(Re)Productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, and Infanticide (Francophone Cultures and Literatures, V. 41)

(Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, and Infanticide Mary-Kay F. Miller PETER LANG (Re)productions Francop...

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(Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, and Infanticide

Mary-Kay F. Miller

PETER LANG

(Re)productions

Francophone Cultures and Literatures

Michael G. Paulson & Tamara Alvarez-Detrell General Editors Vol. 41

PETER LANG

New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford

Mary-Kay F. Miller

(Re)productions Autobiography, Colonialism, and Infanticide

PETER LANG

New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Mary-Kay F. (Mary-Kay Fleming) (Re)productions : autobiography, colonialism, and infanticide / Mary-Kay F. Miller. p. cm. — (Francophone cultures and literatures; v. 41) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. French literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. French literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. African literature (French) —History and criticism. 4. Autobiography in literature. 5. Colonies in literature. 6. Infanticide in literature. I. Title: Reproductions. II. Title. III. Series. PQ149 .M538 840.9’9287’0904—dc21 2002152526 ISBN 0-8204-6362-0 ISSN 1077-0186

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek. Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de/.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2003 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

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Rick, Patrick, Margaret, & Sarah

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Contents

Acknowledgments y ix Introduction y 1 ONE

t (RE)PRODUCTIONS y 5

TWO THREE FOUR

t COLONIALISM y 23

t AUTOBIOGRAPHIES y 47

t WRITING INFANTICIDE: FIGURES OF MATERNAL VIOLENCE y 91 Conclusion y 127 Notes y 129 Works Cited y 145 Index y 151


Acknowledgments My most sincere thanks go to Chris Miller, who, many years ago, guided this project through its first incarnation as my Ph.D. dissertation. His knowledge, patience, and dedication are boundless, and I remain grateful. Colleagues at Vanderbilt University and the University of New Hampshire helped in ways too numerous to mention. I feel truly fortunate to have benefited from the encouragement and advice of so many talented people. A faculty grant from Vanderbilt funded additional research in Paris, which greatly contributed to this project. Family members, both immediate and extended, have provided invaluable support all along the way. Thought-provoking conversations with friends have enriched this work from its inception to its current form. Thanks also go to Sally Merrick, who painstakingly proofread these pages for me. Portions of Chapter Three were previously published in my essay entitled “Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Ex-père de la nation: Subversive Subtexts and the Return of the Maternal,” which appeared in Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, eds. Mary Jean Green, et. al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University of Minnesota Press for permission to reprint. Grateful acknowledgment is also made to Indiana University Press for permission to reprint material that appeared in my article “My Mothers/My Selves: (Re)reading a Tradition of West African Women’s Autobiography” in Research in African Literatures 28.


Introduction This book makes rather strange bedfellows out of a very diverse group of authors, theorists, and critics. While the main focus is on the literary texts of Mariama Bâ, Marguerite Duras, and Aminata Sow Fall, questions raised by these texts and their contexts have led me to the writings of Thomas Mpoyi-Buatu of Zaire, Nafissatou Diallo of Senegal, Aoua Kéita of Mali, and 19th-century French writer, Pierre Loti. Precisely because of the social, cultural, experiential, and literary differences among these writers, I have found it undesirable and, indeed, impossible to adopt a single critical approach in reading their texts. My readings are certainly influenced by a variety of feminist, postmodern, postcolonial, and cultural theories, but it is only through the imbrication of these perspectives that one can begin to forge an appropriate critical apparatus with which to read these texts. Even then, such an approach is necessarily deficient, and I have done my best to heed the moments when the literary texts in question demand to be read on their terms alone, allowing a dialogue to emerge among them that often transgresses cultural, ideological, and literary boundaries. Questions of colonialism, gender, and genre underlie each of the literary texts that I have chosen to discuss here. Far from provoking disparate or exclusive discourses, I find that these questions are intimately linked to one another via the figure of reproduction. As I will explain in more detail in my first chapter, the idea of reproduction is essential to the understanding of the capitalist component of colonialism, as well as to the policy of assimilation that motivated much of the French colonial enter-

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t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide

prise. Reproduction has, in many ways, historically shaped gender relations, and continues to inform much of gender theory. It is also an essential element in the establishment of literary categories and genres, and notably in the distinction traditionally made between autobiography and fiction. As my title would indicate, the literary texts that I consider engage in some way with the autobiographical genre, and struggle with the construction of a literary self. These selves are frequently fragmented and marginalized, attempting to inscribe a first-person voice while resisting the idea of autobiography as a transparent representation of a unified “I.” The works read here relate in a variety of ways to French (and in the case of Mpoyi-Buatu’s La Re-production, Belgian) colonialism. The West and Central African texts grapple with the colonial legacy, with neocolonial influences, and with postcolonial issues of hybridity and identity. The texts of Duras are deeply embroiled in colonial and postcolonial conflicts, but from the perspective of a former colonist in Southeast Asia. I have also included discussions of some of Pierre Loti’s work, focusing on it as representative of colonial fiction, and examining how some contemporary texts enter into an intertextual dialogue in which these colonizing fictional structures are challenged and sometimes dismantled. In the writings of Mariama Bâ, Marguerite Duras, and Aminata Sow Fall, the construction of a feminine voice and subject motivates the narrative. The difficulties of this female writing/narrating subject are sometimes evoked by the powerful figure of infanticide, which encapsulates the violent conflict between the reproductive roles traditionally assigned to women and the creative/productive role of the female writing/narrating subject. In Chapter One, I will focus on the process of reproduction and its role in colonialism, gender relations, and literature. Critically, this will take us from Marx to Irigaray, and will then lead us to Thomas MpoyiBuatu’s novel La Re-production as well as to the writings of Mariama Bâ, Nafissatou Diallo, and Aminata Sow Fall. In Chapter Two, I will look more closely at the workings of French colonialism in West Africa and in Southeast Asia. In Part One of this chapter, I will examine the reproduction of colonialism through education and in Part Two, I will begin to theorize about the link I perceive between colonialism and autobiography. Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, Marguerite Duras’s Eden Cinéma series, and Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Appel des Arènes have much to tell us about colonial education and a careful reading of these texts will reveal the involvement of the educational system in a variety of colonizing strategies. A comparison of several

INTRODUCTION

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works of Pierre Loti and Marguerite Duras will demonstrate the insidious relationship between colonialism and autobiography, a relationship that I will continue to discuss in the following chapter, which focuses more specifically on the autobiographical construction of a female literary self. In this third chapter, I will look at the ways in which Mariama Bâ, Nafissatou Diallo, Marguerite Duras, Aoua Kéita, and Aminata Sow Fall manipulate autobiographical structures and frequently transgress the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. Theories of women’s autobiography as well as theories of autobiography’s place in African literature will help to analyze the strategies deployed in Bâ, Diallo, Duras, Kéita, and Sow Fall’s texts. Because the authors’ engagement with the genre of autobiography is informed not only by culture, but also by gender, and by their relationship to colonial and colonizing systems, very different individual stories sometimes reveal similar struggles and strategies. The final chapter will explore infanticide as a literary theme and figure. Present in various forms in a surprising number of texts, it speaks violently and eloquently of the conflict between women’s traditional role as reproducers and their desire to fashion a productive literary role. In this chapter, I will look at infanticide as the repressed term in a number of theories concerning gender and identity and at its presence in the texts of Mariama Bâ, Marguerite Duras, Pierre Loti, and Aminata Sow Fall. This fourth chapter will complete my analysis of the various manifestations of reproduction in the constructs of colonialism, gender, and genre. Through this analysis of infanticide, we will finally see how reproduction is not categorically rejected by writers such as Bâ, Duras, and Sow Fall, but rather reconfigured and re-presented in such a way as to free the feminine from a cycle of imitation and perpetuation.


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(Re)productions In this chapter and throughout this book, I wish to discuss the problematic relationship of reproduction to production for writers—with particular attention paid to female writers—engaged in colonial and postcolonial endeavors. We often use and understand the terms production and reproduction as inseparable from one another, as integral and interdependent parts of a single process. Taken alone, each can have innumerable meanings, and can function within almost any conceptual framework or process. Taken together, their recognition value comes primarily from their role in Marxist theory, and from subsequent and related roles in feminist and literary theory.1 Perhaps the most difficult aspect of defining and discussing reproduction is its contradictory relationship to production. As it is usually understood, reproduction is at once intrinsically, inextricably bound to, yet utterly alienated from production, having none of its inventive force. Production becomes the dominant member of the pair, while reproduction is subsumed or devalued. When we talk about the reproduction of a work force or of women’s reproductive role in society, this disparity becomes an imbalance of power that is politically charged. The stakes certainly change, but the tension between notions of superiority and inferiority still obtains when we discuss inanimate entities such as paintings, where a reproduction is generally considered inferior to the original. In the realm of literature, until relatively recently fiction and poetry alone represented artistic creativity and invention, whereas a genre such as autobiography, considered as an imitation or reproduction of actual events,

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represented an act of self-indulgence or signaled the onset of decrepitude and has generally been accorded a lesser literary status. Yet on another level, reproduction is the link between individual and species, product and industry, event and system, and in many ways is the key to power and dominance in contemporary culture. This protean and paradoxical nature of reproduction precludes, for the most part, a single response to it. In many of the works that I will study in this chapter and beyond, reproduction appears in various forms, some oppressive and some liberating. In some texts, for example, we might see a categorical rejection of the reproduction/perpetuation of a colonizing gesture, and at the same time, an attempt to recuperate and/or empower the reproductive in another area. It is this capacity for polyvalence and even self-contradiction that makes reproduction a feasible organizing principle for a study that attempts to bring together a number of diverse issues and cultures. Before moving on to an analysis of reproduction in certain literary texts, I would like to discuss briefly how the processes of reproduction and production are defined and redefined among theorists of various critical orientations. REPRODUCTION IN MARXIST THOUGHT

Marx emphasizes that simple reproduction is “the mere continuity of the production process,”2 and more contemporary scholars have observed that: “in orthodox Marxist economics . . . there is no valid distinction between production and reproduction.”3 These observations illustrate the difficulties of delineating and discussing a process which by definition can be neither autonomous nor unique, but without which, biologically, technologically, culturally, the world we live in would be unthinkable. Yet even in Marxist theory, reproduction becomes invested with a significance that extends beyond its function within the production process, as Marx takes into account the reproduction of human capital. “The capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production” (716, my emphasis). In other words, the wage-laborer who sells his/her labor in exchange for the means of subsistence does not exist a priori, but is created and then reproduced by the capitalist system. The worker and the working class are also “reproduced” in the form of offspring to whom skills are transferred (719). It is at this point that reproduction impinges upon the private domestic sphere and begins to stretch the definition that Marx originally gave to it. No longer just the dispassionate repetition of a mechanical process, its place within and influence on family, tradition, and culture comes to light.

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Engels continues in this vein when he analyzes gender relationships in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: “to emancipate woman and make her the equal of man is and remains an impossibility so long as woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor.”4 Interestingly, Engels seems to ignore here any of the exploitative aspects of the public sphere of production, which are so frequently the focus of his work with Marx, and concentrates only on the detrimental effects of women’s position in the domestic sphere and their performance of reproductive instead of productive labor. This alignment of the feminine with the reproductive and the masculine with the productive, the accompanying devaluing of reproductive labor, and the uncritical acceptance of the value of “productive” labor combine to make the idea of reproduction a very problematic one for women in general, and specifically for the female writers I will discuss later in this chapter. Engels’ thoughts on reproduction even extend into the literary realm, but the value of the term changes: “Realism, to my mind, implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances.” 5 Thus the meaning of reproduction slides from perpetuation to imitation and provokes a whole new set of considerations. The above quotation appears in Georg Gugelberger’s essay “Marxist Literary Debates and their Continuity in African Literary Criticism” as part of his argument against what he calls “modernist” texts and the impenetrability of their style. According to Gugelberger, African literature needs first and foremost to be functional: to communicate simply and to the largest possible audience, and to carry a transparent sociopolitical message to that audience. African literature and literary criticism are, as he puts it, on a “long and troublesome journey from aesthetics to ethics” (2). He praises African writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ousmane Sembene for being “less formalistically achieved, but politically more engaged . . .” (2). While this is clearly an encomium to reproduction (in the form of mimesis) that flies in the face of many contemporary theories of language and literature, reproduction is nonetheless divorced from literary creativity and skill. And while Gugelberger would—and does—call his vision of African literature “radical,” in many ways it simply reinforces a very widely held belief among European and African critics alike that African literature is always transparently, palpably, and primarily, political. Indeed, critics such as Gugelberger demand that it be so: “ . . . the more refined and successful in aesthetic terms a work of art becomes, the more it lacks moral and social integrity” (3). While much of African literature is political (and such, I would argue, is the case of many litera-

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tures from other continents and other periods), more and more of its writers have objected to the polarization of politics and aesthetics.6 Whenever the age-old question of the role of art and the artist in society comes up, the issue of whether or not art must realistically reflect the world that produces it is a central one. As early as Plato and Aristotle, one encounters the problem of literary reproduction. While for Plato, the artist is hopelessly removed from the real and, therefore, can never hope to benefit society with his art, Aristotle suggests that the poet’s work affords an invaluable perspective and commentary on society: “the poet’s job is not to report what has happened but what is likely to happen. . . . Hence also poetry is a more philosophical and serious business than history; for poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars.”7 Albeit for opposing reasons, both find “pure” imitation, or reproduction, impossible, or at least not the job of the poet/writer. And in the centuries that have since elapsed, myriad theories of mimesis, realism, and vraisemblance have been advanced, the majority of which concur that literature need not tell “what really happened,” only what might plausibly have happened, or even what should have happened. The gap thus created is the space in which literary creativity is thought to flourish, and the literary value of anything that reproduces actual events too closely is questioned. Our contemporary suspicion of any clear delineation between “art” and “reality” makes the role of reproduction in literature even more ambiguous. As I have noted above, the problematic nature of literary reproduction is highlighted in works that are considered autobiographical, and we will find later in this study that some African women writing life stories are denied any literary or aesthetic credibility at all because of the many ways in which they appear tied to reproduction. With an extensive technology of “reproduction” present in almost every sector of modern life, the role of the reproductive in art takes on yet another dimension first for Walter Benjamin, and decades later, for Jean Baudrillard. In Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he asserts that mechanical reproduction, unlike manual reproduction (for example, a poster of a famous painting as opposed to a hand drawn copy) threatens the authenticity and the authority of the object reproduced: First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens. . . . Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a pho-

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tograph or a phonograph record. . . . the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition . . . 8

The revolutionary portent of this interpretation of reproduction is multiple. Reproduction is redefined as autonomous and active: it surpasses its original, even containing elements formerly absent from it. Rather than endlessly perpetuating a system, according to Benjamin’s analysis, reproduction shatters tradition.19 And, Benjamin tells us, the key to this power lies in reproduction’s ability to put the authenticity and the authority of the original in question (221). The effect of large-scale multiplication and accessibility, then, is confusion, indifference, or suspicion concerning the “source.”10 The idea that reproduction can challenge authority and shatter tradition holds particular importance for women writers, an importance that becomes magnified when the writing is deemed autobiographical, and when the authors grapple not only with questions of gender, but of culture and colonialism as well. Embroidering on Benjamin’s vision of a plethora of reproductions eclipsing the original, Jean Baudrillard examines late 20th-century technology and culture and pronounces the original introuvable and the real beseiged: It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double. . . . So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. The latter starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Conversely, simulation starts from the utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference.11

Whereas Benjamin sees freedom from “authority” in an artistic and a political sense, in the process of reproduction, Baudrillard sees it as a process out of control that has radically altered the order of late 20thcentury society, but not in the egalitarian way Benjamin envisions: And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. . . . The cool universe of digitality has absorbed the world of metaphor and metonymy (Simulations, 152).

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It is worth noting that although in many ways this presents a view of reproduction that we have not seen before, reproduction is once again incompatible with art, and specifically, with the literary art of rhetoric. Reproduction has banished “underlying meaning”; the poststructuralist fascination with the arbitrary link between signifier and signified has worked to set the signified adrift altogether, leaving the hollow yet powerful signifier to reign. No longer accused of not being equal to its “original,” reproduction is accused of consuming its “original,” but a certain antinomy is still maintained between reproduction and the notions of depth, complexity, and literary invention. While one might read an egalitarian message in the proclamation that “art is everywhere . . . art is dead”; that is, art is no longer defined as unique, rare, and in the possession of an elite, and is therefore at once everywhere because it is quotidien and accessible, and dead in its rarefied form, Baudrillard undeniably has a darker view of reproduction: Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a disquieting foreignness. . . . All reproduction implies . . . a kind of black magic, from the fact of being seduced by one’s own image in the water, like Narcissus, to being haunted by the double and, who knows, to the mortal turning back of this vast technical apparatus secreted today by man as his own image . . . and that returns to him, cancelled and distorted—endless reproduction of himself and his power to the limits of the world. Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate (153).

Benjamin’s vision of the mechanical reproduction of works of art as making a vital contribution to Marxist political struggle is strongly countered by the Baudrillardian vision of reproduction as another form of domination. In Baudrillard’s scenario, reproduction dominates because it obliterates that which it is supposed to reproduce, and what he calls the “simulacrum” becomes the only available reality. This analysis of reproduction will be also be useful in the next chapter when I examine French colonial systems in more detail, for the French policy of assimilation led to “reproductions” in the form of colonizer and colonized that evacuated the realities of French and Senegalese cultures and substituted for them a fabricated colonial culture and the myth of the colony. FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES

We have seen the multiform, and often contradictory, ways in which reproduction has been constructed in marxian discourse and have begun to glimpse why its presence as figure, theme, or condition of production in a literary text might plunge that text into political and literary conflict

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and debate. The relationship of reproduction to gender, touched on in the preceding pages, is of particular importance since the vast majority of literary works that I will discuss in this book are written by women. The role of the reproductive in women’s lives seems to be at the heart of most feminist theory, and in the following pages, I will try to give a brief overview of reproduction’s place in the work of several major feminist theorists. Simone de Beauvoir attributes the lion’s share of women’s ills to their reproductive role. In The Second Sex, she observes: “Necessary as she was to the perpetuation of the species, [woman] perpetuated it too generously, and so it was man who had to assure equilibrium between reproduction and production.”12 According to Beauvoir, woman’s involvement with reproduction binds her to her body and locks her out of the realm of production: On a biological level, a species is maintained only by creating itself anew; but this creation results only in repeating the same Life in more individuals. But man assures the repetition of Life while transcending Life through Existence; by this transcendence he creates values that deprive pure repetition of all value (72).

Women merely perpetuate life, while men transcend it, argues Beauvoir, for whom maternity is the strongest of shackles: There is one feminine function that it is actually almost impossible to perform in complete liberty. It is maternity. . . . having a child is enough to paralyze a woman’s activity entirely. . . . She is forced to choose between sterility, which is often felt as a painful frustration, and burdens hardly compatible with a career (774–775).

Reproduction, in Beauvoir’s analysis, is quite straightforward: pure repetition, and a corporeal, rather than a spiritual or intellectual, endeavor; it paralyzes women and deprives them of “Existence” by condemning them to perpetuate “Life.” Decades later, Luce Irigaray’s assessment of reproduction’s influence on gender roles and identities sounds startlingly similar: The point being that man is the procreator, that sexual production-reproduction is referable to his “activity” alone, to his “pro-ject” alone. Woman is nothing but the receptacle that passively receives his product, even if sometimes, by the display of her passively aimed instincts, she has pleaded, facilitated, even demanded that it be placed within her. Matrix-womb, earth factory, bank—to which the seed capital is entrusted so that it may germinate, produce, grow fruitful, without woman being able to lay claim to either capital or interest since she has only submitted “passively” to reproduction. Herself held in receivership as a certified means of (re)production.13

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But Irigaray’s analysis is laced with irony: unlike Beauvoir, she does not accept the supposed passivity of reproduction and argues that it is not anything inherent in reproduction itself, but the way in which it has been represented, evaluated, and finally used to shape female identity that contributes to feminine oppression. Irigaray pushes the question of reproduction further still: playing on the Freudian assertion that until the oedipal stage, “the little girl is (only) a little boy,” she implies that in the influential Freudian schema, female identity is staged as an instance of reproduction. Woman’s position as Other, argues Irigaray, is the effect of “the same re-marking itself” (21). This concept of identity construction via the reproduction of a dominant self will appear again in my discussion of French colonialism and serves as a link between the constructions of the feminine and the colonized. Julia Kristeva theorizes that it is not woman who is repressed in society so much as it is the mother.14 In her essay “Stabat Mater,” Kristeva notes our inability to separate the idea of woman from the idea of mother and posits that the figure of the mother in Western culture has little basis in reality. Instead, she is “le fantasme que nourrit l’adulte, homme ou femme, d’un continent perdu: il s’agit de surcroît moins d’une mère archaïque idéalisée que d’une idéalisation de la relation qui nous lie à elle, illocalisable—d’une idéalisation du narcissisme primaire.”15 According to this analysis, then, our image of the mother would in many ways be a reproduction of ourselves, an idealization of the bond of sameness. But more “public” images of the mother do not necessarily betray this. Kristeva’s critique focuses on Christianity’s construction of the cult of the Virgin Mary, making palpable the irony of a quintessential mother figure who is irremediably separated from every real mother. Kristeva reads this separation as a need to repress the realities of maternity, that is, to repress the biological mechanics of reproduction in order to refuse the inevitability of death. Once again, the danger of reproduction is that it threatens the sublime with the prosaic. Beauvoir, Irigaray, and Kristeva have shown how women, either as “agents” of reproduction or as objects considered to be (inferior) reproductions of men, have been defined and frequently contained/constrained by this process. But one also sees in Irigaray and Kristeva reproduction’s potential force. The literary texts that we will begin now to analyze will grapple with both the repressive and liberating powers of reproduction.

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REPRODUCTION IN FICTION L’auto-engendrement Rien que cela Qui exclut toute nécessité de la re-production —Thomas Mpoyi-Buatu, La Re-production16

The fury with which Mpoyi-Buatu’s narrator attacks reproduction leaves the reader slightly dazed, wondering what might have provoked this violent assault. This disconcerting, disorienting narrative consists primarily of the narrator’s diatribe against all forms of reproduction and against the colonial system intimately linked to it. Simply put, the narrator sees reproduction at the base of all the ills of contemporary Zairian society. It is what maintains a traditional and repressive family structure, prevents the emancipation of women, perpetuates poverty, and obstructs the real dismantling of the colonial system put into place by the Belgians. The narrator first appears as a prisoner tortured by his two guards and accused in the following terms: Ton dossier signale que tu as donné des cours sur la sexualité . . . Qu’est-ce que c’est que cette aberration? —Je tentais de provoquer chez ces jeunes l’élan du désir. —L’élan du désir! . . . Tu prêchais le désir par négation de la reproduction. . . . Tu contreviens aux règles que nous essayons de mettre en place afin de donner à ce pays une assise. Tu es coupable: ta cause est entendue. Bien entendu, les sujets de concours choisis et imposés par toi ne pouvaient tourner qu’autour du sexe et de la petite ideé mesquine que tu te fais de l’éducation en général et de l’enseignement en particulier: la reproduction, toujours la reproduction (17).

We see already the polysemy of reproduction in the text. At the start, it quite clearly refers to sexual reproduction, but the guard’s use of it in his last utterance is considerably more enigmatic. Further study of the text will show this second meaning of reproduction to be the repetition and perpetuation of western colonial ideas and values in the people, especially in the children, of Zaire. As the above passage implies, the narrator delights in flouting convention, especially convention pertaining to sexuality. Educated by clergy,17 and himself a teacher in a school run by clergy, the narrator’s views on sexuality as well as his own sexual practices systematically defy Catholic doctrine. He advocates incest, defends prostitution, and identifies himself as homosexual. Underlying all of this, we are given to understand, is his unwavering, violent rejection of reproduction in its

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procreative guise, the sole justification of human sexuality accepted by the Church. Perhaps paradoxically in a text that foregrounds the sexual, with an emphasis on what the narrator’s society considers sexually marginal, there is nothing erotic about sexuality in La Re-production: every choice, however intimate, is directly or indirectly political. The narrator describes his sister’s decision to prostitute herself in the following terms: Elle se prostituait par haine de la maternité à laquelle sont astreintes toutes les femmes dans ce pays et par haine du mépris dont est entaché le corps. . . . Elle abandonna l’enseignement des Scribes Enjuponnées. Elle prêta le serment de chier sur le mariage. De ne jamais avoir d’enfant. Une véritable épidémie dans le pays. On en fait comme des petits pains. Comparaison disproportionnée. Le pain fait croître. L’enfant n’est même pas utile à l’organisme (24, 32).

In a text constantly inflected with excessive gestures, this kind of stance becomes the norm. It is clearly not enough for the sister to remain unmarried and childless; she must stamp out any appearance of obedience to a tradition, either autochthonous or colonial. The narrator describes his own sexuality in analogous terms: On vit sur des structures de reproduction. La sexualité, c’est une machine à produire des monstres. C’est pour cela que je ne rêve que de castrats. J’aime qu’ils frottent leurs queues mutilées contre mon cul. J’éprouve une pure jouissance. Je tue en moi, à travers mes rêves, toute forme de sexualité à visée reproductrice (71–72).

The first sentence of this passage alerts the reader to its overarching relevance, despite the apparent narrowing of focus that subsequently occurs. Once again, the desire to push everything (representation, the reader’s tolerance) up to—and then beyond—its limits, shows itself to be perhaps the only sensual desire in the text. For the “pure jouissance” of which the narrator speaks does not come from physical contact, but rather from dealing a double death-blow to sexual reproduction. Not content to let an ordinary homosexual encounter negate reproduction, the narrator goes a step further and castrates his imagined partners. It is this frenzy that constitutes the passion of the text, this excess that spurts out page after page. The narrator himself concedes: “ Je . . . décidais de fonder la violence de l’inceste. En fait. Non pas seulement pour la volupté de la transgression. Mais pour me prouver que l’acte sexuel devrait se dissocier de toute socialité” (163). In embracing only sexuality that pushes limits, the narrator fulfils his true desire to “se dissocier de toute socialité,” because said “socialité” is linked to repressive, and for the most part colonial, structures.

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It is the more general reproduction of colonial and colonizing structures that lies at the heart of the narrator’s rage. His first target is education, and the reader sees at once the bitter irony of the narrator’s position, for he is simultaneously victim and perpetrator of colonizing educational practices. Denounced by his superior, who symbolizes colonial authority, the narrator is imprisoned, and suffers at the hands of his prison guards. One in particular, taunts him: Après tes études universitaires, tu es revenu à la source: ainsi la tradition est sauve. L’avenir appartient à l’élite. La belle machine de la duplication est mise sur rails. Elle n’a plus qu’à glisser en douceur. La relève est assurée. . . . Ne voilà-t-il pas que . . . monsieur se met à cracher dans la soupe. Il avait tout de même pris ses précautions: pour lutter contre le système, plongeons-y jusqu’à la merde! . . . Je hais ton savoir parce qu’il ne vient même pas de toi. . . . Tu crois jouir d’un savoir et ce savoir ne t’appartient pas. Un savoir médiocre dans la tête de quelqu’un qui est déjà un médiocre. . . . tu manques la profondeur du pays (15, 26–27).

Here, what the narrator call “reproduction,” the guard calls “duplication” and designates the narrator as a willing accomplice to it. The guard’s trenchant comments introduce doubt, not only about the value of the narrator’s knowledge, but also about his “authenticity”—or perhaps his “authority”: “tu manques la profondeur du pays.” The author lacks something substantial; one might say he is a mere “reproduction,” but of what? The guard implies that he is only superficially African, but the narrator himself would locate the problem in the reproduction and propagation of European systems of thought. In the narrrator’s frequent diatribes against the educational system of his country, he indicates that it is largely to blame for the omnipresence of colonizing ideas and images: briser les chaînes invisibles de la cage. Le système belge m’y avait enfermé. L’enseignement c’était ça: un mouvement missionnaire. Etat indépendant du Congo. Postes d’évangélisation. Classes. Ensuite Saint Siège. Ecoles. Missions. Missions d’écoles. Ecoles d’émission. Ecoles démission. Ecoles des Missions. Impossibilité d’en sortir (25).

One of the “cages” constructed here is a linguistic one: the reproduction of sounds in French forms a trap that obliges the reader to share in the narrator’s confusion and sense that he functions in a system and a language that lack meaning. Throughout the text, the narrator struggles with the impossibility he speaks of in this passage. Philosophical musings are interrupted by a radical questioning of the nature and validity of philosophy itself. The narrator makes parenthetical remarks on how to edit his text that disrupt reveries and pedantic passages. His critical gaze is

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constantly trained on the systems that underpin his thought, yet he is unable to escape them entirely. And he is keenly aware that, as a result, his every utterance is unstable, poised on the brink of reversing itself or otherwise showing itself to be foundationless. The questions of authenticity and stability arise again in the narrator’s discussion of the greater significance of topography: De nos jours encore, nous vivons sur nos propres ruines. Il est vrai qu’une ville est créatrice de société. Il est non moins vrai que nous sommes une fausse société. . . . Or la Belgique est un pays où existe une fausse concentration. Je n’y ai jamais été mais j’imagine . . . La concentration des maisons, le rétrécissement de l’espace vital leur font prendre l’étouffement pour une profondeur épaisse qui serait à l’origine du fondement d’une psychologie ethnique assez dense. Les naïfs! Ici, la profondeur, niée par l’architecture coloniale, est dans les hommes, avant de se diluer dans les objets. Mais les objets semblent inexistants. Les années coloniales se sont imprimées dans la ville. Tout était broyé: les amours, les vies, les lois, les jouissances . . . (66, 69).

The narrator’s city is built to realize a colonial “fantasy of control.” Again and again, the narrator returns to the ideas of fantasy, illusion, and deception crystallized in his physical surroundings. This Zairian city (Kinshasha) is a reproduction, if not of the metropole then of the colonial imagination. There is a jarring discontinuity between the realities of the society and the contours of the city, one that threatens to eclipse these realities altogether: “nous sommes une fausse société.” In Baudrillardian fashion, the reproduction is the reality, and the rest is just history. But Mpoyi-Buatu’s narrator fervently wishes to recover that history. Not necessarily to return to it, but to reactivate it and use it to step out of the cycle of reproduction, the “false society,” and the false identity it has created. Note his observation that “depth,”in other words, something genuine, exists in the people before it is negated by their environment.18 La Re-production is written in the first person in the form of a journal, and at different moments in the text, the narrator broaches the questions of self-writing and self-engendering. The narrator most explicitly turns his gaze inward and ponders the construction of his own identity in the third part of the novel, asking: Alors qui suis-je? . . . J’avouais manquer de réponse décisive. . . . Je me vivais en cercle. J’étais Echo et Narcisse. Je naviguais entre Echo et Narcisse. Pour me dépasser en eux de par leur nature de mythologies étrangères. . . . Je m’embourbais. La subjectivité est une voie décevante. Je me déterminais en toute conscience. Mais elle était fausse. Du moins avant la prise de conscience. Toute subjectivité qui s’offre en toute conscience rate sa prise de conscience. Tout était à recommencer. Aller à la Source. A la recherche. De la grammaire. De l’écriture.

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Orale. Oui la G.D.E.O. (Grammaire de l’Ecriture Orale). Je ne voyais pas la philosophie autrement (159).

The choice of two symbols of false or ironic reproduction, Echo and Narcissus, as moorings for the narrator’s identity indicates his conflicted awareness of his involvement in the reproductive system he excoriates and the impossibility of constructing a “genuine” identity, in short, the impossibility of his own position as subject. On the one hand, his choice of Echo and Narcissus privileges his connection to Western philosophy but, on the other hand, by using them as figures of the kind of solitary sexuality and self-engenderment the narrator advocates, he attempts to distance them from their reproductive and western origins. More importantly perhaps, these two figures embody the tension present toward the end of the passage, and indeed throughout the text, between orality and writing, with Echo representing orality and Narcissus representing the illusion of substance created by the visual. But both the narrator’s project to explore his own identity beyond the bounds of Echo and Narcissus and his intention to study philosophy and what he calls “oral writing” are doomed to failure: “Au-delà de moi-même, il n’y avait que moi. C’était à la fois grandiose et limitatif. Peu exaltant. En un mot: un désastre. On se manque toujours en allant faire un tour du côté de Narcisse” (163). This is not only a rejection of the self-absorption usually associated with western individualism, but also a critique of a subject that, on the one hand, sees empty reproductions of itself everywhere but, on the other hand, has been so fractured by colonialism that its definition is an impossible project. Thus the narrator rejects the autobiographical impulses that have periodically asserted themselves throughout the narrative, yet he remains influenced by the image of a “genuine” autobiography and drawn to the notion of a “true” and whole self. This alternative representation of self and self-writing can be found in the character of Tippu Tib. Tippu Tib, an African character from colonial times who makes his livelihood playing the Europeans and the North Africans off one another, holes up in a cave in order to write his autobiography. Fearing his text will be seized, for it inculpates many people, he writes a “false autobiography” in Arabic, which is eventually surrendered into colonial hands. The real autobiography, like the first, is written on an impossibly long sheaf of papyrus, but unlike the first, is written in Tippu Tib’s native language of Bobangi, and, therefore, becomes “un texte insignifiant pour les oppresseurs” (142). This episode illustrates the perceived dangers, but also the potential value and subversive quality of autobiography: it can be manipulated in such a way as to deflect attention away from one’s “true” self, but in its “pure” form it works to uncover and affirm that self, while

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protecting it from its oppressors. Interestingly, all of this depends heavily on a calculated and strategic use of language. Arabic, which Tippu Tib says that he has “stolen” from the North Africans, is used to deceive his other oppressors, the Belgians, while his native language is used at once to reveal and to obscure. Several things tie the narrator’s own writing experience to the Tippu Tib episode. Like the narrator, Tippu Tib is entangled in oppressive systems of reproduction; the papyrus on which he writes, we are told, is obtained in exchange for slaves. Both write from a confined space, and with improvised materials. The narrator’s materials are, however, notably more gruesome than Tib’s papyrus: he writes from his prison cell on a piece of paper with which he has been bandaged after having been beaten and raped, and he writes with a mixture of blood and sperm. This is the ultimate rejection of reproduction, in which blood and sperm evoke not fertility, but rather violence, rebellion, and writing. Autobiography, as a mirroring or reproduction is inadmissible, but another kind of visceral self-writing takes its place. In a final echo of the Tippu Tib character, the narrator reveals: “Je tiens à dire que je traduis tout ceci de ma langue. La langue dans laquelle j’écris est une couche superficielle: muakulu wa bénda. Je pense en ma langue et je me traduis moi-même en langue étrangère” (239). But this echo serves also to underscore the distance between the two characters. Tippu Tib’s autobiography can be seen as an act of rebellion, but it is, nonetheless, written at the price of perpetuating slavery and colonialism. The narrator trades only in his own flesh in order to compose the present narrative. Although he does depend on a foreign language to write his story, he does every violence he can to that language and to the system it represents, and makes manifest the blood-letting involved in his act of translation. The narrator offers “la discontinuité” as an antidote to reproduction. And indeed the rejection of procreation, the violent political, intellectual, and social rebellion that he preaches are all envisaged to interrupt and disrupt the crippling reproduction of colonizing practices in a society that, chronologically speaking, is “postcolonial.” The frequently choppy, disconnected style of the text itself, the narrator’s portrayal as an anxious, ambivalent character constantly questioning his own assertions suggest the principle of discontinuity already at work. The text aims to dismantle with no promise to restore, seeing freedom only in the interstices of a disrupted moral and social code.

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REPRODUCTION AND MIDWIFERY IN MARIAMA BÂ, NAFISSATOU DIALLO, AND AMINATA SOW FALL

Reproduction plays a quite different role in the texts of Mariama Bâ, Nafissatou Diallo, and Aminata Sow Fall. In La Re-production, MpoyiBuatu’s narrator presents a decidedly male perspective, despite occasional attempts to include a female, sometimes even feminist, point of view. While reproduction functions in numerous ways in the texts of Bâ, Diallo, and Sow Fall, I will focus, for the remaining pages of this chapter, on the subject of midwifery and the figure of the midwife in Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, Diallo’s De Tilène au Plateau, and Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Appel des arènes. I will not do a complete analysis of these works at this time, because each of them will be discussed fully in subsequent chapters. In Une si longue lettre, the character of petite Nabou is a double of tante Nabou, mother-in-law to Aïssatou, the recipient of the narrator’s “long letter.” Tante Nabou, a woman of noble birth, loathes Aïssatou because the latter is from the artisan class, and wishes a wife of noble lineage for her son Mawdo. She undertakes to come between Aïssatou and Mawdo by bringing her young niece, petite Nabou, to live with her and preparing the niece for a future as Mawdo’s younger wife. Tante Nabou educates young Nabou formally, by sending her to a school of midwifery, and traditionally: C’était surtout, par les contes, pendant les veillées à la belle étoile, que tante Nabou avait exercé son emprise sur l’âme de la petite Nabou, sa voix expressive glorifiait la violence justicière du guerrier; sa voix expressive plaignait l’inquiétude de l’Aimée toute de soumission. . . . Mise en scène d’animaux, chansons nostalgiques tenaient haletante la petite Nabou. Et lentement, surement, par la ténacité de la répétition, s’insinuaient en cette enfant, les vertus et la grandeur d’une race.19

The reproduction of values, their inculcation through constant repetition, is portrayed here with no little ambivalence, for although the material in question concerns the “virtues and greatness of a race,” the reader also knows that it is being manipulated by an unsympathetic character in order to tighten her “hold on the soul” of a naive young girl. The reader further notes that Mariama Bâ uses the very same technique of repetition in this passage in order to communicate the almost hypnotic effect of tante Nabou’s tales. Indeed, repetition is a technique that Bâ favors throughout the text. Bâ’s use of doubles creates a system of cultural reproduction, whereby character types are transferred and transformed from generation to generation. Aïssatou and Ramatoulaye, their husbands Mawdo and Modou, Aïssatou and young Aïssatou, one of Ramatoulaye’s daughters,

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and, of course, tante Nabou and petite Nabou, all are very nearly the same, but have one highly significant difference that changes their fate. In Une si longue lettre, we see reproduction used for pedagogical and rhetorical purposes, but thematically, its function is regarded with some suspicion. Despite her traditional education, petite Nabou does not become an exact replica of her aunt; instead, she seems a prototype of the Senegalese woman who honorably, yet sometimes painfully, makes the transition between traditional and contemporary society: la petite Nabou exerçait un métier. . . . Responsable de services de garde rapprochés, à la Maternité du Repos Mandel, . . . elle accomplissait à la longueur de journée maintes fois, les gestes libérateurs de vie. Les bébés passaient et repassaient entre ses mains expertes. . . . Au coeur de la vie, au coeur de la misère, au coeur des laideurs, la petite Nabou triomphait, souvent, avec son savoir et son exprérience. . . . Responsable et consciente, la petite Nabou, comme toi, comme moi! Si elle n’est pas mon amie, nos préoccupations se rejoignaient souvent (71–72).

