FOREWORD BY KENNETH HARROW |
Olympe Bhêly-Quenum(b. 1928) belongs to the first generation of francophone African authors of fiction. Coming after the Negritude poets of the 1930s, African authors of the 1950s embraced a two-sided strategy of combating colonialism. Those like Mongo Beti or Ferdinand Oyono exposed the ills of the colonial system, while others like CamaraLaye, or the Anglophones like Achebe, sought to validate their own indigenous cultures, “writing back” to the derogatory images of colonial literature. Bhêly-Quenum’s extraordinary career began in 1960 with his first novel, Un piège sans fin published in 1960, the same year that Dahomey, his home country (now called Benin) became independent. In most of his fiction he has followed both tracks of those early “post-colonial” authors by remaining close to his original culture, indeed his family culture, and by exposing the biases of a Eurocentric view of Africa which he had come to know first hand.
At an early age he set out to travel to Ghana and to his grandmother’s homeland of Nigeria, where he was able to learn English. In 1945, in Dahomey, he passed a competitive exam and was hired by John Walkden, a Unilever Company, as an assistant warehouseman "able to understand and read English."After three years he was able to leave for France where he pursued his secondary education in Avranches, Normandy and received a Baccalaureate majoring in Classic Letters (French, Latin, Greek and English) minoring in philosophy. He taught classical languages and literature from 1955 to 1960 when he succeeded in publishing his first novel, Un piège sans fin, with Stock in Paris. The novel was translated into English as Snares Without Ends, by Dorothy S. Blair. (1966, Longman U.K.)
In 1960.Dahomey (later renamed The Republic of Benin) became independent and in 1961, Bhêly-Quenum, again changed direction in his career. He was then the well known author. He undertook a course of diplomatic studies in 1961-1963, training at the Institute of Higher Studies for Overseas Territories (I.H.E.O.M.) in Paris, at Quai d'Orsay (the French Foreign Office) the Diplomatic Academy in The Hague, and in the French Consulates Generals in Genove, Milan, Florence and in the French Embassy in Rome. He obtained his Diploma and was certified in diplomacy by the I.H.E.O.M.
However, diplomacy didn’t appeal to him and he turned to journalism and became Editor in Chief and then Director of an African magazine: La Vie Africaine, which he directed until 1964 when the publication folded. He then founded, with his wife, the French-English bilingual magazine L'Afrique actuelle, that he directed until 1968 before he joined UNESCO Head quaters in Paris where he was employed as an African issues specialist in the Office of Public information.
While working at UNESCO he resumed his study of sociology at the Sorbonne, where he completed his socio-anthroplogicalessay : Trance And Possession In The Voodoo Alladahouin, deepening his fascination with African religion, an inheritance from his mother and his maternal grandmother that remained despite his Catholic upbringing. Eventually those personal and academic interests in vodun (the African religion most closely associated with Dahomy, and eventually, its New World incarnation in Haiti termed “voodoo”) bore fruit in much of his best-known fiction.
Over the years since then he has published increasingly on works that evoke his maternal traditional association with Beninoisvodun as his mother was a priestess. His prose is that of classical French as he was educated in French, and lived in France for more than half a century. But his background in Beninois religion, Fon and Yoruba language and culture, marked his personality and his writing where he typically sought to achieve a synthesis of his African traditions, his classical training in France, his love for the classics and Western culture, especially Greek.
He summarizes the synthesis of influences that have marked his life from the times that preceded the end of colonialism down to the present:
“Fon de naissance maisd'ascendanceyorouba par sa grand mèrematernelle, immergédèsl'enfancedans le culte, vodou, franc maçon, chrétien fervent, passionné de lettresclassiques, tour à tour ou en même temps professeur, diplomate, fonctionnaire international, mais surtout et toujours écrivain, nègre noir jusqu'à la moelle mais marié à une Normande, aujourd'hui enfin, retraité suractif, basé plus que vivant dans un minuscule village du Gard”
[Fon by birth but Yoruba originally through his maternal grandmother, immersed since childhood in Vodun through his priestess mother, Free Mason, fervent Christian believer, passionately attached to Classical letters—at once teacher, diplomat, international bureaucrat, but above all writer, black African down to the marrow, but married to Norman Frenchwoman, today retired and based in a small village in the Gard region].
