French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

In Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera L’Africaine—better known in its Italian version as L’Africana—the highlight of the musical expression is the great tenor aria “O Paradiso,” sung by Vasco da Gama as he rounds the Cape and gives voice to his rapture upon beholding the magnificence of the South African landscape. But this is not the only note on which the aria is rung, for in the second part, Vasco da Gama declares his resolve to annex this land and to offer it to his country, so that, as he pointedly puts it, the whole of Europe might be enriched. In this aria, an aesthetic response to Africa prompts a colonial impulse to which it becomes immediately conjoined. This observation defines the broad perspective of my presentation: the way in which the African world functions not merely as object of contemplation but also as universe of experience, serving in both registers as reference for imaginative expression. It is especially in the novel that this universe is fully explored in the French language, first by metropolitan writers associated with the corpus that has come to be known as the roman colonial—the corpus of novels written by French authors in which the colonial world serves as setting¹—and later by their African successors.

It is with the emergence and development of what can now be termed the “postcolonial francophone novel”² that the global reach of French as a language of cultural production has been most forcefully demonstrated. This development was, however, facilitated and brought into being by an existing literary representation of Africa in the roman colonial. As with African novelists who have written in other European languages—English and Portuguese, in particular—the acknowledged masterpieces of the fictional genre provided the essential foundation for fictional expression. Indeed, the very fact of language became both an enabling and constraining factor, for what is now designated as “African literature” is ultimately a derivation from the metropolitan corpus. It is in this sense that, with its immediate reference to their context of life and experience, the roman colonial came to have a special meaning for African writers coming into the French literary inheritance. Works by French writers for whom Africa served as fictional setting—as was indeed the case for the entire corpus of the roman colonial which functioned as vehicle for a certain Western discourse—can be said, given the historical and ideological context of their creation, to have constituted an especially pressing challenge: one to which Africans had inevitably to respond.

In order to fully grasp the scope of the trajectory from the roman colonial to the postcolonial African novel in French, we must begin by considering the travel narrative or récit de voyage, which served as the historical and intellectual background to the roman colonial and as its literary antecedent; in its essential character as representation of the Other, the French colonial novel overlaps with and prolongs the récit de voyage, which, in the wake of the historic encounters between Europeans and other peoples during the Age of Discovery, came to constitute a distinct genre of Western literature. Where the diversity of peoples and manners within Europe was acknowledged and taken almost for granted and interactions between them proceeded along the lines of a common recognition, the encounter with these other worlds fostered a new perception: that of a radical difference between Europeans and other races, who began to be perceived as forming distinct categories of humankind. The fact of alterity (alterité) thus became a major theme and preoccupation of Western thought.³

Already in the sixteenth century, works such as Montaigne’s “Essai sur les Cannibales” and Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage faict en terre du Brésil⁴ attest to a distant interest in the life, manners and modes of thought of inhabitants of the world beyond the perimeters of Western civilization, an interest that was to be expanded and elaborated in the eighteenth century by writers such as Diderot (Supplément au voyage de Bougainville) and Montesquieu (Lettres persanes). A new element came to be introduced by the enslavement of Africans and the hierarchical conception of race that it engendered. In the famous passage in which Montesquieu ironizes on the blackness of Africans in L’esprit des lois and in the incident of the Surinamese slave in Voltaire’s Candide, we witness an early understanding of the connection in modern times between race and slavery. The postulation of race as an essential category (primarily biological but with cultural and moral implications) provided the conceptual foundation for the hierarchy formulated by Gobineau in his Essai sur les inégalités des races humaines, a hierarchy that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl later sought to ground in the different modes of mental functions of various races—hence his notion of a primitive or “prelogical mentality” (mentalité prélogique) which he ascribed to non-Western peoples, predominantly Africans.⁵ This is the ideological framework that for so long governed the negative representation of Africa and its peoples in French literature,⁶ even when a positive image can still be discerned in such works such as Histoire de Louis Anniaba⁷ and Claire de Duras’s Ourika.

