We have seen all the uncertainties and limits concerning linguistic transmission; we will now examine how a modification in the practice of French becomes fused with all these uncertainties. The ultimate goal of these changes is the canceling out of the speech of the colonized. The phrase remade syntax. Because language is henceforth charged with a power that identifies it with the colonial nation, French can only be granted on the condition that it make itself impregnable. Without which, possession would cease. This ambition to control the speaker through language eventually fails as unexpected literary and discursive events emerge. The trap is nonetheless perilous, and nothing indicates that it might be sprung once and for all. On the contrary, those of us who speak French continue to have trouble hearing ourselves talk. The indigenes receive a place in the language that is granted to them. If they become French and make their Frenchness heard, they risk becoming themselves spokespeople for an ethnic and political assignment that their naturalization opposed. The colonial accent can ultimately color everyone’s speech, beyond the question of real or imaginary origins. A network of utterances and syntagmas colonize language. This resemblance between the French language and France’s historical fate does not make the language sick or intrinsically bad, since a language is perceived only in its production. On the other hand, ready-made language endows itself with a layer of intimacy, with a colonial xenophobia. This makes the transcendence of ritual parlance through effective language an essential and urgent task. As it happened, beginning with the early decades of the twentieth century, the means of censuring language doubled in the colonial reinterpretation of the words of the colonized. Since the internal immunity of the dominator’s French alone was not up to the task, the colonial powers will try to erase the very discursive reality that escapes them.
As with any dynamic involving foreignness and conquest, the words of the other are inserted in the vocabulary and regularly assume a pejorative value. Didn’t the pain and the vin of the Bretons (bara and gwin) give us baragouin, “gibberish”? Between the end of the nineteenth century and the decades that followed, the negativity of the word fatma begins to spread (a generally pejorative adaptation of the Arabic female name Fatima—used much like “chick” in colloquial American English—fatma is usually but not exclusively used to refer to women of actual or perceived Arab descent), along with gourbi (“rathole” or “hovel”) and bled (“country,” “countryside,” or “region”). These loanwords from Arabic are quite distinct from the medieval adaptations, such as zéro, chiffre (figure), alchimie, and hasard (chance). Bamboula, taken from the languages of sub-Saharan Africa during the eighteenth century (in the restricted sense of “drum”), passes into colonial discourse and becomes synonymous with “festive excess,” “orgy,” and then simply Nègre. Both Tombouctou and Timbuktu will come to mean “nowhere.”
This lexicon creates a supplementary effect through combination. I cite a short passage from Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan (Mort à crédit), in which the narrator goes to a fortune-teller:
We came to a booth…the last woman [moukère] in the place, a grandmother, was rolling up her hangings…. She was dressed like a houri…. She rolled up her oriental carpets…. She was yawning tremendously…enough to dislocate her jaw…. Wah! Wah! she grunted out through the night…. The Fatima [fatma] motions me to come up, to step into her shack [gourbi]…. The old bag [la moukère], she turns it over, she looks at my hand. (213)
On arrive devant une estrade, c’était la dernière moukère, une grand’mère qui décrochait ses teintures…elle était nippée en houri…. Elle roulait ses tapis d’Orient…. Elle baillait énormément, à se décrocher la mâchoire…. Ouah! Ouah! qu’elle grognait à travers la nuit…. La fatma, elle me fait signe de venir, de monter dans son gourbi…. Elle me prend la main, la moukère, elle me la retourne, elle me regarde dedans, les paumes. (259)
The seer condenses the figures of the gypsy (saltimbanque, “acrobat”), “the Oriental,” and the fatma (259). Céline multiplies the clichés, leaps over them somehow, and lands amid an accumulation of racist colonial vocabulary that seems to beget itself naturally (moukère leads to houri, which leads to gourbi, which leads to moukère, ad infinitum). This lexical hyperbole renders the strangeness of the nonself absolute. In accordance with his egocentric poetics, Céline must separate the “I” from all others; in this case, this separation occurs adding together terms that have become acclimatized in French, yet contained by an external logic. The Célinian text indicates that words with Arabic origins are encysted in the language; style must underscore the impurity of the idiom. Exotic language, in general, attempts to sublimate the unheard-of (the language of the other) in the recreation of a savage French (think of the famous opening line of Flaubert’s Salammbô: “C’était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d’Hamilcar” [It was in Megara, in the suburbs of Carthage, in Hamilcar’s gardens]). These attempts often veer toward banality. Céline reclaims the failure of the exotic and uses it to construct a xenophobic scorn, where the Arab-Oriental-Gypsy will retain his or her non-French accent. The saltimbanque can only have a “gaping mouth” (bouche toute ronde), yawning. The sounds that escape from his throat are “growls” or barks. The “Wah! Wah!” parodies the Arabic language itself,1 destined to remain a “foreign body,” fundamentally incomprehensible to the French speaker.2
One should add that moukère is borrowed from Sabir, a lingua franca of the Maghreb, which received its name from the colonizers themselves.3 Lingua franca designates the composite dialects, which have been widely spoken in the Mediterranean basin from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. Travelers from a variety of nations would therefore use this common language, which relied on a fluctuating syntax and a vocabulary combining Romance languages, Arabic, and Turkish. Without ever playing the role of a creole, the lingua franca was largely practiced as a foreign language in Algeria when the French soldiers seized the territory. The shared roots of large portions of vocabulary made quick exchanges possible. Moukère derives from mujer and is a general term for “woman,” in Sabir as in Spanish. The song “La Moukère,” to which I will return shortly, certainly helped spread the word in French. Moukère then becomes Arabic (whence the predominance of writing it with the more “savage” k) and takes on a more precise denotation, henceforth referring to an “Arab woman.” The apparent integration of the foreign word into French thus depends on a deliberate error of recognition that inverts the very nature of Sabir: a transcultural word is taken for a specific, connoted term in French. Colonial usage recommends recourse to a vocabulary as strange as it is foreign—at least when it is a question of speaking of realities external to French life.
