Word: ouologuem
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BOUND TO VIOLENCE, by Yambo Ouologuem. A young Mali novelist's exuberant mock epic of the bloody history of a real but imaginary African empire...
Nothing less savage-or less funny -than Anthony Hecht's couplet commentary on Aesop, the slave as moralist, should introduce this small masterpiece on man's ingenious cruelty to man. Yambo Ouologuem (pronounced Oo-o-lo-guem), born 30 years ago in the French Sudan, now the Republic of Mali, writes from the point of view of victim. But what a victim...
...Ouologuem manages his 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...
...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 a white soul. African history-and the novel-reaches a supremely ironic climax as Kassoumi, with his white wife, returns to become puppet leader of his emerging Third World nation. The slave disguised as master...
...After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" cried T.S. Eliot. At the conclusion of his bloody bloody chronicle Ouologuem does not presume to forgive either blacks or whites. But in the remarkable final chapter-having turned from historian to novelist-he turns from novelist to mystic. "Politics," he writes accusingly, "does not know the goal but forges a pretext of a goal." Negritude or colonialism, black power or white power-on these terms, history makes victims, if not slaves of us all. With a skepticism nearly as pure as faith, Ouologuem concludes: one ought to despair of men's ancient compulsion...