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Article Title: Orality and Historic Echoes Running Through Yambo Ouloguem's BOUND TO VIOLENCE
Author: Arthur Edgar E. Smith
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Orality and Historic Echoes Running Through Yambo Ouloguem's BOUND TO VIOLENCE <br> Article By: Arthur Edgar E. Smith <br><br> Malian writer, Yambo Ouologuem's most famous novel BOUND TO VIOLENCE[1968] satirically portrays Africa before and during colonial subjugation whilst assessing the role of local overlords who in league with Arab slave dealers, sold their subjects into bondage. After winning the prestigious French literary prize, Prix Renaudot, Yambo received much media attention, being widely reviewed, appearing on T.V. shows and being interviewed, being featured in many prominent publications and the book itself being translated into numerous languages. Then a disclosure that the book contained materials from Graham Greene's thriller IT'S A BATTLEFIELD [1934], Andre Schwarz Bart's THE LAST OF THE JUST [1955] and works by Guy de Maupassant upset the scene. The English publisher, William Heinemann, was obliged to acknowledge the use of passages from Greene. The French edition was banned. The American edition too disappeared fairly fast, but the Heinemann edition remained in print Ouologuem also wrote LETTRE A LA FRANCE NEGRE [1968] described as a collection of somewhat flimsy diatribes and some erotica, published under the pseudonym Utto Rodolp, LES MILLES ET UNE BIBLES DU SEXE [1969]. Little else has been heard from him since. Despite this controversy, BOUND TO VIOLENCE could not be dismissed. For it has been widely read as a wonderful book. Born in 1940 in Bandiagary in the Dogon country, in Mali to a ruling class family, Ouologuem, the only son of a land owner and school inspector, quickly learnt several African languages and became fluent in French, English and Spanish. After matriculating at a Lycee in Bamako [capital of Mali] Yambo went to France to continue his education at Lycee de Charenton in Paris and then continued his studies for his doctorate in Sociology. Upon returning to his home country in the late 70's he became director of a Youth centre near Mopti in central Mali where he remained until 1984. He has led a secluded religious life in the Sahel ever since. BOUND TO VIOLENCE, his first and only novel, has been widely hailed as the first truly African novel. 'It fuses legend, oral tradition and stunning realism in a vision arising authentically from black roots.' He draws on the history and culture of the great medieval empire of Mali in which Nakem was central in the 13th century dominated onwards by the Saif dynasty, their rule characterized by ruthlessness marked with bloody and tragic adventures. After a brief, violent fresco depicting Nakem's past, the story moves into the 20th century. Here the Saifs still continue in power. But when the French arrive as colonizers, they unwittingly become puppets in their astute hands. These native rulers continue to dominate by means of witchcraft and crime. Scenes of violence and eroticism, of sorcery and black magic appear as natural parts of human activity there. From this sumptuous and frightful background emerges the book's main protagonist, Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, the son of slave who was sent to France to be educated and groomed for a political post which could well be the next step to his becoming another puppet to the Saifs. These ruling dynasty of Saifs dominate the history of the land from ancient times to modern Africa within a truncated African republic of Nakem, Zuike. Ouologuem shows how the ancient African emperors, the Moslems, and finally the European colonial administrators were responsible for the black African's 'slave mentality.' These three forces produce 'negraille' a word coined by Ouologuem meaning'nigger trash'. He was in addition skeptical about the potential for liberation through struggle. The first of the novel's four parts is a compressed history of the first seven hundred years of the Nakem Empire starting from around 1200 with brutality, violence, oppression and corruption permeating it. Slavery is also widespread with 'a hundred million of the damned - so moan the troubadours of Nakem when the evening vomits forth its starry diamonds - being carried away.' Cannibalism: 'one of the darkest features of that spectral Africa over which hung the malefic shadow of Saif al - Haram' was also common. The Arabs had conquered the land [settling over it 'like a she-dog baring her white fangs in raucous laughter and the common black] man known as niggertrash suffers for it. Religion - Islam -is abused in order to consolidate and keep power. It 'became a means of action, a political weapon.' The brief second part captures the coming of the whites at the close of the 19th century. The empire is 'pacified and divided up by the