History And All Its Discontents

On Yambo Ouologuem's "Bound to Violence" (translated by Ralph Manheim)

Even amid the world literature boom in America that’s taken place over the last quarter-century or so, African fiction gets relatively short shrift. Latin America has its own magical-realist tradition that gets book marketers salivating, European authors still impress Americans with their Old World wisdom (or the mystique of being translated), and Asian literature continues to beguile readers – Murakami is an empire unto himself at this point, a Sri Lankan won a recent Booker prize, and Can Xue is tipped to win the Nobel any day now (not to mention the cult of Mishima that’s sprung up…). African authors bring up the rear; when Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel in 2021, the resounding public response stateside was: who? Besides Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and JM Coetzee, an African novelist hasn’t broken out in America in the same way that, say, Ferrante, Knausgaard, Bolaño or Murakami have (and Adichie and Coetzee don’t sell as well as those four); even with my dismal view of contemporary fiction, I imagine there has to be something coming from Africa that’s on that level, but some combination of publisher, media, and readerly public disinterest has so far prevented that from happening, nevermind any kind of ‘rediscovery’ of older African authors a la Tove Ditlevsen or Jose Donoso. It’s Achebe, Wa Thiong’o, Soyinka, maybe a little Mahfouz, and that’s at the good bookstores.

But surely it can’t just be a case of indifference! Something else must be afoot, and a book like Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence is a reminder that great literature can be suppressed, that there are books you’ve never heard of because a certain someone(s) made sure of it. The Malian author’s novel was released in 1968 and was quickly feted in France, winning the Prix Renaudot and presaging a great career for Ouologuem; only a couple years later, amid a plagiarism scandal, the book was taken out of print – it literally was not legal to buy it in France. Ouologuem, wounded by the response, returned to Mali from Paris and eventually stopped publishing altogether, save for some poems here and there. Are there parts of Bound to Violence from other sources? Sure, and a number of the authors repurposed in it were fine with that, but Graham Greene most certainly was not, and so the book languished in the pulp for many decades. Ouologuem’s style is allusive and reference heavy, and there are scenes that collage together the work of other authors, but all in service of a larger artistic whole; his youth and race made him something of an easy target, and thus Ouologuem and his book were flushed away from readers for many years. Until very recently, in fact! Bygones are bygones, and the whole plagiarism thing has been swept away – there were either some quotation marks missing, or the whole thing’s been recontextualized as a bit of postcolonial remixing. Quoth one African-American and French literature scholar in The New York Times, “It’s not plagiarism, it’s something else … I don’t think we have a word for what he did.” Chérif Keïta’s introduction leaves it a little vague, but the important thing is, the book is back thanks to Other Press, and with it the canon of African literature in America is in a much more bristling and complicated place than it was before.