Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  It is that, for me, Senghor was always very complex. Perhaps because I never read him at school, but instead listened to him declaim his poems on the radio, especially his famous “Prière aux masques” and “Femme noire,” in that sandy voice that still gives me goose flesh. During the same period, I listened to Rabemananjara, the last word of whose poem “Madagascar” is engraved in my memory, a horse’s trot still reverberating in my ears: “Ma-da-gas-car.” The slow fall of a ping-pong ball. The reason is simple: radio broadcasting in Cameroon having few sound-tracks, the station would broadcast the few poems in its archives, then broadcast them, and broadcast them again. At five o’clock each evening, the national station. Even if his orchestral voice haunts me for a long time to come, Senghor will still appear complex to me. Perhaps because his collection of poems, Poèmes, published by Éditions du Seuil, is the first book that I bought with my own money, my economy of several weeks, augmented by my father so that I could reach the necessary sum of 1470 francs CFA. I bought Senghor of my own free will at the bookstore of Éditions Clé in Yaoundé in 1987—I know the date because I had by then bought a series of books, including Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre and Peau noire, masques blancs; and my then-teacher and mentor who later became my reader, Dassi Fosso, had advised me to write the date of purchase on the book’s first page. Instead of writing the date, I drew the head of the Senegalese poet. Unlike my encounters with Césaire, whom we had read over and over in Lycée—Une Tempête in second year, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in first, and La Tragédie du roi Christophe in terminale—Senghor was for me a private discovery. I discovered him because of his radio-broadcast voice, and between 1986 and 1988, I read my poems on the radio. So I sought out Senghor. Today, still, opening Poèmes, I realize that at that time, I always emphasized his postscript to Éthiopiques—“As the manatees drink at the source,” especially the last two paragraphs, which I underlined a lot in pencil. The underlining does not surprise me, because these two paragraphs begin with this, “We have thus arrived at the last question: the diction of the poem.” I underlined especially the sentences “This poem is a jazz score in which the performance is as important as the text,” “Thus poems can be recited—I don’t say declaimed—chanted or sang,” and “The poem is not finished until it is made to chant, to be speech and music at once.”2 Rather practical reading, I would say, for a budding poet who, in a classic, looked for phrases like those of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet; useful reading for a young writer to whom the poetry of the spoken word had been revealed by the radio, but to whom no one had ever given a practical handbook. During those formative years, did I ever read Senghor in any way other than poetic? I don’t believe so.

  Regarding writers of my generation, I usually say that Senghor is everyone’s grandfather; certainly this signifies that he is not my father, be-causeafter all it is I who “sought out” him, to emphasize Ralph Ellison’s term,3 but above all, it means I always sought in Senghor’s work “the architecture of the poem,” the workmanship of poetic speech. And it is precisely here that Senghor’s writing is rich, very few African writers having reflected so continuously, alongside their writing, upon the instruments of their writing. Faced with the masterly tomes of his reflections, Liberté I, II, III, etc., criticism establishes distinctions of importance, rickety stairs which set the poet against the president, the essayist against the poet, the theoretician of “African Socialism” against that of the “francophonie”; however, most of the time, happily, criticism does not divide his poetry into phases, the poet having begun to publish only quite late in life, after thirty. For me, however, all these aspects come together in a kind of edifice—thus in a complex—that intrigues and fascinates me, but does not evoke in me the repulsion that propelled Mongo Beti to write in all seriousness in “Conseils à un jeune écrivain francophone” (Advice for a Young Francophone Writer): “I swear, without the least confusion, that I do not read the works of this ex-president-poet; whatever I say about him, is what friends have told me.”4 I am a reader of Senghor, an observer of his complex, and when as an adult writer I passed from the diction of his writing to its meaning, from its meter to the labyrinth of his words, it became clear to me that the architecture of his poetry falls along four easily marked axes, all of which are obliterated before the simple fact that I am Cameroonian, that I am Bamileké, as I mentioned at the beginning. The axes are these: first of all, identity as an analytical category; self-definition within a binary relationship which places the subject in opposition to the object; an evasion of the political paradox; and, finally, a relationship of too great an intimacy with Gaullism—I mean Gaullism and not France. I will analyze these four axes—that of logic, that of épistèmè (in the Foucaultian sense), that of ethics, and that of politics—step by step, gaze always fixed on our own violent times—before I draw conclusions, primarily through my relations, of which I have already named two—those relations whom I did not seek out, but who were givens on my path. Next, I will speak from the tradition in which these axes have situated Cameroon, the place from which I choose both to write about this country and to read Senghor.

