http://www.nathanielturner.com/yamboouologuem.htm
Bound to Violence
Yambo Ouologuem
on Violence, Truth and Black History
Interviewed by Linda Kuehl
I interviewed Yambo Ouologuem in his publisher's office in March,
shortly after the American publication of his first novel, Bound to
Violence (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), which won the Prix
Renaudot in France and which has been acclaimed here as "the first
truly African novel." Surely it is an amazing book—for epic grandeur,
the compression of seven-and-a-half centuries of African history from
1202 to 1947, when his fictitious nation, Nakem-Zuiko, is on the
threshold of independence; for cultural sweep: legends, myths,
chronicles, religious matter woven into an opulent narrative; for
eloquence: the cadence and music of the prose, splendidly translated
from the French by Ralph Manheim; and for pride and courage: the risk
of a black man showing his own history with complexity, humor, and
shrewdness that must indeed threaten platitudes and deceptions shared
in his own native Mali as well as in Afro-America.
Linda: Is Bound to Violence the first truly African novel, as it has
been called?
Yambo: It's not the first novel written by an African. It's just that
the others were written from the point of view of a native son, which
is to say that if the writer was born in Senegal, he wrote about
Senegal, and if he was born in Congo, he wrote about Congo. I never
conceived of writing from the viewpoint of a Malian or in an African
language though I don't mean by this that I am not a nationalist. I
only mean that you have to understand black history through a kind of
unity. My book covers eight centuries and is at the same time a
fresco, an epic, a legend, and a novel.
Linda: How much is absorbed from chronicles and documents?
Yambo: The book was not absorbed. These were ancient, Arabian,
medieval, old Portuguese, and old Spanish manuscripts, and I condensed
and raised them to the level of legend. Only from the point of view of
form is it fiction, for it's about history and politics. In fact, when
I first gave it to my publisher, he said it was impossible to do that
way because I gave names of real people involved in crime, people who
killed and trained asps, so I had to change the names and make the
actual countries into one imaginary one. I did give the real name of
Saif—the dynasty in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan—and the Saif still exists.
But I speak of the empire of Nakem-Zuiko which is an anagram. Most
names have been reversed which is perhaps why, the day after my book
won the prize in France, there was a military putsch in Mali, and many
political meetings took place with everyone trying to see whether his
own private life or his own murders or those of his predecessors were
described.
Linda: Was it a coincidence that the putsch occurred the next day?
Yambo: I don't say it was a coincidence. But the fact is that before
giving me the prize the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France and the
Ambassadors in Africa and the Presidents of the Republics wanted to
give me a prize for a basic documentary history. But, since in France,
you cannot win two prizes for one book, the Ambassadors were asked not
to give theirs because then I couldn't get one for its literary value.
Anyway, for diplomatic reasons, my publisher didn't want to emphasize
political content. He had paid a lawyer to avoid trouble, and if,
after that, the book was presented as a kind of secret about Africa,
he would soon be involved in trials. But when it was published, I
received many letters from Presidents of many Republics, each one
thinking I had intended his own country.
Linda:How did Malians respond?
Yambo: Since it was the first time and Africans had won a major
literary prize—and I was 28 at the time, competing against about 1000
French writers who were 50, 60, 70 years old—they felt proud. On the
other hand, there were those who said, yes, what he says is true, but
should he say it.
Linda: Why did they question this?
Yambo: Many of them belong to that category of people who define
themselves in reference to what the white man thinks. They wanted to
give the white an image of Africa that would flatter the white. But
what people forget is that whites did not come to Africa after one
year of fighting but after 28 years of fighting, and were then able to
colonize because there was a division of states which had made slave
trade possible. Sometimes there was collaboration between the white
and black chiefs in order to conquer other states and share the
benefits of that conquest. Whites played the game of being great
reconcilers and black chiefs thought only of their own interest.
Linda: You have called African history prior to white imperialism an
"orgy of violence." Is this why some Africans and Afro-Americans may
have objected to your book?
Yambo: I did not say that the history of Africa was an orgy of
violence. I only said that black people in Africa were oppressed, and
that if the black man wants a better place to live he has to know his
own history and not define it by thinking the only enemy is white. He
has enemies too among what they call black aristocracy, and the black
man never was a Negro before the black aristocrat sold him as a slave.