The occupation of Egypt in the late eighteenth century by Napoleon and the expedition he commissioned laid the foundation for the archeological work of Champollion, Volney, and other French scholars, which enabled the constitution of the new discipline of Egyptology and led to the emergence in the nineteenth century of Oriental studies (Langues Orientales) and of ethnology, new disciplines concerned primarily with the study of non-Western peoples and constituted as part of a new body of knowledge, a form of savoir. The intensified curiosity they engendered facilitated an opening up of the world to the Western imagination, which in turn lent a powerful impulse to exoticism in literature and in art. Nerval’s Voyage en Orient and Flaubert’s Salammbo share a common source in the taste for the bizarre and the exotic that underlay the scholarly endeavors that produced the new scholarship, which serve as antecedents and backdrop to what Edward Said has called “orientalism.”⁸ Although Said’s reference was to the Middle East, the general thrust of his critique derives from his sense of the association between orientalism and ethnology on one hand, and on the other, the ideological foundations in the nineteenth century of the French colonial adventure as it expanded throughout the world.⁹ What interests us here is the fact that the literary expression of orientalism provided a template for the French colonial novel and, in the specific case of Africa, determined a set of tropes by which the continent and its peoples came to be represented. The ambiguous character of this literature is well illustrated by Eugène Fromentin’s Une année dans le Sahel (1857) and Pierre Loti’s Le roman d’un Spahi (1881), both of which proffer a vision of Africa and its peoples determined by a colonial perspective. I propose to examine these two works in some detail, for they provide an understanding of the ways in which literature functioned as an expression of colonial relations, granting us a view, often direct, into the states of mind of the characters involved in these relations.

Eugène Fromentin enjoyed in his lifetime a double reputation as a painter and as a writer who invested the best part of his literary gifts in his travel books. Une année dans le Sahel, a record of a voyage he made to North Africa, was first serialized in the Revue des Deux-Mondes in 1854 and reissued in book form in 1857, thus less than thirty years after the French conquest of Algeria. That this event was still a fresh memory is registered in the following passage in which, referring to the heroism of the Arab resistance to the French invasion, Fromentin takes a measure of colonial violence:

La véritable histoire de la colonie est, ici comme partout, déposée dans les sépultures. Que d’héroisme connus et inconnus, presque tous oubliés déjà, et dont pas un cependant n’a été inutile.

[The real history of the colony is, here as everywhere, entrusted to tombs. Such heroism, my friend, on the part of the known and unknown, almost all of whom are already forgotten yet not one of whom lived in vain.]¹⁰

The book contains several passages of magnificent scene painting, the prose reflecting an artist’s eye for detail and nuance, but its main interest derives from Fromentin’s observations of the people, which testify perhaps to an effort of sincere comprehension. Nevertheless, there runs through the book a sense of disquiet and moral discomfort, epitomized in this summing up of what seems to Fromentin the operative power of the Arab character in the colonial context:

Quel que soit le sentiment vrai qui se cache sous la profonde impassibilité de ces quelques milliers d’hommes, isoles désormais parmi nous, désarmés, et qui n’existent plus que par tolérance, il leur reste encore un moyen de défense insaisissable : ils sont patients, et la patience arabe est une arme d’une trempe extraordinaire dont le secret leur appartient, comme celui de leur acier.

[Whatever the true feelings that hide beneath the extreme passivity of those several thousand individuals, who from now live among us, disarmed, their very existence just tolerated, they still have left an unassailable means of defense. They are patient and Arab patience is an arm that has an extraordinary temper. As is the case with their still blades, the secret process is known only to them.]¹¹

Fromentin is well aware that this is a generalization; he makes the crucial concession a few pages later that it is impossible to define the Arab character “d’une façon absolue.” This does not prevent him, however, from adopting the same totalizing view with regard to other peoples that crowd his pages, in particular Jews and Blacks. Describing the latter as “des êtres à part,” he goes on to offer an image of them “as a strange group of people, unsettling to behold [étrange race, inquiétante à voir]” and concludes the portrait with an observation:

belle et repoussante à la fois, les yeux caressants, la voix sifflante, le parler doux ; joviale avec un visage aussi funèbre que celui de la nuit ; rieuse, mais avec la bouche fendue comme le masque antique, et donnant ainsi je ne sais quoi de difforme à la plus aimable expression du visage humain.