  Cameroonian Readings: Logic and Épistèmè

  This is a fact: Senghor’s poetry is made not only of form; it is also made of ideas, of concepts. It is similar to a structure of sand, cement, and water. Let us take identity. Is the fact that Senghor began to write during the triumphal period of racism—that of Nazism combined with colonialism—responsible for the clear grounding of his thought in the concepts of identity and belonging? He too was a son of his times, no doubt, and certainly it is still difficult to represent oneself other than in panegyrics: what it must have meant to be the first black agrégé5! Perhaps if one were to take into account what it meant to have been the only Black in the classroom, the only Black in the school, and perhaps even in the whole university, one could get some indication of what separates us from Senghor, we who were born in and grew up in Africa, and in a country where, without wanting it, we were in the majority. One would understand perhaps why a phrase like this one is closer to us in reality than are all the acts of Senghorian intellectual gymnastics: “a drive through the real Africa, among the real populace of the African world would have revealed that these millions had never at any time had cause to question the existence of their—Negritude.”6 Of course the question would be this: what is the “real Africa,” but let us ask another first, for reference: who writes these lines? Soyinka, the mytho-poet of the road, who distinguishes Senghor’s theoretical gesture—the product “by and for a tiny elite”7—from the creative activity of a pulsating Africa whose genius Soyinka himself attempts to grasp through history and myth. And I remember too his smile when I asked him last year in Hanover, in what terms exactly had he put his phrase about the tiger, about how it does not proclaim its tigritude; I remember what he told me—after repeating his phrase and throwing in another reference to the eagle that does not proclaim its eagletude—that such preoccupations are known only to Francophone Africans. Is there a more polite way of saying that it is a non-issue? Notice, however, Soyinka’s own reference to the “real Africa”—does this term not raise the same question as Senghor’s Negritude? Truth in poetry is illusion, we know; however, is this issue not inscribed in the very logic of Negritude, in the fundamental essentialism of its quest? Too, Senghor speaks of Wesen, a concept he borrows from elsewhere, from German metaphysics and especially from ethnology, via his rather close reading of Leo Frobenius.

