Yambo Ouologuem

Yambo Ouologuem (born August 22, 1940 in Bandiagara , † October 14, 2017 in Sévaré ) was a writer from the West African state of Mali . His first novel, Le devoir de violence ( The Commandment of Violence ), won the Prix ​​Renaudot . He later published Lettre à la France nègre and Les mille et une bibles du sexe , the latter under the pseudonym Utto Rodolph . The need of the violence was initially well received, later Ouologuem but was accused of whole passages of Graham Greene and other established writers off to have. Ouologuem subsequently turned away from the Western press and lived in seclusion in his home country.

Life

Yambo Ouologuem was born in 1940 as the only son of an aristocratic Malian family in Bandiagara, the most important city in the Dogon region (part of what was then the colony of French Sudan ). His father was an influential landowner and school councilor. Ouologuem learned several African languages ​​as well as French, English and Spanish. After enrolling at a Lycée in the capital Bamako , he went to Paris in 1960, where he studied sociology, philosophy and English at the Lycée Henry IV . From 1964 to 1966 he taught at the Lycée de Clarenton in a suburb of Paris, while at the same time he was studying for a doctorate in sociology at the École normal supérieure .

His major work, The Commandment of Violence , published in 1968, sparked controversy and academic debate over allegations of plagiarism. In 1969 he published a volume of biting essays entitled Lettre à la France nègre . The erotic novel Les mille et une bibles du sexe , published by Ouologuem under the pseudonym Utto Rodolph, depicts the sexual adventures of four French people in France and Africa. Ouologuem returned to Mali in the late 1970s following the controversy over The Commandment of Violence . Until 1984 he was director of a youth center near Mopti in central Mali, where he published a number of textbooks for children. Since then, it was said, he led a secluded life devoted to religion.

The command to use violence

His main work Le devoir de violence was published in 1968 by the French publisher Éditions du Seuil and was published a year later in German translation under the title The Commandment of Violence . It was initially given great praise by the critics and in the same year won the Prix ​​Renaudot as the first work by an African author . Ouologuem became famous, Le Monde called him one of the few black African intellectuals of international stature and compared him to Léopold Sédar Senghor . This novel sharply criticizes African nationalism and denounces the violence used by Africans against other Africans. Because the novel is historically inaccurate in numerous places, some critics argue that the praise and alleged authenticity of the novel is a purely Western point of view. These critics see it as a rejection of a glorifying view of African history, and according to an article in The Nation , Ouologuem has shattered the myth of a glorious African past .

Soon, however, controversy broke out because some passages from Graham Greene's Battlefield of Life and the French novel The Last of the Righteous by André Schwarz-Bart seemed to have been copied. After a lawsuit by Greene, the book was banned in France and only reissued in 2003. Ouologuem at the time claimed that he originally cited some of the controversial passages, but his original manuscript was no longer available to verify. He also claimed that in some early interviews he had spoken openly about wanting to excerpt the passages, which made the discussion in France much less controversial. Since 1977, the English edition carries the notice that the publisher recognizes the use of certain passages on pages 54-56 from the book Battlefield of the Life of Greene.

The command to use force is a major example of the semi-oral structure commonly found in West African literature. It sketches seven and a half centuries of history of central Mali using a fictional kingdom called Nakem-Zuiko and the also fictional Saïf dynasty. The first part of the book deals with several powerful Malian empires, in particular the pre-colonial Toucouleur Empire with Bandiagara as its capital and the pre-Islamic Bambara Empire which replaced the Toucouleur state. It works out how African rulers worked with the slave traders and sold millions of their subjects into slavery. The last ruler of the dynasty, Saïf ben Isaac El Heït, is portrayed as the most brutal king who gave his empire the same fate that affected the real West African empires: wars, alliances, dislocation, downfall; However, the ruling class managed to stay in power through collaboration with the colonial rulers and, after gaining independence, to regain sole power. The narrative is characterized by violence and eroticism; it depicts sorcery and black magic as natural human activities.

In the second, colonial part of the story, the protagonist Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, who is descended from slaves, is sent to France to be prepared for a political career. Last but not least, history shows the process by which submissiveness or negraille (a French word created by Ouologuem) is deeply engraved in the memory of the population.