[Being both repellent and beautiful, their faces are as funerary as night’s own. When they smile, it’s with a gaping mouth like a classical mask, thus providing something strangely misshapen to precisely what is most pleasing in a face’s expression.]¹²

Fromentin’s curiosity is more vivid when he turns his attention to the Arab women, for whom he confesses a fascination. This throws light on one of the principal episodes in the work: his adventure with Haoua, an Arab woman whom he espies in the street and to whom he later pays a visit at her home during which he is able to ascertain the veracity of Delacroix’s depiction, in his painting Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, of the domestic arrangements of a certain class of Arab women.¹⁴ Along with random accounts of his tours of the region on horseback and brief anecdotes of his meetings with local personalities, the story of Haoua comes to provide the book’s narrative content, in its tracing of her personal history through two marriages, culminating in her brutal murder by her estranged husband at the “fantasia” (durbar festival) that concludes the book.¹⁵

Fromentin’s often meticulous documentation of the elaborate social structure that regulates the communal life of his Arab hosts, as well as his intuition of its animating values, suggests a recognition on his part of a distinctive and conscious organization of their world. This does not prevent him, however, from designating this world at the end of his work as a société primitive. It thus becomes evident that Fromentin has been operating all along with a unilateral vision of this other world, a vision held to from the very beginning and that no fresh experience is allowed to disturb or complicate. The profound motivation of his movement toward the Arabs seems therefore to establish a firm sense of his own racial and cultural superiority, as the basis of a conquering will that is his natural endowment as a white man. This emerges finally as the controlling impulse of his evocations, a requirement that takes precedence over any obligation, dictated by the nature of his work, for an objective account of the native society.

When we turn to Pierre Loti’s novel Le roman d’un Spahi, the related need for a justifying ideology of colonial rule becomes even more evident as the driving force of the narrative and descriptions of the Africa scene. The continent functions here less as an autonomous area of life than as the reflecting canvas of a disaffection toward it on the part of Jean Peyral, the novel’s principal character. Loti proceeds by a conscious method of contrasting Peyral’s French background to the African environment, stressing his acute sense of displacement, which reinforces his attachment to his native Cévennes, despite his lowly origins and status in France. Africa is for him not merely a strange world but a menacing one, so that his sentiment of exile assumes an ontological dimension in what the narrator calls “un état de non être [a state of nonbeing].”¹⁶

It is thus not surprising that the outstanding feature of Loti’s novel is the negative depiction of Africa, carried through a relentless procession of images of death and desolation that mark out the continent as a land accursed (terre de malediction). The native population is seen largely as an undifferentiated mass and characterized in animal terms, the words singe (monkey) and simiesque (simian) recurring throughout as dominant metaphors. The omnipresence of the vulture in particular infuses Loti’s novel with a somber symbolism in which the landscape, with its fauna and flora, combines with the people to create an atmosphere of listless apprehension. Against this background, the liaison between Jean Peyral and the Senegalese woman Fatou-Gueye that provides the focus of the narrative appears unnatural, an animal passion driven solely by a sensuality that precludes any form of genuine relation between the characters.

Peyral’s moral conflicts, dramatized throughout the novel, are set against the unreflective nature of Fatou-Gueye; this is presented as an ingrained perversity that conforms with her degraded status, deriving essentially from her “impure blood” (sang impur):

Les larmes qu’elle a versées, les cris de veuve qu’elle a poussés, suivant l’usage de son pays, tout cela était sincère et déchirant – Jean a été touché jusqu’au fond du cœur par ce désespoir; il a oublié qu’elle était méchante, menteuse et noire.¹⁷

[The tears that she shed, her widow’s lament as is the custom in her country—all this was sincere and distressing. Jean was touched to the depths of his heart by this display of despair. He had forgotten that she was vicious, deceitful, and black. (Translation mine)]