Henri Estienne, addressing himself to the court of Henri III, had already remarked that the only words legitimately borrowed from Italian corresponded to actions without French equivalents: charlatan, bouffon, assacinateur and assacin, supercherie, bardasch (for the contemporary slang word tante, or “fag”).4 Estienne was defending the jargon of Philausone, an Italianized courtier, and railing against “Messieurs the courtiers,” who claimed “the privilege of legitimizing bastard French words, and of naturalizing foreign ones” (Traicté 14). It is true that the facts we have been collecting on the degradation of external languages do not belong to the colonies only. But the inferiorization of these words in the lexicon nevertheless set the stage for tactics that were even more elaborate. At the heart of this issue we find the coordination of techniques tried out in a new arrangement. Locating resemblances with other contexts does not necessarily reduce the importance or the particularity of the colonial linguistic trap; rather, such resemblances demonstrate the historical stratification out of which another event is produced.
When a competition between French and Italian occurs during the Renaissance (as between French and Anglo-American today), purism will call for a language freed from external influences, mirroring the political tensions of the day. With Arabs or Africans kept in their parodic exoticism, an isolated subcategory in French takes form. Although an Arabic word is reputedly assimilated into the language (albeit pejoratively), this passage is contradicted by its colonial enunciation, which exhibits it as unassimilable. Let us reformulate this result in two ways. In the sense of the “colonial phrase,” possession never ceases. It has no end, since through its words (meaning our own words), the colonized is condemned to be himself and another. Or, since language can always say something else, a predisposition forms in French that runs contrary to noncolonial usage. A predisposition, I insist once again on this point; yet insistence does not diminish the difficulty of trying to turn away from shared habits that have taken hold.
I conclude this section with an evocation of the popular song “La Moukère,” mentioned above. Parlance is full of conventions and uncritical repetitions. Can a chorus transmitted for more than a century (perhaps from the 1850s to the present day, or at least until quite recently) be void of resonance? Isn’t this just a question of a successful melody with inoffensive lyrics? I think not. Under its different titles and in its different reincarnations, “La Moukère” might constitute one of the oldest and most archetypal of colonial songs. That somebody named Eugène Dubreuil, “singer, life of the party,” claimed to have written it (Ruscio, Que la France était belle 358) would be enough to explain my own personal interest in the affair. There is more, of course. The melody and some of the lyrics of “La Moukère” became a popular, almost automatic reference in the Maghreb in the twentieth century. Inserting them into another song is enough to signify North Africa. Among those who will do this between 1910 and 1942 are Dranem (“En rev’nant du Maroc”), Maris Dubas (“Butterfly-Tox”), Jacky (“A Rabat”), and Maurice Chevalier (“Ali Ben Baba”).5 In its main variant, the chorus of “Travadjar” goes thus: “Travadjar la mouker / Travadjar bono / Travadjar sens devant derrière / Travadjar chouetto / Bono Blidah! / Boufarik et mascara! / Barca!” The language is inspired by Sabir. Other expressions in the couplets, such as “Ateni duoro,” “hold a piece,” refer to the same synthetic dialect. There is little doubt concerning the erotic dimension of travadjar (work), which helps explain “sens devant derrière” (moving forward behind) and leads to the final couplet: “Smoking a briar wood pipe / Wearing a chechia / We pillage and we pinch / In the razzia / But in the gourbi / We make quite a ruckus / Smiling Fatma / Cuckolds the Araby!” (Fumant une bouffarde, / Portant la chéchia, / On pille, on chaparde / Dans la razzia / Mais dans le gourbi / En f’sant du fourbi / Fatma qui sourit / Fait cocu l’Arbi!). From the beginning, the colonial soldier admits: “My friends, of Africa / I’ve had my fill” (Mes amis, de l’Afrique, / J’en ai plein l’dos). The discouragement and weariness lead, all the same, to the comforts of physical and colonial possession, which motivate the presence of the soldiers in the Maghreb. This stanza is crafted from well-written French, contrary to the short phrases riddled with apostrophes, such as “Arbi,” and especially present in the chorus. However, in the exaltation of easy pleasure, the language, like that of Céline, accumulates acclimated words (chéchia, razzia, gourbi, fatma). All told, the final couplet and the chorus are equivalent to each other. Speaking about Arabs means speaking Sabir, or speaking in Arabic. Not even the becoming-Arab sketched out here, or the soldier’s Orientalized life, could be (spoken in) French. The incessant reprise of “La Moukère” is not a simple case of embedding stereotypes in the culture. It is the incessant iteration of the semi-integrated foreignness of the possessed colonial figure.