Europeans, with the French controlling what remains of Nakem. Hope that life will improve is seen as; Saved from slavery, the niggertrash welcomed the white man with joy, hoping he would make them forget the mighty Saif's meticulously organized cruelty. But the exploitation continues unabated as each side uses the niggertrash to suit their own ends. The Saif remains influential and powerful even under the French administration. The subjugated commoners still have little chance of living tolerable lives. Much of the book, the third section titled 'Night of the Giants', is set in the first half of the twentieth century. Horrific incidents such as the Saif's indiscriminate wielding of whatever power he has left, lots of ugly violence ranging from female infibulations to the Saif's curious assassination technique through trained asps proliferate. Fritz Shrobenius adds another dimension to the exploitation. Learning lately about Nakem, Shrobenius comes there to buy relics, masks and other cultural artifacts. The Saifs themselves contributed to the spread of this exploitation and fraud by making up stories and selling whatever cultural legacy can be procured. Tons upon tons more are donated towards the further spread and intensification of 'Shrobeniusology'. This explicitly shows the mechanism by which the new elite has come to invent its traditions through the science of ethnography. Later after Shrobenius has popularized African art in Europe many others come to purchase pieces. No originals now left, Saif had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight and then dug out later and sold at exorbitant price. Saif made up stories and the interpreter translated. Madoubi repeated in French, refining on the subtleties to the delight of Shrobenius, that human crayfish afflicted with a groping mania for resuscitating an African universe - cultural autonomy, he called it, which had lost all living reality;...he was determined to find metaphysical meaning in everything...African life, he held, was pure art. Then,'...henceforth Negro art was baptized 'aesthetic' and hawked in the imaginary universe of 'vitalizing exchanges.' Then after describing the phantasmic elaboration of some interpretative forgeries by the Saif he announces that '...Negro art found its patent of nobility in the folklore of merchantile intellectualism..'Thus comes the exposure of the network of fraudsters. These start from Shrobenius himself, the anthropologist, as apologist for 'his' people; a European audience that swallows enthusiastically and unquestioningly these exoticized products; African traders and producers of African art, who understand the need to maintain the mysteries that render their products as exotic; traditional and contemporary elites who require a sentimentalized past to authorize their present power. All of them are thus exposed in their complex and multiple mutual complicities. 'Witness the splendor of its art - the true face of Africa in the grandiose empires of the Middle Ages, a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity, order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it's here that one must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization. Ironically, all this earns Shrobenius a twofold benefit on his return home. He mystified his people well enough to get them to raise him enthusiastically to a lofty Sorbonnical chair. He also exploited the sentimentality of the coons, who were only too pleased to hear from the mouth of a white man that Africa was the womb of the world and the cradle of civilization. The niggertrash thus donated masks and art treasures by the tons to the acolyte of 'Shrobeniusology'. Ouologuem then goes on to precisely articulating the interconnections of Africanist mystifications with tourism and the production, packaging, and marketing of African art works. An Africanist school harnessed to the vapors of magico religious cosmological, and mythical symbolism has been born: with the result that for three years men flocked to Nakem- ..middlemen, adventurers, apprentices, bankers, politicians, salesmen, conspirators - supposedly 'scientists,' but in reality enslaved sentries mounting guard before the Shrobeniusological monument of Negro pseudo symbolism. Already it had become more than difficult to procure old masks, for Shrobenius And the missionaries had had the good fortune to snap them all up. And so Saif - had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight or sunk into ponds , lakes, marshes, and mud holes, to be exhumed later on and sold at exorbitant prices to unsuspecting curio hunters. These three-year-old masks were said to be charged with the weight of four centuries of civilization. Ouologuem in this way forcefully exposes the connections in the international system of art exchange, the international art world, and the way in which an ideology of disinterested aesthetic value - the 'baptism' of 'Negro