The overt racism that pervades Loti’s work constitutes it as the prototype of the French roman colonial. Loti’s novel, however, is not made up solely of a drab procession of this type of racial stereotypes. Here and there, he departs from his habitual deprecatory tone in order to grant a certain value to the landscape: “Le Sahara et le Soudan ont de ces nuits froides, qui ont la splendeur claire de nos nuits d’hiver, avec plus de transparence de lumière [The cold nights of the Sahara and Sudan have the splendor of our winter nights, brighter and more luminous].”¹⁸ This positive appreciation of the land implied in the parallel with the French environment (nos nuits d’hiver) anticipates the novel’s climatic scenes, culminating in the death of Peyral during a military campaign along the Senegal River, scenes in which the narrative moves beyond the ideological presuppositions by which it is conditioned. A certain element of pathos pervades the final scene in which the self-immolation of Fatou-Gueye, who also kills the son she has had by Peyral, lifts the narrative to a new emotional level, enough to suggest a deeper imaginative grasp of this character as one endowed with human sensibility. A tension is thus set up at the end of the novel, at the level of its narrative development, between its ideological thrust and the realistic demands of the fictional genre, even when this tends towards melodrama, as here; this tension demonstrates Loti’s concern to lend his narrative a degree of imaginative interest, if not indeed of fictional truth. Even then, Loti’s novel derives its ultimate significance from its function and status as an essential component of the discourse of empire. It is this fundamental circumstance of the roman colonial exemplified by Loti’s work that René Maran sought to confront with his first novel, Batouala.

Maran’s novel may be said to have been produced by an acute psychological tension stemming from his ambiguous situation as a Caribbean, in a double and conflicted relation both to France and to Africa. Born in 1887 in Martinique of Guyanese parents, he spent his early years at various locations in Equatorial Africa, where his father served in the French colonial administration. At the age of seven, he was sent to boarding school in Bordeaux, where he seems to have been lonely and unhappy, a state of mind to which his two novels Le coeur serré (1931) and Un homme pareil aux autres (1947) were later to bear ample testimony. Upon completion of his secondary education in 1910, he entered the colonial service and was posted to Oubangi Chari (now Central African Republic), where he came to develop a new sense of African belonging of which Batouala was the first manifestation. The novel won the Prix Goncourt in 1921, drawing attention to the colonial question, leading to his summary dismissal from the French colonial service. He spent the rest of his life as a full-time writer in Paris, where he died in 1960.

The polemical intent of Batouala is advertised by the subtitle that Maran attached to his work: “véritable roman nègre,” a term that suggests a new mode of depiction of Africa that breaks with the one we habitually encounter in the colonial novel. With this term, Maran announces his intention to represent the continent from an indigenous perspective, one that derives from a closer understanding of life on the continent. The protest theme is central to the novel’s ideological project, upon which Maran was to elaborate in the preface that he appended to the second edition of the novel after the award of the Prix Goncourt. However, the defining element of the novel, in its quality as textual construction, is the effect produced by what might be termed the ethnographic discourse that serves as realistic grounding of the fiction, the recreation of a social and cultural universe as framework of the narrative. Sometimes explanatory—“Il est de règle chez les bandas” (It is a rule among the Bandas)—sometimes apologetic, as in the defense of polygamy, the ethnographic details make apparent throughout the novel the sense of deep personal investment on the part of Maran in the African reference of his novel.¹⁹ It is instructive in this regard to note that the unfolding of the love triangle that forms the core of the narrative is enclosed within an extended account of a gathering of the tribe and the performance of the collective rites associated with the annual initiation ceremony.

However, as the novel progresses, the colonial reference comes to be subordinated to another theme that lends momentum to the narrative, that of human passion—in its manifestation here as a form of sexual jealousy—upon which the major episodes are constructed and through which the denouement unfolds.²⁰ Maran himself draws attention to his deliberate recourse to the aesthetics of realism through which the two aspects of his theme are developed, when he describes the novel, in an image borrowed from painting, as “une succession d’eaux fortes” (a series of watercolors). This refers in the first place to the mode of depiction, the bold strokes of his descriptions and harsh outlines of the narrative method, which leaves little room for nuance and suggestion. It also refers to the narrative convention that Maran was taking over, his conscious reworking of the realistic mode of the nineteenth-century French novel, in order to reflect the African environment and thus to localize the action. This aspect of the novel is signaled at the very outset:

Dehors, les coqs chantent. A leur “kékéréké” se mêlent le chevrotement des cabris sollicitant du mufle les sexes de leurs femelles, le ricanement des toucans, puis, là-bas, au fort haute brousse, le long des rives de la Pombo et de la Bamba, le hognement rauque des enfants de Bacouya, le singe à gueule de chien.