In her capacity as midwife, petite Nabou occupies a more traditional position than either Ramatoulaye, a teacher, or Aïssatou, an interpreter. The very nature of her work ties her to the reproductive, domestic sphere as well as to biological reproduction itself. Bâ’s desire to see women move beyond reproduction is evident in the clearly superior positions Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou, both professional women, occupy in the narrative; yet, as the above passage shows, she does not reject or devalue petite Nabou’s role. Indeed, it is petite Nabou’s dedication to her work as a midwife that saves her from another kind of reproduction: the uncritical perpetuation of tante Nabou’s values. While many of these values are consonant with those embraced by the narrator, the elitist quality of others is unquestionably condemned. Petite Nabou appears to represent the reproduction of tradition and of women’s traditional roles, but, in fact, moves beyond an unconscious perpetuation of certain norms and structures. Coupled with Ramatoulaye’s very strong maternal identity as the dedicated mother of twelve children and what we know about Bâ’s own literary techniques, the character of petite Nabou seems to indicate that, in some cases, Bâ wishes to redefine and perhaps reposition reproduction rather than categorically reject it. I will develop this idea further in subsequent readings of Bâ’s texts. In her autobiography, De Tilène au Plateau, Nafissatou Diallo offers herself and her text as figures of reproduction: Je ne suis pas une héroïne de roman mais une femme toute simple de ce pays: une mère de famille et une professionnelle (sage-femme et puériculturiste) à qui sa maison et son métier laissent peu de loisir.20

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Her status as mother and midwife firmly ties her to the reproductive sphere, yet the text recounts the author’s almost daily rebellion against the patriarchal authority governing that sphere. At the end of the text, while she remains firmly linked to reproduction, she appears concomitantly to reshape it ever so slightly but, nonetheless, significantly: “J’entends les ricanements: écrire un livre pour dire qu’on a aimé Père et Grand-Mère? La belle nouvelle!’ J’espère avoir fait un peu plus: avoir été au-delà des tabous de silence qui règnent sur nos émotions” (132). While she states on several occasions her desire to transmit her family history to future generations, she quite clearly does not wish her text to reproduce it uncritically. As Benjamin and Baudrillard noted in a more visual context, this is reproduction with a difference, and reproduction that makes a difference, for it attempts to provide cultural continuity while lobbying for important changes. The final reference to the breaking of taboos hints at the radical potential of this text, potential that we will explore more fully in a subsequent chapter. In Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Appel des arènes, the profession of midwifery is used to confer a highly ambiguous status upon the lead female character: Diattou, the mother of the story’s protagonist, is at once inextricably linked to reproduction and irremediably alienated from it: Ndiogou [Diattou’s husband] . . . savait que sa femme avait beaucoup souffert et souffrait encore de n’avoir enfanté qu’une seule fois. Il reconnaissait les tourments de cette femme anxieuse qui, en sa qualité de sage-femme principale à la Maternité, aidait, chaque jour que Dieu faisait, des dizaines de mamans. Elle les aidait à réussir l’exploit qu’elle rêvait de renouveler depuis dix ans. Dix, vingt, trente fois par jour, elle célébrait la fête de la naissance avec un sourire toujours émerveillé.21

The text implicitly links Diattou’s physical inability to reproduce with her unwillingness to reproduce in her son anything having to do with the culture and traditions of her family and society. She identifies her professional knowledge as western and continually pits it against Senegalese knowledge and customs. In a sense, she vitiates her position as midwife by refusing to acknowledge her place and the place of her profession within a tradition, and, as a result, she is condemned, both literally and figuratively, to sterility. This antiseptic character is forced to assist, from the outside, a process in which she can no longer take part. Diattou’s relationship to maternity and reproduction grows increasingly more complex as the novel progresses, and we will look at it very closely in the last chapter of this book. Buatu’s emphasis on discontinuity and rupture is countered in Bâ, Diallo, and Sow Fall by strategies that seek to interrupt repressive and/or

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colonizing processes of reproduction, but not to reject reproduction categorically. Rather, these texts point out its radical potential and attempt to position women as agents rather than vessels in reproductive scenarios. In order to understand more fully the role of reproduction as a colonizing force, as well as its ability to subvert that role, we will now turn to an analysis of some histories and constructions of French colonialism.

t2y

Colonialism That Western conceptions of non-Western societies are just that—subjective conceptions wholly influenced by our own geographical, political, and epistemological positions—has been expertly and eloquently established in texts such as Said’s Orientalism, C. Miller’s Blank Darkness, and Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa. Western understandings of things “Oriental” or “African” come from Western representations of Asia and Africa, representations that often have little to do with what Asians or Africans would perceive as the realities of their situation.1 These images fueled the colonial enterprise, and the colonial enterprise, in turn, generated scores of new images. In the first part of this chapter, then, I wish to discuss the French construction of colonies and the identities of colonized peoples, placing particular emphasis on the involvement of various modes of reproduction in this construction.2 Specifically, the reproduction of French culture through schools and other institutions, and the reproduction of French language and systems of knowledge through print and the newly emerging francophone literatures helped to guarantee the overall reproduction of colonial systems, and at the same time insured their ultimate breakdown. Quite clearly, the role of the French school was pivotal in this process, and will, therefore, provide the focus for Part One of this chapter. In Part Two, I will begin to look at the relationship between colonial structures and autobiographical structures and to examine this link in the works of Mariama Bâ, Marguerite Duras, and Pierre Loti.

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t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide PART ONE: THE POLITICS OF EDUCATION

The narcissistic need to see oneself in others, or to see any Other as merely a negative version of oneself, and the concomitant desire to reproduce one’s own world and superimpose it onto any “foreign” territory undeniably inform the French colonial policy of assimilation practiced, however sporadically or halfheartedly, in the colonies.3 Yet, as I have already indicated, an equally compelling reason to reproduce a French lifestyle in the colony and French values in the colonized population was to ensure the reproduction of colonialism itself and the capitalist system that subtended it. For the capitalist component of the colonial enterprise was undeniably one of the most important. Marx depicts the link between colonialism and capitalism in the following terms: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Black Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.4

William Cohen notes that 18th-century advocates of expansionism viewed colonies as both “outlets for surplus (or undesired) populations” and as a new source of trade: “In 1765 the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce described colonies as ‘establishments founded to consume and to be an outlet for the products of the Metropole.’”5 The growing need to market European products led to the need to create populations that shared European tastes. Again, Marx pellucidly explains: [the bourgeoisie] compels all nations on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.6

Viewed through this lens, the policy of assimilation reveals its goal of multiple reproduction: the reproduction of French tastes and cultural values, which leads to the production and reproduction of French goods, which, in turn, leads to the reproduction of the colonial enterprise itself. As I noted in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, no institution was better suited to implement the “reproductive,” assimilationist agenda than the French schools established in the colonies. In Ecole blanche/Afrique noire, Samba Gadjigo reads several francophone African autobiographical novels as testimonies to the objectives and influences of French schools in Africa. Gadjigo scrutinizes French attempts to make the

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minds and psyches of a select group of young Africans conform to French systems of knowledge: la limitation de l’étude de la géographie à la seule colonie et surtout à la métropole a empêché le colonisé de percevoir la communauté de destin qui le liait aux autres individus de l’empire colonial. . . . Il ne serait pas exagéré d’affirmer que la situation de dépendance persistant encore entre pays africains et l’ancienne puissance colonisatrice est le résultat durable de l’enseignement de la géographie appliqué dans les écoles africaines.7

Gadjigo’s scathing critique of an educational system designed to oppress rather than liberate finds its diametrical opposite in a 1935 study of French colonial education conducted by W. Bryant Mumford, a former “Superintendent of Education, Tanganyika Territory.” His book, Africans Learn to Be French (apparently no irony intended here), posits education as the single most important factor in French assimilation policy.8 In its unabashed endorsement of France’s parental role, it lays bare the impulse toward selfreproduction and the motivation behind it: France, to all her colonies, is the ultimate model and the centre of inspiration. In those colonies, such as Martinique and Algiers [sic], where association with the mother country has been long, or which are geographically close to France, the traditions of France are most deeply rooted. Indeed, such colonies can be regarded as “adopted children,” who belong fully to the French family of peoples. With the mother country they share French ways, French history, and French ideals. In those colonial areas, such as the underdeveloped interior of West Africa or Indo-China, where, because they have been only recently acquired, association with the mother country has been short, or which are geographically distant from France, the traditions of France are less deeply rooted, though the process of education has begun, and as time passes they too will draw closer to France and become full members of the French family of peoples (14).

This image of France as nurturer and instiller of morals is an explicitly maternal one, eliding the perhaps more paternal role of disciplinarian and enforcer. This transforms the parental figure from a tender into a severe, or even infanticidal one—a figure for colonialism that Mumford does not wish to consider. Whereas the British colonial author wishes to convince his readers that the ultimate objective of the French government was to make French citizens out of the autochthonous people of the colonies, Samba Gadjigo’s reading of the same system reveals this aim to be a deceptive lure: Loin de constituer une tentative d’assimilation, l’entreprise coloniale consiste plus exactement, de la part de l’Européen, à se donner comme modèle mais, en même temps, à bloquer l’autochtone dans la voie d’accès à cet “idéal.” Parler

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t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide d’”assimilation,” c’est prêter à l’indigène une initiative que la dialectique de la domination lui refuse (13).

Thus, a colony is constructed in which the distinction between Self and Other can always be maintained through the reality of material domination, while simultaneously proclaiming an ideal of resemblance and “assimilation.” This production of the colonized who is supposed to be an inferior reproduction of the colonizer is the logical result of what Mudimbe calls “ the grid of Western thought and imagination, in which alterity is a negative category of the Same”9 Through the policies of assimilation and the control of access to information, the European produced and reproduced both an Africa and an African suited to Western purposes. Naturally, French colonial policy differed from colony to colony. In the Vietnamese Novel in French, Jack Yeager tells us that policy in what was known as French Indochina vacillated between assimilation and association, the goal of which “was to continue the legitimacy of Vietnamese society while exploiting existing social structures as a means of control.”10 David J. Steinberg further asserts that any appearance of Vietnamese control was purely illusory: “even where Vietnamese continued to play a role on the political stage they were mimes acting out a French scenario.”11 It is significant that even when assimilation was not the dominant policy, the mimetic, or reproductive, aspect of it still obtained. Two of the most significant facets of French colonization in Vietnam were the introduction of Christianity and the romanization of Vietnamese.12 Both of these transformations flowed from the belief that the more closely the Vietnamese resembled the West in general and the French in particular, the more “civilized” they would become. As was the case in Senegal and other French colonies, the reasons behind the spread of Christianity and the introduction of the French language or the Roman alphabet in Vietnam were economic as well as cultural, and ultimately these changes helped to reproduce and maintain the colonial system. In his book, In Search of Southeast Asia, David Steinberg also identifies these changes as radical attacks on Vietnamese culture: many mandarins considered [the attempt to change the Vietnamese writing system] subversive, since the wholesale adoption of romanized Vietnamese by the Vietnamese population would have temporarily severed Vietnamese society’s connection with its Confucian texts and Buddhist sutras, both of which were written in classical Chinese and Chinese characters (132).

Again, the introduction of the French language as well as French belief and value systems simultaneously introduced the idea of French superiority and the “ideal” of reproduction, of becoming like the French:


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French pressure was most insistent in Vietnam at the one point the Confucian bureaucracy could not concede without agreeing to its own extinction: the French right to transform Vietnam into an ideologically differentiated society, in which catholicism could compete ideologically and institutionally with the bureaucracy (138)

Frequently the missionaries who brought Catholicism also brought French schools, institutions particularly suited to the inculcation of French norms and ideologies.13 In her essay on French education in Vietnam, Gail P. Kelly argues that, far from wishing to make the Vietnamese more like the French, the colonists ultimately sought to bar the Vietnamese from modern French education by setting up a segregated school system with a separate curriculum for Vietnamese students.14 She argues that because traditional education in Vietnam promoted resistance to colonialism, the French were obligated to focus on Vietnamese education and to set up an alternative system. They began by allowing Vietnamese children who could pass the entrance exams to be schooled with the French children of the colony, and “by the early twentieth century children of Vietnamese civil servants, entrepreneurs, landed gentry, and the traditional elite began to outnumber colon children in these institutions” (98). Feeling that their own children were being slighted, French colonists militated for the establishment of separate schools for the Vietnamese (99). Kelly contends that these schools were designed to “preempt any independent formulations of Western, or modern, education” (99). Yet neither were these schools imparting any kind of genuine traditional education, for one of their fundamental purposes was to suppress such education and its tendency to foment rebellion. One is left to conclude, therefore, that the principal aim of this education was to form generations of Vietnamese whose grasp of Vietnamese and French cultures, knowledge, and technology stayed within the limits drawn by the French. In short, the education system was designed to produce and reproduce the colonized as a group.15 In the remaining pages of Part One, I will look at representations of education in literary works from both sides of the colonizing line. While the texts of Mariama Bâ and Aminata Sow Fall grapple with the problematic colonial legacy of Western education in Senegal, Marguerite Duras invokes myriad images of education in the process of remembering and inventing her own colonial story in Southeast Asia.

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THE VOCABULARY OF EDUCATION: MARIAMA BÂ AND UNE SI LONGUE LETTRE

Initially, Mariama Bâ’s representations of French education seem nothing short of celebratory. In a speech given in 1980, Bâ speaks with obvious affection for Germaine le Goff, a former French teacher who evidently accepted her colonial mission with great zeal: In the midst of her triumph of policies of assimilation, she preached for planting roots into the land and maintaining its value. . . . A fervent patriot herself, she developed our love for Africa. . . . Her discourse outlined the new Africa.16

Readers familiar with Une si longue lettre will certainly be reminded of the following passage: je n’oublierai jamais la femme blanche qui . . . a voulu pour nous un destin “hors du commun.” . . . Nous sortir de l’enlisement des traditions, superstitions, et moeurs; nous faire apprécier de multiples civilisations sans reniement de la nôtre; . . . renforcer nos qualités, mater nos défauts, faire fructifier en nous les valeurs de la morale universelle. . . . Si son souvenir résiste victorieusement à l’ingratitude du temps . . . c’est que la voie choisie pour notre formation et notre épanouissement ne fut point hasard. Elle concorde avec les options profondes de l’Afrique nouvelle, pour promouvoir la femme noire (27–28).

In the first passage, words and phrases such as “her triumph of policies of assimilation,” “preached,” and “a fervent patriot” give the impression of missionary and colonial zeal, complete with its militaristic subtext. In the passage from Une si longue lettre, a similar vocabulary is at work: the educator’s memory “résiste victorieusement à l’ingratitude du temps,” she works to “stamp out” or “suppress” [“mater”] her students’ failings and instill in them “universal morals.” Elsewhere in Une si longue lettre, similar images reappear. In an apparent encomium to teachers, Bâ introduces a military metaphor and the image of conquest: “Les enseignants. . . . Armée toujours en marche, toujours vigilante. Armée sans tambour, sans uniforme rutilant. Cette arméelà, déjouant pièges et embûches, plante partout le drapeau du savoir et de la vertu” (USLL, 38, my emphasis). Moreover, the fact that this army is always marching, always vigilant, yet silent, strongly suggests the idea of education as a surreptitious, but wholly invasive, colonizing force. In her speech and in her novel, then, Mariama Bâ extols the virtues of French educators and a French-style education.17 Yet the words that she chooses to do so tell another story: that of education as an extension of colonization and as an effort to produce and reproduce generations of Senegalese whose “defects” have been stamped out, who have been warned off of tradition and superstition, and who would therefore be able


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to create a “new” Africa, one deeply influenced by and dependent upon the French. Bâ herself must certainly have been aware that the largely nationalist visions of these generations were crumbling all around her, making the recurrence of the term “a new Africa” somewhat enigmatic. If, however, we look again closely at the two passages above concerning “la directrice” and Germaine Le Goff, we find more than a little textual evidence to indicate that in her interpretation of the “new Africa,” Mariama Bâ replaces both colonial and nationalist ideals of Africa with her own feminist vision. At least one passage from Une si longue lettre does explicitly what the preceding passages do rhetorically; that is, place the value of western-style education in question. Ramatoulaye, the protagonist, who is herself a teacher, expresses the following doubts about the future of young Senegalese to her educated but alienated friend, Aïssatou: Mais tes jeunes frères? Leurs pas ont été dirigés vers l’école des Blancs: Le jardin d’enfants reste un luxe que seuls les nantis offrent à leurs petits. . . . L’école primaire, si elle prolifère, son accès n’en demeure pas moins difficile. Elle laisse à la rue un nombre impressionnant d’enfants, faute de places. Entrer au lycée ne sauve pas l’élève aux prises à cet âge avec l’affermissement de sa personnalité . . . L’université aussi a ses rejets exorbitants et désespérés. Que feront ceux qui ne réussissent pas? L’apprentissage du métier traditionnel apparaît dégradant à celui qui a un mince savoir livresque. On rêve d’etre commis. On honnit la truelle. . . . Fallait-t-il nous réjouir de la désertion des forges, ateliers, cordonneries? Fallaitil nous réjouir sans ombrage? Ne commencions-nous pas à assister à la disparition d’une élite de travailleurs manuels traditionnels? Eternelles interrogations de nos éternals débats (USLL, 31–32).

Unlike most of the discourse on education found in Une si longue lettre, this passage explicitly points to education’s social divisiveness and its capacity to devastate traditional structures.18 Moreover, it confirms the existence in Une si longue lettre of a counter-discourse that interrogates the role and function of education in Senegalese society. None of this is to suggest that formal education does not have an important role to play in Senegal, but, rather, to point out the existence and the importance of a subversive discourse in texts that initially appear to glorify French-style education. INADEQUATE REPRODUCTIONS: AMINATA SOW FALL AND L’APPEL DES ARÈNES

Aminata Sow Fall’s comments on her own education differ sharply from those made by Mariama Bâ concerning the formative influence of her teacher, Germaine Le Goff. In an interview with Gobina Moukoko, Sow

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Fall rejects the notion of formative influences and models in her work, stating that she was not consciously influenced by anyone, and reminding her interviewer that the focus of her studies had been French: “[J]e ne connaissais que Senghor et Césaire, et encore très vaguement.19 Aminata Sow Fall’s refusal of any and all models amounts to a rebuff of the French system of education in which she was immersed as well as a critique of the notion of assimilation. The same refusal also works to delineate and distance her own work from that of the “fathers” of the modern francophone African literary canon. In the literary space that she clears for herself, Sow Fall lucidly interrogates the problems of her society, in particular the clash between old and new and the rupture with tradition brought about by colonization. In her novel L’Appel des arènes, formal education finds itself an integral part of the tension between tradition and modernity. Nalla, the young protagonist, has begun, inexplicably, to lose interest in his studies, prompting his father to enlist the help of M. Niang, a tutor. Nalla’s parents, Ndiogou and Diattou, have both been educated in Europe, and Diattou in particular is openly skeptical, if not disdainful, of her society’s traditions. Nalla, however, feels drawn to the past as well as to the beauty of certain contemporary cultural practices, such as the weekly wrestling matches introduced to him by Malaw Lô, a renowned wrestler who quickly becomes Nalla’s friend and role model. Nalla’s distraction at school is the result of his fascination with Malaw, with Malaw’s stories of the past, and with the wrestling matches. M. Niang’s attempts to recapture his student’s attention succeed only partially, and the exact nature of the problem continues to elude definition: Lorsque Monsieur Niang . . . s’est acharné à lui faire dire quelque chose, Nalla, comme tiré d’un profond sommeil, n’a émis que des propos vagues, inaudibles et même parfois dénués de sens. . . . Là-bas, aux arènes, la belle cadence du tamtam s’étire jusqu’à Nalla, pénètre en Nalla, emplit Nalla d’une douce émotion, occupe tout l’être de Nalla qui, en ce moment entend, comme s’il était aux arènes, les accents mélodieux des cantatrices dont les chants exaltants enflamment les lutteurs. . . . Malaw Lô fils de Ndiaga Lô Qui me bravera moi Malaw Lô Lion de Kajoor fils de Ndiaga Lô Malaw Lô “Kor” Madjiguène Lô Maître des arènes de Walo Invincible aimé fort et beau Du Njambur qui vit naître Ndiaga Lô A Ndar Gééj drapé dans son pagne d’eau Tous chantent l’épopée de Malaw Lô.21


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This is the first appearance of an embedded narrative that frequently interrupts the main narrative in the form of “bàak,” defined in the text as “poèmes de lutte,” that is, poems that accompany wrestling matches. Other elements of the tale are furnished in conversations between Nalla and Malaw. The story told is that of Diaminar, Malaw’s village, of the family members who founded it, and of its eventual dissolution: [Nalla]—Dans tes “bàak,” tu dis: “Diaminar où l’on ne dit que Lô.” [Malaw]—C’est parce qu’à Diaminar tous les habitants ont le même nom. . . . Quand le village fut fondé, les jeunes gens célibataires se marièrent entre cousins, et c’est devenu une tradition qu’aucun fils du terroir n’ose transgresser . . . Cette loi se plia une seule fois . . . (72).

Diaminar, the past, and tradition all return to the present of narration, not only through Malaw’s wrestling arenas, which revive a traditional art form and represent to the narrator his lost culture, but also through the bàak and the tales that Malaw recounts to Nalla. This harmonious image of teacher and pupil clashes with earlier depictions of M. Niang’s futile attempts to engage Nalla’s attention or of the disputes between Nalla and his mother over his grades. Moreover, the tales themselves are written in French in the text, but contain many words in Wolof that are defined in footnotes.21 In this manner, L’Appel des arènes points out that classic Western narrative form and the French language are inadequate and must be interrupted and appended in order to tell a more complex tale.22 There are several instances of metamorphosis in the text that point to the pain and at times the violence of belonging to more than one world. The transformation of Nalla’s personality as he becomes more and more drawn to the wrestling arenas and to the world of his friend, Malaw, causes great distress for both Nalla and his parents. Nalla’s mother, Diattou, is also presented as one who has effected drastic personal changes with disastrous results: “Diattou mit le plus grand soin à se métamorphoser. Elle se soumit à la torture d’apprivoiser ses cordes vocales et de les polir. Elle apprit à régler sa démarche et ses gestes sur la vitesse de l’Occident” (88). But the text shows this case of metamorphosis to be impossible. Mame Fari, Diattou’s mother, warns: “un séjour dans le fleuve ne fera jamais d’un bâton un crocodile” (59). A further example of metamorphosis can be found in the figure of Malaw’s father. During a struggle with a lion, the father is bitten and thereafter has the power to transform himself into the beast that had attacked him. “On vit mon père bouger, puis se secouer, et enfin se dresser, totalement métamorphosé. Ses yeux avaient la couleur de l’ocre. Des mugissements rauques s’échappaient de sa poitrine” (95). This last example acts as a metaphor for all the

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other metamorphoses in the text, as it makes clear that belonging to multiple worlds necessarily involves disfigurement. Such is the condition of the text, with its two languages and narrative traditions continually interrupting one another, as well as the condition of its characters. The concept of education presented at the beginning of the novel is broadened to include a variety of experiences. Western-style education is not ultimately rejected, but its inadequacy in a Senegalese context, much like the inadequacy of the French language to write Senegalese culture, is underscored. In the interview cited above with Gobina Moukoko, Sow Fall herself uses the issue of literacy to remind us again of our tendency to define education as uniquely Western: “Au Sénégal, quand on parle d’un livre, même les personnes qui ne peuvent pas le lire demandent à savoir ce qu’il contient” (55). She then tells the story of a religious leader, who did not understand French, but who nonetheless had purchased La Grève des bàttu. “ Il avait entendu parler du livre. Il a demandé ce qui y était rapporté. Le récit l’a intéressé, et il a acheté le livre pour son neveu (55). Thus, Sow Fall takes the discussion of literacy out of the “universal” terms in which it often takes place and positions it in the context of a traditionally oral society where illiteracy does not entail exclusion from knowledge as it does in the West.23 In sum, Sow Fall strenuously resists the reproduction of colonizing structures through education and literary production and consumption in French,24 and instead offers a more syncretic model of education, in which learning is not defined solely along Western lines. THE OTHER SIDE OF PEDAGOGY: THE EDEN CINÉMA CYCLE

The mother in the Eden Cinéma cycle is defined as an educator, yet at the same time she is distanced from this position: in Barrage contre le Pacifique and L’Eden Cinéma, she is said to be an “ancienne institutrice,” a former member of the “corps enseignant.” In L’Amant, she is identified as “madame la directrice de l’école,” but she is never shown in the classroom. There are, nonetheless, several scenes in which she plays a teacherlike role, and it is these passages that we will examine in the pages to follow. In the opening pages of Barrage contre le Pacifique, the portrait of the mother character is limited to her role as teacher and colonist. As soon as the children are introduced, her official role as educator is eclipsed, and her role as colonist is transformed by the death of her husband into that of victim of the colonial government.25 She is, however, the most unwilling of victims, and it is in the process of making a monumental (and


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quixotic) attempt to regain control of her land and her life that she temporarily resumes her role as teacher and “leader”: Tous les hommes des villages voisins . . . étaient venus. Et après les avoir rassemblés aux abords du bungalow, la mère leur avait expliqué ce qu’elle voulait d’eux. ‘Si vous le voulez, nous pouvons gagner des centaines d’hectares de rizières et cela sans aucune aide des chiens du cadastre. Nous allons faire des barrages.’ . . . Les paysans s’étaient un peu étonnés. D’abord parce que depuis des millénaires que la mer envahissait la plaine ils s’y étaient à ce point habitués qu’ils n’auraient jamais imaginé qu’on pût l’empêcher de le faire. Ensuite parce que leur misère leur avait donné l’habitude d’une passivité qui était leur seule défense devant leurs enfants morts de faim ou leurs récoltes brulées par le sel. Ils étaient revenus pourtant trois jours de suite et toujours en plus grand nombre. La mère leur avait expliqué comment elle envisageait de construire ces barrages. . . . Au bout d’une semaine tous à peu près s’étaient mis à la construction des barrages. Un rien avait suffisait à les faire sortir de leur passivité. Une vieille femme sans moyens qui leur disait qu’elle avait décidé de lutter les déterminait à lutter comme s’ils n’avaient que cela depuis le commencement des temps.26

While evidently a passage about the power of the mother’s passion, these lines perform other functions as well. The image given here of the neighboring farmers shaking off their passivity combined with a later reference to “les terres libérées” (55) make it clear that this struggle against the sea masks a battle with another force seemingly more implacable, that of colonialism. Yet the presentation of the mother as teacher and resistance leader is also undermined in a number of ways. For instance, the narrator points out the web of illusion and delusion in which all are entangled: the mother’s self-confidence and certainty elicit the people’s faith; the people’s faith, in turn, strengthens the mother’s belief in her project, but the project itself is chimerical from its conception to its inevitable failure. Any teaching or leading that takes place is based entirely on illusion and done by and for the deluded; an apt metaphor, it would seem, for colonial education in general. PART TWO: THE POSTCOLONIAL TEXT AS RE-VISION

The French colonial education system that we discussed in Part I formed the first generations of Africans and Southeast Asians writing in French, who, among other things, frequently took on the task of re-presenting exotic and colonial representations of these regions. Among the European genres, the novel, and in the case of African writers, the autobiographical novel, was frequently selected by early writers. The combination of choosing a relatively traditional European genre, and of writing in French about and against political and literary systems that had colo-

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nized them, placed these authors in the delicate position of using colonizing structures in order to write against a literary tradition that itself had done the work of colonialism.27 Beginning here and continuing through Chapter Three, I will examine literary “responses” to colonialism that also engage with the genre of autobiography. Here, in this second half of Chapter Two, I will look at the work of two European writers, Pierre Loti, who was a prolific contributor to the colonial literary tradition,28 and Marguerite Duras, who lived as a colonist in what was then known as French Indochina, but who weaves a significantly different “colonial fiction” from that of Loti. While Loti’s texts illustrate, formally and thematically, the construction and reproduction of colonial culture, in Duras, colonial culture is both a constitutive element of the text and the object of a piercingly critical gaze.29 In an intriguing and often confrontational dialogue, these works engage with one another thematically, as well as in their treatment of colonialism, their manipulation of autobiographical structures, and their representation of gender.30 If the French ideal of reproduction springs in part from a narcissistic desire to endlessly construct and find oneself in any surroundings, I would argue that this desire is central not only to colonialism, but to what I would call “traditional” autobiography as well.31 It is my hypothesis that the traditional autobiographical project, wherein an author’s desire to narrate the “story” of her/himself necessitates the creation of an object exterior to the self, is analogous to the French colonial project, where in order to “narrate” itself, to inscribe the grandeur of its civilization, France needed to project itself onto something exterior to it.32 It has been argued that autobiographies are like palimpsests, each new one being written over and against a long tradition of previous autobiography.33 Analogously, the French colonial enterprise could only write its own story over and against the history and civilization of the peoples it dominated. This colonial story, another sort of palimpsest, is written over a living text, and must inevitably be interrupted by the (hi)stories it represses, interruptions that we will see in the next chapter on autobiography and in the final chapter on infanticide. Such a reading of either autobiography or colonialism would define them as a writing of the self over other selves, an ultimate act of domination, and one that has historically been performed by Western men. Because women have frequently been the objects of similar kinds of domination, their autobiographical readings and writings often reconceive the genre as a way to write the self in its non-hierarchical relation to other selves, rather than as an absolute, totalizing entity. The relationship between the subject and power is of obvious importance to


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both autobiography and colonization, and several of Michel Foucault’s insights concerning this question will be useful here. In his essay entitled “The Subject and Power,” Foucault discusses the ways in which an individual is made into a subject in Western societies, as well as the kinds of power that shape and constrain that subject, and against which, consequently, individuals struggle.34 The Western state is largely defined in Foucault’s essay by the operation of a certain form of power, described by Foucault as “pastoral,” that creates subjects and locks individuals into subject positions. Ecclesiastical in its origin, this power is now wielded by secular institutions (215). It focuses on the individual in the following ways: it concerns itself with individual “salvation,” understood in contemporary society as one’s well being; the agent of this pastoral power must concern him/herself not only with the whole community but also each individual; in order for such power to be exercised, an intimate knowledge of the mind, soul, and conscience of each individual is required; finally, it involves a “production of truth; the truth of the individual himself” (213). The struggle against such power, then, is a struggle against that which “categorizes the individual,” “attaches him to his own identity,” “imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects” (212). While the centrality of the subject to autobiography is self-evident, the link between the state and the subject is not. By establishing the centrality of the subject to the state, Foucault’s analysis of the Western subject helps to explicate the link that I wish to make between autobiography and colonization. Not surprisingly, since it was modeled after the state, the French colony, too, depended on both individualizing and totalizing forces, and the colonizers, like the agents of pastoral power, were obliged to tend to both part and whole. In order for the colony to function, a colonized identity was forced upon each autochthonous member of the colony. The production of the “truth” of the individual, of which Foucault speaks, is vitally important here because the colonized individuals had a new “truth,” a new individual identity produced for them that locked them into the new colonial community and separated them from the old autochthonous one. The idea of autobiography as a definitive portrait and, more importantly, as that which reveals the truth of an individual, works in harmony with the apparatus of the state to produce a subject. Therein lies autobiography’s reifying and colonizing potential; yet at the same time, and this is what more contemporary conceptions of autobiography have made clear, the act of writing resists this call to fixity and transparency, thus pro-

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viding “the subject” with the means for liberating itself from a single imposed identity. While autobiography may have a potentially repressive or colonizing function, it also has the potential to subvert and undo such a function, by making possible, if not inevitable, the transformation of the writing subject and its reinvention. While this potential exists in all autobiography and for all writers of autobiography, it is particularly important in the hands of colonized peoples or other oppressed groups. Although the simultaneous introduction of the Western state and the autobiographical genre to the regions of Africa and Southeast Asia colonized by the French promised to mold the individual into an appropriate subject, in autobiography also lay the means to undo the identity of colonized and colonizer.35 In the pages that follow, I will analyze the construction and fragmentation of the colonizing self in Pierre Loti’s and Marguerite Duras’s narratives as well as the involvement of these narratives in autobiographical strategies. In Chapter 3, my focus will shift to the colonized self and the manipulation of autobiographical structures to dismantle colonial representations. Extremely popular among the French reading public, the works of Pierre Loti reproduced, introduced, and disseminated certain 19thcentury conceptions of Africans and Asians. As Léon Fanoudh-Siefer remarks, Loti’s novel, Le Roman d’un spahi, “doit être regardé comme la pièce maîtresse du mythe de l’Afrique noire.”36 Building on FanoudhSiefer’s analysis of Loti’s texts, Alec Hargreaves asserts in The Colonial Experience in French Fiction that “The inferiority ascribed to Negroes in popular novels such as Loti’s helped Europe to conquer and rule Africa with an easy conscience.”37 Loti became a kind of colonial representative, enacting the desire of the Metropolitan reader to experience the colonies. By claiming to be perfect “reproductions” of the lands they describe (indeed, Loti began by sketching and painting the places he visited and wrote his first texts to accompany and elaborate on his visual impressions),38 Loti’s novels drew in the reader of the Metropole and connected him/her to life in the colonies, thus effectively establishing imagined Franco-African and Franco-Asian communities.39 Paradoxically, these unilaterally conceived communities did not exist for the colonized, who were at once essential and inconsequential to this European vision. Thus, Loti’s images helped to produce and reproduce an Africa and an Asia that were “real” to Europeans, as well as a romanticized vision of the French colonies and colonists that facilitated their perpetuation.40 Although he deals in the colonization of images, rather than in any explicit colonial policy, Loti’s colonizing literary acts are no less effective or pernicious.


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The figure of Loti himself is a curious one. For “Pierre Loti” is a fiction created by Julien Viaud, suggesting that his “invention of Africa” and other regions allows, in turn, for self invention. In many texts, Loti plays the role of both character and author, raising some nagging questions about genre: a text wherein the author and the main character share the same name usually falls into the category of autobiography, and, indeed, Loti’s books are commonly read as autobiographical, but when the author is a fictional persona, generic boundaries begin to blur.41 Whether or not the events in Loti’s novels correspond to Julien Viaud’s adventures, it is important that Julien Viaud creates a fictional persona for himself who, in turn, frequently shares his name with the protagonist of his books. Whatever their relationship to Julian Viaud, Pierre Loti the authorial persona and Pierre Loti the character are engaged in an autobiographical project. Moreover, even in texts where the character is not called Loti, the protagonists are clearly modeled along the same lines. In a broad sense, the emphasis placed by all of these texts on self-exploration and self-discovery links them to the autobiographical tradition. They share with “traditional” autobiography the apparent goals of confession, self-revelation, self-knowledge, and a need to define the meaning of one’s life. At the same time, the fictional status of the texts and the enigmatic relationship between Julien Viaud and Pierre Loti work to distance them from that tradition. In the role of traveler and adventurer, both fictive author and character find themselves in another ambiguous position: that of being a colonizer without being a colonist. Loti is alienated both from France and from the cultures he observes, and, despite appearances to the contrary, he takes the voice of neither one nor the other.42 Even when the protagonist is drawn to the culture he observes, it remains unalterably other, (as we shall see in a later discussion of Le Roman d’un Spahi), and it is frequently the case, particularly when it comes to Asian countries, that the protagonist expresses outright repugnance for the people and cultures he encounters. Yet, as Loti’s articles in Le Figaro indicate, this author and his protagonists are not completely willing to serve as representatives of France either.43 What is represented in the texts signed Pierre Loti is a perpetual quest for an unnamed, intangible ideal, destined to remain beyond his grasp. The exotic landscapes serve as merely a foil for a search of a more intimate nature; in those texts where Loti is both character and author, the fiction of autobiography gives further credence to the idea that it is Loti’s quest for himself that incidentally leads him through the numerous regions of Asia and Africa that form the ostensible subjects of these novels. As Chris Bongie points out in Exotic Memories, Loti is disil-

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lusioned from the outset by life in the colonies and fully aware that any period of “adventure” and “glory” has passed, if, indeed, it ever existed.44 Loti’s “autobiographical” act is a colonizing one: his representations have no referent save distorted visions of himself and, taken together, expose a totalizing desire to explore the four corners of the globe only in order to inscribe his own image there. Marguerite Duras, too, has a complex relationship to colonial culture and to the cultures of Europe and Asia that inform her life and work. Like Loti, she was a participant in the colonial venture: as the daughter of two teachers who joined “the colonial army” in then French Indochina and later as an employee of the Colonial Office in Paris.45 There are, of course, significant differences: Duras was born in Vietnam, and after the death of her father, she and her family themselves became victims of a corrupt colonial government. This victimization is certainly linked to economic class, but even more certainly linked to gender, and therein lies another important difference between the perspectives of Duras and Loti. Nonetheless, the questions surrounding Duras’s position vis-à-vis colonialism are thorny ones. For while she categorically condemns the corruption and the exploitative nature of the colonial government and answers exotic description like that found in Loti with a brutal portrait of life in the colonies, texts such as Un Barrage contre le Pacifique , L’Eden Cinéma, L’Amant, and L’Amant de la Chine du nord have their own problematic relationship to exoticism and colonization, a relationship that I will discuss later in my reading of Duras’s texts.46 More ambiguity surrounds the role of autobiography in Duras’s corpus. One cannot read L’Amant or L’Amant de la Chine du nord, or critical readings of them, without taking this issue into account. Through various interviews and remarks made in prefaces and stage notes, Duras has made something of an “autobiographical pact” with her readers.47 Since Barrage contre le Pacifique, every rewriting of this core story has incorporated more overtly autobiographical elements, while simultaneously confounding autobiographical readings through utterances such as “L’histoire de ma vie n’existe pas” (L’Amant, 14). For Duras, to write one’s “life story” was to write the next text in a life composed of texts.48 The images and characters, including the lover, are part of this process, yet the reader does not have the impression that she is looking for a final or absolute image of herself that will triumph over or engulf all other images. Each new text does not get closer to an accurate reproduction, but, rather, re-presents characters from her life and texts and frequently changes them drastically. These images and characters are part of a multiple and polyphonic self, of which there is no definitive


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version. Yet, as in Loti, the writing self is Western, and it organizes and controls these other images and images of “the other.” Duras walks the fine line between autobiography as colonization and autobiography as subversion. Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, L’Eden Cinéma, L’Amant, and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord bear a thematic resemblance to many of Pierre Loti’s texts in that they explore the identity formation of their European protagonist through her relationship with a “foreign” lover. The story of the Chinese lover has been exoticized, even fetishized, by her readers and critics, as well as by Duras herself. Certain events have contributed to the exoticization of this love story and its characters: the translation into many languages of L’Amant and its considerable popularity, particularly in the US; Duras’s own commentary on it, in which she multiplies details and complicates “plot” in interviews and texts; Annaud’s film version; and the publication of L’Amant de la Chine du nord, which pushes the story begun in 1950, with the publication of Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, one step further. L’Amant de la Chine du nord explicitly suggests that the story of the narrator’s Chinese lover serves, in part, as a screen that allows her to talk about another love story, this one incestuous, with her brother. Her affair with the man from Cholon is at once a link to her family, because it permits her to contemplate and write about them, and the final straw, the act of rebellion that decisively drives her from them. The lover himself is alternately presented as exotic stranger and intimate confidante. Yet despite their own colonizing potential, Duras’s texts explicitly denounce the colonial system and attempt to rewrite the French colonial story, a move that places them in direct conflict with the texts of Loti. Loti’s novel Un Pèlerin D’Angkor, like Duras’s Eden Cinéma series, is set in Southeast Asia during the period of French colonial rule. As in Le Roman d’un spahi, the perspective of the narrator in Un Pèlerin d’Angkor is decidedly pessimistic: Que voulez-vous, je ne crois pas à l’avenir de nos trop lointaines conquêtes coloniales. Et je pleure tant de milliers et de milliers de braves petits soldats, [que] . . . nous avons couchés dans ces cimetières asiatiques, alors que nous aurions si bien pu épargner leurs vies précieuses, ne les risquer que pour les suprêmes défenses de notre cher sol français . . .49

In the pages that directly follow this dedication, the narrator, now well beyond his adventurous youth, speaks of his presentiment from early childhood of the events that would shape his life. He describes his first visual encounter with Angkor: a photo of the ruins of Angkor found

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among the affairs of his brother, who had recently died in Asia. Grieving over the death of their elder son, the narrator’s parents forbid him the life of travel and exploration of which he dreams. Yet, he assures us, as he stands among his brother’s mementos of “the far East,” he senses with absolute certainty his destiny as an adventurer: Et j’eus cette fois la prescience très nette d’une vie de voyages et d’aventures. . . . Dans cet avenir de mystère . . . je me voyais devenant une sorte de héros de légende, idole aux pieds d’argile, fascinant des âmes par milliers. . . . Pour que mon personnage fût plus romanesque, il fallait qu’il y eût une ombre à la renommée telle que je la souhaitais. . . . Ensuite m’apparut mon propre déclin, mon retour au foyer, bien plus tard, le cœur lassé et les cheveux blanchissants (4–5).

