Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship

The Aesthetics of Tyranny

Cecile Bishop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351553568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The figure of the dictator looms large in representations of postcolonial Africa. Since the late 1970s, writers, film-makers and theorists have sought to represent the realities of dictatorship without endorsing the colonialist cliches portraying Africans as incapable of self-government. Against the heavily-politicized responses provoked by this dilemma, Bishop argues for a form of criticism that places the complexity of the reader's or spectator's experiences at the heart of its investigations. Ranging across literature, film and political theory, this study calls for a reengagement with notions - often seen as unwelcome diversions from political questions - such as referentiality, genre and aesthetics. But rather than pit 'political' approaches against formal and aesthetic procedures, the author presents new insights into the interplay of the political and the aesthetic. Cecile Bishop is a Junior Research Fellow in French at Somerville College, Oxford.

Chapter 1
Two Readings of Henri Lopes’s Le Pleurer-rire

To begin this chapter, I would like to go back briefly to the scene of Bokassa's coronation with which I started this book. At first sight, Bokassa's imitation of Napoleon may seem to epitomize the entrapment of many post-colonial states in a situation of political and cultural mimicry, in which African rulers have sought to appropriate the ex-colonizer's rhetoric. For Napoleon I, the gesture of crowning himself instead of letting the Pope do it signified his independence from Rome's religious authority and a break from the traditions of the French monarchy. By importing this gesture into the post-colonial context, Bokassa produced the opposite meaning: his imitation of Napoleon's self-crowning did not signify independence but, on the contrary, his enduring political and cultural subjection to the ex-colonizer. Yet in doing so, didn't Bokassa unwittingly expose the inauthenticity and pompousness of Napoleon's own coronation, in which the French emperor presented himself as a new Caesar?

This re-interpretation of Bokassa's coronation follows a well-established pattern in postcolonial theory and criticism. Looking at the prevalence of concepts such as parody, mimicry or hybridity, it may indeed be argued that repetition and its subversive potential is one of the key concerns of the discipline. As I mentioned in the Introduction, many of the most influential and fascinating works of postcolonial theory have explored the complex and ambiguous effects created, for example, by the imitation of colonial culture by colonized elites (a phenomenon famously described by V. S. Naipaul in his novel The Mimic Men or by Ousmane Sembène in Xala), or by the appropriation of European literary and aesthetic forms by writers from (post-)colonized countries. In these interpretations, the act of repeating the colonial norm has usually been given an ambiguous signification. On the one hand, repetition, with the distortions and displacements of meaning it enables, is often described as subverting any claims to a fixed, stable or authentic identity, be it that of the colonizer or that of the colonized. In this way, it is seen to radically undermine the essentialist claims of colonial discourse. But on the other hand, repetition also reveals the difficulty of overthrowing the existing order, and remains locked in a relation of mutual dependency with the forms of cultural or political domination it imperfectly subverts.

An example of this type of analysis may be found in Homi Bhabha's famous discussion of the stereotype. According to Bhabha, the aim of the stereotype as a discursive strategy is to ensure both the knowability and the fixity of the other's identity. But the stereotype, because it can only work by being constantly repeated, also betrays an anxiety and a repressed awareness of the fact that identity cannot be ascribed or known in this way. The stereotype is therefore

a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place', already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated... as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual licence of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved.¹

According to this interpretation, the stereotype is not only an oppressive form of discourse that may be used by the colonizer to assert his difference from the colonized and his cultural superiority, but also the symptom of a more obscure discomfort concerning his proclaimed superiority, or even the reality of cultural difference.

Although this first chapter will be concerned with notions that have been central to postcolonial theory, such as parody and stereotypes, it will seek to go beyond these familiar interpretive moves. It will focus on one of the most celebrated francophone novels about dictatorship, Henri Lopes's Le Pleurer-rire. In the first part of the chapter, I will suggest that Lopes's use of parody and colonial stereotypes may resonate with the sort of paradoxical politics that have been central to much work in postcolonial criticism. Indeed, Le Pleurer-rire makes a particularly deft use of parody and irony, and offers an engaging response to the dilemma between, on the one hand, a denunciation of dictatorship that would confirm colonial stereotypes, and on the other hand, a form of nationalistic, politically committed literature. In the second part of the chapter, however, I will reveal that Lopes's novel may also offer a privileged point of inquiry to question these dominant forms of interpretation. I will show that in spite of an apparent concern with politics, such interpretations may be perceived as disconnected from the actual political realities of the continent. More precisely, I will show that the failure of many postcolonial critics to engage in consistent ways with issues such as authorial intention or the relevance of biographical information, reveals some inherent theoretical tensions in the field.

