation studies community, sentiments which Meschonnic

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spent his entire scholarly life refuting. The critical discourse surrounding the translation of aural elements painfully continues to mirror the generic compartmentalization denounced above. Mary Snell-Hornby’s recent attempt at categorizing translation according to a specific type of media71 leads to the same aporia, perpetuating the prescription of a certain type of reading/ rewriting to a certain type of discourse. The “multimodal” category, after an original suggestion by Katharina Reiss (1971) that was initially termed “audio-medial,” encompasses texts that have been identified by literary institutions as calling upon sound in one way or the other: “songs, film scripts, opera libretti and stage plays, [. . .] comics and advertising material.”72 All these paradigms are found wanting an ability to conceive sound motifs as escaping any specific generic category, as a transversal manifestation potentially occurring anywhere. In an effort to identify a more relevant framework, it is worth noting that Adiaffi’s n’zassa a-generic ideology harmoniously intersects with intermedial paradigms, more specifically Sylvestra Mariniello’s broad recycling concept and Irina Rajewsky’s more delineated propositions that she uses as a textual analysis tool. Mariniello’s fluid vision of intermediality as any form of recycling or conjunction of various media practices is relevant in that she favors to underscore the flux of sensory and aesthetics experience taking place in a text rather than to focus on interaction between closed texts.73 Rajewsky’s propositions, more specifically the second one where she envisions intermediality as “a communicative-semiotic concept, based on the combination of at least two medial forms of articulation”74 allow for their part to transcend the conventional hierarchy of senses traditionally attributed to a specific type of media. Both approaches provide a relevant framework for giving a contextualized close reading to Adiaffi’s text for translation purposes. Indeed, such a framework allows for conceptualizing sound motifs as being reminiscent of or connecting to other literary modalities while transcending chronological hierarchies (oral literary arts, theater, spoken word performances, audiobooks). In that regard, one can safely say that Katiyo’s translation succeeds in establishing the links to the performable in delivering a performable literary object, as it were. What her translation may be less susceptible of establishing, however, is to present Adiaffi’s text as potentially recycling a vernacular rhetorical practice that establishes the character of Mélédouman in his stylistic mastery—a mastery that leverages his opponent’s own language to substantiate Mélédouman’s sophisticated, artistic, and cultural identity. As suggested in the introductory remarks of this chapter, translation acts as a magnifying glass, revealing the “original” text in its most subtle articulations and allowing micro decisions taken by translators to relate to the writers’ larger agendas.



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Notes 1. I would like to thank Dr. Erin Riddle for her careful reading of an earlier version of this text and her insightful comments. 2. Bruno Gnaoulé-Oupoh, La littérature ivoirienne (Paris: Karthala/Abidjan: CEDA, 2000), 275. 3. Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1987). 4. Gérard Dessons and Henri Meschonnic, Traité du rythme: Des vers et des proses (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 57–58. 5. Fabienne Moore, Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 9. 6. Dessons and Meschonnic, Traité du rythme. 7. See Henri Meschonnic, Ethics and Politics of Translating, edited and translated by Pier Pascale Boulanger (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011)/Éthique et politique du traduire (2007), where his thoughts regarding the translation of rhythm and its politics are conveniently condensed. 8. Paul Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 170; Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (London: Clarendon Press, 1977); Jean Derive, “Une deuxième vie pour la poésie négro-africaine traditionnelle, La traduction en français? Problème de poétique et de lectorat,” in Black Accents: Writing in French from Africa, Mauritius and the Caribbean: Proceedings of the ASCALF Conference Held in Dublin, 8–10 April 1995, edited by J. P. Little and Roger Little (London: Grant and Cutler, 1997), 218. 9. Zumthor, “Introduction,” 170; also underscored by linguist Rostislav Kocourek, Essais de linguistique française et anglaise: mots et termes, sens et textes/Essays in French and English linguistics: Words and Terms, Meanings and Texts (Louvain/ Paris: Peeters, 2001), 119. 10. See Justin Bisanswa, “Roman africain et totalité,” Revue de l’Université de Moncton 37, no. 1 (2006), 15–38 for a full discussion on the African novel. 11. M. Keith Booker, The African Novel in English: an Introduction (Portsmouth (USA): Heinemann/Oxford (UK): James Currey, 1998), 9. 12. Roger Tro Dého, “La littérature orale et la rhétorique du mensonge dans Silence, on développe de Jean-Marie Adiaffi,” Trans 7 (2009), 2. http://trans.univparis3.fr/. One could however point to the many other narrative modes in oral literature. 13. All English translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated. 14. Sélom Komlan Gbanou, “La traversée des signes : roman africain et renouvellement du discours,” Revue de l’Université de Moncton 37, no. 1 (2006), 53. 15. Tro Dého, “La litterature orale”, 2. 16. On the copyright page. 17. Bernth Lindfors, “Politics, Culture, and Literary Form,” in African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, edited by Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson (Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 24.

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18. Madeleine Borgomano, “Les éclairs et les foudres de Jean-Marie Adiaffi,” Notre Librairie 87 (1987), 30. 19. Ibid., 30–33. 20. Agni culture and language are part of the larger Akan group. 21. Gnaoulé-Oupoh, La Littérature ivorienne, 274. 22. Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia, “Akan Poetry,” in Introduction to African Literature, edited by Ulli Beier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967). 23. Nana Abarry, “Teaching Akan Oral Literature in Ghanaian Schools,” Journal of Black Studies 24, no. 3 (1994), 318. 24. L. A. Boadi, “Poetry in Akan,” Research in African Literatures 20, no. 2 (1989), 186. 25. Ibid., 182. 26. Ibid., 189. 27. Paronomasia consists in bringing together words that point to different referents while presenting a sonic similarity (Christine Klein-Lataud, Précis des figures de style [Toronto: Editions du Gref, 2001]), 28. 28. Boadi, “Poetry in Akan,” 186. 29. Maria Tymoczko, “Sound and Sense: James Joyce’s Aural Esthetics,” in Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition: A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford, edited by Joseph Falaky Nagy and Leslie Ellen Jones, CSANA yearbook 3–4 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 365. 30. Boadi, “Poetry in Akan,” 185–187. 31. Including paronomasia, alliterations and assonances, lexical repetitions, syntactical parallelism, internal rhymes, derived words, and tongue twisters. 32. Adiaffi, La carte, 41. 33. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 30. 34. Adiaffi, La carte, 38. 35. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 28. 36. Adiaffi, La carte, 3. 37. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 1. 38. Adiaffi, La carte, 3. 39. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 1. 40. Adiaffi, La carte, 33. 41. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 24. 42. Adiaffi, La carte, 42. 43. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 30. 44. Adiaffi, La carte, 11. 45. My translation calling upon paronomasia. 46. Adiaffi, La carte, 32. 47. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 23. 48. Adiaffi, La carte, 42. 49. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 30. 50. Adiaffi, La carte, 63. 51. My translation.



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52. “An inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases,” Merriam-Webster Online, “chiasmus”, accessed June 24, 2014, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/chiasmus. 53. Adiaffi, La carte, 50. 54. My translation. 55. Antoine Berman, Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne. (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). 56. See Gbanou, “La traversée,” 41, on the role played by criticism and literary institutions in gradually focusing on the aesthetics of African novels and presenting their form as singular. 57. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 27. 58. Adiaffi, La carte, 37. 59. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 38. 60. Adiaffi, La carte, 53. 61. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 7. 62. See alternative English translation suggested above. 63. Adiaffi, Identity Card, 50. 64. Adiaffi, La carte, 68. 65. Laurence Jay-Rayon, “La traduction des littératures africaines europhones comme réactivation du patrimoine poétique maternel,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Montréal: Université de Montréal, 2011. 66. Ibid. 67. See Lise Gauvin’s linguistic over-awareness [“surconscience linguistique”] in her “D’une langue l’autre. La surconscience linguistique de l’écrivain francophone,” in L’écrivain francophone à la croisée des langues (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 5–15. 68. Michael Delville, “Stephen Fredman’s Poet’s Prose: The Crisis In American Verse.” The Prose Poem: an International Journal 7 (1998). 69. Antoine Berman, “L’analytique de la traduction et la systématique de la deformation,” in La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 50–51. 70. Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith, “Making Words Sing and Dance: Sense, Style and Sound in Yoruba Prose Translation,” Meta 46, no. 4 (2001), 744. 71. Mary Snell-Hornby, “What’s in a turn? On fits, starts and writhings in recent translation studies,” Translation Studies 2, no. 1 (2009), 41–51. 72. Ibid., 44. 73. Sylvestra Mariello, “Médiation et intermédialité,” Paper presented at the first convention of the Centre de recherche sur l’intermédialité, March 2–6, 1999, Montréal, Canada, 1999. 74. Irina O. Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remediation: Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités 6 (2005), 52.

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Bibliography Abarry, Nana. “Teaching Akan Oral Literature in Ghanaian Schools.” Journal of Black Studies 24, no. 3 (1994): 308–28. Adiaffi, Jean-Marie, La carte d’identité. Paris: Éditions Hatier International, 2002, ©1980. ———. The Identity Card. Translated by Brigitte Katiyo. Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1983. ———. D’éclairs et de foudres: Chant de braise pour une liberté en flammes. Abidjan: CEDA, 1980. Berman, Antoine. Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. ———. “L’analytique de la traduction et la systématique de la deformation.” In La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain. Paris: Seuil, 1999. 49–68. Bisanswa, Justin. “Roman africain et totalité.” Revue de l’Université de Moncton 37, no. 1 (2006): 15−38. Boadi, L. A. “Poetry in Akan.” Research in African Literatures 20, no. 2 (1989): 181–93. Booker, M. Keith. The African Novel in English: an Introduction. Portsmouth (USA): Heinemann/Oxford (UK): James Currey, 1998. Borgomano, Madeleine. “Les éclairs et les foudres de Jean-Marie Adiaffi.” Notre Librairie 87 (1987): 30–33. Delville, Michael. “Stephen Fredman’s Poet’s Prose: The Crisis In American Verse.” The Prose Poem: an International Journal 7 (1998). Dessons, Gérard, and Henri Meschonnic. Traité du rythme: Des vers et des proses. Paris: Armand Colin, 2005. Derive, Jean. “Une deuxième vie pour la poésie négro-africaine traditionnelle, La traduction en français? Problème de poétique et de lectorat.” In Black Accents: Writing in French from Africa, Mauritius and the Caribbean: Proceedings of the ASCALF Conference Held in Dublin, 8–10 April 1995, edited by J. P. Little and Roger Little. London: Grant and Cutler, 1997. 199−220. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. London: Clarendon Press, 1977 ©1970. Gauvin, Lise. “D’une langue l’autre. La surconscience linguistique de l’écrivain francophone.” In L’écrivain francophone à la croisée des langues. Paris: Karthala, 1997. 5–15. Gbanou, Sélom Komlan. “La traversée des signes : roman africain et renouvellement du discours.” Revue de l’Université de Moncton 37, no. 1 (2006): 39−66. Gnaoulé-Oupoh, Bruno. La littérature ivoirienne. Paris: Karthala/Abidjan: CEDA, 2000. Jay-Rayon, Laurence. “La traduction des littératures africaines europhones comme réactivation du patrimoine poétique maternel.” PhD Dissertation, Montréal: Université de Montréal, 2011. Klein-Lataud, Christine. Précis des figures de style. Toronto : Editions du Gref, 2001.



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Kocourek, Rostislav. Essais de linguistique française et anglaise: mots et termes, sens et textes/Essays in French and English linguistics: Words and Terms, Meanings and Texts. Louvain/Paris: Peeters, 2001. Kouadio, Jules Tiburce. “Étude des fonctions initiatiques rythmiques et poétiques dans D’éclairs et de foudres de Jean-Marie Adé Adiaffi.” Master’s Thesis, Abidjan: Faculté des Lettres d’Abidjan, 1984. Kouadio, Kobenan N’Guettia. “De l’expressivité au sens dans la poésie ivoirienne d’expression française.” PhD Dissertation, Université de Savoie, 2005. Lindfors, Bernth. “Politics, Culture, and Literary Form.” In African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, edited by Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009. 22–30. Mariniello, Sylvestra. “Médiation et intermédialité.” Paper presented at the first convention of the Centre de recherche sur l’intermédialité, March 2−6, 1999, Montréal, Canada, 1999. http://cri.histart.umontreal.ca/cri/sphere1/definitions.htm. Meschonnic, Henri. Ethics and Politics of Translating, edited and translated by PierPascale Boulanger. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Monroe, Jonathan. A Poverty of Objects. The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1987. Moore, Fabienne. Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Nketia, Kwabena Joseph Hanson. “Akan Poetry.” In Introduction to African Literature, edited by Ulli Beier. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967. 23–33. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remediation: Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6 (2005): 43–64. Smith, Pamela J. Olubunmi. “Making Words Sing and Dance: Sense, Style and Sound in Yoruba Prose Translation,” Meta 46, no. 4 (2001): 744–51. Snell-Hornby, Mary. “What’s in a turn? On fits, starts and writhings in recent translation studies,” Translation Studies 2, no. 1 (2009): 41–51. Tro, Dého Roger. “La littérature orale et la rhétorique du mensonge dans Silence, on développe de Jean-Marie Adiaffi,” Trans 7 (2009): 1–10, http://trans.univ-paris3.fr/. Tymoczko, Maria. “Sound and Sense: James Joyce’s Aural Esthetics.” In Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition: A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford, edited by Joseph Falaky Nagy and Leslie Ellen Jones, 359−76. CSANA yearbook 3−4. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Zumthor, Paul. Introduction à la poésie orale. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

Part V

Intersections of Text and Image

Chapter 18

Les Noces de Cana [The Wedding at Cana] by Wilson Bigaud or the Meeting of Colonial Heritage and Ancestral Traditions in Haitian Naive Art Jean Hérald Legagneur Translated by Medha Karmarkar One of the distinctive features of Haitian “naïve” art is that when the artists who participate in it do not endeavor to represent everyday Haitian life in all its contours and quirks, they quite simply try to capture in pictures the traces and fragments of the history that have shaped their imagination. This is the case for the first time with Jean-Richard Chéry who shows how an Enterrement à la Campagne [A Burial in the Countryside] is structured, with Philomé Obin who allows one to see the lifestyle of the Bourgeois du Cap-Haitien [the Middle-Class of Cape Haitian] or with André Normil who depicts “Toute Haïti sous nos yeux” [All of Haiti right before us]. This is also the case with Micius Stéphane who, in various paintings, describes the life and conditions of the peasants. This is mainly true, in the second instance, with Wilson Bigaud, whose fresco Les Noces de Cana [The Wedding at Cana]1 constitutes, in this respect, an iconic case. This fresco, which decorated the walls of the Episcopal Cathedral of the Church of the Saint Trinity of Port-au-Prince, presented two foundation stories, namely: the first miracle performed by Jesus which consisted in changing water into wine and the first large gathering in Haitian Vodou which launched the slave revolt in SaintDomingue: the Ceremony of Bois-Caïman.2 It thus takes on a double meaning in the history of Haitian art and culture. On the one hand, it has participated in a renewal of religious art in Haiti that was dominated for a long time by the ex voto [votive offering] and chromolithography of the Catholic saints. On the other hand, it constitutes a synthesis between Vodou and Christian 233

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elements, thus between ancestral traditions and a colonial heritage, displaying secular and religious motifs, sacred and profane objects, so-called scholarly culture and popular traditions. This state of affairs caused a scandal and provoked controversies amongst the heads of the Episcopal Church. Moreover, the study of this fresco, whose significance or artistic objectives have led the parishioners to accuse the clergy of that time of “vodouizing” the church and thus commiting blasphemy, is based on an iconographic and iconologic analysis on the deciphering of different icons, or even more of the “different plastic signs and forms” represented. This approach will focus on examining the painting on the way in which it combines, creates links, states these facts, and proposes to decipher them. In other words, it is about knowing how one can interpret this fresco in terms of the methods used and the organization of motifs, determining the status, and symbolism which should prove to be interesting. This study will mainly consist of defining analyses which can be drawn from the reactions provoked by the composition or structure of this fresco. Thus, one wonders how Bigaud manages to create a balance between two stories that are both incompatible and heterogenous, creating the foundation for a cultural weaving that continues to shape everyday Haitian life. Our decision to approach the fresco from this angle stems as much from curiosity as it does from the controversies it has stirred, the role it has played, and also the ethical responsibility it has assumed in art and in the Haitian social reality. In order to do so, we propose to adopt a method that will simultaneously straddle the notions and approaches of several authors. However, I will specifically focus on the semioticopoetic method used by Jacques Rancière in Le destin de l’image [The Destiny of the Image] applicable in the analysis of all types of visual images. Context of the realisation of The Wedding at Cana The cultural and literary context surrounding the creation of Bigaud’s fresco was mainly marked by the exhilarating atmosphere of the great international exhibition which was organised during the festivities of the the 200-year celebration of the founding of the city of Port-au-Prince. It was also quite tumultuous, given that the Roman Catholic Church had just conducted, in complicity with the bourgeoisie and the Haitian government of the time, a wave of persecutions known in Haitian history as the “Anti-Superstition Campaign,” against the practice of Vodou under the pretext of christianizing or civilizing the masses. Yet, paradoxically, the frescos, of which The Wedding at Cana, had prolonged, in many respects, the ideal pursued by the indigenist movement (even if it was already in its decline) to the extent that they had expressed “a certain



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manner of saying, doing, and thinking plastically which fell within the identity problematic of the writers of the Revue Indigène” [the Indigenous Journal].3 The Wedding at Cana thus adopts this “artistic Haïtianity,”4 which can be defined as the Haitian way of feeling and reacting to things. Let us not forget that the world was in a postwar mode, that is, the resumption of tourist activities which were on the rise between 1948 and 1950. This was also the period of great intellectual effervescence marked by the visit to Haiti of well-known personalities like Aimé Césaire and André Breton. The latter had given lectures and written laudatory texts on the topic of Haitian naive art. He had designated Hector Hyppolite (one of the most famous self-taught Haitian painters) as the most emblematic representative of this artistic trend and had bought many of his paintings. Some say that this was a very eventful time during which Haitian culture was in the very best of health. The Iconographic Dimension of THE Wedding at Cana Until their destruction along with the cathedral during the violent earthquake which shook Haiti on January 12, 2010, the frescos, mainly The Wedding at Cana, were never the subject of any specific study.5 Out of all of them, The Wedding at Cana remains the one that is the most remarkable with respect to its colors, the unexpected in its themes and detail, the scenery, and setting. The fourth largest work in terms of proportion alongside those which decorated the abside of the church, it depicts a bucolic setting—a veritable archetype of the Haitian villages where one can observe two trees stripped of their branches at the vertical ends and covering the top of the composition. This painting extends over a very wide space, brightened by two windows bordering the walls of the only chapel belonging to the cathedral on the right side of the choir. Working on his painting in a roughly sketched way, where the forms are superimposed in tiers or by gradation, the artist places at the center of the wall, in the area situated between the windows, the main theme of the painting. Indeed, under a sort of an arbor (a characteristic element of the Haitian rural world), the bride and groom are seen seated at a table, surrounded by the witnesses and wedding guests. A hand-crafted lamp called tèt-gridap in Haitian Creole (similar to the French bobèche), hangs from the ceiling of the arbor. Mary, in dazzling color, and Jesus dressed in blue and red (the Haitian national colors), standing and in profile, dominate this scene painted with brilliance. At the feet of Jesus, is a bare-foot man (a classic image of a Haitian peasant), pouring water into two yellow amphoras. Jesus, about to perform his miracle of transforming water into wine, places his hands above the two amphoras. In the foreground, a woman in a red dress is kneeling, a sign

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of devotion or reverence in an environment characterised by its extremely relaxed atmosphere. To her right, a bare-chested peasant adjusts his drum (a very popular instrument in the cultural activities of the people in Haiti) watched by a child. To her left, a little displaced, a notable from the village smokes his pipe while he rocks in his armchair. Stretched out at his feet, an animal resembling a baby goat gives the impression of playing with the child, himself stretched out on the ground. Moreover, while this miracle is taking place, a multiplicity of activities are going on in the surrounding area. To the left and in the foreground, a rooster thief is being chased by someone in charge. In the background in the same line two crosses (painted respectively in black and in red) indicate the presence of a cemetery. To the right, a vaccine [a Haitian musical wind instrument], a drum, and a Rara-rhythmed6 popular dance reinforce the expressive weight of this compostion. But the most evocative and highly significant icon of the fresco remains that which one might consider a sacrifice scene with a slaughtered pig before which stands a child. One will also notice a yellow hen and her four chicks of the same color pecking at the ground. This scene strangely reminds us and subtly evokes the description made by Haitian and foreign historians of the Ceremony of Bois-Caïman, the founding-act that gave birth to the Haitian nation. The Plasticity of the Wedding at Cana: the formal and chromatic aspect These different scenes along with the various elements that have been identified in the fresco make it a typically Haitian representation where intertwined mountains, trees, and hills on the slopes on which arise a host of cottages are found. The mix of heterogenous elements along with incompatible motifs and scenes challenge every notion of balance and harmony in the painting. These elements create, along with the hustle and bustle of the people, the effect of contrasts and surprise which affect, dominate, indeed wipe out the solemnity and devotion which should have been required during the performing of the miracle. Moreover, the formal construction of the painting, which happily places secular motifs alongside religious objects, namely the juxtaposition of profane sequences and sacred scenes, fits into the framework of the artistic strategy of the artist. The same goes for the color sequence which gives meaning to the different scenes of the painting: the predominance of red and its contrast with the green, and also the shaded spots placed symmetrically at the vertical ends of the fresco present the main nuances; the concentration of white at the center and the few yellow spots scattered here and there assure



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its luminosity. This synergy between what are known as “cool” colors (blue and green) and those that are “hot” (red and yellow) when coupled with the artist’s “naïve” style of painting, reinforces not only the desired intense psychological tension, but also reconfirms the plastic quality of the fresco. It is to be noted that this fresco has received a modest treatment in a popular style whose setting evokes the destitute life of the Haitian countryside. From this point of view would it not be interesting to compare this painting with the canvas treating the same theme painted by Véronèse, 451 years ago and preserved in the section of Italian painting at the Louvre museum? Bigaud and Véronèse’s Wedding at Cana: what dialogue? If the two works share—in certain respects (for reasons just explained) their iconography—the same theme and the representation of certain identical symbols, however these works are not linked either in their style or composition. Furthermore, Bigaud’s fresco is created in a popular manner and does not present any single focused approach of study whereas Véronèse’s canvas, conceived to decorate the refrectory built by Palladio for the Benedictines of the island of San Gregorio Maggiore, has been painted in a scientific way and conforms to academic norms. Bigaud is modest, Véronèse is grandiose. The former places his setting in the heart of nature, where the main scene is under an arbor, the latter places us overlooking the outdoors. Véronèse’s architectural elements take into account, along with the modern costumes of the period, the lavishness of Venice and evoke Greco-Roman antiquity by the presence of the tall, smooth, and fluted columns each mounted with a Doric, Corinthian, or composite capital. As for Bigaud, his architecture points to the rustic and impoverished life of the Haitian countryside where the cottages are constructed with improvised materials. The musical instruments observed in Véronèse’s canvas reflect the scholarly and classical sites that animate the wedding banquet in the Western world, while those made by hand observed in the Bigaud’s fresco illustrate and summarize at the same time the atmosphere that characterizes traditional and popular music that rythmns Haitian country life. On the other hand, if the gap is so obviously wide between the two works stylistically and technically, nonetheless, many elements make them similar. The two artists render, in their own way, according to their culture and their artistic and esthetic ambitions, the narrative related in Gospel of John II v. 1-11. They use the same colors, but they treat them differently. In the painting by the Venitian, the sacred episode of the story is treated with a noteworthy iconographic freedom where the white and blue (of the lapis

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lazuli) predominate and ensure its luminescence, but the contrast is also made possible by the green, the grey, sprinkled with a few dark spots. The animals represented in the two works do not all have the same functions: the linked levers in the foreground of Véronèse’s painting is an allegory of faithfulness in the couple, as is demanded by tradition in the Western world. This symbol contrasts with the animal that looks like a lamb (sacrificial animal) seen in the foreground in Bigaud’s painting to evoke the Christ. In Véronèse’s painting, this image takes on meaning in the scene where the three sacrificers are shown in the process of chopping up a lamb. As for the wild boar with its throat slit before which poses the boy in Bigaud’s fresco, it has already been explained that it is a sacrifice scene that reminds us (with the dance, the people armed with machetes) of the Ceremony of Bois-Caïman. In Véronèse’s painting Jesus is shown in blue and red which is also the case with Bigaud’s; Marie has her hair in a black veil that foreshadows the death of Jesus. With Bigaud, on the other hand, this reply is given by a woman in attendance dressed completely in black. In this way, these two works bear witness to the lucidity of each author respectively, and reflect the cultural and social differences of each of them. It is up to us now to examine Bigaud’s painting with regard to the feelings of rejection and admiration that it has aroused by the boldness and liveliness so unique to it, that is to say the way in which it has been received.  The Wedding at Cana: Reactions  It is perhaps not at all surprising that the various unconventional characteristics of this fresco would have provoked strong reactions amongst the worshippers of the Episcopal Church of Haiti. Their reaction, which consisted of smearing the fresco with paint, constitutes a mode of reception which according to Nicole Everaert-Desmedt is expressed in the form of a “rejection making the spectator go [. . .] from acknowledgement to astonishment, [. . .], from tranquillity to unease, from belief to doubt. . . .”7 That is precisely what Pierre Francastel tried to show by writing “[. . .] everyone has the capacity to grasp [a work] and to integrate it in his or her personal experience without having recourse to any particular technique of comprehension.”8  In the case of Wedding at Cana, the hostility and thus the rejection of the fresco can perhaps be explained by its disconcerting and destabilizing character which contrasts with the vision and the beliefs of the worshippers in the miracle performed by Christ. Indeed, the images painted produce new affects and make possible a new way of thinking that words could not achieve, but only the image can produce. This means that the image is endowed with “subversive power” which according to Patrick Vauday “remains dependant



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on an ontology which subjugates it to the recognition of and identification with essences.”9 This operation of recognition and identification of the essences interpreted as an understanding of symbols, that is, the comprehension of the “filtered cultural codes” in the painting lead the worshippers to react against a painting that troubled them by its themes, disoriented them by its iconographic construction, and betrayed their expectations by its plastic composition. These different facets of the fresco are in contradiction with the vision that the worshippers had of the miracle by Jesus; and as a result, their faith is challenged and beliefs shattered. Consequently, faced with a crisis, their gaze was incapable of welcoming in a neutral way what the frescos offerred as an artistic or esthetic experience. Such a mode of reception may be diagnosed as a sort of “malaise” that the spectator experienced, faced with a change which occurs with the disappearance of the determining traits of what he or she considered to be the identity of the religious figures represented, or the erasure of what Burckhardt calls “the symbolism inherent to forms” of these figures.10 These changes are viewed by the worshippers as an attack on their beliefs, a transgression of their faith, something hard to accept, to live, or to tolerate within the confines of their place of worship. The Wedding at Cana displeased the worshippers, desecrated their religious universe and above all, forced them to live, as Jean Paul Douguet would say, “something else other than what he or she hopes to live, in an unquestioning way.”11 This “something else” is nothing but a new way to understand this sequence of biblical history and to put it in an image. This image diverts the gaze of the worshippers from the kind of representations that the chromolithographies had accustomed them to. It takes them instead into the Haitian field of representation of biblical stories, having them enter their own milieu made up of fantastical dreams, enigmatic fantasies, of contrasts, and syncretism. At this stage in our analysis, we can speculate why this work has been able to gain such importance and, consequently, exert such great influence on the imagination of the worshippers who found themselves caught between the artistic, the religious, and the supernatural. To analyse the fresco from this angle, is to ask questions about its mode of existence as well as its artistic significance or esthetic purpose. The Wedding at Cana: Between mode of existence, artistic significance, or esthetic purpose By mode of existence, we mean the dynamic created within and around a work and also the values it possesses and conveys at the same time. From this

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angle, the fresco lives up to one’s expectations, in fulfilling in particular, “a modern artistic will”12 which is in the break that it has created by its conception and its plastic realization; by its “values of existence” and also by its “artistic values,”13 that is to say, by its specificity as a pictural reality. From this point of view this painting needs to be understood both as it is and for what it represents symbolically from the point of view of where it belongs (the Episcopal Church of Haiti), of its origins (the dynamics of the Centre d’Art), of its relationship with a family of objects (religious art [Vodou art and Christian art] and naive art), of its context of creation (the debate provoked by the advent of the naive mode in Haitian art).14 From this perspective, the Wedding at Cana assumes a function which creates a change of significance within it, of its effective status from the time it was sabotaged and vandalized, which represents according to Jean-Pierre Babelon and André Chastel a “necessary stage [in its recognition as much as in its legitimacy]. Because, [for them] nothing highlights the symbolic value of certain objects better.”15 In this way, how could one not recognize the cultural value and thus the patrimonial dimension of this painting which contains as many motifs and develops with the Haitian and his society as much complicity and reciprocity, connivance and contradiction, a relationship of attraction and repulsion, an overlap of ludic and anecdotal elements alongside religious themes which evoke the main structures of Haitian social reality? In this way, Georges Corvington quite rightly pointed out that “the obstination of a progressive bishop would allow for the Cathedral to become the most important and famous museum of Haitian religious art.” 16 All this goes to prove the fact that this fresco posseses artistic and aesthetic properties that confer upon it a mode of being which is its very own. Elucidating these properties is to dare to search for their meaning and clarify their purpose in conformity with the double paradigm associated with “Vodou art”17 and “naive art” without losing sight of the idea of “artistic Haitianity” which was on the agenda in the program of the Haitian Bureau of Ethnology at a period when it was important for this institution to redefine the Haitian community and its defining cultural values.18 This idea of an artistic Haitianity materializes as much in the themes as in the iconic composition of the fresco which represents the figures involved in the scene of the miracle by Christ, as black. Here too, it is necessary to examine the motives behind the aggression suffered by the fresco because Marie-Josée Nadale and Gérald Bloncourt report that “[. . .] the first frescos painted in Haiti [. . .] were whitewashed with quick lime because the Black Virgin had shocked” the public.19 By this strange texture, Bigaud won his wager of “staging a strangeness of the familiar, in order to have appear a different tool of measurement which may only be discovered by the violence of conflict.”20 Now, it is indeed



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this other tool of measurement that allows us to define the artistic intention of Bigaud, namely: create a “shock” thanks to the “power and instantaneous magic of images” considered by Vauday to be “relics and vestiges of our beliefs and of our spontaneous adherances.”21 Thus, constructed in a “dialectical” and “symbolic” manner, Bigaud’s fresco would like to be the marriage or the meeting in the form of images of the two extremes, at times like a “raw, sensitive presence” and at others, like a plastic “discourse.” By his “manner” of creating surprises, of collecting and coordinating visual signs as the equivalent of linguistic signs of the articulated language, Bigaud produces with the construction modes, icons of the first miracle performed by Jesus and those from the first ceremony performed in Haitian Vodou, that which Rancière calls a “gap” or a “dissimilarity.”22 This proximity of the gap or the gap in the proximity crosses and links two origin stories that one can consider as two founding acts, thus two memories which are the representation of a double ritual ceremony. From this perspective, the fresco institutes an “aesthetic regimen of art” which is another articulation between the practices of forms of visibility and modes of intelligibility.”23 Moreover, the “gap” and “dissimilarity” create a double operation of opposition, a “disjunction” of the visible and its significance by the staging of the Ceremony of Bois-Caïman and by the folklorization or rather by the indigenization in the form of dissemblance of the biblical scene of The Wedding at Cana. The fresco thus creates a sort of mimesis which does not reflect any operation of imitation or an impossible play between an original and a copy, but instead institutes a form of “resemblance” which defines a type of aesthetic regimen of naive art. This mimetic relationship, established between the visible and the intelligible of these two stories, could be interpreted as a poetics of deconstruction of the classic opposition maintained between Vodou and Christianity whose historical roots go back to the adoption of the Code Noir [Black Code] which made conversion mandatory for the enslaved once they arrived in the colonies. However, this action would have remained incomplete if in its implementation it did not lean towards a mimesis or a poetics of reconstruction in that it collected and condensed material and form in a dynamic of transformation of opposing categories and analogical entities. This is where Bigaud proved to be a visionary in that he creates a work not only destined for contemplation but also a call to action as he invites Christians and Vodouists, who shared the same Lakou24 to live their faith respectively in harmony and fraternity, in serenity and intellectual perspicacity and dexterity. The Wedding at Cana thus constitutes a fresco that surpasses all expectations, weakens and destroys preconceived notions by its atypical composition, transplanting both opposing visual effects and the expressive power of forms by means of a framework that is completely unstructured. By means of

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its strange texture, its destabilizing iconographic content, its persuasive force, the fresco deconstructs anti-Vodou ideologies and sets itself up as an act of autonomization of Haitian culture with respect to European culture. In this manner, this fresco reveals itself to be a major artistic and aesthetic symbol which takes a definite cultural value in the history of artistic creation and in the construction and composition of Haitian identity as its base and as the outcome of a weaving which has been erased but is still at work in many of the aspects of Haitian life. As a reflection of a socially rooted and psychologically determined production, the fresco is an exercise in doing and acting which not only inspires comment but acts too in a noisy manner, in its way of “persuading, narrating or describing” as if it had the faculty to speak. Even if the work is destroyed in its materiality, it survives as a major pictural icon in Haitian art as an entity with a widely abstract impact that ties Vodou and Christianity in a collusion that is both aesthetic and syncretic, mystical and mythical that should be explored as a valuable work of identarian heritage resulting from a long quest.

Notes 1. The fresco that we are analysing has already been the subject of a preliminary study in an article called: “European Culture and Identity Construction in Haiti: Historical Filiation and Anthropological Difference of Practices and Representations.” One can consult this article by following the URL: http://www.msh-m.fr/editions/edition-en-ligne/doctorales/les-numeros/histoire-et-imaginaire-dans-la/article/ culture-europeenne-et-construction. 2. One could simply object that it is not about the representation of the Ceremony of Bois-Caïman but a simple Vodou one. However, no one could ignore that the presence in this fresco of men armed with machetes, drums, vaccines [musical instruments], a slaughtered pig, etc. does not evoke descriptions made by the historians of this historical fact. This ceremony would have taken place in the night of August 22 to 23, 1791 in the north of Haiti, under the auspices of Boukman, a Vodou priest, as a sign of revolt against slavery. Labeled a myth, this ceremony never took place, according to Léon-François Hoffman. Such a position could not but provoke strong reactions. See with respect to this ‘‘Histoire, mythe et idéologie: la cérémonie du Bois-Caïman,’’ in Léon-François Hoffman, Haïti: lettres et l’être (Toronto: GREF, 1992); David Geggus, “La cérémonie du Bois Caïman,” Journal de l’histoire caribéenne (1991); Gérard Barthelemy, “Propos sur le Caïman. Incertitudes et hypothèses nouvelles,” [Remarks on Caïman. Uncertainties and new hypotheses], Chemins critiques, vol. 2, no. 3 (1992); Eddy Etienne, “Bois Caïman et la genèse d’une nation”, [Caïman and the genesis of a nation]. Revue de la Société haïtienne d’histoire et de géographie, Vol. 47 (1991). 3. Rodney Saint-Eloi, “Peinture et Indigénisme,” Conjonction, no. 19 (1993), 125.