The reader is struck by the fatalistic tone of the narrator and by his insistence that in the present of narration, everything of import in his life is already over. Equally striking is the way in which these initial lines reveal the protagonist’s story as well as the more general story of the Loti persona, who wrote himself into so many tales as the “héros de légende.” This fictional autobiography is also, then, an “autobiography” of Loti’s fiction. During the subsequent narration of events, the protagonist will only “discover” what he has known or possessed from the beginning; in short, the entire text is encapsulated in the image of a wistful child staring at an illustration of the ruins of Angkor. Everything in these 234 pages is empty, flat, always already in ruins, and exists only to fulfill what the narrator perceives as his destiny, just as the other Loti “legends” are written to showcase their hero, regardless of his clay feet. In a move characteristic of most, if not all, of Loti’s texts, the narrator returns obsessively to the alien, other-worldly nature of the autochthonous peoples he encounters (“cette inassimilable race jaune” 16). The distance operates not only on a cultural level, but on a physical, and even a temporal level, as well: A première vue, on croirait qu’il est inhabité, ce pays; à mieux regarder, cependant, on s’aperçoit combien son opulent manteau vert est déjà sournoisement travaillé en dessous par le microbe humain. . . . des hommes apparaissent, bien humbles et comme négligeables sous l’éternelle verdure souveraine. Annamites grêles, au torse couleur de safran. . . . Une très petite humanité enfantine et déjà vieillotte qui n’a guère évolué depuis l’ancêtre préhistorique, et que la puissante flore tropicale dissimule depuis des siècle dans ses feuilles. . . . presque l’on s’imaginerait voir les chrysalides d’où naissent ces bonshommes jaunes: sortes de vers, de mites, qui rongent ici l’admirable revêtement des plaines (19–21, my emphasis).

The people of Vietnam are compared to microbes (the narrator later uses similar terms in reference to the disease that killed his brother), then to worms and insects. They are part of the décor, almost too small or


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insignificant to see, and yet their surreptitious existence is incontestably presented as menacing, destructive. The idea that their development has been arrested in some interim stage is introduced with the phrase “une petite humanité enfantine et déjà vieillote . . .” and recurs in the image of the chrysalis. Not only does the narrator cast the people of Vietnam as a completely different species, he further distances them from himself by imprisoning them in pre-history. Yet the word ancestor, which functions here to banish the Southeast Asians from the present, will reappear many pages later and will actually serve to link Loti to the peoples of Vietnam and Cambodia: “Ce bas-relief . . . s’inspire de l’une des plus antique épopés conçues par les homme d’Asie,—ces Aryens, nos ancêtres (101). The figure of the ancestor explains the link between the narrator and the characters he observes: both share a common heritage; they are part of him, but an inaccessible part. The self for whom the narrator searches during his Southeast Asian travels remains inaccessible as well. When the narrator returns to his childhood home, and especially to the room he calls his “musée d’enfant,” he finds everything unchanged. Nevertheless, the room and its contents have aged, and images of death abound. The enclosed space of the room, used as a framing device for the text, is closely associated with the narrator’s childhood self. The adult narrator states explicitly that the voyages he dreamed of as a child proved to be meaningless and empty: “de l’inconnu, il n’en existe plus. . . . Alors, vraiment, ce n’était que ça, le monde?” (221). Thus, the text implies that the quest to know the self has resulted in nothing, save to bring the narrator closer to death. The unstated autobiographical project of the text is as much a failure as the voyages themselves, and we see nowhere more clearly than in these last pages the link between the two. The narrator’s horror of the unknowable Asians is his horror of his own unknowable self, but in a survival attempt he makes the flattening and colonizing gesture of insisting that he has seen and known everything, and that it is all the same in its emptiness. Marguerite Duras’s experimentation with autobiographical narration is of a more self-conscious nature. The intricacies and impossibilities of writing the self are frequently presented in L’Amant and L’Amant de la Chine du nord. Because of her historical and political positions, Duras is much more aware than Loti is of the significance of her role as former colonist and of the colonizing potential of her writing. Indeed, I would argue that the texts of the Eden Cinéma cycle are written against and even attempt to unwrite the colonial/exotic tradition represented by Loti. It is important to note, however, that this effort does not prevent Duras’s

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texts from making some of the same gestures that we find in the texts of Loti. In the pages that follow, I will look at some of the intersections between the writings of Duras and Loti as well as Duras’s attempts to give voice to a number of colonized identities. As we know, Loti was quite widely read in France, and the mere mention of the name conjured up visions of delectable and daring adventures. In Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Marguerite Duras writes of the mother’s seduction by Loti’s exotic images: elle rêvait devant les affiches de propagande coloniale. “Engagez-vous dans l’armée coloniale,” “Jeunes, allez aux colonies, la fortune vous y attend.” . . . Elle se maria avec un instituteur qui, comme elle, se mourait d’impatience dans un village du Nord, victime comme elle des ténébreuses lectures de Pierre Loti. Peu après leur mariage, ils firent ensemble leur demande d’admission dans les cadres de l’enseignement colonial . . . (Barrage, 23, my emphasis).

Duras’s use of the word “victim” inculpates Loti’s fiction for the devastating effect of its misrepresentations, but interestingly enough, she does not focus here on those misrepresented, but, rather, on those misled. This is an initial step in the establishment of a gray zone in which the mother character and her children are at once colonists and colonized. Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, L’Eden Cinéma, and L’Amant are anti-colonial novels because they not only criticize colonialism but they also stand in contrast to those texts of the colonial period that paint exotic portraits of lands and peoples. Even L’Amant de la Chine du nord, which most obviously objectifies and exoticizes the lover (he is referred to most frequently as “le Chinois”), differs radically from the representations of non-Europeans in the texts of writers such as Loti; for, as I noted briefly above, the act of exoticization and alienation is highly self-conscious in the Duras text:50 Silence. Puis le Chinois demande: —Tu as eu peur tout à l’heure. —Oui. Toi aussi. —Oui. —Tu m’aurais tuée comment à Long-Hai? —Comme un Chinois. Avec la cruauté en plus de la mort (110).

These last two lines are repeated on the next page, and passages similar in tenor appear throughout the text; that is, distance and difference are always present in the intimacy between the two lovers, and frequently one or the other is perceived as menacing. The constant circulation of power and weakness between the lovers is inextricably linked to the flow of their desire. But the struggle for power between these two characters can never


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be resolved, in part because neither one can stake out a stable position. The Chinese lover is despised socially by the Europeans and the Vietnamese, yet wields a terrific economic power (this was generally the case of the Chinese population in Indochina during the French colonial period). His Chinese identity in L’Amant and L’Amant de la Chine du nord is also important because it evokes the colonial history of Southeast Asia before French occupation, thus placing him in the role of colonizer as well. In turn, the narrator’s own position as colonizer is attenuated by the extreme poverty of her family, as well as by her age and gender. The insistence with which the lover and everything concerning him are referred to as Chinese is, however, curious; it renews, with every reference, the distance that separates him from the narrator. Although, in part, it is to be understood almost as a racial epithet, “Chinois,” both as substantive and adjective, is repeated so often in the text that it loses all referential meaning and comes, instead, to evoke metonymically the ideas of difference and distance. One is reminded of the way in which Loti’s narrators return again and again to the “strangeness” of the people they observe. In Duras, this strangeness is as much a property of the self as it is of the other, and the obsessive use of a cultural marker to signify the gulf between the narrator and the lover points, in fact, to an overdetermined alienation that is informed by class oppression and gender inequalities, as well as by cultural difference. While the narrator undeniably yields a certain amount of power as a white colonist, the lover’s wealthy father won’t permit him to marry her, considering her a prostitute. Moreover, the lover is a dozen or so years older than the narrator, sexually experienced, and somewhat freer to enter into such a liaison because of his gender, although he is otherwise vulnerable as a Chinese man with a white, underage lover. The following passage reveals the narrator’s perception of herself as a colonized person, literally as “occupied territory”: Je vois la guerre comme lui était, partout se répandre, partout pénétrer, voler, emprisonner, partout être là à tout mélangé, mêlée, présente dans le corps, dans la pensée, dans la veille, d’occuper le territoire adorable du corps de l’enfant, du corps des moins forts, des peuples vaincus . . . (L’Amant, 78).

Although the pronoun “lui” in this passage ostensibly refers to the narrator’s older brother, it quite clearly can be extended to include the lover as well, particularly given the image of the “territoire adorable du corps de l’enfant.” Indeed, the narrator refers to herself in several places as the lover’s child, stating that he makes love to her as he would do to his own child (L’Amant, 122–123). This passage stands in sharp contrast to others in which the narrator portrays herself as seductress. It is here that we

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get a glimpse of the imbalance of power inherent in a relationship between an adult male and an adolescent female. This is the vulnerable and violated side of the narrator, and the one she associates with the colonized people she sees around her. In Duras’s other texts, the colonial system plays a much more explicit role than in L’Amant and L’Amant de la Chine du nord. Stark, violent passages communicate the devastation wreaked by colonialism: Chaque femme de la plaine, tant qu’elle était assez jeune pour être désirée par son mari, avait son enfant chaque année. . . . il en mourait tellement que la boue de la plaine contenait bien plus d’enfants morts qu’il n’y en avait eu qui avaient eu le temps de chanter sur les buffles. . . . Et il fallait bien qu’il en meure. . . . les enfants . . . naissaient avec acharnement. Il fallait bien qu’il en meure (Barrage, 117–119).51

This brutal appraisal of the consequences of sexuality serves as antithesis to Loti’s mystification of it in the following passage from Le Mariage de Loti: Rarahu était une petite créature qui ne ressemblait à aucune autre, bien qu’elle fût un type accompli de cette race maorie quin peuple les archipels polynésiens et passe pour une des plus belles du monde; race distincte et mystérieuse, dont la provenance est inconnue. Rarahu avait des yeux d’un noir roux, pleins d’une langueur exotique, d’une douceur câline, comme celle des jeunes chats quand on les caresse . . .52

Duras’s passage deflates Loti’s exoticism, laying bare the rhetoric of his seduction. For it was, after all, this type of seduction that lured the mother of Duras’s Eden Cinéma cycle into the “colonial army,” eventually leading her to Indochina, and to poverty and desperation. This does not, however, prevent Duras from resuming her position of power as former colonist and Western writer and employing her own seductive rhetoric, particularly in L’Amant and L’Amant de la Chine du nord, when describing the lover: La peau est d’une somptueuse douceur . . . Le corps est maigre, sans force, sans muscles . . . il est imberbe, sans virilité autre que celle du sexe, il est très faible, il paraît être à la merci d’une insulte, souffrant. Elle ne le regarde pas au visage. . . . Elle le touche. Elle touche la douceur du sexe, de la peau, elle caresse la couleur dorée, l’inconnue nouveauté (L’Amant, 49–50).

Her refusal to look at his face, to name him, erects a barrier between the narrator and the lover. His strangeness and separateness from her play a large role in this seduction and find their echo in the “strangeness” of the language used in the text: ambiguous or conflated pronouns, fragments,


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and non sequiturs all combine to represent both the impotence and the arbitrariness of language and the impossibility of defining identity.53 Unlike Loti, Duras does not paint a facile portrait of an “Other” as a negative of the self; instead, the others she examines in these purportedly autobiographical texts are composed of both the familiar and the strange, and each bears the inscription of the writing self. In a certain sense, these characters are interchangeable: the very grammar of the text sometimes makes it impossible to distinguish between the mother and the narrator or the two brothers and the lover. This conflatability does not indicate superficially developed characters, but, rather, a position taken on identity that is anomalous in the context of traditional autobiography: that no identity in this text is fixed or autonomous. While this might be read as a colonizing move in which everyone is assimilated to the narrator, and ultimately to the author him- or herself, I would argue that in this instance Duras’s use of the autobiographical genre subverts the work of colonialism by fracturing the ideal of a dominant, unified, masculine self, such as we find in Loti, and by replacing it with the image of an adolescent girl who forges an unstable and polymorphous self in relation to the very different characters who surround her. Duras’s manipulation of autobiography works to undermine Loti’s model of a search for self that colonizes by imposing and reproducing the colonial identities of civilized European and unfathomable native. Her texts, while simultaneously rewriting their own core narrative and the narrative of French colonialism in Vietnam and Cambodia, approach questions of gender, colonization, and selfreproduction from the perspective of both oppressor and oppressed. The ever-shifting balance of power in her texts destabilizes not only hegemonical structures but also any attempt to disassociate the texts from a colonizing gaze. In the chapter that follows, I will continue to examine literary “responses” to colonialism, focusing in particular on the colonized subject and its relationship to the autobiographical genre, and the questions of production, reproduction, and gender.


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Autobiographies In the past three decades, conceptions of autobiography and autobiographies themselves have changed radically. Since poststructuralist and postmodern theories have questioned the idea of the subject and dismantled notions of transparency and truth historically associated with autobiography, it is difficult, if not impossible, for authors to conceive of it or critics to talk about it as a non-fictional narration, as a straightforward reproduction of life events. The goals of confession, revelation, transparency, and truth elaborated by autobiographers such as Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau, as well as many of their readers, are no longer seen to be the primary motivators of the autobiographical project. Since the 1980’s, critics have spent countless pages trying to define the genre itself or contemporary subsets of it,1 and even the notion of autobiography as a separate genre has been called into question.2 In this chapter, I will discuss the blurring of the boundaries between autobiography and fiction in African and European women’s texts, and these writers’ strategic use and rejection of certain autobiographical structures. In so doing, we will return to the question of the connection of autobiography to reproduction and to gender, a discussion begun in Chapter I. We will also come back to the theoretical articulation between autobiography and colonialism posited in part Two of Chapter II, and look at its operation in African texts.

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t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND GENDER: WRITING WITH A FEMININE “I”

Some critics have argued that because women were for so long denied subjecthood and agency, they would logically seek to fashion a unified, whole subject in their autobiographical writings, while others have argued that, on the contrary, autobiographical writing is best used to question or dismantle such a subject.3 For the purposes of this study, it is my premise that any subject constructed in a text is inescapably multiple, and those multiple selves are oftentimes discordant. This will be borne out in the readings of Aoua Kéita, Nafissatou Diallo, Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, and Marguerite Duras that follow. It will be my aim in this chapter to look for and recognize the diverse subjectivities that emerge from the writings of African and European women who undertake to inscribe a first-person female subject. Because autobiography has for centuries been seen as a genre that imitates or faithfully reproduces the events of its author’s life, it has often been perceived as a genre from which imagination and creativity, the powers of literary production, are absent.4 Inherent in much of the reconception of autobiography has been a rejection of reproduction; indeed, contemporary practitioners of autobiography have sometimes attempted to expunge all traces of the reproductive from their texts.5 What is at stake in autobiography that keeps reproduction at a distance is the author’s desire to establish him/herself as self-generating within the boundaries of the text. This textual self is clearly distanced from any notion of reproduction and is solely associated with literary production and creation. It seems logical that the stakes could change for women writing autobiography, for if the writer’s goal is to distance him/herself as child from the reproductive and the maternal, the act of distancing appears doubly complex for women. For instance, women’s own association with the reproductive has in the past caused all of their writing to be read as autobiography, thinly veiled or not. In her essay “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?” Domna Stanton analyzes “the age-old, pervasive decoding of all female writing as autobiographical. . . .” She continues: “autobiographical” constituted a positive term when applied to Augustine and Montaigne . . . but . . . had negative connotations when imposed on women’s texts. It had been used . . . to affirm that women could not transcend, but only record, the concerns of the private self; thus, it had effectively served to devalue their writing.6

The possibility of transcribing or transcending personal experience is the subject of much debate among theorists of autobiography.7 For the purposes of this study, I consider autobiography to be the creation of a liter-

CHAPTER THREE: AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

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ary narrative that picks up pieces from and sometimes parallels an extratextual “personal” narrative. It is an act of renarration, narration, and creation, as much for Marguerite Duras and Aoua Kéita as for Rousseau and Montaigne. But even in light of contemporary theories of autobiography, when we read autobiographies written by women, we are reading against a long literary history that reads autobiography as a strictly defined genre in which the author provides the reader with an accurate account of his or her own life and against a material history in which women have been perceived as “agents” of reproduction in all areas of life: sexual, social, economic, and literary. A number of critics have identified the complex relationship to the maternal as one of the tangible differences between men’s and women’s autobiographical and fictional writings.8 Many women writers may experience the maternal as a very ambiguous symbol of origin due to the tenuous position of their female predecessors, as well as a symbol of their own (pro)creative powers. For a male writing subject to distance himself from the maternal is to join a literary tradition of male fathers who have done the same. For a female writing subject to distance herself from the maternal is to find herself in less stable territory. The mother/daughter, father/son metaphors that abound for describing the relations between different generations of writers indicate clearly that what is at issue here are textual, not biological, personas and relations. Nonetheless, because women are always in danger of being restricted to their bodies and excluded from literature, these terms are overdetermined and implicate social and biological roles as well. Although it leaves her in an ambiguous position, the female writer may have a special stake in putting to rest the maternal in her autobiographical texts: if she is finally to constitute herself as subject through her texts, it follows logically that she would not wish to attribute her origin to an Other, to a maternal source, nor would she wish to turn her selfcreative potential into procreative potential by positing herself as mother figure. Altering the terms and the stakes of autobiography, though, can lead to a reemergence of the maternal as narrating subject.9 Whatever the outcome, autobiography seems to be an important site for the staging of maternal and daughterly exchanges. To speak of “women’s autobiography” is problematic and perhaps dangerous, but to present writing and literature as free from the influence of gender is perhaps even more so.10 If we are to speak of autobiography in terms of gender, thereby positing a difference between male autobiography and female autobiography, how are we to articulate this difference without falling into the trap of essentialism?11 In no way do I wish to

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imply that the difference at stake here emanates from an immutable, innate source, but at the same time my readings of women’s autobiography revolve around figures of the reproductive and the maternal. Because reproductive and maternal functions are at least as much shaped by societal, historical, and psychological forces as by biological ones, I do not believe that to recognize these functions as influential elements in the constitution of a female self, and not that of a male self, is to subscribe to biological determinism or essentialism. Autobiography and the maternal exist in a unique relationship to one another, due in part to their relationship to reproduction and in part to the role they may play in the constitution of a “subject.” For the female writer engaged in the process of creative production, the reproductive component of autobiography and maternity may be perceived as a potential trap. Yet autobiography also has the potential to become a means of empowerment for the female self, a way to construct and make material a self often perceived as ancillary, if not completely subjugated or invisible. AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN AN AFRICAN CONTEXT

In Chapter II, Part Two, I stated that autobiography had both the power to colonize, by its traditional focus on the unified (white, male) self, and the power to liberate, by providing a site in which new, decolonized selves could be invented. In fact, the genre of autobiography has been greeted with suspicion in Africa, with some authors embracing it and others rejecting it as antithetical to African conceptions of self and community. Some of this suspicion may well come from the form taken by some of the earliest African “autobiographies.” For example, in 1943, Dietrich Westermann published Autobiographies d’Africains, a text containing a curious mixture of anthropology, autobiography, and biography.12 The text is a collection of eleven (auto)biographies “d’indigènes originaires de diverses régions de l’Afrique et présentant des métiers et des degrés de cultures différents” (title page). The fact that Dietrich Westermann is named as the author of this volume, that he is not African, and that the narratives contained inside in no way recount his life prompt us to question the nature of these “autobiographies.” Not only are Xkoou-goa Xob, Gabousou, Kwami, Foli, Akou, Amadasou, Samba, Akiga, Mtiva, Maxwimabi, and Mghayi robbed of a distinct identity by being referred to simply as “Africans,” but even more significantly, the name on the cover, the only name that is associated with these “autobiographies,” is “Dietrich Westermann.” This gesture of appropriating life stories and putting them in European packaging is emblematic of colonial intervention in African


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societies. Indeed, this text is very much Westermann’s autobiography, for it is incumbent upon a subtext that is wholly about Westermann and his position as a European male observer.13 It is unsurprising, then, that some African critics consider autobiography with skepticism, wary of its totalizing power, its power to subordinate multiple African identities to a single, dominant, Western “I.” In an article published in Revue de littérature comparée, Mohamadou Kane, the Senegalese literary critic, asserts that what he considers the individualistic nature of autobiography is at odds with the artist’s traditional role.14 Kane argues that autobiography has little place in Africa and notes that “[l’autobiographie] n’a pas fleurie en Afrique où, dans certaines régions, les griots ou d’autres artistes ambulants ont pour mission d’exalter les êtres d’élite” (562). To usurp the griot’s function in order to tell one’s own history does represent a transgression on the part of the autobiographer and makes autobiography an unwelcome interloper for some.15 Nonetheless, Kane acknowledges that in the move from orality to written expression the novelty of autobiography exercised a certain seduction over African writers. He regards this as a preliminary and temporary phase, however, classing autobiographies as the work of immature authors, as yet incapable of looking beyond their personal experience (562). Although these criticisms stem from a perception of autobiography as a Western encroachment upon African art forms, they are otherwise classic criticisms of the genre and display the usual misconceptions about the transparent and reproductive nature of autobiography. The only aspect of autobiography that Kane finds compelling is the relation established in autobiographical works between author and reader, which he compares to the traditional relationship between story teller and listener in African oral tradition. In a later study, Roman africain et tradition, he notes: [l’auteur]considère ne pouvoir apporter de témoignage plus véridique que celui puisé dans son expérience personnelle . . . l’autobiographie, en permettant à l’auteur d’intervenir directement, de prendre le lecteur à témoin, rétablirait les anciens rapports privilégiés, par exemple entre le conteur et son public en milieu traditionnel.16

Kane effectively concedes here that autobiography can consist of something other than a narcissistic gaze and that as a genre it is not, in fact, inherently at odds with African literary ideologies. James Olney, an American critic, concurs with Mohamadou Kane’s assertion that individualism has no place in African literature, but he views the role of autobiography quite differently. He does seize on autobiogra-

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phy as the Western reader’s key to understanding what differentiates African from Western literature, but what I find important about his work is that he does not immediately dismiss autobiography as a Western genre, but instead acknowledges its capacity to permute in order to adapt itself to the society in which it is produced and read. African autobiography is different, contends Olney, because “the life that provides the subject for African autobiography is much less individually determined, much more socially oriented, than the life recounted in Western (European and American) autobiography.”17 The African autobiographical “I” as described by Olney is truly a “we,” who can accurately describe even very early life experiences because “African life is marked, directed, and regulated by ritual repetition so that the description, like the experience, assumes a communal and archetypal quality” (39). While his focus on multiplicity is important, his assertion that the representation of the community via the individual is peculiarly African seems dubious. Consider Michel Beaujour’s observation in Miroirs d’Encre: “Leiris formule ici, en quelque sorte, la règle du jeu de l’autoportraitiste: JE résume la structure du monde, comme le microcosme celle du macrocosme. Par suite, le discours de JE et sur JE devient un microcosme du discours collectif sur l’univers des choses . . .” (Beaujour, 30). By this I do not mean to collapse autobiographical writings from Africa into autobiographical writings from the West, but simply to point out the inaccuracy of portraying the two as always and irrevocably different. Moreover, Olney, like Kane, relies on a more or less traditional conception of autobiography to formulate his theories. In the African texts to which we will now turn (and finally in Marguerite Duras’s texts as well) we will see that it is precisely this traditional conception that is dismantled, as these writers “take on” the autobiographical genre in order to alter the terms of its production, as well as those of their own relationship to production and reproduction in literature, gender relations, and colonialism. AOUA KÉITA’S FEMME D’AFRIQUE

Aoua Kéita’s text, first published in 1975, explicitly announces its autobiographical intentions in its title Femme d’Afrique: La vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-meme.18 Although the stark, anonymous quality of the title Femme d’Afrique is softened by its subtitle, it still communicates clearly Kéita’s emphasis on the Everywoman nature of her life. While the reader may be struck time and time again by the exceptional aplomb of this woman who is constantly struggling with those more powerful than she, the narrator herself insists that she is simply a dutiful and responsible


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daughter, wife, professional, and political activist. Nonetheless, the title signals an important change in the identity politics of francophone African literature, because it is at once reminiscent and significantly different from the title of Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir, published in 1966, and widely read as an autobiographical novel. Christopher Miller points to the deliberate vagueness of the title L’Enfant noir as evidence of French refusal of African specificity (TOA, 118). In Kéita’s title, an adult woman has taken the place of the child, and the “darkness” has assumed a geographical and political identity. And, as I mentioned above, even the title’s initial move towards anonymity is modified in the subtitle, indicating that this text strives to establish identity and independence, although seemingly aware of the uncertainty of both. The choice of genre further confirms the desire to construct and give voice to a subject, and unlike Camara and other male predecessors, Kéita specifically presents her work as nonfiction. Interestingly enough, this choice has served to exclude her from the literary “canon” of francophone African works. Femme d’Afrique is rarely considered as a literary text, but principally as an account of Kéita’s political activities and the development of the RDA from the 1930’s to the 1960’s.19 Yet, as my discussion of the relationship between Kéita’s and Camara’s titles would indicate, I believe that Femme d’Afrique situates itself, and rightly so, along a literary continuum. If it has an obvious political agenda, this certainly would not differentiate it greatly from many well-known literary autobiographies. Moreover, it employs certain basic literary techniques in an effort to captivate its reader’s attention as well as to communicate on a figurative level: it opens on a near-idyllic scene from childhood, a scene that gains ever greater significance as the text unfurls; it uses anecdotes that ultimately serve as allegories and are designed to impart what it sees as great moral truths; and it is replete with images, particularly those of maternity and motherhood, that construct its protagonist and inscribe her position. Kéita makes a classic opening move: the first scene is of the author as a child, listening to her mother recount tales clearly designed to impart appropriate values to their audience. [Ma mère] avait un thème de prédilection: ses contes portaient toujours sur les mésaventures d’une fille désobéissante qui, désirant fortement le mariage d’amour, avait été malheureuse en ménage ou tuée par l’homme de son choix. . . . A la fin de la légende ma mère dit: “Dès lors, les filles devinrent plus obéissantes, surtout dans le domaine du mariage afin d’éviter le triste sort de Diadiaratou.” Ma mère nous raconta cette légende à plusieurs reprises espérant qu’elle nous servirait de leçon (16; 20).

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In the tale in question, the disobedient daughter, Diadiaratou, after rejecting all of the suitors proposed by her parents, insists on marrying a handsome stranger, of whom her family is suspicious. Her new husband turns out to be a djinn, an evil spirit who abandons her far from her home. When she finally finds her way back to her family, she vows to accept any suitor suggested by her parents, no matter how distasteful to her, thus signaling her new obedience. The choice of this tale is an interesting one because of its emphasis on the figure of the dutiful daughter and its theme of arranged marriage. Its relationship to the narration of Aoua Kéita’s story is somewhat ambiguous. For while Kéita faithfully carries out her responsibilities as daughter, midwife, and militant, she does not conform to the model of the obedient daughter outlined in her mother’s tale. In fact, the scene that immediately follows that of the mother’s traditional instruction shows Aoua, under her father’s guidance and to her mother’s great dismay, being introduced to formal instruction: Mon père me parla en ces termes: . . . L’avenir de ta mère constitue un gros souci pour moi. En effet avec quatre filles qui iront construire d’autres foyers . . . que deviendra ta mère après ma mort? . . . ta mère restera sans soutien si entre-temps elle n’a pas un garçon. . . . A cause de mon âge, je ne suis pas sûr de vivre jusqu’à la majorité de ce fils éventuel. C’est pourquoi je remercie Dieu par la grâce duquel les Français ont créé une école des filles à Bamako.20 Je vais de ce pas te faire inscrire . . . Je te conseille la sagesse, la politesse, le respect envers tes maîtres, le travail appliqué, tout ceci dans ton intérêt et dans celui de la mère que tu prendras en charge après ma mort (23).

While the father prepares Aoua to be a responsible daughter, he ensures that she will not become a traditional one. And indeed, Aoua’s mother is anguished by the path he chooses for their daughter: “Pour ma mère, c’était un scandale d’envoyer une fille en classe” (24). Effectively, the father designates Aoua to be the “male” of the mother’s all female household (the mother does eventually have a son, but he is many years the junior of Aoua), and thus makes it forever impossible for the daughter to conform to the feminine standard set by her mother and exemplified in her tales. When Aoua finishes her studies and is named to a post in Gao, her mother: pria son époux de me donner en mariage le plus tôt possible, afin de mettre un frein à tout. Elle avait en vue un jeune parent tailleur; mon père, lui, le jeune médecin [Diawara, whom Kéita later marries]. Nouvelle consultation qui entraîna mon départ pour Gao trois jours plus tard. Mon père réconforta ma mère et la pria de formuler les voeux les meilleurs pour mon plein épanouissement (28).


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Again, Aoua is not permitted the opportunity to be a dutiful daughter according to the mother’s standards because to do so would be to violate paternal authority. She does marry Diawara, the man her father has chosen, and there is some indication in the text (see 44–45) that this is not a marriage of love on her part, but, rather, an appropriate one. Yet this obedience does not protect her because over a decade later, Diawara yields to the demands of his mother, and divorces Aoua. Significantly, although Kéita cites the real reason for her mother-in-law’s wrath as Kéita’s infertility, the mother-in-law cites Aoua’s failure to show the proper courtesy toward her during a recent visit, again placing Kéita in the category of disobedient daughter. Throughout the text, Kéita is caught between obedience and disobedience, between her traditional role as female and her responsibilities as an educated, politicized woman. While she appears to be an utterly faithful daughter, wife, activist, and professional, practically every fulfillment of duty entails a transgression. The autobiography itself is no exception. Earlier in this chapter, we saw Mohamadou Kane’s contention that autobiography was at odds with traditional African art forms. Whether or not one accepts that claim, Kéita herself clearly delineates the boundaries that she transgresses by narrating her story in the first person: Une petite explication sur la timidité de beaucoup de camarades à l’époque. Pendant les périodes précoloniales et coloniales, dans certains pays africans, et singulièrement dans le nôtre, les coutumes et les traditions ne permettaient pas à un noble de s’adresser directement à haute voix à une assemblée. Dans les conseils de familles, de villages ou de tribus, les Chefs parlaient très bas comme s’ils s’adressaient à eux-mêmes. C’était les porte-parole désignés toujours parmi les hommes de castes les plus éloquents (griots, forgerons, anciens esclaves, etc.) qui parlaient très haut pour toute l’assemblée (63).

I have already cited Christopher Miller’s fascinating analysis of this custom, and refer the reader to it again here.21 Kéita’s decision to “speak to” a multitude of readers in her own voice deliberately breaks with the tradition outlined above.22 Surprisingly, perhaps, the form she chooses seems to insert her into another tradition, this one Western and literary. It would, however, be too simplistic to argue that Kéita’s embracing of a seemingly traditional form of autobiography signals a simple exchange of African tradition for Western art and science. Yet it is true that she is heavily influenced by Western notions of science and procedure, and her chronological, highly structured narrative reflects that sense of order. One is tempted to see in her an example of a non-Western subject’s colonization by traditional autobiography’s emphasis on the linear development of the subject into a fully matured, self-reflective, and authoritative adult,

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and yet one cannot ignore the fact that she uses this autobiography to excoriate the colonial government and its oppression of her compatriots. We are reminded again that any apparent “obedience” on Kéita’s part inevitably leads to transgression. And in Femme d’Afrique she ably manipulates Western forms and structures in an effort to dismantle Western domination. By breaking numerous silences her text becomes radical, regardless of apparent conformities to traditional autobiography. Moreover, I do not believe that Kéita’s narrative is as transparent, as “reproductive,” as it might appear. As I mentioned in the opening paragraph to this section, the Kéita presented in the text has an “everywoman” quality about her. In fact, we learn very little about Kéita’s inner life: her marriage, her divorce, her infertility. Instead, she narrates her development as a professional and an activist, and traces the concurrent development of the RDA. Somewhat paradoxically, the overall image we have of Kéita is a maternal one. She is intimately connected to reproduction and mothering via her status as midwife. She refers to herself frequently in the third person as la sage-femme or la sage-femme de Gao, demonstrating that her identity is closely tied to her near-maternal role. Yet Kéita speaks openly of her own inability to have children, and, significantly, neither laments nor apologizes for her infertility. In short, the text establishes her as a productive, nurturing participant in the birth process who is not confined by the physical limitations of reproduction. This is perhaps the most striking instance of Kéita’s carving out for herself a space of radical freedom within a seemingly conservative, traditional structure. As I have indicated above, this gesture is echoed on the level of genre as she uses what many scholars would classify as a traditional, Western autobiographical mode to condemn Western intervention in African societies and to construct a powerful voice that she identifies as African and feminine. Writing at the same time as Kéita, Nafissatou Diallo, also a midwife, expresses many of the same concerns and also chooses the autobiographical genre as her mode of expression. More obviously rebellious than Kéita, Diallo narrates act after act of disobedience. Although she presents her story as literally “conservative,” that is, designed to preserve the memory and value of a certain way of life in the face of radical social change (“Le Sénégal a changé en une génération. Peut-être valait-il la peine de rappeler aux nouvelles pousses ce que nous fûmes” [Avant Propos]), there is an undeniably progressive subtext to De Tilène au Plateau. Diallo uses this narrative of her upbringing to criticize commonly held beliefs and practices, even while she repeatedly affirms her love for her family and community.23 An early statement encapsulates


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Diallo’s attitude towards the links among past, present, and future, and the responsibilities of modern-day Senegalese toward the younger generations: “Je prie pour mes parents disparus; je leur suis reconnaissante de l’éducation qu’ils m’ont donnée et j’essaie, avec plus de philosophie et, certes, moins de rigueur, de faire suivre cette voie à mes enfants” (13, my emphasis). Like Kéita, Diallo expresses a desire to effect social change, but she focuses on the familial and private realms instead of political and public ones. Despite its self-proclaimed modesty, Diallo’s text in fact narrates the construction of a very rebellious female self.24 The avant-propos announces a simple, transparent, “reproductive” project: “Sur quoi écrirait une femme qui ne prétend ni à une imagination débordante ni à un talent d’écrire singulier? Sur elle-même, bien sûr” (9). This very traditional interpretation of autobiography, combined with an almost paradoxical self-effacement, contrasts sharply with the deliberate emergence of a self that transgresses authority, particularly paternal authority, at every turn. Every major event has as a cornerstone an act of disobedience, if not of outright defiance. The narrator tells us that she lasted only three years at Coranic school because of her misbehavior, explains how she feigned illness to attend a forbidden festival, and manipulated friends and relatives in order to free herself from an unwanted marital engagement. The episodes narrated range from peccadilloes to serious clashes with authority figures, one of the most significant of which occurs when she violates her father’s rules about her interaction with the opposite sex: Un point d’ombre persistait au milieu de ses [the father’s] qualités: il était d’une jalousie maladive en ce qui concernait nos relations avec les garçons. . . . Je n’ai jamais compris pourquoi il pensait à mal chaque fois qu’un garçon nous approchait. . . . Plus de compréhension et de confiance nous auraient été salutaires . . . (48).

Surprising the narrator kissing a young man in the street, the father reacts violently: Père me saisit, m’enleva, me porta en quelque sorte jusqu’à sa chambre dont il referma la porte à double tour. . . . La colère le défigurait. . . . Il me fouetta. Sans pitié. Je criais, il me fouettait, utilisant pour la première fois sur moi un nerf de boeuf. Je hurlais; il fouettait, comme une mécanique impardonnable, qui ne s’arrêterait jamais. Je criai “Tu vas me tuer! Tu veux me tuer?” Il fouettait toujours. Je hurlai: “Tu sais que je n’ai plus de mère, c’est pour cela que tu peux me battre de la sorte.” Pour la première fois il parla: “Si ta mère était là, elle serait morte de honte et voudrait te voir morte. Fille méprisable, tu nous a déshonorés.” . . . je ne fus plus qu’un corps anéanti, presque sans souffrance, tassée dans un coin, encaissant sans cris, sans mouvements, comme un cadavre, la pluie des

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t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide coups. Mame Soda frappa à la porte: “Samba, arrête! Tu vas la tuer!” [He responds,] “Qu’elle meure! C’est ce qu’elle mérite.” (89).

The very narration of the event constitutes a stinging critique of the father’s behavior, as the narrator paints for her readers this portrait of uncontrolled anger and violence in an otherwise measured character. Though she shows understanding for the father’s fear of dishonor and remorse for, as she puts it, having forced him to lose control of himself, she is outraged by his treatment of her, and she refuses to interact with him for weeks. Eventually, she concludes that he regrets his actions, but the only way for them to reestablish normal relations is for her to apologize to him. She does so, but makes it clear to the reader that while she recognizes her own fault in the matter, she continues to condemn the father’s violence. Diallo’s narrative continually exposes faults and breaks silences. I have already cited in Chapter I (30), one of her closing remarks: “J’entends les ricanements: ‘Ecrire un livre pour dire qu’on a aimé Père et Grand-Mère? La belle nouvelle!’ J’espère avoir fait un peu plus: avoir été au-delà des tabous de silence qui règnent sur nos émotions” (132). It is significant that this last gesture refuses a reductive interpretation of the text and, indeed, belies Diallo’s own initial presentation of her project as a simple recounting of her life’s events. Ultimately, Diallo sees her text as an agent of social change and a vehicle for constructing a female voice that challenges traditions, taboos, and authority figures. In the midst of West African women establishing themselves as autobiographers, Aminata Sow Fall and Mariama Bâ entered the literary scene as among the very first sub-Saharan francophone African women to write and publish novels. Yet some of these novels are not without engagement to the autobiographical genre, as they, much like the texts of Kéita and Diallo, grapple with questions of reproduction and narrate the construction of female subjects and voices. In the sections that follow, I will turn my attention to Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre and Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Ex-père de la nation and the boundaries of gender, genre, and culture that they transgress. UNE SI LONGUE LETTRE: EPISTOLARITY, APOSTROPHE, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Narrated in the first person, in the form of a single letter, Une si longue lettre draws the reader into the intimate lives of Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou, while concurrently acknowledging the distance that separates certain readers from the text’s cultural context. Although Aïssatou is the


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ostensible interlocutor here, she quite often yields to the reader, disappearing while Ramatoulaye instructs the reader about some facet of Senegalese life. While the first-person narrative voice creates an illusion of immediacy between both the narrator and the reader and the narrator and Aïssatou, the insertion of cultural information, political commentaries, and similar material alerts the reader to the presence of an underlying agenda. The novel’s epistolary format periodically breaks down, more often than not in order to attend to the perceived need of the reader. The narrator takes care to address Aïssatou frequently, thus reinforcing the epistolary illusion, yet other aspects of the text undermine such an illusion, while serving as inclusive gestures toward the reader. The text simply does not attempt to dissemble the existence of interlocutors other than Aïssatou, as demonstrated by its division into chapters, footnotes explaining Wolof borrowings, and explanatory digressions about Senegalese politics and culture. Narrated (and written) by a teacher, Une si longue lettre stresses the role of education in Senegalese society and clearly serves as a pedagogical tool with which to instruct the uninitiated reader. The narrative opens on Modou Fall’s death and his wife Ramatoulaye’s confinement, the oppressiveness of which she tries to ease by writing each day to Aïssatou: “J’ai reçu ton mot. En guise de réponse, j’ouvre ce cahier, point d’appui dans mon désarroi: notre longue pratique m’a enseigné que la confidence noie la douleur”(USLL, 7). The novel then consists of a series of flashbacks through which the narrator traces her own development and that of Aïssatou, from schoolgirls to married women to mothers of families and finally to deceived wives. Plots, subplots, and characters are neatly balanced: Aïssatou’s story parallels Ramatoulaye’s; Modou’s escapades complement Mawdo’s (Aïssatou’s ex-husband); Daba (Ramatoulaye’s and Modou’s daughter), petite Nabou (Mawdo’s young second wife), and Binetou (a school friend of Daba who eventually becomes the second wife of Modou Fall), together present the choices available to young Senegalese women. This thematic equilibrium is mirrored in the structure of the novel: the short chapters are each roughly of the same length; the narrative of Ramatoulaye’s widowhood parallels the narrative of her past, as well as that of Aïssatou, thus ensuring that past and present are equally represented. The orderliness of the novel contradicts the upheaval of the life it recounts, but, at the same time, betrays the will to regain control, to identify and classify the events of the life in preparation for a new venture. The fiction of Une si longue lettre is, then, autobiography, for it is clearly an autobiography that the character of Ramatoulaye sets out to write.