Part 1: Subversive Ironies and Political Ambivalence

Since its publication in 1982, Le Pleurer-rire has often been described as being part of a post-independence aesthetic 'renewal' of Francophone African literature. In his 1986 book Nouvelles écritures africaines: romanciers de la seconde génération, Séwanou Dabla described Le Pleurer-rire and Sony Labou Tansi's La Vie et demie (1979) as prime examples of the emergence of a new and subversive stage of African literature, inaugurated in 1968 by Ahmadou Kourouma's Les Soleils des indépendances and Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence.² A similar analysis was proposed in Creation et rupture en littérature africaine (1996) by Georges Ngal, who also insisted on the ground-breaking dimension of La Vie et demie and Le Pleurer-rire, especially in their treatment of dictatorship:

L'apparition de Sony Labou Tansi avec La Vie et demie (1979) et d'autres écrivains comme H. Lopès [sic] avec Le Pleurer-rire (1983) permet de parler de 'ruptures', dans le champ linguistique et littéraire. Le contexte historique incite à la revendication de plus de liberté face au dictateur, démystifié, rendu plus bouffon et ubuesque, dans un Etat, échec du placage de l'Etat d'origine européenne.³

[The emergence of Sony Labou Tansi with La Vie et demie (1979) and of other writers like H. Lopès [sic] with Le Pleurer-rire (1982) allows us to speak of 'ruptures' in the linguistic and literary field. The historical context incites authors to demand more freedom against dictators, who are demystified, made more buffoonish and ubuesque [grotesque], in nation-states that are failed imitations of their European models.]

Dabla and Ngal opposed the exuberant and self-consciously literary aesthetic of Sony and Lopes to the work of a previous generation of writers which they described —somewhat unfairly — as narrowly realist and hostile to formal concerns.

Le Pleurer-rire is indeed characterized by a complex, multi-layered narrative and a constant use of metafiction. The novel is set in a fictional African country called 'Le Pays' [The Country], which is situated 'quelque part sur ce continent' [somewhere on this continent] (p. 60) and is ruled by a dictator, Bwakamabé Na Sakkadé. Bwakamabé is a brutal tyrant, who has been compared to a number of real African heads of states, including Bokassa (who shared his nostalgic passion for the French army), Mobutu (who made similar arguments about democracy being a Western invention), Sékou Touré (who had comparable literary ambitions) or Idi Amin (whose expulsion of Uganda's Indian community resembles Bwakamabé's eviction of Lusitanian traders).⁴ The composite character of 'Le Pays' is reinforced by the mosaic of languages that have been included in the novel, especially in the characters' names, which are derived from Lingala, French, Kikongo, Latin and Arabic.⁵ The main narrative strand of the novel consists of a retrospective first-person account by a character named 'Maître', who used to be Bwakamabé Na Sakkadé's maître d'hôtel and is now writing a memoir about this experience while living in exile. This main narrative is constantly interrupted by sub-plots and digressions resulting from Maître's apparent lack of focus, as well as by the critical comments of some of the other characters on the truthfulness and political value of Maître's manuscript.⁶

Maître corresponds to one of the familiar devices of satire, that of the naive narrator. He describes himself as 'un nègre modeste qui fait son éducation' [a modest black man seeking his education] by listening to other people's opinions (p. 36). Thus Maître is usually keen to let others intervene in his narrative, and his own voice feeds on all the worn-out discourses that surround him: dictatorial propaganda, colonial clichés, anticolonial platitudes, patriarchal prejudices, public rumours (humorously referred to as 'radio-trottoir'), quotations from canonical writers, and so on. In the face of the overwhelming quantity of pre-existing discourses about Africa, the solution enacted in the novel is not to seek authenticity, but rather to embrace the many clichés which have caricatured and misrepresented the continent. But in reality, Maître's account constantly undermines these opinions: not only are they frequently made to contradict each other, but his own narrative actually reproduces them in a slightly altered form.

For instance, Maître borrows his depiction of Bwakamabé from the official press:

A l'école primaire, il aurait appris plus vite que les autres et se serait distingué à l'attention de ses moniteurs par des qualités exceptionnelles. [...] Il n'aurait jamais fait une faute d'orthographe à ses dictées. Il aurait toujours été le plus rapide en calcul mental et le meilleur en problèmes. Car sinon, il n'aurait jamais été admis à l'Ecole des enfants de troupe du Général Mangin et ne serait pas aujourd'hui président de la République.