To “cuckold the Araby” prolongs the delirious desire in the language and remotivates the nickname: after all, the “very naughty woman” (the “femme si coquine”), a song from the Zouaves tells us, “cuckolds her Arabic…uckold” (fait son Arbico…cu).6 The pun inscribes an onomastic fatality. The racial slur is never enough but must be multiplied to stigmatize even further. Dispossession continues when derisive language becomes the source of further spoils. Colonial rhetoric resorts to turns of phrase that also return fire. These tropisms are most clearly located in the oppositional language at the front. I would speculate that they are re-enforced, perhaps even produced, by the rise of decolonization movements. To extract this other level of intensity from colonial linguistic censure, I will at first limit myself to a body of articles written in the journal L’Afrique française (published by the Comité de l’Afrique Française), which gives an account of the political tensions in the Maghreb during the 1930s.
These texts, written by different authors, are linked together through their deployment of a double lexical misappropriation. One can thus read that the first Moroccan nationalist party, Comité de l’Action Marocaine, “stole its name in a razzia” (L’Afrique française, 1936, 648).7 In their first appearances in French, gaze, gazia, and razia, loanwords from Maghrebi Arabic, designate the supposedly typical military practice of North African peoples. The technical (or ethnographic) acceptance of this term persists in the treatises describing indigenous ways and customs. The French colonial expeditions of the 1830s will also be very quick to lay hold of this term and to identify it with a violent (and eventually punitive) act of pillage. This colonial appropriation transforms the word into an emblem of the behavior of the French African army. Razzia appears in “La Moukère,” while in the middle of the nineteenth century, “Le Chant du Chacal” (Song of the Jackal) celebrates the term by asserting: “You have to see him in a razzia” (Il faut le voir en razzia).8 The Littré dictionary remarks: “It is through imitation that the French in Algeria use the word ‘razzia’ to describe their own expeditions against the tribes from whom they often steal provisions and animals.” Apart from the fate of the term in a wider context, razzia serves as an example of the magical transfer of qualities at the heart of colonial discourse. Our authors give the word back to anticolonial movements in order to underline their total illegitimacy. The name Action Marocaine for a group of Moroccans is inappropriate; the only true designation is the (Arabic then French) word for “pillage,” rendered unto its natural owners. The razzia, defined as belonging properly to the Arab, had been reappropriated by the occupying army; it is recreated in such a way that it signifies the absence of a proper name (un nom propre), that is, “l’Action Marocaine.”
Elsewhere, the Algerian nationalist group L’Etoile Nord-Africaine is denounced for collecting funds in order to pay for the defense of activists arrested by the French state. The journal’s news section sums up the situation: “To pay the fees of the…lawyer, ‘L’Etoile Nord-Africaine,’ according to El Ouma, had to ‘work like a dog’ [fait…suer le burnous]…! ” (L’Afrique française, 1934, 579). In this series of articles, the ellipses principally serve to announce one-liners, exclamation marks, and grins: all told, not too far from Céline. In this short quote, the “punch line,” typographically designated as exceptional, resides in the inverted use of the expression “faire suer le burnous” (literally, “make the burnoose sweat,” i.e., to perform physically demanding manual labor to the point of exhaustion). The expression is usually employed to describe either forced or poorly paid labor that the indigenes owed to the colonizers. A French parallel would be travailler comme un nègre (work like a nigger). It is possible that the older French expression faire suer le bonhomme (put the squeeze on the good chap), related to the money and food that soldiers extorted from peasants, might have served as a model, given the similarity in the sound. Bonhomme was adapted to the conditions of the terrain and became burnous. Already we have an attempt to equate “the Arab” with his clothes, as the female Muslim will become “the veiled girl” (la fille voilée). The article in L’Afrique française once again transposes exploitation, staining the burnoose with local color; the raising of funds is compared to colonial domination and “restored” to the apparent essence of the Arabs.
