García Márquez in Africa

The title of this article is multidimensional. How was García Márquez’s writing received and distributed in Africa? Beyond Africa’s colonial languages—Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Arabic—into what continental languages was it translated (Swahili, Berber, Chichewa, Malagasy, Sotho, Amharic, Swazi, Comorian, Somali, Oromo, Manding?) and distributed, in what numbers, by what networks, and to which cities of Africa’s forty-eight sub-Saharan nations with their 750 to 3,000 languages? García Márquez published a few articles about Africa and traveled to Africa, reporting, speaking, and conferring. Thereafter the African diaspora in the Caribbean figured more prominently in his work. Finally, and most importantly, the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude inspired and validated writers in possession of rich regional folklore crossed by the stresses of modernization, postcolonialism, and language politics. African writers had already novelized their folklore (e.g., Nigeria’s Amos Tutuola and Guinea’s Camara Laye), experimented intertextually and historically (e.g., Mali’s Yambo Ouloguem), and ironized their history (e.g., Cameroon’s Mongo Beti and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe). The term that was originally interchangeable with “magic realism,” “the marvelous American real,” had been coined to describe Haiti, that is, the African diaspora. Such writers as Sierra Leone’s Syl Cheney-Coker, Nigeria’s Ben Okri and Chika Unigwe, Ghana’s Kojo Laing, Congo’s Sony Labou Tansi, Uganda’s Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Mozambique’s Mia Couto found their realities newly believable—and readable. As the British-Ghanaian Nii Parkes observed, “One Hundred Years of Solitude taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own.”

Emergence de l’écocritique dans la littérature africaine : Invisibilité mythique de L’enfant noir de Camara Laye

Nous assistons à une émergence de la littérature et de la critique littéraire africaine dans la discussion de l’écocritique. En effet, l’écocritique essaie de trouver des solutions possibles qui consisteront à corriger la situation écologique contemporaine en analysant les manières dont la nature et l’environnement sont représentés dans la littérature. La combinaison de l’écocritique et des études postcoloniales a donné lieu à de nouvelles pensées critiques où les idées d’identité, de terre, de culture, des rapports de force, d’environnement etc. peuvent être abordés par de nouveaux aperçus. Les recherches littéraires montrent que L’enfant noir (1953) de Camara Laye n’a pas été analysé d’une perspective écocritique. En tant que l’un des premiers textes de la littérature francophone d’Afrique de l’ouest, ce roman peut ouvrir à de nouvelles perspectives pour la discussion de cette discipline en se focalisant la mythologie africaine. Notre étude est une tentative de relecture de ce classique africain.

Camara Laye et J. M. G Le Clézio dans la quête épistémologique de la nature par le mythe d’origine

« Écrire, c’est rêver. Là-bas, quand on arriverait à Onitsha, tout serait diffèrent, tout serait facile. Il y aurait les grandes plaines d’herbes que Geoffroy avait décrites, les arbres si hauts, et le fleuve si large qu’on pourrait croire la mer, l’horizon se perdant dans les mirages de l’eau et du ciel » (Le Clézio, 1991 : 31). Ces propos extraits de Onitsha du Nobel de Littérature de 2008, inscrivent l’écologie au cœur de l’œuvre de l’auteur. Parallèlement, un autre auteur, Camara Laye, conscient des rapports étroits qui existent entre la nature et la sagesse africaine, ne manqué pas de fournir un autre paradigme du rêve de l’homme africain dans le roman, L’Enfant noir (1966). Au-delà donc des aspects narratifs de ces deux romans, il s’agira dans cet article de chercher à comprendre l’importance de l’interaction des éléments de la nature dans une perspective de la quête de soi et de celle du milieu environnant.

Ethnography Within an Autobiographical Portrait: The Case of Camara Laye’s the African Child

Africa as a continent has many ethnic groups. For most non-Africans, Africa is a homogenous society and therefore all African societies and cultures are lumped together. There may be many similarities between cultures. However, the subtleties in culture for each group are not obvious to people outside Africa and most often they are ignored. Early novelists from Africa like Camara Laye have sought to project their own unique stories and give an expose on what and why their ethnic group puts up certain practices. In these stories however, the artist also invariably writes the history or ethnography of the group. So, though Laye’s work is regarded as a novel and in most instances as an autobiography of childhood, the work has deep touches of ethnography and therefore provides a bridge between these two spheres. It becomes therefore important to have a close study of these two domains as shown in The African Child. This paper therefore aims at investigating some ethnographic concerns of the Mandinka society and analyzes the purpose and role of two prominent names used in the work. It is these apparently neglected part that aid in projecting Laye’s autobiography.

O menino negro: as memórias de Camara Laye

ResenhaLAYE, Camara. L’enfant noir. Paris: Poket, 2007.

Perception of the relationship France–Africa by André Gide and Camara Laye

André Gide, the French traveller, went to Congo and Chad in 1925, on an official mission. He noted his impressions in his journal, published later under two titles: Voyage au Congo (Voyage to the Congo) and Retour du Tchad (Return from Chad). He expressed delight at the flora and fauna but presented the Africans as primitive beings, without spiritual or cultural values. His travels turned into a humanitarian quest when he witnessed the treatment inflicted on the natives by employees of the monopolistic rubber companies. The dilettante and aesthete Gide became a man committed to a struggle to improve the life of Africans in these regions. The publication of his books, and of articles describing the situations, had important positive consequences. Thirty years after Gide, a Guinean writer, Camara Laye dismantled the clichés attached to these supposedly “primitive barbarians”. He offers another picture of the Africans and of Africa in his novel, le Regard du Roi (The Radiance of the King, 1954). The hero is a troubled Frenchman travelling in Africa. Camara inverted the roles traditionally attributed to Europe and Africa. The crossing of various regions is presented as initiatory tests which bring about the hero’s palingenesis. Camara shows that a spiritual Africa brought peace and salvation to the Frenchman. The article will contrast these perceptions.