REPRESENTATIONS OF CHILDWOOD IN OLYMPE BHÊLY-QUENUM's WORKS by Willfried Feuser

(Présence Africaine n°155, 1er semestre 1997)

In Francophone Africa, which surrounds Nigeria on all its land borders, we find Béninois author Olympe Bhêly-Quenum (born in 1928), who, like many of his Anglophone brethren, operates on two interrelated levels (novel of childhood/juvenile fiction). In his novel L'Initié (1979) (1), and equally in his famous short story, Promenade dans la forêt (2) translated as A Child in the Bush of Ghosts, from which I shall quote the surrealist surprise ending, the secrets of childhood and the pain of growing are explored. In the story, the boy, an abikú,a wanderer child, returns home from his voyage initiatique into the land of the dead, which is also a sexual initiation :

I arrived there at nightfall. In front of the door of my parents' house 1 was stunned to see on either side an ear- thenware pot containing a concoction such as our customs prescribe for funeral ceremonies : I also heard a dirge gently syncopated by calabash rattles.
I entered and saw a gathering of sad people. The women, including my mother,had untied their hair as a token of mourning. The people gathered there noticed mypresence and started up. Some took to their heels, others, paralysed by fear, just stared at me. I stepped forward to my mother who had been quickly joined by my father.

" What has happened ? Who has died ?
Dead silence.
" You have to forgive me for leaving without telling you about it.
" Where have you come from ? Are you dead or are you a living person
in our midst ? " my father asked.
" I'm alive. "
" What, alive ? " my mother said, weeping.
" Nobody's dead. Death doesn't exist and if it does, no dead man will ever return, I re-plied firmly, but with my most casual expression.
The people had come back, more numerous now than when 1 had first set foot in the house.
" Where have you come from ?
" Where've you been ?
" We thought you were dead.
"For the past three days we've been sure about it.
" The diviners have confirmed it.
I was somewhat depressed by these comments and asked if the funeral ceremonies had anything to do with me. They said yes.
" The diviners have been telling you lies. I went for a walk, and I've come back with flesh and blood, body and soul, cured from the fear of death. I apologise for having given you so much worry.
" My son, tell me honestly where you have come from, my father said.
" Just from a walk. I didn't realise that it lasted three days.
" What did you eat ? asked my mother.
" Nothing.
" Who did you stay with?
" Nobody.
" I don't understand you.
" I' ve nothing to explain.
" Why?
" Such things can't be explained. I am alive and life goes on.
" Oh, this child ! my mother murmured.
" I'm hungry, mother. You can see l'm alive and kicking since I'm hungry and
thirsty.
" May you never again disappear like that !
"I promise, but don't ever ask me for an explana-tion, I said.
And everything was all right again. How long did this dream last ? I shall never know."

The life-long impact of spiritual experiences such as initia-tion rites and the awesomely select status of the spirit child on the psyche of the African male can be detected in several other great African writers like Ben Okri, whose novel, The Famished Road (1991) - its title is pure Soyinka - Olympe Bhêly--Quenum sent me from London to Port Harcourt in August 1992. In much of Bhêly-Quenum's long and short fiction young peo-ple, black, white and métis, like les étudiants in his novel LeChant du Lac (Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique, 1966) and the group around the student teacher Kofi in many of his short stories, are in constant revolt against hypocritical conventions and racial bigotry. Their spiritual core in most instances is le souffle des ancêtres, represented both for Marc in L'Initié and his prototype Kofi in " Une Grande Amitié " by the arcane tea-chings of his long-deceased Uncle Atchê

" Reste toi-même Kofi fils de noble Vendredi
Toi Abikou né après être venu et parti.
Ouvre tes yeux.
Jauge les hommes et les choses
Et les circonstances aussi.
Ne t'arrête jamais à mi-chemin du combat
. Pour l'amitié et la justice… "

and similarly

" Je suis Abicou
Venu avant tous les autres,
Né après la mort de tous les frères et sœurs
Je suis l'enfant qu'on a eu peur
De voir repartir
Parce qu'il était
Venu plusieurs fois déjà. "

Àbikú children are tragic aristocracy of premature death, forever defying death, an in-domitable breed. Kofi, in " Une Grande Amitié "(3), has as his European counterpart his friend Edouard, a boy emasculated and driven to knitting like a girl by his adulterous mother. Edouard is the death-wish of youth personified, and his imminent suicide is disclosed to Kofi in a dream :

" Le maigre cortège avance lentement, allant nul ne sait où, comme à la dérive à travers Noirseuil, tandis qu'on entend, provenant des bouches d'égout, un air de Brahms étalant lentement un voile d'angoisse sur la ville :

Herr, lehre doch mich, dag ein Ende mit mir haben muf3,
und mein Leben ein Ziel hat, und ich davon muf3.
Siehe, meine Tage sind einer Hand breit vor dir,
und mein Leben ist wie nichts vor dir.

Un requiem allemand.

Bhêly-Quenum's most recent novel, Les Appels du Vodou (1994), is a classical fare-well to the Africa of his childhood and youth. According to Kenneth Harrow,
"orty-one years after the appearance of Camara Laye's L'Enfant noir Olympe Bhêly-Quenum has given us the sequel Laye never wrote. This is the story that brings to a conclusion not the life of the successful student who went 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. "(4)
As an inveterate teacher of Greek an Latin and co-author (with S.A.M. Pratt) of the seven volumes of Practical French (London, Longmans-Green, 1963-1968) Bhêly-Quenum also ful-filled the wish of his late friend Jean Lacape to write a special book for children in producing Un enfant d'Afrique (Paris, Larousse, 1970), clearly tar-geted at " les lecteurs et les lectrices de dix à quatorze ans ".

Obviously an àbikú himself, he shows the indomitable and, at times, elitist spirit of his confraternité both in literature and life. In speaking of a well-known African pub-lisher who had let him down, he wrote to me in a letter from his country abode in Gar-rigues- Sainte-Eulalie (Provence) in May, 1996 :
" Il aura des ennuis et des problèmes : parole d'ABIKU. On y croit ou on n'y croit pas, mais c'est ainsi. "
Ethnically, Quenum is Fon. The neighbouring Yoruba in western Nigeria, just across
Benin's eastern borders, have pro-duced Africa's most famous writer, Wole Soyinka.
These two writers are linked by a mysterious bond, that of their common àbikú status. In some of the letters the Béninois author addres-sed to me during the Nigerian Civil War, while Soyinka was held incommunicado, first at Kirikiri maximum security prison, Lagos, then at Kaduna, he evoked this bond. He fought tooth and nail for the play-wright's release. To my knowledge, the only journal in the world which in December 1967 published Mrs. Laide Soyinka's " Open Letter to General Gowon ", a passionate appeal to Nigeria's then Head of State to release her husband, appeared in Bhêly-Quenum's Paris-based bilin-gual news magazine, L'Afrique Actuelle.

(1) Olympe Bhêly-Quenum, L'Initié, Paris, Présence Africaine, 1979 ;
(2) Une Promenade dans la forêt ( in Liaison d'un été, Paris, Sagerep/L'Afrique
Actuelle, 1968) ; A Child in the Bush of Ghosts, in Jazz and Palm Wine;
edited by Willfried Feuser, Harlow/Essex, Longman, 1981.
(3) Written in Rennes,winter 1953-1954, in Carrefour de Cultures. Tûbingen:Gunter Narr Verlag 1993.
(4) Kenneth Harrow (reviewer) in World Literature Today. Autumn 1995.