Word: nakem
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...merely satirical, too exuberant to be tragic, his first novel (the first African novel to win one of France's top literary honors, the Prix Renaudot) begins as a sort of mock epic outlining in blood red the very real history of an imaginary African empire, Nakem...
...tableaux with a violent compression of energy, as if he were staging Marat/ Sade played by the Keystone Kops. Over the centuries, in the name of Allah, in the name of Christ, in the name of the god of self-interest, "that precious raw material, the niggertrash" of Nakem is conquered, exploited, then "freed" by new conquerors -Arab, French, even, alas, black...
Suddenly the cast of thousands disappears. The brilliant-and clearly well-researched - pageant of 7½ centuries of "galloping inhumanity" (1202 to 1947) drastically slows its tempo. African Everyman becomes specific-one Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi of a Nakem that increasingly resembles Mali. Nakem's black rulers have already decided that only slaves will be exposed to corrupt French schooling. Raymond comes of a slave family. He studies hard and, as his reward, ends up in Paris receiving an elite-and not so elite-education. To Ouologuem, Kassoumi is the ultimate sophistication of slavery: the black man imprinted with...
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