art' as 'aesthetic' meshes with the international commodification of African expressive culture which requires the manufacture of Otherness . [ Appiah, Kwame Anthony] Also of interest is Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, a child of poverty who takes advantage of French schooling and achieves academic success leading him to further on his studies in France where he meets both success and failure . He falls in love with a wealthy Frenchman and encounters his sister in a bordello. There he discovers as well the particularly inescapable long reach of Saif . On his return back home his thoughts of a triumphant return were broken by his discovery that he and his country were again being manipulated by the ruling Saif. He a son of the soil seeming the likeliest candidate for the novel's hero by the end of the narrative has less than uplifting political prospects left. Some hope however comes from the brief concluding section 'Dawn'. Abbe Henry, the hunchback priest obsessed by the tragedy of the Blacks, half-crazed with the christian duty of love is humbly beautiful as the despair of a Christian soul is now a bishop. The last section consists almost entirely of a dialogue between Abbe Henry and Saif, both philosophical discourse and power struggle. This Saif appears vanquished, but Ouologuem reminds us; one cannot help recalling that Saif, mourned three million times, is forever reborn to history beneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics, Using various elements of oral literature Ouologuem enriches the narrative and explores a wide span of African history to establish how Africa was like before and after the onslaught of the Arab and European slave dealers and colonizers. Oral traditions enrich the texture of Ouloguem's narration thus giving it its special feel, some of which includes its vivacity, its uniqueness, its semblance of authenticity and its immediacy. Given the wide span of African History explored encompassing well over 700 years from 1202 to 1947 the narrative method has of necessity to exceed the bounds of the conventional. The narrative thus reads like an epic oral tale told from a communal [we] point of view. The reader thus feels he is listening to a tale being related by a Griot for instance. Its start is like a legend being told in the village square. Our eyes drink the brightness of the sun and overcome, marvel at their tears. Mashallah! war bismillah!... To recount the bloody adventure of the niggertrash - shame to the worthless paupers - there would be no need to go back beyond the present century, but the true history of the Black begins much earlier, with the Saifs, in the years 1202 of our era, in the African Empire of Nakem, south of Fezzan long after the conquests of Okba ben Nafi al-Fitri The figurative expressions as 'our eyes drink the brightness of the sun', the frequent interjections and exclamations in the middle of sentences and the religious incantations give the work its distinctive oral Griot-like timbre. In reading we could easily imagine listening to the emphatic and dramatic delivery of the story teller. Through his incantations and his comments interlarding the tale, he shows his emotional reactions to the details being narrated, thus giving us the illusion of being part of an audience keenly listening in the village square with our attention being drawn as it goes on to particular details. This effect could best be seen in how our attention is drawn to the way the niggertrash are ill-used: They promised their serfs, servants and former captives that, pending the hostilities which the neighbouring tribe was no doubt plotting, they would be 'looked upon - hear! - as provisionally free and equal subjects.' Then, once peace was restored among the various tribes, for the war had failed to break out - out - hee - hee - the same notables promised the same subject that after...hum... hum...a brief'apprenticeship of forced labor, they would be rewarded with the Rights of Man.... As to civil rights, of them no mention was made. Halleluyah. The interjections throughout this passage are tinged with mockery or scorn. The reader is thus alerted to the insincerity of the promises being bandied about. The narrator's dismay is evident in the closing exclamation: 'Halleluyah!' In the next passage Ouologuem invokes the lofty and grandiose style and tradition of the African chronicler, the Griot. How in profound displeasure,with perfumed mouth and eloquence on his tongue, Saif ben Isaac al - Heit endeavored to mobilize the energies of the fanatical people against the invader; how to that end he spread reports of daily miracles throughout the Nakem Empire - earthquakes, the opening of tombs, resurrections of saints, fountains of milk springing up in his path, visions of archangels stepping out of the sunset, village women drawing buckets from the well and finding them full of blood; how on one of his journeys he