This sort of spin and misappropriation announces the grand strategy of rhetorical inversion of antiracist values by the contemporary Far Right, which Pierre-André Taguieff has demonstrated in La force du préjugé. Yet the double inversion also conditions the response that the colonized may bring to bear on the project of censure. It does not seem irrelevant that verlan (a form of slang constructed through inversion, addition, and subtraction of syllables and sounds in a word) has now been designated as the prerogative of the banlieue, although it has been active in French for centuries. There is nothing random about this identification, coming from both within and without, between a jargon and a social population marked by the (post)colonial fact. The inversion of syllables and sounds in verlan hijacks the logic of the colonial prescription of language. In this respect, two closely related techniques take on a heightened importance: veul and lanvers, which refer to double phonic reversals. Lanvers is verlan for the word “verlan,” which is itself an inversion of the French word that means “the reverse”—l’envers—but which does not simply return intact to its linguistic point of departure. Through a series of successive transformations, femme (woman) becomes meuf in verlan, then feum (in veul, another term for lanvers). Arabe is inverted into beur, then into reubeu. There is also flic (cop), which becomes keuf, then feukeu, where the influence of the English fuck seems quite plausible—especially since fuck les keufs exists as a slogan—and where the influence of Arabic seems possible, kif or kef (referring to either hashish or the pleasure derived from it), the Arabic letter kaf, and the word kufr (disbelief, infidelity) can be heard. The vocabulary of Lanvers remains fairly limited, but in these cases, the instances of significant foreign languages (American English, Arabic) combine with the reversal of a reversal that must avoid recuperation and assimilation. After all, meuf, keuf, and beur have since been “integrated” into spoken French, far from the “no-place” of the banlieue. This supplementary return, played out in language, responds to the grammatical movement of political prescription.
The set of linguistic manipulations that I have inventoried illustrates techniques of proliferation within verbal creation and appropriation. These discourses configure a system of language that speaks the colonial phrase in the very body of French, understood as the necessary symbol of a theologico-political conception of the nation. This special form of xenophobia helps to open a parlance, a style where the indigene is always simultaneously foreigner and assimilated, even prey to haunting. Haunting because francisation, in the second colonial empire, is the imposition of an alterity within identity. The force that arrogated to itself the power of possession always believes it can “contain” the perils of enchantment, thus protecting itself from its effects. Yet colonial France tries to ensure that it will maintain exorcism in the meaning that it first imagined. To keep possession, French must be set into the mind of the indigene. However, it is advisable to let foreignness be proportionate to the familiar. Colonialism is a haunting that refuses to be dispelled; this loa blanc has no intention of withdrawing. The frenzy of the practice of possession obligates the colonizer to be more and more identical to the colonized, and—if he tries to keep the upper hand—to refine his weapons each time, so he will have a difference upon which to call. In his superb book, The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha proposes “almost the same, but not quite” as the colonial axiom.9 At least within the French space I am examining, this formula does not quite apply. To begin with, possession is the self and the other. The gap of the self that Bhabha brilliantly puts into play is not colonial reality (which desires the copresence of different substances), but the law of duration within colonial desire that wants to perpetuate itself without end. The “not quite” results from the status quo of exploitation; it is not constitutive of the formation of an empire over the indigene. The enacting of colonial linguistics aims precisely toward the impossible possibility of a continuation of colonial practice through the invention of procedures that are radically other within the life of the same French language.
Beyond this point, Bhabha gives too much credit to the methodical proclamations of philosophy. Despite the principle of noncontradiction and identity, continuously bandied about by Aristotle and his successors, so-called Western thought was never confined to an exclusively rational logic. I have already written about this, and I will return to it. I say it again in these lines. To be one and the other is not an experience born of colonization, even though it is included in colonization. The destiny created for the francophone indigene educated in the colonial language, this position of speaker and outsider, is not in itself troubling for the potential West (l’éventuel Occident). On the contrary, reports of the end of haunting drive the colonial powers toward escalation: deny the faculty of language (the mute slave), before offering a reduced French reserved for specific people, then confer the language—but only after having made it unusable; finally, as we shall see, censure speech once it occurs, while affirming that it never took place.
But to continue with the stage we have been discussing, the performance of the language in colonial discourse is conceived in order to break indigenous speech. This effect is in no way conducive to the emergence of another enunciation, as an extrapolation of Bhabha’s claims might lead us to believe. Only a position that surpasses the impasse allows an opening into speech. This joint display of the permitted and the forbidden does not contravene the operation of the language in the West; its supposed irrationality is not productive in and of itself, and it is pointless to hope that a third logic will arise from it. On the contrary, the harshest kind of grammatical legislation presupposes contradiction. At the same time as he defends the logical coherence of his ideas, Vaugelas superimposes a religion of usage,10 whose credo reads thus:
As with Faith, so, too, with Usage, the definition of which obliges us to believe simply and blindly, without our reason shining its natural light upon it; yet we nonetheless do not fail to reason over this same faith, nor to find the reasons for things that are above reason. (Remarques, preface, 5.2)
Reason is exceeded in good Usage, the definition of which is centered on the social space of the court (3), but whose essence resides in the je ne sais quoi of sovereign power. Similarly, universalist reason and colonial usage are not mutually exclusive. They culminate in a social prescription, as Vaugelas’s Usage and Reason justify the court’s grammatical privilege that cannot, at last, be located. The normativity of the seventeenth century or the colonizer’s verbal injunction forms different figures of an interdiction within diction, within speech. The theologico-political language of censure did not wait for the overseas expansion. It is now our task, however, to stop describing the paths of interdiction within possessions, if we want to grasp more firmly the power of indigenous speech.