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But, as we know, many readers and critics have received Une si longue lettre, not as the fictional autobiography of Ramatoulaye, but as the thinly veiled autobiography of Mariama Bâ.25 We also know that on several occasions Bâ herself vehemently denied that the novel was autobiographical; Barbara Harrell-Bond refers to this in “Africa Asserts its Identity,” as does Bâ’s editor on the back cover of Bâ’s second novel. Despite her protestations, critics continued to focus on points of convergence between Bâ’s life and her text, even those critics who were friends, such as Aminata Maïga Ka: je comparais Mariama [Bâ] à Ramatoulaye. Elle me rétorqua alors: “Je n’ai ni la bonté, ni la grandeur d’âme de Ramatoulaye.” Mais ayant eu la chance de la connaître . . . je sais qu’avec Mariama, Ramatoulaye a de grandes similitudes.26

One cannot help but think of Domna Stanton’s lament that all women’s writing is read as autobiographical. It would seem that this concern is a cross-cultural one, although the stakes will certainly change for African women, given autobiography’s already questionable status in African literature. There is an analogy to be drawn between traditional conceptions of Western women’s writing and autobiography on the one hand, and debates about the position and “legitimacy” of African literature on the other.27 Like the writings of many European and American women, the relationship between African writers’ texts and the Western canon is that of margin to center. European critics often read and condemn African literature as a transparent and facile representation of African society, their underlying assumption being, as Chinua Achebe has suggested, that Africans have not yet mastered the European art of writing novels.28 Perhaps reading the Other’s writing as transparent reassures the conventional Western male mind that nothing eludes it; for how to envision the Other’s imagination when that Other is a product of one’s own imagination? Yet many African critics regularly read African novels as autobiographical, referring to an indissociable connection between “art” and “reality,” and rejecting as Western conceptions of literature as a selfcontained universe. In Sunday Anozie’s Sociologie du roman africain, he speaks of the West African novel in the following terms: “Alors paraît évidente la fonction primordiale du roman comme art social, c’est-à-dire comme une version orchestrée de la réalité nouvelle.”29 In Ecole blanche/Afrique noire, Samba Gadjigo conflates novel and autobiography in the following passage:


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Par son contenu et sa forme le roman africain . . . a été pour l’intellectuel colonisé, non seulement un moyen de réflexion sur soi, mais aussi un instrument de révélation de la situation globale dans laquelle évoluent colonisateur et colonisé. L’autobiographie a été naturellement le véhicule de cette double réflexion. Un jeune Africain révèle d’abord son milieu d’origine, son expérience scolaire puis sa prise de conscience de sa place dans la société. Ce thème a été abordé par presque tous les romanciers africains francophones à un moment ou à un autre de leur carrière.30

While I clearly consider the boundaries drawn between autobiography and fiction to be highly questionable, to posit an unproblematic correspondence between a text that calls itself a novel and the life of its author is, nonetheless, reductive. Neither do I dispute the social and political functions of many African texts, but I would again resist the gesture that distills a literary text into a purely political document, noting that precisely this kind of gesture banished Aoua Kéita’s Femme d’Afrique from the literary realm and from the consideration of literary scholars. In light of these critical tendencies, however, it should come as no surprise that many critics see Mariama Bâ’s life in Ramatoulaye’s narrative.31 It is significant that Bâ herself resisted the label of autobiography so vigorously. Another quotation taken from Aminata Maïga Ka’s article may allow us some insight into Bâ’s discomfort with this label. Explaining why many critics had read Une si longue lettre as autobiographical, Ka declared: “Mariama Bâ n’écrit pas avec sa tête mais avec son coeur. . . . (134). This association of autobiography with life and instinct, as opposed to artifice and intellect, conjures up the image of autobiography as reproduction in a very biological and, again, reductive sense of the word; it also effectively removes it from the creative, artistic sphere. One can easily see why Bâ might contest a reading of her work that implies she is incapable of inventing a compelling, plausible narrative without using her own life as a model. At the same time, she refuses an association that will place her solely in the role of reproducer, in the sense both of life-giver and chronicler. If we do not see a similar refusal on the part of the male authors of whom Gadjigo speaks, I would argue that Bâ, unlike writers such as Camara or Béti, runs the risk of remaining trapped within a reproductive sphere if she cannot use fiction to free herself from such confinement.32 Bâ does not, however, simply reject reproduction in favor of production. If we momentarily set aside questions about the autobiographical nature of the text and look at it first as the fictional autobiography of Ramatoulaye, we note that in inventing and inscribing herself in the text, she does not renounce the reproductive sphere. This character is, after all, a mother of twelve who is committed to her maternal role. The struggle that takes place between autobiography as reproduction and fiction as

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production seems in some ways already resolved in the figure of Ramatoulaye.33 That Une si longue lettre is narrated in the first person undoubtedly makes it easier to believe that we are witnessing not only the autobiography of Ramatoulaye but that of Mariama Bâ as well. And certainly there exist correspondences between Bâ’s life and Ramatoulaye’s: Ramatoulaye is an abandoned wife with twelve children, Bâ a divorced mother of nine. Ramatoulaye’s education and profession parallel Bâ’s. In fact, neither Bâ nor her relatives shy away from stating that personal experiences informed the narrative.34 In an interview with Barbara Harrell-Bond, Bâ indicates that the character of Aïssatou was modeled after someone she knew: “I didn’t say it in the book, but when she [Aïssatou] returned, it was only for brief holidays”(BHB, 5). While this kind of comment might seem to undermine the “anti-autobiographical” position that she was known to take, I see the contradictions in Bâ’s comments and observations about Une si longue lettre as further evidence that she wishes to confound any neat delineation between autobiography and fiction. There are undeniably moments in Une si longue lettre where the historical and social position of the narrator parallels that of Mariama Bâ, yet for all that, the text remains a fictional, literary work. And indeed, Mariama Bâ never agrees to the label of autobiography for Une si longue lettre. The structures and plots that Bâ chooses and those she rejects are of great importance here and demonstrate that the text does not exist to mirror the events of Bâ’s life, but to deploy certain narrative strategies and challenge certain traditions. The narrative in Une si longue lettre is both cyclical and linear: Ramatoulaye begins with her present situation, engages the reader in a narration of the past that leads back to the time of the novel’s beginning and then moves forward. Because of its epistolary form, however, we are constantly aware of the present of narration, which unrelentingly advances as each day Ramatoulaye takes up her pen and begins a new installment of her missive. And yet the end of the narrative appears to be much less a terminus than the beginning; for the novel opens on Modou’s death, which signals the final chapter in Ramatoulaye’s life as a devoted spouse. In contrast, the end of Une si longue lettre holds no trace of finality: Ainsi, demain, je te reverrai. . . . Je voudrais tellement t’entendre freiner ou nourrir mes élans, comme autrefois et comme autrefois, te voir participer à la recherche d’une voie. . . . Je t’avertis déjà, je ne renonce pas à refaire ma vie. . . . Le mot bonheur recouvre bien quelque chose, n’est-ce pas? J’irai à sa recherche. Tant pis pour moi, si j’ai encore à t’écrire une si longue lettre . . . (130–31).


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Even the punctuation refuses finality in the form of the “points de suspension” that bring this narrative to silence. The position of written narrative at the end of Une si longue lettre is very ambiguous. We note that it is born out of death, confinement, and dissatisfaction: Mon coeur s’accorde aux exigences religieuses. . . . Les murs qui limitent mon horizon pendant quatre mois et dix jours ne me gênent guère. J’ai en moi assez de souvenirs à ruminer. Et ce sont eux que je crains car ils ont le goût de l’amertume (18).

In the final paragraph of the novel, Ramatoulaye states that only if she fails in her search for happiness will a second “long letter” be generated, implying again that written narrative is intimately tied to crisis: the death of her husband and her own confinement spur Ramatoulaye to write to Aïssatou, who has undergone similar trauma.35 Indeed, we find that some of Aïssatou’s suffering was alleviated by books: “et plus que ma présence . . . les livres te sauvèrent. Devenus ton refuge, ils te soutinrent” (51). This relationship between disaster and written narrative is, of course, evocative of the relationship between French colonial presence in Senegal and the existence of Senegalese literature written in French. Writing is clearly of monumental importance to the narrator; the narrative is the means by which she joins Aïssatou, sorts out and makes sense of her life history, and articulates her feminist struggle and social critique. Nonetheless, she neither takes for granted the conditions of production of her writing, nor does she find them innocent. The lack of closure in the narrative and the fact that in its last chapter it envisages its own continuation in oral form indicate further tension between the oral and the written. The epistolary nature of the text reminds us that its goal is communication with Aïssatou, a formerly oral communication that has been interrupted by her absence and for which this “letter” provides a temporary substitute. The subtext to Une si longue lettre is in many ways an oral one, and that orality interferes at moments with the recounting of the tale. For example, the technique of recounting to Aïssatou events of which she logically would have intimate knowledge (i.e., the conditions of her separation from her husband) frequently seems awkward. Yet the perceived weakness of this literary strategy takes on an entirely different significance if one compares it to the strategies of a griot, an oral storyteller, who recounts an individual’s personal and family history, not because the material is necessarily unknown to that individual, but in order to make it known to a larger group or to remind them of it, to highlight it in their memory for a variety of purposes.

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Because of the significance of this “letter” as a substitute for conversation, a way of making present the absent Aïssatou, the strategies of the text can be read perhaps more fruitfully as apostrophe than as epistolarity. In an article titled “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Barbara Johnson looks at Baudelaire’s “Moesta et Errabunda” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” as classic examples of the figure of apostrophe in lyric poetry. Johnson defines apostrophe as “the direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimate being by a first-person speaker. . . .”36 In addition to Baudelaire and Shelley, she reads modern poems about abortion and suggests that, despite the seeming enormity of their difference, they are all about the possibility of erasing the distance between the speaker and the absent person, object, concept, or emotion through figures of rhetoric and poetry. For Johnson, apostrophe is the reanimation of a lifeless entity. She concludes that “What is at stake in both poems is . . . the fate of a lost child—the speaker’s own former self—and the possibility of a new birth or reanimation” (188). While Johnson’s argument will take on even more significance for us in the next chapter on writing and infanticide, it is also significant for this reading of Une si longue lettre. Although Bâ does not adopt a lyric form, her text is predicated on the figure of apostrophe. One could argue that the goal of all letter writers is to replace absence with presence, thereby implying that apostrophe normally accompanies epistolarity, and that its use in Bâ is not considerably different from its use in any epistolary novel. Yet an important difference does exist. The exchange of letters typically found in an epistolary novel partially satisfies the aforementioned goal; that is to say, the presence of the letter is a substitute for the presence of its writer. But as we will see shortly, one cannot talk of a simple exchange of letters in Une si longue lettre because although Ramatoulaye speaks of receiving letters from Aïssatou, this communication does not appear in the form of letters in the text.37 Une si longue lettre narrates a prolonged attempt to render the absent present, rather than a series of exchanges in which letters answer one writer’s apostrophe and stand in for their own writer’s physical presence. In Une si longue lettre, Ramatoulaye accepts no substitutions for Aïssatou; letters, writing, cannot indefinitely stand in for physical presence and oral exchange. Written language almost succeeds in making present the absent Aïssatou, and this imminent presence, in turn, signals the absence or cessation of writing. This differs from the Baudelaire poem where, Johnson argues, the point is not really to make the absent person reappear, but to replace her and to fill the void in the writer’s life with poetry. And yet while we can legitimately look at this difference in Bâ’s text as another


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deviation from Western, male tradition, it would be a great oversimplification to content ourselves with this analysis. The purposes of Ramatoulaye’s letter are, in fact, multiple, and its mission to bring Aïssatou to Ramatoulaye represents only one of them.38 As we have already discussed, the writing of the letter itself serves to renarrate a history in order to inscribe the writer in it as a subject, thus allowing her to forge her future. This certainly resembles the search for the “lost child—the speaker’s own former self” and the desire for “rebirth or reanimation” that Johnson speaks of in the poems of Baudelaire and Shelley. While it would be altogether too hasty to oppose Bâ categorically to European literary tradition, one must note that she modifies it by nonconventional usage of conventional forms such as apostrophe and epistolarity.39 Keith Walker comments: “epistolarity, normally associated with the privacy of the “I,” is here socialized, politicized, nationalized, and even internationalized . . .”40 In his reading of Une si longue lettre, Christopher Miller shows how Bâ’s manipulation of the epistolary genre sets her apart at once from European feminist and African male literary tradition.41 Rather than simply add to Miller’s thorough and astute analysis of Une si longue lettre as an epistolary novel, I would like to direct my inquiry to the other letters that appear within this epistolary narrative. Miller and other critics note that there is no “real exchange of letters between Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou” (TOA, 281), thus rendering problematic the classification of the novel as epistolary. While, strictly speaking, this is true, I would like to draw attention to the fact that Ramatoulaye’s letter opens on the subject of just such exchange: “Aïssatou, j’ai reçu ton mot. En guise de réponse j’ouvre ce cahier” (7). And a second letter from Aïssatou heralds, if not a literal ending, certainly a highly significant moment of closure in Ramatoulaye’s life:”Ousmane, mon dernier né, me tend ta lettre. . . . Ces mots caressants qui me décrispent sont bien de toi. Et tu m’apprends la “fin.” Je calcule. Demain, c’est bien la fin de ma réclusion. Et tu seras là . . .”(104). So although we never read Aïssatou’s letters, their presence acts as a framing device in the text. As I have already noted, the novel ends at the threshold of a space reserved for orality, yet this end, nonetheless, includes a reference to possible future writings. If we look at the use of letters in the narrative, that is, at the image of a written medium instead of an oral one, we note that at practically every landmark moment in the text, the characters involved communicate by letter. I will take as examples the letter that Aïssatou writes when she leaves Mawdo and the letter that Ramatoulaye writes rejecting Daouda’s mar-

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riage proposal. The first represents a curious phenomenon in the text, which Christopher Miller describes as: a general overextension of Ramatoulaye’s knowledge and narrative authority, allowing her to quote conversations and letters that she “couldn’t have known.” In other words, verisimilitude is compromised. . . . This interlarding of information for the real reader’s benefit reveals the compromise between epistolarity and narration that Bâ practices (TOA, 282).

Aïssatou’s letter of rupture, which has no counterpart in Ramatoulaye’s story and, therefore, emblematizes the divergence of the paths the two women have chosen, serves thematically to distinguish Aïssatou, to emphasize her “noble” character. Aïssatou’s marriage has failed for two reasons: first, her mother-in-law rejects her because she is of “casted” birth, from a family of goldsmiths, whereas her husband descends from nobility; second, the mother-in-law’s dissatisfaction finally prompts her to find a second, suitable wife for her son. Rather than accept a co-wife, Aïssatou chooses to leave: Mawdo, Les princes dominent leurs sentiments, pour honorer leurs devoirs. Les “autres” courbent leur nuque et acceptent en silence un sort qui les brime. Voilà, schématiquement, le règlement intérieur de notre société avec ses clivages insensés. Je ne m’y soumettrai point (50).

The letter takes to task both the Senegalese caste system and the practice of polygamy. It confronts issues of love and fidelity, and demonstrates the exercise of free will by which a woman can refuse a polygamous situation detrimental to her. Essentially, the letter is a synthesis of the novel’s themes. This letter, which supposedly constitutes the very difference between Aïssatou and Ramatoulaye, turns out to confirm their sameness. Although Ramatoulaye’s recital of the letter may seem somewhat less than plausible, what is plausible is that Ramatoulaye knows this letter by heart because she herself is in the process of writing one just like it. If the letter undermines the differences between Aïssatou and Ramatoulaye, can a case be made for letters undermining other differences in the novel? The question is particularly germane to a reading of this letter, for we feel compelled to ask why a woman leaving her husband would leave so eloquent, so philosophical, so grammatical a letter written in French, instead of choosing an oral medium (and perhaps her native Wolof), or even a less formal written medium. The first answer to this question lies, of course, in the desire to emphasize Aïssatou’s noble character, thus challenging the Senegalese caste system, in which she does not


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occupy the highest rung. According to Christopher Miller, further evidence of her nobility lies in the very fact that the letter is written in French: “by her participation in the education process—the march toward literacy—Aïssatou becomes ‘noble’ in a new reformed sense of the word” (TOA, 280). But this reformed nobility, female and literate in French, can’t speak to the old Wolof nobility. In Mariama Bâ’s text this selfdetermining woman doesn’t (can’t?) talk about her dignity and revolt in Wolof. She writes a letter in French, studies European books, and then leaves Senegal for the United States. It would seem that her character proves too strong, her feminist commitment too uncompromising, her immersion in a written medium too great, to allow her to remain in Africa. Literacy and feminism are implicitly questioned as imported ideals that foster a kind of neo-assimilationist ideology and, therefore, constitute yet another erasure of difference. While clearly, consciously, Bâ advocates synthesis and compromise, Ramatoulaye’s letter as an alternative to Aïssatou’s, the sub-text is perhaps not so harmonious. The second letter concerning us is the one Ramatoulaye writes to Daouda Dieng, a suitor. In it, she refuses his proposal of marriage, first, because she doesn’t love him, and second, because she refuses to perpetuate the system of polygamy. The letter is important because it demonstrates both Ramatoulaye’s independence and her integrity. Unlike her odious brother-in-law who wishes to marry her out of selfishness, Daouda represents a life of comfort and genuine companionship. We know that Ramatoulaye considers marriage an ideal way of life and seeks to be married again, yet even as a middle-aged widow and mother of twelve, she refuses a match based more on compatibility than love. This refusal, of course, signals (or, more appropriately, reaffirms, because she has already refused Daouda’s hand once as a young woman) her own distance from a tradition where marriages are often arranged. This distance represents a compromise: it is not as great as that which separates Aïssatou from tradition, but it does indicate a move away from Senegalese tradition toward a more Western concept of love, as evidenced by the traditional Farmata’s reproach: “C’est Dieu qui te punira de n’avoir pas suivi le chemin de la paix” (101).42 Like Aïssatou’s farewell note, this letter forms a microcosm of the entire novel. One could even begin to make a case for the interchangeability of the letter to Daouda with the one to Mawdo, based on the cover of one of the English editions of the novel. The edition, published by Heinemann, sports a cover almost identical to that of the French NEA edition: we see only a hand, writing a letter. In the French edition, the letter shown is, quite unsurprisingly, the letter to Aïssatou; in the English edition, how-

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ever, the letter shown on the cover is the letter to Daouda. Does this imply a correlation between the letter in the title and the letter to Daouda? In the French edition, the relationship between the letter referred to in the title and the letter depicted on the cover seems perfectly natural, but the English cover disturbs this complacency. Are we to infer that Daouda’s letter is “so long a letter,” or does this English cover imply that all of the letters contained in the narrative can be substituted for one another? If the latter is the case, the seemingly personal, individual nature of the emotions and situations addressed in the various letters becomes suspect. This is yet another instance in which the letters in this text appear to reduce everything to a common denominator. Paradoxically, although these missives written in French are designed to highlight their respective authors’ difference from each other and from traditional Senegalese society, taken together they serve to demonstrate how closely the writers and their letters resemble one another. This kind of paradox is emblematic of the conflict between literary and oral culture that underlies this text, where the mastery of French promises a “new nobility” and individual freedom, and at the same time threatens the erasure of difference. I have discussed Une si longue lettre as a work that straddles both genre and narrative techniques. This in-between location seems a part of the narrative strategy of the novel. The position of the text, always somewhat marginal to what is codified, sanctified, not to say canonized, reflects the position of those who appear to command its attention; it carves out a place in which marginal voices can be heard. As C. Miller explains, Bâ’s position between epistolarity and narrative distinguishes her both from European feminists and African male writers. Her novel thus embodies the status of the majority of francophone African women writers, and in this sense it can perhaps be justifiably deemed “autobiographical,” in that it symbolizes the position of its author both within a literary and intellectual tradition and in Senegalese society. (How) should the questions concerning the role of the autobiographical in Une si longue lettre be resolved? If one is to believe the passage on the back cover of Bâ’s second novel, Un chant écarlate, the labeling of Une si longue lettre as an autobiography so disturbed Bâ that it played a part in the writing of her second work. Un chant écarlate, Bâ’s editor tells us, depicts “un univers résolument vu de l’extérieur.” Seeing and narrating from the outside have become a primary goal. This concern surfaces in Une si longue lettre as well, where Aïssatou’s position, coupled with her identification with Ramatoulaye, guarantees an outside perspective in addition to the intimate perspective of the narrator. The inside-outside contrast is accentuated by the very epistolarity of the novel.


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We write a letter to someone who is absent, exterior to our daily environment. Conversely, Ramatoulaye’s physical confinement and her selfreflexive narrative represent a distinctly interior space. The text itself vacillates between the intimacy of the epistolary form with its first-person narrative and the foreign presence of an extra-textual reader who requires footnotes and lengthy explanations of Senegalese culture. To maintain a position “outside” Wolof tradition, even outside Africa (Aïssatou lives in the US), is cast as desirable, but only if that position is held by someone who, like Aïssatou, simultaneously belongs to the interior. Yet, throughout the novel, interiority teeters on the brink of suffocation and oppression. It is significant that the non-traditional, outside perspective is in this instance represented by a woman who is, after all, Senegalese. Concomitant to this tension between interiority and exteriority, we recognize a second and analogous struggle between reproduction and production. The interior, private, and domestic world is reserved for dutiful and obedient wives, mothers, and daughters, whereas the exterior public sphere is reserved for men and sometimes invaded by rebellious women. Because of the colonial system by which this book cannot help but be informed, exterior and interior take on new meaning in terms of the respective positions of Africa, Europe, and the U.S. Aïssatou uses her literacy and knowledge of European languages to flee to the “outside,” leaving a traditional, and in her case oppressive, realm. Ramatoulaye, on the other hand, moves from inside to outside and back again, albeit not without difficulty. She has more obviously merged two worlds, allowing the exterior to invade the interior, introducing production into the reproductive sphere through her writing, just as she compromises the domestic sphere by rebelling against certain constraints (once a widow, she rejects the custom of marrying her husband’s brother, she refuses to censure her pregnant unmarried daughter, etc.) while refusing to leave this sphere through divorce or a general renouncement of marriage. The singularity and difficulty of her position is emphasized even as it is confirmed as a viable and honorable lifestyle: Les dates extrêmes de paiement des factures d’électricité ou d’eau sollicitaient mon attention. J’étais souvent la seule femme dans une file d’attente. .. .Je me débarrassais de ma timidité pour affronter seule les salles de cinéma; je m’asseyais à ma place, avec de moins en moins de gêne. .. .On dévisageait la femme mûre sans compagnon. Je feignais l’indifférence, alors que la colère martelait mes nerfs et que mes larmes retenues embuaient mes yeux. Je mesurais, aux regards étonnés, la minceur de la liberté accordée à la femme (76).

By coupling Ramatoulaye’s maternal, domestic identity with her public persona and egalitarian ideals, Bâ insists that feminism is not a concept

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imposed from the outside, but, rather, emanates from within. And through the character of Aïssatou, she implies that even those ideas that appear to enter Senegalese society from the outside inevitably reveal their Senegalese roots. To read Bâ’s text as a “simple” autobiography, thinly veiled, would be grossly reductive. Not to recognize that this text traces the development of a female first-person voice, the construction of a female subject, and that this evolution is analogous to Bâ’s experience as one of the first women to write and publish in francophone Africa would do an equal disservice to the text. Bâ’s text constitutes one of the first moves in Senegalese women’s writing toward works that do not respect traditional delimitations. It challenges notions of autobiography as void of creativity and good fiction as void of personal anecdote. It alters perceptions of reproduction and production by combining the “reproduction” of certain extra-textual events with the artistic production that generates the narrative, by positing the maternal as a source of literary production, and by positioning the maternal in the public as well as in the private sphere. In L’Ex-père de la nation, Aminata Sow Fall continues this process of reshaping the maternal and redrawing the boundaries of gender and genre. NEGATING THE FATHER: FEMALE COUNTER-NARRATIVE IN L’EX-PÈRE DE LA NATION

Aminata Sow Fall at first glance has nothing in her corpus that one could interpret as autobiographical. Nonetheless, L’Ex-père de la nation, is written in the first person, and is the fictional autobiography of the former head of state of a fictitious African nation.43 Thus the distance that separates Sow Fall from the “I” in her text is twofold: a distance of gender and of position. One might wonder if the desired illusion of immediacy might be somewhat impaired by this distance, yet although it is clear from the outset that no “autobiographical pact” can be concluded between author and reader, the illusion of autobiography is convincingly maintained throughout the text. The text is in fact involved quite deeply in autobiographical projects and strategies. Sow Fall commented, during an interview with me in June 1989, that she welcomed the opportunity to write in the first person with impunity, knowing that no one would try to attribute to her the thoughts and deeds of a character so unlike her. Yet despite her disavowal of any autobiographical intentions, the delight she expresses at writing in the first person invites closer scrutiny. In an early essay, titled “Shadowed


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Presence: Modern Women Writers’ Autobiographies and the Other,” Julia Watson encourages us to look for the presence of autobiographical projects in seemingly unlikely places: the reader’s experience of an autonomous voice narrating a life may be strongest where the self is apparently suppressed, suggesting that for the woman writer, the tactic of writing in the shadow of an Other can be an act of liberation from the constraints of conventional accounts of female lives.44

I think that this idea can be fruitfully applied to Sow Fall’s text as well. I do not wish to suggest that L’Ex-père de la nation recounts the life of Aminata Sow Fall, but merely to point out the resonance between Watson’s reference to the use of another’s autobiography for the purpose of liberation, and Sow Fall’s expressed pleasure at having the freedom to write in the first person without necessarily implicating herself in the text. Moreover, one’s first impression of L’Ex-père de la nation as recounting anything but the female writer’s experience as writing subject is radically questioned by redefinitions of women’s autobiography, such as Françoise Lionnet’s assertion that: To read a narrative that depicts the journey of a female self striving to become the subject of her own discourse, the narrator of her own story, is to witness the unfolding of an autobiographical project. To raise the question of referentiality and ask whether the text points to an individual existence beyond the pages of the book is to distort the picture (AV, 91).

Lionnet’s readings are based on a concept of métissage, the weaving together of multiple voices, perspectives, and cultures in such a way that they are allowed to coexist rather than be hierarchized or collapsed into one another. The idea of métissage offers us a valuable tool for reading texts outside of their traditional or self-proclaimed contexts. For Lionnet, clear distinctions between autobiography and fiction, “male” autobiography and “female” autobiography, and production and reproduction are false.45 I certainly agree that these oppositions are problematic, but they have existed historically and continue to exist; they have been inculcated in male and female writers and in men and women in general. Although they may be intellectually “false,” they are materially very “real,” and it is just such conflict that subtends L’Ex-père de la nation. By writing this “anti-autobiography,” Sow Fall signals her distance from autobiographies written by women such as Nafissatou Diallo, Aoua Kéita, and even Ken Bugul (Le Baobab fou), whose texts explicitly state their goal as a faithful portrayal of their authors’ lives. But before advancing further in this discussion of whose autobiography, or anti-

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autobiography, is contained in L’Ex-père de la nation, we need a clearer idea of the text’s manifest subject. Madiama, a deposed head of state, writes retrospectively of his life from his prison cell. A puppet president and a man of caste, he is controlled by unnamed foreign countries, and participates, despite himself, in the economic ruin of his nation. He fares no better at home, where his ill-chosen second wife (his is a polygamous marriage) alienates his first wife and divides his family. The political component of the plot frequently resembles that of Ousmane Sembène’s Le Dernier de l’Empire, itself loosely based on the 1981 transfer of power in Senegal from Léopold Senghor to Abdou Diouf. In Le Dernier de l’Empire, the character in line for the presidency is, like Madiama, a man of caste. The conflict and chaos that arise due to this situation, considered unacceptable by many, constitute one of the novel’s numerous and pointed critiques of both Senegalese society and neocolonial influences. Sembene’s novel is a roman à clef peopled with figures from Senegalese politcal life. Sow Fall’s text, however, discourages the reader from drawing parallels between its events and actual political events in Senegal. A comparison of the two texts indicates that Sow Fall complicates the questions her text raises by refusing to provide her readers with an unambiguous reference. Rather, it is through the manipulation of autobiographical structures and the introduction of the powerful figure of infanticide that images of colonialism and other power dynamics are constructed and dismantled in L’Ex-père. Sow Fall’s autobiographical moves in L’Ex-père de la nation challenge the idea that the use of autobiography by anyone other than Western man signals the non-Western author’s colonization rather than a challenge to white male hegemony.46 Since the view of autobiography as a colonizing genre is based on the idea that its very existence is incumbent on a Western conception of a unique self as origin and center, it is interesting to note that when autobiography appears as an element in the writings of some non-Western men and women, the position and role of the self often change.47 If we understand by autobiography a positioning of the narrating self in relation to other selves, a reflection on the development of that self within its own text; and if we look at autobiography as an attempt not just to establish subjectivity for one specific individual, but to uncover subjects that have long been buried as objects and characters in other people’s texts, then autobiography contains great power to resist colonization. In L’Ex-père de la nation we find just such an uncovering at work, as a seemingly secondary narrative bubbles up and interrupts the story of the dominant paternal “je.”


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L’Ex-père de la nation can be read as a political allegory, but it can also be read as a feminist fable, the two readings in fact connected via the family imagery that predominates in the text. Madiama is portrayed alternately as the child and the father of his nation: “Cher enfant de notre chère patrie . . . cher fils de notre mère patrie . . . Un enfant du pays pour le destin du peuple” (12–13). Madiama later becomes known, as the title of the novel would indicate, as “père de la nation”(my emphasis). Ironically, this title is imposed upon him by his manipulative aides, and he accepts it with childlike docility. Madiama fails to exert his paternal authority successfully in the public sphere. L’Ex-père as political allegory highlights the dangers of one-party rule, the turning of a blind eye to corruption, excessive debt to outside nations, and a whole host of other problems that plague many African nations today. Many passages of L’Ex-père read like dramatizations of the hypotheses of political theorists such as Fanon in Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth):48 Les masses rurales, dédaignées par les partis politiques, continuent à être tenues à l’écart (Damnés, 92). Vous [Madiama] ne pouvez plus vous perdre dans la foule. Il faut que le mystère vous entoure et que, progressivement, le peuple vous identifie à un mythe. Mythe de la puissance et de la gloire (L’Ex-père, 51). Les circuits économiques du jeune Etat s’enlisent irréversiblement dans la structure néo-colonialiste. L’économie nationale, autrefois protégée, est aujourd’hui littéralement dirigée. Le budget est alimenté par des prêts et par des dons. Tous les trimestres, les chefs d’Etat eux-mêmes ou les délégations gouvernementales se rendent dans les anciennes métropoles ou ailleurs, à la pêche aux capitaux (Damnés, 125). Je ne pouvais pas me cacher que la banqueroute menaçait le pays . . . On avait emprunté, emprunté et emprunté, pour survivre et aussi pour acheter des armes. Le pays lui-même était devenu une sorte d’objet hypothéqué dans les mains des puissances riches qui nous prêtaient et qui, de ce fait, s’octroyaient tous les droits de me dicter une politique à suivre, des actions à mener, des décisions à prendre (L’Ex-père, 163).

Sow Fall fictionalizes political theory within a fictionalized autobiography, consistently choosing “production” over “reproduction” as her medium of expression. She does not attempt to “accurately” represent or reproduce details from Senegalese political life, as Sembène often does in Le Dernier de l’Empire. This difference sets L’Ex-père apart from the dominant masculine mode of literary production represented by Le Dernier de l’Empire and disturbs the process of its reproduction. Sow Fall does not simply slip into a space created by a male predecessor, but chooses to alter the terms of the discourse and the mode of representation.

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Sow Fall’s strategy is also at odds with the call for transparency and truth made by intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. In Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre, he states: “In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved. The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite.”49 Perhaps Sow Fall’s insistence on ‘clothing the truth’ originates from a desire, not to appease the “mother” country, but to debunk the myth of the naked native. In other words, the lack of easy, one-to-one correspondences found in her work indicates a refusal of this image of the “naked,” “natural,” (read uncivilized) “native,” who is incapable of dissimulation but also of imagination. Although Sartre’s image contrasts sharply with the popular image of the colonized as lazy and deceitful, it smacks, nonetheless, of a colonizing, even though well-intentioned, representation. In further opposition to Sartre’s “mother” country, hungry for empty and alienated reproductions of itself, stands the father of Sow Fall’s fictional nation. Yet if this father figure constitutes an implicit rejection of colonialism and its symbols, it too finds itself negated (l’ex-père) even before the beginning of the narrative. Although it seems at first that maternity and reproduction are being rejected and replaced by paternity and fiction, the paternal ultimately gives way to a recuperated maternal force, free of colonial connotations. The boundaries between reproduction and production, autobiography and fiction, become less sharply delineated as these elements are repositioned and redefined. In the domestic sphere of the novel, Madiama is characterized as a father and a son whose life is directed by his family. The counsel given by Madiama’s father determines the course of his son’s life, and this paternal influence is preserved even after the father’s death in the person of Madiama’s elder brother. Coumba, Madiama’s mother, plays a critical role in the text, orchestrating and molding Madiama’s married life by choosing as his wife Coura, a woman Coumba has raised like a daughter and molded after her own image. Curiously, an analogous relationship exists in Une si longue lettre between Tante Nabou, Mawdo’s mother, and petite Nabou, whom Tante Nabou grooms to perpetuate her values and heritage, and then gives to her son as a second polygamous wife. I will discuss the implications of this kind of strategy shortly. In addition, Madiama is portrayed as having a strong sense of his own paternal identity, particularly at a moment in the text when he considers renouncing his presidency, in part to regain the respect of his family: “J’aurais enfin le sourire affectif de Nafi [his daughter] . . . Nafi serait


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alors accourue vers moi:—Papa, je ne t’aurais jamais cru une telle grandeur!” (116–117). Ironically, this same Nafi, whose aloofness wounds Madiama’s paternal ego, becomes a critical factor in his downfall. When she is killed during an anti-government demonstration, she becomes for both sides the symbol of the other’s evil. The opposition party takes as its insignia a picture of Nafi running and laughing, with the caption “élan brisé par les balles de son père.” Conversely, Madiama is obsessed with her death and cites it as his reason for not resigning his post and for his subsequent tyrannical rule over the populace, whom he holds responsible for Nafi’s death. Madiama is cast as an infanticide; not only is he implicated in the death of his daughter, but his government deprives, oppresses, and threatens to crush the “children” of the nation, justifying the opposition party’s depiction of him as a baneful father. It is significant that in L’Ex-père, infanticide is a crime committed by the father, not the mother. Madiama, once divested of his paternity and openly accused of “infanticide,” allows himself to sink into despotism. Infanticide, the ultimate breach of faith, is portrayed here as the act that unleashes tyranny, but also revolt, and ultimately change. Although the link is not immediately apparent, I would argue for the existence of an important connection between infanticide and autobiography in this text. I have already observed that the writer of autobiography, in producing a literary self, often enters into a conflict with the reproductive and the maternal. As Françoise Lionnet notes, in women’s autobiography “selfwriting becomes self-invention” (AV, 33). This sets up a very complex relationship between the maternal and the “daughterly.”50 Autobiography has the potential to constitute the “daughterly” text par excellence, that is, a text in which the mother figure has been eclipsed as a source by the selfinventing daughter. I bring this up on the heels of a reference to infanticide in L’Ex-père de la nation because I see a certain tension between autobiography and the act of infanticide, if we read infanticide as a maternal act meant to suppress the daughter or son. Traditional definitions of autobiography associate it with reproduction, whereas the representation of infanticide, as I interpret it, suggests the rejection of a female reproductive function. Yet thematically, infanticide is not a female act in L’Ex-père, and under Sow Fall’s pen, autobiography itself works to distance reproduction, making the text not only a privileged site of mother/daughter conflict but also, and ultimately, of a certain conflation between the motherly and the daughterly. In a very important move, Sow Fall frees her female characters of the need to commit infanticide by using autobiography first to distance and then to reshape the reproductive.

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The figure of the mother provides a sharp contrast to the infanticidal father. The characters of Coura and Coumba threaten at each moment in the text to merge into each other, and they finally do just that when Coura symbolically assumes Coumba’s identity in order to fight Madiama’s introduction of a second wife into her home. These women come to wield considerable power; for example, Coumba arranges the marriage of Coura and Madiama, believing that she thus fixes the course of their lives. A second and even more striking example of maternal influence and power in L’Ex-père occurs when Madiama announces to Coura his second marriage and she responds in the following manner: Je jure au nom de Dieu, que pour toi, je ne serai plus une femme parce que, par ma propre volonté, je me fais dès aujourd’hui la réincarnation de ta mère, ma tante Coumba Dado Sadio. Si tu cherchais en moi la femme, sache que c’est ta mère Coumba Dado Sadio que tu cherches et alors, honte, sacrilège, malheur! . . . [Madiama narrates] Après avoir lâché la bombe qui m’avait abasourdi, elle avait détaché la bande supérieure du mbottu de Nafi. Elle avait fait gicler le lait de son sein et avait dirigé le jet sur ma bouche encore ouverte. Je m’étais levé avec fougue . . . prêt à saisir sa main, mais c’est elle qui avait saisi la mienne avec douceur . . . et elle avait répété avec une maîtrise qui acheva de me désemparer: ‘Je suis ta mère Coumba Dado Sadio’ (58–59).

A sharp distinction is thus drawn between the physically destructive power of the father and the psychologically compelling and no less potent power of the mother. Unlike the mother portrayed in Sow Fall’s L’Appel des arènes, who displays infanticidal tendencies, Coumba and Coura’s strength depends in no way on the threat of physical violence directed against their maternity or its products; on the contrary, it derives mainly from their ability to wield their maternity as an arm against the paternal. A second source of female power in this text lies in the threat of incest, which underlies the entire scene described above between Madiama and Coura. This threat consolidates Coura’s power, the mother’s milk that she squirts into Madiama’s mouth instantly forging a relationship between them in which sexuality can no longer play a part. Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre flirts with this subject as well. C. Miller notes that in Bâ’s text there is an “over-sameness—just short of incest” (TOA, 281) in the relationship between petite Nabou and Mawdo, issuing from the fact that petite Nabou has been molded by Mawdo’s mother, Nabou, into an exact replica of herself and therefore a “perfect” wife for Mawdo. In both texts, by hand-picking and forming the women whom their sons will marry, mothers create incestuous relationships, first by making these women sisters to the men in question and ultimately by turning them into younger versions of themselves.


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The question of incest is significant because of these female characters’ rather peculiar role in manipulating such a taboo relationship, successfully using it to exert control over the men in their lives. Indeed, they prepare the incestuous situation, then lead their sons and daughters into it, in what can be interpreted as an attempt to prolong their influence and power. As we note in L’Ex-père, not only does the mother extend her influence beyond her own death, but that influence and a new threat of incest infuse yet another woman, Coura, with strength and freedom of choice that would not ordinarily be available to her: “sache que je ne suis pas malheureuse, au contraire! J’éprouve une joie profonde d’exprimer mon droit à l’existence quand tout apparemment, concourait à m’écraser” (59). As it is presented in L’Ex-père de la nation, incest is analogous to infanticide (as the latter is typically portrayed: a crime committed by the mother) in that it concentrates power in the hands not simply of women, but specifically of mothers. While some feminist theorists might argue that this serves only to reinforce negative stereotypes of the mother figure, I would argue that in this instance, the blame is placed unequivocally on Madiama, with Coura’s transformation from wife to mother representing only a bid for self-determination and autonomy that relies on the manipulation of identity and taboo rather than on physical violence. As I have just noted, Coura gains access to power via her position as mother to Madiama; yet, paradoxically, this maternal position frees her from reproduction. After the scene in which Coura assumes Coumba’s identity, no further children can issue from her union with Madiama. This subtle reinterpretation and repositioning of the maternal is emblematic of a larger narrative strategy. In many respects Madiama’s story is an “antiautobiography” that serves to bring out the female story in the text, a story of daughters and mothers transforming potentially oppressive situations into opportunities for seizing control over their own lives, for becoming the subjects rather than the objects of this tale. Because the maternal is affirmed and at the same time separated from the reproductive, one sees a unique conflation of mother and daughter in this text. The intial conflict between autobiography and infanticide is paternal: Madiama’s “autobiography” begins to unravel and yield to Coura’s narrative at the moment he is inculpated in infanticide. Yet the final relationship between autobiography and infanticide in L’Ex-père is the coexistence of two analogous responses to reproduction. In fact, Sow Fall’s autobiographical response to reproduction can itself be read as a kind of infanticide in which the reproductive role of the feminine is refused.

