By AiW Guest: Lizzy Attree.
Author note: Huge thanks for Katie Reid’s editorial support and insight which really enhanced this article and perfected its final form.
Le Devoir de Violence / Bound to Violence, by Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem was republished earlier this year as a Penguin Modern Classic, a series of books self-defined as “shaping the reading habits of generations since 1961.”
First released in 1968 by the prestigious Editions du Seuil, and translated into English by Ralph Manheim in 1971, anyone familiar with Bound to Violence and the history of its reception might query this decision: why revive this particular French west African book, in its original translation, for readers now, in 2024? Why, moreover, embrace it into its Classics range, an act of canonisation in itself, with a history of imbalanced power relations and reader influence of its own?
Winning the Prix Renaudot in its year of publication, Bound to Violence was lauded as a “skyscraper” of a book, and a “great African novel.” before being swiftly condemned for plagiarism, notably by Graham Greene, who mounted a legal case against Ouologuem. (For those not familiar with the history, Greene’s early 1934 novel, It’s A Battlefield (Heinemann) was one in question, having been brought to attention by a research student and fan of Greene’s work in Australia. For more on the public nature of the scandal and its tenor, it may be worth looking at the New York Times article, published from London shortly after the release of the translation in the States, in 1972; and/or how it is picked up by scholarship, such as this comparative angle paper in Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora out of Harvard, also 1972, in which you can read the short passages at issue, laid side-by-side for comparison as part of the analysis. Neither article is behind the publication’s paywalls. Also of note, André Schwarz-Bart’s Dernier des Justes / The Last of the Just, and works by Guy de Maupassant were also in the frame but with notably different responses.) Mired in the resulting controversy, the novel was withdrawn from publication in France and the US. The author returned to Mali after ten years of a bitter feud with Seuil, refusing to admit any wrong-doing and dying in obscurity in 2017.
These events are mirrored in Senegalese novelist Mohamed Sarr’s La Plus Secrète Mémoire Des Hommes, first published by Editions Phillippe Rey (Paris) in co-edition with Editions Jimsaan in Dakar in 2021, and later, in translation, by Lara Vergnaud, as The Most Secret Memory of Men with indie Other Press (NYC) in 2023. Dedicated, simply and directly, as being “For Yambo Ouologuem,” Sarr’s novel tells the story of a young Senegalese writer named Diégane Latyr Faye, living in Paris, who discovers a legendary 1938 novel by the fictional African author T.C. Elimane. Nicknamed “the Black Rimbaud”, Elimane has disappeared in the wake of a fierce literary scandal. The parallel of Ouologuem with the absent Elimane is spot on, whose work – like that of visionary enfant terrible and iconoclast of French poetry Arthur Rimbaud, to whom many literary greats have acknowledged their indebtedness – is depicted as being notoriously transgressive and surreal.
Sarr’s metafictional take has revived interest in Ouologuem who is now being reconsidered as a maligned literary star of his generation. Indeed, looking back to literary forebears who have been missed by many is a provocative place to begin thinking through Bound to Violence as a 2024 ‘Modern Classic’. French west African texts are certainly less accessible in the UK/West than their English language counterparts but the more recent growth in prestige of translation as a craft, alongside the growing dominance of authors in both French and international literary prizes in the last few years demands greater attention.
It was for his depiction in La Plus Secrete Memoire Des Hommes that Sarr won the prestigious French language Prix Goncourt in 2021, lauded as the “first writer from sub-Saharan Africa” to have done so. In the same year, David Diop won the International Booker Prize for his novel Frère d’âme / At Night All Blood is Black, translated by Anna Moschovakis: it was also shortlisted for ten major prizes in France and won the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens, an award in which a shortlist of 12 works selected by Académie Goncourt are read and debated by around 2,000 high school students, who then vote on their winner; as well as the Swiss Prix Ahmadou Korouma, a French language prize named after the Ivorian writer and awarded “to a fiction or essay book on sub-Saharan Africa”. In 2022, Wolophone and Francophone writer Boubacar Boris Diop took the Neustadt International Prize for Literature – a prize for which “any living author writing in any language is eligible, provided only that at least a representative portion of his or her work is available in English”. The representative text in the nomination was Murambi: Le Livre des Ossements / The Book of Bones, translated by Fiona McLaughlin.
Even earlier, this precedent was set when Maryse Conde won multiple French literary prizes, as well as the alternative Nobel, the New Academy Prize in Literature, in 2018 for her entire body of work, mostly published between 1976 and 1999. Of note, both Conde’s Ségou / Segu (1984) and Traversee de la Mangrove / Crossing the Mangrove (1989) have been republished in translation as Penguin Modern Classics, in 2017 and 2021 respectively.