It was the black aristocrat who made black people become Negroes. If
you look at the entire history, you find there were three stages of
oppression: blacks oppressing blacks, Arabs oppressing blacks, and
whites oppressing blacks. Which is why I said you cannot deal with a
single country of a single region of a single tribe. You cannot write
from the point of view of a nationalist language if you want this
comprehensive vision.
Linda: If Africans themselves were responsible for slave trade—
Yambo: Excuse me. Let me say that Africans were not the only people in
the world to be responsible because domestic slave trade—that is to
say, internal slave trade—existed throughout the world. You know, of
course, about France before the Revolution, and you know about Russia
before the Revolution when Russians were sold as domestic slaves in
the market and other public places. The only difference is that except
for the black man there was no international traffic.
Linda: According to your book, Arabs falsified African history.
Yambo: I means that many mistakes have been made inside and out of
Africa about the Arabs, Many people thought the Arabs were a mirror
image image of African civilization. Look at the phenomenon of Cassius
Clay—or, should I say, Muhammad Ali? Cassius Clay—or Muhammad Ali—
thought that the best way to find his roots—which is to say, with
Africa—was to go through Arabian civilization. But that's a mistake.
If he had read the Koran—the Holy Scriptures—he would have found in it
a code defining the status of slaves, so that slave trade is inherent
in Mohammedanism. It is as if a Jew—because he didn't know his own
history—referred to Hitler in order to discover his own identity. But
this isn't Muhammad Ali's fault because the history presented to him
didn't show him that Arabs were the great slavetraders.
Linda: Is the black American's affinity for Africa based upon
ignorance and romanticism?
Yambo: No. What I am saying is that—to take an image, for example—if a
mother loves her child, it doesn't mean she loves a doll that gives
her no trouble or that it is always clean, neat, and so forth. She
knows a child is difficult to care for and that it happens to be
dirty. But that doesn't prevent her from loving her child.
Linda: However, does the Afro-American acknowledge the dirt?
Yambo: The dirt is not only in African history but in all history.
Look at the Greek past. And the dirt doesn't come from the people. It
comes from the leaders, and the notables, the chiefs who oppress the
crowd.
Linda: But Afro-Americans see oppression coming solely from whites and
not at all from black notables or aristocrats.
A. Look, it took me a lot of courage to write this book which is about
oppressors who were my own family and I did my best to be as universal
as possible.
Linda: Did you see John Williams' review in the Times Book Review? It
confused me because he seemed to review a novel totally different from
your own and appeared to be minimizing and making palatable, so to
speak, what Afro-Americans may not wish to hear.
Yambo: I too was confused. But this is for Mr. John Williams to
answer. I think you should ask him if he reviewed the novel
Linda: Did you feel pressure as an African from Mali to write history
in your way?
Yambo: Not at all, because I'm involved in publishing textbooks. I
want Blacks to be educated in their own context and not in reference
to either Arabs or whites. Before we had books in which people used to
say things like, "It's noon. Father should come home soon." Or, "It's
snowing outside. We are eating at the table." How nice to be home
while it is snowing outside." And the children would ask the teacher,
"What's snow?" And the teacher would answer, "Snow is cotton, but
cotton that melts." And the children would ask, "Well, how can cotton
melt?"
So, you see, this had nothing to do with their original culture. And
even here, in this country, you have history written in English, seen
through the eyes of English travelers. You have few publications that
are translations from true authentic traditional ancient manuscripts
or from African documents or from Ethiopian tradition or Islamic
ancient manuscripts. You have things only seen from the point of view
of whites.
Linda:Can you be proud of a history based upon violence perpetrated by
the Saif—your representative tyrant?
Yambo: The problem is to know whether we men can really do something
in the world in which we have been involved through violence. That's
the point. We are bound to violence, but need to think the matter over
and see how to be human beings living in peace together. And those who
want to find their roots should not define themselves in reference to
the outside enemy—the white—since the enemy can be black also. In
black America, I'm sure those who want to improve conditions of the
black man do not think it's a good thing, that, in the context of
oppression, the whites present them with a few successful blacks in
order to make them believe there is no problem at all.
