Kenneth Harrow World Literature Today

World Literature Today (Autumn 1995)

Les appels du vodou by Olympe Bhêly-Quenum

Paris. L'Harmattan. 1994. 336 pages.
By Kenneth Harrow (Michigan State University)

Forty-one years after the appearance of Camara Laye's Enfant noir, Olympe Bhêly-Quenum has given us the sequel Laye never really wrote. This is the story that brings to a conclusion not the life of the successful student who went off to France to make his fortune, but the life of his mother who stayed behind in Africa. It is the story of the end of the Africa of one's youth, for a whole generation of young writers - the now famous novelists of the fifties and sixties, Bhêly-Quenum among them.
L.aye's dedication of his first novel to Daman, his mother, set the nostalgic tone and established the narrator's sentimental point of view. In reviving the memory of his youth, as though from a great distance, Laye incurred the criticisms of those who felt betrayed by his revelation of religions mysteries as well as those angered by his failure to condemn the colonial enterprise. Les appels du vodou goes much further in providing full descriptions of vodou practices, incantations, and beliefs. It presents a portrait of the great priestess who is the protagonist's mother, her life in the aristocratic circle described by her family, the call of the divinity in service of his order, and tire glorious nature of the vocation.
One dimension of this navel, then, is purely testimonial, or even anthropological, in the sense that L'enfant noir has also been taken as a document about Mande belief. This aspect is underlined by the explanatory footnotes mostly glossary items that conclude many of the chapters, as well as the intertextual explanatory passages clearly intended for the noninitiated. However, in the final analysis, despite the extensive documenting of vodou belief and the, intermixing of vodou hymns in French and Fon, one is left at the end with the feeling that only an outsider's view has been vouchsafed.
In part this feeling of distance is due to the narrative discourse. Ironically, Laye was accused of utilizing a formal French tone in his "ur-autobiography"; here, Bhêly-Quenum writes in a distinctively intellectual, at times scholarly or even pedantic zone. The protagonist of the novel, Agblo, is the son of a Christian father and a vodou priestess mother. The mores of his family, and of the society at Gléxwé, is decidedly mixed. His grandmother is Egba, and she maintains Yoruba practices. His family is noted for the eminence of its vodou priests. And yet Agblo, the reincarnation of an illustrious vodou ancestor, marries a French woman and resides in France. Like the City of Gléxwé itself, better known as Ouidah, the children of' this society are baptized with Christian names and infused with vodou beliefs, accepting the two together as naturally as the mélange of Dutch wax prints and Dahomean cloths.
The discursive equivalent to the religions and cultural métissage is provided by the infusion of Greek references into the French text. This might take the simple form of' musical term, like strophe, hymne, or coryphée, along with such terms as medusa, pyrrhique, ithyphalle, or tragique. Or it might take the form of an epigraph from Homer. Simultaneously, Fon terms like xwétanou or even vodou are used so extensively as to naturalize their presence.
However, the reader's sense of distance from the priestess is never really bridged, for a number of reasons. The decidedly intellectual tone of the narration lends dignity to the actors in the text, but in French clothes. Furthermore, the author resorts to an overly didactic impulse on occasion when lie insists upon the necessity of maintaining one's identity in the soil of one's ancestral home. This insistence is carried to the extreme point of celebrating a politics of identity, as if there were no more significant question to be posed to essentialization than that provided by the images of lost youths who have abandoned their true roots. The vitality of the present is belied by the reliance on descriptions of traditional rites as "primordial" or "antique", as if joining them to the stature of the Grecks lent dignity to the African reality.
In the end, Les appels du vodou is a novel of death, a celebration of death in the grand old way as known to the world of vodou adherents. It brings closure to L'enfant noir In insisting upon the full investiture of death in decidedly Fon and vodou terms. And if the sense of the familiar is attenuated by a discourse marked as though by a historian's gaze, still Bhêly-Quenum's novel succeeds in restoring the ancestral custom to its place of preeminence. Along with the recent works of Henri Lopes and Ahmadou Kourouma, Les appels du vodou will be taken as an important attestation to the impulse to seek self-validation through one's heritage.

Kenneth Harrow
Michigan State University

World Literature Today