Bound to Violence

Yambo Ouologuem

on Violence, Truth and Black History

Interviewed by Linda Kuehl

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?

Source: Commonweal (11 June 1971)

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update 7 July 2008