[Outside, the roosters are crowing. With their “kekereke” are mixed the bleating of the goats muzzling the behinds of their females, the chuckling of the toucans, and over there, in the depth of the deep brush all along the banks of the Pombo and the Bamba, the raucous quarrelling of the children of the Bacouya, the dog-faced monkey.]²¹

As a corollary of this functional realism, the evocations are governed by an effort to render in precise terms the characteristic modes of speech of the African characters, those turns of phrase by which social intercourse, the daily process of communication, is given form in oral societies, as in this example: “our ears are near your mouth.” A few pages later, we encounter another expressive image that springs naturally from the context: “Ta parole est de l’eau claire [Your speech is as clear as spring water].” The proverbial inclination demonstrated here and its rhetorical force can be felt at its most direct and incisive in this intervention by Batouala’s father, urging resignation to French domination:

Maran’s deployment of the language of fiction in French, then, is marked by a rhetoric that compels recourse to an African lexicon related to a distinctive environment and expressive of a culturally defined mode of apprehension: “Lentement sortie de sa case en nuages, la lune parcourt le grand village des étoiles [Emerging slowly from its hut of clouds, the moon glides across the starry village].”²³ Earlier, this movement of the moon is described in terms that are even more arresting:

The play of metaphor in passages such as these can be said to endow the French language with a distinctly new inflection. The significance of this emerges from the way Maran’s appropriation of French is governed by an African sensibility, in such a way indeed as to ground a veritable aesthetic of orality. This observation is well illustrated by the occurrence of those forms of iteration that lend a formulaic character to his prose: “Calme, ni frais, ni lourd, le vent agitait la dense peuplade des feuilles [Calm, neither cool nor muggy, the wind moved the dense mass of leaves].” The phrase returns two paragraphs later at the head of another evocation, prompted twice in the passage by this variation: “Ni frais ni lourd.” In other words, this phrase serves to set in motion a series of parallelisms, a device that is well attested in oral poetry. It thus comes as no surprise that Maran also incorporates the folktale into his novel, complete with songs and refrains that are integral to the genre, an aesthetic project intended to evoke a specific African universe of discourse and sensibility.

Maran’s textual practice involves, then, the meeting of two languages, held in tension, in which the African language serves as a kind of counterpoint to French.²⁵ This convergence of two linguistic systems and the two registers of expression they represent establishes within Maran’s novel a kind of dialogism, in Bakhtin’s sense of an interaction between two modes of speech, a relation of two modes of discourse. What is more, the whole import of the style takes us beyond the pure realism of its formal reference, so that it tends toward a symbolic representation of nature as much in its concrete embodiments as in its varying moods and dispositions:

Une nuée impénétrable sourd des étendues naguère surchauffées. L’eau cherche l’eau, s’attroupe, se fraie des routes, s’ameute en cascade, se mue en ruisseaux, dévale sur les pentes. Bondit vers la rivière.

[An impenetrable cloud rises from the area only lately overheated. Water seeks water, runs together, opens some paths for itself, gathers up in cascades, breaks off in streams, hurries down the slopes. Leaps toward the river.]²⁶

Et la pluie, des plus en plus ferme, de plus en plus dure, de plus en plus drue, éventre les toits, les effondre, flaque dans les cases, éteint leur foyers, délite les murs, cependant que le zigzag des éclairs, leur éclat, les craquements saccadés de la foudre, le fracas des arbres entraînant d’autres arbres en leur chute et les roulements de l’orage étonnent l’espace de leurs cataractes grondantes . . .

[And the rain, more and more solid, harder and harder, stronger and stronger, rips open roofs, breaks them up, splashes in the houses, puts out their fires, splits the walls, while the zig-zag of the lightning, its glare, the abrupt cracklings of the lightning bolts, the noise of the trees dragging down other trees in their fall and with their roaring waterfalls the rumblings of the storm astound the region . . .]²⁷

The accumulation of terms—the whole press and movement of this passage—betrays a self-conscious striving for effect, conditioned by Maran’s profound internalization of the dynamics of French prose as illustrated by classic writers such as Chateaubriand, whose influence is evident in the quotation. At the same time, Maran’s style testifies to a certain vitalist inspiration that governs the narrative and determines its organizing tropes. For what is notable here is the insistence on the extraordinary force of nature in its African manifestation.