Linda: This is a sophisticated perspective and difficult to base a
revolution upon because—
A. On what can you bas a revolution?
Linda: Upon something more simplistic.
Yambo: But more realistic.
Linda: Reality simplified.
Yambo: How can you base a revolution on a life? What you do is just
what Saif has been doing.
Linda: As a white American, I know my history and I am ashamed of—
Yambo: I beg your pardon. You say you are ashamed of your history, but
you mean that you already know it and you judge—not from the point of
view of historical fact—but from orals. They are two different
disciplines. Politics has nothing to do with morality. I don't know in
any part of the world an honest politician because in politics you
have compromise and when you compromise you cannot speak in terms of
morals. You only speak in terms of efficiency and power.
Linda: However, if someone is trying to find his heritage when he has
been cut off from it, indeed cut off from his entire past, then I see
a dilemma if the history he discovers is not a noble one but, like all
histories, violent. Where does that leave the person but in a
precarious position?
A. Do you know that, in France, whites had been writing to tell me my
book was the work of a revolutionary and that I wanted black to
suppress all whites because blacks were so cunning and powerful and
had such a great way of dealing with people that whites looked like
puppets? And do you know that some people said I was a black Sade and
that I was even dangerous because I didn't dare put my photo on the
French edition?
Linda:How did you answer them?
A. That I didn't intend to be orthodox either politically or socially
or from a racial viewpoint. If we really want to do something, we have
to see ourselves as we are, and to be proud of oneself does not mean
looking at one's ugliness but at one's whole.
Linda: Who perverted African history?
A. At the end of the Second World War, somebody wanted to give an
ideal image of Africa, but not knowing how to do this, said that
Africans were Egyptians, connecting Africa with the great Egyptian
civilization. What he should have done was studied was studied
traditional societies and shown ways in which they were great and not
in connection with any other.
Linda: You have said that "Negro art found its patent nobility in the
folklore of mercantile intellectualism," and that masks made by Saifs
were buried in mud and ponds and dragged up to be sold as if they were
four centuries old. And that this was inspired by the European
ethnologist represented by your character, Shrobenius, who
"resuscitated an African universe . . . which has lost all living
reality."
A. Of course, dealing with art in this cunning way is not particular
to African art but to all antiques though it is common throughout
Africa. My character, Shrobenius is based in fact upon the German
ethnologist, Leo Frobenius. I received a letter from his family
thanking me for not mentioning that he had been kicked out of Africa
for hiring gangsters and stealing. Frobenius was the consequence of
the esthetic of primitive mentality, of those ethnologists who wrote
about the black man as a nice silly boy adoring God, cut off from
reality, living in the purity and innocence of the African world.
They studied head and facial angles to determine the connection
between the Negro and animals. When people got fed up with this
ideology, they tried to connect black and Greek civilization because
by then blacks were helping whites fight two world wars. It's like
what happened during the Biafra War—sentimentality for suffering people
—only at that time it wasn't sentimentality for suffering Negroes but
for people who were good friends. So it was also successful and that
Frobenius was also successful and that ethnologists exploited African
art for commercial ends.
Linda:Were you being satirical about Saif's Jewish heritage?
A. No, because it was not imaginary since that heritage belongs to the
history of Ethiopia, to the Negus of Ethiopia, Negus meaning King of
Kings. The present Negus is called Haile Selassie, which means the
power of trinity, so that you have all the religions which were the
background of Christianity. I needed Saif's Jewish background to
parallel the three states of oppression I mentioned earlier, there
being also three stages of religion—the Judaism being a kind of spring
from which Christianity and Mohammedanism were connected through
paganism.
Linda: You scatter exclamatory phrases throughout your narrative,
phrases like "God curse his kingship!" and "God keep his soul!" and
"Oh sacrilege!? Are these humorously intended?
A. They are a way of getting the rhythm of traditional African music
as well as getting a spiritual thread and general trend of life.
Suppose you are talking about something important and suddenly I say,
"Now a message from your sponsor." The humor is a way of making subtle
hints and reminding the reader that we are dealing with a world in
turmoil.