transformed three pages of the Holy Book, the Koran, into as many doves, which flew on ahead of him as though to summon the people to Saif's banner; and with what diplomacy he feigned indifference to the gods of this world: in all that there is nothing out of the ordinary. In this grand sweep of a sentence Ouologuem succeeds in giving force to the eloquence of Saif ben Isaac al- heit whose 'profound displeasure' allied 'with perfumed mouth and eloquence' mobilized the people to frenzied and fanatical onslaught against the invaders. Through parallel structures and repetitions he also shows the prowess of the Saif in spreading a propaganda of terror to further give vent to the furore of the people in attacking the invaders. Ouloguem also creates the impression of narrating legends based on factual historical occcurences. This effect is created through his constant recourse to historians and griots as suggested in: ' Afterwards, wild supplications was heard from the village square...Then pious silence and the griot Kituli of cherished memory ends his tale as follows .'and 'The consequences of his audacity are related by Mohamed Hakmud Traore descended in an unbroken line from griot ancestors and himself griot in the present-day African Republic of Nakem-Zuiko.' The impression is thus often given of a teller sifting through the various details from various sources to get at the kernel of the truth. Many a time he would indicate this by either naming the various griots and historians concerned or by merely introducing them as 'according to one version' 'in another version', 'still others claimed that' and so on. His inability to get one authentic report on Isaac al - Heit is explained thus: At this point tradition loses itself in legend for there are few written accounts and the versions of the elders diverge from those of the griots, which differ from those of the chroniclers. Through his comments and religious incantations, the narrator conveys the impression that he and his audience share common norms and values. A shared ancestral background is also alluded to through his frequent recourse to such phrases as 'our era' Ouologuem repudiates the negritudinist glorification of Africa's past by portraying it as an unending cycle of violence, greed, debauchery and exploitation, as reaffirmed in the title BOUND TO VIOLENCE and in this extract from an interview of Ouologuem by Linda Hiecht: ....black people in Africa were oppressed. 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. 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. Ouologuem's position is then unlike Armah's anti-negritudinist. For he holds Africans as much responsible for the indignities they suffered as the foreign forces. Thus, he neither idealizes nor endorses either party. His African world has no political system. Traditional religion too seems absent here. Everything is left in a state of chaos and turmoil with the rulers using people as they wish. The system of justice evident in TWO THOUSAND SEASONS could not be seen here. Ordinary people are continually being misused by the notables. Immoralities of the worst kinds are widely practiced. The history of Africa is thus shown as one unending flow of violence which in turn kept them under such dread that they were scared stiff of even rebelling. Thus Appiah's submission that it is a repudiation of national history makes much sense though perhaps it could be more apt as a denunciation of racial or continental history. BIBLIOGRAPHY Appiah, Kwame Anthony , IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE Ouologuem, Yambo, BOUND TO VIOLENCE translated by Ralph Manhein, A Helen and Kurt Woolf Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, New York, 1971 Palmer, Eustace, THE GROWTH OF THE AFRICAN NOVEL, Heinemann Educational Books , London, 1979 Wise, Christopher[ed], YAMBO OUOLOGUEM POSTCOLONIALWRITER, ISLAMIC MILITANT, 1999 'De l'histoire a sa metaphore dans Le Devoir de Violence de Yambo Ouologuem ' By Josias Semajanga in ETUDES FRANCAISES, vol 31, no1,etc[1995] 'Fiction and Subversion' by A. Songolo in PRESENCE AFRICAINE no 120 [1981] 'Ouologuem's Blueprint for 'Le Devoir de Violence'' by E. Sellin in RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURE 2 [1971] <br><br> Original Article URL: <a href='http://artsandentertainment.myfreearticlecentral.com/Article_10502_Orality-and-Historic-Echoes-Running-Through-Yambo-Ouloguems-BOUND-TO-VIOLENCE.aspx'>Orality and Historic Echoes Running Through Yambo Ouloguem's BOUND TO VIOLENCE</a> <br><br> Arthur E Smith Senior Lecturer of English at Fourah Bay College has taught at various levels in Sierra Leone. Mr Smith who participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature in the U.S. in 2006 and was made Honorary Citizen Louisville, was a delegate to the International PEN Congress in Dakar, Senegal in 2007 and delivered a paper at the Richard Wright at 100 International Conference in University of Beira in November 2008. His writings could be read at his personal website at http://www.arthuredgaresmith.net <br><br>