The encystment of foreignness will not long satisfy colonial aims. In this escalation, censure must also act in a more general fashion. You are speaking? Are you sure? Against the nascent francophonie of the 1930s, one may mobilize the rules, those of Vaugelas and of public education, in order to correct the awkward speaker. Hypercorrectness will put a straitjacket on all attempts to speak. Since one solution does not exclude another, I will continue working with my collection of articles from L’Afrique française, where we will discover that lexical misappropriation functions quite smoothly with calls to linguistic order.
In a column entitled “Fantasies & Mirages: Vocabulary,” the recurring problem relates to the imperfect manipulation of French by Maghrebi rebels. When the term indigene is criticized for its pejorative aspect by those who first take up the issue, the columnist responds that nothing must be changed, since “French words have a meaning that has been fixed through usage” (L’Afrique française, 1933, 300). When the Littré dictionary uses a citation from Voltaire to salvage this defense of usage, resistance seems futile.11 Additionally, the author of this series of continuing articles on vocabulary insists on the aberrant “distraction” that had seized “certain people in the far East of Barbary…: playing on words” (299). This kind of play is licit only for the “masters and possessors of the nature” of the language. “Barbary” (la Berbérie), again according to the Littré, is the homeland of the Greek term barbaros, and thus of the barbarisms denounced in the column. His multiple opponents think they are speaking French; they are mistaken, having understood nothing about usage; they are derailed, off-key, lost. They produce chimerical words. They create fantasies, those allies of the mirage: fantasies, empty images, and clichés, evoking—in addition to the fantasia—the act of bravura, and the desire to court danger.
Barbarisme in French finds a natural home in Barbary and overseas in general. If it is often easier to demonstrate or denounce linguistic usage at the level of vocabulary, educational censure clearly goes beyond the category of the word. To the degree that an Arabized vocabulary exists, French is threatened by the broken syntax of petit-nègre (pidgin French) and by the exaggeration of the “Oriental style.” To say it is “threatened” is only partially appropriate, since these two supposedly indigenous tendencies cannot be taken seriously. They are still close to the grotesque or the childlike, and they figure widely in the rhetoric of the “masters” and “institutors” of the French language. A colleague of mine, trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, while remaining well intentioned, as they say, described to me the “Turkish delight style” (style loukoum) of a Tunisian student. Much earlier in my life, in first grade at my elementary school in Lyon in late 1979 or early 1980, my teacher lambasted the petit-nègre we were producing, particularly in writing.12 As with the Barbary barbarism, this technique ascribes a colonial location to deviations in language. The problem is not the potential fault as such, but rather the identification of a given error with the origin of those who committed it. The difficulty of mobilizing syntactic resources characterizes all beginning speakers, and quite often those who express themselves in a second language. Hyperbole and metaphor exist in many other places than the Orient. (Incidentally, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lahontan, who lived a long time in Nouvelle France, considered these same tropes quite typical of the verbal style of autochthonous peoples of North America.)13 These lapses are suddenly revealed by colonial experience to be the consequence of trying to assimilate subaltern populations. Likewise, an imperfection in a French utterance is attributed to the corruption, through usage, of the stuttering subjects of empire. Deviation gets delegated to others, those unassimilable integrated ones. Education—secular, or as it is called, “free,” libre—once again played a crucial role in the consolidation of grammatical beliefs, bestowing on them the legitimacy of formation. The pseudo-obviousness of these colonial categories is maintained by the production of texts and discourses ratifying these distinctions. Batouala is the first novel written by a black author—René Maran—to have received the Prix Goncourt, in 1922, seventy years before Patrick Chamoiseau. The subtitle of Maran’s narrative is Véritable roman nègre (A Genuine Negro Novel), signifying both the accession to literature by a black writer, and more importantly, the establishment of a black subject matter, since the action takes place in the Oubangui-Chari and becomes marked by savagery (of customs, situations, and of the prose itself). Before again becoming a purely academic author and losing the shock of his writing in a second, policed version, in Batouala Maran will redeploy a system of French colonial languages. The narration skillfully applies a great lyrical exoticism, in the lineage of Leconte de Lisle or José-Maria de Heredia. The indigenous words are woven in with a noble French. I cite as evidence one of the first sentences:
And when ‘Ipeu,’ the Moon, was orbiting the heavens,—in their distant villages: M’bis, Dacpas, Dakouas, and Langbassis were praising the deeds of the great mokoundji Batoula; while the discordant sounds of the balafons and the koundés united with the tom-tom of the li’inghas. (21)
Et quand ‘Ipeu,’ la Lune, au ciel gravitait,—dans leurs lointains villages: m’bis, dacpas, dakouas et langbassis chantaient les prouesses du grand mokoundji Batoula, cependant que les sons discordants des balafons et des koundés s’unissaient au tam-tam des li’inghas.
