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About Henry de Monfreid. Monfreid was famous for his travels in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa coast from Tanzania to Aden, Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula and Suez, that he sailed in his various expeditions as adventurer, smuggler and gunrunner during which he said he more than once escaped the Royal Navy coast-guards cutters. Monfreid is probably best known in the English-speaking world for the following two books: La reconnaissance romaine ne tarde pas: Simon, 24 mai , AMC: It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed, for the good and prosperity of all.
I liked particularly your discussion of the despotic and the political regimes in relation to the dominion of freedom and the dominion of servitude. Also I was pleased with your point about the lack of a well-developed political philosophy in saint Thomas. I wish most Thomists knew this. Plan La question linguistique. Madness and incest are part of the realignment of the Cameroonian literary field. Radical negations, one of rationality, and the other, the social bond which are both at the very heart of human dignity; madness and incest pose the urgent question about a writing of anthropological mutilation.
This urgency, which recalls the anguish expressed by the earlier generations of writers on the question of engaged literature, for example, leads the critic to detect the commonalities as well as the ruptures that structure a literary tradition in the making.
Jazz rhythms, in Miano's novel, bear witness to an aesthetic practice that claims the totemic oeuvre of Mongo Beti as its founder. Miano signals her indebtedness only to forge new paths in the dialogue with the rhythms of the diaspora. Similarly, nationalist consciousness continues to be one of the points of convergence in the articulation of a postcolonial project, especially in the writing of anticolonial resistance.
The conversation between Mongo Beti and Miano is filled, with regard to anticolonial memory, with malaise. Miano helps, as the analysis will show, to push anticolonial memory further to the edges of mar-ginality. Miano appears to fall victim to a writing that is dominated by the memory of the colonizer. Gilbert Doho seeks specifically to restore the amputated memory in resorting to the archives of orality. The return of orality, through the sounds of the diaspora and suppressed memories, is one of the aesthetic surprises in the writing of anthropological mutilation. Cameroonian literature and its mutations.
Cameroonian Writing and the National Experience , maintains that the concepts of freedom and identity are at the heart of Cameroonian writing. The old guard of francophone literature bowed out with the death of Mongo Beti, Philombe, and Oyono in the course of the last decade. Central to the literary production of that venerable generation was an ethical dimension. The ethics of writing is found in the depiction of the suffering of a martyr-people.
Echoing this martyrdom, the writers raised a monument to the activists in the anticolonial struggles. The novel writes the final lines of a saga begun by Mongo Beti in Main basse sur le Cameroun, Remember Ruben, and La Ruine presque cocasse d'un polichinelle, and then more recently taken up again in l'Histoire du fou.
'Anthropological mutilation' and the reordering of Cameroonian literature
We might ask whether through a character such as Adrien, we are witnessing the last stand of the political novel or perhaps the inauguration of a new form of a political imaginary. The rarity of political subjects in the new writings would lend credence to the first supposition. Mongo Beti's death marks in a symbolic manner the end of the era when the Cameroonian novel was filled with political statements. And even if we were to take the author of Remember Ruben as the model of that focus on the political, we should also note that his last two novels sound the clarion call of retreat instead.
Mongo Beti proclaimed moreover that the Union des Populations du Cameroun, the torchbearer of anticolonialist challenge, had accomplished its mission, which was the liberation of Cameroon Beti, "L'UPC et ses avatars"; Kemedjio, Mongo Beti: The novels that focus on the political are rather more representative of the last jolts of an era that was on the verge of decline.
The vestiges of the political may be a mutation in representation.
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Gilbert Doho and Werewere Liking henceforth recount the collective epic that feeds Mongo Beti's prose in the first person. The collective biography becomes personal, indeed intimate in the case of Liking. The figure of evil, long incarnated by colonial or neocolonial authorities, is now democratized or privatized. Democratization produces a writing of collective self-destruction, while privatization brings the violence within the family.
Lydie Moudileno observes that, unlike the first francophone writers' reticence about engaging in an exploration of the body, the new generations inscribe the body in an explicit manner within the lived experience of the postcolonial universe. The writing of suffering is seen in an aesthetic that, for the first time in the Cameroonian novel and perhaps the African novel, frees itself from taboos in order to allow the body to be seen in all its materiality. The styles of writing about suffering are matched only by the representation of sexuality that often verges on the pornographic.