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L’Ex-père de la nation, a text that calls itself fiction and is written to read like an autobiography, questions and displaces Western readings of autobiography and “political” literature as transparent attempts to translate a world outside the text. Indeed, the potential for this is indicated as early as the title, where the father is crossed out, and as late as the last sentences of the text: “Coura me rend chaque jour une visite d’une heure environ, quand elle m’apporte mon déjeuner. ..C’est seulement quand elle me quitte que je prends ma plume pour écrire” (189). As in Une si longue lettre, crisis and confinement provoke written narrative, much as the crisis of colonialism underpins the writing of this text. The novel closes on Madiama in prison, while Coura, free, gives shape and direction to his days. Moreoever, if writing represents Madiama’s only freedom, it is Coura who reveals this freedom to him and grants him access to it. Refusing to accept her “fate” as the first wife in a polygamous marriage, Coura explains: Si de tout l’univers je ne disposais que d’un grain de sable pour asseoir mon corps, je ne laisserai pas l’univers me comprimer sur ce grain de sable . . . [Madiama]—Un grain de sable dans l’univers, c’est petit! [Coura]—Petit, oui. Mais maniable . . . Il n’y a pas de servitude absolue . . . Il faut savoir dénicher la parcelle de liberté cachée au fond de nous . . . Il suffit de le vouloir (56).

The analogy between Coura’s socially dictated subjugation to Madiama and the position of formerly colonized peoples living in the shadow of a colonial past and a neo-colonial present becomes explicit in this passage. More importantly perhaps, the strategies proffered by the novel for refusing this position are aligned with the feminine. The roles of Madiama, a seemingly powerful and free man, and of Coura, a female character who appears to have “no choice,” have been drastically altered. This narrative of events simultaneously leading to and flowing from masculine confinement reveals itself to be the narration of a feminine progression towards freedom. Masculine “autobiography” gives way to the narration and invention of a female subject, suggesting that L’Ex-père de la nation provocatively confounds the rules of gender and of genre in order to construct and narrate a female literary subject. Through their reconsideration of the notions of fiction and autobiography, Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre and Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Expère de la nation, present the reader with conceptions and positions of the self that differentiate it from a traditional Western autobiographical self, unique and unified. One sees in these texts the narration of the self in relation to others, and an attempt to uncover a plural and suppressed subjectivity rather than to establish the uniqueness of an individual identity.


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These moves turn autobiography into a tool with which to resist and dismantle colonization. In L’Ex-père de la nation, Madiama has clearly fallen victim to neo-colonial forces; he is effectively a colonized product of an ongoing process, altered since Independence, but tenaciously and insidiously continuing to shape individuals and governments. Therefore, the process by which a second, embedded, female narrative reveals itself to be the more compelling and powerful of the two reflects a literary shedding of things colonial, including autobiography as an individualistic, isolating, and “reproductive” genre. The ambiguous status of Une si longue lettre, coupled with the inclusive nature of Ramatoulaye’s “je,” which seeks to speak not only for Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou but for Senegalese women in general, distance Bâ’s work from autobiography defined as a solipsistic enterprise. As we saw in the last chapter, Marguerite Duras’s relationship to colonialism is necessarily quite different from that of Mariama Bâ or Aminata Sow Fall, yet her narrator’s conception of self and other is clearly influenced by her relationship to colonialism, and this, in turn, influences her narration of the self or selves caught between the roles of oppressor and oppressed. THE EDEN CINÉMA CYCLE: FRAGMENTED REPRODUCTION

Marguerite Duras maintains a more openly problematic relationship to autobiography than either Bâ or Sow Fall in that she acknowledges certain of her texts to be autobiographical, yet insists: “the story of my life doesn’t exist”(Lover, 8). Despite the distances that separate these authors culturally, we find in all three similar explorations and transgressions of the boundaries of gender and genre from within a colonial context. L’Amant, the third writing of the story of a French mother and her children living in French “Indochina,”51 does not divulge its genre. It does not state that it is a “roman,” an “autobiographie,” or something other. In the pages that precede the beginning of the narrative, the text simply tells us that it is entitled L’Amant, it is written by Marguerite Duras, and it is “pour Bruno Nuytten.” Neither does L’Amant divulge the identity of its characters. Its “je” is never given a name, and the lover, too, remains anonymous throughout. Far from being autobiographical in a typical sense, that is, revelatory of identity, the text questions the existence of a life story: “L’histoire de ma vie n’existe pas. Ç an’existe pas. Il n’y a jamais de centre. Pas de chemin, pas de ligne. Il y a de vastes endroits où l’on fait croire qu’il y avait quelqu’un, ce n’est pas vrai il n’y avait personne” (14). Characteristically, Duras questions her own author-

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ity, both past and present, with this statement, for the “stories of her life” that exist prior to L’Amant are, of course written by her. Yet she also warns us to be wary of the fiction of autobiography, particularly of autobiography as the definitive story of a well-defined individual.52 Indeed, most of Duras’s female protagonists, whether or not they are purported to be autobiographical, are strangely similar. The “difference in sameness” (Ames, 4) applies not only to Duras’s characters, but also reminds us of Aïssatou and Ramatoulaye and the letters they write, all varying slightly in make-up but tightly interwoven as elements of the same problematic. L’Amant does constitute an autobiographical project,53 whether or not it faithfully reproduces events from the life of Marguerite Duras or tells a generalizable tale of the awakening of sexual identity instead of an individual one. L’Amant is the retelling of L’Eden Cinéma and Un Barrage contre le Pacifique; all three recount the mother’s battle against the sea that inundates her land and against the colonial government that sold her the land and defrauded her, the narrator’s sexual initiation, and her relationships with her lover, brother(s), and mother.54 Besides the correspondence between known details of Duras’s biography and the locations, characters, and events of these three texts, L’Eden Cinéma contains, in the form of production notes, what amounts to an “autobiographical pact”: J’ai hésité à garder—en 1977—les incitations au meurtre que contient la dernière lettre de la mère aux agents du cadastre. . . . Puis j’ai décidé de les laisser. Si inadmissible que soit cette violence, il m’est apparu plus grave de la passer sous silence que d’en mutiler la figure de la mère. Cette violence a existé pour nous, elle a bercé notre enfance. . . . Ma mère nous a raconté comment il aurait fallu massacrer, supprimer les blancs qui avaient volé l’espoir de sa vie ainsi que l’espoir des paysans de la plaine de Prey-Nop (150, my emphasis).

The initials MD follow these notes, thereby linking the fictional mother, who doggedly and violently resists obliteration by the colonial government, to Duras’s own mother.55 Although it represents the third telling56 of a similar, though not identical story, L’Amant has probably provoked more commentary and aroused more interest among the public at large than any other of Duras’s texts.57 Perhaps this is due to the fact that it assumes an autobiographical status more fully and in a way in which Barrage and L’Eden Cinéma do not, by virtue of its first-person narrative. Although readers know about the correspondences between Duras’s childhood and the events in Barrage and L’Eden cinéma, in neither work is this autobiographical interpretation indicated in the body of the text. In L’Amant, however, as well as in L’Amant de la Chine du nord, the first-person narration would


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seem to authorize a reading of this text as autobiography. Curiously, certain readers seem to apply this authorization retroactively to Duras’s entire corpus: Marguerite Duras ne ressuscite pas son passé car il n’est jamais mort: toute son oeuvre en est parsemée, empreinte. . . . Venu pour combler des lacunes, L’Amant se greffe non seulement sur les romans antérieurs contenant les éléments autobiographiques . . . et sur les interviews enregistrées . . . mais encore sur d’autres romans, auxquels maintes allusions sont faites.58

Although L’Amant appears to have little in common with traditional autobiography, since it begins by positing that the life story it recounts doesn’t exist, it has, nonetheless, been used to reduce Duras’s considerable corpus to the working and reworking, the remembering and the reproducing, of certain formative events of her childhood and adolescence.59 Yet surely the “je” of L’Amant refers neither to a transparent nor to a single identity. In fact, there are many moments in the text when “je” becomes “elle,” and ascertaining the referent is nearly impossible. The narrator begins the text in the first person and refers to the mother most frequently as “elle.” This system gives way in her narration of the first encounter with the lover, which she narrates in the third person. This transition becomes further complicated at the end of this scene: D’abord il y a la douleur. Et puis après cette douleur est prise à son tour, elle est changée, lentement arrachée, emportée vers la jouissance, embrassée à elle. La mer, sans forme, simplement incomparable. Déjà, sur le bac, avant son heure, l’image aurait participé de cet instant. L’image de la femme aux bas reprisés a traversé la chambre. Elle apparaît enfin comme l’enfant. Les fils le savaient déjà. La fille, pas encore. . . La mère n’a pas connu la jouissance (50).

The first “image” in this passage, the one on the ferry, refers to the narrator; but it is followed immediately by a second image of the mother, an image that seems to cross the room in which the daughter’s initiation takes place. While apparently narrating the scene of her own jouissance, the narrator distances herself from the scene and brings her mother into it, making it difficult to decide if we are witnessing the jouissance of the daughter or the lost jouissance of the mother. To further complicate matters, the narrator compares jouissance to the sea (la mer), which in French is a homonym for mother (la mère), suggesting that the mother is somehow present in the daughter’s pleasure. If the “elle” in the text has multiple identities,60 it raises the possibility that the “je,” as well, contains more than a single voice. This conflation of the narrator and the mother occurs frequently in the text and will be discussed again later.

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Although the text does not concern itself with an accurate and realistic portrayal of its author’s life, this in no way prevents it from functioning and presenting itself as a mirror. Michel Beaujour’s metaphor of a “miroir d’encre,” or mirror of ink, is especially apt here, as we have at hand a mirror that does not reflect, does not faithfully reproduce an image, but, rather, transmits an image via the both literally and figuratively opaque medium of ink and writing. Consider the opening pages of the text, where standing in front of a mental mirror, the narrator contemplates her face: j’ai vu s’opérer ce vieillissement de mon visage avec l’intérêt que j’aurais pris par exemple au déroulement d’une lecture . . . J’ai un visage lacéré de rides sèches et profondes, à la peau cassée . . . J’ai un visage détruit (9–10, my emphasis).

This face that ages dramatically at eighteen, so that it contains simultaneously youth and age and foretells the story of physical devastation by alcohol that won’t occur for decades, can be likened to L’Amant’s role as a broken mirror of Duras’s corpus. L’Amant contains fragments of preceding and seeds of subsequent works; it, too, recounts disaster and devastation as well as stories of love and youth.61 Events, characters, and emotions encountered in other texts appear here, cast in a different light, reduced to a sliver of their former narrative existence, or expanded by new details and perspectives. Clearly, conventional notions of reflection, reproduction, and mimesis become inadequate once within this framework. Reproduction has a different face in L’Amant because it is primarily the already textualized, the already fictionalized, that is reproduced. Even something as vital to the narrative as the love story between the narrator and “l’amant” is reproduced (although not faithfully) from Barrage and L’Eden Cinéma. L’Amant is a reproduction of the process of remembering; it seeks to imitate it formally and to contribute to the ongoing production of memory. We are presented with images and memories in sequences that recall the functioning of the memory, yet this process is also openly controlled by the writer: “Ce jour-là je dois porter cette fameuse paire de talons hauts en lamé or. Je ne vois rien d’autre que je pourrais porter ce jour-là, alors je les porte” (18–19, my emphasis). The text reproduces incompletely the process of identity formation, with the adult narrator intervening to explain, to supplement, to move the narrative forward to the present or to suspend time: Ce que je veux paraître je le parais, belle aussi si c’est ce que l’on veut que je sois . . . tout ce que l’on veut de moi je peux le devenir. Et le croire. Croire que je


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suis charmante aussi bien. Dès que je le crois, que cela devienne vrai pour celui qui me voit et qui désire que je sois selon son goût, je le sais aussi (26).

This passage, where the narrator informs us of her capacity for selfinvention, works metonymically to cast the entire text as a project of self-genesis. The presence of the mother figure in the text complicates this attempt at self-reproduction. Although the text declares that it is predicated on the mother’s absence, everything in L’Amant points to and recreates her presence: “Ils sont morts la mère et les deux frères . . . C’est fini, je ne me souviens plus. C’est pourquoi j’en écris si facile d’elle maintenant, si long, si étiré, elle est devenue écriture courante” (38). As the preceding quotation indicates, the mother continues to exist physically in the body of the text as “écriture courante.” The narrator does struggle to differentiate herself from the figure of the mother, to wrest power away from her, especially the power she derives from her status as source of origin, and her resultant power to shape and direct the life she has created: je lui ai répondu que ce que je voulais avant toute autre chose c’était écrire, rien d’autre que ça, rien. Jalouse elle est. Pas de réponse, un regard bref aussitôt détourné, le petit haussement d’épaules, inoubliable. . . . Le proviseur lui dit: votre fille madame est première en français . . . la saleté, ma mère, mon amour, elle demande: et en mathématiques? On dit: ce n’est pas encore ça, mais ça viendra. Ma mère demande: ça viendra quand? On répond: quand elle le voudra, madame (31).

The battle for control of the daughter’s life is evident in this passage, the very existence of which attests to the daughter’s victory, but also to the lasting influence and indelible imprint the mother has left on the text. The mother’s aversion to the daughter’s desire to write is represented as fear of separation. The text equates writing and the abandonment of the mother; having announced her desire to write and having had it met with stony silence, the narrator muses: Je serai la première à partir. Il faudra attendre encore quelques années pour qu’elle me perde. . . . Pour les fils il n’y avait pas de crainte à avoir. Mais celleci, un jour, elle le savait, elle partirait, elle arriverait à sortir. Première en français. (31).

First in French, first to leave, the two seem inextricably bound. Perhaps it is because in becoming a writer, the narrator threatens to leave her mother in a much more definitive fashion than she would by simply leaving for Paris to pursue her studies, a departure that would be necessary even to obtain the coveted math degree.

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In the case of an autobiographical project, the opportunity for selfgenesis provided by autobiographical writing constitutes a kind of abandonment of the mother. It is the daughter’s ultimate victory, in which the quintessential reproductive figure of the mother becomes écriture courante shaped and defined by the daughter. The “je” of L’Amant asserts herself as writing subject and source of her own origin when she transforms reproduction into the (pro)creativity of writing. The ambiguous and tenuous position of the mother is evident again in L’Eden Cinéma, where the core events of the trilogy are presented in the form of a play. Here, the stage directions reveal a considerable discrepancy between the mother’s symbolic position in the tale being told and her physical position on stage: La mère restera immobile sur sa chaise, sans expression, comme statufiée, lointaine, séparée—comme la scène—de sa propre histoire . . . ce qu’elle représente dans la pièce dépasse ce qu’elle est et elle en est irresponsable. Ce qui pourrait être dit ici l’est directement par Suzanne et Joseph. La mère—objet du récit— n’aura jamais la parole sur elle-même(L’Eden, 12).

This immobile, impotent character, who at moments seems incapable even of hearing and understanding the dialogue that purportedly tells her story, works to neutralize the powerful and terrifying mother figure depicted in the plot. Whereas the symbolic importance of the mother prevails in the narrative, her place on stage can only be defined in physical terms as she witnesses, motionless and silent, the playing out of her life. But if L’Eden Cinéma represents a re-telling of Duras’s autobiography, then the insistence on the mother’s life as the subject (or, more appropriately, the object) of this work would confound that autobiographical status and introduce once again the difficulty, if not impossibility, of keeping separate the mother’s and daughter’s stories. Yet this constant shift in focus between mother and daughter plays an essential role in the daughter’s construction of an autobiographical narrative, further emphasizing the multiform character of the self narrated therein.62 While the figures of mother and daughter are conflated time and time again in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, L’Eden Cinéma, and L’Amant, a marked difference exists between these last two that concerns the bodies on which these texts are predicated. As the stage directions indicate, almost everything in L’Eden Cinéma is done around, against, or in some other relation to the body of the mother. Although in L’Amant the body of the daughter becomes (con)fused with other bodies (that of Hélène Lagonelle, and of the lover, as well as of the mother) it, nonetheless, remains the central focus of the text. Indeed, body and text are synony-


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mous as that on which the story of “je” is inscribed. In L’Eden Cinéma, towards the end of the play, when the mother dies, no attempt is made by the actor/mother to feign death. The stage directions read: “La mère est encore là, assise dans le bungalow, alors qu’on parle de sa mort. Le caporal l’aide à se coucher sur le lit de camp qu’il vient d’apporter. La mère, donc, se prête, vivante, à la mise en scène de sa mort” (143). I concur with Mary Lydon’s interpretation of this as a daughter’s victory: “Thus Duras accomplishes (appropriately for a writer) at the linguistic level the task that had defeated the mother: the subjugation of la mèr/e.”63 Such a victory, however, cannot be seen as absolute. For if the daughter has finally attained the position of subject (Suzanne, the daughter in Barrage and L’Eden Cinéma, dominates the text, and Duras writes it) we sense that it is the mother’s consent or apathy that has allowed the daughter to become powerful. Lydon intimates the same in the course of commenting on her translation of jouer as “to act,” and using the mother’s “death” scene in L’Eden Cinéma as an example: and my English rendering of jouer sheds further light perhaps on the mother’s complicity in the staging of her death in L’Eden Cinéma. Could it be that to act (to take action) may mean to lend oneself to a particular representation for which someone else has written the script? (Lydon, 161).

The precarious balance between mother’s and daughter’s stories, between the authority of the mother and that of daughter, underlies L’Eden Cinéma, making it an unstable work, always poised on the verge of telling the other’s tale, of returning power to the hands from which it has just been wrested. This state of flux is perhaps appropriate for a work that serves as a transition piece between Un Barrage contre le Pacifique and L’Amant. In Barrage, we discover the originary tale of the mother, the sea, the emergence of the daughter’s self, a “unified” Joseph, and the first incarnation of M. Jo, later to become the Chinese lover of L’Amant. Yvonne GuersVillate observes that the crucial differences between Barrage and L’Eden Cinéma (and, I would add, L’Amant and L’Amant de la Chine du nord) are formal ones, and that the reader of Duras’s autobiographical cycle truly is struck both by the synthesis of events that occurs in the move from Barrage to the later texts and by the stylistic move from realism to lyricism.64 Curiously though, Barrage, full of details, full of dialogue, full of anecdote—in short, full—emphasizes to a much greater degree than either L’Eden Cinéma or L’Amant the imminent and inevitable separation between mother and daughter. There is greater distance between

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mother and daughter in Barrage; one is not heavy with the other as in the later works. Unlike L’Eden Cinéma and L’Amant, Barrage contains few passages where mother and daughter become interchangeable, either grammatically or rhetorically. While appearing to be the source, the whole from which later texts break off, Barrage never manages to convey any unity between mother and daughter. The realism of Barrage is less suited to portray the primordial emotions subtending this story than is the lyricism of either of its counterparts. As Sanford S. Ames notes: “for Duras, the crucial moment is the passage of the individual’s experience as he imagined it into story, song, and the gossip of the text. This is a passage into forgetfulness in which the encounter loses its specificity, its personal properties.” (17). The narrator in L’Amant seems to affirm that the specific information contained in Barrage fails, for all its specificity, to add up to the whole story. The numerous details of Barrage result only in sketches of the characters. The relationship between Joseph and Suzanne provides us with an example: while the ambivalence she feels toward him is merely alluded to in Barrage, it has become vitally important in L’Amant. Likewise, one can read the incestuous undercurrent of the relationship between brother and sister only between the lines of Barrage, whereas in L’Amant the narrator explicitly conflates her brothers and her lover linguistically, and in L’Amant de la Chine du nord, an incestuous relationship between the narrator and the younger brother is explicitly narrated. The presence of an almost traditional omniscient narrator further distinguishes Barrage from L’Eden Cinéma, L’Amant, and L’Amant de la Chine du nord. The only text of the four that is narrated in the third person and without any explicitly autobiographical avowals, Barrage, nonetheless, contains instances where the boundaries between Suzanne and the narrator are not clearly delineated: “Il parlait tous les jours à Suzanne des sentiments qu’il éprouvait pour elle. Moi si je l’épouse, ce sera sans avoir aucun sentiment pour lui. Moi je me passe des sentiments. Elle se sentait du côté de Joseph plus fortement que jamais” (Barrage, 69). Barrage thus paves the way for L’Eden Cinéma, which by its genre requires the use of the first person. Suzanne’s “je,” then, together with the production notes, signed by Duras, that associate the events of the text with those of her childhood, in turn prepare the reader for the supposedly autobiographical “je” of L’Amant. Yet in L’Amant, the narrator asserts from the beginning that the story of her life does not exist, but implies that the full story will be told in this text, portrayed at the time of its writing to be the final text in the cycle.65 This is reminiscent of a gesture made in L’Eden Cinéma: “Difficile à


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suivre, la vie de la mère, après L’Eden Cinéma” (18). The narrator refers literally to the cinema where the mother played the piano to accompany silent movies, but the remark can be read as a kind of prophesy as well, foreseeing the subsequent blurring of distinction between the mother’s story and the daughter’s. In fact, the mother’s life does become more difficult to follow after L’Eden Cinéma, for in L’Amant the daughter’s life pushes itself to the foreground, appropriating (or recovering) events from the mother’s life told in Barrage and L’Eden Cinéma. For example, the mother’s dress of “cotonnade grenat” (Barrage, 32), which she never takes off except to sleep, becomes the “robe de soie grenat usée à l’endroit des seins” in L’Eden Cinéma (30), and then in L’Amant, appears on the daughter: “Je porte une robe de soie naturelle, elle est usée, presque transparente. Avant, elle a été une robe de ma mère, un jour elle ne l’a plus mise parce qu’elle la trouvait trop claire . . . (L’Amant, 18, my emphasis). It is utterly impossible to tell whether the phrase I have highlighted refers to an earlier period in the sequence of events being narrated here, or to the depiction of the dress and its owner in earlier texts, just as it is impossible to decide if the events of Barrage, L’Eden, L’Amant, and L’Amant de la Chine du nord correspond to events in the “real life” of their author, or if their autobiographical potential resides in the ever-changing tableau they present of the functioning and malfunctioning of memory and imagination as they attempt to invent a past for the writing self. Duras once commented that if one could not forget, life would be unbearable, which perhaps allows us to read L’Amant as a way of making peace with an original trauma by forever questioning the authenticity of any purported original. Indeed, the repugnant M. Jo of Barrage, whose gaze and attentions are painfully received and perceived by Suzanne as her first prostitution, is remembered (forgotten?) in L’Amant as a lover who provokes far more ambivalent feelings in the narrator. We are again reminded that Durasian reproduction consists of a kind of repetition and reinsertion of fragments from other places in her corpus, as well as the presence of structures that attempt to reproduce the workings of memory. But memory itself reproduces almost nothing; it is a result of the imagination’s processes of production. Bâ, Sow Fall, and Duras manipulate the autobiographical genre in such a way as to challenge dominant modes of representation by subverting the use of reproduction in its imitative function in autobiography, and by their representation of multiple and fragmented selves as the subjects of autobiography. One might object that Bâ and Sow Fall utilize rather conventional systems of representation in their texts, yet we have seen

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how Bâ employs literary forms and figures to establish her difference from an African tradition that, until recently, excluded women, and a Western tradition that would define autobiography according to certain rules. A similar claim can be made for L’Ex-père de la nation, where Sow Fall’s apparently conventional first person fictional narrative contains and eventually becomes secondary to the account of a woman’s attempt to define herself in relation to another woman and to gain autonomy from her husband. In addition, the novel seems to engage in a dialogue with Le Dernier de l’Empire, written by Ousmane Sembène, a man who has greatly influenced contemporary Senegalese literature and film. It differs significantly from his text, however, in its unwillingness to link its narrative to specific historical events, that is, to perform a “reproductive” function. In Duras’s texts, the ambiguous use of pronouns and manipulation of autobiographical structures indicate her refusal to use her texts to represent any final “truth” about her life or her identity. Yet unlike Roland Barthes, for example, she doesn’t explicitly write her autobiography only to unwrite it by affirming that everything therein is described and experienced by a fictional character. Rather, she narrates a purportedly originary tale and peppers her œuvre with fragments of it, thus confounding attempts to distinguish autobiography from fiction, or even to define them in the context of her work. The phenomenon of conflation, which occurs in each of the texts, merits further discussion here. In Une si longue lettre, one notes the number of similarities between Aïssatou and Ramatoulaye and the even more pronounced sameness of Tante Nabou and petite Nabou. In L’Ex-père de la nation, the characters of Coura and Coumba are portrayed as identical and finally merge together. Duras, as I have just shown, also uses this technique, usually to transgress the boundaries between mother and daughter, but also to merge the bodies of the two lovers, and at one point to superimpose the lover and the brothers. The dichotomy between self and other, of such importance in the colonial venture, collapses in these works—not completely, but often enough to suggest a radical questioning of such a division. Finally, all three authors respond in some fashion to a traditional alignment of the maternal with the reproductive. As I have mentioned earlier in this chapter, autobiography, as a genre that deals with selfdefinition and self-genesis, might be seen as the perfect occasion for a more “productive” daughterly voice to assert itself and overpower a “reproductive” maternal voice. By writing in a maternal voice and casting the maternal in both productive and reproductive roles, Mariama Bâ rejects these dichotomies; so, too, does Sow Fall when she subverts the


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paternal and brings to the foreground the maternal in L’Ex-père de la nation. Duras follows suit by constantly challenging the positions of mother and daughter and ceaselessly exchanging one for the other. In Sow Fall, in Duras, and in Bâ as well (although not in Une si longue lettre, but in Un Chant écarlate, which we will discuss in the next chapter), questions of the maternal and the reproductive are further complicated by the act of infanticide, which serves to thoroughly destabilize familial relations. Like their use of autobiography, their use of infanticide as figure and theme is closely tied to perceptions, functions, and subversions of the productive and the reproductive and will furnish the subject matter for my final chapter.


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Writing Infanticide FIGURES OF MATERNAL VIOLENCE

A SILENCED ACT

One of the most striking aspects of infanticide is the relative dearth of information concerning it. Historical and sociological studies of infanticide can be found, but in-depth analyses of infanticide as a literary theme are relatively rare. Curiously, feminist theorists seem to have largely avoided the topic as well. Simone de Beauvoir makes a few passing references to it in The Second Sex: The primitive hordes had no permanence in property or territory, and hence set no store by posterity; children were for them a burden, not a prized possession. Infanticide was common among the nomads, and many of the newborn that escaped massacre died from lack of care in the general state of indifference. The woman who gave birth, therefore, did not know the pride of creation (70–71).

That Beauvoir does not pause to analyze this phenomenon in a text devoted to the excavation of women’s history and the exploration of the psychological, political, and philosophical aspects of their relationship to men—a study of women, moreover, that isolates their reproductive function as the basic element of their oppression—alerts us to the deeply repressed nature of infanticide in history and in literature. Either Beauvoir does not think it important, an implausible attitude given the focus, method, and aims of her text, or she deliberately avoids confronting it, a more compelling although equally enigmatic possibility. Beauvoir again omits any discussion of infanticide from her section on mothers, where she stresses society’s romanticized, mythical concep-

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tion of motherhood, sets out to demystify it, to reveal its institutional structure and function, and, of greatest importance here, to disabuse the reader of the notion that there is anything inherently maternal about women. What might be the reasons behind her dismissal of infanticidal behavior that could, in fact, be used in the service of her argument? Indeed, Beauvoir is careful not to ascribe infanticide to women at all. In the first reference, cited above, she speaks of nomads. In the second, she attributes the practice of infanticide to a traditional and strict patriarchal regime, and specifically to individual fathers: the father can . . . condemn to death both the male and female children; but in the case of the former, society usually limits his power: every normal newborn male is allowed to live, whereas the custom of exposing girl infants is widespread. Among the Arabs there was much infanticide . . . woman gains entrance into such societies only through a kind of grace bestowed upon her, not legitimately like the male (93).

Beauvoir locates the blame for infanticide among “the primitive hordes,” with no indication of whom she might mean, in “strict” patriarchal society in general, and specifically, in “Arab society,” again without giving any specifications. All of this serves to distance the practice from contemporary, industrialized Western society, as well as to deflect responsibility for infanticide away from women and onto men.1 The ‘natural’ mother may not exist for Beauvoir, but the murderous mother cannot even be mentioned. Although today, more than fifty years later, an ongoing demystification of the maternal allows feminist theorists and others to discuss infanticide openly, the subject largely retains its taboo status. In this chapter, I am going to discuss infanticide primarily as a literary figure and theme, and not as a physical act or social phenomenon. Although I will argue that the figure of infanticide can sometimes be read as a metaphor of liberation, a freedom from reproduction, this interpretation is not intended to apply to non-literary situations; in short, I am in no way condoning the act of infanticide. Maria Piers, in an historical and sociological study of infanticide, views the infanticidal impulse as “as old as mankind itself”(9). She examines the various motives for infanticide and suggests that by killing and/or ‘devouring’ one’s infant, one identifies with and incorporates the victim (26–27). Luce Irigaray makes a similar suggestion in her piece Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre, in which she describes the anguish of the daughter who feels engulfed, swallowed up by her mother, who herself exists only as someone’s daughter and someone’s mother, never as a distinct individual.2 This figurative infanticide occurs only on a symbolic level, whereas Piers concentrates on actual instances of infanticide. She does, nonethe-

CHAPTER FOUR: WRITING INFANTICIDE

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less, refer to infanticide in literature, naming Chekov’s Sleepyhead, in which a nursemaid’s mounting frustration with a fussy child leads her to smother it, and Goethe’s Faust, in which the heroine kills the child she has by Faust and is condemned to death for her crime. In addition, Piers refers to numerous nursery rhymes that portray or allude to infanticide. Unlike Beauvoir, Piers does not hesitate to target women as the principal perpetrators of the deed: If we refer to the infanticidal parent as “she,” then, it is not by accident. On the contrary, it is significant. For, the overwhelming majority of infanticidal adults throughout the ages have been, and still are, women; usually they are the victim’s mother or mother substitutes (41).

Yet another counterpoint to Beauvoir’s presentation of infanticide can be found in Piers’s targeting of 18th-century France rather than a nonWestern, and, as Beauvoir puts it, “primitive” society as the scene of “infanticide of unprecedented magnitude” (56). Piers explains that between 1770 and 1790 the population in France increased by 2 million people and that 1/3 to 1/2 of the population was indigent. The desperate act of infanticide often led to the arrest and execution of the mother, thereby establishing a correlation between the destruction of the child and the destruction of the mother, between infanticide and matricide. Despite a certain reluctance to examine the origins and implications of infanticide and the significance of women’s role in it, it nonetheless figures as the theme of numerous literary works from Greek mythology to the most recent fiction. Perpetually taboo, it most often constitutes a subplot, although there are notable exceptions. Toni Morrison foregrounds it in her 1988 novel, Beloved, in which Sethe, an escaped slave, kills her baby girl and attempts to kill her sons in order to prevent them from being taken back into slavery.3 The baby returns to haunt her, eventually materializing as an 18-year-old woman who moves in with Sethe and her daughter Denver. Morrison depicts infanticide in all its complexity: while it is a horrible act, it is also an indomitable force, for it does, in fact, repel the white slave owners: Right off it was clear, to the schoolteacher especially, that there was nothing there to claim. The three (now four because she’d had the one coming when she cut) pickaninnies they had hoped were alive and well enough to take back to Kentucky and raise properly to do the work Sweet Home desperately needed, were not. Two were lying open-eyed in sawdust; a third pumped blood down the dress of the main one [Sethe]—the one the schoolteacher bragged about. . . . but now she’d gone wild (149–50).

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Yet while infanticide in this text is meant to “free” its victim, it subjugates its perpetrator to an overwhelming burden of guilt. A paradoxical act of love and murder, infanticide in Beloved defies both “natural” and civil law, and places Sethe beyond the grasp of the white male order (for example, the “master” leaves; she is quickly released from jail), but also beyond the comprehension and compassion of her peers. Spurned by her neighbors, Sethe’s world ends at the boundaries of 124 Bluestone Road, a world fled by her two sons, leaving it inhabited exclusively by women: grandmother, mother, daughter, and the ghost of the murdered baby girl. Women’s experiences as mothers dictate every major event in this novel. As Marianne Hirsch notes, this is a power rarely accorded to the maternal figure and one intimately explored in order to reveal its multiple and often contradictory nature, its capacity to free, to subjugate, and to shatter traditional orders.4 MATERNAL MYTHOLOGIES: THE ROLE OF MEDEA

Beloved is one of many texts that Hirsch examines in her compelling and innovative study, The Mother/Daughter Plot, in which she attempts to locate and give voice to the repressed mother in women’s literature and theory. In her Prelude, she proposes the myths of Demeter and Electra as paradigms that “suggest alternate patterns of development, as well as alternate narrative patterns” (28). These myths focus on mothers and daughters instead of fathers and sons and tell a different version of Freud’s “family romance”(Hirsch, 5–11). That Hirsch mentions Medea only briefly, and then as an illustration of deep-seated fears of maternal power and anger, is understandable given her intention to recuperate the mother figure in feminist literature and theory. Nonetheless, Medea remains one of the original figures of women’s ambivalence toward marriage and, more importantly, motherhood. She epitomizes the “unnatural” woman/mother not only in her final act of infanticide, but throughout the tale. She is irrefutably violent, killing her brother Pelias, Creaon, and his daughter Glauke, before laying hands on her own children. Yet the myth has a decidedly feminist tone for the late 20th-century reader: O women, of all creatures that live and reflect, certainly it is we who are the most luckless. First of all, we pay a great price to purchase a husband; and thus submit our bodies to a perpetual tyrant. And everything depends on whether our choice is good or bad—for divorce is not an honorable thing, and we may not refuse to be married.5


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Likewise, one detects more than a little sympathy in the chorus, whose female identity is not without significance here: The order of the world is being reversed! Now it is men who have grown deceitful, Men who have broken their sacred vows. The name of woman shall rise to favor Again; and women once again Shall rise and regain their honor: never Again shall ill be said of women! (Medea, 211).

While Medea’s act of infanticide is prefigured everywhere in the text, her guilt is extenuated first by the blame that is deflected onto Jason, second by the implication that in killing her children she is saving them from a worse fate. While we find ample proof in the text that Medea loves her children, we cannot deny her disenchantment with maternity: “I’d rather be sent three times over to the battlefront than give birth to a single child” (206). In this tale where the mother is a subject who controls her own universe (albeit a subject created by a male author), the topics are male inconstancy and maternal ambivalence. The infanticide that Medea commits allows her finally to triumph over Jason while at the same time transferring the blame to him: Jason: O my sons, it was an unspeakable mother who bore you! Medea: O my sons, it was really your father who destroyed you! (238).

According to Hirsch, all mothers are in some way unspeakable, although she considers the greater (and closely related) problem to be that they themselves do not speak. She argues that in the vast majority of literary and critical writings by women, not only is the mother’s story occluded, but nothing is ever recounted or explained in the mother’s voice from her perspective. Feminist critics have long argued that male authors write from the perspective of the child in pursuit of the original lost object, symbolized by the mother, but Hirsch’s astute analysis implies that in taking up the pen, women did not profoundly disturb a male order; rather, they slid neatly into position within it. Although she does chart an evolution away from this tendency, she nonetheless contends that the “daughterly” voice continues to dominate women’s literature as well as feminist scholarship. Yet even in this study dedicated to the recuperation of the mother and the maternal, one type of mother is largely repressed; I refer, of course, to the Medean or infanticidal mother. Instead, Hirsch chooses Jocasta as the pivotal mother figure in mythology. For Hirsch, Jocasta represents maternal silence and absence; not only is she an unprivileged character in the Oedipal myth, her “mater-

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nal story simply does not exist” (Hirsch, 5). Although Hirsch doesn’t focus on Jocasta’s infanticidal role, except to wonder briefly about her feelings when “handing her child over to die” (4), I would suggest that to consider this aspect of Jocasta’s character and to include infanticidal impulses in the Oedipal drama would be to shift the focus of this drama slightly from child toward mother. Such a shift is, of course, precisely what Hirsch advocates. Indeed, she reads Beloved, a tale of infanticide, as a modern day “feminist family romance,” which displaces, if not unseats, the triangular and male biased Oedipal drama from its role as paradigm of the development of human sexuality. WRITING INFANTICIDE

While infanticide is not frequently studied, it, nevertheless, figures explicitly or implicitly in several feminist literary anlayses. For example, in “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” which we discussed briefly in the last chapter, Barbara Johnson asks whether “female writing is somehow by nature infanticidal.”6 Using Lacan’s theory of an infant’s coming into language, and comparing the structure of the child’s demand directed towards a personified and absent mother figure to the structure of apostrophe, Johnson reads all of lyric poetry as an address to the mother. What happens to the nature of that genre, she asks, if positions are reversed, and the speaker is a mother addressing her dead child? (197–198). If we follow Johnson’s logic—that apostrophe animates an absent, inanimate, or dead subject—we understand how in a poem addressed to a dead child, to cease to write would be to compound the original “infanticide” with a literary one. Johnson concludes by ascribing the problem of the mother as speaking subject and the hostility generated by the issue of abortion to the fact that post-Freudian society speaks by and large from the position of the child. In her article “Writing and Motherhood,” Susan Suleiman also identifies the problem of psychoanalysis as its exclusive focus on the child.7 Suleiman explores the long-standing mutual exclusivity of writing and mothering through the works of Freud, K. Horney, M. Klein, and feminist scholars and writers such as Tillie Olson and Adrienne Rich. She objects that while mothers are endlessly explored, they are rarely the agents of any exploration: “The work of art itself stands for the mother’s body, destroyed repeatedly in fantasy but restored or “repaired” in the act of creation. . . . Just as motherhood is ultimately the child’s drama, so is artistic creation” (357). Suleiman emphasizes mothers’ frustration at being caught between children and art, their ambivalence about their


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maternal responsibilities and their guilt over these emotions. She analyzes two short stories that feature infanticidal impulses and concludes that maternal aggression toward the child attends the mother’s act of writing; in short, that writing itself is perceived as an act of aggression toward the child. Josephine McDonagh analyzes the figure of infanticide “in law, philosophy, political economy [and] literature” in 18th and 19th century Britain and posits it as a figure of more general cultural anxieties.8 She suggests that the portrayals of infanticide in cultural, political, and literary texts of the period were tied to ambivalent perceptions of civilization and culture (220–221). When the society was perceived as positive and nurturing, the notion of the “good mother” also represented civilization. The good mother was assigned the role of reproducing “not only the population but also the values of the nation” (225), whereas the infanticidal mother was portrayed as barbaric. When the society was perceived as alienating, the infanticidal mother was seen to be saving her victim from a wretched life. McDonagh concludes that: “the idea of infanticide will maintain a shadowy presence in subsequent constructions of nationhood, holding within it . . . contrasting ideas about the nature of civilized society” (231). We will see later in this chapter that tensions over differing notions of civilization and clashes between civilizations often manifest themselves in literary texts through the figure of infanticide. Thus far, we have looked only at European and American representations of infanticide, but I will point out here and throughout this chapter that infanticide occurs with surprising frequence as a figure and theme in the works of Senegalese women writers. Although the European and American theories just discussed will be of help in reading this literary phenomenon, we need also to examine African sources to understand the different roles of the maternal and the impact of infanticide in Senegalese society. In Senegalese fiction written by women, the mother quite often occupies the position of speaking subject, and, in addition, the maternal identity of the authors themselves is stressed.9 This appears to represent quite a different maternal position from the ones described above. I will ultimately focus on the infanticidal figures in Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Appel de arènes and in Mariama Bâ’s Un Chant écarlate, but before moving on to these texts, I would like to look briefly at several other Senegalese works that touch on infanticide. Aminata Maïga Ka weaves infanticide into the fabric of La voie du salut, the story of two women, a mother and her daughter, and their marital experiences.10 Each symbolizing in opposite ways the conflicts arising when tradition and modernity must coexist, Rokhaya and her daughter

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Rabiatou survive neither these conflicts nor the narrative. The novel opens on the death of the mother; Rokhaya’s marriage is brought about because of an infanticide (albeit an involuntary one, caused by a badly performed excision); the novel closes on the death of the daughter and of the child she is carrying—a death prompted by the news of her husband’s betrayal. The deaths of mothers and their children, which begin, end, and underlie this narrative, imply a pessimistic, if not desperate, view of Senegalese women’s fate inside the institutions of marriage and maternity. A second novel by Ka, Le miroir de la vie, also contains an infanticidal incident.11 When Fatou, a maid in an upper-class Senegalese home, becomes pregnant, she has no choice but to hide her condition. She gives birth on a dirt floor in an area used as a toilet, and when she finally looks at her child one half-hour after its birth, she finds that it is dead. Caught trying to dispose of the dead newborn, she is arrested for infanticide and hangs herself in prison. Although Fatou does not willfully kill her child, the novel clearly implicates her in its death. As in La Voie du salut, infanticide results more from a flawed social code that dictates excision or stigmatizes pregnancy outside of marriage than from a mother’s malevolence. But directly or indirectly, the death of the child almost certainly entails the death of the mother. With infanticide and matricide thus linked, the common gesture of equating maternity with life is undercut, putting into question the stability of the maternal role. Juletane, written by Myriam Warner Vieyra, a native of Guadeloupe who has lived in Senegal for over twenty years, presents an explicit, deliberate act of infanticide.12 After her marriage to Mamadou, Juletane discovers the existence of a first wife, Awa. A miscarriage and her resultant infertility prevent Juletane from becoming the favorite wife, and she is forced to share her household, first with Awa and her children, and then with Ndeye, a third and younger wife. Everyone in the household considers Juletane crazy; she lives in solitude and silence, speaking only to Awa and her children. At several points in the novel Juletane speaks of her maternal feelings for Awa’s children: “J’aime les enfants d’Awa, ce sont les enfants que j’aurais voulu avoir” (75). When the three children are found dead, no one attempts to look further than Allah’s will for the cause. But somewhat later in the text, subsequent to a fantasy about murdering Ndeye and again several pages later, Juletane admits that she believes herself guilty of poisoning them with her anti-depression medicine (125–133). In Juletane, as in the two novels of Maïga Ka, the domestic sphere of children and marriage proves to be a prison where madness thrives and ultimately leads to the death of both the children and the women charged with taking care of them.13 Implicit in this narrative


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is a critique not only of polygamy but also of the idea of valuing women solely for their reproductive capacities. Although the alternatives most obviously presented are madness and death, Juletane’s notebook, which survives her and provides a second female character with some muchneeded insight into her own life, together with Vieyra’s novel itself, suggest a new and salutary means of escape through writing. Before I continue to explore the metaphor of infanticide and its relation to writing in the works of Mariama Bâ and Aminata Sow Fall, I wish to look briefly at three studies on the role of the maternal in Senegal, two sociological and one psychological, and the importance of the conclusions they draw in setting a stage for the infanticidal dramas played out in Bâ’s and Sow Fall’s texts. In their works on Senegalese society, African ethnographers A. Raphaël Ndiaye and Abdoulaye-Bara Diop together create a rich and animated dialogue about the role of women and the maternal in Senegalese society. Ndiaye describes woman’s role in Senegalese society in the following manner: La femme au Sénégal, comme d’ailleurs dans presque toute l’Afrique noire, est au centre de la vie sociale: elle domine à la maison; elle est gardienne des traditions civiques, morales et même religieuses; elle oriente également les activités fondamentales du groupe par les exigences de la vie familiale qu’elle exprime, elle détermine directement ou indirectement les activités secondaires par les besoins discrets qu’elle suggère; elle apporte la joie et l’équilibre dans la cellule familiale et dans la société; enfin, elle incarne la dignité du groupe.14

Ndiaye is concerned about previous misrepresentations of African women by foreign authors and insists that his study will consist only of “faits réels, vécus, sans parti-pris,” (6), implying that only foreignness and its corresponding biases could explain a portrait of Senegalese women different from the one he paints. Abdoulaye Diop’s work also demonstrates his connection with the society he studies and his interest in bringing an African perspective to bear on these issues concerning Senegalese men, women, and family structures; yet his analysis of women’s status in Wolof society is often diametrically opposed to Ndiaye’s. Where Ndiaye presents his readers with a romantic vision of woman as nurturer and guardian of tradition, Diop explicates the material condition of Wolof women in the most pragmatic of terms: c’est la répartition sexuelle générale des fonctions qui explique, principalemennt, la plus faible activité des femmes dans l’agriculture. Cette répartition défavorise les femmes dans le domaine productif qui est essentiel.15

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on note . . . avec les changements, des déséquilibres, fréquemment en faveur du lignage agnatique, traduisant la domination de l’homme dans les domaines économiques, politique, religieux (246).