Plain Text Version:
Orality and Historic Echoes Running Through Yambo Ouloguem's BOUND TO VIOLENCE Article By: Arthur Edgar E. Smith Malian writer, Yambo Ouologuem's most famous novel BOUND TO VIOLENCE[1968] satirically portrays Africa before and during colonial subjugation whilst assessing the role of local overlords who in league with Arab slave dealers, sold their subjects into bondage. After winning the prestigious French literary prize, Prix Renaudot, Yambo received much media attention, being widely reviewed, appearing on T.V. shows and being interviewed, being featured in many prominent publications and the book itself being translated into numerous languages. Then a disclosure that the book contained materials from Graham Greene's thriller IT'S A BATTLEFIELD [1934], Andre Schwarz Bart's THE LAST OF THE JUST [1955] and works by Guy de Maupassant upset the scene. The English publisher, William Heinemann, was obliged to acknowledge the use of passages from Greene. The French edition was banned. The American edition too disappeared fairly fast, but the Heinemann edition remained in print Ouologuem also wrote LETTRE A LA FRANCE NEGRE [1968] described as a collection of somewhat flimsy diatribes and some erotica, published under the pseudonym Utto Rodolp, LES MILLES ET UNE BIBLES DU SEXE [1969]. Little else has been heard from him since. Despite this controversy, BOUND TO VIOLENCE could not be dismissed. For it has been widely read as a wonderful book. Born in 1940 in Bandiagary in the Dogon country, in Mali to a ruling class family, Ouologuem, the only son of a land owner and school inspector, quickly learnt several African languages and became fluent in French, English and Spanish. After matriculating at a Lycee in Bamako [capital of Mali] Yambo went to France to continue his education at Lycee de Charenton in Paris and then continued his studies for his doctorate in Sociology. Upon returning to his home country in the late 70's he became director of a Youth centre near Mopti in central Mali where he remained until 1984. He has led a secluded religious life in the Sahel ever since. BOUND TO VIOLENCE, his first and only novel, has been widely hailed as the first truly African novel. 'It fuses legend, oral tradition and stunning realism in a vision arising authentically from black roots.' He draws on the history and culture of the great medieval empire of Mali in which Nakem was central in the 13th century dominated onwards by the Saif dynasty, their rule characterized by ruthlessness marked with bloody and tragic adventures. After a brief, violent fresco depicting Nakem's past, the story moves into the 20th century. Here the Saifs still continue in power. But when the French arrive as colonizers, they unwittingly become puppets in their astute hands. These native rulers continue to dominate by means of witchcraft and crime. Scenes of violence and eroticism, of sorcery and black magic appear as natural parts of human activity there. From this sumptuous and frightful background emerges the book's main protagonist, Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, the son of slave who was sent to France to be educated and groomed for a political post which could well be the next step to his becoming another puppet to the Saifs. These ruling dynasty of Saifs dominate the history of the land from ancient times to modern Africa within a truncated African republic of Nakem, Zuike. Ouologuem shows how the ancient African emperors, the Moslems, and finally the European colonial administrators were responsible for the black African's 'slave mentality.' These three forces produce 'negraille' a word coined by Ouologuem meaning'nigger trash'. He was in addition skeptical about the potential for liberation through struggle. The first of the novel's four parts is a compressed history of the first seven hundred years of the Nakem Empire starting from around 1200 with brutality, violence, oppression and corruption permeating it. Slavery is also widespread with 'a hundred million of the damned - so moan the troubadours of Nakem when the evening vomits forth its starry diamonds - being carried away.' Cannibalism: 'one of the darkest features of that spectral Africa over which hung the malefic shadow of Saif al - Haram' was also common. The Arabs had conquered the land [settling over it 'like a she-dog baring her white fangs in raucous laughter and the common black] man known as niggertrash suffers for it. Religion - Islam -is abused in order to consolidate and keep power. It 'became a means of action, a political weapon.' The brief second part captures the coming of the whites at the close of the 19th century. The empire is 'pacified and divided up by the Europeans, with the French controlling what remains of Nakem. Hope that life will