Writing, as we see in Femme noire, femme nue, becomes the laboratory for a true deregulation of sexual norms. The erotic novel stages orgies and all kinds of sexual experimentation that subject men and women solely to the demands of pleasure. Erotic performance seems to remove the sexual act from the laws of reproduction that chain the characters to prostitution, the nationalization of the uterus, or clandestine abortions.
The "cataclysmic disorder" Femme nue 31 that the pleasure principle introduces into the world of sexuality is accompanied by a questioning of sexual norms. Beyala questions the "conservative cultural orthodoxies" that are at the heart of the censoring of sexuality in African cultural productions. In that moral order, "the act of displaying sexual organs stems from pornography, which is considered a Western practice" Tcheuyap The upsurge of sexuality in African films is also part of a strategy of claiming initiative "through unrestricted and uncensored sexual pleasures" Tcheuyap Reclaiming her body in such an unapologetic gesture occurs to the detriment of the old patriarchal order, whether incarnated in the failing State or in impotent patriarchs: The fickle lover of Tu t'appelleras Tanga is not only handicapped, but he suffers from premature ejaculation syndrome.
The failing phallus writes the story of the failure of the nationalist, consumerist bourgeoisie. The whispered fate of Frieda Ekotto's character testifies to the reconfiguration of sexual codes: Les petites coupures valaient mieux que cette mutilation. Siliki loved women, and one of her uncles who suspected that penchant arranged to surprise her with her friend. Siliki had had to admit her sin, in front of the whole family.
He had decided that a clitoral ablation wouldn't be done, the punishment prescribed by tradition in such cases. They were modern now. Small cuts were better than that mutilation. So Siliki was sold to a trafficker. Ekotto's story is part of the Cameroonian library, as she so well affirmed in her talk in Vermont. The attentive critic will note with interest that the novel appears at the moment when homophobia in Cameroonian society was exploding into the open and transforming into a sort of public lynching of alleged homosexuals.
Historians of culture will shed light on the possible conditions that permit the emergence of an episteme of the intellectual and literary imaginary on the question of homosexuality in the Cameroonian public square.
For the time being, we can observe that the deregulation of norms of sexuality is inscribed in a broad movement of disintegration of the social fabric. Disintegration of the social bond. The phantoms of terror invented by the popular imagination occupy an important place in Liking's fantastic universe: Beyala's oeuvre is an anthology of the "bloody slashing of mutilated childhood" Tu t'appelleras Tanga The cruelty of "devouring mothers" comes through in all its horror.
Kalissa evokes a "community that is killing its own children" Kalissa 82 in a "monstrous African city where life is harsh for the underprivileged class" D'Almeida She nevertheless draws our attention to the fact that the devouring mothers are themselves devoured by social forces that are even more powerful. Tanga's mother perfectly illustrates that scenario. She starves her children to feed her lover who equates her to the meat she has cooked for him.
Tanga's mother is thus metaphorically cannibalized by an impotent and parasitic patriarchy. Her volatile and abusive husband humiliates her through his multiple affairs. Her own daughter, Tanga, eventually becomes a victim of his addictive devouring of female pleasure: And so it was that the man my father who, not content to bring his mistresses home, to fiddle under my mother's disgusted gaze, would later rip me apart in the budding of my twelfth year. And so that this man my father-who made me pregnant and poisoned the child, our child, his grandson-the man never noticed my suffering, and yet it lasted until the day he died, until the day of my own death Beyala, Tanga The fruits of incest proliferate like a flower of evil.
The animalization of the guilty is read as a means of redemption for her dehumanized soul. She can once again take her place in the society of humans: By sleeping with her brother she behaved like a bitch, and it's only normal that they make her sleep with a dog in public" Liking, Amputated Memory He is never to be unmasked: D'ailleurs, aujourd'hui, j'en suis certaine: What is more, I am sure today that he has succeeded.
The power of forgetfulness is phenomenal. It is the traumatized who have a hard time wearing the veil of oblivion" Amputated Memory The transgression remains unpunished. The ritual of purification doesn't take place. Another time, another zoophilia: She becomes, in the mechanics of the narrative set in place by Liking, a dog. According to the grammar of the restorative ritual evoked above, she initiates her own exclusion from the human race.
Ritualistic zoophilia has become profane. Prostitution with dogs allows the prostitute in Liking's narrative to survive in the face of poverty. The ethical compass bequeathed by traditions is henceforth null and void. The disintegration of the social bond is symptomatic of this banalized absurdity.