The status of women in Senegal appears a prickly subject at best, giving rise to debate not only, as Ndiaye would have it, between African and European scholars and activists, but among African scholars and activists as well. This issue is multifaceted and intricate, particularly for an American feminist critic, and it reaches well beyond the scope of the present study. Only one aspect, but a vital one, of the larger question concerns this project; that is, the role of the maternal in Senegalese, primarily Wolof, society. The dialogue between Ndiaye and Diop will provide us with several valuable insights into the difficulties inherent in articulating this role and its importance. Ndiaye’s look at fecundity rituals and nursing practices often reveals an almost lyrical perspective: “L’allaitement est l’occasion de marquer beaucoup de tendresse au nouveau-né, tendresse qui trouve toute son expression à travers le regard de la mère, son long sourire suspendu et parfois à travers quelques berceuses” (Place de la femme, 21–22). Diop, in marked contrast, provides a lucid appraisal of the role of the reproductive and the maternal among the Wolof: L’importance de la femme wolof . . . est certainement due à sa fonction de procréatrice et non de productrice. L’image qu’on se fait traditionnellement de la femme est celle d’une bonne épouse et d’une bonne mère dont les enfants, nombreux, survivent, réussissent et s’occupent de leurs parents. . . . La fonction procréatrice de la femme, nécessaire à la reproduction du groupe, serait le fondement de l’importance en même temps que de l’infériorité sociale de celle-ci, dans la mesure où son contrôle, essentiel pour la communauté, réduirait la femme à l’état de soumission (Famille wolof, 247;my emphasis).

The terms production, reproduction, and procreation serve here to delineate masculine and feminine spheres, which are then assigned public and private status, with the private feminine sphere subordinated to the public masculine one. This subordination, Diop argues, prevents the cycle of reproduction from being broken by forbidding women to focus on the productive rather than the reproductive. Diop and Ndiaye’s differences shed light on both texts, as well as on the position of women in Senegal, all the while reminding us of the impossibility of objectivity and the danger of believing that social science can give us absolute “knowledge” about its subjects. Although both Ndiaye and Diop locate women in the domestic sphere and affirm that their procreative role determines their role in society, Ndiaye represents this role as immutable and fulfilling,


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while Diop, exposing the power dynamics underlying social hierarchy, demonstrates the move from biology to a socially constructed role.16 Diop tells us early on in his book and then reminds us in his conclusion that the maternal lineage is thought to impart essentially biological characteristics, such as blood and flesh, but also such qualities as character and intelligence, whereas from the paternal lineage one receives attributes such as courage and nerve (20). Diop further qualifies the paternal lineage as having “une dimension sociale et économique” (244), and notes that the maternal lineage is tied more closely to biology and is characterized by closer bonds between members. He also acknowledges the very central affective role of the mother: Les relations mère-enfants sont celles qui sont restées les plus constantes et les plus solides, malgré les bouleversements que connaît la société wolof et qui ont affecté, voire détérioré les comportements de parenté. . . . Plus proche de ses enfants, même des garçons qu’elle comprend mieux, elle les protège contre la rigueur paternelle. . . . Le couple mère-enfants forme, généralement, un noyau solide à l’intérieur de la famille étendue et surtout polygamique. . . . (51–52)

Although Diop and Ndiaye’s studies differ greatly in scope and perspective, one notes that both perceive and portray the mother as nurturer and protector, and the mother-child bond as a privileged one. Because in traditional Wolof society the domestic sphere is the sphere of production, both agricultural production and the production of artisans, to speak of a distinction between a masculine public sphere and a private or domestic feminine one has no real meaning. Women are nonetheless kept at a distance from the process of production, asserts Diop, primarily by their procreative/reproductive role: La reproduction sociale du groupe s’accomplit par la reproduction physique de ses membres que la femme assure par sa fonction procréatrice irremplaçable. Le contenu social et économique du lignage agnatique viendrait du rôle prépondérant de l’homme dans la production agricole. . . . La filiation patrilinéaire . . . privilégie la position de l’homme qui permet au lignage agnatique, seul reconnu, de s’approprier la progéniture de la femme (246).

This deflecting and detouring of women’s maternal power and influence occurs not only on an observable, material level, but on a theoretical and psychological level as well, as is evidenced in a study like Oedipe africain, conducted by two French psychoanalysts, which examines the existence of an Oedipal complex in various ethnic groups of Senegal. This study by Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues, based on clinical data gathered during their four years of practice in Dakar, Senegal, symptomatically omits mothers and daughters from the material it presents and

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the conclusions it draws. Recognizing this, the authors justify it in the following fashion: Nous avons remis à plus tard l’exploitation des dossiers de filles. Leur nombre ne nous permet pas des recoupements suffisants. Les fillettes et jeunes filles, moins scolarisées dans l’ensemble que les garçons, peuvent rarement s’exprimer en français. De plus, en raison de l’éducation qu’elles reçoivent, elles ne s’expriment qu’à peine et avec peine devant un étranger, un inconnu. Aussi nos dossiers féminins sont-ils incomparablement moins riches que ceux des garçons.17

While these difficulties are undoubtedly legitimate, they are hardly insurmountable; indeed, elsewhere in the text the authors reveal that in the course of clinical work they had regular recourse to translators, and encountered and overcame more than one cultural barrier. They themselves appear uncomfortably aware of this near total absence of daughters and mothers. In their conclusion they again note that their study needs to be “complété par une série de recherches sur les rapports de la mère et de l’enfant . . .” (302). Even taking into account the cultural stumbling blocks and the legitimate need to limit the scope of the study, it seems much more likely that the very nature of the Oedipal complex as elaborated by Freud and reworked by Lacan is principally responsible for this remarkable exclusion of mothers and daughters from Oedipe africain. This very kind of omission is noted and critiqued in many feminist analyses of Freud and Lacan, and I will presently discuss one such analysis in more detail. First, however, I would like to consider several examples from Oedipe africain that demonstrate the exclusion of the female from the theoretical formulations of the Ortigueses. Amadi, a 14-year-old Toucouleur and Wolof boy interviewed by the Ortigueses, recounts several fantasies where a mother leaves her baby alone, an accident occurs, and the child dies. In another fantasy “La mère meurtrière est aussi un ogre qui dévore ses enfants” (108). The theme of the infanticidal mother is recurrent, yet never analyzed in depth. Abandonment by the mother is likened to abandonment by the group, “abandon mortifère équivalent de la castration” (109). In other words, infanticide is transformed into castration, glossing over the difference between mother and group, and between mother and father. A similar move occurs in the case of Talla, a 14-year-old Sérère boy, who first recounts fantasies of a knife-wielding white woman who menaces a child, and then of a second woman saddened “à cause des rudes travaux et qu’elle n’a pas d’enfant” (175). Talla goes on to explain that this woman worries that when her husband dies, there will be no child to take over the house and the finances. The authors read these images in the following manner:


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La position de cette femme est marquée par ce qui lui manque: pas d’enfant pour hériter du père quand il mourra. La dame blanche possédait la “chose,” l’image phallique signifiant le manque de l’objet énonçable, reconnaissable; mais à propos de la femme sérère est énoncé ce qui manque, la possibilité de l’héritage. . . . le symbolisme de la castration . . . est exprimé à travers l’idée de l’héritage (176).

Oedipe africain consistently avoids any focus on the relationships between women and children. As occurs in Freudian and Lacanian readings of mother/child relationships, any depiction of a mother/child relationship in Oedipe africain must be mediated by the phallus and by the threat of castration. My point here is not to substitute my own analysis for the one proposed by the Ortigueses, but simply to point out their seeming inability to escape from the Oedipal framework and interpret the data in terms that allow for differences of gender and culture. This study constantly diverts attention away from the mother, makes her absent in order not to upset a theory constructed around her absence. An analogy suggests itself between this move and the more general project of Oedipe africain which seems to be the careful fitting of details from African case histories into an Oedipal schema. The Ortigueses seem to anticipate objections to their work on the basis of cultural bias: Faudrait-il en conclure qu’une information sociologique poussée doit précéder le travail clinique? Nous répondons que, si un minimum d’informations est nécessaire, ce qui importe avant tout c’est l’attitude analytique qui cherche à comprendre la place du sujet dans ce qu’il dit (55; my emphasis).

While the analysts acknowledge difference superficially, they are unwilling to let it fundamentally disturb their project. This is evidenced further on in the text, when they remark that “beaucoup d’écoliers ne sont pas très éloignés des positions ‘européennes,’“ but that others differ so greatly from this “model,” that their problems cannot be thought of as psychological, but rather as social (93). In other words, anything that deviates too greatly from a European schema simply cannot be considered within the scope of their work. The Ortigueses find what they wish to find, which is to say, reflections of the West, and push to the margins that which is “too African” and that which is female.18 In her introductory chapter to Bearing the Word titled “Representation, Reproduction, and Women’s Place in Language,” Margaret Homans addresses the problematic role of mothers and daughters in the œdipal drama as elaborated by Freud and Lacan. Using as her foundation Lacan’s theory of a child’s evolution from its pre-œdipal bonds with the mother and their non-symbolic communication, to its entry into language

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and the symbolic order, Homans propounds a theory of women’s peculiar relationship to language based on the idea that “the death or absence of the mother sorrowfully but fortunately makes possible the construction of language and of culture.”19 For Homans, the phenomenon of female omission that I noted above in Oedipe africain is a general one to be found in both Freudian and Lacanian versions of the Oedipal complex. According to her, the son, forced to separate himself from his mother under the threat of castration, constantly “searches for . . . a series of figures: someone like his mother” (9); this then places the mother in the position of the literal, says Homans, because the literal is what is always absent from language (4). But daughters, argues Homans, following Nancy Chodorow’s paradigm,20 never need to separate from the mother the way sons do, and retain a bond to her and to presymbolic language as well. Because the girl has less invested in the absence of the mother, her need for figurative language is not as great, thus creating a closer relationship between the daughter and the literal. Homans believes that by becoming mothers themselves, daughters wish to reproduce “a presymbolic communicativeness, a literal language” (25). Homans notes and herself postulates the mother’s (and daughter’s) equation with the literal. But it seems to me that this alignment allows the kind of reductive move by which all women’s writing is read as autobiography, especially autobiography as the literal, the reproductive. Her suggestion that any attempt on the part of a woman writer to speak a figurative language depends on and reinforces the mother’s (and, by extension, the daughter’s own) absence is based on the acceptance of theories she rightly criticizes for the blind eye they turn to the feminine. I’d like to envision for a moment a different scenario, one in which women writers appropriate the figurative and the fictional and distance themselves from the literal and the reproductive by inserting the act of infanticide into their texts. As we have seen above, Abdoulaye-Bara Diop asserts that both women’s importance and their subjugation in Wolof society derive from their reproductive/procreative role within it. Analogously, Margaret Homans demonstrates that it is woman in her role as mother who is associated with the literal, the reproductive, and on whose absence Western21 culture and language rest.22 With this in mind, I would like to explore the idea that the recurrent appearance of infanticide as theme and figure in the works of Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Bâ, and Marguerite Duras constitutes a refusal of women’s writing as “reproduction.” This is evidenced in the rejection of autobiography, when defined as writing that reproduces life events, and the gravitation toward texts that ceaselessly


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cross the boundaries of genre, blurring most traditional distinctions between autobiography and fiction. The importance of this shift lies in its accompanying shift of agency, which one observes in particular in Sow Fall and Bâ, from the son or the daughter to the mother. No longer does the order of things depend on a matricide, or confinement to the reproductive sphere, but rather on an infanticide, or a refusal to view reproduction as exclusive of literary production. In taking apart the figure of infanticide, it becomes necessary to reevaluate both the mother’s role in the oedipal drama and reproduction itself. In Freud’s retelling of the myth of Oedipus, the violent complicity of the mother in the attempted infanticide is elided, and only the threat of violence between father and son remains: I am referring to the legend of King Oedipus and the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles. Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and of Jocasta, is exposed as a suckling, because an oracle had informed the father that his son, who was still unborn, would be his murderer.23 The myth of King Oedipus, who killed his father and took his mother to wife, reveals, with little modification, the infantile wish.24

Although this almost forgotten infanticide occurs at the direction of the father, thus casting doubt on the mother’s agency, it reminds us that the mother, too, can pose a threat to the infant. This knowledge potentially alters Oedipal dynamics. Infanticide might indeed pose the ultimate threat to Freud’s (and later, Lacan’s) retelling of this myth, for in the presence of a successful infanticide there could be no subsequent drama of incest and parricide. Furthermore, infanticide reintroduces the specter of the mother’s power into a scenario where only her desirability is acknowledged. In this sense, the absence on which these theories of the constitution of Western culture and language are based, may be seen not as the absence of the mother but as the absence of infanticide. The introduction by (Western) women writers of successful infanticides, or the desire for them, into their texts might then constitute a challenge to the symbolic order at what are represented as its very roots. The next step is to ask if any of this can truly be valid for the texts of Mariama Bâ and Aminata Sow Fall. As I noted in my discussion of Oedipe africain, where the authors attempt to force their data to follow an œdipal schema, the applicability of this Western paradigm to Senegalese culture is problematic at best. Moreover, questions concerning the cultural boundaries of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis are well beyond the scope of this study. So although I cannot grant infanticide the same power of upheaval in a Senegalese framework as it might have in Western one, given Diop and Ndiaye’s depiction of the Senegalese mother, together

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with her representation as life-giving nurturer in many writings by Senegalese male authors (a question to which I will return presently), it certainly is still possible to view infanticide as a radical departure from the traditional order. As I have stated above, I believe that it represents an attempt to escape from a reproductive function and role, and to remind the horrified reader of the mother’s destructive power. Literature is frequently the only site in which one can confront subjects as taboo as infanticide, and the representation of such a repugnant act imparts a great deal of force to the text. Exploring this deadly act, and even exploiting its power, without incurring any physical damage is the privilege of the writer of fiction, a privilege that both Mariama Bâ and Aminata Sow Fall claim in the texts we will now read. L’APPEL DES ARÈNES AND UN CHANT ÉCARLATE: THE UNCOVERING OF INFANTICIDE

To the portrait that emerges from studies such as La Place de la femme dans les rites au Sénégal, or La Famille wolof, may be added a literary portrait of the African woman and mother first crafted by the “founding fathers” of francophone African literature, but that still obtains today. In works by Léopold Senghor, Camara Laye, and even Ousmane Sembene, images of woman as nurturer, giver of life, guardian of culture, and source of poetic inspiration culminate in her general allegorization as Mother Africa.25 Against this backdrop of literature that conflates woman and mother and posits her as the ultimate benevolent figure, texts such as Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Appel des arènes and Mariama Bâ’s Un chant écarlate distinguish themselves by their deviation from this schema. Furthermore, Bâ was openly critical of the tendency to glorify women and motherhood, calling for the rejection of “the nostalgic praise to the African Mother who, in his anxiety, man confuses with Mother Africa.”26 In jarring contrast to many of their male predecessors, Aminata Sow Fall and Mariama Bâ create mother figures that overturn models of the nurturing mother and introduce the unsettling notion of infanticide. Although the term infanticide can refer to a person of either gender killing any child, for the reasons elaborated above I am specifically interested in it as an expression of a desire on the part of the mother to repress her maternity. As we shall see shortly, even a character’s infertility can be seen as a result of her maternal inadequacies, thus constituting an allusion to infanticide. As noted in Chapter II, the plot of L’Appel des arènes features Nalla, a young Senegalese boy, and his parents Diattou and Ndiogou. Nalla’s


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ever-worsening performance in school is attributed to his fascination and friendship with Malaw, a renowned wrestler and founder of the city’s wrestling arenas. Diattou, especially, is horrified by her son’s interest in something she considers to be “uncivilized.” She is a mid-wife by profession, who, having completed a portion of her studies in Europe, has adopted many Western mannerisms and tends to shun the Senegalese community surrounding her as uneducated and “uncivilized.” The novel at first portrays Diattou as a devoted, albeit modern, mother to Nalla (she constantly sees to his well being, but, for example, refuses to let him eat couscous in the morning, insisting that he eat a European-style breakfast, using utensils instead of fingers). Yet it also indicates that Diattou’s desire to be a “modern,” “Westernized” woman is ultimately incompatible with her role as mother. The portrait of her slowly changes, as she becomes more obsessed with imposing her own expectations on Nalla while ignoring his needs and desires, to the detriment of his and her own well being. Finally, she is implicated in the death of two children and is tacitly accused of wishing to destroy her own son. In the preface to her book Infanticide, Maria Piers asserts that writing about infanticide entails bringing to the surface a prevalent but repressed impulse: thoughts of infanticide, she affirms, exist in everyone’s unconscious, but these thoughts are considered “unacceptable” by most societies (9). Leslie Fiedler speaks of its role in Classical drama: “For the society of the time it functioned as a kind of ‘population control,’ contemplated with awe and terror, but finally accepted as necessary.”27 Thus, Sow Fall and Bâ shock their readers and narrate the unspeakable by according infanticide a central place in their works, to say nothing of flying in the face of a literary tradition that sanctifies motherhood. While infanticide is not entirely absent from francophone African canonical literature, it usually serves only as an antithetical model to appropriate maternal conduct. In the texts of Sow Fall and Bâ, infanticide figures as a kernel of resistance to literary tradition. Moreover, infanticide as a trope implicates Bâ and Sow Fall’s material condition as Senegalese women writers, an issue I will return to later in this chapter. The narrative voice in L’Appel des arènes is overtly conservative and decidedly condemnatory of Diattou: Mame Fari n’avait pas supporté . . . les nouvelles manières de sa fille qu’elle accusait intérieurement d’avoir renié ses origines. Un jour elle lui avait tendu un grisgris conçu pour conjurer le mauvais sort. Diattou avait catégoriquement refusé sans même avoir la delicatesse de remarquer qu’une main était tendue et qu’elle tremblotait, et que cette main était la main de sa mère (59).

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The narrator’s disapproval of Diattou corroborates the novel’s ostensible meaning as a cautionary tale about the danger posed both to individual and society by the modernization and/or westernization of Senegal.28 Indeed, the novel pits tradition and modernity against one another in the characters of Diattou and her own mother, Mame Fari. Frequent comparisons between Diattou and her mother serve to undermine the maternal qualities of the young woman while reinforcing our perception of the older woman as Mother incarnate. For example, Diattou has become infertile and does not enjoy a close relationship with the child she does have. The narrator and the community members depicted in the novel seem to attribute both misfortunes to her divorce from tradition, implying that the source of her infertility lies in a European sojourn, during which she leaves Nalla with his grandmother. Certainly, the rift between her and her son Nalla may be traced back to that moment of her physical and emotional separation from him and from Africa. Both are abandoned in favor of Europe and the knowledge to be found there. Conversely, Mame Fari’s immersion in her culture and tradition compounds her desirability as a mother figure, and indeed Nalla feels a stronger bond to her than to his own mother. He often reminisces about the years spent with her and yearns to recapture a time when he felt connected to his ancestors and his community. Although there exists more than sufficient textual evidence to support Madeleine Borgamano’s reading of L’Appel des arènes as “un plaidoyer pour la tradition contre la modernité,”29 I would argue that Diattou’s very presence in the text points to another perspective, which does not romanticize custom and tradition but rather depicts the torment of an individual forced into a certain role by that tradition, constantly torn between the old and the new. Diattou is trapped both within Senegalese society, which suffocates her by condemning her as a modern woman, and within her reproductive function. The latter circumscribes her place in the world, and her inability to produce more than one child attests to her reproductive and social failure in the estimation of the society in which she lives. More than just a failure in the realm of motherhood, at a certain point in the text, we begin to perceive Diattou as distinctly anti-maternal. She is accused by the community of being a dëmm, defined in the text as a soul-devouring spirit, and is, in their eyes, responsible for the death of Birama, a neighborhood child, whom she considered too “common” to play with Nalla and, consequently, banned from her house. The women of the community ultimately refuse to utilize her services at the maternity clinic because they fear for their newborns: “Sale ‘dëmm,’ tu ne te nour-


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riras pas du sang de mon enfant . . . ” (100). When she does deliver a stillborn child at the clinic, the mother spits on Diattou and accuses her of “eating” this child just as she “ate” Birama. (89) Eventually, it appears that Diattou has come to doubt herself: she is haunted by the death of Birama and by the accusations of the community. She, too, radically questions the place and value of the maternal in her life: “La maternité. Quitter à tout prix la maternité. Elle n’a plus la noblesse et la splendeur d’une source de vie. Elle est hantée par les forces du mal et de la calomnie. Elle est le désastre et le chaos. . . . Maudite maternité” (120–21). Of course, “la maternité” is literally the maternity clinic run by Diattou, but due to the polysemy of the word “maternité” in French, these statements from a character anguished over her relationship with her only child, and distressed by her infertility, resonate with darker meanings. Diattou’s own maternity/motherhood experience has become cursed, both by her trouble with her son and her inability to have more children. Her designation here of maternity as source of “evil,” “calumny,” catastrophe,” and “chaos,” where before, and as represented by the maternity clinic, it had been a clean, shining place of celebration, marks a definitive separation from maternity. The mention of evil and catastrophe together with the deaths of Birama and the newborn constitute an unmistakable allusion to infanticide and represent the ultimate negation of Diattou’s maternal and reproductive capacities. Diattou is not the only character in L’Appel des arènes to become embroiled in infanticide, a fact that compounds the importance of this phenomenon for the text. Anta Lô, a character introduced in an embedded narrative that appears only toward the end of the novel, leaves her native village of Diaminar for the city, where she becomes pregnant and reacts to her desperate situation by killing her newborn. She then returns to the village where, several days after her arrival, she is pursued and arrested by gendarmes from the city. Her arrest illustrates the antagonism between the city and the village, between modern laws and the dictates of tradition. Indeed, in L’Appel des arènes, when modernity violates tradition, the result is often ill-fated, as is demonstrated by the dissolution of Diaminar after the intrusion of urban (read Western) influences. Thus we may read infanticide as one possible result of the clash between old and new, village and metropolis, and, of course, Africa and the West. Yet this kind of binary opposition greatly oversimplifies both the literary and social intricacies of the question at hand. In some ways, this infanticidal incident can be seen as a source for the narrative. After Anta Lô goes to jail, the village of Diaminar dissolves. Her crime provides the impetus for her brother Malaw’s move to the city,

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where he opens the wrestling arenas that so fascinate Nalla. We have now, in a sense, come full circle, because it is Nalla’s attraction to these arenas that begins L’Appel des arènes, and that precipitates the conflict between Nalla and his parents. Anta Lô’s act of infanticide, then, carries in it the seed of the narrative. Interestingly enough, we find in the character of Nalla himself this curious partnership between infanticide and literary or artistic creation. As his tutor, M. Niang, remarks, Nalla’s delight in the wrestling matches springs from a sensitivity to the elegance of the wrestler’s movements and the beauty of the “bakk,” poems sung before the matches. This aesthetic sense points to the child’s own artistic inclinations. In the form of Nalla, then, poetic and artistic potential issues from the barren and infanticidal Diattou. Yet she apparently wishes nothing more than to suppress that potential: “Je n’ai pas l’intention de faire de mon fils un artiste.” This suppression of her son’s creative identity suggests yet another kind of infanticide. Significantly, what she attempts to repress are her child’s creative instincts, what she in fact destroys are her own reproductive and maternal capacities. Diattou’s infanticidal gestures threaten to annihilate her. In contrast, Anta Lô’s infanticide is elevated to the status of myth and portrayed as a catalyst for the subsequent events of the narrative. Curiously, both Diattou and Anta disappear abruptly from the novel. Anta Lô dies in prison, but a certain mystery surrounds her departure from her village. The only one to speak of her is her mother: “Personne ne sut jamais ce que disait la conscience éclatée de ma fille. . . . Moi seule pouvais l’entendre.” Et ma mère, soutenue par le rythme de Fodé chanta ce que disait, selon elle, la conscience éclatée de ma soeur Anta Lô: “Yaayoo booyoo si je savais/Le prix des chastetés bradées/Aïe Aïe mes reins écartelés/Aïe Aïe les sanglots étouffés/De la chair molle de ma chair/Raide dans ma main meurtrière” (129–30).

Anta Lô is, in this way, made into somewhat of a mythical figure, and is in fact doubly fictionalized at this point in the text, in that she becomes a mythical character among fictive characters. She, whose act of infanticide is presented as a narrative source, is finally buried in a song contained in a tale told by a character from the main narrative of L’Appel des arènes. Only as pure symbol can Anta Lo’s infanticide be integrated into the text. Diattou, on the other hand, seems simply to wander out of the novel: Ndiogou et Nalla sont encore dans le salon qu’ils n’ont pas quitté depuis leur arrivée. Diattou est passée près d’eux, les yeux cernés, le visage flasque et le dos recourbé. Son rouge à lèvres déborde. Elle est vêtue d’une chemisette et d’une jupe plissée.—Où vas-tu à cette heure-ci? demande Ndiogou.—A la maternité.—


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Mais, il n’est que six heures et trente minutes. . . . Diattou n’a pas répondu. Elle a continué son chemin (144).

And it is on this line that the text closes. Diattou, uncharacteristically disheveled and distracted, simply walks out of the narrative. There is no longer room for Diattou in Ndiogou and Nalla’s story. The plot of L’appel des arènes revolves around a familial crisis, and while Nalla and Ndiogou resolve that crisis, Diattou carries it with her. She cannot be represented in the narrative, and so is written out of it. Infanticide renders Diattou and Anta unnarratable, for once they are definitively branded as infanticides, they disappear. To narrate their own story, the story of their crime, would be to invite some understanding of this act. Instead, the women and the story of the infanticides they commit are sublimated by the narrative, so that they inform and dwell in it at some remove from the other characters. The price that Diattou and Anta Lô pay for their crime is to be written out of or buried in the fiction that is predicated on them. Paradoxically, the infanticide that is symbolically tied to artistic production must eventually be denied a visible place in this narrative, and it ultimately becomes unnarratable. It functions as metaphor, it spills over the established boundaries of the text, but it is not explicated, it is not narrated. In “What they Told Buchi Emecheta,” Cynthia Ward suggests that what is unnarratable, or in her words “un-textualizable,” is precisely what is “real” and “human.”30 As infanticides, do Diattou and Anta become more “human” and, therefore, less assimilable by casting off the romanticized role of mother in Senegalese literature (and in other literatures as well)? Certainly the treatment of infanticide in some ways debunks the “mother myth” and adds a human and flawed dimension to this idealized figure. In the case of both Diattou and Anta Lo, the stigma and fear of infanticide command more attention than the victim or the death itself. In fact, what Diattou and Anta suppress in L’Appel des arènes is “la maternité”: motherhood and mothering. And as we have seen, this negation of the maternal and the reproductive leads to the elimination of these characters from the events of the narrative. Diattou and Anta introduce the unrepresentable into a representative discourse and threaten the whole system with collapse. It is as if the stifling of a biological reproductive function might undermine another type of reproduction, that involved in the very process of representation, a hypothesis supported by the removal of these characters from the mainstream of the narrative. To narrate infanticide is to explode traditional conceptions of motherhood and the maternal, and in some ways to explode tradition itself. In

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Sow Fall’s novel alone there are two infanticidal women, perhaps already enough to challenge the dominant image of the maternal figure in francophone African literature. Aminata Sow Fall’s text radically questions the ability of Senegalese (and French) literary discourse, even her own, to represent the maternal once that maternal defies conventional definition. While L’Appel des arènes introduces the figure of the infanticidal mother but must ultimately abandon her, Mariama Bâ’s Un Chant écarlate takes up this figure again and pursues it even further. Un Chant écarlate takes as its subject the marriage between Mireille, a French woman, and Ousmane, a Senegalese man. Yaye Khady, Ousmane’s mother, and Jean de la Vallée, Mireille’s father, violently oppose the marriage, while Ousmane’s father sees it as the will of Allah, and Mireille’s mother simply does not have the strength to disagree with her husband. It doesn’t take long, however, for cultural differences to beset the relationship between Mireille and Ousmane, differences that eventually grow into insurmountable barriers between them, propelling Mireille into the excesses of insanity and, finally, infanticide. A fascinating parallel exists between the infanticide that Bâ depicts in Un Chant écarlate and an infanticidal scene in Pierre Loti’s novel Le Roman d’un spahi. In Le Roman d’un spahi, Loti represents a mysterious, dangerous, and ultimately unknowable Senegal, a portrait that closely resembles the one of the European protagonist’s Senegalese mistress, Fatou.31 Published in 1881, the novel recounts the exploits of a provincial French spahi in Senegal, narrating his corruption and progressive detachment from his parents, village, fiancée, and French provincial life in general, as he immerses himself in Senegal and takes a Senegalese lover. Although the novel explicitly narrates the protagonist’s increasing involvement in Senegalese culture and his progressive estrangement from French culture, one finds that Senegal, again like the mistress, is never more nor less than radically other, leaving the protagonist in a no man’s land. Although Loti sets the novel in Senegal, Fatou is the only Senegalese character described in any detail. The portrait is anything but complimentary. Fatou incarnates the Western male concept of the Other: Woman, African, amoral, and uncivilized. In Loti’s novel, Fatou functions metonymically to signify Africa itself. As an African Woman, Loti’s Fatou symbolizes a vast, uncharted territory, a “dark continent,” to use a term that has historically designated both Africa and Woman. Throughout Le roman d’un spahi, Loti paints the consummate portrait of the lazy, deceitful, dishonest “native,” in contrast to the misguided but fundamentally innocent European protagonist. Fatou has lied, cheated, stolen; and Jean,


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though he has tried to sever his ties to her and to Senegal, finds himself irresistibly drawn back to both. This is, inevitably, a fatal choice, but even the protagonist’s death does not entirely resolve the plot. Rather, the portrait of Fatou culminates in an act of brutality that establishes once and for all her inhumanness, her unnaturalness. In the rage that accompanies her discovery of Jean’s lifeless body, she kills their child, and the description of this act is such that it precludes any sympathy for her on the part of the reader. She is not portrayed as human, as, for, example, a griefstricken lover acting out of desperation. Instead, she serves merely as another representation of Senegal and its nefarious influences on the protagonist. The representation extends as well, of course, to Africa and to what Loti perceives as the dire consequences of French involvement on the continent. As Chris Bongie astutely points out, Loti is acutely aware of the ineluctable demise of colonialism, and Le Roman d’un spahi is a requiem for an imagined European innocence.32 In contrast to Loti’s text, Bâ casts a European woman, Mireille, in the role of infanticide and portrays the act quite differently. The pages leading up to Bâ’s infanticide scene show clearly that the act is precipitated by Mireille’s mental breakdown, and inculpate, if only obliquely, other characters.33 Unlike Loti’s description of a bestial Fatou, who kills with unmitigated malice, Bâ composes an intricate character and an overdetermined act of violence. Un Chant écarlate’s re-presentation of the union between Senegal and France, and the infanticide that results, also highlights its own role as highly problematic avatar of the colonial tradition.34 In further contrast to Loti, Bâ offers in this novel a multi-dimensional illustration of infanticide by casting together two mothers: one, Mireille, who kills her child, and the other, Yaye Khady, who is figuratively linked to infanticide throughout the novel but never directly depicted committing the act. Yaye Khady, who acts as Mireille’s nemesis, is cast in the role of malevolent mother-in-law, enraged by her son’s decision to marry a French woman. But Bâ’s treatment of Yaye Khady is ambiguous: while depicting her as narrow-minded and manipulative, Bâ clearly invites the reader to understand and sympathize with the domestic and social realities that determine her reaction to a European daughter-in-law. This French daughter-in-law falls outside a pecking order in which a Senegalese daughter-in-law would relieve her mother-in-law of considerable household duties. Mireille’s foreignness further interferes with and alters the traditional celebrations of marriage, birth, and baptism so that Yaye Khady feels cheated in her interactions with the community. Jeanette Treiber notes that:

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Ousmane marrying a European woman robs his mother of an important support system. Her position and value within the community depend to a great degree on the triangle relationship of mother/son/daughter-in-law, a bond that creates a specific relationship of mutual understanding and support.35

Mbye Cham explains: “Because of Mireille, she will not be ‘paid back’ . . . all the money and gifts she has invested in other peoples’ marriage, birth or death ceremonies.”36 Cham also asserts that the portrayal of Yaye Khady as avaricious and self-interested constitutes a classic representation of the Senegalese mother-in-law: “Yaye Khady belongs to this same category of in-laws who meddle in the affairs of their sons and daughters with destructive results” (96). The long passages that explain the relationship between Yaye Khady and Ousmane, underscoring her dependence on him to help her with domestic chores, work to exculpate her to a certain degree. In short, one detects the presence of a feminist interpretation of the mother-in-law myth. The depth and nuance that Bâ creates in her Senegalese and European characters are largely absent from Loti’s text, where the only character described more than superficially is the protagonist. The novel churns out almost formulaic descriptions of Fatou and of Senegal itself: Anamalis fobil! Hurlement de désir effréné; de sève noire surchauffée au soleil et d’hystérie torride . . . alleluia d’amour nègre, hymne de séduction chanté aussi par la nature, par l’air, par la terre, par les plantes, par les parfums! (111–112) Elle était bien jolie, Fatou-gaye, avec cette haute coiffure sauvage. . . . Les mains de Fatou, qui étaient d’un beau noir au dehors, avaient le dedans rose. Longtemps cela avait fait peur au spahi: il n’aimait pas voir le dedans des mains de Fatou, qu lui causait, malgré lui, une vilaine impression froide de pattes de singe (135; 164)

In a hollow echo of colonial discourse about the “mission civilisatrice,” the narrator’s defining gaze not only produces a unidimensional character, but goes further to bestialize her. Bâ, on the other hand, develops a complex European character, making her the perpetrator of an infanticide, yet still portraying the character with compassion. The text quite clearly places responsibility for Mireille’s madness in the hands of her husband, Ousmane, and her mother-in-law, Yaye Khady. Her insanity exonerates her in some measure from her crime, but, indeed, even without this excuse, the text allows us to read her act as one of misguided love and pity for her son: Son fils pleurait de l’autre côté du mur. Elle abandonna son pot de colle et le rejoignit instinctivement en chantant une berceuse que Yaye Khady lui dédiait, en le faisant sauter sur ses cuisses, les rares fois où elle le prenait : “Gnouloule Khessoule! Gnouloule Khessoule!” L’une de ses élèves lui avait traduit l’expres-


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sion: “Ni noir! Ni clair!” Une violente vague de rancoeur la submergea et elle décréta:—Le “Gnouloule Khessoule” n’a pas de place dans ce monde.—Monde de salauds! Monde de menteurs! Toi, mon petit, tu vas le quitter! (244–45)

While it is important that the European character, and not the African character, commits infanticide in this text, Yaye Khady’s involvement in the death of Gorgui as well as her symbolic destruction of her own son demands a careful reading: [Mireille] fit fondre des dizaines de comprimés dans l’eau d’une tasse, et profita du cri du petit pour vider dans sa gorge le nocif breuvage. Elle ricanait toujours du même ton que Yaye Khady Diop: “Gnouloule Khessoule! Gnouloule Khessoule!” (245)

Yaye Khady’s culpability is twofold: first, her dubbing of Gorgui as “neither dark nor light” comes back to haunt Mireille at a critical moment, providing a focus for her pathological disillusionment; second, at the moment in the narrative where the infanticide takes place the images and dialogue of the two women are conflated. That Yaye Khady also orchestrates her own son’s destruction seems evident. Indeed, Aminata Maïga Ka reveals that in an earlier version of Un Chant écarlate, Ousmane dies along with his son.37 In Le Roman d’un spahi, Fatou’s act is portrayed as far more methodical and more hateful than Mireille’s. Loti has his character torture the child so that she may avoid hearing or seeing anything that might disturb her: Alors elle prit son petit enfant pour l’étrangler. Comme elle ne voulait pas entendre ses cris, elle lui remplit la bouche de sable. Elle ne voulait pas non plus voir la petite figure convulsionnée par l’asphyxie;—avec rage elle creusa un trou dans le sol,—elle y enfouit la tête, et la couvrit encore du sable. Et puis, de ses deux mains, elle serra le cou; elle serra, serra bien fort, jusqu’a ce que les petits membres vigoureux qui se raidissaient sous la douleur fussent retombés inertes (326).