Linda: Were there any technical difficulties in writing this novel?
A. The technical difficulties came from not wanting to write a mere
story. I wanted to convey the rhythm of Africa, the rhythm of the
blues when I was singing despair, sometimes the rhythm of jazz. And,
of course, it's horrible to try to translate the beat of music and the
idea of pure sound into phrases and sentences, though not because I
was writing in French per se, but because French was for me a foreign
language. I had to be somewhat half black and half white because I was
dealing with a foreign civilization. But I understood the language is
nothing but a tool and that one can be oneself by mastering it, and I
was mastering French by giving it the very breath of the black past.
So too could the black American master Western civilization, have a
hold on it, put it at a distance, have a critical view of it, and so
make it something different. I don't consider myself a Frenchman or a
French writer. I am an African conscious of his whole history and
tradition and that's why nothing can offend me. I have a background on
which to rest. And I am not boasting about that past or about my
family but just showing it because that's life. And what's important
in life is not making money but believing there are important things
to be done and being linked with tradition because that's what makes a
man be a real man—not the fact that he's universal. Universality
begins with individuality. That is to say, it is when you are yourself
that other people recognize themselves through your own humanity. If
you belong to nothing, you are an artificial man.
Linda: On the other hand, tradition can restrict, even crush,
individuality.
A. Individuality can conflict with tradition, but this is the western
point of view, not the African. What is dramatic for me and for all
Africans is that when your mother and father die, they leave a
continuation of themselves, so that you keep things that have been
given to you by that generation but can move further and take another
step. For example, Konrad Lorenz, the scientist, has shown the
differences between man and bees. Bees are very clever. They repeat
their tradition, but they make no progress. In one thousand years the
same bees are making homey. But what makes a man a man is that he has
discovered light and light has led him to the wheel and the wheel has
led him to something else, and that the man living in our century has
all the feelings of that first man, Adam, but goes on opening and
enriching them.
The individualistic tradition in Africa is connected to the ideal of
the group, whereas here it's the individual in relation to a group for
a brief moment after which he forms a new group. So tradition here is
more brief. As for the unity and strength of Africa, this cannot come
from West Africa because that would mean it comes from England or
France or Portugal or Spain because these countries have been in
control. It must come from the unity of black Africans and Afro-
Americans. This is the main concern of my book. To be bound to
violence for the black man consists of being more conscious about
himself, seeing things in a wide context and not from the point of
view of a local tribe.
Linda: Why did you name your final chapter "Dawn"?
A. Because the country is going to be independent. And I chose the
game of chess because it's most representative of the medieval
presence in the context of the modern strength of violence and non-
violence through two characters—Saif and the Bishop—with Raymond-
Spartacus Kassoumi in the background just elected as someone supposed
to free the people. With dawn one thinks that tomorrow is another day.
I used the game because it provides a double idea. You have everyone
discovering the card of the other, because in order to move you have
to know the other's intention, and there's another meaning of game
which is a system played among other systems—a somewhat atomistic
conception of all the substances of the world, the four elements of
playing together.
Linda: Is Raymond-Spartacus equipped to play the game as well as Saif?
A. That's the problem of violence and non-violence. You have men of
love and men of bluff, and apparently the men of love have won at the
end. The Bishop has won because Saif has thrown the trained asp inside
the flute into the flames so that there is no longer death but
dialogue. And then Spartacus knows Saif's secret because the Bishop
told him. Still, at the end of the dialogue, Saif has managed to be
the last one to speak, so the debate is open. And let me say that
violence is not barbarity. Violence is the way of knowing how to play
the game of the other and outplaying him.
Linda: Do you personally have any taste for this game?
A. If I had a taste for this kind of game I think I would not have
written the novel.
Source: Commonweal (11 June 1971)
On May 4, 9:40 am, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoch...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mensah, that's a good question to pose to Abdul. I hope he doesn't come back
> with the tired, insulting, Mazruist rhetoric of Arab slavery and violence
> against Africans being of the benign, integrationist type. He claims to be a
> student of history, but where does that history start? From the Crusades?
