Of Postcolonial Entanglement and Durée: Reflections on the Francophone African Novel

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Adesanmi, Pius

Bari Kouli's compatriots were hailing him as a new divinity. . . He was hailed as a saviour; he was already creating his own legend. For days now the people had talked of nothing but his wisdom, his eloquence, his intelligence, his struggle against the White Man to obtain the independence of South Majiland. He was credited with everything, given everything, everything was due to him. He was the Master. (127)

It is significant that the birth of Baré Koulé's mythology coincides with the event marking the birth of the nation: political independence from a European colonial power. This scenario is reproduced in various shades and according to different authorial temperaments in virtually all the power durée novels published after Le cercle des tropiques. It is in this sense that Fantouré's novel foregrounds the ontological doubleness that constitutes the foundation of the African postcolony: the institutionalized myth-narrative of the Maximum Ruler and the narrative of nationalism were the two yarns that were woven together as the unifying identity of the totalitarian African state, especially in Francophone Africa.

The novels of the postcolonial power durée are political novels whose discursive universe is governed by the systematic negation of the subaltern subject's will/right to an egalitarian and participatory political agency. As evidenced by the enforced subscription of the citizens of Les Marigots du Sud to "messie-koism," the quasi-religious state ideology of Baré Koulé, the political novel is also one in which a "felonious state" (Bayart, Ellis, Hibou 1) turns its Weberian monopoly of all instruments of legitimate violence into the production of subservient subjects.12

The entanglement of colonial and postcolonial temporalities is maintained in the power durée novel by the shadowy presence of France, whose representatives function as "advisors." However, the main impact of the postcolonial power durée on Francophone African fiction lies in a radical re-invention of textual idiom. Because the socio-political realities feeding the imagination of the Francophone African writer became so grotesque that textual and narrative strategies inherited from Flaubert, Zola, and Stendhal quickly became inadequate, the power durée novels typically employ the so-called postcolonial delinearization of narrative temporality, a combination of strategies that includes the defamiliarization of reality, the expansion of narrative space, the multiplication of voices to achieve polyphony, the use of neologisms, other syntactic transgressions aimed at domesticating the French language, and, most important, a recourse to African oral discursive strategies, which have transformed the novels of the power durée into avenues for apprehending the postcolony as a site of "excess" and "promiscuity," to borrow Mbembe's notions.

The Feminist Durée

The emergence of the authoritarian postcolonial African nation-state as a thematic durée in Francophone African fiction coexists uneasily with the growth of an oppositional feminist durée in that literary firmament. It is now generally agreed in African studies that colonialism combined with Africa's traditional patriarchal ethos to effect a systematic subalternization of African women.13 Consequently, the African state that emerged from this historical crisis was sexist and patriarchal. The entirely masculinist aura of the nationalist movements that gave birth to the African state, coupled with the sexist dictatorships that followed it, ensured a phallogocentric continuum from which the question of women's voice and agency were occluded (see Oyeronke).