This calculated brutality contrasts sharply with Bâ’s depiction of Mireille, who in a moment of insanity kills her child because she sees no place for him in either Senegalese or French society. Fatou’s act, however, is the final element in a formula that equates Africa with the unspeakable, the depraved, and the deadly. Her suppression of a métisse child only reinforces what Loti’s text has preached to us from the start: that both European “innocence” and “civilization” will be disfigured and swallowed up by this voracious continent. Yet this political pronouncement conceals a more personal struggle. In Loti, infanticide is a violence that figures the conflict present in Loti’s own “autobiographical” project; the desire to write the self collides with the project of writing the culture of

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the “other,” the act of infanticide being perhaps the ultimate form of aggression against someone who is both other and same. Unsurprisingly, it is the colonial search for self that survives this violence: although Jean, the protagonist of Le roman d’un spahi, dies, the more general character of the wistful adventurer survives, and more often than not is called “Pierre Loti.” 38 In Un Chant écarlate, while the character of the métisse child meets with the same fate as the métisse child in Le roman d’un spahi, his death is not portrayed as the site of a transparent struggle between light and dark, good and evil. Notably, we have the involvement of two mothers in this deed: while Yaye Khady lays the groundwork for the infanticide, including the deadly phrase that serves as catalyst for it, Mireille actually commits the crime. Portrayed throughout as polar opposites, only their status as “unnatural” mothers links Yaye Khady and Mireille, as both strive to suppress unions between Africa and Europe. Yet the text itself enacts such a union, and while Mireille faces madness and Yaye Khady defeat, the dialectic they can be said to represent results nonetheless in a synthesis. Whereas Loti’s infanticide appears to be mired in binary oppositions, infanticide in Bâ’s text has multiple perpetrators and lends itself to multiple readings. The infanticide in Un Chant écarlate also signals a rejection of both colonial and neo-colonial production of Africa. To extinguish the life of this half-French, half-Senegalese child is to refuse the condition of the novel’s own production; that is, the “unhappy marriage” between France and Senegal. In this novel written in French by a Wolof woman, the significance of the Wolof words “Gnouloule Khessoule” (neither dark nor light), uttered at the moment of infanticide, should not be lost on the reader. In “ni noir, ni clair,” the text’s translation of the Wolof expression, we encounter the larger problems confronting the text; for nothing is “clear,” and characters, text, and author all find themselves in compromised positions. Through the use of a metaphor that jars even the most jaded reader out of his/her complacency, Bâ weaves together in this manner issues of gender, genre, and colonialism and makes them the foundation of her work. While in Loti infanticide expresses the mortal conflict between self and other, in Bâ it suggests the dark, violent side of a struggle against reduction and confinement, and points to the enormous price of any movement toward freedom. In the last chapter we noted that on the back cover of Un Chant écarlate, it states that this is a story seen and narrated “from the outside.” What Bâ does here is to reject readings of her literary labor as reproductive labor. In so doing, she reclaims for her first text, Une si longue lettre, and


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for autobiography as well, its powers of (self) invention. The figure of infanticide encapsulates the position of the text vis-à-vis Bâ’s struggle with generic labels as well as its relation to colonialism. If infanticide is, on the one hand, an attempt to suppress reproduction, then the link becomes evident between infanticide and Bâ’s desire to have her texts read as something other than reproductions of her own life. I have remarked elsewhere on the analogy between infanticide and the violence of the “mother” country that considers its colonies as “children,” but brutalizes them nonetheless. That the infanticide depicted in Un Chant écarlate is informed by this seems beyond doubt. I have also discussed in detail how the colonizing country uses strategies of reproduction to maintain the oppressive relationship between colonizer and colonized. Mireille’s act of infanticide also makes reference, I would argue, to the need to suppress the reproduction of this kind of relationship. We have seen Sow Fall and Bâ use the figure and theme of infanticide to alter the relation of women to the reproductive. In Sow Fall, the act of infanticide renders its perpetrator almost impossible to narrate and to represent. In Bâ, it symbolizes a writer’s conflict with practices of representation and reading that turn all writing by women into life writing. In both, infanticide is indissociable from writing and deeply entangled in questions of representation and reproduction. Aminata Sow Fall and Mariama Bâ introduce into their works an alien and subversive conception of the maternal that threatens the representation of woman and mother in canonical francophone African literature. Indeed, Sow Fall and Bâ, as among the first women writers to break into an all male literary tradition, pose an analogous threat to the heretofore male francophone African literary canon. In the next section I will look at the presence of infanticide in Duras, which will bring us back to an earlier discussion of its “repression” in certain Western theories of subject formation, and will also engage with the above readings of infanticide as an expression of deep conflict with the reproductive. INFANTICIDE IN DURAS: “CE MONSTRE DÉVASTATEUR LA MÈRE”

To attempt to delimit, to characterize, the mother figure in the Eden Cinéma cycle seems an impossible and quite possibly undesirable task to undertake. For what “defines” her is precisely the ambiguous position she occupies in the text, the ambivalence that she provokes and that emanates from her. In a pivotal scene in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique where Suzanne and Joseph relate the mother’s catastrophic adventure with the

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sea walls to M. Jo, their narrative paints her alternately as a positive and negative force in the lives of the peasants and their children. While her indomitable spirit seems to elicit the narrator’s admiration, her recklessness is condemned. She convinces the people of the plain that barriers can be erected to prevent the plain from being flooded with the salty water of the sea, but her convictions have no basis in fact: Et pourtant la mère n’avait consulté aucun technicien pour savoir si la construction des barrages serait efficace. . . . Elle agissait toujours ainsi, obéissant à des évidences et à une logique dont elle ne laissait rien partager à personne. . . . Des centaines d’hectares de rizières seraient soustraits aux marées. Tous seraient riches, ou presque. Les enfants ne mourraient plus. . . . Puis, en juillet, la mer était montée comme d’habitude à l’assaut de la plaine. Les barrages n’étaient pas assez puissants. . . . en une nuit, ils s’effondrèrent. . . . Les paysans des villages limitrophes de la concession étaient retournés à leurs villages. Les enfants avaient continué de mourir de faim. Personne n’en avait voulu à la mère (Barrage, 54–55; 57)

The mother is both inculpated and exculpated in this passage, credited with wanting to save the children, but implicitly blamed for raising the hopes of the peasants in vain. The very statement that frees her from responsibility in the deaths of the children (“Personne n’en avait voulu à la mère”) implicates her in those deaths, for by its utterance it admits that someone might have reason to find her blameworthy. Likewise, the mother’s position vis-à-vis her own children lacks stability. At times she occupies the role of child, at others the role of parent, and at still others that of a desperate adult whose only attachment to her children is circumstantial. Moments of crisis truncate or subvert conventional acts of parenting: Mais c’est à la façon dont nous sommes habillés, nous, ses enfants, comme des malheureux, que je retrouve un certain état dans lequel ma mère tombait parfois et dont déjà, à l’âge que nous avons sur la photo, nous connaissions les signes avant-coureurs, cette façon, justement, qu’elle avait, tout à coup, de ne plus pouvoir nous laver, de ne plus nous habiller, et parfois même de ne plus nous nourrir. Ce grand découragement à vivre, ma mère le traversait chaque jour (L’Amant, 21–22).

Because the specter of hunger, indissolubly tied to death, pervades these texts, the act of withholding nourishment in Barrage, L’Eden Cinéma, and L’Amant carries with it a particularly violent subtext. The narrator’s description in L’Amant of the hat and shoes she wears to school casts further suspicion on the mother’s motives. Her complicity in her daughter’s violation of the rules of propriety—she sports a nearly transparent dress, gold lamé evening shoes, and a man’s fedora—her amusement and pride


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at her daughter’s originality at first seem to form a bond between mother and daughter. Several passages later, the tone of the narrator changes, castigating the mother for encouraging her daughter, even if unconsciously, to go out in this “tenue de prostituée” in order to rescue the family from its dire financial straits. The mother figure in Barrage, L’Eden Cinéma, and L’Amant does not fit the mold of mother-as-nurturer, despite moments of apparent love and tenderness between her and her children. The narrative emphasizes the outpouring of her anger toward them: she forces them to take care of her, fervently wishes for them to grow up and leave her free of responsibility: “Elle veut rester seule, la mère. Pour toujours. . . . Elle ne veut plus de moi, ni de Joseph. Elle ne veut plus d’enfants” (L’Eden, 98–99). In Barrage, we witness the mother’s violence and desperation: “ Je ne boirai pas mon café parce que je suis vieille et que je suis fatiguée et que j’en ai marre, marre d’avoir des enfants comme j’en ai. . . ” and when Joseph attempts to stop her from beating Suzanne, she asks, “Et si je veux la tuer? Si ça me plaît de la tuer?” (Barrage, 135; 137). Paradoxically perhaps, her infanticidal desire is also an infantile one, her “et si je veux la tuer” evocative of a petulant child’s flirtation with extremes. The Durasian mother figure’s frequent mental and emotional absences despite a physical presence (L’Amant, 105), her vacillation between an infantile and parental role, combine with the violent rages she directs against her children to convey the utterly ambivalent attitude of this mother toward conventional maternal responsibilities and emotions. The children’s sentiments toward the mother reveal a similar degree of complexity. In all three texts, the mother/daughter relationship is analyzed in the greatest detail, but the mother/son relationship appears as the more privileged. Nothing, however, diminishes the intensity of the mother or the obsessive quality of the children’s perceptions of her: “Dans les histoires de mes livres qui se rapportent à mon enfance . . . je crois avoir dit l’amour que l’on portait à notre mère mais je ne sais pas si j’ai dit la haine qu’on lui portait aussi . . . ”(L’Amant, 34). If we assume that this passage refers to texts such as L’Eden Cinéma and Barrage contre le Pacifique, we see simultaneously the repression of hatred for the mother and the attempt to work through this repression. These other texts do indeed express hatred for the mother, and this contradictory act of “forgetting” previous inscription of that hatred while taking pains to address it in the present narrative underlines the shifting, unreliable, almost unnarratable nature of the mother’s story and the emotions she arouses. Her influence and presence are ubiquitous, absolute:

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Je lui dis que dans mon enfance le malheur de ma mère a occupé le lieu du rêve. Que le rêve c’était ma mère et jamais les arbres de Noël, toujours elle seulement, qu’elle soit la mère écorchée vive de la misère ou qu’elle soit celle dans tous ses états qui parle dans le désert, qu’elle soit celle qui cherche la nourriture ou celle qui interminablement raconte ce qui est arrivé à elle (L’Amant, 58–59).

She is at once to be feared and to be pitied, fiercely powerful and utterly powerless, so thoroughly entrenched in her children’s lives that her misery takes the place of their dreams, yet destined to be abandoned by them. In L’Eden Cinéma, the mother’s physical presence on stage enacts her position in her children’s lives: she appears as an impassive yet inescapable presence, but is moved around, spoken about, acted upon by her children; her silence is at once imposed and imposing. I have stated that the mother in the Eden Cinéma cycle is an infanticidal figure, but the nature of that infanticide requires some explanation. Within the universe formed by these three texts, infanticidal impulses issue from multiple sources, and take many forms. The mother’s “absences”—moments when she becomes foreign, alien, incapable of taking care of her children, of feeding them—underline her non-nurturing character, her “unsuitability” for motherhood: “Tard dans ma vie je suis encore dans la peur de voir s’aggraver un état de ma mère . . . ce qui la mettrait dans le cas d’être séparée de ses enfants” (L’Amant, 104). The daughter feels most acutely the threat of danger posed by the mother: her desire to know the mother, to understand her, even to help her frequently pushes the daughter to the brink of insanity: J’ai regardé ma mère. Je l’ai mal reconnue. Et puis . . . brutalement je ne l’ai plus reconnue du tout. Il y a eu tout à coup, là, près de moi, une personne assise à la place de ma mère, elle n’était pas ma mère. . . . L’épouvante . . . venait de ce qu’elle était assise là même où était assise ma mère lorsque la substitution s’était produite, que je savais que personne d’autre n’était là à sa place qu’elle-même, mais que justement cette identité qui n’était remplaçable par aucune autre avait disparu et que j’étais sans aucun moyen de faire qu’elle revienne . . . Je suis devenue folle en pleine raison. Le temps de crier. J’ai crié. (L’Amant, 105–06).

The mother’s threat here is a threat of distance, of separation between mother and children. But this distance doesn’t exist thematically or grammatically in the texts themselves. All three narrate the period before this separation occurs, and it is, in fact, the intense involvement of the family members in each others’ lives that strikes the reader. They seem indissolubly, but unhealthily, tied to one another, despite their desire to break free. In L’Amant especially, the mother fuses grammatically with the daughter via the pronoun “elle.”39 Each text contains the implication that the relationship between mother and son is perhaps too close: allusions to


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incest abound and cast aspersion not only on mother and son, but on sister and brother as well.40 In fact, in L’Amant, the figures used to describe the daughter’s relationship to the lover introduce an incestuous element: “J’étais devenue son enfant. C’était avec son enfant qu’il faisait l’amour chaque soir” (L’Amant, 122). The family is voracious; everything outside of it, even lovers, must be brought back under its dominion, assimilated. The character of Joseph (and in L’Amant, the older brother), who seems at the greatest distance from the other characters, nonetheless retains a bond to the mother that cannot be broken. When he finally leaves his mother and his sister, it is for a woman he meets at Eden Cinéma (L’Eden, 126). L’Eden Cinéma is, of course, the theater where his mother played the piano for ten years, and represents a domestic space for the children: “Elle nous emmenait avec elle à l’Eden. On dormait autour du piano sur des coussins. . . . Elle n’a jamais pu se séparer de ses enfants, la mère” (L’Eden, 16). The mother’s infanticidal moves, which would seek distance, counter the incestuous closeness and oversameness she shares with her children. This connection between incest and infanticide brings us back to an earlier discussion of their roles in psychoanalytic interpretations of the myth of Oedipus, where infanticide seemed to be the “repressed” term, frequently metamorphosed into some form of castration. In the Durasian text, however, infanticide is repressed, but not very thoroughly, and actually erupts on several different occasions. It makes use of infanticide as a figure, perhaps analogous to that of castration, in that it, too, would serve as a deterrent to incest. But with infanticide, it is the mother who wields the power of interdiction. The configuration of the family in these works subverts the Freudian paradigm. It is, for example, the murderous rage of the mother that intervenes between the daughter and her lover. In addition, there are numerous instances of intense attraction to the mother, countered by intense fear of her.41 Instead of the son’s desire for the mother resulting in patricide, we see here the daughter’s desire for the mother resulting in murderous feelings toward the older brother: “Je voulais tuer, mon frère aîné. . . . C’était pour enlever de devant ma mère l’objet de son amour . . . (L’Amant, 13). The absence of the father from the text is glaring, and is yet another element in the rejection of the Freudian model. In all three texts, but particularly in L’Amant, the power of infanticide and incest are acknowledged, and it is the father who is repressed. In the myth of Oedipus, (attempted) infanticide and incest, besides involving the death of the father, lead to the death of the mother. While in the case of Jocasta, this cannot be called a matricide, it does introduce

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the link between infanticide and a matricidal desire.42 This connection appears as well in Duras: “Elle [la mère] aurait pu mourir. . . . Disperser la communauté invivable. . . . Elle a été imprudente . . . irresponsable. . . . Elle a vécu” (L’Amant, 70). In the Durasian “family romance,” the mother is both object of desire and rival, and ambivalence is the operative word. The character of the mother is profoundly divided against itself. How could one reconcile the portrait of the mother as “cette folle. Cette démente. . . . Ce monstre dévastateur, la mère” (L’Eden, 99) with the mother who must plant, nourish, nurture, and see things grow? This fundamental schism is encapsulated in an image common to all three texts: the struggle of the mother (mère): champion of planting, cultivating, fecundity, in short, life; against the sea (mer): devastating, destructive, killing crops and, indirectly, scores of children. Another kind of violence, also infanticidal, erupts in these texts, sometimes merging with the mother’s violence, sometimes provoking it. I am referring to the violence of the French colonial system and the mother’s relentless struggle against it. The passage cited above, which addresses the threat the mother poses to her children, continues on to ascribe the origin of that infanticidal potential to her combat with the colonial government: Qu’est-ce qu’elle a fait croire aux paysans de la plaine? Elle a détruit la paix de ces paysans de la plaine. Elle veut recommencer. Vendre ses enfants, recommencer. Elle veut avoir raison de l’injustice, la mère, de l’injustice fondamentale qui régit l’histoire des pauvres du monde. Encore. Elle veut avoir raison de la force des vents, de la force des marées. Encore. Du Pacifique (L’Eden, 99–100).

The French colonial system constitutes only one historical manifestation of “l’injustice fondamentale qui régit l’histoire des pauvres,” but it is her most tangible enemy. In the mother’s eyes, its most heinous incarnation comes in the form of the government officials who took from her ten years’ savings in exchange for an unfarmable concession. Her final letter to them in L’Eden Cinéma closes on these lines: Je vous le répète une dernière fois, il faut bien vivre de quelque chose et si ce n’est pas de l’espoir, même très vague, de nouveaux barrages, ce sera de cadavres, même de méprisables cadavres des trois agents cadastraux de Kampot (125)

In the production notes that follow the script of L’Eden Cinéma, Duras remarks: “Ma mère nous a raconté comment il aurait fallu massacrer, supprimer les blancs qui avaient volé l’espoir de sa vie ainsi que l’espoir des paysans de la plaine de Prey-Nop” (L’Eden, 150). These passages illustrate the link between the colonial government and the mother’s violent,


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imprudent, and dangerous behavior toward her children and her community. The progression of the passage, from the mother’s violence against the children to her quest for justice from an unjust system as powerful and implacable as the Pacific, is echoed at several moments in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, where violence or death first appear “natural” but are later shown to be the result of colonialism. In the opening pages of Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, the narrator speaks of the “natural” dangers of the colony: Dès qu’ils étaient en âge de comprendre, on apprenait aux enfants à se méfier de la terrible nuit paludéenne et des fauves. Pourtant les tigres avaient bien moins faim que les enfants et ils en mangeaient très peu. En effet ce dont mouraient les enfants dans la plaine . . . ce n’était pas des tigres, c’était de la faim, des maladies de la faim, et des aventures de la faim (Barrage, 32–33).

The tiger myth is dispelled to reveal a more insidious source of death.43 Yet the demystifying function of the text doesn’t stop at this cause either. Rather, by identifying the tiger myth as misleading, this passage prompts the reader to question the nature and origin of the hunger that kills multitudes of children. As countless scenes in all three texts attest, the colonial government bears a good portion of the responsibility for this hunger, and ultimately for the deaths of the children. The violence of these deaths is underscored in the following stark passage that also highlights their inevitability: Il fallait bien qu’il en meure. Car si pendant quelques années seulement, les enfants de la plaine avaient cessé de mourir, la plaine en eût été à ce point infestée que sans doute, faute de pouvoir les nourrir, on les aurait donnés aux chiens, ou peut-être les aurait-on exposés aux bords de la forêt . . . (119).

In L’Eden Cinéma, the mother tries to disabuse the inhabitants of the plain of any illusions they have about the colonial officials by indirectly inculpating them in the death of each child: “Plus il mourra d’enfants dans la plaine, plus la plaine se dépeuplera et plus leur [the officials’] mainmise sur la plaine se renforcera . . . (L’Eden, 122). In her final letter to the officials she says, “Ici il meurt beaucoup d’enfants. Les terres que vous convoitez et que vous leur enlevez, les seules terres douces de la plaine, sont grouillantes de cadavres d’enfants” (L’Eden, 122). The colonial government is cast as infanticide, a curious complement to the infanticidal mother figure who vacillates between a desire to plant and nurture and a murderous rage born of her utter lack of power against this implacable system. As infanticides, the two stand in paradoxical apposition to one another.

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Greed motivates the colonial government’s involvement in infanticide, while the mother’s relationship to infanticide is shaped by her exhaustion, poverty, and rage precipitated by the colonial system. In this she is like the beggar woman who brings her baby to give to the mother, so that she, the beggar woman, can continue her journey: “Plus d’enfants. Pas d’enfant. Tous morts ou jetés, ça fait une masse à la fin de la vie” (L’Amant, 106). While this shared maternal experience does not suffice to bridge the gap between a white woman, however poor, and a colonized woman (after all, in this passage the French mother takes the child, implying that she has the extra resources to care for it), it does introduce the image of women as a colonized group within a larger colonial system. Duras’s unabashedly political subtext, much more evident in Barrage and L’Eden Cinéma than in L’Amant, provides a framework in which we can understand infanticide as a correlative of colonialism. Yet it is also clear from the preceding discussions of infanticide in these three texts that it is an overdetermined phenomenon, and cannot simply be explained in political and economic terms. If its repression in Western psychoanalytic theories of subject formation has implications for the mother’s (and daughter’s) position in language and the world, then its recognition in these texts by a woman writer shifts those positions and suggests an attempt to rewrite female subjectivity. But before I discuss this interpretation of infanticide, I would like first to recall the relationship between infanticide and colonialism in the works of Aminata Sow Fall and Mariama Bâ. In L’Appel des arènes, the infanticide committed by Anta Lô is provoked by the presence of European institutions and influences, and the narration of it provides a link between tradition and modernity in the text. The aspects of tradition that form the subtext of the novel come to the fore as the text narrates an act of violence. This return of tradition through violence resonates on both a literary and political level. From the literary perspective, this might imply a valorization of more traditional narratives by doing “violence” to French language and textual forms; from a political perspective, the resurgence of tradition is in direct conflict with a colonial history and often a neo-colonial present. The way in which infanticide is used in L’Appel to move from tradition to modernity and back again makes it a figure for both the deadly effects of colonialism and for the violence necessary for a colonized country to free itself from its pernicious grasp. I have already shown the relationship between infanticide and colonialism in Bâ’s Un chant écarlate, where the victim of infanticide is the product of a “union” between Senegal and France. Furthermore, the


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important differences between Bâ’s portrayal of infanticide and Pierre Loti’s portrayal of it underline her rejection of colonial representations of Africa. For Bâ, Duras, and Sow Fall, then, the metaphor of infanticide grows out of a colonial framework. Infanticide also appears in the texts of Bâ, Sow Fall, and Duras as a figure of protest against the mother’s usually reproductive role in their respective literatures and societies. In Un chant écarlate and L’Appel des arènes, Bâ and Sow Fall attempt to narrate the unspeakable by introducing infanticidal characters into their texts. This act reflects the status of Bâ’s and Sow Fall’s texts themselves as the inscription of a previously unwritten female narrative into Senegalese literary tradition. Yet both seem to acknowledge the difficulty, if not impossibility, of fully developing an infanticidal character in the system of representation available to them. Sow Fall creates the mythical character, Anta Lô, who dies soon after she kills her child, and writes Diattou out of the narrative, leaving only Ndiogou and Nalla as actors in the final scene. Bâ displaces the infanticide in her text, making it the act of a French character instead of a Senegalese one. This character, Mireille, like the infanticidal characters in L’Appel des arènes, disappears from the narrative immediately after she commits her crime. Duras encounters similar problems with a system of representation widely thought to be posited on the absence of the mother. She reacts to it by subverting the dominant myth of the subject’s constitution in language, predicated on the mother’s absence, and replaces it with narratives in which the mother and her infanticidal potential exist. I say “infanticidal potential” because Duras never does have her character commit infanticide; only the threat of it is contained in the mother’s desperate query “Et si je veux la tuer?” As in Sow Fall and Bâ’s works, there is a point past which the infanticidal mother cannot be represented. The essential barriers have been transgressed nonetheless, for it is not in the act itself that the importance of the infanticide metaphor lies, but rather in what it signifies: refusal of an exclusive and devalued reproductive role, and of exile to the margins of language and literature.


Conclusion Not the least of infanticide’s power as a metaphor resides in its visceral impact on the reader: its unthinkable, unspeakable violence. Evoking the potential for brutality in all relationships of gross inequality, it figures both European colonization of Africa and Asia and the more general colonization of women. Thomas Mpoyi-Buatu’s La Re-production is perhaps the most insistent in its representation of the bloody nature of all relationships of dominance. Since reproduction in its many forms is demonized in this text, infanticidal sentiments appear frequently throughout the narrative, flouting the usual taboos. La Re-production recommends that we kill the monsters we’ve created and urges us to stop all actions that could lead to their further reproduction. Bâ, Sow Fall, and Duras take a more subtle tack. While infanticide plays a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit role in their texts, its taboo status is clear. The danger that surrounds it on all levels only heightens its power as a symbol that problematizes a violent past but also suggests that the struggle to break with such a past inevitably involves further violence, if only of the literary kind. The “I” that is constructed in the texts we have read is born out of such a struggle and it is therefore unsurprising that we are not presented with a clearly defined subject brimming with “author”-ity, but rather a subject that questions its own existence, that exposes its own divisions and fragmentations, that questions the genre in which it is trying to construct itself, and that ultimately constructs not only new notions of self, but new notions of autobiography as well. This is part of an ongoing process of

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decolonization, an attempt to free both individual and literature from traditions of constraint. Like infanticide, the idea of autobiography simultaneously figures colonizing strictures and suggests a way to free oneself from them. If these texts point to the impossibility of autobiography in a “postmodern,” “postcolonial” world, they also point to the impossibility of reproduction in general. Ironically, in this age of “mechanical reproduction,” where sophisticated technologies allow us to “replicate” things more “perfectly” than ever before, it is increasingly clear that each reproduction contains its own reality and proclaims its difference, no matter how slight, from all else. The gynophobic condemnation of reproduction found in Mpoyi-Buatu is countered by Bâ, Sow Fall, Duras, and other women we have read here, who show that to interpret reproduction reductively is to miss the point: reproduction is nothing if not the creation of new and autonomous subjects and texts.

Notes

ONE t (RE)PRODUCTIONS 1. Of course, in much critical work one finds the overlapping of two or more of these theories. It is as tricky (and for the most part undesirable) to lay out distinct functions of reproduction and production and keep them separate from one another, as it is to isolate the various strands of ideology that appear in any given work of criticism. Therefore, when I discuss the presence and role of reproduction in literary texts, reproduction will always be an overdetermined concept. 2. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 714. 3. Didier Coste, “Rehearsal: An Alternative to Production/Reproduction in French Feminist Discourse.” Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 251. 4. Frederick Engels, The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972),10. 5. As quoted in Georg Gugelberger, Marxism and African Literature (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1986), 6. My emphasis. 6. I have in mind writers such as Sony Labou Tansi, Werewere Liking, Catherine N’Diaye, Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, among others. 7. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 32–33. 8. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 220–221. 9. For another perspective on the interconnected roles of reproduction and its transformative nature, see Elissa Marder’s interesting analysis of Barthes’ La Chambre claire in “Nothing to Say: Fragments on the Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” L’Esprit Créateur vol.XL, no.1 (Spring 2000): 25–35, where she

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide examines, among other things, the connection between the mechanical reproduction of the photograph and biological reproduction. This has many implications when considering the mass-production of western culture and its products, and their presence in formerly colonized countries. Bill Ashcroft addresses this kind of question in his Post-colonial Transformations, and it is also the subject of several essays by Senegalese writer, Catherine Ndiaye. We will come back to these questions, and to Ashcroft and Ndiaye, later in this text. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 4, 11. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 70. Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974); trans. G. Gill, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 18. See Toril Moi’s analysis of Kristeva in Sexual/Textual Politics (New York: Methuen, 1985), 167–171. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater” in Histoires d’Amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983), 225. Emphasis in original. Thomas Mpoyi Buatu, La Re-production (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986). “Ensoutanés” is the word used in the text. “Ensoutaner” is defined in the Petit Robert as “faire prendre la soutane à quelqu’un” (my emphasis); thus Buatu’s use of this term indicates from the outset that in this text religion and some form of coercion always go hand in hand. One is reminded here of Baudrillard’s observation, quoted earlier, that “Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate” (153). Mariama Bâ, Une si longue lettre (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1979), 70–71. English translation by Modupé Bodé-Thomas, So Long a Letter (London: Heinenman, 1981), 47. My emphasis. Nafissatou Diallo, De Tilène au Plateau (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1975), 9. English translation by Dorothy Blair, A Dakar Childhood (London: Longman Drumbeat, 1982). Aminata Sow Fall, L’Appel des arènes (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1982), 15.

TWO t COLONIALISM 1. In Blank Darkness, Christopher Miller calls this desire for reproduction “projection,” and establishes it as a defining characteristic of Africanist discourse in French. The practice of projection sets off Africanist discourse from Orientalist discourse, in which the Orient appears in every way as the antipode of the West: “Africa is the Other’s other, the Orient’s orient, which happens to be called ‘Occident,’ and which is nothing” (Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 16.). Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 2. Although my focus is obviously on Africa, I will also discuss certain aspects of French colonial policy in Southeast Asia (Indochina), since the second part of this chapter and subsequent chapters will treat the works of Marguerite Duras.

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3. The French policy of assimilation, that is, the project of making colonized peoples “just like” the French, has been shown by more than one scholar to be a lure, a deception designed to minimize resistance to the colonial presence. In his classic text The Colonizer and the Colonized, first published in 1957, Albert Memmi, a Tunisian writer and scholar, scrutinizes the French colonial practice of assimilation and exposes its stated goal of replicating the “mother” country in the colony and the colonizer in the colonized, as utterly spurious: “the true reason . . . for most deficiencies is that the colonialist never planned to transform the colony into the image of his homeland, nor to remake the colonized in his own image!” Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. H. Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 69. For an analysis specific to Senegal, see Michael Crowder, Senegal: A Study of French Assimilation Policy (London: Methuen, 1967). 4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chapter xxxi as cited in On Colonialism (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 292. 5. William Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 156–157. 6. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 12. 7. Samba Gadjigo, Ecole blanche/Afrique noire (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1990), 124–125. 8. Although the reader cannot help but notice the rivalry present in the text between the British policy of association and the French policy of assimilation, the author’s admiration of the French system of education is nonetheless wholehearted. 9. The Invention of Africa, 12. In his analysis of the Burgkmair painting “Exotic Tribe,” V.Y. Mudimbe attempts to reconstruct the painter’s efforts to create black figures using, in all probability, a white model (6–8). The result, of course, is a tableau of “Africans” who are, as Mumford puts it elsewhere, “[European] in all but the colour of their skin.” 10. Jack Yeager, The Vietnamese Novel in French (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987), 16–17. 11. David Joel Steinberg, In Search of Southeast Asia (New York: Praeger, 1971), 183. My emphasis. 12. Roman Catholic missionaries were active in Vietnam as early as the 17th century. Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660), a Jesuit missionary, is named by Steinberg as the first who tried to “convert the Vietamese writing system from Chinese characters to European letters” (Steinberg, 131). 13. See also Lê Thanh Khôi, Le Vietnam, (Paris: Minuit, 1955), 434–5 for a brief discussion of the problems that later confronted young members of the Vietnamese bourgeoisie who continued their education in Paris: “Les fils des anciennes familles se mettaient avec fièvre à la conquête de cette science qui avait permis à l’Occident de les vaincre. . . . Mais beaucoup d’entre eux qui étaient allés s’impregner du ‘nouveau savoir’ . . . aux rives de la Seine ressentaient à leur retour un déséquilibre profond. Ardemment désireux de préparer la rénovation de leur pays, ils se trouvaient impuissants dans le milieu colonial et coupés de leurs compatriotes dont ils ne partageaient plus les croyances et les disciplines ancestrales.” 14. Gail P. Kelly, “Colonial Schools in Vietnam” in Education and Colonialism (New York: Longman,1978), 100–101. 15. The link between colonial and capitalist production and reproduction suggests itself again in a thorough and astute analysis of colonial education in Vietnam, done by Jane Bradley Winston in Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France (New York: Palgrave, 2001). She argues, in part, that French educational policy in

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19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide Vietnam was heavily influenced by a “scientific management” theory originally formulated to improve management-labor relations and increase productivity in French industry (101–109). We again become aware of the role of gender in the production/reproduction schema as Winston informs us that much of female colonial education in Vietnam was focused on “introducing the native women to modern technologies of reproduction and motherhood . . .” so that Vietnamese women could “reproduce an expanded, robust, and productive Vietnamese workforce” (115). Barbara Harrell-Bond, “Africa Asserts its Identity,” American Universities Field Staff Reports no. 10 (1981), 7. For an excellent discussion of this, see Christopher Miller’s Theories of Africans ( 270–293, esp.276). For a discussion of Bâ’s own ambivalent position as an educated African woman , see Laura C. Kempen’s chapter “The Hybrid Voice of the Privileged,” in her book, Mariama Bâ, Rigoberta Menchu, and Postcolonial Feminism (New York: Lang, 2001). Gobina Moukoko, “Entretien avec Aminata Sow Fall,” Le Cameroun littéraire, no. 1 (juillet-septembre, 1983), 53–56, esp. 53. Aminata Sow Fall, L’Appel des arènes (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1982), 13–14. In Post-colonial Transformations, Bill Ashcroft notes this practice among many postcolonial writers. Referring to the use of words in the writer’s native language that remain unglossed in the text, he asserts that “the inserted language ‘stands for’ the colonized culture in a metonymic way. . . .” (75). In addition, the “baak” interject a musicality into the text (they are chanted or sung at the wrestling matches) that challenges the reader to interact with the text in nontraditional ways. For a fascinating discussion of the aural elements and functions of ASF’s writing, see Florence Martin’s “Echos et grains de voix dans Le Jujubier du patriarche d’Aminata Sow Fall,” in French Review, vol. 74, n0.2 (Dec. 2000). Moreover, if we read this anecdote carefully, we are also reminded that literacy in French does not define literacy in general. The religious leader in question, if he is Muslim, is almost certainly literate in Arabic. The production and reproduction of language in former French colonies raises a number of questions similar to the ones raised concerning education. For example, print, or the physical reproduction of langauge, plays a crucial role in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (London: Verso Editions, 1983): the novel and the newspaper . . . provided the technical means for ‘representing’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation. . . . each supplicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. . . . the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper . . . is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life (30; 39–40). Thus, literary production can be used to help create a political community such as a colony in the minds of the colonizers, the colonized, and those who remain in the Metropole.

NOTES

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26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

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The African philosopher, Paulin Hountondji, of Benin, also advances theories regarding the role of written langauge in a political community. Hountondji insists that only the “preservation” of ideas in writing allows the mind to function critically. In oral tradition, he says, “l’esprit . . . est trop occupé à préserver le savoir pour se permettre de le critiquer.” (Sur la “philosophie africaine” [Paris: François Maspero, 1977] 131.) In order for Africa to compete intellectually and technologically with the rest of the world, according to Hountondji, it must come to depend on written langauge. In Postcolonial Duras, Jane Bradley Winston does an excellent analysis of the mother’s precarious position as “colon” woman/teacher. “Colonial officials sought to educate the native woman into the colon woman’s place . . . to have native teachers succeed French institutrices as “the conservative force” reproducing (my emphasis) the social and cultural status quo” (116). Marguerite Duras, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 53–55. English translation by Herma Briffault, The Sea Wall (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1952). For a detailed analysis of the development of the francophone Vietnamese novel, see Jack Yeager, Vietnamese Novel. The term “colonial” is somewhat misleading here. According to sources such as Léon Fanoudh-Siefer, Loti wrote exotic literature, not colonial literature. In Jonathan Ngaté’s study Francophone African Fiction (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988), he explains that the colonial authors wrote against the exotic tradition, striving to make their own work more “accurate.” As Ngaté notes, this is, of course, simply more of the same. I am using the term “colonial” here to emphasize Loti’s ties to the colonial enterprise. For more detailed and biographical discussion of Duras’s life in French colonial Indochina and her later involvment in colonial affairs, see Laure Adler’s Marguerite Duras: A Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Alain Vircondelet’s Duras: biographie (Paris: François Bourin, 1991); Jane Bradley Winston, Postcolonial Duras. This link also exists between Loti’s Le Roman d’un spahi and Mariama Bâ’s Un chant écarlate, and I will read those texts together in the chapter on infanticide. I should first draw an important distinction between what I call here “traditional” autobiography, perhaps better referred to as autobiography traditionally conceived and received, and autobiography in a postcolonial context. Following the example of Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau, traditional autobiography is motivated by ideals of confession, disclosure, transparency, and self-revelation. Its defining characteristic, according to Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), is an “autobiographical pact” between author and reader in which the identity between the author and the narrator/protagonist is guaranteed. Such a project has been deemed particularly Western, with its emphasis on individuality, a unified subject, and frequently on a linear, chronological narrative that strives to put everything in its place at or near the end of a life, in an attempt to arrive at that life’s “meaning.” More contemporary readings and writings of autobiography challenge the nature and definition of the literary project and its subject, releasing autobiography from its burden of truth and transparency, and reorienting it toward the examination of the subject as construct. The tension between autobiography as representative of Western culture and colonialism, and autobiography as an interroga-

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32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide tion of the boundaries of genre, culture, and gender, is precisely the tension between Loti and the women who write in his traces. Cf. Christopher Miller’s discussion of “projection,” (BD, 16). See Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre (Paris: Seuil, 1980). Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1982) 213. For a classic discussion of the construction of these identites, see Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon, 1967). Léon Fanoudh-Siefer, Le Mythe du nègre et de L’Afrique noire dans la littérature française (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968) 13. Alec G. Hargreaves, The Colonial Experience in French Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1981), 45. Roland Lebel, (Histoire de la littérature coloniale en France (Paris: Larose, 1931), 71, cited in Léon Fanoudh-Siefer, Le mythe du nègre et de l’Afrique noire (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 55) also identifies Loti as a link between the colonies and Europe: “A l’heure où la France accomplissait son plus bel effort d’expansion coloniale, Loti fut l’initiateur qui dirigea les regards vers les pays nouveaux, et c’est à lui que l’on doit la première connaissance exacte et colorée de nos colonies renaissantes.” Michael G. Lerner, Pierre Loti (Boston: Twayne, 1974), 21. The notion of imagined community as I use it here comes from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Fanoudh-Siefer observes: “cette poésie de Loti a servie de véhicule à de nombreuses images d’Epinal qui ont marqué ses lecteurs, et qui ont été transmises de génération en génération” (Fanoudh-Siefer, 107, as quoted in Hargreaves, 45). Just how Loti’s images of colonial life helped to perpetuate it will be seen in later discussions of Duras’s texts. Fanoudh-Siefer cites several autobiographical interpretations of Le Roman d’un spahi, of which Roland Lebel’s is perhaps the most explicit: c’est bien ainsi que Pierre Loti, dans Le roman d’un spahi . . . ne fait qu’arranger les feuillets de son carnet intime: il imagine une histoire où sont racontéees ses aventures personnelles, il donne à son héros une âme semblable à la sienne, et l’action n’est qu’un prétexte à décors (cited in Fanoudh-Siefer, Le Mythe du nègre, 55–56). See also Hargreaves, The Colonial Experience in French Fiction, 22.

Hargreaves also notes the difficulty in distinguishing between Loti’s novels and the works he intended to be “travelogues” (21), and concludes “Whether they be classed as novels or travelogues, most of Loti’s first-person narratives together constitute a kind of running autobiography, though one of a distinctly imaginative nature, in which matters of biographical fact are subordinate to more poetic processes” (Hargreaves, 22). 42. It is one of the operative fictions of his texts, of course, that Loti embodies “the French perspective.” Indeed, Loti’s novels helped to create the French perspective, but at the same time kept a certain distance from it. 43. For a discussion of these articles, see Hargreaves, 170. The Figaro articles referred to are from 28 September, 13 October, and 17 October 1883. 44. Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1991).