The simplicities associated with the roman colonial are thus reversed and its characteristic tropes expanded, reworked, and ultimately transcended in a new aesthetic in order to convey a deeper, more authentic portrayal of the societies and cultures upon which Maran’s novel is focused. As text, Maran’s novel needs therefore to be read as a polemical reinscription of Africa within the framework of the French literary tradition. This takes the work beyond the exotic interest inherent in the objective descriptions of a world removed from the immediate experience of his presumed audience, for Maran aspires in his evocations to no less than a poetry of the African environment: of its forceful landscape and the natural life it sustains. We might note that this aspect of the novel is foregrounded by the brooding presence of the panther at key moments in the narrative and its role in the precipitation of events that culminates in the terrible irony of the final scene. In this scene, we see Batouala after having been wounded by the panther and in the clutch of a physical and mental agony as he slowly dies while watching his wife make love to his rival. The scene thus throws light on the way in which Maran’s evocation of the African environment comes to be charged with a deep tragic significance, an element inscribed within the story of Batouala himself, retracing as it does a single and momentous day in his life: from the morning when he awakes to a troubled existence, through its progression to the night of his extinction. In this way, Maran’s novel enacts the trajectory from birth to death that defines the necessary course of our human condition.

The reception of René Maran’s Batoula has from the beginning been diverse and even contradictory. The initial wave of enthusiasm provoked by the singular fact of a black writer winning the Prix Goncourt was soon followed by a sense of unease generated by the far from flattering image of Africa offered by the novel.²⁸ The fact is that although Maran’s novel is inspired by a reaction against the colonial novel, the work incorporates many of the standard tropes of the genre. It is true that these are deployed in such a way as to lend intensity to the dominant theme of his novel—that of human passion. It is precisely on this account that the novel provoked the strongest reaction, for the most insistent criticism has always concerned its apparent primitivism, as in the famous scene of a drinking orgy that ends with the death of Batouala’s father. The authorial commentary here and elsewhere in the novel betrays a deep ambivalence that haunts Maran’s consciousness, an ambivalence that goes deeper than the question of ethnic affiliation, for it is entailed in the myriad web of contradictions in which the colonized writer is caught up, the impossibility of adopting a unilateral point of view regarding the cultural and moral issues involved in the colonial encounter.²⁹

But it is also possible to place this scene in its context and to read it as an expression of his feeling for a populace reduced to extreme straits by their intolerable situation, for the conversation that takes place during the drinking constitutes a long and bitter indictment of colonialism. The orgy itself is represented as the sign of a profound demoralization of the Africans, their loss of the will to live as a consequence of their abjection.³⁰

Even when this is granted, the final scene, with what is regarded as its crude sexuality, has been considered especially objectionable. But it is well to bear in mind that Batouala was very much a work of the times, marked by a naturalism that also implied an intense valorization of the senses in literature.³¹ We need to recall in this respect the promotion of the libido encouraged by the reading of Freud, a sign of liberation from the repressive morality of bourgeois society; this reaction found expression, as with the surrealists, in a celebration of elementary drives and impulses. We might add that Maran’s vitalism, of which this celebration forms a part, has its source too in the Dionysian inspiration associated with Nietzsche.

Despite the criticisms and reservations, however, the impact of Maran’s novel proved to be lasting, for it assumed an exemplary significance for the generation of African writers that emerged in the years between the two world wars, beginning with Paul Hazoumé (Doguicimi, 1935), Ousmane Socé (Karim, 1935), and Abdoulaye Sadji (Maïmouna, 1953), whose novels reflect a new determination to narrate the African experience from an indigenous point of view.³² These are the pioneers of the postcolonial novel in French, at the head of which Maran’s work must now be seen to stand—an expressive current that includes the pastoral of an African childhood represented by Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir (1954), the fierce anticolonial realism of Ousmane Sembene, Mongo Beti, and Ferdinand Oyono, culminating in L’aventure ambigüe (1961), Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s great novel of colonial alienation.

The francophone African novel has since moved well beyond the thematic and expressive boundaries of this early generation of novelists, but the influence of Maran endures. We can see this in the reconstitution of the French language within the novel as a genre, a development in which his example has been determinant, first taken up by Birago Diop in his tales, and fully reflected in the oral forms and structures of Hampaté Bâ’s L’étrange destin de Wangrin (1973). It is with Amadou Kourouma, however, that this renewal of French begun by Maran attains its height. Kououma’s large-scale transpositions in his novels of Malinke into French imparts to the borrowed language a new tonality, refashions it as a new register of expression.