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4. Carlo A. Célius defines this expression as a definite form, ‘‘a delimited form of identity enunciation which reverberates in the heart of the Fine arts in its local dimension [. . .] So it’s at the level of a field taken in its globality and its local functioning that one must approach the question of artistic Haitianity.” 5. Other than our Master II thesis entitled “Le problème de la conservation de la mémoire artistique en Haïti: le cas des fresques de la cathédrale de la Sainte Trinité de l’Église Épiscopale d’Haïti” [The problem of conserving the artistic memory in Haiti: the case of the frescos of the Cathedral of the Saint Trinity of the Episcopal Church of Haiti], defended in 2009, there does not exist, as far as we know, any other specific study on the frescos in question. They are however, mentioned in a general way here and there in articles and books that speak about Haitian naive art. 6. The Rara is (with Carnaval) one of the most popular cultural expressions in Haiti, generally conducted by a sort of musical group, punctuated by popular dances accompanied by drums and vaccines, a sort of flute made with bamboo stems, also with songs that the peasants perform during Lent. Christians in Haiti do not favorably view this cultural manifestation, which they say belongs to what happened during the crucifixion of Jesus. Thus, one understands why they cannot but react to a painting representing a theme that, doubly goes against their religious convictions. 7. Nicole Everaert-Desmedt, Interpréter l’art contemporain. La sémiotique peircienne appliquée aux œuvres de Magritte, Klein, Duras, Wenders, Cháves, Parant et Corillon (Bruxelles: De Boeck, 2006), 39. 8. Pierre Francastel, Études de sociologie de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 9. 9. Patrick Vauday, L’invention du visible. L’image à la lumière des arts, (Paris: Hermann, 2008), 6. 10. Titus Burckhardt, Principes et méthodes de l’art sacré (Paris: Dervy, 2011), 6. 11. Jean-Paul Douget, L’art comme communication. Pour une redéfinition de l’art, (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), 10. 12. Aloïs Riegl, Le culte moderne des monuments. Son essence et sa genèse (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 94. 13. Ibid. 14. The discovery of naive painting in Haïti in 1945 brought about considerable changes in Haitian artistic practices. This decisive event that Carlo Célius considers of “aesthetic impact” constitutes a rupture from the point of view of creation, provoking a great upheaval on the visual and iconic plane. This state of affairs has brought diversity and variety to the history of this art; it has given a boost to its development, even while it provokes conflicts and both aesthetic and ideological resistance. In spite of all this, this form of art has managed to impose itself in the Haitian artistic universe as a type of: “independent” art leaving in its way, works that are very expensive that one can admire in the collections, galleries and museums of many countries. This aesthetic incidence signifies for Célius (2005, 75) quite a bit of a miraculous discovery by José Gómez Sicre, a famous critic of Cuban art, and the sensational meeting (cf. note 4) in 1945 at the Center d’Art of naive art with the art judged as advanced, practiced by another category of painters called “sophisticated.” This meeting took place when the Centre d’art had on display the exhibition of Modern Cuban Painting in April 1945 which brought together painters who were already well known in the

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world like Wifredo Lam. Haiti was supposed to reciprocate but sadly our painters were quite obviously surpassed technically by the the Cubans. However, thanks to Sicre’s discovery of a painting by Philomé Obin in the reserves of the Center: the Visit of President F.D. Roosevelt to Cap-Haitien July 15, 1943, Sicre draws attention to the painter of the canvas in question who [as Célius tells us] “practices a specific form of art that is worthy of appreciation.” In other words he affirms that there is art where the aesthetic credo in force at the Center did not allow for him to be recognized.” Sicre advised Dewitt Peters, director of the Centre d’Art at that time, to have Haiti represented by primitive paintings whose value he had already recognized. This painting captivated Havana by its poetic charm; and then it would be Washington’s turn (Whyte Gallery, April 1946), Paris’s turn (Musée d’Art Moderne, December 1946), New York’s, San Francisco’s, etc. The names of Hector Hyppolyte, Philomé Obin, Sénèque Obin, Dieudonné Cédor, Wilson Bigaud, Rigaud Benoit, Castera Bazile, Jasmin Joseph, Préfète Duffaut, Micius Stéphane, Louverture Poisson, etc., would for a long time occupy the forefront of the art scene with its naive painting. 15. Jean-Pierre Babelon and André Chastel, La notion de patrimoine (Paris : Liana Levi, 1994), 19. 16. Georges Corvington, Port-au-Prince au cours des ans. La ville contemporaine, 1934–1950 (Port-au-Prince: Imp. Henri Deschamps, 1994), 270. 17. With respect to this, read this excerpt from a speech given by André Breton during his visit to Haiti in 1946 published in the newspaper La Ruche, the Tuesday, January 1, 1946, edition, P.1 and 2 reprinted in Conjonction, no. 193 (April–June 1992), 62–64. [“I do not hesitate to affirm that the people said to be ‘of color’ have always enjoyed a favor, an exceptional prestige in surrealism. There is an excellent reason: I was telling René Bélance, my friends and I were saying it is they who have stayed THE CLOSEST TO THE SOURCE, and that, in this essential approach of surrealism which consisted in starting to listen to the inside voice that inhabits each person, we found ourselves reconnected right away with the thinking called ‘primitive’ which is less alien to you than it is to us, which, besides, also seems quite strangely robust in Haitian Vodou. In periods of social and moral crisis, I think it is crucial to study this primitive thought in order to rediscover the unquestionably authentic aspirations of human beings.”] 18. Carlo A. Célius defines this expression as a definite form, “a delimited form of identity enunciation which reverberates in the heart of the Fine arts in its local dimension [. . .] So it’s at the level of a field taken in its globality and its local functioning that one must approach the question of artistic Haitianity.” Carlo Avierl Célius, Langage plastique et énonciation identitaire. L’invention de l’art haïtien (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007), 7. 19. Marie-José Nadal and Gérald Bloncourt, La peinture Haïtienne (Paris: Nathan, 1986), 45. These frescos were painted in 1945 in a small chapel situated in Pétionville. 20. Rancière, Le destin de l’image, 15. 21. Vauday, L’invention du visible. L’image à la lumière des arts, 6. 22. Rancière, Le destin de l’image, 15. 23. Ibid., p. 88.



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24. The word Lakou in Creole and cour [courtyard] in French evoke a reality unique to the Haitian rural universe as described in Wilson Bigaud’s fresco. The reality is that one can find many houses [kay in Creole] in a reduced space where everyone calls and treats one another as a co-mère [sister] or compere [brother] in the true sense of the term, in order to display and express a certain familiarity with each other. This reality takes on all its significance in the practice of the houngans [Vodou priests] to bring together all their many concubines and also their numerous children in their cottages located around their honfort [temple]. The foreign reader who does not know this facet of peasant life could imagine it through The Wedding at Cana.

Bibliography Babelon, Jean-Pierre et André Chastel. La notion de patrimoine. Paris: Liana Levi, 1994. Beauvoir-Dominique, Rachel. “Libérer le double, la beauté sera convulsive. . . A propos d’une collection d’art vodou.” GRADHIVA, Vol.1 (2005): 57–71. Célius, Carlo Avierl. Langage plastique et énonciation identitaire. L’invention de l’art haïtien. Québec: Presses de l’université Laval, 2007. ———. “La création plastique et le tournant ethnologique en Haïti.” GRADHIVA, Vol. 1 (2005): 71–91. Corvington, Georges. Port-au-Prince au cours des ans. La ville contemporaine, 1934–1950. Port-au-Prince: Imp. Henri Deschamps, 1991. Doguet, Jean Paul. L’art comme communication. Pour une redéfinition de l’art. Paris: Armand Colin, 2007. Everaert-Desmedt, Nicole. Interpréter l’art contemporain. La sémiotique peircienne appliquée aux œuvres de Magritte, Klein, Duras, Wenders, Cháves, Parant et Corillon. Bruxelles: De Boeck, 2006. Francastel, Pierre. Etudes de sociologie de l’art. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Joly, Martine. Introduction à l’analyse de l’image. Paris: Armand Colin, 2006. Lerebours, Michel Philippe. Haïti et ses peintres, De 1804 à 1980. Souffrances et espoirs d’un peuple. Port-au-Prince: Imprimeur II, 1989. Mitchell, William J. Thomas. Iconologies. Image, texte, idéologie. Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2009. Naïm, Kattan. Ontologie, esthétique et œuvre d’art littéraire. http://id.erudit.org/ iderudit/203100ar. Accessed 2 April 2011. Pouivet, Roger. Qu’est-ce qu’une œuvre d’art? Paris: Vrin, 2007. Rancière, Jacques. Le destin de l’image. Paris: La Fabrique, 2003. Riegl, Aloïs. Le culte moderne des monuments. Son essence et sa genèse. Paris: Seuil, 1984. Saint-Eloi, Rodney. “Peinture et Indigénisme,” Conjonction, no. 19 (1993): 125–147. Vauday, Patrick. L’invention du visible. L’image à la lumière des arts. Paris: Hermann, 2008.

Chapter 19

Tourist Art A Tracery of the Visual/Virtual Gabrielle Civil

You are welcomed as if straight off the plane. Two black women, one light, one dark, in deliberately folkloric garb—bright colors, long skirts, and beads—beckon you with nostalgic Caribbean strains. One stands still. The other moves slowly, almost imperceptibly, and then gains momentum. Harry Belafonte croons, “Haïti Chérie says Haiti is my beloved land . . . .”1 Very slowly, projected writing, darker grey on grey, scrolls up a screen. Quotes by Veerle Poupeye and Frantz Fanon compose themselves. Fanon marks the turn: “and these outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life, perpetually in motion.”2 Vladimir Cybil Charlier’s images shift as slides. (See Figure 19.1) My words ring in the air. This is not the usual presentation of knowledge. This is performance. As such, the performance disrupts conventional academic protocol, moves beyond strict text, enlists reproduction and re-creation (of sounds, of words, of images, of archetypes), calls for memory, interpolates scripts in new ways, and, most shockingly, insists on the body. The tableau vivant breaks with the sounds of Haitian cha-chas and sticks, a live invocation of poetry. take the art tour to jacmel air stream to boston donkey hoof to port-au-prince shark raft to montreal cracked foot to cap-haïtien tap tap to brooklyn dark limousine aux cayes visa to miami shot to croix-des-bouquets return tracery of tourist art itinerary en route 247

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These are always the first words read aloud in our performative reiterations. The language arrives from Tourist Art, a fine arts book collaboration by Cybil and myself on mass-produced Haitian paintings and the juicy questions they invite. What is the relationship between Haitian “fine art” and these cheap reproductions? What does it mean for Haiti, a place largely without tourists, to produce so much tourist art? What does it mean to buy a souvenir of a place outside of that place? What does it mean for Haitian art to have greater value and mobility than Haitian people? Tourist Art takes on these questions not through the usual presentation of scholarship, but through the generation and circulation of art. in the market, effusion, emulsion, florescence of art: dead wood sculptures with death grip smiles, big-dicked warriors with casket-like shields, flip-flops melting in the sun and these landscapes of higglers, angular gourd men.

In 2004, I took a trip to the Dominican Republic. There to show a section of my performance artwork Anacaona, I was thinking a lot about embodiments of history, aestheticization, and what I was calling “figures of self.” How does the self get constituted in the body? How can we recognize and activate our own representations? It was my first time in the Dominican Republic and Haitian art was everywhere. Not in museums, but in markets. The same impossible forests. The same replicated images of market women. Who was painting them? What selves did these figures represent? Once I was back in the US, these generic landscapes—and the actual contrasts between Haiti and the Dominican Republic—kept floating in my head. To get it out of my system, I put it all down on paper—in lines of poetry. A few months later, Jerry Philogene wrote a feature on Vladimir Cybil Charlier in the 2005 Haiti special issue of Bomb magazine.3 Cybil’s art played visually with the same romantic images found in both Haitian masterpieces and tourist souvenirs. In her Time Life series, Cybil drains the scenes of their color, offers wavy lines of black ink, and then inserts a bright cartoon in the frame. In an impossible Haitian jungle scene, you now find Garfield, Snoopy, or Dumbo. For Ogoun X, a large painting in her Pantheon series, she transforms the African American hero Malcolm X into the Haitian voudoun spirit Ogoun. Clearly, Cybil too was interested in engaging and transforming figures of self (see Figure 19.2). This was dyaspora art, reflecting consciousness of Haitian culture, fine art, and popular culture in a globalized frame. It also had a sense of humor. I loved her work. Through a mutual friend, I approached Cybil about collaboration. To my delight, she agreed and Tourist Art was born. For the next seven years,



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Cybil and I worked on this project. Although based in two different places (Cybil in New York, me in Minnesota), we worked in true collaboration. Cybil’s illustration ideas sparked poetic revisions. My ideas about the poem helped generate the images. In person, over the phone, and via e-mail, we discussed the design of every page. Finally, in November 2012, we launched the book. As an object, Tourist Art measures 8 × 6.1 × 0.2 inches. Though it mainly features horizontal layouts, verticality arrives in unpredictable moments. Even the cover forces the reader to turn the book in order to read the text. Deliberately gesturing toward cheap, commercial reproduction, Tourist Art is produced via print-on-demand technology. This plays with perceptions of high and low art, even as we assert the work as fine art and original self-expression. Combining original poetry, drawings, and watercolors, Tourist Art addresses and manifests writing through the visual and the virtual in many ways. As an art book, it describes and re-creates Haitian tourist art paintings, themselves visual replacements of Haitian people. The project also addresses the situation of the virtual population of tourists: consumers who are absent from Haiti but whose buying power still sets into motion Haitian mass commercial production. The book offers alternate visuals for Haitian art history, taking on key narratives and figures. Moreover, Tourist Art as concept, text, and performance arrives from the virtual place of Haitian dyaspora, the site where Haiti must be literally (and graphically) rescripted in order to exist for the Haitians who live there. While it asserts and follows its own itinerary, Tourist Art also resonates with diverse other discourses. A critical tracery of this project allows points of encounter with texts from anthropology, art history, typography, marketing, and my own autobiography. In the spirit of the project itself, this tracery will sprawl, evoke, and raise questions as much as argue and assert. My aim is to place Tourist Art in critical conversation with other texts and offer a critical context for both the project and actual Haitian art objects in the world. Here follows a marking of our manifest, a “tracery of tourist art / itinerary en route.” The Writing Lesson Claude Lévi-Strauss’s infamous chapter of Tristes Tropiques, “The Writing Lesson,” opens with the sentences: “That the Nambikwara could not write goes without saying. But they were also unable to draw, except for a few dots and zigzags on their calabashes.”4 Here the Western assumption of primitive illiteracy “goes without saying.” The own “saying” of the Nambikwara, their complex languages of orality and signification, do not count as writing to the

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assured anthropologist. His recollection of the day “they were all busy drawing wavy horizontal lines on paper” and his fascination with their leader who believed his “scribblings had a meaning” lead instead to a meditation on the “sociological” rather than “intellectual object” of writing.5 While Lévi-Strauss does come to some paternalistic admiration for their efforts (“So the Nambikwara had learned what it meant to write!”), he never concedes that they actually can write. According to him, they seem to understand the purpose of writing (what writing is for) without being able to actually do it. Moreover, whatever writing any one of them could do becomes merely an imitation of his own act: “I could only conclude that they were writing or, more exactly, that they were trying to do as I did with my pencils.” It is a “drawing” of “wavy horizontal lines,” not even fully recognized as drawing for it is merely an unsuccessful attempt at writing. In Lévi-Strauss’s wavy lines, the Nambikwara are a people whose stage of articulation is deemed so preliterate as to become pre- or counteraesthetic.6 It may seem too easy to point out the Eurocentric ignorance here (particularly as French philosopher Jacques Derrida takes Lévi-Strauss so thoroughly to task in Of Grammatology), but Western assumptions of primitive innocence/ignorance are a perfect starting place for an approach to Haitian tourist art. What to do with a lingering perception of ignorance and imitation? With a kind of writing not seen as writing, a kind of drawing not seen as art but as failed writing, as low culture, and economic devastation? With a primitive inability of a people that goes without saying? And yet must be reiterated again and again. . . . A Surprise In Where Art Is Joy, Selden Rodman offers his own “writing lesson” of Haitian art history. He proclaims: “DeWitt Peters, an American watercolorist teaching English on a wartime assignment who had wanted to start an academy where Haitians might learn to be artists, was about to receive the surprise of his life. . . .”7 DeWitt Peters could not have read Tristes Tropiques when he arrived in Haiti in 1943, as Lévi-Strauss’s book was not published until 1955. Still, Peters shared the anthropologist’s desire to offer a writing lesson to “the natives.” As a conscientious objector to the Second World War, his official assignment was to teach English in Haiti. Yet from the start, Peters dreamed of teaching Haitians to be artists. The “surprise of his life” came when he discovered that Haitian artists already existed. Like Lévi-Strauss, Peters’s base assumption was that Haitians “might learn to be artists”—from him. Unlike Lévi-Strauss, Peters conceded that Haitians could be artists, although the Haitian art most



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appealing to him was “unlearned,” “self-taught,” or at least not taught by him or other Western artists. With the donation of a building by the Haitian government in 1944, Peters founded the Centre d’Art in Haiti and a new chapter began in Haitian art history. In Caribbean Art, Veerle Poupeye writes: “The spectacular upsurge of Haitian art in the mid-forties is usually attributed to the establishment of the Centre d’Art in May 1944, a joint Haitian-American venture that served as a school and gallery.”8 Poupeye’s phrase “a joint Haitian-American venture” is telling as the Centre d’Art emerged as the major site for Haitian art to be seen, sold, consumed, and collected by American tourists. (“So the Nambikwara had learned what it meant to write!”) Moreover, a quick internet search on Haitian art today will turn up multiple sources that present Peters’ intervention as “the founding,” “the birth,” or “the discovery” of Haitian art itself, inextricably linking American presence to Haitian art production. We can also trace this back as the start of a particular dynamic around the “primitive” or the “naïve” in Haitian art circulation and reception. Preferred by Peters and the art buyers at the Centre d’Art in the 1940s, paintings, carvings, and metalworks made by “unlearned” Haitian artists still dominate Western art markets. Even as some Haitian artists had or have gained greater access to formal art training, and as abstraction, realism, and other forms can be found in Haitian art practice, so-called “primitive” art continues to be most often characterized as “authentic”—or perhaps “the most authentic”— Haitian cultural production. (The fact that Haitian voudoun images feature prominently in much of this work also resonates with these notions.) This “primitive” Haitian art can both thrillingly defy Western expectations (that such people could produce art at all) and also allow Westerners to maintain a sense of Haitian artists as “primitive,” and “naïve,” thereby reinforcing their own Western sense of civilization and superiority. Poupeye also outlines this dynamic and its impact on Haitian intellectual discourse. Most patronage of the “primitives” came from Europe and North America where they were enthusiastically received as the “authentic,” “unspoiled” Haitian artists, while the work of their modernist counterparts was criticized for being too derivative. Predictably, this did not go down well with the Haitian intelligentsia and a divisive polemic developed that still lingers today.9

In a spirited online discussion entitled “Haitian Art before and after 1944 and DeWitt Peters,” the notion of “‘authentic,’ ‘unspoiled’ Haitian artists” indeed does “not go down well.” Acclaimed Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes simply: “The story that Haitians had to wait for Mr. Peters to discover their hidden talent is just one more story of arrogance.”10 Haitian activist and intellectual

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Daniel Simidor agrees, outlining key factors that contextualize the emergence of Haitian art in the 1940s: The decade of Indigenisme prior to the founding of the Centre d’Art . . . the “anti-superstition” campaign waged in the 1940s by the Catholic Church and the Lescot regime [which] helped secularize Haitian art by destroying the places of worship that Haitian folk artists used to decorate for a living . . . [and] the introduction of American tourism, championed by the Estime government, [which] brought together a significant number of direct buyers and sellers for the first time.11

Here Simidor deftly rewrites Peters’s “discovery” of Haitian art, insisting on the crucial idea of Haitian agency. Simidor particularly highlights Haitian artists’ response to two governmental interventions, the anti-superstition campaign, and the championing of tourism. Perhaps most importantly, he debunks the notion of Haitian artists of this era as merely passive, intuitive, or “naïve.” Simidor reports: [A] number of Haitian artists initially involved with the Centre d’Art have stated emphatically that they knew quite well what they were doing, and that they did not join the Center to learn how to paint but mostly to avail themselves of the supplies and tools available there and of the opportunity to get a “good price” for their works. The main contribution of the Centre d’Art, some have said, was that it brought Haitian art face to face with the mighty dollar.12

Simidor gives credit only where it is due, emphasizing Peters’s capacity to provide material resources and help artists get a “good price” for their work. Note too how access to the US market, coming “face to face with the mighty dollar,” becomes an integral part of what has been called the “golden era” of Haitian art. (A “joint Haitian-American venture” indeed . . . .) As an art historian, Poupeye also mentions that “primitive” artist “[Philomé] Obin had been painting for some thirty years before he joined the Centre d’Art, which again shows that ‘primitive’ Haitian art did not appear suddenly.”13 While Poupeye cites the influence of Haitian Indigenisme, particularly the “influential collection of essays Ainsi Parla l’oncle [Thus Spoke the Uncle] (1928)” by Jean Price-Mars and the rise of “anti-American sentiments [which] played a significant role in the increase of Haitian cultural nationalism, especially during the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934,”14 Simidor stresses an even broader context of Haitian cultural and intellectual life.15 Along with Price-Mars, Simidor reminds us that Albert Mangonès, Maurice Dartigue, Georges Remponeau, and Gerald Bloncourt all performed cultural work that preceded and coexisted with Peters’s efforts in the Centre d’Art. Simidor



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contends that all of these factors would “tend to dispel the myths of ‘1944’ as the moment of creation and of Peters as the ‘father’ of Haitian art. But some myths have a peculiar life of their own.”16 In terms of Haitian art, no Haitian intellectuals or broader intellectual, social or cultural movements are mentioned today with the same frequency as Peters’ founding of the Centre d’Art. The story of the white male US citizen discovering Haitian artists has proven to be too appealing to resist. The idea of Haitian artists and intellectuals mobilizing their own vision, talent, and cultural nationalism is also far less marketable. Shortly after Peters’s death in 1966, the US ambassador to Haiti, Benson Simmons, remarkably declared, “If DeWitt Peters had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him.”17 Peters did exist, and so it was necessary for Cybil and myself to reinvent him and the story of the “discovery” of Haitian art. In Tourist Art, the creation myth of DeWitt Peters becomes linked to the ur-colonial encounter: the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus. In a graphic departure from the rest of the book’s design, a faint, antique map of the island of Hispaniola is centered over the crease of a two-page spread (see Figure 19.3). Light-grey Spanish script appears in some areas as landscape. Words like “autoroute” [highway] and “quartier” [neighborhood] visibly signal inscriptions of colonial power. A black ink drawing of a fifteenth-century ship is partially shaded with blue pencil on the right-hand page. In red, the name “S.S. Rodman” appears on the bow. Recalling Columbus’s three ships, the S. S. Rodman is coming to meet two smaller blue ships near the Haitian coastline on the opposite page. Though smaller, their names are legible: S. S. Hippolyte and S. S. Obin, named after two prominent Haitian painters. The poetry of the section proclaims in large, red, antique script: in 1943, dewitt peters too sailed the ocean blue. not long after, selden rodman came too. they founded the centre d’art d’haïti and saw primitive beauty as far as they could see. a new world for you, new markets for me. tourist art fabricates this discovery endlessly.

Echoing the childhood rhyme “In 1492 / Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” this text links the creation myth of the Centre d’Art with both “new world” exploration and the creation of global markets. In this text, the circulation of tourist art becomes a way to “fabricate” or “endlessly” recirculate the notion of the colonial discovery of the primitive Haitian artist.

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Where Art Is Joy Much of my knowledge of DeWitt Peters comes from the work of Selden Rodman, a fellow US artist who came to Haiti in the 1940s and became the codirector, with Peters, of the Centre d’Art in 1947. Rodman wrote extensively about Peters, especially in his 1948 book Renaissance in Haiti (a work that fortified the legend of Peters as the “father” of Haitian art). The work of Rodman’s that I know best, however, is Where Art Is Joy, his 1988 account of “Haitian Art: The First Forty Years.” In this text he writes: “It would be absurd to claim that joy was the only component of this phenomenal art. Or that Peters was looking for it. From the beginning, however, right down to the present, joy has been a constant.”18 This notion of “constant joy” signals some of Rodman’s specific cultural preconceptions of Haitian culture. And some strong critiques can be made of Rodman’s paternalistic characterizations of Haitian art and people in this book. For example, Rodman describes master painter Castera Bazile as “Peters’ house boy from Jacmel.” And the book actually opens with an extraordinary citation from Ralph Korngold’s Citizen Toussaint: “If one thing is characteristic of the African race, it is the amazing ability to wring a few drops of joy from the most hopeless situations . . . to know nothing but the moment and its intensity of pleasure and pain—what liberty!” To which Rodman immediately adds, in the first two words of the book, “And art!”—wholeheartedly endorsing Korngold’s essentialist, racist projections onto diasporic black people, forever suspended in the “intensity” of the present as opposed to a contemplation of the past or a preparation for the future.19 In terms of Tourist Art, though, it bears mentioning that I received Where Art Is Joy as a gift from my mother on my seventeenth birthday, after spending a special Saturday afternoon listening to Rodman himself lecture and point out aspects of Haitian artworks in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, my hometown museum. Receiving the book was a great surprise— I believe it was one of the first art books I ever owned—and a joy for me. I loved poring over the rich color plates, learning about Haitian art and knowing that this art was validated by critics and collected by patrons around the world. And you surely could trace my desire to make Tourist Art, a book about Haitian art, to this first gift. Where Art Is Joy also marked my discovery of Haitian art as something separate from the myriad paintings everywhere in my childhood home, some from the early days of my parents’ marriage (“Actually purchased from galleries!” my mother proclaimed), most brought back as souvenirs from my father’s yearly trips to Haiti. In Rodman’s book, some key things happened for me as a young dyaspora. First, Haiti became associated with something rich, valuable, and happy (joy!), a very different discourse from what I heard



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on the news or in other parts of my life. At the same time, Haitian art became something serious and important, not just appearing in my visual field— something present for my family, a presence of my family so far away, so unknown—but something with established outside value, something valued by insiders (those outside of me), something actually written about. The Phrase Writing about Haiti has long been fraught. In “A Cage of Words,” Haitian journalist Joel Dreyfuss writes, “I call it ‘the Phrase’ and it comes up almost anytime Haiti is mentioned in the news: the Poorest Nation in the Western Hemisphere.”20 It is a phrase, Dreyfuss reveals, that international editors insert even when journalists leave it out. It is what has ironically been referred to as “Haiti’s last name.” Such scripts about underdeveloped countries have long been a staple of Western journalism. Inspired by Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write about Africa,” Ansel Herz’s “How to Write about Haiti” begins, “For starters, always use the phrase ‘the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.’ Your audience must be reminded again of Haiti’s exceptional poverty. It’s doubtful that other articles have mentioned this fact.”21 Eschewing satire, Dreyfuss offers a different proposition: “What a difference it would have been if American, or French, or British journalists had looked through the camera at their audience and declared, Yes, this is a poor country, but like Ireland and Portugal, it has also produced great art. Yes, this poor country has suffered brutal government and yet, like Russia or Brazil, it has produced great writers and scholars.”22 Here the artistic richness of Haitian culture is poised to rewrite the pernicious phrase of Haitian poverty. Like Alain Locke in the Harlem Renaissance and Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor in Négritude, Dreyfuss is proposing a vision of art as a means to affirm humanity—or at least to convince skeptical whites of black humanity. He is also proposing something key: how discourse about art determines perceptions of people, and perhaps vice versa. Greater recognition of the “great art” and “great writers and scholars” of Haiti could humanize the Haitian poor in the eyes of the world (i.e., “American, or French, or British journalists”). Following the mythology of the “suffering artist,” this is the kind of greatness that transcends poor material conditions or even perhaps depends on them to thrive. Interestingly, Dreyfuss’s appeal is retroactive. He doesn’t demand journalists do this now; rather he looks back on the past and suggests “what a difference it might have made,” as if time has already run out and Haiti is forever captured in a phrase, trapped in a “cage of words.”

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Thinking again of Tourist Art, what happens when a group stakes its worth on the visible, legible recognition of its art? Especially when some of its most visible art may not be great, may not even be deemed art at all (“a few dots and zigzags on their calabashes”)? Good Art/Bad Art/Fine Art/Tourist Art In our performance iteration of Tourist Art, (very slowly, projected writing, darker grey on grey, scrolls up a screen), we feature this quotation from Veerle Poupeye’s Caribbean Art, text that, along with a quote from Frantz Fanon, adorns the cover of our book: The relationship between Caribbean tourism and art has always been uneasy. Haiti, in particular, has had art tourism since the late forties when its ‘primitive’ school came to international attention . . . [C]heap mass-produced Haitian paintings can now be bought as souvenirs throughout the Caribbean. While this extreme commercialization is culturally deplorable, the demand for such Haitian art has provided employment for thousands of people, something that cannot easily be dismissed since Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.23

Poupeye explicitly links the work of artists at Peters’s Centre d’Art (the “primitive school”) with tourism, again connecting art to material conditions, poverty, labor, and employment. While Dreyfuss pushes us to look past the poor material conditions of Haiti to the high quality of Haitian art, Poupeye suggests that the poor quality of some Haitian art could possibly be forgiven due to poor material conditions and the need for “employment for thousands of people.” While this becomes implicitly linked to the destruction, or at least the erosion, of Haitian culture (a situation she decries as “culturally deplorable”), tourist art becomes explicitly linked to the survival of Haitian people themselves. Haitians make a living from this work; they make this work in order to live. In other words, in order to eat, Haitians have to be eaten, consumed in the art market as cheap, mass-produced souvenirs. A key concern in Tourist Art is the nature of value for Haitian art: How do we understand this value and who decides? How can we negotiate, if not reconcile, different circumstances of creation, different modes of circulation, different material conditions of production? At this point, painters from the Centre d’Art of the 1940s and ’50s like Hector Hippolyte, Castera Bazile, Rigaud Benoit, and Préfète Duffaut, and sculptors like Jasmin Joseph and Georges Liautaud, are recognized worldwide as great Haitian artists. Their works fetch high prices on the global art market and museums collect their work. For example, a month after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti,



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the Milwaukee Art Museum’s collection of Haitian art arguably became the most important in the world. At the same time, the average US tourist on a cruise to the Bahamas will likely not know the names of any of these artists but will encounter multiple rip-offs of their work at local markets. The value of all these works is clearly marked on a capitalist scale through pricing, but the value of the work for those who produce it as well as those represented in it has been less frequently assessed. Compelling research on Haitian tourist art comes from anthropologist Erin B. Taylor. Developing performance iterations of the Tourist Art project, I stumbled upon her blog post “Markets as Cultural Intersections I: Reflections of Nationality in Haitian and Dominican Paintings” (2011). Taylor’s descriptions of standing in Dominican markets looking at Haitian paintings reminded me of my own visit to Santo Domingo, and her photograph of the young black woman tourist looking at Haitian paintings became for me a surprising “figure of self.” Taylor’s essay “Why the Cocks Trade: What a Transnational Art Market Can Reveal about Cross-Border Relations” continues to focus on the sale of Haitian and Dominican art in Santo Domingo, paying close attention to the role of tourist consumption and border relations. Interviewing Haitian and Dominican art dealers and surveying the art history of both countries, Taylor argues for a more nuanced collective understanding of art production, markets, and transnational trade. She writes, “The paintings are shadows of cultural realities that are produced for the tourist gaze. However, they also objectify historical conditions of production that are empirically observable today.”24 This tracery began with the Eurocentric gaze of one anthropologist and has arrived at the helpful analysis of another. Taylor resists the colonialist narrative of Peters’s “discovery” of Haitian art, writing, “From as early as 1807 under Henri Christophe, Haitian leaders encouraged the development of Haitian art and brought metropolitan artists in to train local artists.”25 She also clarifies the current conditions of production for most tourist artists: Most paintings sold on the street are close copies of each other, with variation depending on the conditions of production. An individual who paints in their own home may potentially have more freedom to create than a person working in a factory with Fordist-style production, where painters are wage labourers who are paid a fixed amount to produce art on a mass scale. They do not own the means of production—paint-brushes, canvases, wooden frames, or a workspace—and their workflows more closely resemble an assembly line than an artists’ studio.26

Here again we can guess the important material value of this work for the tourist artists, that is, “wage labourers . . . paid a fixed amount to produce

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art on a mass scale.” But it’s difficult to know the value of this art for them on a psychic level. What does it mean to be a cultural worker in this way? How do these cultural representations intersect with personal artistic tastes or tendencies? Their own sense of figures of self? (The mention of Ford here reminds me of my childhood in Detroit, hearing my Uncle David talk about the quality of Chrysler cars with a sense of pride and ownership because he was working there in the plant. Could the value of these paintings work something like this?) Even more significant, Taylor links her description of the conditions of contemporary Haitian tourist artists to the original conditions of labor in Peters’s Centre d’Art: “The initial group [of the Centre d’Art] formed the basis for an entire movement that would supply artworks to buyers during Haiti’s ‘golden age of tourism’ after World War Two. . . . Peters commissioned wage labourers to reproduce the most popular styles en masse, and thus an art movement was born.”27 Like Poupeye, Taylor makes an explicit connection between the 1940s emergence of Haitian art on the international art market and Haiti’s “golden age of tourism.” More shockingly, she identifies Peters as a key source of the commercialization of Haitian art, who went so far as to commission “wage labourers to reproduce the most popular styles en masse.” If an art movement was born, so too were the seeds of an art factory sweatshop. With this sentence, Haitian art, even by fine art masters, is inherently commodified, set up for mass production, imitation, and gross commercialization. Haitian art is always already tourist art. At another point Taylor writes, in conversation with anthropologist Karen Richman, “Richman asks whether the unknown artists who turned up on the doorstep of the Centre d’Art were largely engaged in mimesis, copying a style that they already knew Peters preferred. If she is correct, then what we know about Haitian art has been created as a mirror of the ‘other’ since its very beginning, if we consider the ‘other’ in this context means ‘of a different nationality.’”28 Immediately, this notion of mimesis raises a red flag. Is this just another one of Lévi-Strauss’s visions of primitive writing as Western imitation? The idea that Haitians have no originality or agency except in “copying” or catering to US tastes? Taylor doesn’t commit fully to this proposition. And yet, as Simidor, Poupeye, and others suggest, proximity to the “mighty dollar” in a situation of vast economic deprivation can compel a number of social, cultural, and aesthetic decisions. Still, the possibility of Haitian art having always been a “mirror” is unsettling. At the same time, Taylor is not really talking about Haitian art but “what we know about Haitian art.” And who is this we? Peters? Rodman? Anthropologists? Tourists? Haitian fine artists trained at schools of beaux arts? Tourist artists in “Fordist-style” factories? Hand-wringing dyasporas?



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In key ways, the question of the “we” becomes a question of self-reflection or mirrors. In Tourist Art mirrors figure in multiple ways. In one two-page spread, writing on the right-hand page is reversed and shown as mirror writing on the left-hand page, with the white text printed on grey. The entire book can be read as our transformed mirror of Haitian tourist canvases as well as the situation of their circulation and production in the world. At the same time, if we entertain Taylor’s notion of Haitian art as “mirror of the other,” we have to push back on the idea that “‘other’ in this context means ‘of a different nationality.’” Following in the footsteps of Edward Said, I would maintain that the “other” is one projected, recognized, and constructed to be different in order to maintain a sense of superiority for the one doing the projecting, recognizing, and constructing. The “other” here is always the primitive, the Haitian; the canvases arguably become a reflection of that for the Dominican, the tourist, the US citizen. More than a mirror, though, if it is true that the “unknown artists who turned up on the doorstep of the Centre d’Art” were engaged in making reproductions according to Peters’s taste, then I would suggest that this element of Haitian art is more like a simulacrum, a copy of something without an original. For more than copying the actual images (of Hippolyte, Bazile, etc.), these would be copies and reiterations of Western projections and desire within a palpable, invisible capitalist frame . . . tourist art is anachronistic. tourist art is historical. tourist art is nostalgic. tourist art is timeless. tourist art is mnemonic. tourist art is native xerox. tourist art is anachronistic. tourist art is historical. tourist art is nostalgic. tourist art is timeless. tourist art is mnemonic. tourist art is native xerox. tourist art is anachronistic. tourist art is historical. tourist art is nostalgic. tourist art is timeless. tourist art is mnemonic. tourist art is native xerox. tourist art is etcetera ad infinitum repetition past present and future. amen.