improve is seen as; Saved from slavery, the niggertrash welcomed the white man with joy, hoping he would make them forget the mighty Saif's meticulously organized cruelty. But the exploitation continues unabated as each side uses the niggertrash to suit their own ends. The Saif remains influential and powerful even under the French administration. The subjugated commoners still have little chance of living tolerable lives. Much of the book, the third section titled 'Night of the Giants', is set in the first half of the twentieth century. Horrific incidents such as the Saif's indiscriminate wielding of whatever power he has left, lots of ugly violence ranging from female infibulations to the Saif's curious assassination technique through trained asps proliferate. Fritz Shrobenius adds another dimension to the exploitation. Learning lately about Nakem, Shrobenius comes there to buy relics, masks and other cultural artifacts. The Saifs themselves contributed to the spread of this exploitation and fraud by making up stories and selling whatever cultural legacy can be procured. Tons upon tons more are donated towards the further spread and intensification of 'Shrobeniusology'. This explicitly shows the mechanism by which the new elite has come to invent its traditions through the science of ethnography. Later after Shrobenius has popularized African art in Europe many others come to purchase pieces. No originals now left, Saif had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight and then dug out later and sold at exorbitant price. Saif made up stories and the interpreter translated. Madoubi repeated in French, refining on the subtleties to the delight of Shrobenius, that human crayfish afflicted with a groping mania for resuscitating an African universe - cultural autonomy, he called it, which had lost all living reality;...he was determined to find metaphysical meaning in everything...African life, he held, was pure art. Then,'...henceforth Negro art was baptized 'aesthetic' and hawked in the imaginary universe of 'vitalizing exchanges.' Then after describing the phantasmic elaboration of some interpretative forgeries by the Saif he announces that '...Negro art found its patent of nobility in the folklore of merchantile intellectualism..'Thus comes the exposure of the network of fraudsters. These start from Shrobenius himself, the anthropologist, as apologist for 'his' people; a European audience that swallows enthusiastically and unquestioningly these exoticized products; African traders and producers of African art, who understand the need to maintain the mysteries that render their products as exotic; traditional and contemporary elites who require a sentimentalized past to authorize their present power. All of them are thus exposed in their complex and multiple mutual complicities. 'Witness the splendor of its art - the true face of Africa in the grandiose empires of the Middle Ages, a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity, order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it's here that one must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization. Ironically, all this earns Shrobenius a twofold benefit on his return home. He mystified his people well enough to get them to raise him enthusiastically to a lofty Sorbonnical chair. He also exploited the sentimentality of the coons, who were only too pleased to hear from the mouth of a white man that Africa was the womb of the world and the cradle of civilization. The niggertrash thus donated masks and art treasures by the tons to the acolyte of 'Shrobeniusology'. Ouologuem then goes on to precisely articulating the interconnections of Africanist mystifications with tourism and the production, packaging, and marketing of African art works. An Africanist school harnessed to the vapors of magico religious cosmological, and mythical symbolism has been born: with the result that for three years men flocked to Nakem- ..middlemen, adventurers, apprentices, bankers, politicians, salesmen, conspirators - supposedly 'scientists,' but in reality enslaved sentries mounting guard before the Shrobeniusological monument of Negro pseudo symbolism. Already it had become more than difficult to procure old masks, for Shrobenius And the missionaries had had the good fortune to snap them all up. And so Saif - had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight or sunk into ponds , lakes, marshes, and mud holes, to be exhumed later on and sold at exorbitant prices to unsuspecting curio hunters. These three-year-old masks were said to be charged with the weight of four centuries of civilization. Ouologuem in this way forcefully exposes the connections in the international system of art exchange, the international art world, and the way in which an ideology of disinterested aesthetic value - the 'baptism' of 'Negro art' as 'aesthetic' meshes with the international commodification of African