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Yambo Ouologuem, Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, ed. Christopher Wise. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999. 258 pp. 0-89410-861-1. US$55.
During the 1970s, when African literature was sinking roots in European and North American academic institutions, Yambo Ouologuem was a pivotal figure. Le devoir de violence had burst onto the scene, announcing a radical shift in literary sensibility, an alternative to the rather flat realist or the "sincere" autobiographical modes of self-expression then prevalent. Sincere, by all evidence, is something Ouologuem was not. The text and its author were quickly embroiled in rounds of polemic concerning its possible plagiarism.
The novel ultimately kept its annunciatory promise. We need only think of the subsequent works of Sony Labou Tansi, V. Y. Mudimbe, or indeed Calixthe Beyala, to realize how far African writing in French has leapt from the early years-if, that is, literary leaps and bounds can be measured in terms of innovation and experiment. Though Ouologuem was not the sine qua non of this development, his text cleared terrain for others to cultivate, or in Wise's words, he helped swab the deck.
Then, of course, a strange thing happened. After another provocative but less successful work, Lettre d la France negre, and a decent piece of pornography, for readers with those tastes, Ouologuem dropped from the (European) face of the earth. It turned out he had simply returned to Africa, translating into actual fact the metaphor of retour aux sources that dominates the literary but not necessarily geographical logic of African intellectuals. From the French perspective, there was something very Rimbaud-like in this renunciation and almost angelic departure. As Christopher Wise's personal chapters in the book under review amply demonstrate, such a reading of Ouologuem's trajectory is profoundly Eurocentric, though once again, there is room for considerable ambiguity when it comes to almost...