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Rape, Repression, and Narrative Form in Le Devoir de violence and La Vie et demie
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Julien, Eileen |
| Copyright Year | 1991 |
| Abstract | The depiction of sexual violence in recent African fiction contrasts markedly with fiction in English and French before the late sixties, where rape and sexual violence are uncommon-a noticeable ab sence, given the pillaging of African resources, human and other wise, under the slave trade and colonialism. And yet an understand able one, perhaps, when we consider the keen sense of decorum in indigenous and Islamic cultures, the conservative values imparted in colonial and missionary schools, and the politics of publication and reception. Le Devoir de violence, by Malian writer Yambo Ouolo guem (Paris: Seuil, 1968), and La Vie et demie, by Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi (Paris: Seuil, 1979), are formally innovative novels of the postcolonial period that expose the brutality of autocratic and totalitarian regimes. They mark turning points in recent literary history, and they practice the representation of sexual violence. I Such violence is, of course, not the central issue of either Le Devoir de violence or La Vie et demie but is rather a measure of the sickness of social and political relations. This particular use of image may seem to ignore the particularity of female sexuality: sexual violence and rape become near transparent signs of something else. Yet sexual violence in these texts is elUCidated, if we read carefully, by the context of political violence. Rape, these texts suggest, is not an aberration, not a singularly sick act, nor an individual problem in an otherwise healthy society. Rape is represented, then, not as an isolated, gratuitous instance of violence that can be read metaphori cally-that is, as an abstracted image of human disorder, ugliness, and disenfranchisement. It is portrayed rather, as the French term viol makes clear, metonymically, as a quintessential act of violence in a context of rampant abuse, both political and sexual. In this regard, Mary Douglas' study of the concepts of pollution and taboo offers a pertinent insight. She notes that "rituals enact the form of social relations and in giving these relations visible expres sion they enable people to know their own society. The rituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body."2 While the rapes that Ouologuem and Tansi depict may not be said to constitute ritual in the strictest sense, they nonetheless perform the same role in these texts: they enable characters and readers to know-not through simple analogy (metaphor) but be cause rape is a related manifestation (metonymy)-the society in which rape takes place. With regard to sexual violence, Le Devoir de violence and La Vie et demie are especially interesting, then, because they contextualize rape: power, taken to its logical end, becomes brutality and asserts itself simultaneously in the political-military arena and in the realm of sexuality. For these writers, public life and private life are not separate domains. Yet the exposition or intimation of this dynamic in a text does not constitute in and of itself a challenge to it, for the very premises and form of each narrative express attitudes toward power, which in the case of Ouologuem's novel reinscribe it and in that of Tansi dispute it. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/3467/eileen%20julien%20bk%20chapter.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