expressive culture which requires the manufacture of Otherness . [ Appiah, Kwame Anthony] Also of interest is Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, a child of poverty who takes advantage of French schooling and achieves academic success leading him to further on his studies in France where he meets both success and failure . He falls in love with a wealthy Frenchman and encounters his sister in a bordello. There he discovers as well the particularly inescapable long reach of Saif . On his return back home his thoughts of a triumphant return were broken by his discovery that he and his country were again being manipulated by the ruling Saif. He a son of the soil seeming the likeliest candidate for the novel's hero by the end of the narrative has less than uplifting political prospects left. Some hope however comes from the brief concluding section 'Dawn'. Abbe Henry, the hunchback priest obsessed by the tragedy of the Blacks, half-crazed with the christian duty of love is humbly beautiful as the despair of a Christian soul is now a bishop. The last section consists almost entirely of a dialogue between Abbe Henry and Saif, both philosophical discourse and power struggle. This Saif appears vanquished, but Ouologuem reminds us; one cannot help recalling that Saif, mourned three million times, is forever reborn to history beneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics, Using various elements of oral literature Ouologuem enriches the narrative and explores a wide span of African history to establish how Africa was like before and after the onslaught of the Arab and European slave dealers and colonizers. Oral traditions enrich the texture of Ouloguem's narration thus giving it its special feel, some of which includes its vivacity, its uniqueness, its semblance of authenticity and its immediacy. Given the wide span of African History explored encompassing well over 700 years from 1202 to 1947 the narrative method has of necessity to exceed the bounds of the conventional. The narrative thus reads like an epic oral tale told from a communal [we] point of view. The reader thus feels he is listening to a tale being related by a Griot for instance. Its start is like a legend being told in the village square. Our eyes drink the brightness of the sun and overcome, marvel at their tears. Mashallah! war bismillah!... To recount the bloody adventure of the niggertrash - shame to the worthless paupers - there would be no need to go back beyond the present century, but the true history of the Black begins much earlier, with the Saifs, in the years 1202 of our era, in the African Empire of Nakem, south of Fezzan long after the conquests of Okba ben Nafi al-Fitri The figurative expressions as 'our eyes drink the brightness of the sun', the frequent interjections and exclamations in the middle of sentences and the religious incantations give the work its distinctive oral Griot-like timbre. In reading we could easily imagine listening to the emphatic and dramatic delivery of the story teller. Through his incantations and his comments interlarding the tale, he shows his emotional reactions to the details being narrated, thus giving us the illusion of being part of an audience keenly listening in the village square with our attention being drawn as it goes on to particular details. This effect could best be seen in how our attention is drawn to the way the niggertrash are ill-used: They promised their serfs, servants and former captives that, pending the hostilities which the neighbouring tribe was no doubt plotting, they would be 'looked upon - hear! - as provisionally free and equal subjects.' Then, once peace was restored among the various tribes, for the war had failed to break out - out - hee - hee - the same notables promised the same subject that after...hum... hum...a brief'apprenticeship of forced labor, they would be rewarded with the Rights of Man.... As to civil rights, of them no mention was made. Halleluyah. The interjections throughout this passage are tinged with mockery or scorn. The reader is thus alerted to the insincerity of the promises being bandied about. The narrator's dismay is evident in the closing exclamation: 'Halleluyah!' In the next passage Ouologuem invokes the lofty and grandiose style and tradition of the African chronicler, the Griot. How in profound displeasure,with perfumed mouth and eloquence on his tongue, Saif ben Isaac al - Heit endeavored to mobilize the energies of the fanatical people against the invader; how to that end he spread reports of daily miracles throughout the Nakem Empire - earthquakes, the opening of tombs, resurrections of saints, fountains of milk springing up in his path, visions of archangels stepping out of the sunset, village women drawing buckets from the well and finding them full of blood; how on one of his journeys he transformed three pages of the Holy Book, the Koran, into as many doves, which