He has published regularly since 1960, his most famous work being Le Chant du lac (1965, Présence Africaine), for which he won a major literary award, Le Grand Prix literature d’Afrique Noire, en 1966. His other major works, besides Un Piège sans fin, include Un Enfant d’Afrique (1970), L’initié (1979), Les Appels du vodou (1994), and collections of short stories, Liaison d’un été (with stories going back to 1949), La Naissance de l’abikou (1998) and Promenade dans la forêt(2006).
In 2000 C’était à Tigony appeared.
Although known primarily as an author of long fiction, Willfried F. Feuser has called him " One of the great masters of the African short story," and speaks of the force and troubling beauty of a short story entitled “La Reine au bras d'or. " (Introduction to Bhêly-Quenum in Jazz and Palm-Wine, cited in grioo.com) http://www.grioo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2214&start=400
On his own website Bhêly-Quénum recounts an encounter he had in his youth that proved to be important for him, if not determinant for his career. He tells us the first story in Liaison d’un été was written after he met André Breton in 1949, at the age of twenty-one, and recounted to Breton a dream. Astonished, Breton declared, “C’est étrange,mais c’est du rêve à l’état brut. Je vois que vous n’avez pas encore lu Freud, mais vous devriez écrire ce rêve avant de devenir écrivain.” [It’s strong, but it’s a dream in its pure state. I see that you haven’t read Freud yet, but you should write down this dream before becoming a writer.” http://www.obhelyquenum.com/livres/liaison-d-un-ete.html
On Breton’s death Bhêly-Quenum writes that without the instigation of the poet, I would never have thought about writing down the dream”—and by extention, creating the works inspired in that manner. Like Césaire, Bhêly-Quenum’s meeting with Breton proved consequential.
Later Bhêly-Quenum dedicates Liaison d'un été,(1968)to Breton. Subsequent, in publishing his first novel, Années du bac de Kouglo,written enpubliant
récemmentécrit en 1950-1951, " le rêve de 1949, plus précisémentsa transcription en suivant le conseild'André Breton, étaitfondateur : le fondement de nombre de mesécrits.” [the dream of 1949, and more precisely its transcription following Breton’s advise, was fundamental: it provided the foundation for a number of my writings.] http://www.grioo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2214&start=400
Snares without End deals with the tragedy of a good man who is experiences misfortunes throughout much of his life. After his father’s cattle herd is destroyed by a disease his wife becomes suspicious of him driving him to commit a senseless crime. He is imprisoned, wishes to die, but then escapes the punishment when his friends die in a rockslide. The despair and misfortunes evoke the dark side of an existential condition, evocative of the forces of fate that hover over human attempts to exercise their free will and agency.
With Le Chant du lac his reputation was insured. He evokes the mysteries not of existence, but of African spirituality lodged beneath the cold waters of the lake, the site so often linked in West African imaginary with spirits, like Mammy Wata. The monstrous forces lying beneath the lake attempt to draw down to their depths a woman and her two children, along with her faithful boatsman. Its central drama turns on the struggle between two worlds, that represented by the educated youth who return to their home village in Dahomey from France where they absorbed the ideological impress of “modernity” and the local fishermen and villages who respected their “traditional” water gods, paying annual homage to them in fear of their destructive powers. The struggle for what turns into the life of the gods of old entails a motif that runs through much of the arts of 20th century Africa, as seen in the fantasmagoric scenes of Cissé’s films where the departure of the gods is seen as leaving a demythologized new generation vulnerable to the abusive neocolonial or postcolonial state whose armed forces are no longer guided by scruples. The promise of the new day, youth empowered by education, respectful of tradition and elders, aware of heritage, and yet no longer the same as before the ambiguous colonial venture, these are tropes that mark much of Bhély-Quenum’s fiction. BhélyQuenum describes this image of a new world, a New Africa, as one where the dawn, splendid in its light, still weeps for the passing of its gods, its elders, “obvious symbol of an Africa unsettled and yet fascinated by its past and its future” (http://www.obhelyquenum.com/livres/le-chant-du-lac.html).
On this, his own website, Bhêly-Quenum adds to this description of his novel the autobiographical claim to be the son “d’unegrandeprêtresse“ [of a high voodoo priestess] which authorizes him to lead the reader “dans les arcanes d’un monde dontilconnaît les norms” [through the labybrinth of a world whose norms he knows well]. The end of the novel evokes the shattering effect on the entire community who hear the drums announce the news of the death of the gods. This unfathomable announcement is echoed in the most potent novels of Achebe, Things Fall Apart, which deals not only with the arrival of colonialism, but the passage of the religious worldviews of the Igbo from traditionalist beliefs to missionary Christianity, and Arrow of God where the fall of the high priest is accompanied by the conversion of his son to the European’s religion.