> From Alexander the Great? From Rome? From the 15th century period of
> European (Christian) imperial ascendance? From the beginning of Islam in 7th
> century Arabia? From the beginning of Islamic imperialism represented in
> succession by several Islamic Caliphates/empires in the Middle East and
> South Asia? From the brutally imperious Ottomon Islamic Empire? Where do we
> start the accounting in order to locate the original sin, offense, or
> provocation? This simplistic, politically correct and lazily repeated canard
> about originary Western provocation justifying or explaining Muslim
> terroristic response is both ahistorical and reductive. And since Abdul
> brought up the subject of Muslim and African victimhood, let me say that:
>
> 1. The imperial, "terroristic" (to stay faithful to Abdul's semantic
> template) expansion of Islam from the Arabian peninsula into North and
> Northwest Africa victimized millions of Africans--Christians and
> traditionalists.
>
> 2. The successive Caliphates, beginning with the Umayyads, brutalized and
> victimized peoples of many races and religions in Africa, Asia, and Eurasia
> BEFORE the often cited age of European imperial ascendance in the 15th
> Century. In other words, Arabo-Islamic imperial "terrorism" could be read as
> having provoked the age of Western imperial "terrorism" if we adopt this
> simplistic and pedestrian explanatory model of equating chronology with
> causality.
>
> 3. The Ottoman Empire, the most powerful, longest lasting, and biggest
> Islamic empire of them all was a brutal machine of mass murder, imperial
> "terrorism" forced conversions, genocide, and in some cases, and wanton
> decimation. The victims of the Ottoman Empire's imperial violence (or
> terrorism) included Africans--both Muslim and Christian, Europeans,
> Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Persians, Indians, etc. All empires--Christian,
> Muslim, secular--have victims. You can't have empires without victims. On
> the one hand folks like Abdul want to rave about the glorious achievements
> of the medieval "global" Muslim empires but they won't even acknowledge the
> multi-racial and multi-religious victims and victimhoods produced by those
> imperial accomplishments, preferring instead to construct a simplistic
> narrative of European imperials as villains and Muslim victims. It is the
> intellectual equivalent of eating your cake and wanting to have it too.
>
> My point is this: A rhetoric that justifies or explains the terrorist
> activities of Muslim extremists in the present by simply referencing the
> terrorist imperial activities of Westerners is at best incomplete and at
> worst an ahistorical and dishonest refusal to acknowledge other originary
> terrorisms perpetrated by Islamic imperial formations--which, like Western
> imperial terrorism, victimized a diverse group of peoples, races, and
> religions. To the extant that we cannot justify or explain the Crusades and
> subsequent European imperial adventures as having been simply a response to
> or a "fight back" against prior Islamic imperial adventures, this banal
> rhetoric of political correctness and of refusing to properly name and
> delegitimize Islamist terrorism is void. Bottom line: it is an unhelpful,
> dead-end exercise that illuminates nothing.
>
> On the related question of whether terrorism--however defined or
> practiced--is prohibited or not by the canons and revelations of Islam,
> Christianity, and Judaism, I disagree with Abdul's take that the Holy books
> forbid terrorism or acts that can be construed as terrorism, especially if
> he means that these texts conclusively, unequivocally forbid them under any
> and all circumstances. There are clearly verses in the Quran, the Hadith,
> and the Sunnah that call for violence, even unprovoked, nihilist violence,
> against unbelievers. The relevant question is whether or how these verses
> are weighted against other verses in the same cannons that unequivocally
> condemn gratuitous violence against unbelievers (Christians and other
> non-Muslims) and even urge love toward the "people of the book." Another
> question is who constitutes an "unbeliever" and in what circumstance is such
> a designation warranted? There are many issues to consider:
>
> 1. Can the verses calling for violence and "terrorist" activities be
> realistically or even theologically detached in interpretive terms from the
> circumstances in which they were revealed? Some interpretations disregard
> the modern applicability of these violent verses or interpretively
> contextualize them as reflecting the state of the Muslim Ummah in 7th
> Century Arabia at a time when Islam was persecuted and was under threat from
> the traditional religious establishment, necessitating a flurry of
> revelations that explicitly call for violence against unbelievers because
> rapprochement seemed impossible and only aggression could have saved the
> young faith. Fast forward to the later revelations given when Islam was on
> secure ground, and was growing and expanding through imperial conquest and
> conversions. The verses and injunctions become decidedly more conciliatory
> and less violent, urging the accommodation of subordinated peoples and
> respect for the religions of subject peoples who would not convert. That
> tells me two things: that the context in which these verses were given
> should be factored into any comprehensive effort to interpret them for
> today's Muslims and that the Quran, like all other holy books, has to be
> read with a sense of history, circumstantial transitions, and in light of
> the prevailing order in a given epoch. To insist on interpreting verses
> across time and space and without a sense of revelatory transitions as the
> extremists do is to adopt a literalist approach to exegesis in order to
> justify a prepackaged agenda.