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The violence announced by Beyala's oeuvre takes on the shades of suicide. The forces of death appear to have won the battle. The living dead populate the Cameroonian imaginary. The bloodsucking mother dominates the landscape of the novel: Elles n'en ont que pour consolider leur position sociale. Ici, c'est chacun pour soi. They have them only to fortify their social position. Here, it's everyone for himself or herself.
A child can become the worst enemy of his or her parents, without even knowing it. There truly is no longer any community-Dad was right] Miano, Contours du jour qui vient The bloodsucking mothers in Miano and Beyala drive their children to suicide on the altar of their despair. The prostitution of children is taken as a means of survival. Writing registers the parades of survival enacted to contend with a fate that seems to be ever more implacable. The friend of Sibora, the woman of the people and expert "in the business of survival" Makuchi 28 , sets the power of laughter against the existential wound: She taught me a great lesson: Never to let go of those things that nourish our beings, our souls, and make life worth living, despite Makuchi reminds us, as if to freeze out any urge of optimism about the resistance of Sibora's girlfriend, that the burst of laughter masks a repressed anger.
The frustrations find no resolution. They are but superficially buried three feet deep, not even six feet deep. And that is perhaps why Monga The Anthropology of Anger warns us about the mute angers that will explode, sooner or later, in a huge conflagration. The sacrifice of children by dissolute mothers, zoophilia for survival, or laughter in order to bear the unbearable are parades of survival to which is added the epidemic of mental illnesses, another modality of manifestations of the existential wound.
Madness in the cruel city. The decaying of the existential fabric gives birth to a writing of madness. Mongo Beti invites us to explore insanity in l'Histoire du fou. The madman has killed the young brother who has been under his care. This fratricide is at the root of his descent into Hell: The epidemic of madness ravages the city. The madman in L'Histoire du fou is naked, just like the brigade of madmen in La Cicatrice.
Aventures De Mer
While all the "fratas" and "sisters" prayed their father who is in heaven, she entered soundlessly and stood right at the center of the lectern, her hands stretched out to the side, gazing toward heaven" Amputated Memory Dementia is at the heart of the short story "American Lottery" by Makuchi, included in the collection Your Madness, Not Mine and whose title is quite telling: The day you shall have the time or the chance to walk down Freedom Street, look carefully, just look at the corner of Freedom Street and Survival, you will see a tall, lanky, bearded old man, who sleeps under the shelter of the huge mango tree.
That old man who talks to himself, staring into space, staring at the leaves, at the moon, talking with the stars, singing in the rain, that old man who shivers from the cold some night, whose manhood lies bare for all the children to ogle, giggle at, and mock; for all the children who run by, some shouting, some screaming some laughing; that old man they call Pa, or Popaul, or Papa Popaul; that old man is my little brother, Paul.
I made him into an alien Makuchi 96; emphasis added. In the work of Nathalie Etoke, madness is also manifested through nudity: On la voit sans la voir" Nobody questions the naked woman who is wandering around. The nakedness of the madman or the madwoman is part of everyday life.
You see her without seeing her Etoke The banalization of insanity makes it invisible: They were rarely as young as me, but in those absurd times, anything was possible Miano, Contours Anthropological mutilation comes from the routinization of the unbearable. It points to an individual and collective abdication in the face of an impasse. All that is left is the search for mirages: Consumed by the illusion of the American Diversity Visa lottery, Paul cannot bear the failure of his quixotic plans.
His application never leaves the Cameroonian post office.
The fading of his wild dreams leads him straight to madness. Madness is symptomatic of that refusal to confront disappointing reality through rational means. Anthropological mutilation seizes upon that hallucination invented by the despair of people set adrift when they are faced with a suffering that is all too real.
The city is cruel for madmen and women. It sets no place aside for them, no special, hospitable structure. The transgression of incest no longer activates the ritual mechanism of resocialization. Prostitutes who have sex with dogs for cash are marked in an indelible manner by that animalization. Sexual depravity leads, as Liking and Tcheho observe, to the bestialization of the human being. The mercenaries of zoophilia have not implemented any mechanism for rehumanization. Society is deprived of any structure for the insane.
Miano describes the madness of Ewendji, made insane through her desperate belief in the love of a man-desperate to the point of sacrificing and abandoning her daughter at the altar of this illusion. Doctors who care too little about their Hippocratic Oath abandon Ewendji, like the orphans or the prostitutes who have been dehumanized by zoophilia, to her fate: Les psychiatres n'ont pas voulu de toi.