The tensions enlisted by the clashing epistemologies, famously described by Cheikh Hamidou Kane as “Uneaventureambiguë,” that is, not just an ambiguous tension but a deadly contagion of thought that results in the death and suicide of Africa’s “new” generation. Vodunentails a generational life-and-death struggle against modernity returns again in Les appels du vodou (1994) whichgoes 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 entire glorious nature of the vocation. One dimension of this novel, then, is purely testimonial, or even anthropological.
In part this feeling of distance is due to the narrative discourse. Bhêly-Quenum writes in a distinctively intellectual, at times scholarly tone. 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. Les appels du vodoudepicts a celebration of death in the grand old way as known to the world of vodou adherents, and thus can be taken as an important attestation to the impulse to seek self-validation through one's heritage.
C’était a Tigony is a novel that concerns itself with the central issues of the day in an age of neoliberal capitalism, with a frame provided by a giant multinational corporation investing in extractive industries, an autocratic state rule cast in the modern vein as “democrat” of the people who dissimulates the corrupt relationship with European powers, and the vast struggle of the unemployed masses set against the backdrop of poverty and detritus on the one bank of the river, and the familiar contours of wealthy denizens living on the other. In short, an updated version of the colonial divide now sustained in a postcolonial Africa. However, although the novel sets the action in play with a massive national strike, and with a chorus of voices of the people echoing the complaints of the “wretched of the earth,” the drama of the narrative comes to turn on several key interpersonal relations. The central one involvesDorcasKeurorleonan-Moricet white geophysicist posted to Africa, who falls in love with a young African, Segue n’Di, who reveals to him the joys of physical love which her husband was incapable of providing her with. The enlightened couple represent an ideal of openness, sensuality, and authenticity in the sense of early Existential thought. The binary division of the characters, echoing the strictures of neoliberal ideology, demands the counterpart of corruption, bigotry, and hatred are located in the oppressive white figures who are emblematic of neoliberalism operating in Africa today, alongside a cast of ignorant and vicious Africans and Europeans. The good are assisted by the “old African Hand” journalist, a sensualist and intellectual bonvivant, and another range of idealized children, of reassuring elders, and in particular, an Ethiopean Jewish woman of aristocratic bearing who recites the Song of Songs and the Haggadah in Hebrew.
If Le Chant du lac evoked the trials of a “young” Africa seeking to forge the path for its future between an idealized past and an unstoppable future, C’était à Tigony brings us into that future world, two generations later, and it is not only far from having liberated itself from the heritage of neocolonialism, it finds itself confronting not only the inadequacies of the postcolonial regime, but more ominously, the unstoppable forces of the multinational corporation—with no more spirits of the sky or of the mountains or the sea to turn to. Here it is the neoliberal order working against a new generation of Africans and Europeans armed with the best weapons of High Culture, at home in any corner of Africa or of Europe—the Afropolitans and their lover-allies among the Euro-cosmopolitans.
C’était à Tigony caps the career of one of Africa’s major authors whose life spans the entire breadth of contemporary African fictions, and whose earlier works have been celebrated and well-known to readers and scholars of African literature.
Kenneth Harrow. “Les appels du vodou by OlympeBhêly-Quenum.” World Literature Today, 69, 4: 867-68 Autumn 1995. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151774.
Claude Wauthier, “Un auteur à découvrir :OlympeBhely-Quenum entre l’Europe et l’Afrique,” RFI Service Pro. MFI Hebdo: Culture, Société.http://www1.rfi.fr/fichiers/MFI/CultureSociete/987.asp. Accessed September 27, 2014.
Willfried F. Feuser ,Jazz and Palm Wine,
“Promenade dans la forêt”
Précédemmentparu sous le titre Liaison d'un été .
Grioo.com, Espace de Discussion. “UNESCO: Livres de l’Afrique”
http://www.grioo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2214&start=400
“Bhêly-Quénum, Olympe. Promenade dans la forêt(Précédemmentparu sous le titre Liaison d'un été). http://forum.potomitan.info/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=828