  Negritude understood then as the Wesen of “the real Africa”? It is true that Senghor tries to escape into theory by creating, in contre-coup, the concept of the “Civilisation de l’universel,” perhaps most of all in order to counter Sartre’s dialectics, set down in Orphée noir, that define Negritude as “anti-racist racism,” and annihilates the concept with that same blow. Yet, does Senghor’s “universal” abstraction quell the trembling that our era feels faced with any and all essentialisms? The representation of Afr
ica as essentially black—here then is a mind game, the staggering limits of which our era can judge each day and night. And we know that Senghor’s fertile mind had them to spare: “francité,” “africanité,” “arabité,” “germanité,” “latinité”—what says it better? By the same logic, we have watched the birth of “créolité,” “antillanité,” at the hands of Glissant, Chamoiseau, and their comrades. Blind in one eye, we are still applauding their creations. Have we not seen the same essentialism manufactured in Zaire, as well as in Togo, an “authenticité” that plunges these countries into diktat? Did we not see it, fraught with neologisms, among Ivorian intellectuals and writers, as Niangoran Porquet forged the “griotique” and then soon after “ivorité,” which put the country into flames and blood?8 As for “congolité,” it has only just begun its macabre dance. We can laugh today at Senghor’s famous “negrité,” but we should cry before the numerous offspring of his logic. In reality, we no longer need to criticize his Negritude, as Soyinka does, by opposing it with a so-called “real Africa” (which itself owes much to the logic of Negritude; which is elsewhere now called “neo-negritudiniste,” according to another neologism, this time from Biodun Jeyifo). African history since the independences, our history, that is to say, is a better critic than any of us. Because, fundamentally, was Mugabe not armed with this vision of “negrité” when he took away the right of belonging to Africa from the whites of his country? Is Nadine Gordimer not an African writer? And, what of Coetzee then? We would ask Senghor. Moreover, since it is belonging we are speaking of, is it not for such a concept that the million Tutsis were massacred in Rwanda in 1994, subjected to the insane words “Go back to Egypt!” (the ancestry that Anta Diop had established between them, Ancient Egypt, and ourselves, having been turned against them). “Real Africa”? “Negrité”? A dangerous quest that has nonetheless damaged African intelligence in its essentialist pursuit of Negritude; a labyrinth where the masks of our by-the-kilo dead are dancing; a corridor of vampires in which even our most insightful writers are reeling drunkenly, beside our most cynical politicians! One day we will recognize this simple truth: Rwanda is the grave of Negritude. Until that day, we, children of violence and silence, are already living in this fact.

  And from this evidence at the end of a long tunnel of night, Negritude appears to be rooted in an épistèmè that defines the African as other, fixing him or her in a binary relation (of conflict or of marriage, what does it matter?), of same and other, of subject and object. That this order of things is a heritage of Western thought, hundreds of contributions have already established; in their readings of Senghor’s complex, they have not desisted from suggesting the intellectual falseness of his famous “kingdom of childhood.” For us today, however, following Mudimbe’s analysis, the subject/object relationship appears to be directly inherited from the colonial order that created an infinite number of dichotomies, of which Negritude itself as “a discourse of alterity,” as Mudimbe’s phrase goes, is one of the most vulgar manifestations. It becomes clear that this relationship, inscribed as it is in all its glory by Sartre in his famous preface, Orphée noir, remains canonical. It is not only canonical in its logic (the figure of Narcissus is sufficient for that), but in its structure. It defines an idea’s house and thus opens or closes various passageways and their possibilities. “I is an other,” Rimbaud tells us; his phrase captures the paradoxical situation in which Negritude has placed us: I look at myself in the analytical mirror, the weapons Negritude has provided in my hands—and I see myself as the West’s other! At the same time as I recognize the distortion of my face, I discover the chains on my ankles that bind me to that familiar dichotomy—same and other. In short, following the lead of colonial discourse, Negritude has Africanized Africa. How does one escape the violence that for Mudimbe is a “panacea” and for me, who was born in Cameroon, is the revelation of a conceptual prison? The lack of movement that has followed this frightening discovery, as much as it stuns me, shows that Negritude, in its épistèmè, has left us in a profound transcendental fall before the zigzags of our history, by erecting ethnology’s assumptions inside of us; and leaving us unable, for example, to conceptualize the violence of which we are capable. It is incumbent upon us to create other paths, to see Negritude only as the prelude to a new order of intelligence, and to thus go beyond ethnology’s othering dualism; we must open our minds to the “patience of philosophy,” to begin to pay attention, to devote ourselves to the disassembling of our own reflection.