flew on ahead of him as though to summon the people to Saif's banner; and with what diplomacy he feigned indifference to the gods of this world: in all that there is nothing out of the ordinary. In this grand sweep of a sentence Ouologuem succeeds in giving force to the eloquence of Saif ben Isaac al- heit whose 'profound displeasure' allied 'with perfumed mouth and eloquence' mobilized the people to frenzied and fanatical onslaught against the invaders. Through parallel structures and repetitions he also shows the prowess of the Saif in spreading a propaganda of terror to further give vent to the furore of the people in attacking the invaders. Ouloguem also creates the impression of narrating legends based on factual historical occcurences. This effect is created through his constant recourse to historians and griots as suggested in: ' Afterwards, wild supplications was heard from the village square...Then pious silence and the griot Kituli of cherished memory ends his tale as follows .'and 'The consequences of his audacity are related by Mohamed Hakmud Traore descended in an unbroken line from griot ancestors and himself griot in the present-day African Republic of Nakem-Zuiko.' The impression is thus often given of a teller sifting through the various details from various sources to get at the kernel of the truth. Many a time he would indicate this by either naming the various griots and historians concerned or by merely introducing them as 'according to one version' 'in another version', 'still others claimed that' and so on. His inability to get one authentic report on Isaac al - Heit is explained thus: At this point tradition loses itself in legend for there are few written accounts and the versions of the elders diverge from those of the griots, which differ from those of the chroniclers. Through his comments and religious incantations, the narrator conveys the impression that he and his audience share common norms and values. A shared ancestral background is also alluded to through his frequent recourse to such phrases as 'our era' Ouologuem repudiates the negritudinist glorification of Africa's past by portraying it as an unending cycle of violence, greed, debauchery and exploitation, as reaffirmed in the title BOUND TO VIOLENCE and in this extract from an interview of Ouologuem by Linda Hiecht: ....black people in Africa were oppressed. 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. 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. Ouologuem's position is then unlike Armah's anti-negritudinist. For he holds Africans as much responsible for the indignities they suffered as the foreign forces. Thus, he neither idealizes nor endorses either party. His African world has no political system. Traditional religion too seems absent here. Everything is left in a state of chaos and turmoil with the rulers using people as they wish. The system of justice evident in TWO THOUSAND SEASONS could not be seen here. Ordinary people are continually being misused by the notables. Immoralities of the worst kinds are widely practiced. The history of Africa is thus shown as one unending flow of violence which in turn kept them under such dread that they were scared stiff of even rebelling. Thus Appiah's submission that it is a repudiation of national history makes much sense though perhaps it could be more apt as a denunciation of racial or continental history. BIBLIOGRAPHY Appiah, Kwame Anthony , IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE Ouologuem, Yambo, BOUND TO VIOLENCE translated by Ralph Manhein, A Helen and Kurt Woolf Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, New York, 1971 Palmer, Eustace, THE GROWTH OF THE AFRICAN NOVEL, Heinemann Educational Books , London, 1979 Wise, Christopher[ed], YAMBO OUOLOGUEM POSTCOLONIALWRITER, ISLAMIC MILITANT, 1999 'De l'histoire a sa metaphore dans Le Devoir de Violence de Yambo Ouologuem ' By Josias Semajanga in ETUDES FRANCAISES, vol 31, no1,etc[1995] 'Fiction and Subversion' by A. Songolo in PRESENCE AFRICAINE no 120 [1981] 'Ouologuem's Blueprint for 'Le Devoir de Violence'' by E. Sellin in RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURE 2 [1971] Original Article URL: http://artsandentertainment.myfreearticlecentral.com/Article_10502_Orality-and-Historic-Echoes-Running-Through-Yambo-Ouloguems-BOUND-TO-VIOLENCE.aspx Arthur E Smith Senior Lecturer of English at Fourah Bay College has taught at various levels in Sierra Leone. Mr Smith who participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature in the U.S. in 2006 and was made Honorary Citizen Louisville, was a delegate to the International PEN Congress in Dakar, Senegal in 2007 and delivered a paper at the Richard Wright at 100 International Conference in University of Beira in November 2008. His writings could be read at his personal website at http://www.arthuredgaresmith.net

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