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45. See Adler, Marguerite Duras, 83–93. 46. Marguerite Duras, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique; L’Eden Cinéma (Paris: Mercure de France, 1977); L’Amant (Paris: Minuit, 1984). English translation by Barbara Bray, The Lover (New York: Random House, 1985); L’Amant de la Chine du nord (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). English translation by Leigh Haffrey, The North China Lover (New York: The New Press,1992). As we read in Adler and Winston, Duras was the author of quite a lot of propaganda during her time at the Colonial Office, most notably l’Empire français, which contained racist portrayals of many of the peoples colonized by the French (Adler, 90). Duras later dismissed the book as “a youthful error of judgement” (Adler, 91). 47. See, for example, Duras’s Écrire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). English translation by Mark Polizotti, Writing (Cambridge: Lumen Editions, 1998); Leslie Garis, “The Life and Loves of Marguerite Duras,” New York Times Magazine (20 October, 1991: 44–60); stage notes for L’Eden Cinéma (Paris: Mercure de France, 1977); and the above-mentioned biographies by Adler and Vircondelet. In the next chapter, I will enter into a more detailed discussion of the problems inherent in trying to classify Duras’s texts according to genre. 48. For further discussion of Duras’s autobiography as rewriting, see Leah Hewitt’s chapter “Rewriting Her Story, from Passive to Active: Substitutions in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover,” in her book Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: U. Nebraska Press, 1990). 49. Pierre Loti, Un Pèlerin d’Angkor (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1912), dedication. 50. For an interesting and more thorough discussion of exoticism in L’Amant and Barrage, see Suzanne Chester, “Writing the Subject: Exoticism/Eroticism in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and The Sea Wall,” in De/Colonizing the Subject, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press, 1992). Chester’s essay addresses several questions similar to those raised in this essay. Her discussion of the effect of the narrator’s gender on her role as colonizer will be particularly valuable to the reader interested in reading Duras’s texts from a postcolonial perspective. 51. Infanticide is an absent presence in these texts peopled with dead and dying children and a violent mother figure. I will return to this passage and others similar to it in a later chapter on infanticide. 52. Pierre Loti, Le Mariage de Loti (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1878), 8. 53. I will discuss the language of Duras’s texts and its relationship to her autobiographical project in the next chapter.

THREE t AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 1. In Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1980), Philippe Lejeune argues that autobiography is defined by the presence of an “autobiographical pact” between author and reader, in which the author explicitly tells the reader that s/he is identical with the “I” in the text. This in no way obliges the author to represent events as they “really” happened, however, making autobiography a carefully designated and codified space in which to re-produce or reinvent oneself, but not a place in which one is bound to tell the “truth.” In Mirroirs d’encre (Paris: Seuil, 1980), Michel Beaujour distinguishes autoportrait from autobiography and defines the former as “l’absence d’un récit suivi . . . Je ne vous raconterai pas ce que j’ai fait, mais je vais

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide vous dire qui je suis” (8–9). More recently, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson give an overview of the numerous feminist critics who have theorized about the nature of autobiography and women’s relationship to it in Women, Autobiography, Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). In “Autobiography as De-Facement” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), Paul De Man argues that: “Autobiography, then, is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts. . . . But just as we seem to assert that all texts are autobiographical, we should say that, by the same token, none of them is or can be” (70). Leigh Gilmore (Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), uses the term “autobiographics” “to describe those elements of self-representation which are not bound by a philosophical definition of the self derived from Augustine, not content with the literary history of autobiography, those elements that instead mark a location in a text where self-invention, self-discovery, and self-representation emerge within the technologies of autobiography” (as cited in Women, Autobiography, Theory, 184). See, for example, Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. 106; Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, De/Colonizing the Subject, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics; and Joan Scott, “Experience” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan C. Scott (New York : Routledge, 1993) 22–40. In the introduction to Life/lines (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), a study of women’s autobiography, Celeste Schenck and Bella Brodzki observe that “to the uncritical eye, autobiography presents as untroubled a reflection of identity as the surface of a mirror can provide. The corresponding assumption has been that autobiography is a transparency through which we perceive the life, unmediated and undistorted” (1). In an earlier essay, “Autobiography: The Dark Continent of Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 5 no. 4 (1968) 421–454, Stephen Shapiro, writing about autobiography in general, noted: “if it looks like a sonnet, it is literature. . . . Imagination is present. But if it looks like the story of a life and it is not a novel . . . it should be regarded with suspicion: there is no imagination in there, only fact and memory” (423). For further discussion of critical perceptions of the relationship between autobiography and imagination, see also Louis Renza, “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Consider for example, Roland Barthes’ or Nathalie Sarraute’s approaches to “autobiography.” Domna Stanton, The Female Autograph (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 3–17, esp. 4. Of particular interest is Joan Scott’s above-mentioned essay “Experience.” See Domna Stanton, Female Autograph; Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change and “Mothers, Daughters, and Autobiography : Maternal Legacies and Cultural Criticism” in Mothers in Law: Feminist Theory and the Legal Regulation of Motherhood, Ed. Martha Albertson Fineman and Isabel Karpin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) 3–26; Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989).

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9. In The Mother/Daughter Plot, Hirsch suggests that female writers almost always speak as daughter rather than as mother. Because autobiography is associated with both reproduction and self-invention, it could be seen as an ideal sight for the establishment of a maternal voice that is not fettered by its reproductive associations. 10. Leigh Gilmore’s discussion of this question is an important one “The question of gender, then, cannot be explored mainly through the compulsory lumping together of all male-authored texts, on one side, and all female-authored texts on the other” (as cited in Women, Autobiography, Theory, 183). 11. In an interview with Ellen Rooney, Gayatri Spivak discusses the problems that accompany terms and concepts such as essentialism and anti-essentialism. Spivak points out that essentialism can be and has been used to achieve certain goals, and that one ought not to confuse a strategy of essentialism with a theory of essentialism: “a strategy is not a theory. A strategy suits a situation” (Differences 1.2, summer 1989), 124–156. She further emphasizes, and indeed the entire interview serves to underline, the duplicitous character of “essence,” which is precisely what makes it a vital concept: “I would remind the feminists who want so badly to be antiessentialists that the critique of essence à la deconstruction proceeds in terms of the unavoidable usefulness of something that is very dangerous” (129). 12. Dietrich Westermann, Autobiographies d’Africains (Genève: Payot, 1943). 13. James Clifford studies the phenomenon of self-examination in ethnography in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). “Leiris’ fieldwork in a ‘phantom Africa’ throws him back on a relentless self-ethnography— not autobiography but an act of writing his existence in a present of memories, dreams, politics, daily life” (14). Philippe Lejeune (Pacte Autobiographique) also discussed this phenomenon in his chapter “Autobiographies de ceux qui n’écrivent pas,” and more recently, Carole Boyce Davies explores the problem of “authority and control over the text” (3) when the narrating subject and the writing subject are not the same (“Collaboration and the Ordering Imperative in Life Story Production” in De/Colonizing the Subject, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) 3–19. 14. Mohamadou Kane, “Sur les ‘formes traditionnelles’ du roman africain,” Revue de littérature comparée no. 3/4 (1974), 561. 15. The concept and practice of autobiography become highly problematic when we consider a culture such as the Mande, where, as Christopher Miller informs us in his chapter on orality and literacy in Theories of Africans, silence is considered a noble quality and the manipulation of the word is restricted to a less privileged, yet powerful, group, the nyamakala, from whom come the Mande griots. Although it has been argued that the griot’s task is, in reality, self-serving, since he often simultaneously lauds his own griot ancestors along with the ancestors of his patron, the right and responsibility of the griot to preserve and transmit history is inviolable (78–98). From this perspective, the autobigraphical project is dubious indeed, involving the violation of one group’s authority and the ignoble recourse to language and metaphor by the autobiographer. Such a scenario is, of course, limited to this particular culture and assumes that the writer of autobiography is of noble descent. I will consider this issue further in my discussion of Aoua Kéita’s Femme d’Afrique. 16. Mohamadou Kane, Roman africain et tradition, (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1982), 64–5. 17. James Olney, Tell Me Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), viii. 18. Aoua Kéita, Femme d’Afrique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1975).

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19. Julia Watson has published an article “Unruly Bodies: Autoethnography and Authorization in Nafissatou Diallo’s De Tilène au Plateau” in Research in African Literatures, vol 28 (summer 1997), 34–56, in which she classifies Kéita’s text as autobiography that makes “a literary intervention in the articulation of specific gendered African subjectivites” (35). Beverly Ormerod and Jean-Marie Volet, “Ecrits autobiographiques et engagement: le cas des Africaines d’expression française” in French Review, vol. 69, no. 3 (February 1996): 426–444, also consider Kéita’s text as “la première autobiographie due à une Africaine d’expression française . . .”(426), although they discuss the text only in terms of Kéita’s political engagement. 20. I find it fascinating and emblematic of the way language functions in this text that this sentence denies the French all agency and interprets colonialism as one piece of a divine plan far beyond the control of the Europeans or the Africans involved. 21. See footnote 15 in this chapter and 78–98 in Miller’s TOA. 22. It is interesting to speculate that an autobiographical novel might not be such a flagrant transgression of this custom, indicating that Kéita attaches special significance to autobiography. 23. In Francophone African Women Writers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), Irène d’Almeida, too, questions earlier readings of De Tilène au Plateau and suggests that its conservatism is deceptive: “She [Diallo] remains closely attached to the ‘traditional’ world of her origin, even as she suggests how that world is unfair or inadequate” (37). 24. In the afore-mentioned “Unruly Bodies,” Watson does a very interesting analysis of the subversive nature of Diallo’s text. 25. See Gobina Moukoko, “Entretien avec Aminata Sow Fall,” Cameroun Littéraire no.1 (juillet-septembre 1983); Fémi Ojo-Ade, “Still a Victim?” African Literature Today vol. 12 (1982); Barbara Harrell-Bond, “Africa Asserts its Identity,” American Field Staff Reports no. 10.2 (1981), in which Bond states: “More offensive to Mariama Bâ, were the banal and inaccurate remarks on the cover [of the German translation of USLL], stating that the book was autobiographical, something she had repeatedly denied in interviews” (1); A. Gerard and J. Laurent, “Sembene’s Progeny: A New Trend in the Senegalese Novel,” Studies in 20th Century Literature 4. 2 (Spring, 1980); Aminata Maïga Ka, “Ramatoulaye, Aïssatou, Mireille et . . . Mariama Bâ,” Notre Librairie 81 (1985); back cover of Un Chant écarlate (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1981). 26. Aminata Maïga Ka, “Ramatoulaye . . . ,”134. 27. See, for example, Jonathan Ngaté, Francophone African Fiction (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988); Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemenn, 1975); Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001), for discussions of the difficult relationship between European literatures and African literatures written in European languages. 28. The article cited in note 25, “Sembène’s Progeny,” by A. Gerard and J. Laurent is an example of this kind of paternalistic, neocolonial criticism. 29. Sunday O. Anozie, Sociologie du roman africain, (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1970), 15. Of course, this critical tendancy is sharply reproached by some African writers and critics, for example, Catherine N’Diaye, who in the “Postface” to her Gens de sable (Paris: POL, 1984) states: “Il serait temps que l’écrivain du Tiers-Monde se comporte en esthète—qu’il abondonne l’oeil critique de sociologue, qu’il laisse tomber le ressassement de l’historien, et qu’il se détourne de la réduction de l’économiste” (157).

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30. Samba Gadjigo, Ecole blanche/Afrique noire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990), 16. 31. For a discussion of Une si longue lettre through the lens of Philippe Lejeune’s theory of the autobiographical pact, see Josias Semujanga’s “De la narration autobiographique dans Une si longue lettre de Mariama Bâ,” Les Lettres romanes 51, nos. 3–4 (Aug-Nov, 1997): 289–99. 32. That Bâ sees writing in part as an escape from confinement is evident in the opening image of USLL, where Ramatoulaye writes from a position of confinement. 33. I will continue this discussion of maternal figures as points of convergence for both the reproductive and the productive in the next section on Sow Fall’s L’Ex-père de la nation. 34. In April of 1995, I interviewed Mariama Bâ’s widower, M. Obèye Diop, in Paris, and spoke informally with several other relatives. 35. Frieda Ekotto analyzes the role of confinement in Une si longue lettre in her article “Language and Confinement in Francophone Women Writers.” L’Esprit Créateur, 38, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 70–83. 36. Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 184–99, esp. 185. 37. The letter from Aïssatou to her husband (50) is somewhat of an exception, since it does appear in letter form, but is signaled as a “citation” by Ramatoulaye of Aïssatou’s “original” letter. 38. Johnson’s discussion of apostrophe cannot help but bring to mind Paul de Man’s discussion of prosopopeia, which he defines as “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face. . . . Prosopopeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name . . . is made as intelligible and memorable as a face” (“Autobiography as DeFacement” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 75–76). 39. About Bâ’s use of epistolarity, Christopher Miller writes: “Une si longue lettre can be seen to represent a dialectic between borrowing from Europe and deviating from European norms” (TOA, 281). 40. Keith Walker, “Bâ, Epistolarity, Menopause, Postcoloniality” in Postcolonial Subjects, ed. Mary Jean Green et.al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 260. Walker does a very interesting analysis of Bâ’s use of epistolarity and its relation to her postcolonial position. 41. Indeed, several critics have remarked on the rarity of the epistolary novel in francophone African literature. See Mineke Schipper’s essay entitled “‘Who Am I?’ Fact and Fiction in African First-Person Narrative,” from her book Beyond The Boundaries (London: Allison and Busby, 1989), 99–132. 42. See Jack Yeager’s The Vietnamese Novel in French (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987) for an analysis of the adoption of Western concepts of love by members of a society where marriages are traditionally arranged. 43. Aminata Sow Fall, L’Ex-père de la nation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987). 44. Julia Watson, “Shadowed Presence: Modern Women Writers’ Autobiographies and the Other” in Studies in Autobiography ed. James Olney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 180–189, esp.182. 45. “The conflict between productive and reproductive roles is a false problem, a myth created by false anxietie. . . . There is no real conflict: it was only a societal myth

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about maternal neglect, an internalization of false dichotomies between mothering and smothering or mothering and working”(AV, 136–37). 46. Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 28–48. Gusdorf argues that: it would seem that autobiography is not to be found outside of our cultural area; one would say that it expresses a concern peculiar to Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own (29, my emphasis).

47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

Though Gusdorf does not explicitly alienate women from the autobiographical mode, his exclusive use of gender-marked language and male authors, not only in this paragraph but throughout his essay, makes it difficult to argue that Gusdorf’s “man” is neuter. While autobiography may threaten to colonize non-Western men, it poses an even more complex threat for women whose autobiographies, as well as other writings, have not been read as literary texts, but rather as sociological, historical, or political documents. See, for example, Doris Summer in “Not Just a Personal Story,” (Life/Lines, 107–130), where she discusses the use of autobiography as “a medium of resistance and counterdiscourse” for “colonized peoples” (111). In the same collection, Nellie McKay notes that “ . . . early black autobiography altered the terms for the production of Western autobiography as they had been defined by the dominant culture” (“Race, Gender, and Cultural Context,” 175–188 esp. 176). Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1966), 92; English translation by Constance Farrington, The Wretched of the Earth (Middlesex: Penguin, 1967). Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth, 7–26, esp. 7. We see again here the image of the “unnatural” and infanticidal mother that was discussed briefly in the preceding chapter and will be fully examined in the final chapter on infanticide. I have stated that Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre is narrated from a maternal perspective. This is not to say that conflict between the maternal voice and the daughterly voice does not exist in the text. It does; nonetheless, it is the maternal perspective that emerges as the dominant one. Although Duras’s geography is occasionally creative, the three narratives take place, generally speaking, in regions that are part of Vietnam and Cambodia. Sanford S. Ames’ assessment of Duras is useful here: “What she demonstrates is that we are all alike in our dispossession, our imaginary appearance, and can only signal one another from a place we have never been. . . . This difference in sameness has no fixed point of reference, no goal or original model” (4). Sanford S. Ames, “Edging the Shadow” in Remains to be Seen (New York: Lang, 1988), 3–30. In her biography of Duras, Laure Adler notes the interesting slippage back and forth between text and life: “When the book first came out, [Duras] kept repeating that it was fiction and not an autobiographical account. In the end she gave up and agreed to remember herself as a fourteen-year-old girl who one day, on a ferry in Indo-China, in a large black car . . .” (345).

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54. In 1991, Duras rewrites the story yet again in L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), to which I will make reference throughout this chapter but will study in much less depth than L’Amant. It is L’Amant’s difference from earlier texts such as Barrage and L’Eden Cinéma that interests me here. L’Amant de la Chine du nord functions in a sense as a further elaboration of that difference. 55. The grammatical ambiguity here between violence and the mother “elle a bercé notre enfance” is significant. The violent, infanticidal qualities of the Durassian mother will be discussed in the next chapter. 56. Fragments of L’Amant can be found in almost every one of Duras’s texts. For a more detailed discussion of this see M. Borgamano, “L’Amant: une hypertextualité illimitée,” Revue des Sciences Humaines no. 2 (1986): 67–77; and Eva Cwiek, “L’Egocentrisme narratif dans L’Amant de Marguerite Duras,” Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny XXXIV, n0.4 (1987): 377–89. 57. Laure Adler calls it “the book that brought Duras international fame” (MD, 345). In Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), Leah Hewitt remarks: “the critical reaction to The Lover is in keeping with autobiography’s less than respectable status vis-à-vis literature and confirms Duras’s perennial tendency to straddle categories and to confound opinion” (96). 58. Eva Cwiek, “L’Egocentrisme . . .” 378. 59. Indeed, with L’Amant de la Chine du nord, Duras appears to respond to this reductive move and reclaim her role as novelist, even though the slippage between life and text remains: “Je suis restée dans l’histoire avec ces gens et seulement avec eux. Je suis redevenue un écrivain de romans.” (Preface to L’Amant de la Chine du nord, 12). 60. Not only is it often difficult to distinguish between an “elle” that refers to the mother and one that refers to the narrator, there is in fact a third “elle” in the form of Hélène Lagonelle, whose name lends itself to this play of pronouns and confluence of identities (L’Amant, 89–94). 61. In an article on specular love and incest in Duras’s works, Danielle Bajomée cites Duras’s conception of the mirror: “Duras écrira des miroirs qu’ils sont ‘comme des trous dans lesquels l’image s’engouffre et puis ressort. . . .’” “Amour spéculaire et inceste dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Duras” in Le récit amoureux, ed. Didier Coste (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1984), 235–53, esp. 239. 62. In “Au défaut des mères: Yourcenar, Duras, et la création littéraire,” The French Review, 75, no. 5 (April 2002): 891–902. Carole Allamand notes the relationship between writing and the maternal: “Pour exprimer la nécessité de l’écriture, le texte recourt . . . à une analogie, toujours la même, à savoir la nécessité de la maternité. . . . écriture et maternité apparaissent donc interchangeable . . . la relation maternelle . . . est littérarisée” (893). 63. Mary Lydon “L’Eden Cinéma: Aging and the Imagination in Marguerite Duras” in Memory and Desire, ed. Woodward and Schwartz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 154–167, esp. 158. 64. Yvonne Guers-Villate, Continuité/discontinuité de l’oeuvre durassienne (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1985), 134. 65. As Verena Andermatt Conley notes in her article on “Duras and the Scene of Writing” in Remains to be Seen, 183–195, “L’Amant would be the closing of a series. In it the very stuff of Duras’s fiction and movies is explained, revealed, given an origin. . . . Yet in a sense, L’Amant is but another transformation, another fictional account or metaphoric substitution . . .” (183). And Duras demonstrated, in

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t (Re)productions: Autobiography, Colonialism, & Infanticide 1991, with the publication of L’Amant de la Chine du Nord and in subsequent interviews and writings, that this was a story in which closure was impossible.

FOUR t WRITING INFANTICIDE 1. For example, Beauvoir makes no mention here of 18th-century France, in which infanticide was prevalent (see Maria Piers, Infanticide [New York: Norton, 1978] 58). 2. Luce Irigaray, Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre (Paris: Minuit, 1979). 3. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: New American Library, 1987). 4. For an excellent analysis of the mother as subject in Beloved, see Hirsch’s The Mother/Daughter Plot. 5. Euripides, Medea in Greek Plays in Modern Translation, ed. Dudley Fitts (New York: Dial Press, 1947), 206. 6. Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 198. I realize that to talk about abortion and infanticide in the same breath is a politically treacherous undertaking. In no way do I wish to imply that the two are equivalent, simply that they involve some similar issues, and that as literary themes they can be seen as connected in certain ways. 7. Susan Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood” in The (M)other Tongue, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 8. Josephine McDonagh, “Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture from Hume to Arnold” in Inventing Maternity, ed. Susan Greenfield (Lexington: UP Kentucky, 1999), 215–237. 9. The author’s biography often emphasizes the author’s role as wife and mother. For example, on the back of Aminata Maïga Ka’s La Voie du salut, we read, “Militante fervente de la cause féminine, et mère de famille, elle est mariée à l’écrivain sénégalais Abdou Anta Ka.” 10. Aminata Maïga Ka, La Voie du salut (Paris/Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1985). 11. Id., Le Miroir de la vie (Paris/Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1985). 12. Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Juletane (Paris/Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1982). 13. For other readings of Juletane that focus on confinement, writing, and violence, see Françoise Lionnet “Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts in Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Gail Jones, and Bessie Head,” Callaloo 16.1 (1993): 135–52 and Frieda Ekotto, “Language and Confinement in Francophone Women Writers” in L’Esprit Créateur xxxviii, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 73–83. 14. A. Raphaël Ndiaye, La Place de la femme dans les rites au Sénégal (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1986), 6. 15. Abdoulaye-Bara Diop, La Famille wolof: tradition et changement (Paris: Karthala, 1985), 245. My emphasis. I will discuss shortly Diop’s positioning of women in relation to production and reproduction. 16. I find it intriguing that although Ndiaye sees women in a reproductive role, he credits them as well with artistic inspiration and creativity; this creativity,however, seems to be as unconscious as their reproductive capacity: “finesse de voix, subtilité des sentiments et des émotions, vivacité de l’imagination . . . prédisposent naturellement les femmes à l’activité de création littéraire et à l’entretien du répertoire connu” (52–53).

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17. Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues, Oedipe africain (Paris: Plon, 1966) 22. 18. In Continents noirs (Paris: Editions Tierce, 1987), Awa Thiam objects strenuously to this study and to others like it: “Les travaux de Freud ont reposé essentiellement sur un univers où domine la famille nucléaire. An Afrique—à quelques exceptions près—de telles structures familiales n’existent pas. La famille négro-africaine traditionnelle est polynucléaire . . . pourquoi s’obstiner à mettre des problèmes là où ils ne sont pas, à créer des complexes là où ils n’existent pas?” (79–80). 19. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2. 20. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 21. Homans doesn’t make this distinction, presumably because neither Freud nor Lacan makes it, but I think that it is an essential one. 22. Homans is not, of course, the only theorist to discuss the marked absence of the mother from Western discourse. Julia Kristeva, to name only one, asks, “But why is the speaking subject incapable of uttering the mother within her very self? Why is it that the “mother herself” does not exist? Or that what is (what is said) has a mother who can only be phallic? . . . The mother reemerges as the archetype of the infinitely interchangeable object of the desiring quest” from Desire in Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 194–195. 23. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 294. 24. Idem., Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton), 47. 25. See C. Miller, Theories of Africans, 257–260, for an interesting discussion of the representation of woman in Senghor’s “Femme noire.” 26. Quoted in Mineke Schipper, “Mother Africa on a Pedestal” in Women in African Literature Today, ed. Eldred Durosini Jones (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1987), 47. 27. Leslie Fiedler, “On Infanticide,” Journal of Popular Culture XIV 4 (Spring 1981): 676. 28. For a reading of L’Appel des arènes as social critique, see Samba Gadjigo’s “Social Vision in Aminata Sow Fall’s Literary Work,” World Literature Today 63, 3 (Summer 1989): 411–415. 29. Madeleine Borgomano, “L’Appel des arènes “d’Aminata Sow Fall (Abidjan: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1984), 61. 30. Cynthia Ward “What They Told Buchi Emecheta,” PMLA 105, no. 1 (January 1990): 89. 31. Pierre Loti, Le Roman d’un spahi (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1888). 32. Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 33. For another analysis of the character of Mireille and her role as infanticide, see J.P. Little “The Legacy of Medea: Mariama Bâ, Un Chant Écarlate and Marie Ndiaye, La Femme Changée en Bûche” in The Modern Language Review 95, no. 2 (April 2000): 362–73. 34. For a more thorough discussion of the relation between modern African literature written in French and the French colonial literary tradition, see Guy OssitoMidiohouan, “Exotique? Coloniale? Ou quand la littérature africaine était la littérature des français d’Afrique,” Peuples noirs, peuples africains 29 (1982): 119–126 35. Jeanette Treiber, “Feminism and Identity Politics: Mariama Bá’s Un chant écarlate,” Research in African Literatures 27, no. 4 (winter 1996): 109–123, esp.120.

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36. Mbye Cham, “Contemporary Society and the Female Imagination: A Study of the Novels of Mariama Bâ” in Women in African Literature Today (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1987), 96. 37. Aminata Maïga Ka, “Ramatoulaye, Aïssatou, Mireille et . . . Mariama Bâ,” Notre Librairie 81 (1985): 130. 38. I find it intriguing that a similar juxtaposition of colonialism, solipsism, reproduction, and violence exists in a text as far removed from the literature we’ve discussed here as The Last of the Mohicans. In her article on infanticide in The Last of the Mohicans, Mary Chapman argues that “women threaten white male fantasies of selfmaking, because they are biologically necessary for the white population’s future on the American frontier. . . . Violence towards offspring seems to stand in for unrepresented fantasies of mother-killing” (241–42). Mary Chapman, “Happy Shall He Be, That Taketh and Dasheth Thy Little Ones against the Stones”: Infanticide in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans,” in Inventing Maternity, ed. Susan Greenfield (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999), 238–251. 39. I have discussed this aspect of the text in more detail in Chapter II. 40. In L’Amant de la Chine du Nord, which I have not included in this chapter, the incestuous relationship between sister and brother becomes explicit. 41. Deborah Kelly Kloepfer does an extensive analysis of the dangerous mother figure and the fear of mother/daughter incest in The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H. D. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 42. It is also interesting to note that in both instances the death (or fantasized death) of the mother is a suicide. 43. My thanks to Eliza Nichols, who first suggested the significance of this passage to me.

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Index

A abortion, 64, 96 Achebe, Chinua, 60 Africa, in autobiography, 50–52 African literature, 7, 51, 53, 60–61, 117 Africans Learn to Be French (Mumford), 25 Amant, L’ (Duras), 32, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 79–84, 84, 85, 86–87, 118–22, 119 Amant de la Chine du nord, L’ (Duras), 39, 41, 42, 43, 80 Ames, Sanford S., 86 Anderson, Benedict, 132n24 Angkor, Cambodia, 39 Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 39 Anozie, Sunday, 60 apostrophe, 64–65, 96 Appel des arènes, L’ (Sow Fall), 21, 29–32, 106–17, 124, 125 Aristotle, 8 artists, and society, 8 assimilation, 24–26, 28, 30, 67 association, colonial policy of, 26 Augustine, Saint, 47, 133n31 authority, reproduction and challenge to, 8–9

Autobiographies d’Africains (Westermann), 50–51 autobiography African, 50–52 Bâ and, 58–70, 87–89, 116–17 and colonialism, 34–36, 38, 50–51, 55–56, 72 and domination, 34–36 Duras and, 38–39, 41, 45, 79–89 as genre, 5–6, 33–34, 36, 37, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55–56, 72, 79–80, 87–89, 127–28, 133n31 and identity, 72, 78–79, 82–83, 127, 133n31 and the individual, 51 and infanticide, 75, 77, 115–16 Kéita and, 52–58 Loti and, 36–38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 115–16, 133n31 and reproduction, 48, 61, 75, 77, 82, 104–5 and resistance to colonialism, 79 Sow Fall and, 70–79, 87–89 as subversive, 17–18 women and, 34, 48–50, 70, 71, 104–5

152


B Bâ, Mariama, 1, 2, 3, 27 and autobiography, 48, 58–70, 87–89, 116–17 and infanticide, 104, 107, 113–17, 124–25, 127 Un chant écarlate, 68, 89, 112–17, 124–25 Une si longue lettre, 19–20, 28–29, 58–70, 76, 88 Baobab fou, Le (Bugul), 71 Barrage contre le Pacifique (Duras), 32–33, 39, 42, 44, 80, 82, 84, 85–86, 87, 117–18, 119, 123 Barthes, Roland, 88 Baudelaire, Charles, 64, 65 Baudrillard, Jean, 8, 9–10, 16, 21 Beaujour, Michel, 52, 82 Beauvoir, Simone de, 11, 91–92 Belgium, 13–18 Beloved (Morrison), 93–94, 96 Benjamin, Walter, 8–9, 10, 21 Béti, Mongo, 61 Blank Darkness (Miller), 23 body, physical, 84–85 Bongie, Chris, 37–38, 113 Borgamano, Madeleine, 108 Bugul, Ken, 71

C Camara, Laye, 53, 61, 106 Cambodia, 39–41. See also French Indochina capitalism, 24 Catholic Church, 13–14 Catholicism, 27 Cham, Mbye, 114 Chant écarlate, Un (Bâ), 68, 89, 112–17, 124–25 Chekhov, Anton, 93 children, speaking/writing from position of, 95, 96 Chodorow, Nancy, 104 Christianity, 12, 26–27 Cohen, William, 24 Colonial Experience in French Fiction, The

(Hargreaves), 36 colonialism and autobiography, 34–36, 38, 50–51, 55–56, 72, 79 capitalism and, 24 and domination, 26, 34–36 education and, 15, 24–33, 131n15 and idealism, 36, 37 and the individual, 35–36 infanticide and, 122–25, 127–28 and printed works, 132n24 and representation, 23 reproduction and, 13–18 Colonial Office, Paris, France, 38 creativity, 5, 8

D Damnés de la terre, Les (Fanon), 73 “dark continent”, 112 de Man, Paul, 139n38 Demeter, 94 Dernier de l’Empire, Le (Seinbène), 72, 73, 88 Diallo, Nafissatou, 1, 3, 71 and autobiography, 48 De Tilène au Plateau, 20–21, 56–58 difference, reproduction and, 21 Diop, Abdoulaye-Bara, 99–101, 104 Diouf, Abdou, 72 domination and autobiography, 34–36 and colonialism, 26, 34–36 and the individual, 35 reproduction as, 10 Duras, Marguerite, 1, 2, 3, 27, 32–33, 34 and autobiography, 38–39, 41, 45, 48, 79–89 Eden Cinéma cycle, 38–45, 79–87, 117–25 and the exotic, 42 and infanticide, 104, 120–25, 127

E Echo, 16–17

INDEX

y

153

Ecole blanche/Afrique noire (Gadjigo), 24–26, 60–61 Eden Cinéma, L’ (Duras), 32, 42, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86–87, 119, 120, 122–23 Eden Cinéma cycle (Duras), 32–33, 38–45, 41, 79–87, 117–25 education and colonialism, 15, 24–33, 131n15 and military metaphors, 28 and modernity, 30 and resistance to colonialism, 27, 32–33 segregation in, 27 and tradition, 30–31, 54 Une si longue lettre and, 59 Electra, 94 Enfant noir, L’ (Camara), 53 Engels, Frederick, 7 epistolary novels, 58–59, 64–65, 68–69 exotic, the Duras and, 42 landscape and, 37 Loti and, 42, 133n28 love and, 39 Exotic Memories (Bongie), 37–38 Ex-père de la nation, L’ (Sow Fall), 70–79, 88, 89

Fiedler, Leslie, 107 Figaro, Le, 37 Foucault, Michel, 35 France, as colonial power, 23–33, 36–45, 122, 131n15 francophone Africa, 53, 68, 117 French Indochina, 26, 32–33, 34, 38–45, 79–84. See also Cambodia; Vietnam French language, 26–27, 32 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 96, 102–5, 121

G Gadjigo, Samba, 24–26, 60–61 gender. See women genres autobiography, 5–6, 33–34, 36, 37, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55–56, 72, 79–80, 87–89, 127–28, 133n31 epistolary novel, 58–59, 64–65, 68–69 novel, 33–34 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 93 Great Britain, 97 Grève des bàttu, La, 32 Guers-Villate, Yvonne, 85 Gugelberger, Georg, 7

F Fall, Aminata Sow, 1, 2, 3, 27 L’Appel des arènes, 21, 29–32, 106–17, 124, 125 and autobiography, 48, 70–79, 87–89 L’Ex-père de la nation, 70–79, 88, 89 and infanticide, 104, 106–17, 125, 127 Fanon, Frantz, 73 Fanoudh-Siefer, Léon, 36, 133n28 Faust (Goethe), 93 feminism and assimilation, 67 Bâ and new Africa, 29 L’Ex-père de la nation and, 73 and reproduction, 10–12 Femme d’Afrique (Kéita), 52–56, 61

H Hargreaves, Alec, 36 Harrell-Bond, Barbara, 60, 62 Heinemann (publisher), 67 Hirsch, Marianne, 94–96 Homans, Margaret, 103–4 homosexuality, 14 Horney, Karen, 96 Hountondji, Paulin, 132n24

I identity autobiography and, 72, 78–79, 82–83, 127, 133n31 construction through reproduction

154


of, 12, 16–18 in Duras’ work, 45 in Femme d’Afrique, 53 infanticide and, 124 incest, 76–77, 86, 120–21 individual, the and autobiography, 51 colonialism and, 35–36 in Western society, 35 Indochina. See French Indochina infanticide, 89 and autobiography, 75, 77, 89, 115–16 and colonialism, 122–25, 127–28 in L’Ex-père de la nation, 75 in literature, 93–125 psychoanalysis and, 105 and reproduction, 111, 116–17, 125 studies of, 91–93, 99–106 In Search of Southeast Asia (Steinberg), 26 Invention of Africa, The (Mudimbe), 23 Irigaray, Luce, 11–12, 92

J Jocasta, 95–96 Johnson, Barbara, 64–65, 96 Juletane (Vieyra), 98–99

K Ka, Aminata Maïga, 60, 61, 97–98 Kane, Mohamadou, 51, 55 Kéita, Aoua, 1, 3, 71 and autobiography, 48, 52–58 Femme d’Afrique, 52–56, 61 Kelly, Gail P., 27 Klein, Melanie, 96 Kristeva, Julia, 12

L Lacan, Jacques, 96, 102–5 language and colonialism, 132n24

of francophone Africa, 53, 68, 117 French, 26–27, 32 Vietnamese, 26 Wolof, 31, 59, 67, 116 women and, 103–4, 125 Le Goff, Germaine, 28, 29 Lejeune, Philippe, 133n31 Lionnet, Françoise, 71, 75 literature African, 7, 51, 53, 60–61, 117 and politics, 7–8 and reproduction, 7–8 Loti, Pierre, 1, 2, 3, 34, 43 and autobiography, 36–38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 115–16, 133n31 and the exotic, 42, 133n28 and infanticide, 112–13, 115–16 Le Roman d’un Spahi, 37, 112–16 pseudonym of Julien Viaud, 37 on sexuality, 44 Un Pèlerin D’Angkor, 39–41 Lydon, Mary, 85 lyric poetry, 64, 96

M Mariage de Loti, Le (Loti), 44 marriage, 53–54, 55, 65–66, 67, 98–99 Marx, Karl, 6, 7, 24 Marxism, reproduction in, 6–10 Mary, Virgin, 12 masculinity, and literature, 73, 74, 78 maternity. See motherhood, the maternal McDonagh, Josephine, 97 mechanical reproduction, 8–9, 10, 128 Medea, 94–95 métissage, 71 midwifery, 19–22, 56 military, metaphor of, 28 Miller, Christopher, 23, 53, 55, 65, 66, 67, 68, 76 mimesis, 7, 8, 60–61, 82 miroir de la vie, Le (Maïga Ka), 98 Miroirs d’Encre (Beaujour), 52 modernity, modernism education and, 30 in literature, 7 versus tradition, 107–9, 124

INDEX

y

155

Montaigne, Michel de, 47, 49, 133n31 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, 93–94, 96 Mother Africa, 106 Mother/Daughter Plot, The (Hirsch), 94 mother-daughter relationship, 54–55, 75, 83–86, 94, 101–5 motherhood, the maternal, 76, 109 artistic creation and, 96–97 and autobiography, 49–50 idealization of, 91–92 literature and, 95 and “Mother Africa,” 106 and reproduction, 11, 12, 56, 88, 111 in Senegal, 99–106 See also infanticide; mother-daughter relationship Moukoko, Gobina, 29, 32 Mpoyi-Buatu, Thomas, 1, 2, 128 La Re-production, 13–19, 127 Mudimbe, V. Y., 23, 26 Mumford, W. Bryant, 25

N Narcissus, 16–17 Ndiaye, Raphaël, 99–101 NEA (French publisher), 67 Ngaté, Jonathan, 133n28 novel, as genre, 33–34, 58–59 nursery rhymes, 93

O Oedipal complex, 101–5 Oedipe africain (Ortigues and Ortigues), 101–3 Oedipus myth, 95–96, 105, 121–22 Olney, James, 51–52 Olson, Tillie, 96 orality, 17, 51, 63, 68 Orientalism (Said), 23 original, originality, 8–9, 10 Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, The (Engels), 7 Ortigues, Edmond, 101–3 Ortigues, Marie-Cécile, 101–3

P paintings by Loti, 36 Pèlerin D’Angkor, Un (Loti), 39–41 Piers, Maria, 92–93, 107 Plato, 8 poetry. See lyric poetry politics L’Ex-père de la nation and African, 73 and literature, 7–8 postcolonialism, 128, 133n31 postmodernism, 47, 128 poststructuralism, 10, 47 power. See domination production, and reproduction, 5–7, 9, 11 prosopopeia, 139n38 prostitution, 14 psychoanalysis, 96, 101–5, 121–22, 124

R RDA, 53, 56 realism, 7, 8, 86. See also mimesis representation, 9, 23 reproduction, 5–22 devaluation of, 5–6, 7 feminism and, 10–12 in Marxism, 6–10 mechanical, 8–9, 10, 128 power of, 6 and production, 5–7, 9, 11 sexual, as sole justification, 13–14 significance of concept of, 1–2 Re-production, La (Mpoyi-Buatu), 13–19, 127 Revue de littérature comparée, 51 rhetoric, 10 Rich, Adrienne, 96 Roman africain et tradition (Kane), 51 Roman alphabet, 26 Roman d’un Spahi, Le (Loti), 37, 39, 112–16 romanticism, colonialism and, 36, 37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 47, 49, 133n31

156


S Said, Edward, 23 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 73 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir), 11, 91 self. See identity Sembène, Ousmane, 7, 72, 73, 88, 106 Senegal, 19–20, 21, 28–32, 51, 56–79, 96–117 Senghor, Léopold, 72, 106 sexuality, 13, 17, 43–45, 57. See also homosexuality Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 64, 65 signification, reproduction and theory of, 9–10 si longue lettre, Une (Bâ), 19–20, 58–70, 88 simulation, 9, 10 sketches by Loti, 36 Sleepyhead (Chekhov), 93 Sociologie du roman africain (Anozie), 60 Southeast Asia. See French Indochina Stanton, Domna, 48, 60 Steinberg, David J., 26 Suleiman, Susan, 96–97

voie du salut, La (Maïga Ka), 97–98

W Walker, Keith, 65 Ward, Cynthia, 111 Watson, Julia, 71 Westermann, Dietrich, 50–52 Wolof culture, 99–101 Wolof language, 31, 59, 67, 116 women and autobiography, 34, 48–50, 70, 71, 104–5 Engels on, 7 and language, 103–4, 125 and reproduction, 7, 11–12, 48, 49, 56, 88 in Senegal, 99–106 See also mother-daughter relationship; motherhood, the maternal “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 8–9 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 73 writing and disaster, 63 versus orality, 17, 51, 63, 68

T Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 7 Tilène au Plateau, De (Diallo), 20–21, 56–58 tradition education and, 30–31, 54 versus modernity, 107–9, 124 reproduction and, 9 Treiber, Jeanette, 113–14

V Viaud, Julien (pseudonym Pierre Loti), 37. See also Loti, Pierre Vietnam, 26–27, 40–41, 131n15. See also French Indochina Vietnamese language, 26 Vietnamese Novel in French (Yeager), 26 Vieyra, Myriam Warner, 98–99 Virgin Mary, 11

Y Yeager, Jack, 26

Z Zaire, 13–18

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