The book is characterized by its vastness: legends and myths, chronicles and religious matters are woven into an opulent narrative, through eloquence, rhythm and music of prose. The narrative mode and narrative character of this work are based on West African epics such as the Soundjata epic : An Islamic scholar narrates and comments as if he were facing an eagerly listening audience. Again and again there are ritual insertions like in the name of God! or Praise be to God , and references to both oral and written literature. The book has been defended by numerous critics, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah , who sees it as a rejection of the first generation of modern African novels, such as Achebes Things Fall Apart or Layes One from Kurussa . It collided directly with Senghor's idea of negativity and its Africanist mystification. Ayi Kwei Armah later revived Ouologuem's ideas. Despite all the discussions, the book is one of the major works in post-colonial African literature.

Works

• Yambo Ouologuem: The Commandment of Violence , novel, translated by Eva Rapsilber, Munich 1969.
• Yambo Ouologuem: Le devoir de violence , ISBN 2-84261-396-1 , Ed. Le Serpent à Plumes 2003.
• Yambo Ouologuem: Lettre à la France nègre , ISBN 978-2-84261-395-2 , Les Editions du Rocher 2003.
• Yambo Ouologuem: Les mille et une bibles du sexe , Éd. you Dauphin 1969.
• Yambo Ouologuem and Paul Pehiep: Terres de soleil , 1969.

literature

• Christopher Wise : Yambo Ouologuem, postcolonial writer, Islamic militant , Boulder CO (Lynne Publishing) 2008.
• Christopher Wise : The Yambo Ouologuem Reader , Africa Research & Publications 2008.
• Ousmane Diarra , Sirafily Diango , Moussa Konaté and Yambo Ouologuem: Nouvelles du Mali, ISBN 978-2-35074-100-0 , Magellan et Cie 2008.
• Wole Soyinka (Ed.): Poems of Black Africa , ISBN 978-0-435-90171-4 , Hill and Wang 1975.
• Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier (Eds.): The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry , ISBN 978-0-14-118100-4
• Antoine Marie Zacharie Habumukiza: Le Devoir de violence de Yambo Ouologuem - Une lecture intertextuelle , Saarbrücken 2010, ISBN 613-1-52304-5
• Nikolai Strähle: Ouloguem - Problems of the production of ethnological knowledge using the example of the Shrobénius episode , student project at Heidelberg University in 2010
• Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink: Yambo Ouologuem , in: Critical Lexicon for Contemporary Foreign Language Literature (KLG), in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Yambo Ouologuem, premier lauréat africain du Prix Renaudot, est mort , accessed on October 18, 2017
2. ↑ ^{a b} Dorothea E. Schulz: Culture and Customs of Mali , Santa Barbara 2012 ( ISBN 978-0-313-35912-5 ), pp. 53-54.
3. ↑ ChickenBones - A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes: Bound to Violence - Yambo Ouologuem , accessed on May 31, 2013.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Contemporary Literary Criticism: Yambo Ouologuem 1940-  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   , visited on June 2, 2013
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Petri Liukkonen and Ari Pesonen: Ouologuem, Yambo (1940-) ( Memento from December 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) , visited on May 31, 2013.
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Nabo Sène: L'histoire africaine revisitée , Le monde diplomatique, June 2003.
7. ^ ^{A b} Richard Serrano: Against the Postcolonial: Francophone Writers at the Ends of the French Empire , Lexington Books 2006, ISBN 0-7391-2029-8 , p. 23.
8. ↑ ^{a b c} Henning Krauss and Louis van Delft (Hrst.): Open structure: literary system and life reality , commemorative publication for Fritz Niest on his 60th birthday, Tübingen 1994 ( ISBN 3-8233-4128-6 ), p. 155
9. ↑ ChickenBones - A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes: Interview by Linda Kuehl, Yambo Ouologuem: on Violence, Truth and Black History , Visited on May 31, 2013.
10. ↑ Eric Milet and Jean-Luc Manaud: Mali , Éditions Olizane (2007). ISBN 2-88086-351-1

Web links

• Literature by and about Yambo Ouologuem in the catalog of the German National Library