The same process can be observed in the work of the Caribbean writers, beginning with Jacques Roumain and his novel of Haitian peasant life, Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944).³³ We can look beyond this work to the ongoing process of creolization of French by Simone Schwartz-Bart and Patrick Chamoiseau in their novels, notably Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) in the case of the former and Texaco (1992) for the latter.³⁴ These references are of considerable interest, insofar as they raise the question of the definition of francophone literature, and its relation to the French language and the tradition of letters it sustains. This is too large an issue to be taken up here, but we may remark that the francophone writer works out of a notional conception of French as an ideal, a paradigm, of which his or her expression becomes an avatar, albeit charged with a particular significance. Maran’s work was the first to display an understanding of this situation in francophone Africa.³⁵

Maran’s inspirational role in the genesis of the new francophone literature was acknowledged by Senghor, who called him a “precursor” of Negritude.³⁶ This may suggest that Maran is no more than a transitional figure, but a consideration of his oeuvre reveals a major novelist with a coherent vision of life, more fully developed in his subsequent works, especially in the austere construction and grim vision of his last novel, Le livre de la brousse (1934).³⁷ As it finds expression in this novel, Maran’s tragic vision extends and complements that which informs the narrative in Batouala, so that we are made aware that his total apprehension of life derives ultimately from an acute awareness of the precarious nature of our existence in the world, of mankind pitted against a pitiless nature in a relentless struggle for survival. In all his novels, the African environment serves as theater and allegorical reference for this primordial drama of existence. In this way, Maran proceeds from an immediate representation of this environment, in all its specificity, to a universal statement on the human condition.

2. The term “postcolonial” is employed here in its current academic/critical meaning to designate the literature produced by people colonized by Europeans, as a response to their political, economic, and cultural domination by the West. This sense of the term was first proposed by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in their influential work The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures.

5. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive. The emergence of race as a category is a direct consequence of the taxonomy of Linnaeus, applied to the effort to classify humankind in the work of various European scholars, including Kant, and leading ultimately to Gobineau’s monumental work. Emmanuel Eze’s study Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the Postracial seeks to address the question: “How did the origins of modern philosophy and the science of anthropology provide theoretical grounds for the formation of race as a modern idea?” The study considers the background to the famous “dérapage” of Enlightenment thought with regard to the racial question, a development examined in its economic and moral implications by Louis Sala-Molins, Les misères des Lumières.

28. See Chidi Ikonné, From Du Bois to Van Vechten: The Early New Negro Literature, 1903–1926, 6, 38. Ikonné cites Ernest Hemingway’s review in the Toronto Star of March 25, 1922. The novel’s reception was even more intense in black intellectual circles, as reflected in the reviews published in Crisis, which featured Maran’s novel on its cover for May 1922. See also Jessie Fausset, “‘Batouala’ Is Translated,” Crisis 24–25 (1922–1923), 218–19, and Hubert Harriaon, “M. Maran’s Batouala, A French-African Tale,” New York World, August 20, 1922. For a comprehensive account of the reception of Maran’s novel in black circles, see Alice J. Smith, “René Maran’s Batouala and the Prix-Goncourt,” Contributions in Black Studies 4 (1980–1981): 17–34. I am indebted to Jeffrey Perry for these references.

29. Writing on the early novels in French by indigenous Arab writers, Seth Graebner has observed in History’s Place: “Reading anticolonialist commitment in the colonial novel requires us to consider disavowals, cross-purposes, and ambivalences of myriad origins. In reading works by colonized authors, we cannot satisfy ourselves with generalized arguments about political commitments in the anti-colonial struggle.”

30. See Georges Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire, which provides ample documentation of the devastating effect of French colonial rule on the populations of Central Africa, as a direct consequence of a policy that, according to an administrative text quoted by Maran in his biography of Félix Eboué, considered the natives as “des produits naturels du sol,” in the same category as ivory and rubber (Félix Eboué: Grand commis et loyal serviteur, 1885–1944, 36). We need to recall that the atrocities in the Belgian Congo motivated Gide’s visit and his account related in his Voyage au Congo.