The market route of Sarr’s novel, in part a tribute to “the challenge for African writers to escape the literary ghettos in which people try to confine them,” as Sophie Joubert recognises, might also be instructive here. The first British publication of The Most Secret Memory of Men (in Vergnaud’s translation) came a little late to the UK market, released earlier this year (2024) in late February, in hardback, with Harvill Secker, an imprint of – you guessed it – Penguin Random House. The paperback will be released in 2025.
At the risk of over-reading the relationship between the UK re/publications of these intertextually intimate Francophone west African texts in translation – The Most Secret Memory of Men in February; Bound to Violence in March – and where the (admittedly long and inextricably global) British arm of Penguin Random House is visible, their proximity in timing does appear to draw something of a trajectory. But, underlying the significance that this may point to for the English language literary establishment and the expansion of its canon, for this most recent Bound to Violence publication, there also runs the question of the ‘classic’ itself.
Penguin’s Modern Classic edition of Bound to Violence is introduced by the authority of Malian filmmaker and Francophone African and Caribbean literary scholar, Chérif Keïta. Entitled ‘Tracking the Trickster in Mali: My Encounter with Yambo Ouologuem,’ beyond the illustrative tale of a difficult near meeting with Ouologuem when on an immersive field-trip to Mali with his students, Keïta’s Foreword picks up on the rage that infuses Ouologuem’s sometimes playful but certainly ‘badly behaved’ use of the French language. Striking at the heart of polite French letters, taking the novel far from that “in which the African writer had pandered to the condescending expectations of the Western reader” (ix), Keïta puzzles over the ambiguities in the international responses to the plagiarism scandal, foregrounding Mali and Ouologuem as visionary, the energetic drive behind the book’s proverbial violence.
And Bound to Violence is shockingly negative in its derisive descriptions of pre-colonial west Africa. Bucking the trend of its contemporaneous postcolonial writing, it notoriously attacks Négritude, specifically its purely positive representations of African culture, to the extent that Senegal’s poet president Leopold Senghor described it as “appalling”. A challenging book, particularly to republish as a ‘classic’ for a new audience, it continues to beg the question, why revive this discredited novel for readers in the twenty-first century?
Divided into four parts — ‘The Legend of the Saïfs’, ‘Ecstasy and Agony’, ‘The Night of the Giants’, and ‘Dawn’ – covering everything from practices of slavery and the incursion of the Arab empire, to the Saïfs’ identity as Jewish and the onslaught of the French colonists, Ouologuem’s novel certainly runs a full gamut. No-one is spared the caustic satire on the brutality of humanity, and a complex and multi-directional attribution of blame and subjugation emerges, as it is both illustrated and decried.
Part one, ‘The Legend of the Saïfs’, takes in a sweeping history of the novel’s imaginary Nakem empire, full of violence and infighting of an ancient west African people, akin to the Mali Empire of the 13th Century. The ‘Ecstasy and Agony’ of part two describes the double-edged resistance against European/French colonisation and the final surrender in 1900 of the deceitful and corrupt leader, Saïf ben Isaac al-Heit, whose people thus “[s]aved from slavery, welcomed the white man with joy, hoping he would make them forget the mighty Saïf’s meticulously organised cruelty” (35).
Throughout, the Saïfs are depicted to be a questionable line whose greed and war-mongering are laid bare, but it’s difficult to digest the centuries of incidents perpetrated by the familial Empire (patricide and fratricide) concentrated into part one, and the patchwork quality of this dynastic onslaught serves to obfuscate the central narrative of the story which takes place in the 1900s. The subsequent focus on the first half of the twentieth-century, to 1947, does more to successfully bring together the key characters and events, in particular the ways in which the ruling Saïf compromises with and yet still retains the upper hand through the colonisation process.
The Catholic church, as well as the French diplomatic core, nobles and notables of Nakem, the servants and staff – all comprise a court, of sorts, for Saïf to continue to wield his unrelenting manipulative power over. This includes, for example, claiming the “right of the first night” (56) when two of his servants, Kassoumi and Tambira, marry. Tambira is not a virgin, so she undergoes the painful infibulation, a genital mutilation which removes her clitoris and pins together her labia with thorns to leave a small opening before her wedding night. This is one of the moments in the text with striking relevance today, locating FGM as historically abhorrent, when Gambia’s parliament have recently rejected a proposed bill that would have ended the ban on female genital mutilation, brought by advocates for the continuity of this brutal practice on cultural and religious grounds.