The syntax guarantees the insertion of black vocabulary in the highest register of the French language: alliteration and assonance punctuate the enumeration, the initial “And” (Et) is epic, while the dash displays the literariness of the anacoluthon, underscored by the slightly archaic conjunction cependant que. René Maran asserts himself by savaging a kind of writing created by its lexical opacity and the sophistication of its composition. However, the Nègres in the text speak differently. Their deliberations can be transcribed directly as dialogue, as happens in chapter 4. Here they express themselves in a more standard prose, always correct. But one must understand that these exchanges are translated by the narrator, since the few scenes that place the Africans in relation with the French reveal the incomplete syntax of the indigene, as a sequel to the somewhat less sublime racist caricatures of the Y’a bon banania advertising posters, circa 1915. Here is a short sample: “Your honor, Boula make ass of himself too much. So M’bis and his friend be so glad came to the post to get drunk. The men say to me this just now on the road” (Ma commandant. Boula y’en a faire couillon trop. Alors m’bis et son camarade y’en a beaucoup contents vinir au poste saouler son gueule. Les homes m’y en a dire tout à l’heure sur la route comme ça; Maran, Batoula 96). The phrase of the black African is dislocated as soon as it is inserted into the “language of the blancs” (21). Batouala bears witness to two possibilities of expression for a black speaker in French: either the pidgin of petit-nègre, that is, the defective jargon of the savage, or the high language of literary exoticism. As a supplement, a standardized prose is spoken by some black characters, translated by an assimilated black writer, Maran, the Antillean author and colonial functionary who signs his name to the book and the preface. It is in the direction of the norm that Maran will next move, choosing to break with the risk of the savage in favor of the institutional parlance of his other works and the rewriting of Batoula. The Genuine Negro Novel, in the “definitive” 1938 edition, no longer refers to the geography of the subject. The attempt at stylistic empathy, as contentious as it was, became more important than the academic display of language. The Journal sans date (Journal without a Date), first published in 1927 (then revised after the war under the title Un homme pareil aux autres [A Man Like Any Other]),14 is a narrative mise en abyme of the book’s trajectory. The main character, Jean Veneuse, is a dark-skinned colonial functionary, who, after having been tempted to return to Africa in order to “become a Negro again,” returns to his European state. “France is my religion,” the narrator writes. The language of the Académie Française—French in its mechanized usage—could alone serve the nouveau noir, whom France animates through ventriloquy. The rewriting of Batouala renounces the illusory Africanness of the writing. In a text seeking to join the collectivity of the grammatical and stylistic order, the only “genuinely” black language must retain the incorrect syntax of petit-nègre. Read in this way, the novel, in its two incarnations, reproduces and ratifies through its poetics the hierarchies of colonial discourse.
Despite a belated reedition (of the second version, sadly), it is unlikely that Batouala still exercises any influence over the linguistic apparatus of francophonie. The book, in any case, is much less offensive than the persistence of scholarly attention paid to it, however attenuated this has become. Other sites persist, however: unexpected conservatories that provide models for supposedly extinguished forces. The most popular example in French is certainly Tintin, whose adventures often present types that operate in counterpoint to the main characters. It is enough, today, to reread Tintin in the Congo to learn petit-nègre; one may also consult the phrases of Cheikh Bab-el-Ehr in Land of Black Gold to penetrate the subtleties of “Oriental style.” Its perpetuation is ultimately assured by the meeting of the colonial system with the comic register, which runs from the “good racist joke” to the humorist’s sketch. If we pass over the debate about voluntary or involuntary xenophobia, which most often leads nowhere, the most striking aspect of these more-or-less humorous speech acts resides in their repetition of parlances. The colonial phrase continues to be actualized by means of linguistic codes internal to French, but always in a hierarchy. Without a doubt, the redistribution of idiolects in the language serves the order of French domination well, centralized and metropolitan by definition. In this regard, hypercorrectness was able to touch the language of the poor colonist. In particular, Jews and Catholic pieds noirs also found themselves confined within an approximately French discourse. What goes by the name of pataouète—the dialect of French Algerians during the colonial period, which included many terms borrowed from Arabic, Spanish, and Italian—could never find a place in le bon usage. It is nonetheless symptomatic that the diffuse recognition of pied-noir speech (with its own accent, syntax, exaggerations, interjections) among French speakers has never given rise to a didactic description, such as that which occurred with petit-nègre or “Oriental style.” Pied-noir expression constitutes a peril only for pieds-noirs; it is not a danger for everyone, as are African syntax and the “Turkish Delight” style. Pataouète was thus treated as a sociolect or a particularity to be rejected in the name of the norm, not as a deep and faulty structure. Pied-noir speech enjoyed an imperfect recognition, traces of which will be born by the exclamations dis (say) and ma parole (upon my word)—as if it was always necessary to emphasize locution and to begin speaking again. But at least for them there was a certain right to speak, even if minoritarian.
