Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment

Abstract

Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment. By Odile Cazenave & Patricia Celerier. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. 246; bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth, $24.50 paper. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Celerier problematize the term "engagement" by examining it through historical, political, and social perspectives. Many African writers struggle to define themselves first and foremost as authors rather than solely on the basis of nation, culture, or geography. In their introduction, Cazenave and Celerier provide an overview of the concept of engagement, highlighting the historical context of the intellectual engage starting out with Emile Zola's seminal "J'accuse" to Sartre's ideologies when referring to a litterature engagee. In the context of Francophone African writers, one cannot discuss commitment and engagement without postcolonization. Therefore the authors bring to light a number of related issues dealing with Francophone literature, such as "the origins of Black civilizations, the elaboration of a Black aesthetics, the question of authenticity and tradition, the role of or alite and vernacular African languages, the use of French and the function of the writer and critic" (p. 7). Chapter 1, "Enduring Commitments," focuses on the role of litterature engagee in Francophone African literatures. Analyzing the works of writers and critics such as Sembene Ousmane, Mongo Beti, Aminata Sow Fall, and Henri Lopes, the authors consider how the notion of engagement differs for various writers depending upon national/transnational, social, economic and political realities. Parallel to that and just as important is the role of the writer as an artist whose function is to be free to create. The second chapter, "The Practice of Memory," stresses the importance of history for postcolonial writers. Among the various questions considered are: "How do we remember?" How should history be re-written by transforming myths and heroes? The chapter highlights the Duty of Memory Project on Rwanda and the way it pushed the participating writers "to engage in a cultural and historical context mostly foreign to them" (p. 56-58). The chapter brings to light complex issues of moral responsibility and justice, the links between memory and the engage writer, the difficulty of looking at the past when you only have traces, when "official" history has been manipulated, and the challenge for writers to re-create history in order to preserve memory by linking stories and histories. …