Iconography/The System As a diasporic Haitian visual artist, Cybil decided early on to confront the formal system of drawing in Haitian folk art. Categorized and often valorized as “primitive,” the actual vocabulary of images, forms, and lines in Haitian masterworks by Hippolyte, Liautaud, Duffaut, and others has been often overlooked (“a few dots and zigzags on their calabashes”—I will aim to use this phrase as much as others use “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere”). While she learned a Western vocabulary as an art student in the US, Cybil decided as a personal artistic endeavor to isolate and replicate a system of forms in Haitian art.

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As she explained to me, standard scenes of Haitian art could be easily categorized: the market, the forest scene, the Vodou ritual. A US-based Haitian artist, Cybil considers, practices, and transforms these scenes. For instance, her 96-inch square painting Bubble Gum Haitiana becomes a primer for these forms (see Figure 19.4). As you see in the detail Figure 19.4, Cybil translates the distinct lines and curves of the Haitian donkeys, baskets, and market women seen both in masterworks and their mass-produced knockoffs into distinct, delicate strokes. This iconography, central to her own visual arts practice, becomes a part of the visual world of Tourist Art. Cybil incorporates deliberate homages to Haitian masterworks, literally inscribing her own face as a famous portrait of Haitian King Henri Christophe. She inserts my face into Hippolyte’s La Sirène and changes the mermaid’s tail into an unfinished paint-by-numbers to signal how Haitian masterworks have become patterns for reproduction (see Figures 19.2 and 19.7). The visual iconography of Haitian art is also paired with cheeky references to advertising and other symbols of globalization. On one page, a market woman wears not a scarf but a baseball cap and carries a towering basket of shit on her head. A dyaspora identity crate holds plantains and a copy of the newspaper Le Nouvelliste as well as McDonald’s french fries (in their unmistakable red container with the branded M on the front). Overall, the visual field of the images in Tourist Art is often dominated by blank spaces, as if the entire book, the entire project of Haitian art, were a coloring book, waiting to be filled in by an outside hand. Only as the book continues do the images become more defined, does more color enter the field, do the market women take more definite form. By the end of the project, the text itself takes the shape of images. One spread of poetry takes the concrete form of a basket. The last page of the book features language spilling out of a basket carrying a red circle bisected by a line, the international “do not” symbol. “You want us as tracery, background souvenir,” the poem proclaims. “You cannot keep us out.” The Script/The Mark In my mind, the most important script in the book is not the “Arial Black” font that shapes most of the text, a common “sans-serif” in grey, easily and often replicated. It is not the red cursive script of the lines “tour de force,” the block-stenciled words “DUTY FREE CONSUMPTION” over a drawing of a bottle of Rhum Barbancourt, nor even the antique script in the spread of DeWitt Peters’s “discovery of Haitian art.” Instead, this script appears almost imperceptibly in a small corner of one page. If you look closely at the “tourist postcards” inscribed with poetry, you can see the mark of Cybil’s actual



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handwriting at the top left corner of a postcard (see Figures 19.5 and 19.6). This script inscribes the return address for a postcard whose main text is written in a computer facsimile of handwriting. In her own handwriting, Cybil has written my name and the address “6 Million Dyaspora Lane.” Although not exactly a signature, that reminder of the mark of her own hand, in the midst of computerized typefaces and commercial printing, reminds me of a key aspect of Haitian tourist art. Taylor writes, “Even if production-line artists view the scenes they are reproducing as authentic cultural representations, they have little to no power to shape the product. As such they have more in common with scribes than authors. This does not mean that there is no originality in their work, as every artist leaves their own mark upon the paintings.”29 While it is unclear if tourist artists actually view their work as “authentic cultural representations,” the mark of their presence in this work remains undeniable. The notion of tourist artists as “scribes” again recalls Lévi-Strauss’s “A Writing Lesson,” their drawing perceived as a kind of imitation or dictation imposed by material conditions. Still, Taylor leaves open the possibility of originality and insists on the significance of the actual presence of the individual artists on the work. In Tourist Art, Cybil’s script becomes her legible “mark upon the paintings,” text written in her own hand, a visible trace of our return location, an impression of Haitian identity. At the same time (see Figure 19.7), she inscribes our presence visually in the fine arts tradition of Haitian art as well, reincorporating our female dyaspora presence into the original vision.

Basket Women About Face While Tourist Art animates Haitian market women, you never actually see images of these women on canvases. In the book, Haitian market women sell baskets of paintings whose canvases are notably blank. This points to the difference between the representation of these women and their actual lives. As a black feminist art project, however, Tourist Art traffics more with the imaginary than with the actual. i want to imagine her spreading color as more than a chore, that sweatshop artist prettying up the line. the market arrays her, displays her, frames her, invisible, displaced. could she smuggle home paint, add flourishes, sign her name in some trace, unresigned. tourist art as self portrait unsigned. basket women about face.

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I have never encountered a Haitian woman tourist artist or art dealer in real life. Still, in Tourist Art, Haitian market women are imagined and visualized as creators, tourist artists themselves in a complicated, implicated system of capitalism and global relations. In the poem, tourist paintings and souvenirs move from market women’s baskets to find their way into suitcases, onto jet planes, and inside limousines to arrive in Jacmel, Nassau, Miami, Brooklyn, Detroit . . . .The last gesture of the poem is to imagine Haitian women themselves finding this same mobility, as artists and as people, circulating their own embodied presence in the world. As diasporic Haitian women artists, Cybil and I are lucky to have this level of mobility. We hope this project can not only navigate artistic concerns but can also mark a visible solidarity with Haitian women and all Haitian people. As artists, we offer this work as art and scholarship, theory and practice.30 Notes 1. Harry Belafonte, “Haiti Chérie,” Video, 3:20, 7 March 2010. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=VpjZx4iCNX42010. 2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 180. 3. Jerry Philogene, “Vladimir Cybil,” Bomb 90 (Winter 2005), 18–24. http:// bombmagazine.org/article/2692/vladimir-cybil. 4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, translated by John Russell (New York: Criterion, 1961), 290. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., p. 291. 7. Seldman Rodman, Where Art Is Joy (New York: Ruggles and Latour, 1988), 7. 8. Veerle Poupeye, Caribbean Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 64–65. 9. Ibid., p. 66. 10. Bob Corbett, ed., “Haitian Art before and after 1944 and DeWitt Peters.” 2001. Accessed 5 July 2014. http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/art/pre-1944.htm. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Poupeye, Caribbean Art, 66. 14. Ibid., p. 65. 15. Corbett, “Haitian Art.” 16. Ibid. 17. Joe Livernois, “Art Links Monterey and Haiti: DeWitt Peters Taught There in 1940s.” Monterey Herald, 10 January 2010. http://www.montereyherald.com/ ci_14211034Livernois 18. Rodman, Where Art is Joy, 10. 19. Ibid., p. 7.



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20. Joel Dreyfuss, “A Cage of Words,” in The Butterfly’s Way, edited by Edwidge Danticat (New York: Soho Books, 2001), 57. 21. Ansel Herz, “How to Write about Haiti.” Mediahacker, 23 July 2010. http://www.mediahacker.org/2010/07/23/how-to-write-about-haiti. 22. Dreyfuss, “A Cage of Words,” p. 58. 23. Poupeye, Caribbean Art, p. 22. 24. Erin B. Taylor, “Why the Cocks Trade: What a Transnational Art Market Can Reveal about Cross-Border Relations,” Visual Studies 29.2 (2014), 183. doi: 10.1080/1472586X.2014.88721. 25. Ibid., p. 185. 26. Ibid., p. 180. 27. Ibid., p. 186. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., p. 188. 30. This essay would not have existed in this form without the support and feedback of Vladimir Cybil Charlier, Amy K. Hamlin, Sam Worley, Renée Larrier, and Ousseina D. Alidou. I offer them special thanks and gratitude.

Bibliography Belafonte, Harry. “Haiti Chérie.” Video, 3:20, 7 March 2010. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=VpjZx4iCNX4 Civil, Gabrielle and Vladimir Cybil Charlier. Tourist Art. Charleston, South Carolina: Create Space, 2012. Corbett, Bob, ed. “Haitian Art before and after 1944 and DeWitt Peters.” 2001. Accessed July 5, 2014. http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/art/pre-1944.htm. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Dreyfuss, Joel. “A Cage of Words.” In The Butterfly’s Way. Edited by Edwidge Danticat. New York: Soho Books, 2001. 57–59. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963. Herz, Ansel. “How to Write about Haiti.” Mediahacker, 23 July 2010. http://www. mediahacker.org/2010/07/23/how-to-write-about-haiti. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John Russell. New York: Criterion, 1961. Livernois, Joe. “Art Links Monterey and Haiti: DeWitt Peters Taught There in 1940s.” Monterey Herald, 10 January 2010. http://www.montereyherald.com/ ci_14211034. Philogene, Jerry. “Vladimir Cybil,” Bomb 90 (Winter 2005): 18–24. http://bombmagazine.org/article/2692/vladimir-cybil. Poupeye, Veerle. Caribbean Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1998. Price-Mars, Jean. Ainsi Parla l’Oncle. (First Published 1928). New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1954.

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Rodman, Seldman. Where Art Is Joy. New York: Ruggles and Latour, 1988. Taylor, Erin B. “Markets as Cultural Intersections I: Reflections of Nationality in Haitian and Dominican Paintings.” Erin B. Taylor, 22 September 2011. http:// erinbtaylor.com/markets-as-cultural-intersections-i-reflections-of-nationality-inhaitian-and-dominican-paintings. ———. “Why the Cocks Trade: What a Transnational Art Market Can Reveal about Cross-Border Relations.” Visual Studies 29.2 (2014): 181–190. doi: 10.1080/1472586X.2014.88721.

Chapter 20

Religious Iconography in the Everyday Lives of the Senegalese Abdoulaye Elimane Kane Translated by Oumar Diogoye Diouf

The domestication of the practice of a religion that has a universal vocation like Islam and Christianity through national and local cultural channels is a shared phenomenon that is common to all societies. In Senegal, for instance, that domestication was achieved through innovations, creations, and various techniques, both among Muslims and Catholics. First, there has been the recourse to national languages: sermons, preaching, and religious chants. Among Muslims, the production of poems and personal narratives about local saints and founders of (Muslim) brotherhoods requires a great deal of creativity. It is important to stress and consider what belongs to the language itself—that is, to the word and the verb at the initial stage of that acclimation of revealed religions. That domestication is then translated through the image. Before being pictorial, the latter, as a sign of piety and devotion is gestural: handshaking and peculiar greeting signs of which the “the Mourides way of greeting” is a typical example. To greet a member of a supposedly higher rank in their brotherhood, the Mourides kiss the back of his hand before putting that hand on their forehead. This peculiar practice has become popular to the extent that it has eventually been adopted by members of the same rank and, either out of mimetism or mimicry, by non-Mourides. The gestural dimension of that domestication of revealed religions also lies in the practice. It is expressed, anywhere and at any time, in both mandatory and supererogatory prayers, including the quest for benedictions. To receive benediction from a random individual believed to be able to provide it, the Mouride promptly joins his or her two hands, and that practice instinctively induces the participation of any individual who witnesses the scene even when he or she knows nothing about the motives or participants in the ritual. These different forms of ritualistic 265

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religious gestures are so marked in the daily life that they oftentimes take a deprecating turn into exhibitionism. It is also in the style of clothing that the religious image gives to the cult one of its most decisive means. This point is so important that, in actuality, it is rather by mimicking the Arab culture (language and way of clothing) that Senegalese Muslims, notably religious guides, acquire both prestige and ascendency over the disciples whose religious education they had in charge. That persistent mimetism did not, however, prevent the emergence of innovations that facilitate the adherence of more and more people and help define the territories of each brotherhood. Among Catholics, that practice is most of the time related to big events such as the 1972 visit of Pope Jean-Paul II or Catholic solemnities like the celebration of Easter or Assumption at the Marian sanctuary of Popenguine. During such big religious events, Catholics wear dresses, shirts, or flags made of print fabric with images of the illustrious sponsor. Among Muslims, the dress-code phenomenon is more diverse: it is an element of brotherhood identification: a black bonnet, a large-sleeve caftan, and a rainbow-colored gown for Mourides. For the disciples of the Tijanya brotherhood, it is a red bonnet, dubbed “Fez bonnet” in remembrance of their Saint patron whose shrine is in Fez, Morocco. As for the Niassene, they wear a bonnet with geometric patterns taken up from the Nigerian disciples among whom Baye Niasse—one of the most dynamic continuators of the work of the founder of that brotherhood—has many disciples. Finally, the members of the Layenne brotherhood cover their head with two visible turbans, a black one on top of a white one, which is an attribute of the religious leader of the Layenne brotherhood. The symbolism of these two colors (white and black) pertains respectively to prophet Mahomet and Limamou Laye, the Senegalese founder of that brotherhood. A dressing norm established at a national level and having nothing to do with any set Islamic prescription has thus been introduced in the customs: wearing a boubou—preferably white—or one of its less valuable substitutes on Friday, the day of the great weekly prayer that necessarily takes place in Mosques. Although it is not mandatory, that dress code has eventually imposed itself as a national identity to such an extent that many practicing Catholics follow it, not by constraints, not to go to the mosque, but simply because it is a means of expressing their “Senegalness.” In terms of production and consumption of religious images, an area that is old and new at the same time given its renewed dynamism is that of the iconography pertaining, on the one hand, to the founders of religious brotherhoods and their descendants who succeeded to one another to perpetuate their work, and on the other hand, to the edifices built in religious capitals. On this account, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, El Hadji Malick Sy, Limamou Laye,



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Abdoulaye Niasse, and Mame Bou Kounta are the brotherhood founders in that order of enumeration. They have first been revealed to the wider public through photographs representing them, taken in hardly known conditions— probably by services of the colonial administration, as in what seems to have become an established fact in the case of Bamba, the founder of Mouridism; that is, the Mouride brotherhood. Of the main brotherhood founders, there is generally only one photo. For Bamba, it is a photo in which he wears a short caftan with long and large sleeves, showing his feet and modest sandals; a white turban around his head and neck, disclosing only a very small part of his face. Of the great guide El-Hadji Malick Sy, one only knows a single photo representing him heavily and elegantly dressed in a boubou and a manteau on top, holding an umbrella over his head. Regarding Seydina Issa Laye, the eldest son of the Layenne brotherhood founder, there is, contrary to his father, a photo representing him with the two turbans: the white one and the black one. In the 1940s and 1950s, the photos of these religious icons and those of their immediate successors were in great vogue and were hung in the bedrooms and living rooms of notables and more or less well-to-do people in urban centers, particularly in Dakar. That decorative function is not antinomical with the sacredness associated with these objects. It has remained permanent throughout a long period of creation, which led artists and entrepreneurs from various disciplines to explore the niche market, working on the reproduction and dissemination of images representing either religious guides that are viewed as saints or the mosques they built. However, that decorative function is neither the sole nor the most important one associated with representations of religious icons. The identification function is assuredly the one that first motivated the purchase of these representations. In all significantly large human groups that share the same ideal and construct the same imaginary world, people tend to create signs of belonging and /or recognition. Thus, effigies of brotherhood founders and images of the mosques built in their religious capitals, reproduced through varied techniques in addition to photographic ones, are subject to research, purchased, and displayed by disciples for whom wearing such conspicuous symbols attests to their belonging. Next to that identification function, religious images fulfill a protection function. In whatever form they may be presented, these images are supposed to have a power that gives their holder assurance and security provided they are in contact with his or her body. Putting the hands on such images or bearing an amulet containing one of them is thought to be capable of providing the holder with the expected protection, and even with a certain charisma that facilitates his or her quest for social status or any other given advantage. Finally, there is a function of economic promotion pertaining to the competition and competitiveness inherent to modern trade activities. The holders

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of the popular economy, particularly those leading traders referred to as baol baol, although they are not necessarily from the Baol region, make space, for the display of saints’ images in their store windows, on the signs of their workplaces, and on their working tools. These representations of saints made in various forms and generally painted with oil serve as symbols of belonging, and constitute at the same time a means signifying the firmness of one’s faith and attracting clients on the ground of a shared adherence to the same religious community. At this point, it is important to take a close look at the different techniques and support materials utilized in the reproduction of these images in order to shed light on the popular nature of the phenomenon. The reproduction process complies with the exigencies and criteria of effective communication. The most accessible techniques are those used by visual artists or mere ingenuous people of good will in wood, metal, and reverse glass paintings. The inner and outer walls of transportation vehicles (car rapides, taxi, and big intercity carriers) have for a long time served as support for pictorial representations of the brotherhood founders, of their successors, and of the mosques in their religious capitals. Likewise, visual artists utilizing the technique called souwere (a deformation the French sous verre—that is, glass painting) have quite early sensed the interest in working on those emblematic figures to reach out for a wider audience. One of most famous souwere paintings is a representation of Bamba standing on a prayer rug, among the ocean waves, before the astounded eyes of his white guards staying on the ship heading for Gabon where he was to be deported. Undoubtedly, that representation is one of the images that have raised the consciousness of the Senegalese about the Magal—a popular festival, commemorating the saint man’s departure for exile, that has now taken on national and international dimensions. We have seen above the ways in which representations of religious icons are put on display stands in commercial spaces. A booming new market is that of calendars: ordered and offered as end-of-year presents by public services and private companies, individuals, and other interest groups. One of the consequences of that trend is that in houses as well as in public and private services, these almanacs with images of religious leaders are displayed with pride next to the official portrait of the country’s President. Another new and ambivalent niche market is the one controlled by the hawkers and peddlers walking down the streets of Dakar and the big urban and intercity arteries: the sale of giant posters of the caliphs of the different brotherhoods whose ingenuous designers excel in updating and innovating by using overprinting techniques to display in one poster the eminent members of a same religious family, for instance. Television and newspaper advertisings of religious events, which are by far more numerous and frequent than those announced in the official calendar are always



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abundantly illustrated with representations of religious guides and mosques of religious capitals. Finally, the works of these founders and the texts dedicated to them bear on their cover pages that attractive iconography, whether they are written in Arabic or translated into Wolof. With its magic and immense possibilities, television which has become the site and object of various power struggles is naturally invested in by all project promoters. Given the fierce competition they are subjected to, these project promoters engage in more and more sophisticated marketing strategies and tricks of which the religious iconography is one of the most effective vectors. Religious TV shows, debates, and news coverages reflect the Senegalese citizens’ demand for equal treatment which attests to the freedom of worship and the diversity of religious brotherhoods. To be sure, that activism of religious actors around the medium of television is fueled by the production and dissemination of a large number of ancient and new documents conveying images that help identify with a given saint or brotherhood. This remark raises a highly important problematic: the shift into a progressive stylization of processes of representation of those great icons. Artists and designers of all kinds inspired by photos of religious guides and holy mosques rely on the sensible qualities of these photos and on their own realism to keep fascinating the spirits as they move towards increasingly pure forms and lines. If the photographic images of saints and religious guides are still the models they use as a starting point, the stylization consists in retaining only the distinctive, essential traits which in any place and under circumstance are noticeable for those who are already familiar with the model. This way, they manage to represent Cheikh Bamba, Malick Sy, or Issa Laye through a sort of detailed drawing or impressionistic technique: the contours of a face framed by a turban, long and large sleeves, for Bamba; the face in profile and the two superposed turbans for Issa Laye; and the umbrella and the square bonnet for Malick Sy. That stage in the recognition of the image attests to a familiarization process stemming from its integration into individual and collective memories. Thus, it takes on the value of an emblem or a logo. It also testifies to the fact that the image is entering a process of scale change. Indeed, the stylization paves the way for a very large dissemination anywhere—that is, regardless of whether the original is presented or not and wherever the site of production may be. It is that beginning of scale change that I consider as a desire for universality. Each of these religious icons transcends the strict limits of his brotherhood thanks to the high scale production, dissemination, and consumption of their images, at the national level, under any circumstance, and particularly during great religious festivals. However, the demands of the popular economy and the laws of competition have brought about solutions and techniques that meet the requirements for speed and efficacy in terms of communication. Those among the

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Senegalese who export objects and commercial habits that are specific to the popular economy have carried in their wake, particularly in Europe and the US, the supports representing the images revealing their belonging to a given brotherhood. These images, which help bring together these immigrants sharing a same sense of belonging to a given brotherhood, also seek to integrate into the larger iconographic landscape of a host country in which the tradition of democracy and freedom of speech allows the expression and exhibition of the most diverse images, including images expressing religious views or beliefs. Allen F. Robert and Mary Nooter Roberts’ work, A Saint in the City, testifies to that move beyond the limits of the national territory. Periodic cultural events like the Bamba Day in New York constitute an opportunity for the exhibition of religious images intended not only for the Mouride Community but also for the members of other brotherhoods for whom the celebrated saint is under any circumstance, perceived as both a spiritual symbol and a national hero—that is, a temporal figure of the resistance to the colonizer. The desire for universality is a desire for sharing beyond the limits of the homeland which motivated the existence of these representations in the first place. However, that intention and that will are not without problems. Despite the power of transcending ethnic and national contingencies, one might, indeed, wonder whether the image does not necessarily retain a residual link to the culture that produced it. The desire for universality is a sign of the will to acquire competences that are specific to the communicational schemes of globalization. However, in order to turn that iconography into a neutral object that can be exported anywhere, as in the case of certain artifices intended for mass consumption, there are necessary prerequisites that demand recourse to promotional qualities by far more constraining. The first of these promotional qualities is the receptivity of the image on part of its target audience. If through television and now the internet, most advertisements have a transcultural status, it is because they are infra cultural, as Gibert Simon aptly puts it—that is, they are of a biological order. Can we liken the need for sacredness to something pertaining to the animal order? If the need for sacredness, of which religiousness is nothing but a modality, is an irrepressible human need, it may also be specifically of a cultural order so much so that it is through other cultural channels that it can be domesticated once it is out of its land of origin. Senghor once claimed that assimilating entails being assimilated. There are, to be sure, many followers of Layenism and Mouridism, and members of other brotherhoods who are natives of the US, Nigeria, or Germany coming to join their Senegalese brothers during great religious gatherings. How were they talked into adhering to that proselytism? How many of them are there? How do they behave with their family and friends who are more familiar with other religious orders?



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It is because the key actors in the popular economy have sensed the ramping up of the civilization of the image that they rush into that new niche market. Nevertheless, they know by experience and by conviction that, even though that civilization of the image tends to supersede that of the word, the latter keeps all its rights and powers and is not at all about to disappear. This state of facts is even truer when it comes to religious communication. Religious images keep thriving in Senegal, to be sure, yet the word of sacred chants is still present in the audiovisual landscape. Indeed, with the new technologies of information and communication, these religious chants are conveyed through various supports, including jingles, for cellular phones, and DVDs in which images are remarkably combined with sounds. There is also the actual supremacy of quasi-quotidian sermons in religious centers, on the radio, and even in the streets. The experts delivering these sermons rival in popularity with smooth talkers of all kinds praising rat and flea poisons. Therefore, one has to put things in perspective. It is indeed important to keep in mind that the fact that the word, the verb, and the cultural origin are both adjuvants and parameters that cannot be ignored without damage while trying to explicate the challenge posed by the modern-day image to the global dissemination of the symbols that Senegalese religious icons are, outside national boundaries, towards foreign target audiences. The religious image is only significant when conveyed through or supported by a storytelling or narrative, discursive strategy for effectively relating the great deeds and teachings of the founders of brotherhoods and religious orders. The success of the image depends, however, on other factors, and that leads us to the last reason that justifies the interest for the religious iconography in the everyday lives of the Senegalese. A pope who lived in previous centuries is said to have claimed that the image is the “dummies’ bible”; that is, the bible of illiterate, uneducated people. From this perspective, one can understand the importance of the illustrations accompanying texts for prayers or fueling the dissemination of the religious thought as well as the utility of the art of stained-glass windows in churches which hold a central position in the Catholic culture. That illustrative art constitutes an appropriate means of communication indispensable for reaching out to the largest possible audience. In a country like Senegal where the population is in majority composed of illiterate people, who speak neither Arabic nor French (the country’s language of administration and official communication) and where only a small proportion of the population can read in local languages, the image becomes a substitute, a recourse, and a vehicle of meaning of undeniable scope. This is why the production, promotion, and consumption of saints’ images can’t but raise an accountability question about that practice vis-à-vis the Islamic ban on representations of humans. This accountability question is a topical issue that can be convincingly argued both ways depending on one’s understanding of the ban. In many

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passages of the Koran, for instance, God is presented under an anthropomorphic form (“face” of God, His “hands,” His “throne,” His “wraths,” etc.). The Mu’tazilites and the literalists have different interpretations of that anthropomorphic character. The former, holding a reason-based interpretation, contends that these images are but metaphors that help understand without delay concepts corresponding respectively to the essence of God, His power, His reign, His will. For the other camp, these images correspond to realities that shouldn’t, however, be given a physical content. Despite their diverging interpretations, both sides of the debate view the image as a substitute, meaning in this case a default option one has to make do with. To that consequence with a global dimension, one has to add a few considerations pertaining to cultural parameters. The very Islam that combats paganism happens, under African latitudes, to be confronted with a persistence of known behaviors that are sometimes integrated into Catholic and Muslim liturgies and which are all remnants of beliefs or pantheon elements of traditional religions. For this reason, one may wonder whether, in their impulse to domesticate an imported, revealed religion, the multiplicity and diversity of brotherhoods have not, in the end, tamed it by molding it into traditional practices that define the figure of the ancestor—that is, the one who gathers and brings together, the sacred dignity. On this account, the brotherhood founder acts as the ancestor and embodies his attributes because, as in the traditional pantheon, it is his proximity and intelligibility that ensure the group’s adherence, notwithstanding the reference to a superior Entity, but farther than is the faith in Allah, for instance. In this regard, another modality of the substitute function is that the pilgrimage to Touba or Tivaoune during the celebration of the Magal (in Touba) or the Gamou (in Tivaone) cannot replace the obligation to go Mecca if the required conditions are met, yet for the traveler who cannot afford going to the holy Islamic land, this local pilgrimage represents such a powerful symbol that it stands as a consolation, another variable of the substitute function. The figure of the brotherhood founder, of whom the successors are perceived as tacit incarnations (for instance, Serigne Touba, the founder, and each of his caliphs), has something of a totem. As a symbol, he conveys that which allows the group members to identify with one another— that is, the social link. That is the reason why, despite the momentum of the image and its growing importance in the current age of modernity, it cannot fully make sense without the historical, mythical, and cultural backgrounds which confer on it a meaning that is accessible to the disciples. The images of great religious figures consumed by the Senegalese in their everyday lives as well as during solemn occasions, cannot do without little parables, legends, personal life narratives by witnesses who are part of the dramatization of the saints’ lives and who arouse the desire to emulate them while positing the impossibility of matching their performances. It is within that permanent



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stretch that the group imaginary plays and deploys itself to create a collective consciousness for the community. This is why, although it may have achieved a few breakthroughs, the desire for universality which is quite understandable for any enterprise engaged in a logic of competition (whether commercial or not), and which, in the case of religious icons, is a desire to have people share the value of a symbol, can only run against the limit it is assigned by the religious referent assigns to such an enterprise—that is, the signifier that relates the members of a collectivity, a group of signs that constitutes a symbol or the substitute for that which is absent, that which is missing and is, for that reason desirable. Bibliography Baj Strobel, Michel, and Michel Renaudeau. Peintures sous verre du Sénégal. Paris: Editions Nathan, 1984. Kane, Abdoulaye Elimane. “Totem et Touba.” Totem et publicité. Dakar Colloqium (Oct. 27–30). Martine Fourré and René Colignon eds. Dakar, SPHMD / Paris: EFEditions, 2010: 55–60. Marty, Paul. Etudes sur l’islam au Sénégal. vol. 2, Paris: Ernest Larose, 1917. Monteil, Vincent. L’islam noir. Paris: Le Seuil, 1964. Roberts, Allen F. and Mary Nooter Roberts. A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2003. Tisseron, Serge. Psychanalyse de l’image: Des premiers traits au virtuel. Paris: Dunod, 2005.

Chapter 21

West African Culture through Animated Film The Example of Kirikou Maha Gad El Hak Kirikou and the Sorceress [Kirikou et la sorcière] is an animated film written and directed by Michel Ocelot that was released in 1998. The story is based on Contes de la brousse et de la forêt [tales of the bush], written more than half a century before, in 1921, by André Davesne et Joseph Gouin. The film was so successful that Ocelot followed it with two sequels, Kirikou and the Wild Beasts [Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages] in 2005 and Kirikou and the Men and the Women [Kirikou et les hommes et les femmes] in 2012. The first film is a feature film while the two others are composed of a series of short films (four in the second and five in the third). In these short films, it is Kirikou’s grandfather who narrates the hero’s adventures with the sorceress. The present study aims to point out and analyze the relationship between the cultural and the visual aspects through Michel Ocelot’s trilogy by exploring animated film in its connection to West African francophone culture, using a semiotic approach. Before starting the analysis itself, it is important to define the meaning of the term culture which refers to “. . . the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterizes [sic] a society or social group. It includes not only arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs.”1 From the very first images of the first film, viewers are immersed in the cultural milieu, as they hear the sounds of the kora, a West African musical instrument. In addition to the kora—the movie’s music was composed by the Senegalese virtuoso Youssou N’Dour—viewers see images of everyday life. Kirikou and the Sorceress opens with beautiful sequences that should be watched rather than narrated, a panoramic view of the village and thatchroofed houses. The camera guides viewers inside one house where a pregnant, bare-chested woman with small braids dressed in a pagne [wrapper] sits on 275

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the ground, and appears tired. A child’s voice is heard, asking the woman to give birth to him, then, a baby boy appears, clothed. Among the other images shown are cultural artifacts, such as pottery, calabashes, Kirikou’s uncle’s clothing, in addition to weapons of war, lances, and shields. After playing for a few seconds, Kirikou is asked by his mother not to waste water, as Karaba the sorceress has dried the spring. One of the functions defined by Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp in his structural analysis of folk tales2 is the “deficiency” function. Actually, lack of water is also one of the crucial problems affecting the African continent, a major problem that has resulted and continues to result in violence. On the one hand, manifestations of material culture—housing, clothing, and food—are numerous. On the other hand, the time and space of the film are imprecise as there is no indication of a specific temporal and spatial setting. Analysis of the Movie Posters Due to the large amount of images to be analyzed, I’ll discuss each film poster individually before moving to some representative examples of each film. Kirikou et la sorcière [Kirikou and the Sorceress] According to Nicole Everaert-Desmedt, “the plan of the expression is the material plan, the meaning. In an image, the plan of expression is plastic or graphic, i.e., topological arrangement of lines and colors on a surface.”3 The rules for analyzing Western images require a bottom-up, left-right analysis, therefore, I will start with the squirrel in the lower left corner of the poster.4 It holds a sign on which is written the title of the animated film—Kirikou et la sorcière—thus introducing the characters. The squirrel is, according to Louis Marin, “the delegate of the framework,”5 whose role is to guide the viewer to the main character. It observes the scene while holding the sign on which we can read the name Kirikou, written in bold letters and in white, thus expressing the purity of the character. We can also read on the poster “la sorcière” [the sorceress] written with bold letters, but in a smaller type. The color used this time is golden yellow, matching the brightness of the jewelry worn by Karaba, the sorceress. The names of composer Youssou N’Dour and director Michel Ocelot are written in white like our hero’s name, establishing an equivalence between Kirikou and the two creators. The colors of the background are like the rest of the image, either yellow or red-orange (a reference to fire, or to Lucifer?). Vertically, the poster shows a small, naked black boy standing, turned slightly towards the right, his left hand resting on his waist, and the other



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hand hanging by his side. Two squirrels are positioned at his side: one, standing on his hind legs, imitates the boy’s posture, but it seems mesmerized by the presence of the sorceress who is opposite them, staring down. The second squirrel sits at the child’s feet, its body and tail coiled around them. It looks at us and seems terrified. This is another example of “the delegate of the framework,”6 whose role is to attract the viewer’s attention and to guide his gaze to the observed character. The child has his eyes closed, while in front of him, a black woman’s head and neck are represented. She looks at him wickedly with her mouth open. It is clear that she is talking to him, and that she is angry. She occupies half of the poster, which indicates the important role she plays in the tale. The poster’s colors range from yellow to orange red, colors that suggest violence. Red, the symbol of anger in this particular context, fills a large part of the poster, the bottom and the top in particular, thus framing the space where Kirikou stands. Karaba’s eyes are also red, bringing to mind the French expression voir rouge (literally to see red) which means to be very angry. It is important to underline here the fact that in most of the sequences where the sorceress appears, the background is red. Several oppositions based on a binary system can be identified in the poster: male/female, child/adult, small/ large, entirely represented/partially represented, naked child/woman adorned with jewelry, closed eyes/open eyes, accompanied by squirrels with a tree as backdrop/single, without any background, feeling of friendship/feeling of enmity. The presence of the flamboyant or flame tree in Kirikou’s background space highlights the hero in such a way as to present him as part of nature, unlike the sorceress, who appears isolated, a solitary figure. Evil, which she symbolizes, covers a large part of the pictorial space, unlike Good, symbolized by Kirikou, who is assisted by the squirrels and the tree. Collectively, they appear as part of nature, facing the sorceress represented as one sole entity. It is true that she is a large figure, but she looks like an outsider compared to the rest of the image, especially because she is drawn so as to show that she has just arrived: the fact that her head doesn’t appear fully gives this impression. One is tempted to consider Kirikou and Karaba as anti-subjects, subjects that are obliged to oppose one another in order to achieve their narrative program. According to anti-subjects’ logic, if one succeeds, the other one fails.7 But as we shall see, Kirikou will be able to neutralize the evil of the sorceress. As a manipulator subject, Karaba “lets another subject act,”8 namely the watchmen and the village’s inhabitants. With a trick, Kirikou will be able to remove the thorn, so Karaba loses her evil powers and becomes disabled. At first glance, the two characters seem to be antagonists. But in fact, neither the child’s posture, nor his facial expression shows this clash.

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He looks friendly, while the expression on the face of the sorceress is deliberately hostile. Although the child’s posture (body and head) expresses pride and challenge, he never acts aggressively. From the beginning, he wants to know the reason for the wickedness of the sorceress, to the extent that he makes his journey of initiation in order to know the answer to his grandfather’s question. He is the village’s wiseman. Throughout the story, he tries to counter the belligerent attempts by the sorceress. The poster anticipates the film’s ending where Kirikou blows a kiss, which is an element of Western tales like the magical kiss in the King Frog of the Brothers Grimm, for example. It is considered a love message, and an indication of the denouement. Several cultural elements are apparent in the poster as well. In addition to the nakedness of the child,9 which constitutes one of the stereotypes about rural Africa, the hairstyle and jewelry are a part of West African culture. We mentioned above the presence of squirrels and the flamboyant tree, which are elements that clearly belong to the flora and fauna of this region. The sign held by the first squirrel informs viewers about the child’s name, and presents the woman’s function. As for the first name of the sorceress, we’ll know it at the beginning of the film, thanks to Kirikou’s mother. We should mention here that these are the only characters in the movie that have names, thus making an onomastic analysis of them an important endeavor. According to Michel Ocelot, however, the character names have no precise meaning. The name Kirikou doesn’t exist in Africa, but it simulates, thanks to its ending, African names like Mamadou. Gradually, this name will make sense in the film, as it consists of three syllables that contain, in a certain way, the French interrogative pronouns qui, que, ou [who, what, where], thus emphasizing one of the main qualities of our hero, who is always asking questions. The name also suggests the word rikiki, which means tiny; it refers to the boy’s physical shape and small size. The sorceress’ name, Karaba, could be derived from the Arabic karb meaning misfortune and suffering.10 The viewer will learn the answer to the question why is the sorceress is nasty, a question asked by Kirikou. As we will learn from the village’s wiseman, Kirikou’s grandfather, the sorceress is a source of unhappiness and suffering after having herself been victimized by some men who had thrust a thorn in her back. This act is, in fact, a form of collective rape. Furthermore, the repetition of the vowel /a/ in her name reveals the suffering she has endured and that she, in turn, makes others endure, like many real victims looking for revenge. Our hero is the type of person that holds knowledge based on questioning, unlike the witch who takes advantage of the ignorance of the villagers to propagate superstition, making people believe she has a magical power (knowledge vs. magic).