So there is censure. And (post)colonial hypercorrectness especially functions as the great prelude to the muting of the indigene, and to the deafness of the colonizer. Censure includes ordinary violence, especially in wartime: nonpublication, assassination. It also takes other, less direct paths. Think of Mouloud Feraoun, one of the first francophone writers from Algeria. His first novel, Le fils du pauvre (The Poor Man’s Son), will first have to be edited at the author’s own expense before being accepted by Seuil in 1954. The director of the Méditerranée collection, Emmanuel Roblès, will ask Feraoun to cut out the pages devoted to the Second World War. Killed in 1962 by the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), Feraoun will thus experience the limits of the exterminating will of totalitarian colonialism, and this after having been denied authorial prerogative because of his position as a pioneer. Yet silencing may also occur in publication. The inside jacket cover, now modified in the current pocket edition, in effect delivered a warning (avertissement). From this short user’s manual for Feraoun’s reader, I extract this imperative report: “Not one line is imagined.” This is what signals the book’s infra-literariness. However, the first section of the novel opens with a chapter in italics, as if it represents an unfinished autobiographical manuscript by Feraoun. This superior voice, belonging to the one who is designated as the “narrator” (95) of all of Le fils du pauvre, subsequently takes over the testimony and tells the rest of the story. This device builds a narrative whose dynamic is that of fictional deviation. Feraoun, the autobiographical “I,” and the subjective narrator enter into a problematic relationship, which is everything, except for the transparent transcription Roblès announces. The avertissement should be understood as a cancellation of the literary value of the work before the fact. Colonial functionaries, ethnography, and even primary and secondary education all played a role in the production of texts by indigenes, from whom one required documents to verify their very existence. By rejecting the least picturesque section of the manuscript (after childhood in Kabylia and the difficult acclimatization of an adolescent in the colonial city), and then by denying that it was even a novel, Roblès would silence the writer who was among the first from his country to seize written French in order to speak beyond the injunction. This gesture is all the more violent since until quite recently the dominant linguistic model in modern France has been literary expression, both in school and in “polite society.” Trapped by its own dynamic, censure must finally expel the francophone author by recognizing nonliterary features in his text, that is, features that are ultimately dissimilar to the historical reality of the language.
The attitude of silencing and negation is especially evident in relation to pioneering texts. Yesterday’s interdictions can rejoin those of today. In a moment, we will demonstrate this point with Bakary Diallo’s Force-Bonté (Force-Goodness). This work is likely the first long narrative published in French by a black writer from colonial Africa. The author describes his experience as a Senegalese tirailleur during World War I. He relates his experience, emphasizing the greatness of the French empire. The paternalism is assumed; the “I” never hesitates to remind the reader that one must obey France as one would obey one’s own parents: blindly. The description of military and administrative “niggling” and “pettiness” (Diallo, Force-Bonté 186) is in this sense subordinated to the acceptance of the colonial order. The bonté or “goodness” of the French is a leitmotif (see 139, 141, 146, 181, 183, 196, and 208 for examples). This theme allows for the following description, which takes the form of an isolated paragraph: “And like the sky that covers the expanse of the earth, French goodness is everywhere seen” (139). In short, Diallo seems to include himself in the colonial phrase, in a subjugated role. All of him has been magically transformed: “You [French] have changed me, I swear upon it, head, heart, mind, and soul” (205).
Since its publication, Force-Bonté has been read primarily as a personal testimony. The interpretive choices seem to be the greatness of France, its incompetence, or the alienation of black Africans who have passed through the French colonial machine. Literary history has often chosen this last option. Lilyan Kesteloot, who played a major role in introducing and promoting black francophone literature in the academy, finds in Diallo a “naïve panegyric to France” (Les écrivains noirs 21). Later, more favorable interpretations have rightly insisted on the moments where Diallo deviates from his primary acquiescence.15 In fact, Force-Bonté does not fail to distinguish the colonists from the metropolitans, decisions made by decree from individual attitudes.
Naïveté thus has its limits. However, if we want to restore Bakary Diallo to history, this reinterpretation must examine the writing itself. Tackling the problem with ideological or cultural terms allows us, at best, to posit that Diallo covertly denounces the order of power, opposing it with some ideal behavior. The consequences of such a reading are considerable. Yet this is not enough, when attention is not paid to the historical value of the writing: Diallo learned French among the rank and file at the same time that he was perfecting his active understanding of the colonial phrase. Contrary to the imperialist tendency, however, he distinguishes between language and discourse. He confides to his “compatriots” (Diallo, Force-Bonté 183), who have lived in the metropole: “Colonial language, even in French, lacks the real accent that your ears hear here” (184). Diallo identifies the colonial particularity of discourse, connecting it to one case of linguistic actualization, and he disassembles French (as a single, unified language) from its various forms of usage. This gesture initiates a critique of internal forms of censure that tradition had deployed against indigenes. Diallo is not content with simply designating this critique; he also executes it, to the point where he appears to be, on the contrary, closest to the imperative of power.
“French goodness,” so recurrent throughout the text, is nonetheless not its title. Force-Bonté means something else, something that is found in the final lines of the book: “Long live the goodness-force of France!” (208; Vive la force-bonté de la France!). The compound word is in fact Diallo’s creation, and it forms the very beginning and the very end of the book. Yet “force” as such is rarely evoked. A friend of the narrator, advising him not to undergo a fourteenth surgical operation, adds his opinion: “Now, all you can do is regain your physical strength” (199; reprendre de la force physique). Out of context, this is an everyday expression; here, however, it follows the description of an episode where Diallo clashes with the major. They are arguing over the request of the tirailleur, who has been wounded and wants to receive special food rations. This seems exorbitant to the doctor, who gets furious and confines the soldier to barracks. Diallo comments on this episode thus: “Anger is an extraordinary force. It takes hold of a man, shakes him, rattles him at will, and then undoes him through its movement. In this way does it dominate with ease even the man who has studied, analyzed, and understood it…. What do we men thus have lurking in our depths?” (157).
Force exceeds the individual; it imposes itself on him. The major is literally in a trance, animated by a superior entity, which replaces him. Inserting the white doctor’s anger into this position, Diallo responds to the colonial phrase, which he also speaks. Everyone may be grabbed by a power that seizes them, without distinction to race or social status. Those who are enchanted need not be black—a point which of itself greatly modifies the colonial legitimization regarding those enchanted black people who must be civilized.
What is more, force-bonté is constructed like a composite form of energy that belongs to France and descends upon its citizens. The “force” of France is physical and military; it has the power to convoke, to conjugate the intensity of different peoples. Beyond that, it is already also an extraordinary, violent substance, which shows itself in the major’s anger and the racist behavior of the colonizers. This aggressiveness appears exclusively—or primarily—in the colonial possessions. Diallo’s Bildungsroman reveals here that in France, force is associated with goodness. Force-bonté becomes a complex reality where the inversion of signs is possible, and is also characteristic of France: a country whose inhabitants are haunted by force-bonté (goodness-power, kindness-power).16
Through the verbal creation that undergirds the entire work, Bakary Diallo questions the one-way movement of possession. He proposes an unexpected humanism, in which both white and black people are equally likely to be visited by the extraordinary. He holds the contradictory aspects of colonialism together. Ultimately, he is a francophone author; he dismantles the trap of the racialized usage of language and forms a new noun to say the unsaid.
Diallo truly took hold of the word (a bien pris la parole). Presenting itself as a child of Africa and of the colony of French West Africa, the narrating “I” tears itself from the silence of negation. One could counter that a certain kind of silence is better than empty chatter, than predictable babble. In fact, the simple fact of speaking has no predetermined value. Parlance is another destructive form that silences signification within discourse itself; it cannot be compared with the mute refusal of compliance, for example. This is why I construct the scene of speaking up, which exceeds the imposed silence, loosening tongues and undoing the censure that speaking may become. Diallo pronounces the words of the other and throws himself into a language previously unknown to him. He keeps himself in a critical position and passes through the parlance; he subscribes to the prescription in order to distance himself from it. He says goodness in order to say goodness-power.
To be sure, I do not want to turn Diallo into a violent opponent of colonialism. Even less do I want to strike out his words with a single gesture, on the pretext that they do not fit a given political analysis. It’s hard to be a pioneer. Diallo is not a literary model (is there such a thing?); his work, however, forms an event. A path is opened to subsequent explorations. Literature maintains a ceaseless relation to its past. It is not a question of a continuous progress. Textual density nonetheless exists. For all the authors anxious about initiating a francophone African speech,17 the multiplicity of routes already taken is a major challenge. Birago Diop privileges African orality, while Léopold Sédar Senghor mobilizes classical cultures (from the Greeks to the Sereer). Bakary Diallo wants to break ground within colonial French and beyond; this experiment, with its limits and successes, is necessary for other later writing committed to this task. The active critique of the norm has been initiated. Although it must start again each time, it can use its own past to go somewhere else.