Tel est ce que nous apprenait, ou à peu près, ce jour-là, l'éditorialiste de La Croix du Sud, Aziz Sonika, celui-là même qui nourrit le culte de Polépolé et pourfendit, la plume trempée dans la bile d'hyène, l'injure plein la salive, les opposants de l'ancien président. (pp. 29—30)

[In primary school, [...] he had learned more quickly than his fellows and has distinguished himself in the eyes of the monitors by his exceptional qualities. [...] he would never make a single spelling mistake in his dictations. He was always the quickest in mental arithmetic and the best at solving problems. For otherwise he would not have been admitted to the General Mangin Army school, and wouldn't be President of the Republic today.

This is, more or less, what we learned on that day from Aziz Sonika, the Southern Cross's editorialist — the same Aziz Sonika who had nourished the cult of Polépolé and combatted those who opposed the former President, with his pen dipped in hyena^'s bile and his spittle full of abuse.]

Although the text does not offer any alternative to the official version, the use of conditionals and of free indirect speech, the reminder of Aziz Sonika's opportunism (Polépolé was deposed by Bwakamabé), and the exaggerated nature of the praise leave little doubt as to the falsity of what has just been said.⁷ In fact, Bwakamabé's linguistic incompetence throughout the novel makes it hard to believe that he never made spelling mistakes, supposing he even went to school.

Comparably, Maître often reproduces colonial clichés about Africans. For instance, in a digression in which he reminisces over his attraction to his French school teacher, he comments on his own excitation by saying: 'Les Oncles semblent penser rarenient à ces choses-là, eux. Mais moi j'avais, malgré le catéchisme et l'éducation des bons pères, les idées déjà mal orientées. Les nègres-là...' [despite my catechism and the education of the reverend fathers, I was always prey to wayward ideas. Ah but we blacks...] (p. 50). The disputable notion that white people do not often think about sex, the quaint euphemism 'idées mal orientées' [wayward ideas] and the comic effect of the phrase 'les nègres-là...', which reproduces colonial prejudices about black people while making a typically West African use of '-là' for emphasis, all convey the passage's irony.⁸

This extensive copying and intermixing of discourses is dramatized within the novel when Maître is accused of plagiarism. The accusation has been brought by another writer, referred to as 'un certain Benoist-Meschin' [one Benoist-Meschin], whose text Maître claims he has never read (p. 183). Maître once again toys with the fact that he is partly reproducing the discourse of the French about Africa: 'Benoist-Meschin' is a quintessentially French name, and its sonority is strongly reminiscent of the French word 'machin', which is used to designate something or somebody whose name one cannot be bothered to learn or remember. In addition, some readers may recognize this passage as a possible reference to the minor collaborationist writer Jacques Benoist-Méchin, a self-declared admirer of Hitler who published a series of biographies celebrating, among others, Bonaparte and his campaign in Egypt, Hubert Lyautey and T. E. Lawrence.⁹ In signalling the proximity between his critical account of dictatorship and Benoist-Meschin's, Maître emphasizes once more his apparent lack of a consistent political viewpoint, while questioning his own credentials as a progressive writer. Maître's defence against Benoist-Meschin's accusation consists in arguing that the resemblances in their accounts come from their participation in the same historical moment. Maître then goes on to dismiss Benoist-Meschin's claims by saying:

Qu'il sorte un instant d'une conception par trop étriquée et surannée de l'univers, pour tenter de comprendre celui du Monde Noir, l'univers des nouveaux horizons, mais aussi des mystères. Qu'il interroge done mille Africains choisis indifféremment dans la cinquantaine d'Etats qui forment la mosaïque du continent et il découvrira alors qu'il en existe au moins un nombre égal, pour lui affirmer qu'en fait, non, vraiment non, c'est un épisode de leur vie que je viens de relater là. (p. 182)

[Let him leave behind for a moment this view of the universe which is all too narrow and out-of-date, and try to understand the view of it held in the Black World — a universe of new horizons, but also full of mystery. Let him consult a thousand Africans, chosen at random from the fifty or so states which form the mosaic of our continent, and he will find out that at least an equal number will affirm that, truly, no, it is an episode of their own lives that I have recounted here.]

Maître's invitation to understand the mysteries of the 'Black World' may sound like a bad faith attempt to justify his plagiarism of a French author in the name of African auth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Translations
• Introduction: African Dictators and Postcolonial Critics
• 1 Two Readings of Henri Lopes's Le Pleurer-rire
• 2 'The Truth about Amin'
• 3 Achille Mbembe and the Disorder of Discourse
• Conclusion
• Bibliography and Filmography
• Index