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Oyono: ‘Une vie de boy’ and ‘Le Vieux Nègre et la médaille’

2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/kni199

1468-2931

Dominic Thomas,

African history and culture studies

By Patrick Corcoran. (Critical Guides to French Texts). London, Grant & Cutler, 2003. 89 pp. Pb £7.95. This is a well-established critical series that has only recently added works by francophone authors. This is a welcome development that reflects disciplinary realignment and a rethinking of the boundaries of French studies, one that will perhaps be accompanied shortly by a new name, ‘French and Francophone Texts’, in order to underline the centrality of these works to current research and teaching practices. Corcoran is attentive to key critical issues in Oyono's work, and warns that these factors ‘existentially involve authors and readers alike in processes of axiological re-evaluation and cultural repositioning’ (p. 16). However, structural problems emerge from the fact that the book is aimed at students. Insufficiently qualified general claims concerning African and postcolonial literature are repeatedly made, and these will confuse the target audience. Numerous scholarly contributions are widely available on this extremely well-known writer and, since Corcoran does not engage in a sustained analysis of cultural, political, and social questions, this book will have little to add. For example, when Corcoran addresses the theme of revolt among negritude authors and what he sees as the ‘two distinct strategies’ (p. 13) evidenced in texts from the 1950s, he aligns himself with such early critics of African literature as Jacques Chevrier and Dorothy Blair who, in spite of their important contributions, often failed to recognize the complex range of devices adopted for the purpose of denouncing hegemonic colonial practices responsible for the fracturing and dismantling of local culture. Furthermore, as the discussion broadens to the ‘mission civilisatrice,’ Corcoran asks: ‘To what extent the latter was a motive for colonial expansion and to what extent it was a retrospective justification for the invasion and conquest of overseas territories is not of direct concern to the present study’ (p. 14). Surely this is no longer negotiable, as the theorizations of Bhabha, Mbembe, Said, and Spivak on colonial/imperial expansionism have convincingly demonstrated. Corcoran's invocation of the notion of a ‘colonial contract’ (p. 20) illustrates Oyono's attempt to move beyond reductive binary categories. This connects very well with what Achille Mbembe has characterized as the ‘convivial’ nature of the colonizer/colonized relationship (On the Postcolony, 2001), and would have benefited from additional commentary, particularly since repeated allusions to Toundi's ‘gourmandise’ have much to reveal concerning the psychology of human behavior but also his own collaborationist impulses. Corcoran identifies Toundi's ‘radical ambivalence’ (p. 21) as an indicator of the struggle he faces in endeavouring to reconcile his own position with that of the colonizer, and locates it in ‘the African side to his nature’ (p. 21). While he acknowledges the problematic dimension of this ‘essentialist terminology’, this vocabulary needs to be resisted, precisely because colonized interlocutors in the text do not. The Commandant's wife says to Toundi: ‘tu as la folie des grandeurs […] Tu es boy, mon mari est commandant… personne n'y peut rien’ (p. 88). While Toundi may not fulfil the exigencies of the popular ‘Y'a bon Banania’ advertisements, she seems oblivious to the fact that Toundi's ‘folie des grandeurs’ originates in the colonial ‘contract.’ This analysis extends into the broader question of what Corcoran sees as Toundi's willing incorporation into the colonial hierarchy. Instead, I would argue that Oyono convincingly indicts the colonial system for its effectiveness in indoctrinating colonial subjects, a dimension that is contained in Toundi's reference to being ‘grisé’ (p. 22). Only later does Toundi contextualize oppression in the terminology of nationalism, ‘compatriote’ and ‘congénère’ (p. 115, see C. L. Miller, Nationalist and Nomads). While Corcoran devotes the concluding section to the question of language, one of the potentially most revealing aspects of Oyono's work is overlooked. The tenuous relationship between language and writing is addressed through questions of proprietorship in the preface to Une vie de boy: ‘Je me suis efforcé d'en rendre la richesse sans trahir le récit dans la traduction que j'en fis et qu'on va lire’ (p. 14). While the reader knows that the diaries were not technically written in Ewondo, the text inevitably becomes a translation and unsilencing of the author's mother-tongue.