>
> 2. This all brings up the question of who exactly is an "unbeliever" as
> contained in the many verses in the Quran, Hadith, and Sunnah urging
> violence against "unbelievers."
>
> 3. Understandably, extremists are drawn toward an interpretations that
> understand the "unbelievers" in these verses to mean Christians and
> non-Muslims in all ages and everywhere while pragmatic Muslims insist on
> interpreting "unbelievers" in much narrower semiotic and contextual
> purviews.
>
> 4. Is one interpretation more valid than the other? Not necessarily.
> Interpretive conventions shift along with intellectual, economic, and
> political events and certain interpretations gain or lose currency depending
> on the state of mind or state of being of Islamic societies and depending on
> the age in which Muslims live.
>
> 5. There is always an ebb and flow to how moderate or extreme or intolerant
> interpretive conventions increase or decrease in appeal. In moments of
> insecurity and crisis, literalist interpretations and interpretations that
> discountenance temporal and spatial contextual mitigations tend to find more
> appeal, and vice versa.
>
> Bottom line: It's all in the interpretation, who is doing the
> interpretation, and why they prefer one interpretive convention to another.
> The Bible, especially the Old testament, contains verses that can be read
> and have been read as a manifesto for terrorism, racism, and slavery, and
> violent imperialism. Even the ascendancy of Christian Europe to power and
> stature after the Enlightenment did not stop the proliferation of extreme
> Biblical interpretations. It took the convergence of multiple modernist
> forces and influences and the revulsion of Christians themselves for extreme
> interpretations to be discarded for moderate ones that are compatible with
> the realities and pragmatics of the modern and postmodern world.
>
> It is therefore infinitely more productive to focus on why and how certain
> extremist interpretations persist and gain currency and become ideological
> manuals for terrorism than to engage in the escapist, defensive, and
> politically correct game of repeating the empty statement that the holy
> books forbid terrorism, which fails to explain why and how terrorism in the
> name of God has found appeal through many epochs in history.
>
> Obviously the ability of Christians to disregard or impose moderate
> interpretations on the letter of the Bible and the relative inability of
> Muslims to do so is inflected by other factors, as some religious scholars
> have posited:
>
> 1. Muslims believe that the Quran is a direct revelation from God while
> Christians believe that the Bible is the inspired World of God--or that God
> inspired men to write it. This has a huge implication for how the faithfuls
> of both religions approach their faiths and the injunctions in their
> respective holy books. In short, it means that, for Muslims, contextualizing
> and imposing culturally specific interpretive imperatives on violent verses
> to arrive at interpretations that mitigate or release faithfuls from their
> obligations is a lot harder.
>
> 2. In Christianity there is the added interpretive alibi/leeway of the
> Old/New testament divide. This allows Christians to separate injunctions
> given during the time of Law and those given during the time of Grace, the
> time of Grace (the new testament) being the overarching spiritual
> dispensation governing the life of Christians. This does not mean that
> violent verses in the old testament cannot and are not still being invoked
> to justify evil. It means that Christians who do not want to engage in
> violence or evil in the name of their religion have a very good excuse
> because they can legitimately claim that the Law (old testament) does not
> apply to them. There is, as far as I know, no equivalent of this spiritual
> disjuncture in Islam.
>
> For what it's worth, below is a relevant post I made in a discussion on
> extremism sparked by Farooq Kperogi's article in another forum. I was
> obviously responding both to the article and responses from ...
>
> read more »
--
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