  A question yet remains: why Senghor’s complex, why the épistèmè of Negritude, remains so pervasive for writers today? No one would dare ask Victor Hugo to pay tribute to the classical era which he had rejected! Mudimbe, all the while drawing our attention to Ethiopian sources of knowledge, Das Buch der weisen Philosophen nach dem Aethiopischen Untersucht (1950), Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalum (1904), Das Leben und die Sentenzen des Philosophen Secundus des Schweigsamen (1887), opens a way for thought and imagination that, from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, traces the possibilities of a kind of knowledge that is fixed on African terrain, far from the paradigm of race—but this possibility is not yet taken seriously today, erased as it is under the discursive hegemony of the ethnographic épistèmè. Let us not waste our time analyzing why this path was not taken: the history of ideas is always linked to that of power. Today the face of power in Africa is difficult to imagine without the hand of the West. It is strange, though, that embraced by the dialectic of subject/object, we would have been blind for so long in the face of the teleology of violence which has, since the independences, duped our countries—in Congo, in Bamileké country, and culminating first in Biafra, well before Rwanda, and today in Darfur; fixed in the épistèmè inherited from Negritude, African thought has been absent and asleep for too long, ignoring the explosive root, which, like a dangerous snake, runs through its land, and sporadically distorts its surface with seas of blood and millions of the dead. Conceived in a discursive system which places the African subject opposite the West and which elsewhere makes it into an object (and we would like to say, exonerates itself of any responsibility), African thought would not have suspected that such violence would make an African peasant cut his brother’s neck with a machete, or stuff a banana tree branch in the vagina of his African sister, because “to kill is less work than to farm,” as the genocidal peasants said in Hatzfeld’s revelatory book; it would not have suspected the profound dehumanization that means the African calls his brother or sister, “cockroach”—or “frog,” “bosnian,” as happens in Cameroon. The Rwandan genocide is more than a warning to the hoax-makers of the “kingdom of childhood.” We have already said it, but let us repeat it: Rwanda is the grave of Negritude.

  Cameroonian Readings: Ethics and Politics

  Today one can no longer think as if the genocide in Rwanda had not occurred. Genocide is, in essence, a State turned against its citizens, whom it annihilates. For us, then, if “Africa does not exist,” as the Togolese Kossi Efoui said so well, it is because we were born in independent states, and our definition of citizen, and therefore of writer, is always situated in relation to this order of things. Our perspective on Senghor is, from this point of view, perhaps similar to the one from which Ludwig Borne viewed Goethe and which prompted him to write: “Goethe was always a servant of despots; his satire only deals skillfully with the small ones, while he wooed the big ones.”9 Harsh words which share the spirit of those Mongo Beti reserves for the poet-president. Their perspective, however, is our own, that of a citizen. It is from this point of view—citizen—that we are able to find Senghor’s impossible paradox surprising. Let us clarify that we understand paradox in the purely etymological sense that prompts us to discover the neighbor—doxa, order. Here it is appropriate to remember Njabulo Ndebele’s surprise, formulated into a question he posed at a symposium in Lagos in 1987, and which Alain Ricard relays to us: “Why are they so right-wing, these Francophones?10 The an
swer, which Ricard searches for everywhere but in the evidence, is meanwhile inscribed in the terms of the question itself, in the word “Francophone,” which is, as one remembers, a piece of the Senghorian inheritance. But perhaps we should again read Mongo Beti, who was absent from the symposium in question, an event where the Francophone presence was dominated by the dual faces of Ahmadou Kourouma and Sony Labou Tansi: “M. Senghor did not fear, since then, supporting books which presented militants or men of politics. It is true that these works expressed, always more or less hypocritically, approval of the African powers which were themselves favorable to the Western power dear to M. Senghor.”11 Ndebele, whose thinking was rooted in that of Beti, was surprised at the old relationship between art and politics, and the claim to an apolitical place for the artist which Senghor (who, one forgets too easily, never escaped the realm of politics from the time of his arrival in Paris in 1928) was suspected of having made in his defense of L’Enfant noir. In their shared concerns, however, Ndebele and Beti question less the apolitical place of art, because such a place does not exist (and certainly not in the backyard of the poet-president), than they question the ethics of the writer in the political: the writer’s choice, and therefore, the morality of her art.