The resulting son of this union of Saïfs’ servants, comically named Raymond-Spartacus, provides the most compelling element of the story in part three, ‘The Night of the Giants’, also bringing with it a familiar set of narratives of the postcolony, as he develops into a bright educated man who is sent to Paris to further his education. This is where his life resembles that of the disillusionment with the metropole familiar in semi- and more strictly autobiographical postcolonial writing – from Senegalese writer Cheikh Amoudou Kane’s L’Aventure Ambiguë / Ambiguous Adventure (1961), to Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977). Raymond’s tragic existence refocuses the reader’s attention on the dilemma faced by educated African émigrés to meet the expectations of their people, but also to endure the onslaught of change, racism and poverty which meets them in Europe. Raymond even survives the Second World War, only to return to find his home in Strasbourg bombed, his wife and one son remaining. His return to Nakem – le retour – sees his dream of triumph crushed by Saïfs’ ever-present manipulation and exploitation.
Alongside this touching story of one man’s life, there is also some seriously egregious writing in colonial sex scenes which include bestiality and the description of a penis as a “pink, plump mollusk” (66), as well as a whole section narrated by a man called Sankolo, a murderer, who was thought to be dead. Apparently sold and drugged with “dabali” which drives him into an erotically engorged frenzy, he works, travels and ejaculates in a nightmare of pain and forgetting, illustrating in extreme terms the debasement of slavery, caused not just by Europeans but by Africans themselves. Summoning the force of the language already present in the text and translation, Sankolo surmises that “Maybe it’s just a nigger’s life. Slave. Sold. Bought, sold again, trained. Thrown to the winds . . . They need cheap labor” (128). This simple, almost throwaway line encapsulates centuries of inhumanity in the name of capitalism, and again, this is the result of the voracious appetites, not of a monolithic force but of the compound interactions between diffuse empires around the world.
A similarly significant thread for current cultural politics, at a time when the provenance of many looted treasures of African art are now being investigated and objects returned to their countries of origin, is that represented by the anthropologist, Shrobenius, who enters Saïf’s realm in part three along with the French. ’Gifted’ with, he sells-on thousands of pieces of African art, “carloads his disciples had obtained in Nakem free of charge” (113). He is mocked as a “human crayfish afflicted with a groping mania for resuscitating an African universe — cultural autonomy he called it . . . determined to find metaphysical meaning in everything”. But this creates a market for “Negro pseudosymbolism”, which of course Saïf takes advantage of, having “slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight . . . to be exhumed later on and sold at exorbitant prices to unsuspecting curio hunters” (114). The deviancy and subterfuge of Saïf is both frightening and amusing, but never to be underestimated.
In itself, Bound to Violence is a significant, thought-provoking novel. To be considered alongside other African English language literary greats we have come to know of the same era, it is also to be read with caution in terms of its stylistic and satirical ambitions. Ouologuem’s novel fits alongside the experimentation of Tutuola and the ambition of Achebe, with the political ire of Wa Thiong’o, having an additional je ne sais quoi that makes it a thrilling, eye-opening read. A timely re-addition to the African literary canon, is it a Penguin Modern Classic, in the vein that we have come to expect from African writers familiarised as such by the series it joins?
One of the features Penguin have periodically called on over the years to unpack the parameters of their influential book series is Italo Calvino’s article ‘Why Read the Classics?’. 14 pithy steps, eloquently demonstrating why we should read them, Calvino’s article also works cumulatively towards a definition of what a classic is (most recently republished in full on Penguin’s website in October 2023). Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence fits all 14 of the criteria, but one in particular stands out in light of the book’s 2024 republication: ‘A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers’.
Bound to be re-read, Le Devoir de Violence as Bound to Violence illustrates that many of the issues this international west African, Malian novel in translation raises – its publication, reception, and reputation, its anti-establishment rage and iconoclast drives – these are still with us, to be stringently re-examined and rethought, still to be reckoned with.
Lizzy Attree is the co-founder of the Safal Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. She has a PhD from SOAS, University of London and Blood on the Page, her collection of interviews with the first African writers to write about HIV and AIDS from Zimbabwe and South Africa, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2010. She is a Director on the board of Short Story Day Africa and was the Director of the Caine Prize from 2014 to 2018. She teaches World Literature at Richmond, the American University in London. She is the Producer of ‘Thinking Outside the Penalty Box’, an African Footballers project partnering with Chelsea and Arsenal, funded by Arts Council England and supported by the Poetry Society, and a freelance writer, reviewer and critic.
Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence, a Penguin Modern Classic (2024), is available at Penguin Books UK website (penguin.co.uk), on the image link below, where you can also read Chérif Keïta‘s Foreword, ‘Tracking the Trickster in Mali’ via the ‘Look Inside’ function:
