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Re-mapping 1968: Francophone writers and the legacies of the “global” protest

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Abstract

This article examines, through a historical lens, sub-Saharan African and Haitian literary activism that stems from the historical context of 1968. It argues that the socio-political turmoil of that time provides a framework to understand Ahmadou Kourouma, Yambo Ouologuem, Frankétienne and Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s contribution to the global protest. Using Bakhtinian dialogism and the concept of multilingualism as a starting point, it shows how these writers generated new literary trends by redefining genre as well as narrative, and linguistic boundaries. Their works, while reassessing the role of literature in times of crises, were at the center of a politically-conscious literary revolution that still resonates in Africa and the Caribbean.

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Notes

  1. Félix Germain’s Decolonizing the Republic: African and Caribbean Migrants in Postwar Paris, 1946–1974 (2016), and Etudiants africains en mouvements. Contribution à une histoire des années 1968 (2017), edited by Françoise Blum, are among the limited number of works that aim to document African and Caribbean activism.

  2. Overall, of the hundreds of essays and books that discuss the legacy of 1968, very few publications (such as Boris Gobille’s Le mai 68 des écrivains: Crise politique et avant-gardes littéraires (2018)) examine the contribution of writers.

  3. In sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti, the rising dissatisfaction and antagonism that characterized social interactions in the 1950s and 1960s were deeply rooted in failed political transitions after independence.

  4. Notable examples include Mongo Beti (Cameroon), Edouard Glissant (Martinique) and Jacques Stephen Alexis (Haiti), who were forced into exile in 1959 by authoritarian regimes.

  5. Even though they have not received much attention, students and workers’ revolutionary movements in Africa and the Caribbean equally constituted defining historical moments: in Congo, Senegal, and in Haiti, students and workers demanded reforms. while their counterparts from Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana, who had emigrated to France, demanded to be treated like French citizens in accordance with the law that changed these French colonies into French departments (a process known as ‘departmentalization’).

  6. Chinua Achebe, “The Duty and Involvement of the African Writer” cited by BlackPast, B., Black Past, April 17, 2009. https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/1968-chinua-achebe-duty-and-involvement-african-writer/.

  7. Yambo Ouologuem, Bound to Violence, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 1.

  8. Eileen, Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 42.

  9. His publications include: En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (1990) and Allah n’est pas obligé (2000) translated in English as While waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, and Allah is not obliged¸ respectively.

  10. The English Translation was published in 1981.

  11. Ahmadou Kourouma, The Suns of Independence, trans. Adrian Adams (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1981), 16.

  12. Translation published in 2014.

  13. Frankétienne, Ready to Burst, trans. Kaiama Glover (New York: Archipelago Books, 2014), 10–11.

  14. Ibid., 8.

  15. Mikhail Bakhtine, ‘Discourse in the Novel,’ The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 262.

  16. Ibid., 261.

  17. Frankétienne, op.cit., 10.

  18. Quoted in Kaiama Glover, ‘Showing vs. Telling: "Spiralisme" in the Light of "Antillanité",’ Journal of Haitian Studies, Special Issue on Frankétienne 14, no. 1 (2008): 96.

  19. Hédi Bouraoui, L’œuvre romanesque de Frankétienne, Dérives, 53/54 (1987): 89.

  20. Quoted in Kaiama Glover, Ibid.

  21. Robert, Colson, ‘Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest: Narrative Time and the African Dictator in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow.’ Research in African Literatures. 42, no 1 (Spring 2011): 135.

  22. Frankétienne, op.cit., 55.

  23. Ibid., 11.

  24. Kaiama Glover, op.cit., 95.

  25. Frankétienne, op.cit., 10.

  26. Ibid., 111.

  27. Kaiama Glover rightly points out that “One of the central concerns that has consistently marked works of Francophone Caribbean literature and post/colonial fiction as a whole is that of accurately conveying the physical and emotional reality of the post/colonial subject.” Op.cit., p. 94.

  28. Frankétienne, op.cit., 135.

  29. Régis Antoine, La littérature franco-antillaise (Paris: Karthala, 1992), 344.

  30. Rafael Lucas, ‘Frankétienne: un condamné à norme s’est échappé’ Sens-Dessous,1. no. 11 (2013): 108.

  31. Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism: From Resistance to Human Rights in Marie Chauvet’s Les rapaces,’ Revisiting Marie Vieux-Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine, eds. Kiaima Glover and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, no 128, (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 58.

  32. Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, Madness, trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinnokur (New York: Modern Library, 2009), 3.

  33. Martin Munro, ‘Chauvet the Prophet: Writing the Future and the Future of Writing,’ Revisiting Marie Vieux-Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine, op.cit., 55.

  34. Ibid., 45.

  35. Maryse La parole des femmes, Essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1979), 103.

  36. Marie Vieux-Chauvet, op.cit., 233–234.

  37. Ibid., 196.

  38. Ibid., 175.

  39. Ibid., 256.

  40. Ibid., 259.

  41. Ibid., 227.

    My emphasis.

  42. Ibid., 311, 320.

  43. Ibid., 320.

  44. Ibid., 364.

  45. Sibylle, Fischer, ‘Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,’ Small Axe, 23. 11, no. 2 (2007): 14.

  46. The co-existence of several voices in René’s psyche echoes the poet’s cohabitation with three other indigent poets. In her introduction to the translation of Vieux-Chauvet’s novel, Edwidge Danticat argues that the situation of these fictional poets is reminiscent of a real-life group of Haitian writers, Les Araignées du soir [Spiders of the Night]. Vieux-Chauvet was the only woman of this group that included Villard Denis, Serge Legagneur, Rolan Morisseau, Anthony Phelps, and René Philoctète. Members of this group worked in semi-secrecy, and many of them were jailed or forced into exile during the Duvalier regime. (Edwidge Danticat, ‘Introduction,’ Love Anger Madness, trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinnokur (New York: Modern Library, 2009), xv.

  47. Marie Vieux-Chauvet, op.cit., 105.

  48. Mikhail Bakhtine, op.cit., 300.

  49. Edwidge Danticat, op.cit., xv.

  50. The term francophone remains problematic, given the conceptual limits of its definition, that is, “French-speaking”.

  51. In 1968, the French publishing house, Seuil, refused to publish Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence, primarily because of the systematic use of Africanisms.

  52. Mongo Beti cited in The Columbia History of Twentieth Century French Thought, eds. Lawrence D. Kritzman, Brian J. Reilly, M. B. DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 237.

  53. Ngũgĩ wa, Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986), 13.

  54. Cited by Amadou, Koné, ‘Discourse in Kourouma’s Novel: Writing Two Languages to Translate Two Realities,’ Research in African Literatures, 38, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 114.

  55. Ahmadou Kourouma, op.cit., 5.

  56. Ibid., 14.

  57. The questionable aspect of the fictional plot seems to be a clear allusion to the 1963's alleged political plots to overthrow the government of Houphouët-Boigny. As outlined by Jeanne M. Toungara, “some were jailed and tortured during what became known as the 'bogus plot' of 1963.” ‘The Apotheosis of Côte d'Ivoire’s Nana Houphouët-Boigny,’ The Journal of Modern African Studies, 28, no. 1 (March 1990): 31.

  58. Mikhail Bakhtin, op.cit., 361.

  59. Ahmadou Kourouma, op.cit., 109.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Titles are representative of this clever mix, as Kourouma often transcribes maxims. For example, the first title “Le molosse et sa déhontée façon de s’asseoir” [“The mastiff and his shameless way of sitting”] is the transcription of a maxim that means « old habits die hard.”.

  62. Makhily Gassama, La langue d’Ahmadou Kourouma ou le français sous le soleil d’Afrique (Paris: Karthala, 1995), 13.

  63. Amadou Koné, op.cit., 117–118.

  64. Ahmadou Kourouma, op.cit., 6.

  65. Ibid., 121.

  66. Yambo Ouologuem, op.cit., 4–5.

  67. Ibid., 16.

  68. Writers such as Sony Labou Tansi (Life and a Half, 1979) and Henri Lopes (The Laughing Cry, 1982) will also construct narratives around the succession of dictators.

  69. Modibo Keita was the first president of the Republic of Mali, after the country's independence.

  70. He served as the Head of State from 1968 to 1991. Like several dictators, he imposed a single party during his tenure.

  71. A clear allusion to the German Africanist Leo Frobenius.

  72. Yambo Ouologuem, op.cit., 181–182.

  73. Kourouma and Ouologuem’s works mark the rise of a new generation of African writers, labelled the “generation of disenchantment by Jacques Chevrier.

  74. ‘An Interview with Yambo Ouologuem.’ Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts. 9, no. 10 (Winter/Spring 1973), 135.

  75. It is worth mentioning that after a warm reception, the book was engulfed in a scandal that hinged almost entirely on the issues of authenticity and authorship. Ouologuem was accused of plagiarism and the controversy generated by his book continues to fuel scholarly debates.

  76. ‘An Interview with Yambo Ouologuem.’ op.cit.,136.

  77. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Yambo Ouologuem and the Meaning of Postcoloniality.’ Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, ed. Christopher Wise, (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), 59.

  78. This does not apply to all Haitian writers: early writers such as Antoine Innocent (Mimola, 1906) and Justin LHérisson (La famille des Pitite-Caille, 1905) used Haitian creole in some of their works.

  79. Frantz, Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 239–240.

  80. Ibid.

  81. Kaiama Glover, op.cit., 91.

  82. Frankétienne, op.cit., 76.

  83. Frankétienne, Ibid.

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    Michele Kenfack

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Kenfack, M. Re-mapping 1968: Francophone writers and the legacies of the “global” protest. J Transatl Stud 20, 346–366 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-023-00103-1

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