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Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages [Kirikou and the Wild Animals] At first glance, this poster creates a feeling of astonishment: it’s a representation that shows some animals which, according to the title, are wild, but the picture’s content suggests otherwise; viewers are surprised by the attitude of the so-called beasts.11 On the left side of the poster, we see animals of all kinds, a stork, an antelope, a hyena, a rhinoceros, a giraffe; on the right, an ostrich, a gazelle, a zebra, a heron, an elephant, then a non-animal character, a watchman. They are all aligned to let the hero who is running at top speed, pass. In fact, animals are drawn in a fuzzy manner to create this effect of speed. Kirikou seems to be heading straight for us, the viewers; it is clear he has a mission to accomplish. One is struck by the direction from which Kirikou is coming because it is an illuminated area.12 Several oppositions may be found in this image: human/ animal, one/several, moving/static. Here, the film director Ocelot is representing Kirikou’s power over the so-called wildlife, through highlighting the hero’s intelligence and his know-how. The protagonist has a hold over the animals; consequently, his power over humans will be more substantial. This authority will increase over the course of the film, making our assumption correct. For instance, the sequence where Kirikou is preparing some pottery that he had ground, he refuses to put it, like other villagers, on the muzzle’s back, so that it could be transferred to another place where it could be sold. It goes without saying that pottery, with all its types, is another aspect of the culture of West Africa. It is another artifact inspired by African art, as well as the watchmen manipulated by the sorceress. It is clear that Ocelot is inspired by African art masks. Housing is another cultural element that we can identify in the film. As you may have noticed, the new space to which characters, as well as viewers, are introduced, presents a different way of life; these walls and houses evoke a completely different space than the one shown at the beginning. The new standard of living is reflected in the clothing and accessories, namely boubous,13 wrappers, scarves, jewelry. Women in the village had neither jewelry nor scarves; they wore wrappers and not boubous. All of these elements guide us towards identifying it as an urban space; we are no longer in a village, but in a city, even if it’s a simple traditional one. This image reveals a dance scene that shows a great number of characters’ bodies.14 It seems like we are not watching people, but rather elements of nature, in the same way as trees and plants. Once more, the cultural aspect is revealed. In this type of society, the balance between man and nature is a value, just like the clan or ethnic group is a value. Older men also make an impact here. The example of Kirikou’s grandfather, the wiseman of the village, is significant; he lives far from the village where he meditates and has an answer to every question. He comes at the proper time to recognize Kirikou

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who has been transformed into an adult by Karaba’s kiss, the spell having finally been broken after the poisoned thorn was removed from her back. Kirikou et les hommes et les femmes [Kirikou and the men and the women] This poster presents grouped characters in the foreground.15 Although the fact that it has a vertical shape, like most of the posters, one can easily find horizontal axes, formed by the aligned heads, which makes this poster different from the prior ones. A crowd consisting of people of all types and ages, can be seen from the back, slightly turned to the right. One can easily recognize them by their hairstyles: the large woman with blue wrapper and bun, and Kirikou’s mother in the purple wrapper and small braids. Moreover, there are other characters who can be identified by what they wear, such as Kirikou’s uncle, whose spear’s tip appears to the left, and the crotchety old man in a beige boubou. The number of men is extremely limited compared to the women (let us not forget that the sorceress had turned most of the male villagers into watchmen), although the animation’s title is “Kirikou and the men and the women.” Once more, the cultural and the societal aspect prevail, making men come first. The males are the head of the community. All these characters are looking in the same direction; we can guess they are contemplating Kirikou who appears at the upper right hand corner of the poster. He has two long ribbons around his body: a thin, narrow dark-colored one discussed above, and a blue one around his chest, longer than the first one. In addition, these ribbons are placed horizontality, designed to draw the viewer’s attention to the fact that the child is running so fast, fleeing, that we can even say that he is about to take off. It seems he will soon go out of the image’s frame, foreshadowing that he will soon leave the story and fly away. Let us remember that Michel Ocelot has clearly declared that the third animated film in the series would be the last one. Thus, the viewer can understand the reason behind the crowd’s presence; it is a farewell ceremony for Kirikou. Analyzing the image also allows us to detect an important element that belongs to Western culture: the theme of the Savior represented by Jesus, whose questions and meditations have been related in the New Testament. It is important to mention that the child has a small blue pen. Blue is a rather soothing and natural color, which also connotes dreams, peace, quiet, and freedom.16 Moreover, blue is the color of the Virgin Mary. If we observe closely the grouped characters, we find that everyone is turning his or her back to us the viewers, except a little boy who is watching us, and who strangely looks like Kirikou. In fact, he is drawn on the same diagonal that connects him to our hero lying at the top. He is the counterpart of Kirikou, but a sadder version, and he is bearing witnesses for those who



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are vulnerable to the dangers of the possible human disagreement that will prevail after Kirikou’s or the Savior’s absence. Women characters in this animated film appeared in the previous films, such as Kirikou’s mother and the heavy-set woman. In one image we see a procession of women that walk gracefully with bundles of straw on their heads.17 The accuracy of the distribution of the weight and their chromatic strength and balance are a source of delight to the viewer. It is another example of the role and impact of women in traditional African society. In this final movie of the three-part series Ocelot has transformed the griot into griotte.18 It is a tribute to those women who have the role of narrating stories every night. The female griot relates the story of Sundiata Keita, Emperor of Mali in the thirteenth century.19 Considered the guardian of the oral tradition and of the collective memory of the people, the griot’s presence is an important part in this film, showing one of the examples of women’s limitations. Women are prohibited from playing the flute, but Kirikou’s mother will break the rules and play. Meanwhile, Kirikou will be able, thanks to his know-how, to use this musical instrument to calm babies and put them to sleep. We must mention that Karaba will also be entranced by his melodies, to the point where she will eventually sing with the villagers. Thus, through song, she becomes more human. It is also to show the impact of the arts on human lives. If the film gives much information about the role of women in African society, it also shows the correct behavior to model. The episode involving “the blue creature” that was frightening everyone teaches an important lesson. The creature turns out to be a child with light skin and is recognized by Kirikou’s mother as Anigura, a Tuareg child who is a main character in Tuareg tales. That he has a light complexion had aroused suspicion in the village. This is a perfect example of the dialectic about the refusal of the Other, of the one who is different. Thanks to Kirikou and his mother, the villagers will not only accept this Other, but they will also decide that it is their duty to accompany this child back home. In fact, this will be a pretext to visit another space, one that is totally different from theirs, the desert. Before concluding, we must recall that according to the film director himself, Henri Rousseau’s art works20 have widely inspired the graphic design of the African space, as we can see in the images we just analyzed. This study has tried to point out some elements of the relationship between the cultural and the visual through the particular example of animated films. The expression “Francophone West Africa” undoubtedly brings to mind French colonization, the result of the scramble for Africa between colonial powers, that is, France and Great Britain. However, one cannot find any mention of the French presence in the three animated movies. Yes, we can see the famous colonial hat on the head of Kirikou’s uncle—he wears it and

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declares “it will give me power”—, but it is the straw hat that is an original element that belongs to the African culture. The linguistic aspect is also part of the cultural, as we can notice the use of the French language, but it is a very specialized French, since a French child will not call his mom “mother,” and since he will not use the imperative form like in “Mother me.” Another example is the use of the adjective “vaillant,” which is an obsolete term, referring perhaps to one of the vernacular languages of West Africa. It is true that in these animated films, the contributions of other cultures such as Islamic or Christian are evident. The episode of the child who speaks while in his mother’s womb, was inspired by an African tale, according to Ocelot. But one cannot but remember the first episode of Jesus’s life, as narrated in the Koran. When he was born, he was already able to speak, in order to defend his mother, the Virgin Mary. As we previously mentioned, the theme of the Savior evokes Jesus in Christianity; it can explain the brightness of the area where Kirikou comes from (in the second poster). It can also reveal the reason behind Ocelot’s choice of Kirikou’s place in the last poster, at the top, as if Kirikou the Savior is about to fly to the heavens. In fact, Ocelot has succeeded in presenting through his work, a brilliant mixture of the sacred and the profane. Is this not a mixture one of the main features of African culture?

Notes 1. According to UNESCO’s definition. Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies, World Conference on Cultural Policies, Mexico City, August 6, 1982. 2. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (The Hague: Mouton, 1958). 3. Nicole Everaert-Desmedt, ed., Sémiotique du récit (Bruxelles: De BoeckUniversité, 1999), 18. 4. http://www.michelocelot.fr/#kirikou-et-la-sorciere. Accessed 9 June 2015. 5. Louis Marin, De la représentation (Paris: Gallimard, Seuil, 1994), 391. 6. Ibid. 7. Nicole Everaert-Desmedt, Sémiotique du récit, 25 8. Ibid., 38. 9. The film contains several instances of nudity, as was the norm in precolonial Africa. This was controversial enough in the US to delay the film’s release until 2002. The nakedness of the child has been the reason behind the movie being banned in some countries such as in Saudi Arabia. 10. In fact, like other African regions, West Africa has been influenced by Arabic culture since the period of Arab conquests. As a consequence, a lot of Arabic words have been integrated in African languages. 11. http://www.michelocelot.fr/#kirikou-et-les-betes-sauvages. 12. We will discuss this point later.



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13. A boubou is a piece of traditional African clothing that inspired the French writer Blaise Cendrars to the point where he dedicated an eponymous poem to it in his collection entitled “Au Coeur du monde” [at the heart of the world]. Blaise Cendrars, Au Coeur du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). 14. https://www.google.com.eg/search?q=kirikou+et+les+b%C3%AAtes+sauvag es&biw=1366&bih=623&espv=2&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=g0V 3Ve_FLIa3sQHi84PQAg&ved=0CC4QsAQ&dpr=1#imgrc=YmSxZNopfHJ0WM% 253A%3BbjllLT7PDpg6QM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fimage.toutlecine.com%2 52Fphotos%252Fk%252Fi%252Fr%252Fkirikou-et-les-betes-sauvages-2005–28-g. jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Ftoutlecine.challenges.fr%252Ffilm%252F000 1%252F00017830-photos-kirikou-et-les-betes-sauvages.html%3B1200%3B762. Accessed June 9, 2015. 15. http://www.michelocelot.fr/#kirikou-et-les-hommes-et-les-femmes. Accessed June 9, 2015. 16. Michel Pastoureau, Bleu. Histoire d’une couleur (Paris: éditions du Seuil, 2002), 110. 17. http://www.michelocelot.fr/#images-images_de_films--kirikou-et-les-hommes-et-les-femmes. Accessed June 9, 2015. 18. Jacques Nantet, Panorama de la littérature noire d’expression française (Paris : Fayard, 2000), 6–7. “The entire population of a district is invited to a public, landscaped place occasionally for a fence. The spectators sitting on the ground form a circle around a protagonist. Human nature, either male or female, is revealed through the mouth of this wonderful storyteller.” This storyteller is a female griot. 19. “By unifying the military forces of 12 states, Sundiata becomes an emperor known as the Lion King of Mali, who controls tribes from the Niger River to the Atlantic Ocean. Walt Disney Studios reprised the story of Sundiata in 1994 as an animated film, The Lion King, with animals substituting for the humans of Mali legend,” in Ellen Snodgrass, Encyclopedia of the Literature of Empire (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2010), 78. 20. Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) is a French post-Impressionist painter in the naïve or primitive artistic movement. He is also known as “Le Douanier Rousseau.”

Bibliography Cendrars, Blaise. Au Coeur du monde. Paris:Gallimard, coll. “Foliotheque,” 2007. Davesne, André and Joseph Gouin. Contes de la brousse et de la foret 1921. Dakar/ Paris: Nouvelles Editions Africaines/EDICEF, 1990. Everaert-Desmedt, Nicole, ed. Sémiotique du récit. Bruxelles: De Boeck-Université, 1999 (third edition). Gervereau, Laurent. Dictionnaire mondial des Images. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2007. Marin, Louis. De la représentation. Paris: Gallimard, Seuil, 1994. Nantet, Jacques. Panorama de la littérature noire d’expression française. Paris: Fayard, 2000. Ocelot, Michel, dir. Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages. DVD. 2005.

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———. Kirikou et la sorcière. DVD. France Télévisions Distributions, 2002. ———. Kirikou et les hommes et les femmes. DVD. 2012. Pastoureau, Michel. Bleu. Histoire d’une couleur. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. The Hague: Mouton, 1958. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of the Literature of Empire. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2010.

Part VI

Literature, Gender, and Identity

Chapter 22

Power and Patriarchy Sexual Violence and Sexual Exploitation in the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean as Represented in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, Colère et Folie; Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle; Rosario Ferré’s “La Bella Durmiente”; and Nelly Rosario’s El canto del agua Phuong Hoang Literature by women authors from both the francophone and hispanophone Caribbean invariably represents the gender-specific difficulties particular to the lives of women. Consequently, the theme of women’s oppression by patriarchal society is often prevalent in this body of literature. In Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, colère et folie, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Rosario Ferré’s “La Bella Durmiente,” and Nelly Rosario’s El canto del agua, sexual violence and exploitation comprise one of the many obstacles faced by women as they struggle to affirm themselves in their respective male-dominated societies. These works reveal that sexual violence and exploitation force women into conforming to their female role as prescribed by patriarchal society, in which female bodies are to function as commodities exchanged between men, objects conquered for male pleasure and control, and wombs used to bear children. The patriarchal figures present in these texts, whether they are fathers, husbands, or military leaders, promote and enforce sexual violence towards women in order to demonstrate their male dominance and control. Moreover, the sexual exploitation of women, via prostitution and other forms of sex work, further perpetuates women’s financial dependence on men, thereby ensuring 287

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women’s subservient role in society. The novels also indicate that the sexual exploitation of women serves to reinforce existing contemporary and historical stereotypes concerning race and class. Nevertheless, the texts show that women of all social strata are susceptible to sexual violence and exploitation due to the gendered roles that regulate all women to a subordinate position in patriarchal society. The presence of sexual violence, consisting specifically of rape and sexual torture, is central to the plot of both Amour, colère et folie and “La Bella Durmiente.” In the former, published in 1968 by Haitian author Marie VieuxChauvet, similar situations of sexual violence appear in all three sections of the triptych and are especially significant in the plot of the first two. The first, “Amour,” describes the experiences of the Clamont family, as well as those of their social circle in mulatto-bourgeois Haitian society, under the violent authoritarian control of commander Calédu, a lower-class militant with a particular hatred of the bourgeoisie. Calédu sadistically instills fear in others and takes pleasure in torturing those who fail to treat him with deference, as is the case with Dora Soubiran. Publically proclaiming that she “n’a pour chef suprême que Dieu” [only has God as her ultimate leader]1 and “[traitant] de haut” [high-hatting]2 Calédu, Dora enrages the new military commander, who then kidnaps and tortures her over a period of two days, after which she becomes “hagard, méconnaissable, poursuivie par les railleries des mendiants qui s’esclaffaient de la voir marcher les jambes ouvertes, comme une infirme” [dazed, unrecognizable, taunted by the mockeries of beggars who were roaring with laughter at the sight of her walking open-legged like a disabled woman].3 Although the novel does not explicitly reveal that Dora was raped, Vieux-Chauvet makes a point of repeatedly describing Dora walking openlegged after her detainment. Dora “trottine encore sur ses jambes ouvertes comme une bête estropiée. Que lui a-t-on fait? Quel affreux supplice a-t-elle subi pour que depuis un mois elle n’arrive pas à marcher normalement?” [still scurries along open-legged like a crippled animal. What did they do to her? What awful torture did she suffer so that she hasn’t walked normally since a month ago?].4 Her walking abnormally with open legs as a result of torture indicates that she suffered sexual trauma, a conclusion also reached by literary critics and scholars such as Lucienne J. Serrano and Joan Dayan in their respective analyses of the text.5 Calédu’s sexual torture of Dora reflects the gender-based violence that occurred in Haiti during the totalitarian regime of François Duvalier. Duvalier’s persecution of his political dissidents, many of whom belonged to the bourgeois mixed-race elite, involved the use of “sexual violence [which] was deployed against women activists, as well as the female kin of Duvalier’s political opponents, in attacks that were both political and personal.”6 Calédu’s sexual abuse of Dora also echoes the sexual violence



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that has occurred during armed conflict and totalitarian regimes throughout human history. According to Anuradha Kumar: Yet rape in conflict or under repressive regimes is neither incidental nor private. It routinely serves a strategic function and acts as a tool for achieving specific military or political objectives. Like other human rights abuses, rape serves as a means of harming, intimidating and punishing individual women. Further, rape almost always occurs in connection with other forms of violence or abuse against women or their families.7

As shown in the novel, Calédu uses sexual violence in order to punish Dora for her bourgeois contempt of his authority. In addition, because Dora is a member of the mulatto-bourgeois social circle, her visible and prolonged agony also serves to instill fear in other members of the Haitian bourgeoisie, thereby deterring any future affronts to Calédu’s power. Furthermore, as Janie L. Leatherman argues in Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict, sexual violence is “a weapon and strategy of war aimed at domination, humiliation, expulsion, and extermination of the targeted group.”8 This is especially apparent in Dora’s recount of her torture, during which, “A chaque coup, il criait: aristos, bande d’aristos, mulâtres-aristos, je vous estropierai tous, aristos, aristos. . . .” [At each blow, he screamed: aristocrats, a bunch of aristocrats, mulatto-aristocrats, I’ll maim all of you, aristocrats, aristocrats. . .].9 As evidenced by the screams conveying his desire to maim all mulatto-aristocrats, Calédu uses sexual violence towards bourgeois women as a means of fulfilling his desire to dominate and devastate bourgeois society. While “Amour” does not depict sexual violence, the second part of the triptych, “Colère,” presents extremely graphic scenes of sexual injury. In the narrative, the Clamont family, also of the Haitian elite, witnesses the gradual appropriation of their lands by armed men in black who are commanded by a lower-class militant called “the gorilla.” In order to guarantee the return of her family’s land, as well as her family’s safety, Rose Clamont is obliged to engage in sexual relations with the gorilla. During their first encounter, the gorilla tells Rose, “Je vais te faire mal, très mal, mais tu ne diras pas un mot, tu m’as compris? Pas un mot,” [I’m going to hurt you, a lot, but you won’t say a word, understand?],10 which foreshadows the sexual violence towards her. Rose then describes, “Il s’enfonça en moi d’un seul coup terrible, brutal” [He pushed himself inside me with a single terrible, brutal blow].11 Myriam A. Chancy insightfully notes that “Chauvet describes the first day of Rose’s rapes with unsentimental clarity, conveying the horror of Rose’s abuse with words that cannot be minimized”12 in a straightforward depiction of Rose’s sexual violation. Later descriptions of Rose’s sexual abuse at the hands of the gorilla reveal an even greater degree of both physical and sexual

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violence. She describes that “Lorsque je fus nue, il se jeta sur moi si brutalement que je criai. Il me lâcha aussitôt. ‘Je t’ouvrirai jusqu’à ce que mon poing entier y passe,’ me cria-t-il,” [While I was naked, he threw himself on me with such brutality that I screamed. He got off of me immediately. ‘I’ll open you up to the point where my entire fist can fit inside you,’ he screamed at me]13 and “Il m’a fait saigner cinq fois et je n’ai pas crié [. . .] J’ai fini par tolérer des choses horribles sans le secours desquelles il n’arrive pas à être un homme” [He made me bleed five times and I didn’t scream [. . .] I ended up tolerating horrible things, without which he would not be able to be a man].14 In addition to the depictions of her tremendous pain and frequent bleeding, the gruesome details of Rose’s violation also underline the gorilla’s sadistic violent tendencies. J’éprouve pourtant d’atroces brûlures au moindre geste et je marche avec effort. Je continue de dégringoler les escaliers pour ne pas inquiéter mes parents. Pas un jour il ne m’a fait grâce. Ce soir, il était comme fou. Il criait, il me reniflait et me léchait comme une bête. Puis, il m’enfonçait son poing dans le corps et regardait couler mon sang en râlant de volupté. Vampire! Vampire! Je l’ai vu boire mon sang et s’en griser comme de vin. [I feel horrible burns at the slightest movement and I walk with effort. I continue to race down the stairs so as not to worry my parents. Not a day did he spare me. Tonight, he was like a lunatic. He screamed, he sniffed me and licked me like an animal. Then, he pushed his fist inside my body and watched my blood flow while moaning with intense pleasure. Vampire! Vampire! I saw him drink my blood and get drunk from it as if it were wine].15

Similar to Calédu in “Amour,” the gorilla not only abuses Rose for sexual gratification, but also as a means of fulfilling a personal vengeance against the bourgeoisie, especially of bourgeois women. During one of their encounters, the gorilla reveals to Rose that he was once a street beggar, “méprisé, honni par les inaccessibles têtes de saintes de ton espèce” [despised, loathed by the unapproachable faces of female saints of your kind].16 Consequently, his abuse of Rose is a form of retribution against the contemptuous behavior of bourgeois women that he has encountered in the past. In addition to representing political domination of the bourgeoisie, the gorilla’s sexual abuse of Rose is also indicative of gendered domination. During the daily abuse, he repeatedly refers to her as a saint and a martyr, two figures that convey notions of purity, self-sacrifice, and virtue, all of which are historically and socially desired in women by patriarchal societies. Furthermore, Rose recounts, “Je suis d’une docilité écœurante. Je me déshabille et je me couche les jambes ouvertes, les bras en croix et j’attends. Le supplice!” [I’m disgustingly docile. I undress and lie down with open legs, my arms extended like a cross, and



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I wait. Torture! Such torture!].17 This description specifically emphasizes not only her saint-like positioning during the sexual abuse, but also her absolute docility to the gorilla. As Ronnie Scharfman argues, “the conditions imposed by the ‘gorilla’ represent a kind of ritualization of total submission upon which his sense of power and virility depend.”18 Thus, when Rose states that without her complete sexual submission, “il n’arrive pas à être un homme” [he is unable to be a man],19 the novel indicates that her sexual violation represents the gender constraints in which masculinity and male identity are contingent on male sexual domination of women. Whereas Amour, colère et folie depicts sexual violence as a means of acquiring both social and sexual domination, Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré’s “Sleeping Beauty,” represents sexual violence, specifically rape, as a method of forcing women to conform to their gendered role in society. The text, initially published in 1976 as one of the many short stories of Papeles de Pandora, incorporates letters, newspaper clippings, and interior monologues in order to tell the story of María de los Angeles, a young woman from an upper-class Puerto Rican family, who struggles to affirm her identity as her family attempts to pressure her to conform to the gender-specific roles in patriarchal society. Although María is passionate about dancing, she only encounters disapproval from her Reverend Mother, who wants her to become a nun; her parents, who wish that she marry and bear a male heir to the family fortune; and her husband, who also pressures her to be a traditional wife and mother. In a letter to the Reverend Mother, Don Fabiano Fernández, María’s father, explains: Nuestra desgracia está en haber tenido una hija y no un hijo, que hubiese sabido atender nuestro capital y nuestro nombre. [. . .] Todo depende de que María de los Angeles se case con un hombre bueno, que no la venga a destasajar. Solamente entonces, cuando la vea casada, protegida en el seno de ese hogar como lo fue en el nuestro, junto a un marido que sepa conservar y multiplicar su herencia, me sentiré tranquilo. [Our misfortune stems from having had a daughter instead of a son, who would have known how to take care of our resources and our name. [. . .] Everything depends on María de los Angeles marrying a good man, who will not come to ruin her. Only then, when I see her married, protected in the heart of their home like how she was in ours, together with a husband who knows how to preserve and multiply her inheritance, will I feel better.]20

Don Fabiano not only refers to her daughter’s gender as the family’s “misfortune” because he believes that a woman is inherently incapable of maintaining and multiplying the family wealth, but he also insists that María’s future, as well as that of the family, depends on her future husband.

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Prior to María’s wedding, Don Fabiano expresses his relief that his daughter finally “encontraría esa conformidad y aceptación que le faltaban y que a todas las mujeres les produce ser esposa y madre” [would find the conformity and acceptance that she lacked and that makes all women become wives and mothers].21 As he disapprovingly recognizes Marías non-traditionalism, Don Fabiano shows that he expects all women to conform and accept their essential role of being wives and mothers. In La mujer negra en la literatura puertorriqueña: cuentística de los sesenta, María Esther Ramos Rosado argues that Don Fabiano’s attitude constitutes a “Visión burguesa de la vida matrimonial como única carrera para la mujer, y la maternidad, como el fin último del matrimonio. El marido, protector de los bienes gananciales; la mujer, propiedad privada de su esposo” [bourgeois vision of married life as the only career for a woman, and of motherhood as the ultimate purpose of marriage. The husband, protector of their shared possessions; the wife, private property of her husband].22 In the gendered restrictions of upper-class Puerto Rican society, dancing is the only means of self-expression accorded to María in her youth. As Jean Franco’s essay on self-destructing heroines explains, “dancing is also a metaphor for the bodily freedom which has been denied women”23 and which María could no longer undertake if she is to become a traditional wife and mother. Nevertheless, María manages to convince her husband, Don Filisberto, to allow her to continue dancing after their marriage, to which he agrees. However, much to his surprise, Don Filisberto realizes that this promise, according to María, also involves her not bearing children. In a letter to his father-in-law, Don Filisberto explains: Usted recordará que antes de nuestro matrimonio yo le dí mi palabra a su hija de permitirle continuar su carrera de bailarina. [. . .] A los pocos días después de la boda María de los Angeles insistió que mi promesa de dejarla bailar abarcaba el acuerdo de que no tuviéramos hijos. Me explicó que a las bailarinas, una vez salen encinta, se les ensanchan las caderas y al sufrir este cambio fisiológico ya no pueden jamás llegar a ser bailarinas excelentes. [You remember that before our marriage, I gave my word to your daughter that I would allow her to continue her career as a ballerina. [. . .] A few days after the wedding, María de los Angeles insisted that my promise of letting her dance includes the agreement that we would not have children. She explained to me that ballerinas, after pregnancy, have wider hips and, undergoing this physiological change, could no longer become excellent ballerinas].24

María’s decision to reject motherhood in favor of pursuing her passion represents a complete rebellion from the traditional gendered female role in society. In one of her disconcerting interior monologues, she mentions using



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a condom as a means of avoiding pregnancy.25 However, Don Felisberto is adamant about producing an heir, preferably male, and considers the birth of a child as the ultimate consecration of their marriage. In a letter to his fatherin-law, Don Felisberto writes, “Luego le hablé del amor, de cómo un hijo es la única manera de que el matrimonio perdure. Pero cuando se me siguió emperrando, negándoseme, Don Fabiano, cuando me encontré al final de mi paciencia [. . .] la forcé carajo Don Fabiano le hice la barriga a la fuerza” [Then I spoke to her of love, of how a son is the only way for marriages to last. But when she continued insisting, refusing me, Don Fabiano, when I was losing the last of my patience [. . .] I forced her dammit, Don Fabiano, I did her belly with force].26 Because María refuses to conform to her role as a wife and mother, the text indicates that he coerces her by using “force” and rapes her. According to Patricia L. N. Donat and John D’Emilio in “A Feminist Redefinition of Rape and Sexual Assault: Historical Foundation and Change,” the act of rape is “not an end in itself, but as a means of enforcing gender roles in society and maintaining the hierarchy in which men retained control. [. . .] Rape was a form of domination and control, a weapon used to enforce women’s subordinate role to men.”27 In addition to defying gender roles and patriarchal hierarchy by choosing to forgo motherhood in order to continue dancing, María also refuses to comply with her husband’s wishes to have a child and simply does not submit to him willingly. Therefore, Don Felisberto uses sexual violence as a tool to force María to conform to her gendered role as a child-bearing wife, while also reasserting his physical and social dominance in the male-centered hierarchy of patriarchal society. Along with sexual violence, francophone and hispanophone texts of the Caribbean also reveal that women are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation, which consists of prostitution and other forms of sex work. The theme of sexual exploitation is especially evident in Nelly Rosario’s El Canto del agua and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, both of which indicate that sexual exploitation perpetuates women’s financial dependence on men, thereby maintaining the gendered dynamics of patriarchal society. Opening with the occupation of the Dominican Republic by American soldiers during the 1910s, El Canto del agua recounts the story of Graciela and her female descendants as they experience the events of twentieth-century Dominican history. The sexual exploitation of women is apparent even on the first page, which contains a description of a photograph, taken in an unknown country around 1900, of a nude young couple on a Victorian sofa. The beginning of the novel then presents the context of this erotic photograph, in which Peter West, a Western tourist, conspicuously watches a young couple kissing on a beach in the Dominican Republic. After revealing his specialty in erotic photography, West extends a handful of money to Silvio and Graciela before quickly snatching it back before

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Graciela could grab it.28 Graciela’s eagerness in snatching the money reflects her poor economic condition, which is constantly reiterated throughout the rest of the novel. Consequently, Graciela and Silvio agree to be the subjects of West’s pornographic photo-shoot “con la promesa de los pesos” [with the promise of pesos].29 In fact, West continues to entice the pair with money in order to persuade them to comply with his demands. Once they arrive at the warehouse, West’s hand “balanceaba pesos ante ellos” [dangled pesos before them].30 The monetary incentive is so tempting that the couple even allows West to manually stimulate them before wrapping his hand around Silvio’s penis and guiding it into Graciela’s vagina. Afterwards, Graciela wondered if she would get all the money, reiterating once more the role of the monetary offer in her consent to the pornographic photo-shoot. Later in the novel, Graciela is subjected once again to sexual exploitation. After abandoning her second partner, Casimiro, as well as her three-yearold daughter, Mercedes, Graciela meets Eli Cavalier on a train to Santiago. A letter at the beginning of the chapter reveals that Eli is a subscriber of Peter West’s erotic photography club. According to Victoria A. Chevalier: Eli’s membership in West’s club implies that he erotically collects and consumes the sexual, racial other visually, and that his visual consumption is directly connected to the sexual exploitation he plans for Graciela with La Pola, the prostitute whose house they visit in Santiago. That Eli Cavalier can purchase “erotic” images of black, Caribbean women from the distance of Germany is constitutive of their actual purchase as exploited sex-workers in their own country.31

Thus, Peter West’s initial sexual exploitation of Graciela by monetary inducements relates directly to Eli’s later sexual exploitation of Graciela, also achieved by financial offers. At one point, Graciela admits, “No me enseñán a leer y escribir” [They didn’t teach me how to read or write],32 indicating her lack of formal education. She realizes that she is an illiterate countrywoman with no means of income, nor any relatives or friends in Santiago. For that reason, Graciela decides to follow Eli, who takes her to a brothel where she becomes his prostitute. Like with the pornographic photoshoot, Graciela is not physically forced into sex work with Eli either, yet, according to Linda LeMonchek, “A sex worker [. . .] can appear to ‘choose’ her life yet still be coerced into sex because she has no other alternative for men’s [. . .] support. A prostitute may not be dependent on a single man for making a living, but she is dependent on men [. . .].”33 This economic dependence reveals itself in Graciela’s exchange of sex with Eli for his payment of her room and board, which sustains her for a few days in Santiago. Furthermore, the other equally poor prostitutes voice their jealousy of her having



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a rich Western client. Eli himself observes that “Las otras fulanas ya están celosas de ti [. . .] Tienen envidia de todo. De un baño. Del agua caliente. De mi dinero” [The other hookers are already jealous of you [. . .] They’re envious of everything. A bath. Hot water. My money].34 As evidenced by their desire for basic necessities, the sex workers depend on their clients in order to survive and must rely on their own sexual and economic exploitation in order to do so. Whereas El Canto del agua represents sexual exploitation in its entirety, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle hints at the practice while underlining the economic dependency that maintains it. The novel, published in 1972, describes the life of Télumée, a Guadeloupean woman born to an absent mother and raised by her grandmother. In her youth, Télumée becomes a maid for the Desaragnes, a wealthy French family residing on the island. She recounts that on one particular night, “Je me levai, ouvris et à ma grande surprise M. Desaragne entra tranquillement, referma la porte derrière lui, s’adossant à la cloison. Il avait à la main une robe de soie qu’il me jeta en souriant, comme si la chose eût été convenue entre nous” [I got up, opened the door, and to my great surprise, M. Desaragne entered quietly, closed the door behind him, leaning against the wall. He had, in his hand, a silk dress that he threw at me while smiling, as if it had been agreed between us].35 Seeing her struggle against his attempts, M. Desaragne then asks, “une robe ne te suffit donc pas?. . . veux-tu une chaîne en or, une paire d’anneaux?” [A dress isn’t enough for you?. . . Do you want a gold necklace, or a pair of rings?].36 This particular scene conveys the stereotypical image of the poor black maid, who must rely on her French employer for expensive luxury items such as a silk dress, a gold chain, and a pair of rings, all of which constitute payment for her sexual exploitation. Yet this scene also reveals Télumée’s refusal to be exploited. She verbally protests after M. Desaragne runs his hand up her skirt and, when he did not relent, physically threatens him with her nails, which finally put an end to the attempted rape. Télumée’s encounter with M. Desaragne also reflects the use of sexual exploitation as a means of reinforcing historical stereotypes of black women. The relationship between Télumée, a poor black Guadeloupean servant, and M. Desaragne, her rich white French boss who attempts to have sex with her, symbolizes the historical sexual exploitation of black female Caribbean slaves by their white masters. In Caribbean Shadows & Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization, Kathleen J. Renk shows the “widespread sexual relationships between white men and African Caribbean women” during slavery by citing that “concubinage was almost universal, embracing 9/10s of the male population [. . .] White men were expected to have mistresses of color [. . .].”37 Although the novel does not take place during slavery, Cécile Accilien notes that “many békés still consider the people working for them as

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personal property. Thus, M. Desaragne seems to think that Télumée’s body is his property. As previously mentioned, the common myth regarding black women’s sexual appetite, still continues to operate and to justify this kind of behavior.”38 Here, Accilien is referring to the racist pseudo-scientific ideas on racial differences of the nineteenth century, during which: French science clearly assisted in the constructing of the racist idea that the physiological differences between African and European bodies determined the supposedly different sexual appetites of Black and White women. The idea had become such a commonplace by Daumier’s time that Flaubert included it in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues, which defined Black women as being more amorous than White women.39

In fact, the novel suggests that M. Desaragne makes sexual advances towards all of the women on his house staff, thus revealing that he expects to have the historical sexual relationship between white masters and black slaves that was once so rampant on the island. He even states unabashedly, “écoute, j’ai besoin d’une petite négresse qui chante dans la vie et plus vive qu’un éclair, j’ai besoin d’une petite négresse si noire que bleue, c’est ce que j’aime. . .” [listen, I need a little Negress who sings in life and who is livelier than a flash of lightning, I need a little Negress who is so dark that she’s blue, that’s what I like. . .].40 Evidently, M. Desaragne not only describes the stereotype of the lively singing black girl, but he also exoticizes and eroticizes dark black skin. The use of sexual exploitation to reinforce existing racial stereotypes is also evident in Graciela’s relationship with both Peter West and Eli Cavalier in El Canto del agua. In fact, Graciela first attracts Eli because of her dark skin. As Eli notices her fingers on the train, he “supo por las cutículas de sus pequeños dedos morenos que era una muchacha de piel oscura. De pezones purpúreos, quizá. Cerró los ojos y vio los pliegues en que el trasero se encuentra con los muslos. Sintió cómo se le ponía dura en aquel calor. Quiso hundir esa dureza en negrura aterciopelada” [knew, from the cuticles on her dark little fingers, that she was a dark-skinned girl. With purple nipples, maybe. He closed his eyes and saw the folds where backside meets her thighs. He felt that he was getting hard in this heat. He wanted to bury that hardness in velvety blackness].41 Immediately after deducing that she has dark skin from observing her cuticles, Eli imagines her nipples as being purple, then continues to visualize the folds between the buttocks and thighs, revealing his sexualization of dark skin. He then masturbates on the train as he reflects on his previous experiments designed to enhance black women’s natural aroma, and which he hopes to continue in the Dominican Republic where he would have more opportunities to do so:



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“Tras mucho experimentar he inventado un medio para mejorar e intensificar las exóticas emanaciones de las negras,” [. . .] Si se le frotaba la piel con lavanda seca o tomillo fresco o un concentrado de ambos tras un baño en agua salada, opinaba que la mujer negra adquiría un perfume en extremo erótico, bien distinto del aroma insípido de la mujer blanca. [“After a lot of experimenting, I’ve invented a way of improving and intensifying the exotic emanations of black women,” [. . .] If they rubbed their skin with dried lavender, or fresh thyme, or a concentrate of both after a bath in salt water, he thought that black women would acquire an extremely erotic scent, very distinct from the insipid smell of white women.42

Eli’s description further reiterates the old beliefs that black women are much more carnal than white women, as he exoticizes and eroticizes the former’s “perfume en extremo erótico,” [extremely erotic scent] which he prefers to white women’s “insipid” smell. Furthermore, Eli’s thoughts also reveal that sexual tourism constitutes one of the motives for his relocation to the Dominican Republic, a place where he could carry out future aromatic experiments with the local women. In fact, the novel shows that Western men’s sexual exploitation of Dominican women is rather common. As the madam la Pola eyes Graciela’s dark skin, she notes “el tacto de esa piel atraía a los extranjeros como aquél” [the touch of her skin would attract foreigners like that one],43 referring to Eli. La Pola’s observations indicate her familiarity with Western clients and their particular, and historically rooted, interest in dark-skinned prostitutes. It is also important to note that, like M. Desaragne, Eli associates black women with sexual submission to white men. As he reflects on the last woman with whom he engaged in sexual relations, Eli describes her as being “negra y servicial” [black and obliging]44 as if being black also implies being obedient. In his demeanor towards Graciela during the moments preceding their intercourse, Eli begins to exert authority over her. His voice “rezumaba una nueva autoridad, como si aquélla fuese su propia casa” [oozed with new authority, as if he were in his own house],45 as he orders Graciela to comply with his wishes as if she were his property. While observing her nudity, he remarks, “Estoy condimentando mi comida” [I’m flavoring my food],46 indicating that he does not consider her as a human being, but as a commodity to be consumed. His sexual expectations of Graciela also reflect the historical sexual domination and exploitation of black female slaves by their white masters. Like Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Nelly Rosario’s novel also attributes the sexual exploitation of black women by white men to the days of slavery in the Dominican Republic. This is particularly apparent with la Pola’s family, for her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and greatgreat-grandmother all worked as prostitutes:

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el negocio familiar se inició con la violación de la tátara tatarabuela de la Pola, una esclava en los tiempos de las colonias, antes de las rebeliones de esclavos de ustedes. Quirós, un amo de esclavos enviado por el mismísimo demonio, hacía que esclavos desnudos le sirvieran las comidas y cortaran caña en sus plantaciones. [the family business started with the rape of la Pola’s great-great-great-grandmother, a slave during the colonial times, before your people’s slave rebellions. Quirós, a slave-master sent by the devil himself, made naked slaves serve him food and cut sugarcane on his plantations].47

La Pola’s family business of prostitution traces back to the sexual violence inflicted on her great-great-great-grandmother, a slave raped by her master. La Pola’s account also reflects the sexual expectations demanded of black female slaves, who must submit to their master’s wishes and serve him food and cut sugarcane in the nude. This sexualized servility characterizes the relationship between black women and their white masters, constituting a gendered and racial dynamic that continues to be present in the contemporary sexual exploitation of black Caribbean women by white men. Moreover, the sexual violence and sexual exploitation of the heroines in these novels of the francophone and hispanophone Caribbean are perpetrated by patriarchal figures. Both Dora Soubiran and Rose experience sexual violence at the hands of an armed male military leader with extensive social, political, and economic control. In the case of Rose, her father, Louis Normil is in part responsible for her sexual abuse, for he “a bien su manœuvrer Rose” [knew well how to manipulate Rose]48 into accompanying him to the lawyer’s office, knowing that Rose’s youth, beauty, and class may influence the lawyer to argue in his favor. Louis’ implication in the sexual violation of his daughter is revealed with his son’s remark, “Mon père se sert de sa fille dans l’espoir d’émouvoir l’avocat” [My father uses his daughter in the hopes of influencing the lawyer],49 incriminating his own father who represents the family’s patriarch. Likewise, both Graciela and Télumée experience sexual exploitation by wealthy white men who symbolize patriarchal white masters in both the Caribbean’s colonial past and its contemporary legacy. The sexual violence and sexual exploitation of these heroines is a direct result of women being relegated to commodities to be exchanged between men, a characteristic of patriarchal society. In Elementary Structures of Kinship, Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that the universal incest taboo necessitates the practice of exogamy in human societies. The family alliances formed by exogamy are then reinforced through a system of reciprocal prestations involving the exchange of gifts, valuable objects, and women. Lévi-Strauss attributes the universal incorporation of women into this gift-giving system to women’s ability to stimulate men’s sexual instinct, which renders women



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distinctly valuable as an object of prestation. Lévi-Strauss’ theory provides a base for later feminists, such as Luce Irigaray, who insists: Car la femme est traditionnellement valeur d’usage pour l’homme, valeur d’échange entre les hommes. Marchandise, donc. Ce qui la laisse gardienne de la matière, dont le prix sera estimé à l’étalon de leur travail et de leur besoindésir par des « sujets » : ouvriers, marchands, consommateurs. Les femmes sont marquées phalliquement par leurs pères, maris, proxénètes. Et cet estampage décide de leur valeur dans le commerce sexuel. La femme ne serait jamais que le lieu d’un échange [For women are traditionally valued for their use by men, valued for their exchangeability between men. Merchandise, thus. This allows women to determine their own price, which is estimated according to the quality of their work and their need-desire by “subjects”: workers, merchants, consumers. Women are phallically marked by their fathers, husbands, procurers. And they decide women’s value in sexual commerce. Women will never be anything but the place of an exchange].50

Irigaray’s argument not only asserts that women have an exchange value based on their ability to attract potential consumers, but also reveals that women are identified by their relationship to patriarchal figures such as fathers, husbands, and pimps, all of whom have the power to determine their value as well. The usage of women as objects exchanged between men is evident in “Colère,” in which Louis Normil exchanges his daughter in order to retain his family land, an act which leads to her horrific sexual abuse by the gorilla. In her analysis of the novel, Joan Dayan argues that “Colère” reveals “the exchange of money, and women” through the character of Rose, who serves as “a commodity in the marketplace”51 dominated by her father and the gorilla. Similarly, in a letter to Don Fabiano, Don Felisberto describes “La recuerdo pasando de su mano a la mía como una virgen” [I remember her passing from your hand to mine like a virgin],52 as he refers to María, indicating the transfer of María from her father’s hands to those of her husband so that the latter could maintain the family fortune. As with Rose in “Colère,” the exchange of María also leads to her rape by Don Felisberto. In both situations, the men who receive the women in the exchange—the gorilla in “Colère” and Don Felisberta in “La Bella Durmiente”—offer a valuable incentive in return. Therefore, they both consider Rose and María to be legitimately acquired “merchandise,” to use Irigaray’s term, and thus treat them however they wish, resulting in the sexual violence suffered by these heroines. Irigaray’s theory on women’s exchange value also accounts for the sexual exploitation of women represented in the novels. Since women are

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“merchandise” with a “price” to be paid by potential consumers, men could then offer women appropriate monetary or economic compensation in exchange for sexual favors. This is the case with Graciela and Télumée, both of whom receive incentives for sex work. Peter West offers Graciela money in exchange for a pornographic photo-shoot, while Eli Cavalier provides her with basic necessities such as food, shelter, and hygienic items in return for sex. Likewise, M. Desaragne throws a silk dress at Télumée as payment for the sexual favors that he expected, and that she rebuffed. Furthermore, in the description of la Pola’s great-great-great-grandmother’s plantation owner, the text reveals that he: hizo fortuna con sus tres obsesiones: dinero, sexo y sangre mestiza. Decía que la mezcla de sangre arrojaba mejores frutos que el original. Jo, el muy hijo de puta engendraba sus propias criaturas para venderlas, y hacía tratos mientras las muchachitas aún estaban mamando. ¿La tátara tatarabuela de la Pola? Pues fue la primera de sus esclavas en abastecer su reserve. [made a fortune with his three obsessions: money, sex, and mixed-blood. He said that blood-mixing produced better fruit than the original. Jo, the son of a bitch fathered his own children to sell, and made deals while the little girls were still sucking at their mothers’ breasts. The great-great-great-grandmother of la Pola? She was the first of his slaves to supply his stock].53

Not only does the exchange of women relegate women to consumable merchandise with an attached price, leading to the sexual violence and exploitation inflicted on women, it also enables men to economically benefit from such exploitation, as evidenced by Jo’s prostitution of his own daughters and Louis Normil and Don Felisberto offering their daughters for financial gain. According to Gayle Rubin in “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”: If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it [. . .] If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. [. . .] The relations of such a system are such that women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation. As long as the relations specify that men exchange women, it is men who are the beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges—social organization.54

Ultimately, the sexual violence and sexual exploitation of the heroines are the results of a patriarchal social system that largely benefits men and constrains women. It is also essential to note that the four heroines all belong to varying social classes; whereas Dora Soubiran, Rose, and María



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de los Angeles all come from wealthy, elite, light-skinned, mulatto families, Graciela and Télumée were born into the lower social stratum consisting of poor, disadvantaged, and dark-skinned members of Caribbean society. Nevertheless, all four heroines are victims of sexual violence and exploitation, which indicates that gender-specific tribulations affect all categories of women regardless of their class or skin color due to the defined gendered roles that prescribe women’s position in patriarchal society. In conclusion, Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, colère et folie, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Rosario Ferré’s “La Bella Durmiente,” and Nelly Rosario’s El canto del agua all represent sexual violence and sexual exploitation suffered by Caribbean women as they strive to assert themselves in their respective patriarchal societies. While the novels show that sexual violence against women constitutes a form of male domination, in which the perpetrators force women to conform to their place in the social order, sexual exploitation of women perpetuates their economic dependence on men as well as reinforces historical, racial, and gender stereotypes. The texts also indicate that patriarchal figures in the form of fathers, husbands, military leaders, and wealthy white men who symbolize slave masters all inflict sexual violence and exploitation against women. Furthermore, the sexual violence and exploitation also stem from the patriarchal system of exchanging women, in which women function as commodities to be exchanged between men, oftentimes for economic profit. Regardless of class and skin color, the texts reveal that all women are vulnerable as a result of gendered roles that dictate the position of women in society. Notes 1. Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Amour, colère et folie (Lechelle, France: Emina Soleil/Zellige, 2005), 20. The quotes are cited as they appear in their respective languages of publication. I provided my own English translations in parentheses. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid, 23. 5. See Lucienne J. Serrano’s “Intention d’écriture dans Amour, colère et folie de Marie Chauvet” in Ecrivaines françaises et francophones, ed. Nadine Dormoy and Françoise Wuilmart (Paris: Université de Paris 8, Saint-Denis, 1997) and Joan Dayan’s “Reading Women in the Caribbean” in Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, ed. Joan Dejean and Nancy K. Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 6. Erica Caple James, Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 63.

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7. Anuradha Kumar, “Rape as a Weapon of War and a Tool of Political Repression,” in Human Rights: Global Perspectives (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2002), 101–102. 8. Janie L. Leatherman, Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011), 32. 9. Vieux-Chauvet, Amour, 141. 10. Ibid., 252. 11. Ibid. 12. Myriam J. A. Chancy, “‘No Giraffes in Haiti’: Haitian Women and State Terror,” in Écrire en pays assiégé: Haïti, Writing Under Siege (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2004), 310. 13. Vieux-Chauvet, Amour, 252. 14. Ibid., 253. 15. Ibid., 256. 16. Ibid., 253. 17. Ibid., 257. 18. Ronnie Scharfman, “Theorizing Terror: The Discourse of Violence in Marie Chauvet’s Amour, colère et folie,” in Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, ed. Mary Jean Green et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 242. 19. Vieux-Chauvet, Amour, 253. 20. Rosario Ferré, “La Bella Durmiente,” in Papeles de Pandora (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 159. 21. Ibid., 180. 22. Ibid., 263. 23. Jean Franco, “Self-Destructing Heroines,” in Critical Passions: Selected Essays, ed. Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 373. 24. Ferré, “La Bella Durmiente,” 179–180. 25. Ibid., 172. 26. Ibid., 181. 27. John D’Emilio and Patricia L. N. Donat, “A Feminist Redefinition of Rape and Sexual Assault: Historical Foundation and Change,” in Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Laura L. O’Toole et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 188. 28. Nelly Rosario, El Canto del agua (New York: Vintage Español, 2003), 15. 29. Ibid., 16. 30. Ibid. 31. Victoria A. Chevalier, “Alternative Visions and the Souvenirs Collectible in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints,” in Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism, ed. Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 49. 32. Rosario, El Canto, 82. 33. Linda LeMonchek, Loose Women, Lecherous Men: A Feminist Philosophy of Sex (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 120. 34. Rosario, El Canto, 90.



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35. Simone Schwarz-Bart, Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 112. 36. Ibid., 113. 37. Kathleen J. Renk, Caribbean Shadows & Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1999), 73. 38. Cécile Accilien, Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 159. 39. Elizabeth C. Childs, Daumier and Exoticism: Satirizing the French and the Foreign (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004), 75. 40. Schwarz-Bart, Pluie et vent, 113. 41. Rosario, El Canto, 78. 42. Ibid., 78–79. 43. Ibid., 85. 44. Schwarz-Bart, Pluie et vent, 79. 45. Rosario, El Canto, 90. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 86. 48. Vieux-Chauvet, Amour, 240. 49. Ibid., 191. 50. Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1977), 30–31. 51. Dayan, “Reading Women in the Caribbean,” 244. 52. Ferré, “La Bella Durmiente,” 133. 53. Rosario, El Canto, 86. 54. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 174.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Accilien, Cécile. Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Chancy, Myriam J. A. “‘No Giraffes in Haiti’: Haitian Women and State Terror.” Écrire en pays assiégé: Haïti, Writing Under Siege. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2004. Chevalier, Victoria A. “Alternative Visions and the Souvenirs Collectible in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints.” Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism, Ed. Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Childs, Elizabeth C. Daumier and Exoticism: Satirizing the French and the Foreign. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004. Dayan, Joan. “Reading Women in the Caribbean.” Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French. Ed. Joan Dejean and Nancy K. Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. D’Emilio, John and Patricia L. N. Donat. “A Feminist Redefinition of Rape and Sexual Assault: Historical Foundation and Change.” Gender Violence:

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Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Laura L. O’Toole et al. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Ferré, Rosario. “La Bella Durmiente.” Papeles de Pandora. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. Franco, Jean. “Self-Destructing Heroines.” Critical Passions: Selected Essays. Ed. Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Irigaray, Luce. Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris: Editions Minuit, 1977. James, Erica Caple. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Kumar, Anuradha. Human Rights: Global Perspectives. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2002. Leatherman, Janie L. Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011. LeMonchek, Linda. Loose Women, Lecherous Men: A Feminist Philosophy of Sex. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Renk, Kathleen J. Caribbean Shadows & Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization. Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1999. Rosado, María Esther Ramos. La mujer negra en la literatura puertorriqueña: cuentística de los sesenta. San Juan: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1999. Rosario, Nelly. El Canto del agua. New York: Vintage Español, 2003. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Scharfman, Ronnie. “Theorizing Terror: The Discourse of Violence in Marie Chauvet’s Amour Colère Folie.” In Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers. Ed. Mary Jean Green et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Schwarz-Bart, Simone. Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Serrano, Lucienne J. “Intention d’écriture dans Amour, colère et folie de Marie Chauvet.” In Ecrivaines françaises et francophones. Ed. Nadine Dormoy and Françoise Wuilmart. Paris: Université de Paris 8, Saint-Denis, 1997. Vieux-Chauvet, Marie. Amour, colère et folie. Lechelle, France: Emina Soleil/ Zellige, 2005.

Chapter 23

La Mulâtresse During the Two World Wars Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Suzanne Lacascade’s Claire-Solange, âme africaine and Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise Nathan H. Dize When we think of the literature produced before, during, and after the two world wars we rarely think of the Caribbean as a site of significant literary output. Typically, we privilege a white, male, European literary voice. If we do consider literature from elsewhere, it usually follows a pattern of normative privilege. Therefore, it is useful to consider the female Caribbean voice and its response to colonialism, racism, and gender violence during the period between 1914 and 1945. Claire-Solange, âme africaine offers arguably one of the best examples of a female Caribbean perspective on the First World War as well as global politics. Although Suzanne Lacascade’s novel has been obscured and lost over time, the Martinican author portrays everyday scenarios in France during the First World War to empower marginalized Caribbean women during one of the most tumultuous moments in the early twentieth century. While Lacascade shifts our lens to the First World War, Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise is set, in part, during the blockade years in Martinique during the Second World War under Admiral Georges Robert. Together, these two Martinican female writers—even though they are less well known than their canonical male compatriots Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau—lucidly portray the everyday lives of mulatto women in Martinique and in France as they negotiate their place on the periphery of French society. I argue below that through their interrogations of the everyday during these two wars that Lacascade and Capécia generate female protagonists who challenge racial, cultural, gender, and sexual stereotypes, which have historically rendered mixed race women as marginalized figures in francophone Caribbean literature. 305

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During the two world wars, the dominant literary view of everyday life throughout the world came from European and US writers. Therefore, we have a quite biased perspective on the world within a literary frame. The bulk of the literature that treats the history beyond the Western world is exoticized and stereotyped under a white male and even ethnographic gaze. In the Caribbean, writers began to adopt this problematic style in order to describe their own history. The Martinican writer René Maran, author of Batouala: Véritable roman nègre, mimics the European ethnographic model to describe quotidian scenes in French Equatorial Africa. While trying to provide the perspective of a participant observer, Maran—simultaneously allured and repulsed by the Africans—depicts scenes of debauchery and “savage behavior” as the pitfalls of African society. It is quite clear that Maran’s erotic and exotic portrayal of African life is packaged for a French readership. Although Maran could not avoid writing in French like most colonized writers, his imperialist treatment of Africa, and the brutal treatment of Africans as subjects of study fall in line with the majority of white French ethnographic literature of the time. Batouala was published in 1921 and Maran’s Africa seems entirely cut off from the rest of the world because the novel does not mention the First World War. This, however, is a discrepancy that Suzanne Lacascade rectifies three years after the publication of Maran’s novel because the war serves as the main sociopolitical backdrop in Claire-Solange, âme africaine. While she uses a familiar European style, rife with melodrama and ethnographic categorization, the effect is quite different. Lacascade interrogates French models of race and stereotypes in the Caribbean through her appropriation of French poetics. Above all, she wishes to deconstruct the trope of the mulâtresse as a hyper-sexualized, mad woman.1 From the beginning of the novel it is clear that the mulâtresse is the focal point of Lacascade’s analysis of race in the French Empire, she writes: “Mais ces climats sauvages ne conviennent plus à Étienne, il souffre du foie, et sa fille, en somme, se trouve avoir une âme plus qu’à demi-européenne. . .une mulâtresse” [But these tropical climates no longer accommodated Étienne, he suffered through indigestion, and in short, his daughter found herself to have a soul that was more than half European. . . a mulatrêsse”].2 Although Claire is born to a French family, her black skin and tropical origins mark her as the Other, simultaneously lending her cultural identity to both France and Martinique. Lacascade highlights the fact that the French history of métissage is inescapable and she situates the beginning of her novel within the context of the colonial family romance. She also makes reference to the objectification of la mulâtresse in French culture, a phenomenon that was very à la mode in Paris during the 1920s, where “‘la créole des romans [. . .] séduit tous les hommes et désarme les femmes’ [the creole woman of novels [. . .] seduces all the men and disarms the women”].3



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The métisse, or mixed race woman, distorts and disrupts the European family unit in the Caribbean. She is a licentious presence who is the object of the male plantocrats as well as the envy of their wives. Although the métisse is depicted as meek and powerless, her mere existence challenges French cultural hegemony. Lacascade’s choice to display the stereotypical mulâtresse is a cautionary measure more than anything, refusing to allow Claire to fall into the same cultural traps as her mother Aurore. Instead of allowing Claire to tumble into obscurity like Aurore, Lacascade constructs Claire as a strong female character who is engaged in global politics. Claire fearlessly shows off her erudition during dinner conversations about global events, which help to place the novel in its historical context. During a few conversations, the Hucquart family discusses the notion of anti-Semitism in Europe as well as the Dreyfuss Affair. Lacascade displays the discussion of anti-Semitism to interrogate forms of racism and cultural hegemony in France. She essentially preempts what Aimé Césaire would later articulate in Discours sur le colonialisme, “christianisme = civilisation; paganisme = sauvagerie” [Christianity = civilization; paganism = savagery].4 It is also worth mentioning that Césaire wrote these words in 1955 after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and well after the Second World War. Therefore, Lacascade’s questioning of anti-Semitic discourse as racism predates the theories of some of the most esteemed Caribbean thinkers. Lacascade equates Judaism with blackness when Madame Pol asks Claire to give her opinion on the treatment of Jews during the early twentieth century: “Comment vous répondre? Papa a traversé le monde, combattant les préjugés; et pourrais-je mépriser une autre race opprimée, moi je suis nègre” [How shall I respond to you? Father trotted the globe combating prejudices; and could I despise another oppressed race, I am a Negro”].5 Claire understands that anti-Semitism correlates with the racism she has experienced due to métissage. She contests that because both groups are oppressed, that they share a common plight in the white, Christian, masculine discourse in France. Claire’s statement also creates a sense of solidarity with Jews and other subaltern groups that reject the hierarchization of the world based on race, class, and gender. Thus, we see Claire as a visionary Caribbean character, “a woman with a mind, intellect, and political savvy ready to comment on the sociocultural inadequacies of her time.”6 Without hesitation Claire refuses to accept Mme Pol Hucquart’s prejudices, or, for that matter, the rest of her family’s views on religion and white Eurocentrism. During a conversation about Christmas, Claire refuses to be duped by Mme Pol’s facetiousness: Oh! Tante d’Europe, tante blanche, tante trop blanche! Croyez-vous posséder le monopole de la Nativité? Jésus n’est pas un blanc à l’esprit étroitement mesquin! Il vint aussi pour nos zones torrides, celles où le puissant soleil,

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en décembre, chauffe à la fois les airs, l’eau du bain pour les petits enfants, et l’écorce odorante dont les sauvages se font un briquet. [Oh! Aunt from Europe, white aunt, white-white aunt! Do you believe you possess the monopoly on the Nativity? Jesus isn’t a strictly petty-minded white person! He came also for our torrid zones, those where, in December, the powerful sun warms at the same time the air, the bath water for the little children, and the scented bark that the savages use to make themselves a fire.]7

Claire is quick to note, to her “tante trop blanche,” that her aunt has overlooked an entire region of the world that also celebrates Christmas as a result of European colonialism. Lacascade appropriates a racial discourse in order to deconstruct Mme Pol’s evocation of Christianity. Claire also points out to her aunt that Jesus was likely not as white as she would like to believe, alluding to the notion that whiteness is associated with civilization and Christianity. Claire’s anticolonial counterpoint falls on deaf ears as Mme Pol tries to demystify what Aimé Césaire termed, “l’idée du nègre barbare” [the idea of the black barbarian], an idea that continued to justify the colonization of the Caribbean at the time.8 Although Claire is able to openly reject her family’s prejudices about the Caribbean, she cannot escape their “[. . .] leurs gestes [qui] créaient une atmosphere d’exotisme dans ce salon bourgeois” [nonchalant gestures [that] created an exotic atmosphere in [their] bourgeois salon] that renders her the racial Other.9 Once the First World War starts, the novel unfolds in a series of conversations in the Hucquart home until the narrative is interrupted by the amorous correspondence between Claire and her second cousin, Jacques Denzel. The epistolary form serves to create a chronology of the war, postmarking the month and day. Enthralled by the war effort, Lacascade thrusts the reader into a French nationalist discourse: La guerre! les soldats rouges et bleus, l’odeur de la poudre, les sous-officiers, ses amis, défilant comme au 14 juillet; les charges de cavalerie. . . La guerre! la grande leçon de désintéressement et de sacrifices, les souffrances des marsouins altérés, la douleur des femmes qui hurlent sous leurs voiles de coton bleu. [The war! The red and blue soldiers, the odor of gunpowder, the petty officers, the friends, parading like on the 14th of July, the charges of the cavalry. . . The war! The great lesson of selflessness and of sacrifice, the sufferings of the thirsty marines, the pain of women who scream beneath their veils of blue cotton.]10

Through a series of silhouettes Lacascade reveals the feverish nationalism leading France into the First World War. However, one cannot help but



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remark that these images are all representations of France in Europe, which ostensibly excludes the rest of the French Empire. They also proscribe a set of Eurocentric values, which one must subscribe to in order to be considered French. Not only does Claire lack enthusiasm for Bastille Day, she is further ostracized because she does not have a soldier to send off to war: “Claire-Solange prolongerait son séjour en France pour y assister; les femmes de tirailleurs partent avec leurs guerriers; mais elle n’a pas de guerrier!” [Claire-Solange would prolong her stay in France in order to give her support. The soldiers’ wives are leaving with their warriors, but she did not have a warrior!].11 Suddenly a nationalist discourse has also taken the form of a male-centered discourse, from which Claire is also left out because in order for her to be proud of her partial French identity she would need a soldier for social validation. On the other hand, because Claire does not have a soldier she cannot validate him or his power over her according to the prevailing social hierarchy. Feminist scholar Shoshana Felman argues in her work What Does a Woman Want: Reading and Sexual Difference that: The relationship between man and woman is one of sexual hierarchization, in which the man is the master, where as the woman is reduced to the state of a mere slave, at once man’s pleasure object and his narcissistic assurance of his own importance, value, and power.12

Despite the fact that Claire is alone, she is not the property of a French soldier or someone whose mere existence is used to justify male virility. Claire is merely caught up in the fever of the time and cannot help but feel excluded from the popular French social discourse because she does not conform to dominant French culture, race, or gender roles. However, it is under these social pressures that Claire later finds herself entangled in idealistic politics that envision a unified France despite its racial differences. In one of her first letters to Jacques on the frontlines, Claire writes, “Et moi, j’ai laissé partir mon cœur aussi, avec les troupes noires, avec les troupes blanches, avec vous, Jacques!” [And I, I let my heart leave too, with the black troops, with the white troops, with you, Jacques!].13 Under the current social conditions in France Claire ultimately throws herself at Jacques, but her vision of the war effort is inclusive of the African troops, instead of exclusionary. The African troops are, from Claire’s vantage point, equal to the white French soldiers. Unfortunately, like the African troops lost on the frontlines of the First World War, Claire is unable to continue under the current political atmosphere in France. In large part because Jacques never responds to her directly, choosing instead to correspond with Claire’s aunt Jeanne, Claire is left to lie in wait for her potential suitor. While Claire patiently awaits Jacques’

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response, we see her left to wither away both spiritually and physically. Her depression takes over and, like her mother Aurore, she feels increasingly more foreign in France. Thus, in the end we have a narrator who is no longer outspoken or engaged. Instead, we have an introverted mulâtresse who crumbles under the repressive French politics during the First World War, forever left to question her origins. The novel itself has also been lost and repressed in the literary history of the Caribbean, even amongst Caribbean intellectuals because there only remain a handful of original copies in the world. Though, as this analysis implies, the novel still has been marginally resuscitated within North American academia circulated by way of clandestine scans and photocopies. Unfortunately, we are left with a novel that, according to Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, “remains in the abstract, and Claire-Solange, âme africaine never becomes the erotic book it might have been.”14 Another Caribbean novel produced during the interwar period, Je suis Martiniquaise by Mayotte Capécia, born Lucette Céranus Combette, interrogates the everyday conditions of those living through the Second World War.15 The novel focuses on the life of the main character, Mayotte, who grows up during the interwar period to reach adulthood by the time the Second World War is well underway.16 Formally quite different from Lacascade’s novel, Je suis Martiniquaise is a bildungsroman. The protagonist’s upbringing is crucial for Capécia because the narrative follows a circular pattern, in which Mayotte returns to her village at the end of the novel to rejoin her father after the loss of her mother. Although Mayotte’s return to her native village after the falling out with a French naval officer, and Capécia’s novels in general, have been critiqued most famously by Frantz Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs, I wish to display other ways of theorizing about Capécia’s literary output. In order to work through the more recent feminist re-readings of Capécia’s two novels—Je suis Martiniquaise (1948) and La Négresse blanche (1950)— we need to recognize the extent to which Fanon wished to exile Capécia from the Caribbean canon and in doing so ironically preserved her memory. Until 2012, French versions of Capécia’s novels were out of print, as well as its 1996 English translations by Beatrice Stith Clark, although, as Keja L. Valens notes, the English versions are readily available through online marketplaces and still contributes to the revitalization of Capécia in literary criticism.17 In 1952, two years after the publication of La Négresse blanche, Fanon wrote in his psychoanalytical work Peau noire, masques blancs, currently in its second edition in the esteemed Points essais collection, that Capécia denied her blackness to the point that, “[Elle] aspire à se faire admettre dans le monde blanc,” [she] aspires to admit herself into the white world.18 Since the late 90s many feminist critics have attacked Fanon for proposing such a coming out into the white world as being steeped in misogyny, but as francophone literary scholar T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting reminds the more singularly



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focused feminist critics, the dynamic between the two Martinican compatriots cannot be limited solely to gender disparity. In her chapter titled “Fanon and Capécia,” Sharpley-Whiting amplifies the scope of critique of Fanon while rebuffing feminists for their apparent oversights: These feminist critics deny Capécia’s agency or at least circumscribe her autonomy more than Fanon ever could. In their logic, the only way a colonized black woman would ever acquiesce emotionally/sexually to her oppressor was under extreme economic duress; it becomes unfathomable that a black woman would desire, “love”, or “sleep with the enemy,” so to speak [. . .] within the folds of these analyses is a sheer lack of understanding of the terrorizing effects of colonialism and systematic racism and sexism on the psyche of the colonized.19

In her book chapter, Sharpley-Whiting commences what I label the Third Stage in the study of Mayotte Capécia where scholars are hesitant to accept Fanon’s psychoanalytic perspective and the subsequent feminist theories, which have dominated the scholarship on Capécia.20 For Sharpley-Whiting, these perspectives are limiting and represent nothing more than a case of “theoretical orthodoxy or as authorizing [a] new institutionalization.”21 In their critical re-edition of Je suis Martiniquaise and La Négresse blanche francophone cultural critics Myriam Cottias and Madeleine Dobie note that Sharpley-Whiting is not the only one critical of the Fanon revisionists, saying that: Une réaction similaire se lit chez le plus important biographe de Fanon, David Macey, qui prétend que ‘toute tentative de voir dans les critiques de Fanon un manichéisme racial ou la conséquence du sexe de l’auteur plutôt que des considérations objectives ne fait que reproduire les stéréotypes dont Fanon se voit accusé.’ [A similar reaction can be read in the work of the most important biographer of Fanon, the Englishman David Macey, who argues that “all attempts to notice in the critiques of Fanon a racial Manichaeism or the importance of the author’s sex rather than objective considerations only reproduces the stereotypes of which Fanon sees himself accused.]22

Therefore, in analyzing Je suis Martiniquaise it has become increasingly more important to analyze the aspects of the novel that previous critics have ignored, or have neglected due to their own particular theoretical agendas. Even after all of the recent scholarship on Capécia, she still escapes the purview of many Caribbean scholars and bibliographies; except for in notable works such as Maryse Condé’s Parole des femmes, due to the critical lambasting she received by Fanon.23 Above all, I wish to consider the historical

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context as a way of understanding the relationship between Martinique and France during the Second World War by focusing on the everyday life of the protagonist Mayotte in Je suis Martiniquaise.24 The novel begins with Mayotte’s life as a child living with her mother and father in a rural Martinican village, but this is relatively short-lived because Mayotte’s mother dies before she reaches adolescence. Her accelerated maturation causes her to take on many of the responsibilities her mother once occupied herself with, including housework and cooking. Mayotte’s sudden shift to a matronly figure is accompanied by her father’s reversion back into more normative masculine behavior after the death of his wife such as betting on cockfights and copious drinking. This juxtaposition of events weighs heavily on Mayotte’s psyche and she feels that the sudden change has started to transform her from a happy-go-lucky child to an adult. The sudden death of her mother also causes her father’s desires for a male child to resurface: J’avais trop à faire avec le ménage et avec l’école que mon père me forçait à suivre tant bien que mal; je grandissais et d’importants changements s’accomplissaient en moi. Je n’étais plus le garçon manqué que d’autrefois, je riais moins, je devenais sentimentale. [I had too much to do with the housework and with school, which my father forced me to continue with, for better or for worse. I grew up and big changes began to take place in my life. I was no longer the missing son from the old days, I laughed less, I became sentimental.]25

The sudden change in routine causes a (trans)formation in Mayotte’s life as she evolves from an amiable, tomboyish child to a sentimental woman free to reign over home and hearth. In the French, Capécia uses the term garçon to refer to Mayotte as a child which is quite curious considering the way Fanon writes off Capécia as being essentially duped into portraying a particular sort of assimilated femininity. Given that Mayotte is from a rural family and an only child, her father’s traditional values left him disappointed with the fact that Mayotte was born a girl. While Mayotte is quite stable in her embrace of her femininity as an adult, we can see that as a child she expresses an interstitial identity as a result of her father’s lack of attention. As a child Mayotte is perplexed by the joy her mother derives from plucking her eyelashes in front of the armoire, instead expressing more interest in cockfights. Despite the liberty of gender performance that childhood affords her, Mayotte undergoes a (trans)formation from a tomboy to a more matronly woman, a change that follows her when she moves from her rural village to Fort-de-France. Mayotte’s life changes completely after her move to Fort-de-France as her urban surroundings provide her with complete independence. In the city,



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Mayotte realizes that she can “[. . .] avoir un commerce à moi, être tout à fait indépendante, avec la perspective de gagner davantage. J’étais, je suis toujours ambitieuse” [have a business all to [herself], to be completely independent, with the idea of earning more and more [money]. I was, I am still ambitious].26 The urban center of Fort-de-France fosters Mayotte’s ambition and augments her sense of resolve, as she is no longer under the control, albeit as muted as it was, of her father. The city also gives Mayotte the chance to meet other women and men outside of her natal village, and, because the war effort was ramping up in the Western world, the chance to see firsthand the French soldiers stationed in Martinique. Due to Admiral Robert’s blockade in the Caribbean it was extremely difficult to gain access to the world outside the Caribbean, which transformed Martinique—and Guadeloupe for that matter—into veritable microcosms of Franco-Caribbean tension. Despite the obvious economic implications of such a blockade, there were also extreme consequences for gender relations. Although Mayotte had grown out of the hypermasculine space, which her father cultivated after the death of her mother, she suddenly found herself in a new, slightly more cosmopolitan, sexually liberating space. In her article “When One Drop isn’t Enough: War as a Crucible of Racial Identity in the Novels of Mayotte Capécia,” Cheryl Duffus aptly notes that “French servicemen had little to do during the blockade and often spent their time drinking, chasing women, and fighting.”27 The backdrop of the Second World War allows Capécia to show how Martinican men quickly began imitating the French rather than just affecting a French accent. They began to perform a French brand of masculinity handed down by Admiral Robert himself. Mayotte begins to notice that the Martinican men have adopted the fever for war and battle, only further entrapping them in a particular gender and cultural performance, in turn, falling into the same problematic relationship with the French war efforts as the tirailleurs sénégalais [West African troops] during the First World War in Claire-Solange, âme africaine. Mayotte remarks that Martinican men “ran after women” like the idle French soldiers, giving them the “false promise that Martinicans could be ‘authentic’ French people.”28 The blockade not only produced idle French soldiers, but also, to borrow Duffus’ term, served as the crucible for a new brand of Martinican masculinity of which Mayotte is but an observer. As a person conscious of her sexual identity, Mayotte once again profits from her metropolitan surroundings by confidently entering a relationship with a French officer named André. Eager to maintain her independence, Mayotte only agrees to start seeing André because he treats her like a human being, rather than an object of desire like many other Martinican women were at the time. However, one day, André presents her with a golden ring, which she promptly refuses:

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“Tu me t’aites comme une fille ! Murmurai-je. Tu c’ois que je me suis donnée ou’ de l’a’gent. . . —Petite Mayotte, dit-il, tu me fais de la peine. Non pas de refuser cette bague, mais de faire un pareil calcul. Tu m’as donné ton amour, comme je t’ai donné le mien.” [You’re treating me like a girl! I murmured. You believe that I have given you myself for money. . . Little Mayotte, he said, you’re causing me pain. Not by refusing this ring, but by coming to such a conclusion. You gave me your love, as I have given you mine.]29

Mayotte chooses not to accept the ring because she realizes its potential to represent more than a fleeting expression of love. Since her childhood, Mayotte noticed the disparity between men and women, men regarding them as objects of affection rather than as individuals. Mayotte’s mother is perhaps the best example of the gender hierarchy, as she was caught between the exotic desire of the priest that oversaw Mayotte’s school and her husband. Therefore, the rejection of André’s ring allows Mayotte to maintain her social and financial independence. In her post-feminist analysis, SharpleyWhiting argues that Mayotte “is self-sufficient [. . .] She expressly refuses to use André, the French officer in Je suis Martiniquaise for financial mobility, safety, or anything else besides his presence.”30 Later on, Mayotte gets pregnant by André and gives birth to a son whom she names François, which is eerily close to Français, or French, playing on an almost cliché manifestation of his mixed-race heritage. Shortly after François’ birth, André receives an order to depart for Guadeloupe in order to rejoin his regiment, leaving his son and Mayotte in Martinique. However, Mayotte is determined to follow André only to realize that he is nowhere to be found in Guadeloupe. André sends Mayotte a series of letters, and in the last one he encloses a check in order to provide for Mayotte and François in his absence. Utterly offended by this emotionally bankrupt gesture, Mayotte tears up the check and leaves Guadeloupe in order to go back to her natal village to take care of her ailing father. While within a Caribbean context returning to one’s natal land is a sort of rite of passage, Mayotte’s return allows her to reconstitute her cultural identity after the episode with André and to regain a more intimate sense of her Martinicanness. Chimegsaikhan Banzar argues in her article on Caribbean female identity that, “female identity constructs itself through the history and the experience of generations [. . .] the search of the feminine Self is inseparably linked to the reconstitution of the past, of ethno-cultural origins, of familial and communitarian histories.”31 In Carbet, Mayotte can resume her previous role as the master of the household: “Je dus bientôt m’occuper de tout le ménage et des soins que réclamait la santé de plus en plus mauvaise de mon Père [. . .] Je le sentais vivement depuis mon retour à Carbet” [I soon



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had to take care of all the housework and the care of my father, which restored my father’s worsening health].32 Caribbean literary scholar Jennifer Sparrow discusses Mayotte’s narrative trajectory in terms of “flight-as-failure” wherein the canonical departure and return of a protagonist is traditionally interpreted as deleterious rather than ameliorative. However, Sparrow agrees that Mayotte’s narrative is nuanced and that previous readings of Je suis Martiniquaise that she and Sharpley-Whiting critique, “fail to take into account the ways in which the intersections of racial and gender oppression have historically conspired to silence the female subject.”33 Over the course of the novel it is clear that Mayotte is situated at the very intersection between race, gender, and cultural identity, therefore making her choice to return to her natal village of Carbet a deliberate decision that takes into account her own personal identity. Dominican writer Ana-Maurine Lara explains that places, physical or imaginary, can liberate individuals from prescripted social, gendered, and sexual constraints. In discussing her own personal identity as an Afro-Caribbean lesbian writer, Lara explains the way her sexual identity “freed me to invent myself and create myself and my own expectations for my own life—not just in terms of sexuality but also gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality.”34 For Mayotte, the physical space of Carbet represents not only a place where she can (re)invent herself, but also a place that embodies a pure sense of Martinicanness that she cannot find elsewhere. Returning from Fort-de-France and a metropolitan lifestyle, Mayotte takes rural Martinican values and uses them to reconstruct her racial, cultural, and gender identity. The first half of the twentieth century was a chaotic epoch for not only the Western world, Suzanne Lacascade and Mayotte Capécia forge female protagonists who struggle with racial, gender, and sexual prejudices in order to critique established social order, patriarchal society, and the hegemonic cultural mores of France. These Martinican women writers imagine and create female protagonists who are capable of exposing the constraints and contradictions posed by masculinist societies, whether French or Martinican, in order to live differently than the women who preceded them. However, the two world wars of the twentieth century reroute, blockade, and retard the development of coherent cultural, gender, and sexual identities. ClaireSolange enters into a dream-like state after achieving a sense of self-actualization and can never truly fashion a livable identity, whereas Mayotte, despite all of the misdirected criticism towards the novel, reconstructs her Martinican sense of self through the return to her natal village of Carbet. Amidst discourses of patriotism and racial orthodoxy in both novels, as a result of the two world wars, these women find solace in the everyday activities of their lives, which allows them to segment themselves from denigrating forces of power. However, in the end, Claire-Solange and Mayotte depart on mental and physical journeys with dreams of Africa on one hand and the tumult of postwar France on the other.

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Notes 1. Paquita Valdes in La Fille aux yeux d’or by Honoré de Balzac is a near perfect example of the mulâtresse in canonical European fiction. Taken from Havana at a young age and forced into sexual servitude by her mother, Paquita needs to attach herself to Henri de Marsay in order to gain subjecthood and by doing so falls victim to her promiscuous nature. Soon after liberating herself from her mother, she commits suicide, leaving Marsay to ponder only what could have become of this mixed race beauty. 2. Suzanne Lacascade, Claire-Solange, âme africaine (Paris: Eugène Figuière, 1924), 17. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. For emphasis I use the feminine form of mulatto rather than using a more verbose formulation such as the phrase “mulatto woman.” 3. Ibid., 15. 4. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955), 10. 5. Lacascade, Claire-Solange, âme africaine, 36. 6. Valérie K Orlando, Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 41. 7. Lacascade, Claire-Solange, âme africaine, 63. 8. Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, 37. 9. Lacascade, Claire-Solange, âme africaine, 73. 10. Ibid., 151. 11. Ibid., 152. 12. Shoshana Felman, What Does A Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 45. 13. Lacascade, Claire-Solange, âme africaine, 168. 14. Maryse Condé, “The Stealers of Fire: The French-Speaking Writers of the Caribbean and Their Strategies of Liberation,” Journal of Black Studies 35.2 (2004), 160. 15. Christiane P. Makward, Mayotte Capécia, ou l’aliénation selon Fanon (Paris: Karthala, 1999). While Makward’s groundbreaking study of Mayotte Capécia revealed that Mayotte Capécia was Lucette Céranus Combette’s nom de plume, Beatrice Stith Clark arrived at the same conclusion, which she published in the foreword to her 1997 translation of the Capécia’s novels. For a detailed discussion of her itinerary and discoveries during her spring 1995 research trip, see her “Foreword: An Update on the Author,” I Am A Martinican Woman/The White Negress: Two Novelettes of the 1940’s by Mayotte Capécia, trans. Beatrice Stith Clark (Pueblo, Colorado: Passeggiata Press, 1997), vii–x. 16. There has long been speculation about the author’s reasoning behind naming her main character Mayotte and whether the novel is autobiographical because both the protagonist and the author share the same name and ostensibly the same origins. In order to avoid confounding the two, I refer to the author by Capécia and the protagonist by Mayotte. For a similar critical treatment of the names of the protagonist and the writer, see the footnote in Relire Mayotte Capécia: Une femme des Antilles



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dans l’espace colonial français. Eds Myriam Cottias and Madeleine Dobie (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), 15. 17. Keja L. Valens, “Lost Idyll: Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise,” in Desire Between Women in Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 46. Even though Capécia’s work is much more available than Lacascade’s work, it receives little attention in the popular realm outside of academia. 18. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 48. 19. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Fanon and Capécia,” in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, edited by Anthony C. Alessandrini (New York: Routledge, 1999), 65–66. 20. The initial stage of criticism being the work of Fanon and the second is the revisionist feminist perspective. As a result of these various contributions, as well as that of Sharpley-Whiting, Capécia’s two novels are once again in print circulation in French after having been out of print since the late 1950s. See Cottias and Dobie Relire Mayotte Capécia: Une femme des Antillies dans l’espace colonial français. Prior to this publication the two novels were only readily available in English as Caribbeanist scholar Keja L. Valens notes in: “Lost Idyll: Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise.” 21. Felman, What Does A Woman Want?, 8. 22. Myriam Cottias and Madeleine Dobie, “Introduction,” Relire Mayotte Capécia, 14. 23. This phenomenon is largely due to the relative unavailability of her two novels, but there have been various book chapters dedicated to Je suis Martiniquaise, such as: Keja L. Valens, “Lost Idyll: Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise,” and Omise’eke Tinsley, “At the River of Washerwomen: Work Water, and Sexual Fluidity in Mayotte Capécia’s I am a Martinican Woman,” in Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 24. A colonial relationship that became even more complex after Martinique was subsumed into Hexagonal France in 1946 as a département d’outre mer [overseas department] two years prior to the first publication of the novel. 25. Mayotte Capécia, Je suis Martiniquaise (Paris: Corrêa, 1948), 86–87. 26. Ibid., 120. 27. Cheryl Duffus, “When One Drop Isn’t Enough: War as a Crucible of Racial Identity in the Novels of Mayotte Capécia,” Callaloo 28.4 (2005), 1093. 28. Ibid., 1094. 29. Capécia, Je suis Martiniquaise, 145. 30. Sharpley-Whiting, “Fanon and Capécia,” 65. Emphasis in the original. 31. Chimegsaikhan Banzar, “Entre le passé, le présent, et le futur: Quête de l’identité féminine dans la littérature de la Guadeloupe,” in Women in the Middle: Selected Essays from Women in French International Conference 2008, edited by Perry Gethner and Marijn S Kaplan (Denton, TX: Women in French Studies, 2009), 147. 32. Capécia, Je suis Martiniquaise, 191. 33. Jennifer Sparrow, “Capécia, Condé, and the Antillian Woman’s Identity Quest,” MaComère 1.1 (1998), 179. 34. Ana Lara, “Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects,” in The AfroLatin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, ed. Miriam JiménezRomán and Juan Flores (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 301.

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Bibliography Balzac, Honoré de. Histoire des treize: Ferragus. La duchesse de Langeais. La fille aux yeux d’or. Paris: Louis Conard, 1913. Banzar, Chimegsaikhan. “Entre le passé, le présent, et le futur : Quête de l’identité féminine dans la littérature de la Guadeloupe.” In Women in the Middle: Selected Essays from Women in French International Conference 2008, edited by Perry Gethner and Marijn S Kaplan. Denton, TX: Women in French Studies, 2009. Capécia, Mayotte. Je suis Martiniquaise. Paris: Corrêa, 1948. ———. La Négresse blanche. Paris: Corrêa, 1950. Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955. Césaire, Suzanne. Le grand camouflage: écrits de dissidence. Paris: Seuil, 2009. Clark, Beatrice Stith. “Foreword: An Update on the Author.” I Am A Martinican Woman/The White Negress: Two Novelettes of the 1940’s by Mayotte Capécia. Trans. Beatrice Stith Clark. Pueblo, Colorado: Passeggiatta Press, 1997. vii–xii. Condé, Maryse. “The Stealers of Fire: The French-Speaking Writers of the Caribbean and Their Strategies of Liberation.” Journal of Black Studies 35.2 (2004): 154–164. Cottias, Myriam and Madeleine Dobie, eds. Relire Mayotte Capécia: Une femme des Antillies dans l’espace colonial français. Paris: Armand Colin, 2012. Duffus, Cheryl. “When One Drop isn’t Enough: War as a Crucible of Racial Identity in the Novels of Mayotte Capécia.” Callaloo 28.4 (2005): 1091–1102. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952. Felman, Shoshana. What Does A Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Lacascade, Suzanne. Claire-Solange, âme africaine. Paris: Eugène Figuière, 1924. Lara, Ana. “Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects.” In The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States. Ed. Miriam Jiménez-Román and Juan Flores. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 298–313. Makward, Christiane P. Mayotte Capécia, ou l’aliénation selon Fanon. Paris: Karthala, 1999. Maran, René. Batouala: Véritable roman nègre. Paris: Albin Michel, 1921. Nardal, Paulette. Beyond Negritude: Essays from Women in the City. Trans. Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Orlando, Valérie K. Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, “Fanon and Capécia.” In Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini. New York: Routledge, 1999. 59–76. ———. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. ———. “On Race, Rights, and Women,” introduction to Beyond Negritude, by Paulette Nardal. Ed. T.D. Sharpley-Whiting. New York: SUNY UP, 2009. 1–17. Sparrow, Jennifer. “Capécia, Condé, and the Antillian Woman’s Identity Quest.” MaComère 1.1 (1998): 179–187. Tinsley, Omise’eke. “At the River of Washerwomen: Work Water, and Sexual Fluidity in Mayotte Capécia’s I am a Martinican Woman.” In Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism



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Between Women in Caribbean Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 136–168. Valens, Keja L. “Lost Idyll: Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise.” In Desire Between Women in Caribbean Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 45–64.

Chapter 24

Inscriptions of Nature from Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Martinique Annie Rehill

Disruptions of an edenic trope in postcolonial Caribbean literature have often been noted, for example, as one of four main themes in Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley’s Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005).1 Nature’s destructive capacities—hurricanes, earthquakes, hammering rain—are indeed not only acknowledged but often highlighted in regional works, including Joseph Zobel’s La Rue cases-nègres, in which plantation workers toil under a burning sun; and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique, in which several species of mysterious ants explore a dead body. Another example is Dany Laferrière’s stories and novels, which clearly subvert the idea of the Caribbean as the paradise it is often depicted to be in popular media. Within this cultural and ecological context, another nature-related aspect is useful from an ecocritical perspective: Human life is frequently portrayed in a less-anthropocentric way than in its European counterpart. Antillean authors show evidence of a deeper understanding that humans are only one of the life forms that earth supports. Three novels analyzed in this chapter—La Rue cases-nègres, Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove—illustrate a predisposition to perceive nature in a way that appears closer to Amerindian and African ideas than to those originating from European culture, insofar as the ability to live with nature, not only exploit it.2 The novels analyzed in this chapter reveal an exigent awareness of the extent to which humans depend on the land for their survival. Such connections with the place that a culture claims are also evident in other literatures; as the young US sought ways of differentiating itself from Europe and creating its own cultural identity, Thoreau and Emerson wrote about nature in ways that combined Christian concepts with their sensitivity to nature. 321

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Their observations, experiences, and essays gave birth to a new genre that would be specifically associated with the US: nature writing, previously been seen mainly as poetry. Today, lyrical expressions inspired by the nonhuman biological domain continue in wide-ranging creative works, from those by Edward Abbey to Annie Dillard, Diane Ackerman, and many others beyond US borders. Criticism also has gone increasingly global, as well as interdisciplinary, appropriately for a field that involves the consideration of so many ecological and biological factors. Anjali Prabhu, for example, takes the issue with the current tendency to not factor in people’s racial backgrounds. In Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects, she challenges contemporary concepts of hybridity, which she describes as an idea that, “in its most politically articulated guises . . . is believed to reveal, or even provide, a politics of liberation for the subaltern constituencies in whose name postcolonial studies as a discipline emerged.”3 But this is far from this being the case, she says, and downplaying racial differences in postcolonial studies leads to less specificity. Prabhu’s is an important reminder about historical accuracy and precision, one that Edward Said and Michel Foucault would applaud. In the Caribbean, a new genetic hybridity developed from the mingling of indigenous inhabitants with Europeans, Africans, Asians, and others who converged in the region. Combined with the colonial and geographical circumstances in which these people came together, the blend gave rise to a new culture, which in literature can be identified in part by an intimate connection with nature that many writers convey. In Mille plateaux, where Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop philosophical concepts that became fundamental to postcolonial studies, the notion of hybridity is the basis for the development of multiple and diverse life forms, physically as well as psychologically. The authors compare the process to a sterile “sexual union” that continually recommences, each time “gaining more ground” and in this way yielding fruit despite its sterility.4 Despite its biological inaccuracy, or at least incompleteness, this metaphor is helpful in a consideration of the culture and literature of the Caribbean, where hybridity created something new.5 Edouard Glissant develops this notion in Tout-monde, a surreal novel that in many ways reads like a dramatized version of Mille plateaux. Glissant, Deleuze, and Guattari share a rhizomatic (versus arboreal) model for how phenomena spread and develop: Glissant’s thought made a decisive and explicit link with that of Deleuze and Guattari when, in his Poétique de la Relation, Glissant drew a line from his own preexisting concept of “relation” to the concept of the “rhizome”: “The notion of the rhizome is in principle that of what I call a poetics of Relation, according to which all identity extends outward in a relation to the Other.”6



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In Tout-monde Glissant illustrates this vision through a characterization of the Caribbean population as the “salt of the world’s diversity,” articulating an idea about hybridity that encompasses culture as well as genetics and that is immanent in the postcolonial francophone world.7 Prabhu notes that some critics of Frantz Fanon continue to object that in his writing, the psychiatrist/philosopher does not devote sufficient attention to the concept of hybridity, but that he emphasizes instead a universalism that is inadequate, they believe, as a model of thought. But Prabhu insists that the idea of totality is essential in a notion of agency, and that it is missing in the version of hybridity commonly now discussed in postcolonial studies.8 Hybridity can also be seen as playing a metaphorical role in interactions of humans with nature—especially, by necessity, those of runaway Caribbean slaves, les marrons. Their ability to learn the secrets of a new wild environment and, over time, to connect with it and survive in and from it is reflected in many francophone Caribbean works. By comparison with European writers, the authors studied here show a notable awareness of humanity as one part of the whole of nature. The novels evince a profound grasp of the link between the health of human communities and that of the wider world. Gouverneurs de la rosée: Ecology versus Politics Jacques Roumain presents in Gouverneurs de la rosée key elements of the history of Haiti, notably corruption and environmental devastation. Roumain presents the village of Fonds Rouge, formed by descendants of slavery who, even after their liberation, remain oppressed by those in power. Police officer Hilarion is emblematic of the widespread corruption. He plots to imprison Manuel, the protagonist, so that the water discovered by the latter never reaches the population. “The inhabitants would be left to dry up as they waited, and when they had lost all courage and hope, he, Hilarion, would grab their gardens and become the owner of some good, well-irrigated acreage. It was annoying that he would have to share with the lieutenant and the justice of the peace.”9 Earlier, the people of Fonds Rouge worked in coumbites, groups of cooperative farming labor, and it is this arrangement that Manuel, through the sacrifice of his own life (like Jesus Christ, a fascinating angle that is too far beyond the scope of this study), will provide for them once again.10 Manuel’s father, Bienaimé, recalls those days, when he worked as a supervisor: “We entered the grasses of Guinea! (Feet bare in the dew, the pale sky, the cries of guinea fowl in the distance) . . . ”11 And it is clear that the workers also felt a deep connection with the outdoors, as they toiled in the fields while Simidor Antoine’s drumbeats evoked

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their communal African origins: “A rhythmic circulation took hold between the beating heart of the drum and the men’s movements: The rhythm was like a powerful flow that penetrated deep into their arteries and nourished their muscles with renewed vigor.”12 A few paragraphs later, this biological evocation is echoed in the life of a tree: “Its roots plunge into the rich fermentation of the earth, sucking up elementary juices, fortifying fluids . . . The obscure rising of sap makes it moan in the hot afternoons. It is a living being.”13 Through his poetic focus on biological processes, Roumain shapes a link between humans and the life forms on which they depend, and that they also have the capacity to revitalize and save. But in the environs of Fonds Rouge, Bienaimé deplores the deforestation now surrounding the village. The trees remained abundant while his father lived, but they were burned to make gardens and charcoal, notorious destroyer of woods and forests. Manuel comes home after an absence of fifteen years in Cuba, where he worked in the sugarcane fields. Upon his arrival in the village of his birth, he asks the driver who gives him a lift to stop well before his parents’ house. It is the land that Manuel wants to see first, to the surprise of the driver. “Not one hut in sight . . . only a plain of thorn acacias, gum trees, and thickets dotted with cactus.”14 Immediately Manuel shows an understanding of ecology far more advanced than that of his compatriots. In explaining what happened when the people clear-cut the mountains, he says: “The earth is all naked with no protection. It is the roots that make friends with the earth and hold it in place: it is the mango, oak, and mahogany that provide the earth with the rain waters to assuage its great thirst, by their shade against the midday heat . . . Otherwise the rain flays the earth and the sun scalds it: only rocks remain.”15 Roumain wrote with authority, as a scientist specializing in ethnology and archeology who thoroughly knew the ecosystem of his country. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert makes the point that as a body of work, Haitian literature “has bemoaned the environmental calamity that has befallen its people . . . has counseled, above all, political action against exploitative governments . . . focusing on the state’s inaction as evidence of the slow violence of environmental neglect.”16 Roumain celebrates local actions by the people to improve their existences and that of their environment. Having understood that the environmental disaster in his village was the result of human activity, Manuel swears to correct the situation. He will locate water and bring it to the people so they can irrigate and work again in coumbite. When Manuel finally discovers the precious water, he brings Annaïse, who has become his ally and love interest, to the hidden place. Here they make love and conceive a new life in a scene that mingles fluids of the earth and the body: “She was stretched on the ground, and the water’s deep murmur carried in her a voice that was the tumult of her blood.”17 Echoing the beginning of the novel when the workers’ movements and biology are



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juxtaposed with those of sap rising in trees, this lovemaking scene blends the movement of water with the circulation of blood. The life force runs through both the people and the stream, all part of the same phenomenon. But the problem of corruption is complicated by hatred arising from a rift that became entrenched after an old injustice and dispute. Some of the inhabitants (represented by the character Gervilen) are poisoned by resentment even after Manuel and Annaïse arrange a reconciliation that will benefit everyone. Gervilen does not work for the common good but only his own. His actions mirror those that Hilarion plans against Manuel, but it is Gervilen who eventually destroys Manuel. By the time Manuel is murdered, he has already succeeded in renewing communal harmony and leaves his compatriots in charge of the health of their environment. This time they will take care of the earth, behaving as responsibly toward it as they do toward their own small gardens, because they finally understand, through the efforts of Manuel and the knowledge that he came to share, that their destiny is tied directly to that of the land where they live. The community has effectively formed a concrete plan to implement Carolyn Merchant’s blueprint in Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World: “The management of natural resources depends on surveying the status of existing resources, and efficiently planning their systematic use and replenishment for the long-term good of those who use them.”18 As a Communist and scientist, Roumain understood that postcolonial Haiti retained the economic mentality it had inherited from its former masters: an acquisitive approach that diminished natural resources without replenishing them. This was a long-held, entrenched view. In the eighteenth century, explains Merchant, the “dominant Western Worldview . . . assumed that . . . because global resources were so abundant . . . they would always be able to find solutions that would continue humanity’s forward progress.”19 The French, after exploiting Haiti, were forced out but left in their wake no system that could benefit the inhabitants of the region. Only a scheme of domination was in place, and rivalries continued between leaders and between abandoned plantations. As the new country struggled, two formidable enemies opposed its development: France and the US.20 Haiti was thus isolated, at least from these two influential countries, and the persistent fallout is well known. In 1943, Roumain’s fictional inhabitants of Fonds Rouge, having only their background of working the land and with no access to education, were unaware of the environmental destruction they caused. Manuel learned to replenish and restock not in Haiti but in Cuba (where the US was also involved, but where socialism’s greater persistence eventually won) and brought the knowledge home. Gouverneurs de la rosée exemplifies both corrupt politics and a connection with nature that the people must be taught to fully comprehend. Historically, this failed to happen on a widespread scale,

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as Paravisini-Gebert remarks: “The Haitian novel has been a chronicle of the nation’s unimaginable ecological catastrophe.”21 Still, Roumain points to a better future. La Rue cases-nègres: Survival in Nature In Joseph Zobel’s novel La Rue cases-nègres, the biological connection between earth and human life takes a more agricultural form. In the context of postcolonial 1930s Martinique, Zobel depicts M’man Tine, a formidable grandmother who works in the cane fields until she dies from overwork. Like the others she earns just enough to live, but she manages nevertheless to raise her family out of poverty. She accomplishes this by sacrificing her own life, but the reader understands that M’man Tine decided long ago to pay this price. She sends her daughter to the city to work as a maid (a step up socioeconomically), while she keeps her young grandson, narrator José Hassam, with her in the country and focuses on his education, sending him to local and then more distant schools. The education he receives changes permanently his life and that of his mother (as it would that of his grandmother, had she survived). Respites are few for M’man Tine: her pipe, which she smokes before dinner, and Sundays. Mondays she does the laundry, with the other women. This means a trip to the river that provides water and rocks, while the sky gives the sunshine in which to dry and bleach clothing. José accompanies her. “I passed the time looking for guavas,” he recalls, or he might look for “small shrimp in the river current.”22 This shrimp-fishing by hand offers the author one of many opportunities to portray very personal interactions with the natural world in and from which this population survives. At noon, little yellow butterflies flitted over a vast stretch of laundry gleaming white in the sunshine. After having lunch on the grass, I went to a place where the river was full and slow, forming a curve like that in a road, and I entertained myself by throwing pebbles that fell into the water with a soft noise, as if it were raining big drops of music.23

After this pastoral symphony, M’man Tine bathes José in the river, scrubbing him as if he were just another soiled garment. But she also rewards him. “She plunged her hands into the water, groped around a few stones, and surprised beautiful crayfish that I roasted myself in the evening, in the embers.”24 Thus, in the context of an extremely hard life, Zobel also shows a close connection between his characters and elements of nature. At all levels—M’man Tine’s work, the moments of recreation and, later, the child’s persistence at



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school—people live in constant contact with the outside world. Fanon notes in Les Damnés de la terre: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first of all land: land that will ensure bread, and, of course, dignity.”25 In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley note that Fanon identifies the earth as “a primary site of postcolonial recovery, sustainability, and dignity.”26 But this is of course only possible if the people have learned what they can eat and how to find shelter, a process that Zobel’s novel illustrates. To create shelter when the rain is particularly brutal, M’man Tine protects her grandson with her own body in the fields. For food, aside from the shrimp she teaches him to catch, José also learns by himself. At school, while escaping the tyranny of Mme Léonce, who pretends to care for him at noon but actually asks for so many “little services” that he becomes her servant, José finally avoids her altogether and finds his lunch outside. He raids the gardens of Petit-Bourg—“a guava tree loaded with fruit, a cherry tree all red. In the end I located all the fruit trees in the area,” and “if they were near huts, I watched for opportunities and I stole.”27 Constantly on the lookout in case someone should notice him and wonder about his activities, in the end José resorts to munching on sugarcane stalks in the fields near the village, a temporary sweet assuagement of his hunger. “Then nothing bothered me anymore: no more fear of Mme Léonce . . . each day I found my lunch with an accommodating ease.”28 He survives from agricultural fruits, but it is nonetheless nature that feeds José clandestinely. Had he lived before 1848, when slavery was abolished in Martinique, and if he had marooned, the next step would have been to live in the woods and learn the secrets of the wilderness and its medicinal plants. One of his friends (Jojo, who eventually becomes a landscape worker) reaches the decision to do just this, to escape from a cruel father. This suggestion of running away, a possibility that continuously oscillates in the world painted by Zobel, relates to the concept of “becoming animal” explored by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure and then in Mille Plateaux. For the philosophers, this notion represents a fundamental part of psychology and physiology: “It is as if, independently of the development that brings them to adulthood, there were in children space for other becomings . . . . The reality of a becoming-animal, without actually becoming an animal.”29 However, among populations whose relatively recent history includes the reality of slavery, escape might mean the actual need to live like an animal. Thus, in the context of Caribbean literature, the becoming-animal trope must be applied to a situation that could hardly be more concrete. When M’man Tine falls ill, the village women bring medicinal “plants of all kinds . . . and sometimes they had rather vigorous discussions about which

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herbal tea or decoction to make.”30 Their remedies heal her the first time but not the second, when she must be taken to the hospital. M’man Tine “moaned and cried,” convinced, as is José, that this means death.31 (But she survives again and returns home.) The aging woman trusts only healing mixtures that have been collected from nature. Like Amerindians and other indigenous peoples who encountered European populations and mores, and especially because of her heritage of slavery with its systematic abuses, M’man Tine does not trust a system outside of the one she knows in her region, where the people have learned about the plants and animals of their environment. Pascale De Sousa offers an eloquent example of the level of ecological adaptation that was necessary: Settlement patterns in most of the Lesser Antilles followed the rise and fall of a plantation economy dependent upon volcanoes for its rich soil and natural irrigation. In both Guadeloupe and Martinique, this agricultural economy centered on the plains remained dominated by the béké from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century while the steep slopes of extinct volcanoes, locally known as mornes, or active ones were ill-suited to the development of a full-fledged plantation economy and emerged instead in local lore as a stronghold of resistance providing food and shelter to all manners of social outcasts, including fugitive slaves.32

Thus, in Martinique it was not only the composition of the earth but also its shape that made possible the escape in which José’s predecessors sometimes succeeded. The active role of nature consists, then, of more than provides food and shelter; it can also provide physical harbors in the inexorable path toward freedom. Traversée de la mangrove: Transcending the rhizome In Maryse Condé’s novel Traversée de la mangrove nature participates in human affairs and their fate almost as actively as one of the characters. A ravine just outside the village of Rivière au Sel, Guadeloupe, harbors pariahs such as Xantippe, fugitives and victims such as Mira, and alleged criminals as Francis Sancher, the protagonist who wants to escape from his past sins. His faults are never specified; we learn only that Sancher worked as a kind of mercenary, thus the reader can justifiably imagine that he killed innocent people. Xantippe alludes to this at the end of the book: “A crime was committed here . . . a very long time ago. . . . Nobody has uncovered this secret, which is buried in oblivion. Not even he who runs around like a mad horse . . . .Each time I encounter him, the look from my eyes burns his and he lowers his head, for



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the crime is his.”33 In case the reader is not certain of whom Xantippe speaks, he adds: “But he can rest easy, impregnate his women, plant his sons, I will not do anything to him, the time for vengeance has passed.”34 In the village, Sancher is known to have lived with several women. His character serves as a metaphor representing the history of Guadeloupe itself. Like the colonizing enterprise of the past, Sancher seeks absolution. Yet he is also forced to live with the reality of the past: he is personally responsible for having ravaged Guadeloupe. He finds himself in an impossibly tangled, yet undeniably real personal situation, like the ecology of the region that is reflected in the novel’s title: the mangrove. In a country where two-fifths of the territory is covered by forests, vast mangrove swamps extend along the banks of the Rivière Salée. Traversée de la mangrove, crossing the mangrove, suggests symbolically as well as physically the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of finding a way through the web of rhizomes that is a mangrove. Condé expresses here an organic form of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic concept. The rhizosphere is not experienced in terms of beginnings and ends, but as an interconnected, entwined ecological phenomenon. Applying this notion to languages, the philosophers argue that “language trees are shaken by buddings and rhizomes. So that rhizome lines actually oscillate between the tree lines that segmentarize them . . . and the lines of flight or of rupture that carry them away.”35 This image also describes how human culture grows and spreads—unevenly. In the Caribbean, the historical and biological process has consisted of violent displacements followed by survival or death, along with continual movement toward new cultures. Glissant delves into this philosophical, psychological, and biological complexity in Tout-monde, artfully joining seemingly unrelated philosophical and narrative threads while recounting the experiences of individuals whose fates are intertwined. He moves the plot through historical time, linking characters not just to the Caribbean natural world but to that of the entire globe, eventually creating a hybridity that transcends genetic, cultural, and geographical mixtures. Glissant generates in the reader’s imagination an image of universal diversity in a fully present “now”: We are pouring out of these rivers, it is time to unclog, to join the Here with the There. Open the imaginary. . . . The procession of “Over Theres” has stirred up a storm of “Here.” The All-world shines with rotating “Heres.” Wherever I may happen to live, it will never again be in the over there, listen, from now on I struggle in the full Here.36

Condé expresses these concepts on a psychic level. Sancher himself provides the title of the novel because it is that of one he is struggling to write.

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But he has only the title, and he will never finish the book. As he explains to Vilma: “We do not cross the mangrove. We are impaled on mangrove roots. We are buried and we suffocate in the brackish mud.”37 This is what happens to Sancher. He knows he is guilty, with no possibility of the redemption that he nevertheless seeks. Condé uses a characteristic of her country’s natural world to portray a complicated reality about the lives of humans, including all their past and present horrible behavior: things are as they are; we cannot escape what is. Murder, colonialism, slavery, all this and more cannot be deleted. To tolerate the facts, to continue living, one must take another approach than trying to change what exists, which is as complicated and as real as the natural ecology of the mangrove. We cannot cross the mangrove, but we can find another way, another route—spiritual, intellectual, artistic, or simply practical, as those who were close to Sancher intend to do. In various ways, they express the intention to transcend physical reality, creating a personal navigation that can lead them to a new life, salvation, something new and good. This intention is human hope. As interpreted by Ruthmarie H. Mitsch, it does not even require a physical effort: “It may be that there is no need to cross the mangrove, for— just as it does for animal and plant life—the world of the mangrove can offer safe and thriving shelter to a diversity of human beings.”38 Sancher represents past violence, and his death paves the way for other possible avenues, as if Condé were using his corpse as a physical manifestation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of lines of flight. The reader does not learn whether the other characters will take measures to realize their dreams. What is clear is that they now have the opportunity. As Mitsch notes, evoking Deleuze and Guattari: “A clearer look at the world of the mangrove would focus on the rhizomatic, and thus focus attention on community . . . the citizens of Rivière au Sel have not yet learned the lessons offered in Nature, to branch out, like the mangrove. But the day is just dawning.”39 Surrounded by village women praying over Sancher’s body, Dinah listens to them and reaches her own conclusions: “I have proclaimed the dead . . . happier . . . is he who never existed, who has not seen the evil actions committed under the sun.” As for me, my decision is made. I will leave Loulou [her husband] and Rivière au Sel, and I will take my boys with me. I will seek the sun and the air and the light for however many years I have left to live. Where will I find them? I have no idea yet. What I do know is that I will look for them!40

By including the words of the prayer, Condé reminds readers of the Christian paradigm according to which humans must accept their depraved nature, do the best they can during this misery that is life while awaiting death, which



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brings the only possible happiness: eternal life in the magnificent presence of God. But Dinah, like others who have become close with the sinner Sancher, does not accept this oppressive mentality and resolve to look for something better. Such resolution is the essence of hope, and Sancher’s death provides the catalyst for it. Hope is also linked to the natural elements of the environment in which the characters live, as either an opposing force (the mangrove) or a shelter (the ravine). “The trees are our only friends,” Xantippe declares.41 He fled human company after the murder of his family and has lived since in the wilderness. He has named all the trees of the countryside, even the land itself. Xantippe has named Rivière au Sel, and “I know its entire history,” he says.42 The ravine hides the story, the bodies that were buried after the past crime. To name something is to identify it. Xantippe has classified the forms of nature where he lives, and he announces that he knows everything that happened here. But does he speak of the village, of Guadeloupe, or of both? Perhaps the phrase “I know all its history” refers to that of the country, a tragedy for which Xantippe holds Sancher (as a metaphor) responsible, but for which he will no longer seek revenge. When the village men arrive at the scene of the presumed murder of Sancher, they find him face down in the mud. It is already night, in a scene that describes the dark sky as a life form: “The moon closed its two eyes of gold,” and “the stars did the same. No clarity filtered from the silent sky.”43 Condé depicts an active natural world, one that has the capacity to see and to express itself. And in this final scene (which opens the novel, in another rhizomatic reflection of the life/death cycle that continually recommences from the earth), the mystery of the life and death of Francis Sancher remains secreted in a speechless sky. A communal vision that includes nature In Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, Deleuze and Guattari identify three characteristics of a minor literature: deterriorialization of the language, political value, and “collective arrangement of articulation.”44 The three novels analyzed here exhibit all three aspects, notably, for the purposes of this discussion, the last: a collective concern and expression. The authors write not only of individuals but of communities. The sacrifice of a main character leads in the three works to the possibility for others to find, express, and develop their full potential. Before his death, Manuel is able to swear his mother to secrecy about the fact that he has been murdered. He does this to provide the people with a way to again work the land and survive as a group. Manuel’s objective is practical,

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social, even spiritual, in the sense that its realization will allow the population to recreate itself as a thriving community living in harmony with nature. M’man Tine understands that she must work the land until death, but also that because of her resolution, José will be empowered to create a new identity while inspiring those he will teach to do the same. Francis Sancher is introduced already dead in the mud, as if he had always been part of the earth to which he returns. His death gives others the opportunity to create new lives. In each case the focus is on the wider population, but the movement toward the development and improvement of the mind begins with a physical relationship with the earth, which gives and sustains (and takes back) life, like a divinity. Earth is the basis of “raw reality” in these works, along with the socioeconomic conditions in the context of which the stories unfold. Therefore, as they transform their raw reality into “units of knowledge,” the people of the region portrayed in these novels carry in their consciousness elements of the earth itself.45 The works express a regional characteristic notable in part for its perspective on the natural world. Manuel and M’man Tine exemplify a practical relationship with nature as a matter of survival, after which issues of selfexpression and identity can be addressed. Manuel, M’man Tine, and Sancher all serve as physical links between the wilderness and the development of the human mind and spirit. The human-nature link noted in these three Caribbean novels may be a contributing factor in the formation of cultural identities, but it does not remain static. The contemporary ecocritical movement, like other disciplines, accounts for increasing global industrialization and a corresponding global population shift. D. Alissa Trotz, writing on the movement of Caribbean women across the Canada-US border, notes that these women maintain a Caribbean identity without, in many cases, ever returning to the islands.46 Migrants often find ways to preserve their cultural traditions, and, as I hope to have shown, it is partly through interactions with its environment that a population forms the way it sees itself and develops a culture. This ethos endures, even if subsequently the population becomes more mobile. Lawrence Buell observes that “it’s entirely possible to care more about places you’ve never been—the Africa or Israel/Palestine of your imagination—than the ones you know firsthand.”47 Regarding this sense of one’s proper “place,” or belonging, Buell elaborates: “The new environmental writing and criticism is also always in some sense a post-nationalist persuasion. . . . Skepticism toward mythologies of national landscape has been intensified by . . . the increasing awareness that the environmental problems the world now faces ‘are quite unaware of national and cultural boundaries.’”48 Throughout literature, a consideration of ways in which nature is viewed and treated can shed light on how a body of work differs from one region or nation to another; such studies can also lead to greater understanding of the



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regional cultures from which the writings emerge. In Caribbean francophone literature, human life is often depicted in a less-anthropocentric way than in the European tradition (at least since Christianity’s cultural triumph there), likely because of the Antillean population’s more recent and direct interactions with wild nature as a means to survive. In this way, the three novels studied here reveal a general predisposition to understand the natural world in a way that is closer to Amerindian and African ideas than to those originating in Europe, in terms of the ability to live with nature, not just extract from it. Such a mindset has the potential to help change paradigms of modern business regarding natural resources. This type of cooperative thinking can help keep the pressure on companies and governments to find and implement ways to live in greater harmony with the land, harvesting more sustainably from nature instead of simply exhausting it, as Manuel is finally able to teach those in his village. Notes 1. This chapter is a translated and revised version of “Perspective éco-critique: La nature dans trois romans de Roumain, Zobel et Condé,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2013): 135–50, reprinted here with permission. I am grateful to IJFS; to professors Bob Burkholder and Valerie Orlando, who inspired me to pursue, respectively, ecocriticism and francophone studies; to the editors of this volume for their comments that improved my work; and to Brian Rehill for his biological lens. 2. For the purposes of this essay, “culture” refers to the generally held belief systems, traditions, and mores in a given region, bearing in mind Edward W. Said’s reminder that “all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from freefloating objects into units of knowledge.” Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1978]), 67. Depending on historical and geographical circumstances, “raw reality” obviously differs dramatically, including in the level of the people’s exposure to the wilderness. 3. Anjali Prabhu, Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), xi. 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1980), 295. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 5. Hybrid animals are often sterile, but biologists estimate that 70 percent of flowering plants are the result of hybridization. Brian Rehill, professor of biology US Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD, 2012. 6. Nick Nesbitt, “The Postcolonial Event: Deleuze, Glissant, and the Problem of the Political,” Deleuze and the Postcolonial, Simone Bignall and Paul Patton, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 104. Glissant quote translated by Nesbitt. 7. Edouard Glissant, Tout-monde (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1993), 591.

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8. Prabhu, Hybridity, xiii. 9. Jacques Roumain, Gouverneurs de la rosée (Coconut Creek, FL: Educa Vision, 1999 [1944]), 162. 10. On Manuel as a Christ figure, see Renée Larrier, Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 137–42. See 165 n. 17 for examples of others who have written about Manuel from this perspective. 11. Roumain, Gouverneurs de la rosée, 14. 12. Ibid., 17. 13. Ibid., 18. 14. Ibid., 27. 15. Ibid., 41. 16. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures,” in Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 109. 17. Roumain, Gouverneurs de la rosée, 136. 18. Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992), 55. 19. Ibid., 88–89. 20. Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, “L’Insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue: Le bicentenaire de Haïti,” Présence Africaine, no. 169 (2004): 11–31. 21. Paravisini-Gebert, “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes,” 110. 22. Joseph Zobel, La Rue cases-nègres (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1974 [1950]), 66. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 67. 25. Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002 [1961]), 47. 26. DeLoughrey and Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies, 3. 27. Zobel, La Rue cases-nègres, 129. 28. Ibid., 130. 29. Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux, 335. 30. Zobel, La Rue cases-nègres, 167. 31. Ibid., 168. 32. Pascale De Sousa, “Gendering Mornes and Volcanoes in French Caribbean Literature,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 6, no. 3 (2003): 149–50. 33. Maryse Condé, Traversée de la mangrove (Paris: Mercure de France, 1989), 244–45. 34. Ibid., 245. 35. Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux, 632. 36. Glissant, Tout-monde, 577–78. 37. Condé, Traversée de la mangrove, 192. 38. Ruthmarie H. Mitsch, “Maryse Condé’s Mangroves,” Research in African Literatures 28, no. 4 (Winter 1997), 69. 39. Ibid. 40. Condé, Traversée de la mangrove, 109.



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41. Ibid., 241. 42. Ibid., 244. 43. Ibid., 19. 44. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1975), 33. 45. Said, Orientalism, 67. 46. D. Alissa Trotz, “Bustling across the Canada-U.S. Border: Gender and the Remapping of the Caribbean across Place,” Small Axe 35 (July 2011): 60–77. 47. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2005), 73. 48. Ibid., 82 (citing Thomas Claviez, “Pragmatism, Critical Theory, and the Search for Ecological Genealogies in American Culture,” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature: REAL [1999] 15: 343–80).

Bibliography Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Condé, Maryse. Traversée de la mangrove. Paris: Mercure de France, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Editions de minuit, 1975. ———. Mille plateaux. Paris: Editions de minuit, 1980. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. De Sousa, Pascale. “Gendering Mornes and Volcanoes in French Caribbean Literature.” International Journal of Francophone Studies 6, no. 3 (2003): 149–64. Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte, 2002 [1961]. Glissant, Edouard. Tout-monde. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1993. M’Bow, Amadou Mahtar. “L’Insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue: Le bicentenaire de Haïti.” Présence Africaine 169 (2004): 11–31. Merchant, Carolyn. Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. New York: Routledge, 1992. Mitsch, Ruthmarie H. “Maryse Condé’s Mangroves.” Research in African Literatures 28, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 54–70. Prabhu, Anjali. Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Rehill, Brian. Conversation with author, US Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD, July 12, 2012. Roumain, Jacques. Gouverneurs de la rosée. Coconut Creek, FL: Educa Vision, 1999 [1944]. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1978]. Trotz, D. Alissa “Bustling across the Canada-U.S. Border: Gender and the Remapping of the Caribbean across Place.” Small Axe 35 (July 2011): 60–77. Zobel, Joseph. La Rue cases-nègres. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1974 [1950].

Chapter 25

The Politics of Writing as a Space to Shape Identity(ies) Khady Diène

The texts of women authors in Africa and the Caribbean engage the marginalization and vulnerability of women caught up in the violence meted out either by the postcolonial dictators or the social, cultural, and historical structures of their own societies. Writing as an artistic expression becomes a space in which one can express the moral, psychological, historical, and intellectual development of a cultural region. In Juletane (1982), Myriam Warner-Vieyra, a female writer from Guadeloupe, through the diary written by Juletane, relates the story of a young West Indian woman who lives in France and marries an African student whom she will follow when he decides to return to Africa. The novel is in the form of a diary, found and read by Hélène, a West Indian woman living in Paris. It relates Juletane’s experience as a Caribbean woman in a traditional African society. Juletane followed her husband to Africa to find herself in a polygamous relationship. She ends up sharing her husband’s house with two co-wives in Senegal.1 In the novel, both Myriam Warner-Vieyra and the protagonist Juletane use writing to tell their story in the quest of their Caribbean identity(ies). Myriam Warner-Vieyra and Juletane, as many female writers in the Caribbean but also in transatlantic regions, use writing and specifically a diary as a way to explore their historical, gender, political, and physical circumstances and environments. In Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Kamala Visweswaran tries to “understand what the diary as a historical document might tell us about the parameters of a woman’s agency.”2 In light of Visweswaran’s quest I will ask again questions like: what is it that counts as women’s writing? What is literature? The guiding question in this study as well as the possible answers will turn around the politics of writing as a space to shape identity(ies). In which way(s) can women’s writing become a space to shape identity(ies)? 337

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Why create this new space? What are the implications on their consciousness, their identity(ies) and their societies? In The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous, one of the leading figures of the women’s movement, writes that a “woman must put herself into the text- as in the world and into history by her own movement.”3 According to Cixous, for women to enter this new space of writing from which they were excluded, they have to take action, but they also have to exclusively create a space of their own, achievable through the solidarity between them. When she arrives in Senegal, Juletane does not fulfill her dream of a perfect marriage with Mamadou. In the house she shares with her two co-wives, she gradually isolates herself in her room as an act of rebellion. While confined, she starts writing her diary, which becomes what Homi Bhabha calls an “intermediary space.”4 What does this new space represent for her? What is the function of writing as a new space? Is it a place of resistance or alienation or is it something else? Does it have any implication(s) on her identity? The Politics of Writing as a Method In The Location of Culture, Bhabha, stresses the importance of writing he considers as a “problematic space” or a third space, which can liberate: “I have chosen to demonstrate the importance of the space of writing, and the problematic of address, at the very heart of the liberal tradition.”5 For Juletane, the act of writing is an act of resistance and liberation, but it is also a response to life as it is for Mariama Bâ’s Ramatoulaye in So Long a Letter6 and many other women protagonists who all need to write as a support in their moment of crisis: “writing will shorten my long hours of discouragement, I cling to an activity and get a friend, a confident, at least I hope. . . .”7 While writing her diary, Juletane denounces the political, historical, social, cultural, and moral prison in which women are confined by society. In her book Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean, Valérie Orlando calls it a “sociocultural prison” which “can take on many forms.”8 Thus, for these women, writing becomes a space which “enables other positions to emerge,”9 as Juletane’s writing reflects her refusal to be defined by her environment. In her work Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean, Mildred Mortimer views it as an “alternative space, as a place of possibilities.”10 In her essay “Narrative ‘je(ux)’ in Kamouraska by Anne Hébert and Juletane by Myriam Warner-Vieyra,” Elizabeth Mudimbe-Boyi aligns with Mortimer’s idea. She considers this alternative space as a “space of



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possibilities” which gives Juletane the opportunity “to constitute herself as a speaking and narrating subject.” According to Mudimbe-Boyi, “for Juletane, the limits and the enclosure of the room construct a personal space, opening the possibility for dream and evasion from a world from which she feels alienated. The enclosed marginal space thus transforms itself into a center from which Juletane constitutes herself as a speaking and a narrating subject.”11 For these reasons, it is clear that writing, as an alternative space of resistance and/or alienation, allows Juletane to liberate herself for more possibilities. However, its function becomes complicated. In Africa and in the Caribbean, because of the social, religious, and the familial constraints added to state censorship, women’s writing was silenced for a long time. Women tended to write témoignages and diaries, which are accounts of their life experiences. If we frame Warner-Vieyra’s novel as a diary we can wonder in which ways Juletane’s diary could liberate her or other women. Are diaries as a form of action, enough to free women? In Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Kamala Visweswaran, in her quest to understand what the diary as a historical document might “tell us about the parameters of a woman’s agency,”12 argues “writing involves reading, and helps us to reexplore the relationship between ethnography and literature.” For Visweswaran, “to argue that ethnography is literature is to remind us of our presumptions about literature, to ask again, what is literature?”13 What is literature and fiction doing for a woman’s voice? Literature and Ethnography In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography published in 1986 the authors argue that “ethnography is in the middle of a political and epistemological crisis: Western writers no longer portray non-Western people with unchallenged authority; the process of cultural representation is now inescapably contingent, historical, and contestable.”14 Today, more than twenty years later, the debate around the relationship between literature and ethnography is still engaged and as a result, literature has been called “ethno-literature,” “ethnographic fiction,” or “imagined ethnography.” Why have ethnographic accounts recently lost so much of their authority? In her book, she states that “if we agree that one of the traditional ways of thinking about fiction is that it builds a believable world, but one that the reader rejects as factual, then we can say of ethnography that it too, sets out to build a believable world, but one the reader will accept as factual.”15 Analyzing Warner-Vieyra’s novel allowed me to consider her work as a fictional diary standing for a témoignage, which makes it “believable” as defined by Visweswaran.

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In her book Feminism and Method, Nancy Naples analyzes her own research process. She shows how knowledge was produced while she was engaged in diverse research projects. For Naples, self-consciousness as well as the articulation of her ethical stance in the field was very effective in influencing the way she conducted and interpreted interviews, transcripts, and ethnographic research: “The stories we tell about our epistemological journeys are always interested stories and form a significant dimension of what I call a ‘politics of method.’”16 In order to explore Warner-Vieyra’s methodological approach in her fiction writing, I put her novel in conversation with Naples’s Feminism and Method but also with Visweswaran who argues that fiction as ethnographic writing can also restore “lost voices” and “restore the life of a whole society.”17 While Warner-Vieyra is recounting the heroine’s moral, psychological, and intellectual development, she is writing about Senegalese culture, and also telling the history of Senegalese women. In Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean, Renée Larrier states that “when women began to write fiction in large numbers, however, they created female characters who told their own stories. First-person narrators became the norm. This appropriation of voice should be seen as a deliberate narrative strategy by writers and characters to subvert the past.18 In this regard, one can argue that the fictional work, as an ethnographic work, can be considered a historical document, as a means to “archive” a culture or a specific trauma, in order “to make sense of the past.” In Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb, Valérie Orlando argues that francophone postmodern authors like Assia Djebar write as a “means to destabilize canonized archival accounts.”19 In regard to women’s victimization, WarnerVieyra denounces women’s marginalization in most postcolonial societies. We can argue that she is “opening up a space for accounts of psychic pain”20 in the same way Ann Cvetkovich defines the concept of archiving trauma in An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture.21 What does it mean to archive trauma? In which way(s) could we argue that Warner-Vieyra is using Juletane as a way of archiving trauma? Archiving Trauma in Juletane In An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture, Ann Cvetkovich defines trauma as one of the categories clinically labeled as “feeling bad.” For Cvetkovich, trauma, different from depression, “opens up space for accounts of pain as psychic, not just physical.”22 Thus, we can understand trauma through the affective experiences rather than the geopolitical catastrophe as war, genocide, and the Holocaust. Cvetkovich defines trauma as “a name for experiences of socially situated political violence,



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which forges connections between politics and emotion.”23 In this regard, one can say that Warner-Vieyra’s novel uses trauma discourse as a means to make a connection between the suffering of African and Caribbean women and historical and social events. Warner-Vieyra, through her writing, archives the condition of women who suffer trauma both in the public sphere and the private space. The diary form becomes a témoignage, which allows her to exteriorize trauma without losing intimacy, but also a means to create an emotional bond between Juletane and all the women who have suffered the same fate. Cvetkovich argues the importance of recognizing and archiving trauma, insisting on the importance of recognizing traumas of the everyday life because “sometimes it seems invisible because it is confined to the domestic or private sphere.”24 She uses traditional archival documents such as diaries and photographs, but also essays, poems, videos, film production, and performance art. Her project clearly deconstructs the conception of archives in the traditional way because she understands archive as based on shared experiences of a community and not from an authority. In the last chapter of her book, “In the Archive of Lesbian Feelings,” Cvetkovich examines the role of archives through her examination of the materials, which provide evidence of trauma. She contests the traditional method of archival research the same way as in Contesting Archives Finding Women in the Sources. In this study, the authors research women’s experiences around the world. Their research shows that the material found in archives reflects the way power is articulated in human societies. The experiences of oppressed groups excluded from institutional power (women, slaves, immigrants, and working-class people) are subjectively archived and their voices silenced in most of travel narratives, court documents, newspapers, popular magazines, business records, formal texts and images, and oral histories. The authors’ purpose in this edited book is to piece together women’s experiences in different spaces in order to give them a voice, to give them a place in history.25 In her essay “Creating an Archive of Working Women’s Oral Histories in Beira Mozambique,” Kathleen Sheldon stresses the importance for researchers to create a specific space for women in their interviews and conversations. Her essay reveals how oral histories vary from women and men. 26 In Sheldon’s conversation with Francesca Declich, Francesca argues that “women and men had distinct histories to tell because their experiences were different, and when stories were told, male and female audiences heard and remembered the information differently.”27 Unfortunately for Juletane, Mamadou will not read her diary and her stay in Senegal ends in tragedy. However, even if writing her story did not save her personally, it will save many generations of women like Hélène. Juletane’s story has awakened Hélène’s consciousness about the importance and the necessity to shift women’s role within the family structure and within

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society. Our analysis of Juletane proves that women’s writings in postcolonial societies of the Caribbean and the transatlantic regions, no matter their language, unanimously denounce the same problem, namely their marginality in their societies. Thinking about writing as a space to shape identity(ties) challenged us to rethink the importance for women to be aware of their capacities to redefine their roles. Juletane’s story calls into question women’s traditional roles that have to be shifted to support their countries. We also had the opportunity to examine the relationship between ethnography and literature in WarnerVieyra’s piece and to see how her fiction is able to archive trauma and make sense of a historical past. This study challenged us to explore literature as a method and compare it to ethnography as a discipline. As we know, ethnographic research and writing require specific ways such as participation observation which we did not find in Juletane. I have come to the conclusion that fiction is comparable to ethnography only in what it is able to do but not how it is able to do it. Warner-Vieyra’s novel is able to restore lost voices, write culture, and shape identity(ies). Because Juletane is purely fictional, we cannot categorize it as an ethnographic piece. Would it then be more appropriate to call it imagined ethnography? I am here, once again, thinking about the ways in which power is articulated in human society and to ask again: Who has the power to define what is literature but also, what is ethnography? Notes 1. Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Juletane (Dakar : Présence Africaine, 1982). 2. Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 145. 3. Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), 875. http://www.dwrl.utexas. edu/~davis/crs/e321/Cixous-Laugh.pdf. 27 July 2014. 4. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 5. Ibid., 37. 6. Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter. Trans. Modupé Bodé-Thomas (Johannesburg: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1989). 7. Warner-Vieyra, Juletane, 18. 8. Valérie Orlando, Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (Lanham: Lexington Books 2003), 134. In her study, Valerie Orlando analyzes Beyala’s prison, which for her, “takes on many forms.” 9. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 211. 10. Mildred Mortimer, Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean (Lexington Books, 2007), x.



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11. Elizabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, “Narrative ‘je(ux)’ in Kamouraska by Anne Hébert and Juletane by Myriam Warner-Vieyra.” In Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, edited by Mary Jean et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 124. 12. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 145. 13. Ibid., 1. 14. James Clifford and Marcus George E. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). 15. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 1. 16. Nancy Naples, Feminism and Method: Ethnography; Discourse Analysis and Activist Research (New York: Routledge, 2003), 14. 17. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 15. 18. Renée Larrier, Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), 28. 19. Valérie Orlando, Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999), 25. 20. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 2. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 3. 24. Ibid. 25. Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, ed. Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 26. Kathleen Sheldon, “Creating an Archive of Working Women’s Oral Histories in Beira Mozambique,” in Nupur Chaudhuri et al. Contesting Archives, 192. 27. Ibid., 193.

Bibliography Bâ, Mariama. So Long a Letter. Trans. Modupe Bode-Thomas. Johannesburg: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1989. Bâ, Mariama. “La Fonction politique des littératures africaines écrites.” Ecriture française dans le monde 5 no.1 (1981): 3–7. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Blunt, Allison and Rose, Gillian. Writing Women and Space, Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford Press, 1994. Bruner, Charlotte H. Unwinding Threads: Writing by Women in Africa. London: Heinemann, 1983. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminists Theory,” in Sue–Ellen Case, ed. Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

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Cazenave, Odile. Rebellious Women: The New Generation of Female African Novelists. USA: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc, 2000. (Published in French as Femmes rebelles: naissance d’un nouveau roman africain au féminin: L’Harmattan, Paris, 1996. Translated by the author. Chaudhuri, Nupur, Sherry J. Katz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, ed. Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Cixous, Hélène. The Laugh of the Medusa. Paris: L’Arc, 1975. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Paris: Les Temps Modernes, 1949. Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. (translated from Demeure: Maurice Blanchot. Editions Galilee, 1998). Harrell-Bond, Barbara. “Interview avec Mariama Bâ le 9 juillet 1979.” African Book Publishing Record 6 (1980): 209–14. Harrow, Kenneth. “The Poetics of African littérature de témoignage.” African Literature Studies: The Présent State/ L’Etat present. Washington, DC: Three Continent Press,1985. Harstsock, Nancy. “The Feminist Standpoint: Toward a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In Mc Cann and Kim, Feminist Theory Reader, 1983. Hill Collins, Patricia. Fighting Words. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Hitchcott, Nicki and Laila Ibnlfassi. African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction. Oxford/Washington, DC: Berg, 1996. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. NY: Routledge, 1988. Larrier, Renéé. Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. McCall, Leslie. The Complexity of Intersectionality. Signs 30, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 1771–1800. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Mortimer, Mildred. “Enclosure/Disclosure in Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre.” The French Review 64, no. 1 (1990): 69–78. Naples, Nancy. Feminism and Method: Ethnography; Discourse Analysis and Activist Research. New York: Routledge, 2003. Orlando, Valérie. Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999. Perry, Ruth. Women, Letters and the Novel. New York: Ams Press, 1980. Sheldon, Kathleen. “Creating an Archive of Working Women’s Oral Histories in Beira, Mozambique.” In Contesting Archives Finding Women in the Sources. Ed. Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010.



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Stringer, Susan. The Senegalese Novel by Women: Through Their Own Eyes. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Thiam, Awa. La Parole aux Négresses. Paris: Editions Denoël/Gonthier, 1978. Viswesawaran, Kamala. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Warner-Vieyra, Myriam. Juletane. Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1982.

Index

abortion, 114, 116 Achebe, Chinua, xx, 151. See also Things Fall Apart (Achebe) ADEA. See Association for the Development of Education in Africa Adiaffi, Jean-Marie, xxii, 213; artistic sources, 216–17; and Katiyo compared, 220–22; poetics of identity, 217–20 adolescent sexuality in Sahel, xx, 114–16, 121; outside marriage, 117–18; parental attitudes, 118 advertisements of films, 107 advertising media, Moroccan: and graphic representation of vernacular Arabics, 188; scriptic sensibilities, 195–97; use of French words in Arabic script, 190 Africa: imperialist treatment in fiction, 306; suppression of women’s writings, 339; textile traditions, 3, 12–13; transnational symbols, 8. See also West African culture

African-Atlantic postcolonial literature, subjunctive approach, xviii, 31–32 African oral literature. See oral literature, African Akan oral literature. See oral literature, Akan Aliyu, Akilu, 88–89 alliteration, 219, 220, 221, 222 Amir, Aziza, 107 amnesia, and bodily pain representations, 59–60 Amour, colère et folie (Vieux-Chauvet), 288–91, 299 animated film posters: characters, 277–78, 279, 280–81; clothing styles, 280; color scheme, 276, 277, 280; “delegate of the framework,” 276, 277; West African Francophone culture, xxiii, 275–76; women portrayal, 277–78, 281 Anjali Prabhu, 322, 323 anti-Semitism, 307 L’Appel des arènes (The Call to the Arenas) (Fall), xx, 134; call to the arena, 150, 151–52; identity crisis, 145n37;

347

348 Index

integrative and revivalist aspects of folk wrestling, 154–57; visual spectacle of folk wrestling, 152–53 L’Appel des arènes (film), 153–54 Arabic language, and national identity, 106 arkilla furnishing textiles, 20, 22, 23, 24 artistic Haitianity, 235, 240, 243n4, 244n18 Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), 183 En Attendant le vote des bétes sauvages (Waiting for the Votes of the Wild Animals) (Kourouma), 40–43 aural devices: Adiaffi’s use, 217–20; Akan poetry, 216–17; Katiyo’s use, 220–22; prose translation and, 223–24 Auren Dole (song), 87–88 baassi salté (Senegalese dish), 130–32 bakh (praise-songs), and folk wrestling, 154 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 189 Bamako (film), 69 Bamba, Cheikh Ahmadou, 266–67, 268, 269 bandes dessinées (comics), xv, xx, 113–14; conservative approach, 114–18, 119–20 Banzar, Chimegsaikhan, 314 Barthes, Roland, 103 Batouala Véritable roman nègre (Maran), 306 Bayn (telecommunications company), graphic representation in advertising, 195–96, 197 Bazile, Castera, 254, 256 “becoming animal” trope, 327 La Bella Durmiente (Sleeping Beauty) (Ferré), 291–93, 299 Bellah Tuareg weavers, 18–19, 20

Benchemsi, Ahmed, 193–94 Benoit, Rigaud, 256 Bhaba, Homi, 338 Biguad, Wilson, xxii, 233; and Véronèse compared, 237–38 binary opposition in art: animated films, 277, 279; sacred/profane, xxii, 233–34, 236–37, 240–41 Bint al Nil (Daughter of the Nile) (film), advertisement for, 107 Bint al Nil (Daughter of the Nile) (journal), 108, 109 Bloncourt, Gerald, 252 bodily pain, representations of, xviii, 57–58 Bois-Caïman, ceremony of, 233, 236, 238, 241, 242n2 “Le Bon Choix” (bandes dessinées), 114–15 Booth, Wayne C., 209–10 Bop, Codou, 118 “Bouba and Zaza—Childhood Cultures” (animation series), xxi, 183–84, 185 boubou (clothing), 266, 283n13 Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood) (Sembene), 128–29 brass bands, funerals with, 162, 164, 166n3 Breton, André, 235, 244n17 calendars, religious iconography, 268 calligraphy, in Essaydi’s photographs, 98 Cameroon, folk wrestling, 159n5 Cameroonian women: central role in development, 8–9, 12–13; collaboration and complementarity, 10–11; indispensable role of women in development, 9–10 El Canto del agua (Rosario), 293–95, 296–98, 300

Index

Capécia, Mayotte, 305, 310–11, 316n16, 317n20 Caribbean Art (Poupeye), 251, 256 Caribbean. See Guadeloupe; Haiti; Martinique Caribbean women: as commodities, 298–301; cultural identity, 306–7, 314–15; financial dependency, 293–96; gendered role, 291–93, 313; gender identity, 314–15; historical sexual exploitation, 295–98; objectification, 306–7; patriarchal dominance, 288–91; racial identity, 307–9; relation with food, 174–76; sexual identity, 313–14; suppression of writings of, 339 La carte d’identité (Adiaffi), xxii, 214–15; sound aesthetics, 216–20 ceebu jën (Senegalese dish), 124; multisensorial delights, 124–25; national significance, 125–26, 135–36; recipes, 135–39; significance, 142 Centre d’ Art (Port-Au-Prince), 252, 258 Cent vies et des poussières (Hundreds of Lives and Dust) (Pineau), 57, 58; commodification, 64–66; esotericism, 60; interstitiality, 60–61; marginalized voices, 62; negrophobia, 68; politics of negation, 67–68, 71–72; public and private spaces, 59; resistance, 68–69; transmission of oral histories, 61–62 Césaire, Aimé, 34, 37–38, 213, 235, 307 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 321 Charlier, Vladimir Cybil, xxii, 247–49, 259–61 Chéry, Jean-Richard, 233

349

chiasmus, 220, 222; notion, 226n52 Christianity: anti-colonial counterpoint, 307–8; in art. See Les Noces de Cana (Wedding at Cana) CICAM. See Cotonnière Industrielle du Cameroun “Les cinq filles du Père Loriès” (Sylvestre-Ceide), 169–70 Civil, Gabrielle, xxii, 247–49 Cixous, Hélène, 338 Claire-Solange (Lacascade), 305, 306–10 clothing styles: animated film posters, 280; Senegalese Muslims, 266, 283n13 Code de l̕ éducation (France), ordinances on regional languages, 205–6 collective voices, 59 Colombani, Jean, 24 color scheme: animated film posters, 276, 277, 280; Les Noces de Cana (Wedding at Cana) (fresco), 235, 236–37; téra-tera textiles, 20–21 commodification: and bodily pain representations, 64–66; of Caribbean women, 298–301 communality and nature, 331–33 compound (linguistics), 216 concubinage, 294–96 Condé, Maryse, 328 Contes de la brousse et de la foret (Tales of the Bush) (Davesne and Gouin), 275 Contesting Archives Finding Women in the Sources, 341 contraception, 114, 116, 118–19 Converging Territories (photographic series), 96–97, 99 cookbook authors, Senegalese, 124. See also Fall, Aminata Sow; Harley, Margo; N’Dour, Youssou

350 Index

cookbooks, West African, xx, 123–24. See also Un Grain de vie et d’espérance (Fall); Sénégal: Cuisine intime et gourmande (N’Dour) corpomemorial tracing, 58, 71–72 corruption, 325–26 Cotonnière Industrielle du Cameroun (CICAM), 5–6, 13n5 Cottias, Myriam, 311 crémas (Haitian coconut punch), 176 Creole. See Reunion Creole Creolization, 57 ‘Crier/Ecrire/Cahier’ (Larrier), 62 culinary practices, Haitian, 170, 174–76 culinary practices, West African, 124, 139–40; as performance, 126–29, 140–41 cultural identity: crisis, 145n37; and immigrants, 332; and La carte d’identité, 215; mulâtresse, xxiii, 306–7, 314–15; and Reunion Creole, 208–9; and ritual celebrations, 164–65 culture: formation of hybrid cultures, 161, 164–66; notion, 275, 333n2. See also West African culture Cvetkovich, Ann, 340–41 Dadié, Bernard, 150 Dambury, Gerty, 57–58. See also Les ŕetifs dance, and bodily pain representations, 58, 59–60, 62–64 Dan Maraya Jos, 87–88 Dartique, Maurice, 252 Davesne, André, 275 D’éclairs et de foudres (Adiaffi), 215–16 decolonial literary monuments, construction of, 32–33, 39–44 Delacroix, Eugene, 99 Deleuze, Gilles, 40, 322, 327, 329, 330, 331

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 321, 327 Denton, Suzanne, 98 depigmentation, xv derived words, 218–19, 221, 222 De Sousa, Pascale, 328 deterritorialization, 36, 41–42 development: Cameroonian women’s central role, 8–9, 12–13; Cameroonian women’s indispensable role, 9–10; gender partnership in advancement of, 11 Devil on the Cross (Ngügï), 40–41 diagraphia in advertising, 196–98 diary, and shaping of identities, 337–38, 341 Diaw, Aminata, 126–27 Dibissou, Zara, 88 dictators, African, 41–43 digenèse, 62–63 Diop, Birago, 39–40 Diop, David, 40 Djebar, Assia, 340 Djerma weavers and weaving, 20, 23, 27n17 Djirmey, Aboubacar, 155 “Doa ize jiire” (The Year of the Locust Larvae), 51 “Doa jiire” (The Year of the Locusts), 51 Dobie, Madeleine, 311 Dreyfuss, Joel, 255 drumming: and culinary arts, 130–32; and folk wrestling, 153 “Du Crémas à ľidée” (Sylvestre-Ceide), 169–70 Duffaut, Préfète, 256, 259 Dunlop, Douglas, 105, 106 Duvalier, François, 288 dyaspora art, 248 early childhood development (ECD) programs, 181–82, 183, 185; goal, 184

Index

ECD programs. See early childhood development programs ecology, and corruption, 323–26 education: Africa, 182; Egyptian women, 105–6; Ghana, 183; parent’s role, 184–85. See also language-in-education EFU. See Egyptian Feminist Union Egypt: emergence of film industry, 106–7. See also al Misriyya (the Egyptian); women’s press, Egyptian Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), 107, 108 Egyptian women, representation as international figures, 109 L’Egyptienne (magazine), 107–8 El Alj, Ahmed Taieb, 192 Eliassa, Jihad, 197–98 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 321–22 Episcopal Church of Haiti, reaction to Les Noces de Cana, 234, 238–39 esotericism, and bodily pain representations, 60 Essaydi, Lalla, xix, 95–96 ethnography: European model, 306; and literature, 339–40 Eyadéma, Gnassingbé, 41 Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 35 Fagunwa, D. O., 223 Fall, Aminata Sow, xx, 124; on call to the arena, 150, 151–52; on culinary selfishness, 146n52; on delights of ceebu jën, 125; narration of culinary practices, 130–34, 139–41, 145n40; on visual characteristics of folk wrestling, 152–53 family functional literacy programs, 183 “Family Life Education,” 115–16 famines in Sahel, oral literature accounts, xviii, 50–52

351

Fanon, Frantz, 310–11, 323, 327 Farmer, Paul, 83 al-Fatat (magazine): film advertisements, 107; and Egyptian nationalism, 105–6 female education in Egypt, 105–6 female identity, 314–15 female journalists. See Musa, Nabawiya; Shafiq, Doria; al-Youssef, Fatima female promiscuity, 87–88 female sexuality, 66–67 Feminism and Method (Naples), 340 Femme Nouvelle (journal), 108, 109 Les Femmes du Maroc (photographic series), 96–97, 99–100 Ferré, Rosario, 291 fiction. See novel(s) Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Kamala Visweswaran), 337–38 film industry, Egyptian, 106–7; film promotion, 107 film posters. See animated film posters folk wrestling, xx, 149–50, 158–59; acoustic aspects, 153–54; alternative phenomenon, 158; cultural revival tool, 156–57; place of integration, 154–57; social and cultural dimensions, 150–52; spiritual aspects, 153; visual spectacle, 152–53 Fon people, funerals, 162, 163–64, 166n3 food reserves management, oral literature on, 50–51 food substitutes, oral literature on, 51–52 forced marriage of young girls, 87–88 Foucault, Michel, 203–4 France: and Martinique, during World War II, 313–14; status of immigrants, 170–71 French-based orthography, 190, 193 French language, 109; in animated films, 282; in Arabic script, 190;

352 Index

in education, 206–7; and immigrants, 172–73; “print colonialism,” 146n43 Fuad (theater), opening ceremony, 106–7 Fulani weavers and weaving, 20, 23 funeral brass bands, 162, 164, 166n3 Ganda, Abouba, 21 Gani, Bio Ourou, 27n17 garbey kopto, 16–17 gender-based violence, 288–89 gendered roles: in animated film posters, 281; in fiction, 291–93, 312 gender identity, 314–15 gender inequality, and women’s vulnerability to HIV-AIDS infection, 82–84 German Health Practice (KFW), 79 Ghana, education, 183 Glissant, Édouard, 62, 204, 322–23, 329 Gosson, Renée, 321 Gouin, Joseph, 275 Gouverneurs de la rosée (Roumain), 323–26 Un Grain de vie et d’espérance (A Speck of life and hope) (Fall), 124, 139–41; Harley’s “Recettess” section, 133–37, 138, 139, 142; musical elements, 130–32 graphic representation in Morocco, xxi, 188; non-standard Arabics, 192–93; orthographic heterogeneity, 188–91; scriptic sensibilities, 195–97; standard languages, 190–92, 194–95 griot(s), xviii; female, 281, 283n18; role, 33; role in folk wrestling, 153–54 griotic aesthetics: notion, 40; use, 40–44

griotic rhetoric, 32–33; Césaire’s appropriation of, 37–38; Hurston’s appropriation of, 34–37; as poetic material, 39–40; writers’ appropriation of, 33 Guadeloupe, xviii, 57–58, 70, 328–29 Guattari, Félix, 40, 322, 327, 329, 330, 331 Guèye, Gnagna, xv Haiti: anti-superstition campaign, 234, 252; culinary practices, 170, 174–76; cultural and intellectual life, 252–53; gender-based violence, 288; identification with poverty, 255–56; postcolonial, 325 Haitian art, xxii; commercialization, 248, 258; “discovery” of, 250–53; iconography, 259–60; Rodman’s paternalistic characterization, 254; value, 256–57 Haitian immigrants, and language, 172–74 Haitian naive art, 240, 243n14, 251, 252; distinctive feature, 233 Haitian tourist art, 248, 249, 256–57; conditions of artists, 258; material value, 257–58; mimesis, 258–59; question of originality, 261 Haitian women, relation with food, 174–76 Hama, Boubou, 22 Hama, Mohamadou, 22, 23–24 Handley, George, 321, 327 haptic experiences, 59, 72n1 “Haray Ka” (poem), 51 Harlem Renaissance poetry, popularization, 35–37 Harley, Margo, 124, 133–37, 138, 139, 142 Hausa language, 84

Index

Hausa oral narrative, 80 henna, in Essaydi’s photographs, 98 Hippolyte, Hector, 256, 259 historical events: and oral literature, 48–50; transmission of, 61–62 HIV-AIDS education: Niger, 78, 120–21; public health materials, 117–21; role of performing artists, xix, 77. See also SIDA (dance song) Hountondji, 164, 166n3 housing, in animated film posters, 279 Hughes, Langston, 35–36 Hurston, Zora Neale, 34–37 hybrid cultures, formation of, 161, 164–66 hybridity, 333n5; notion, 322–23 Hyppolite, Hector, 235 iconography: Haitian art, 259–60; Les Noces de Cana (Wedding at Cana), 235–36. See also religious iconography in Senegal identity(ies): and writing, xxiv, 337–38, 342. See also cultural identity; gender identity; national identity; racial identity The Identity Card (Katiyo), aural devices, xxii, 220–22 immigrants and immigration, xxi; and culinary practices, 175–76; cultural identity maintenance, 332; idea of homeland return, 176–78; from immigrants point of view, 171; language preservation/denial, 172–74; and religious iconography, 269–70; status in France, 170–71; and women, 171–72 independence, Egyptian, 105

353

individual behavior during famines, from oral literature, 51 intergenerational learning, 183–84, 185 intermedial translation, 223–24 International Conference on Population and Development (1994, Cairo), 78–79 International Women’s Day (IWD), 4–5 International Women’s Day (IWD) pagne, xvii, 3–4; origin and evolution, 5–7; themes and motifs, 7–11 interstitiality, 60–61, 312 INWI (telecommunications company), graphic representation in advertisements, 196 Irigaray, Luce, 299 Islam: and abortion, 114, 116; and HIV-AIDS education, 79; and ownership of women’s bodies, 78–79, 87; and religious iconography, 271–72; and sex education materials, 117, 119–20 IWD. See International Women’s Day Jazz, and West African culinary practices, 126, 127–28 Je suis Martiniquaise (Capécia), 305, 311–15 Jesus Christ in art, 235–36, 238–39, 280, 282 Joseph, Jasmin, 256 Journal de l̕ Île de La Réunion, debate on language-in-education policy, 205, 207–9 Juletane (Warner-Vieyra), xxiv, 337, 338–39, 340; archiving trauma, 340–42 ka, 72n5 kaba, 12, 13n9; in Cameroon, 13n6 “Kakalaba” (Empty Stomach) (poem), 51

354 Index

Kamala Visweswaran, 337–38, 339 Katiyo, Brigitte, xxii, 213, 224; aural devices, 220–22 Kenya, prostitution in, 89 khabār blādnā (Our Country News) (newspaper), 193 Kirikou et la sorcière (Kirikou and the Sorceress) (animated film), 275–76, 276–78; sequels, 275 Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages (Kirikou and the Wild Animals) (animated film), 279–80 Kirikou et les hommes et les femmes (Kirikou and the men and the women), 280–82 kokowa. See folk wrestling Kounta, Mame Bou, 267 Kourouma, Ahmadou, 40–43 Kouyaté, Djeli Mamadou, 33, 40–41 kulnej gutumo motif, 16, 20 laamb. See folk wrestling Laferrière, Dany, 321 language: and immigration, 172–74; and literacy acquisition, 182; Morocco, 187–88; as national identity, 106, 108, 109–10; relation between linguistic forms and political ideology, 188–89 language-in-education: Africa, 182, 183; Code de l̕ éducation (France), 205–6; French stake in, 206–7; national control, 206; Reunion Island, xxi–xxii, 203, 204 language use in Morocco, 189–90; standard languages, 190–92, 194–95 Lara, Ana-Maurine, 315 Laroui, Abdallah, 188–89 Larrier, Renée, 62, 340 The Laugh of the Medusa (Cixous), 338 Laye, Issa, 269

Laye, Limamou, 266–67 Layenne brotherhood, clothing style, 266 Layla (silent film), advertisement for, 107 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 249–50, 298–99 lexical repetition, 218, 222 Liautaud, Georges, 256, 259 linguistic imperialism, 203–4 literacy: and language, 182; and orality, xiv literary genres: and African literatures, 214; Aristotelian dichotomy, 213–14, 223. See also bandes dessinées (comics); novel(s); oral literature literature, and ethnography, 339–40 The Location of Culture (Bhabha), 338 Mabo, Ali, 22 Magal (festival), 268; pilgrimages during, 272 male promiscuity, 82–84, 87 Mali, sex education, 117 Mangonès, Albert, 252 Maran, René, 306 marginalized voices, 62, 71 Mariniello, Sylvestra, 224 marital rape, 293 An Marmake (album), 79 maroonage, 61–64 Martinican masculinity, 313 Martinique, 313; postcolonial 1930s, 326–28 MayMouna Corporation (telecommunications), graphic representation of logo, 196 mbalax (music genre), 130–31 McCann, James, 126 Meditel (telecommunications company), graphic representation in advertising, 190 medium of instruction. See language-ineducation

Index

Merchant, Carolyn, 325 Miano, Léonora, 127–28 Michel Lafon Education, 183 migrants. See immigrants and immigration Millennium Development Goals, 13n8; pagne textile theme, 8–9 Mille plateaux (Deleuze and Guattari), 322 mimesis, 241; Haitian art, 258–59; Senegalese clothing style, 266 minor literature, 32; characteristics, 331 al Misriyya (the Egyptian), xix, 109–10; representation in al-Fatat (magazine), 105–6; representation in Femme Nouvelle and Bint al Nil (magazine), 109; representation in L’Egyptienne (magazine), 107–8; representation in Rose al Youssef (magazine), 105 al Misriyya (magazine), 108 Mitsch, Ruthmarie H., 330 mobility, of Nigerien weavers, 19, 25–26 Modern Standard Arabic, 187; modified orthographies, 193; orthography, 191–92; promotion, 194–95 Mokhtar, Mahmood, 108 Moroccan Arabic (darija), 191; graphic representation, 188, 190, 193; in Latin orthography, 197–98; in Modern Standard Arabic and French orthography, 193; as opposition, 193–94; telecommunication firms’ advertisements in, 190, 196 Morocco: Arabization policy, 188–89, 191; multilingualism, 187–88; national language issue, 191–92;

355

use of Arabic script, 190–91 Mortimer, Mildred, 338 mortuaries, need for, 164 Mourides brotherhood, way of greeting, 265–66 mourning songs, 162, 166n3 Mudimbe-Boyi, Elizabeth, 338–39 mulâtresse, xxiii; cultural identity, 306–7, 314–15; racial identity, 307–9, 315 multilingualism, in Morocco, 187–88 multimodal translation, 224 Musa, Nabawiya, 105–6; emphasis on language as national identity, 106, 108 Musée National du Niger, 22–25 music: and bodily pain representations, 58, 59–60; elements in folk wrestling, 153–54; elements in West African cookbooks, 130–32, 141–42; funerals, hybrid cultures, 162, 164, 166n3; and West African culinary arts, 126–29 Muslim women: Cameroon, 6; Niger, 86–88 Muslim youth, sex education. See bandes dessinées (comics) Nabrawi, Ceza, 107, 108 naive art. See Haitian naive art Naples, Nancy, 340 national identity, and language, 106, 108, 109–10 nationalism, Egyptian. See al Misriyya (the Egyptian) nationalism, French, 308–9 nationalism, Nigerien, and téra-tera textiles, 22–25 nature-human life relationship, xxiii, 321–22, 331–32; ecology vs corruption, 323–26;

356 Index

survival in nature, 326–28; transcending the rhizome, 328–31 nature writing, 322 Ndiaye, Cheikh, 153 N’Dour, Youssou, 124, 137–39, 141, 275, 276 negrophobia, 68 Nganang, Patrice, 214 Ngügï wa Thiong’o, 31–32, 40–41 Niasse, Abdoulaye, 267 Niger: folk wrestling, 150, 155–56; healing practices, 81–82, 85, 86, 89; HIV-AIDS, 77–78, 86, 87; HIV-AIDS education, 78, 120–21; sexual activity, 115; textiles, 16. See also téra-tera textiles; textiles and nationalism, 22–25 Nigerien women, and téra-tera weavers, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26 Nijar, Fati, 88 nīshān (“Straight Up”), 193–94 Nketia, Kwabena, 216 Les Noces de Cana (Wedding at Cana) (Biguad), xxii; compared to Véronèse work, 237–38; cultural and literary context, 234–35; formal and chromatic aspect, 236–37; iconographic dimension, 235–36; mode of existence, 239–42; reception, 238–39; synthesis between Vodou and Christian elements, 233–34 Normil, André, 233 nostalgia, and immigration, 171–72 Notebook (Césaire), 37–38 Notre corps, notre santé (Sow and Bop), 113, 115 novel(s): corruption in, 325–26; equivalent genre in African literature, 214; European ethnographic model, 306; gendered roles in, 291–93, 312;

gender identity in, 314–15; marital rape in, 293; prostitution in, 293–98; racial identity in, 307–9, 315; racial stereotyping in, 295–98; rape in, 288–90, 293; sexual exploitation in, 287–88, 293–98, 300; sexual injury in, 289–91; sexual torture in, 288–90; sexual violence in, 287–91, 300; trauma in, 341 novelists, becoming-griot strategy, 40–43 n̕zassa (literary genre), 214, 223–24 Obin, Philomé, 233, 244n14, 252 Ocelot, Michel, 275, 276, 279, 280 orality, 66–67; and literacy, xiv; notion, 72n3; and transmission of knowledge, xiii–xiv oral literature: advantages and limitations, 48–49; notion, 78; as source of historical events, 48–50 oral literature, African: genre distinction, 214; on Sahelian famines, 50–52 oral literature, Akan, stylistic features, 216–17 oral tradition: cooking art as, 132–33; and HIV-AIDS education, 79, 80 Orlando, Valérie, 338, 340 orthographic heterogeneity in Morocco, 188–91, 192–94 Oumarou, Amadou, 22 Our Bodies Ourselves, 113, 115, 119 Pächter, Minnar, 178n9 pagne, xiv; notion, 13n1. See also International Women’s Day pagne

Index

parallelism, 220, 222 parents: and adolescent sexuality, 118; role in education, 184–85 paronomasia, 216–17, 219, 221–23; notion, 226n27 pastoral art, 235–36 patriarchy: and women as commodities, 298–301; and women subordination, 288–90, 291–93, 298 Peau noire, masques blancs (Fanon), 310 performing arts: and HIV-AIDS education, xix, 77, 79. See also SIDA (dance song) Peters, DeWitt, 254; and Haitian art, 250–53, 258 photography, Essaydi’s, xix; production of, 97–98, 99; role of text in, 96–97, 98–100; sense of silence in, 97 photography in Egyptian women’s press, xix, 103–4, 109; L’Egyptienne, 107–8; Rose al Youssef, 104–6 pilgrimages in Senegal, 272 Pineau, Gisèle, 57, 58. See also Cent vies et des poussières Pluie et vent sur Télunée Miracle (Schwarz-Bart), 293, 295–96, 300 politics of negation, 67–68, 71–72 polyphony, 209–10 Porembny, Edward, 158 Poupeye, Veerle, 251, 252, 256 Pouye, Khardiata, xv praise-poetry, Akan, 216–17 praise-songs, and folk wrestling, 154 Price-Mars, Jean, 252 prose/poetry dichotomy, 213–14, 223 prostitution: in fiction, 293–98; in Kenya, 89; in Niger, 86, 87, 88–89 proverbs, and culinary arts, 130, 145n40

357

public and private spaces, and bodily pain representations, 58–59 public health materials: bandes dessinées, 113–18, 119–20; board game, 120–21 “punctum,” 103 quadrilles, 62–64 racial identity, 307–9, 315 racism, 306–7; and anti-Semitism, 307 Raicha: Errance fatale (Zorome), 117–18 Rajewsky, Irina, 224 rape in fiction, 288–90, 293 Rara, 236, 243n6 recipes: family recipes, 169–70, 175. See also cookbooks, West African refugees, 171. See also immigrants and immigration regional languages, xiii regional languages-in-education, xxi–xxii; and French language, 206–7; French ordinances, 205–6 religious brotherhoods in Senegal, 272; clothing styles, 266 religious chants in Senegal, 271 religious iconography in Senegal, xxii–xxiii, 266–67, 272–73; accountability question, 271–72; in commercial spaces, 268–69; economic promotion function, 267–68; identification function, 267; protection function, 267; receptivity, 270–71; techniques and support materials, 268; universality, 270, 273 Remponeau, Georges, 252 resistance, 71; adaptation and reinventing scripts towards, xii–xiii;

358 Index

transgression as, 68–70; writing as, 338–39 Les ŕetifs (A Restive People) (Dambury), 57–58; interstitiality, 60–61; marginalized voices in, 62; politics of negation, 67; presentation of women’s struggles, 66; public and private spaces, 59; quadrilles performance, 63–64; resistance, 69; use of esotericism, 60 Reunion Creole: in education, 203, 204, 205, 207–9; regional language status, 204; Reunion Island, language-in-education, xxi–xxii, 203, 204 Le Revenant (The Ghost) (Fall), 146n52 rhizome (philosophy), 322, 329. See also hybridity Richman, Karen, 258 “The Risks Tied to Sexual Behaviour Among Adolescents,” 115–16 ritual, and folk wrestling, 153 ritual celebrations, xx, 161; creativity of organizers, 161–63; social and economic changes impact on, 163–64; social functions of, 164–65, 167n11 Rodman, Selden, 254–55 Rosario, Nelly, 293 Rose al Youssef (magazine): cover illustrations, 104–6; film advertisements, 107; and opening of Fuad theatre, 106–7 Roumain, Jacques, 323, 324, 325 La Rue cases-nègres (Zobel), 326–28 rural women empowerment, Cameroonian, 10–11 Sahel, 47–48; famines, 50–52; sex education, 113 Salam, Abdoul, xiv, 77, 79, 80. See also SIDA (song-dance)

“sans-papiers” (the undocumented), 171 Schwarz-Bart, Simone, 295 Sembene, Ousmane, 128–29 Senegal: clothing styles of Muslims and Catholics, 266; culinary practices, 124, 139–40; domestication of religious practices, 265–66; folk wrestling, 150; national dish, 124–26, 135–39, 142; religious iconography. See religious iconography in Senegal Sénégal: Cuisine intime et gourmande (Senegal: Intimate and Gourmet Cuisine) (N’Dour), 124, 137–39, 141 Senghor, Léopold, 40 sex education. See bandes dessinées (comics) sexual exploitation, xxiii, 287–88, 293–95, 300; and racial stereotyping, 295–98 sexual identity, 313–14 sexual injury, 289–91 sexual promiscuity, 82–84, 87–88 sexual torture, 288–90 sexual violence, xxiii, 287–88, 300; graphic representation, 289–91 Shafiq, Doria, 108–9 Shaʼraawi, Huda, 107, 108 Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, 310–11 Sheldon, Kathleen, 341 SIDA (song-dance), 77, 89–90; call and response rhetoric style, 81; dramatic satirical dialogue style, 82–83; effectiveness, 80, 89; humorous dramatic parody style, 84–86; as parable, 85–86; significant impact, 87 silence, in photographs, 97 Simidor, Daniel, 252–53 Simmons, Benson, 253

Index

Sinka, Ali, 22, 23 Smith, Pamela, 223 Snell-Hornby, Mary, 224 social domination, through sexual violence, 289, 290–91 social injustice, against women, 77, 82–84 social media, xv; use of Latin orthographies, 197–98; use of romanized and Arabic-based orthographies, 192–93 social relations during famine, from oral literature, 51 social spaces, and photography, 103, 104 solidarity: Cameroonian women, 10–11; and famine, 51; and folk wrestling, 154–57 “Souffles” (Diop), 39–40 Soulfood équatoriale (Equatorial Soulfood) (Miano), 127–28 souwere, 268 Sow, Fatou, 118 Sparrow, Jennifer, 315 Stéphane, Micius, 233 Stop Sida (public health material), 117 storytellers (conteurs), 71; importance, 62 suban textiles, 19–20 suka, 80 Sundiata (Kouyaté), 40–41 Suthrerland-Addy, Esi, 126–27 Sy, El Hadji Malick, 266–67, 269 “talking textiles”. See International Women’s Day pagne Le Tam-tam des arènes (Tam-tam of the arena) (Dadié), 150 Tansi, Sony Labou, 214 Tayizahi (board game), 120–21 Taylor, Erin B., 257–59, 261 teaching materials, 183–84 television, religious shows, 269 téra-tera textiles, xvii–xviii, 15–16; color scheme, 20–21; evolution, 19–20;

359

and Nigerien nationalism, 22–25; themes and motifs, 16–17, 20–21, 24–26 textiles, xiv–xv; Cameroon. See International Women’s Day pagne; Niger, 16. See also téra-tera textiles; themes and motifs. See themes and motifs (textiles) texts, relations between images and, 96–97, 98–100, 105–6 themes (narrative), Sahelian oral literature, 50–52 themes and motifs (textiles): arkilla kunta, 20; pagne, xiv, 7–11; suban, 19–20; téra-tera, 16–17, 20–21, 24–26 Thiam, Pierre, 125 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), xx; acoustic aspects of folk wrestling, 153, 154; integrative aspects of folk wrestling, 155, 158; significance of call to the arena, 151 Thoreau, Henry David, 321–22 Tifinagh literacy, revival, xi–xii Tijanya brotherhood, clothing style, 266 time and space: and representation of bodily pain, 58–59; and visual experience, 106–7, 109 Touba, Serigne, 272 Toucet, Pablo, 22, 23, 24–25 Tourist Art (Charlier and Civil), xxii, 247–49; DeWitt Peters in, 253; Haitian market women in, 261–62; visual field of images, 260 tourist art, Haitian. See Haitian tourist art Tout-monde (Glissant), 322–23, 329 transcription, of West African recipes, 134–42

360 Index

transgression as resistance, 68–70 translation: prose, 223–24; West African recipes, 134–42 transportation, as textile theme and motif, 19–20, 25–26 trauma: in fiction, 341; notion, 340–41 Traversée de la mangrove (Condé), 328–31 Trotz, D. Alissa, 332 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 251 Tyson, Ndeye Ndiaye, 158 “Unbuntu,” 9 UNESCO, 183 UNESCO BREDA and the ADEA Working Group on Early Childhood Development, 184 UNICEF, 79 United Nations Development Program (UNDP), 83 Véronèse, Paolo, 237–38 visual media, HIV-AIDS education, 120–21 visual performance, and folk wrestling, 152–53 visual representation, in Egyptian women’s press, 103–5 Vodou: anti-superstition campaign against, 234, 252; in art, 233, 240 Warner-Vieyra, Myriam, xxiv, 337, 340 water, lack of, 276 weavers and weaving, Nigerien, 17–19, 25–26 Wedding at Cana. See Les Noces de Cana (Wedding at Cana) (Biguad) wedding celebrations, with cultural groups, 162–63

Werewere Liking, 214 West African culture: centrality of griotic tradition, 33; culinary practices, 124, 126–29, 139–41; folk wrestling, 156; retentions, 34–37; through animated films, xxiii, 275–76, 281–82. See also Sahel; names of specific nations, for e.g., Niger Where Art is Joy (Rodman), 254–55 Wolof language, 135, 136, 143n4 women: animated film posters, 277–78, 281; condemnation of, for prostitution, 88–89; and culinary practices, 128, 141, 144n25; and immigration, 171–72; objectification, 83, 84, 87; ownership of women’s bodies, 78–79, 87; voice to, 99; vulnerability to HIV-AIDS infection, 77, 82–84. See also Cameroonian women; Caribbean women; Egyptian women; Nigerien women women’s press, Egyptian: photography in, xix, 103–4. See also Bint al Nil (journal); L’Egyptienne (magazine); al-Fatat (magazine); Rose al Youssef (magazine) Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel (Sutherland-Addy and Diaw), 126–27 working women, Cameroonian, 8–9 worksongs, West African, 127, 129 World War I, 306, 308–10, 315 World War II, 306, 310, 313, 315 wrestling. See folk wrestling Wrestling in Dakar (documentary), 158

Index

writing: as “problematic space,” 338; and shaping of identities, xxiv, 337–38, 342; as “space of possibilities,” 338–39 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 339–40 Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, Rutgers University Symposium (2013), xv–xvi

361

ʿYar Gagara (song), 88–89 “Yollo morou” (Caressing the Braids) (famine song), 51 al-Youssef, Fatima, 104–5 youth social clubs, and sex education, 118 Zalaika (band), 88 zankpahoun (mourning songs), 162, 166n3 Zarma-Songhay, 50–51 Zobel, Joseph, 321, 326 Zorome, Aly, 117

About the Contributors

Ousseina D. Alidou is Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University, and in Spring 2015, completed her second term as Director of the Center for African Studies. As author of Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (2005), which was a runner-up for The African Studies Association 2007 Women’s Caucus Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, and of Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, and Social Change (2013), she created a servicelearning study-abroad program in Senegal that launched in July 2015. Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum, a University of Essex Ph.D., is Director of the Women’s Studies Program and teaches African Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York. Her academic interests lie in gender and women’s studies, African cultural studies, with a focus on African oral traditions, African languages and Linguistics, translation studies, French and francophone/diaspora studies. Her current research focus is on women’s human rights, gender construction in language and society, African women’s verbal art and knowledge production, women’s movements: from local organizing to global networking for social change. She holds degrees from Université de Yaoundé and the University of Edinburgh. Vladimir Cybil Charlier earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and has received several awards and fellowships for her work, including a residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her paintings and multimedia pieces have been featured in solo shows and group exhibitions in the US, Canada, Venezuela, Argentina, Italy, Dominican Republic, and Brazil. With Gabrielle Civil, she created the book Tourist Art. 363

364

About the Contributors

Gabrielle Civil is a poet, translator, and conceptual and performance artist originally from Detroit. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from NYU and was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to make black feminist performance art in Mexico. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Performance at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. With Vladimir Cybil Charlier, she created the book Tourist Art. Barbara Cooper is Professor of History at Rutgers University. Her research in West Africa has focused upon gender, religion, and health in the Sahel over the long twentieth century. Author of two books, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 and Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel, her current research explores the history of childbirth and reproductive health in Niger. Bojana Coulibaly is a lecturer and researcher in African postcolonial literature. She holds a Ph.D. in African literature from the University of Tours and an M.A. in English from the University of Orleans, France. She has taught African short fiction, African literature and film, as well as political thought in African literature in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures, Rutgers University as well as American and African American literature in the English Department at the University of Orleans. Her research focuses on postcolonial African anglophone and francophone literature, genre studies, and trauma and war literature. Rokhaya Fall Diawara, Early Childhood Development (ECD) Programme Specialist at UNESCO’s Regional Bureau for Education in Africa based in Dakar (BREDA), is the author and technical coordinator for the “Collection of Early Childhood Cultures”- “Bouba and Zaza” series collection (2012). Her other publications include “La case des Tout-Petits”, a collection of five booklets and “Les petits lions”—3 work books. She earned a master’s in Education, Cultural Resources and Social Intervention from Université Paris 13. Since 2007, she has been coordinating the Association for the Development of Education in Africa Working Group on ECD which provides an informal platform to enhance cooperation and collaboration among national governments, regional networks, U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and bilateral organizations. Before joining UNESCO, she worked in the Senegalese government, and was a consultant for the World Bank, UNICEF, and Plan International, drafting and publishing documents, studies, and papers on basic education, the education of street children, and developed a kit for a pilot program on Literacy and Non-formal education in developing countries.



About the Contributors

365

Khady Diène is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern French Studies at the University of Maryland. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on how Senghorian universalism has influenced the world-views of contemporary authors in the context of littérature-monde. Khady is also preparing a graduate certificate in Women Studies. Before coming to the University of Maryland, Khady completed an M.A. in French and American Studies at the University of Kansas. Oumar Diogoye Diouf is a Fulbright fellow who received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He also received a B.A., an M.A., and a Postgraduate Diploma (DEA) from Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar and an ESL/EFL Teaching Certificate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Sénégal). Dr. Diouf currently teaches at Tivaounane Peulh High School in Dakar. In his book project, “Pragmatic Decolonial Moves: AfricanAtlantic Writers within a Minor Literature,” he advocates a necessary rerouting of the postcolonial discourse towards the actual interests, concerns, and challenges of postcolonial peoples. He draws upon pragmatist and affect criticisms to shift emphasis from the hitherto predominant colonial discourse analysis to subjunctive—that is, goal-oriented and change-making—forms of postcolonial discourse analysis. Nathan H. Dize is in the master’s program in Modern French Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also the main translator and content curator of a Digital Humanities project sponsored by the University of Maryland Libraries in partnership with the Department of French and Italian entitled: “A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of1789.” Dize’s research focuses on gender, race, and sexuality in francophone and Caribbean film, history, and literature. Gladys M. Francis (Ph.D. Purdue University) is a native of Guadeloupe and Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgia State University. As the Director of the South Atlantic Center of the Institute of the Americas, she develops international academic and artistic collaborations. Recipient of many research grants, awards, and fellowships, she has also published several articles and book chapters. She is currently finishing a book on the aesthetic of the transgressive in francophone Caribbean women’s creations, while her second monograph on francophone films is in its initial phase. Her edited volume “Amour, sexe, genre et trauma dans la Caraïbe francophone” is forthcoming. Maha Gad El Hak is a professor in the French Language and Literature Department in the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, Egypt, where she

366

About the Contributors

teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on civilization, cultural history, translation, and visual semiotics. Her first thesis dealt with the French translation of Al-Jabarti’s chronicle about the French Campaign of Egypt, while her Ph.D. thesis was a semiotic analysis of the Description de l’Egypte (État moderne). She has conducted research on various types of images: cartoons, comics, movies, animated films, photography, digital image, and posters. She is also the co-author of “le Sentimental en Egypte contemporaine” in the Dictionnaire mondial des Images (2006). Boureima Alpha Gado is a historian and socioeconomist in the History Department at l’Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey in Niger. He is the author of several studies among which are Une histoire des famines au Sahel (ed. Harmattan, 1993), Crises alimentaires au sahel, les réponses paysannes (Ed. du Flamboyant, 2010), les Grandes figures de l’histoire du Niger (1993), and several articles on food insecurity in journals such as Sécheresses, La Revue canadienne des études africaines, Afrique développement (CODESRIA, Dakar). He has accepted invitations as a visiting professor at the Center of African Studies at various universities: London, Leyden (The Netherlands), Uppsala (Sweden), Bayreuth (Germany), Rutgers (US). His work on food crises in the Sahel earned him an international research prize from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He is currently the Recteur of the Université de Tillabéri in Niger. Amanda Gilvin completed her dissertation, “The Warp of a Nation: The Exhibition and Circulation of Nigerien Art, 1920-Present” at Cornell University in 2012. Until June 2015, she was the Five College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African Art and Architecture and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College and Smith College. Beginning in August 2015, she will begin a new position, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Skidmore College. Donna Gustafson is Andrew W. Mellon Liaison for Academic Programs and Curator at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Art History. Her publications and exhibition projects at the Zimmerli include Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture, at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers, Rachel Perry Welty 24/7, Water, and Lalla Essaydi: Les femmes du Maroc. She is author of Images from the World Between: The Circus in Twentieth Century American Art (2001), Thomas Moran: The Poetry of Place (2001), and has published reviews and articles on a variety of topics in American and contemporary art. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers in 2010.



About the Contributors

367

Fakhri Haghani teaches comparative and transnational history of the Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Iranian cultures at Rutgers. Her research, informed by the notion of fluid, flexible, and nomadic borders between languages, identities, cultures, and disciplines, explores the intersection of gender, aesthetics, critical theory, popular culture, politics, and social and intellectual history of modernism, secularism, and liberalism from the standpoint of visual cultures shaped by postcolonial discourses. Professor Haghani is working on a book manuscript which traces the historical roots of the emergence of the “new woman” in Egypt and Iran, which culminated in the 2009 Iranian uprising and the 2011 Egyptian revolution in the making. Haghani’s field research has been funded by the American Research Center in Egypt and the Council of American Overseas Research Center. She holds an advanced degree in Art History from Facolta di Magistero at University of Rome (Sapienza), and an M.A. in Women’s Studies and a Ph.D. in History from Georgia State University. Phuong Hoang is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland. She is currently writing a dissertation on the political writings of francophone Vietnamese and Algerian militants. Her research interests center around the anticolonial revolutions in Vietnam (1945–1954) and Algeria (1954–1962), particularly guerrilla warfare, insurgent organization, and recruitment tactics. Julie Huntington is Associate Professor in the Department of English and World Literatures at Marymount Manhattan College. Author of Rhythm, Music and Identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone Novels (2009), she is currently working on a manuscript titled “Pestles, Pots and Poetry: Recipes as Rhetoric in Contemporary African Fiction” in which she explores what happens when the oral and instrumental traditions associated with meal preparation are translated and transcribed in literary formats. Laurence Jay-Rayon holds a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the Université de Montréal, Canada, and is currently teaching French and translation at NYU and Montclair State University, where she heads the new Center for Translation and Interpreting. Her research interests include translation theory and practice, more specifically in the areas of African literatures, poetics, and children’s literature. Her articles have appeared in Research in African Literatures and Translation Studies journals such as TTR, Meta, Tusaaji, and Hermēneus. She has over 25 years of experience as a language professional and intercultural communications specialist—teaching, translating, interpreting, and publishing—and is fortunate to have lived and worked in 5 countries in Europe, Africa, and North America.

368

About the Contributors

Abdoulaye Elimane Kane retired from teaching philosophy at the Lycée Blaise Diagne and the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. Author of five novels and holder of a doctorat d’état, he has also served as Minister of Communication and Minister of Culture in Senegal. Medha Karmarkar teaches French language and literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of Madame de Charrière et la Révolution des idées and articles on female friendship in the eighteenth century. She is currently working on francophone women writers from North Africa and the Caribbean. Renée Larrier is Professor and Chair of the Department of French and former Acting Director of the Center of African Studies at Rutgers University New Brunswick. Author of Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean (winner of the CLA Creative/Scholarship Award), Autofiction and Authority in the Francophone Caribbean, and coeditor along with E. Anthony Hurley and Joseph McLaren of Migrating Words and Worlds: Pan-Africanism Updated, she also coedited with Brinda J. Mehta “Indian Ethnoscapes in Francophone Literature,” L’Esprit créateur 50 (Summer 2010). She has contributed dozens of articles to essay collections and scholarly journals such as Research in African Literatures, French Review, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Présence Africaine, Journal of International Francophone Studies, Dalhousie French Studies, Journal of Haitian Studies, Women in French, among others. Jean Hérald Legagneur is finishing up his doctoral dissertation on iconic treatment in Haitian naïve painting under the supervision of Jean-Marc Lachaud and Giusy Pisano at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. He has an undergraduate degree in modern letters and a master’s in philosophy from Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis. He teaches at the Université d’Etat d’Haïti. Anne Rehill, who holds a Ph.D. in Modern French Studies from the University of Maryland, studies francophone literature and cultural history in Canada and the Caribbean. She is especially interested in attitudes toward nature as expressed in historical literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anne Patricia Rice holds the rank of Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Lehman College, CUNY. Since she earned her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center at CUNY, her research interests have expanded to include diaspora studies, migration narratives, autobiography, and postcolonial theory.



About the Contributors

369

Edwige Sylvestre-Ceide, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti to parents from the southwest area of the island, has lived in France since early childhood. A native speaker of Haitian Creole and French and later adopting English and Spanish, she earned degrees in translation, international trade management, and international relations, specializing in the European Union and the Americas. She currently works in a Parisian training office specialized in customs and European tax rules. She is also an independent scholar, translator, diarist, and poet whose work has appeared in anthologies published in Cuba and Germany. Cofounder and president of the cultural association Passerelles extra-muros based in Saint-Denis, Paris, she is also a member of several other cultural organizations. Becky Schulthies is an assistant professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. She has published several articles on language ideology and identity in the Middle East and North Africa, media reception’s impact on family interpretive practices in Morocco and Lebanon, and the relationships among media ideologies, technology, and conceptions of language. She also contributed to and coedited the third edition of Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East along with Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn Early. In addition, she has collaborated with Aomar Boum on research that examined al-Jazeera program moderators’ heteroglossic management of discourse on two talk shows. Jean-Baptiste Sourou is Professor of Social Communications and researcher in Anthropology and African Cultures. He works actively on the endless flows of African immigration to Europe. Author of several analytic books and articles, he teaches in Europe, at the Gregorian University in Rome, and in Africa, at St Augustine University of Tanzania. He is the founder and president of the Center for Documentation and Research on Art and Social Sciences (CeDReS-Project) in Benin Republic. Meghan Tinsley is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Boston University, where her research focuses on collective memory and nationalism in postcolonial Britain and France. She holds a B.A. in International Relations and French from Wellesley College and a Master of Science in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies from the London School of Economics. Tinsley’s interest in language, education, and collective identity emerged from her own experience working as a secondary-school English teaching assistant on Réunion Island.