SNARES WITHOUT END : FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

SNARES WITHOUT END.

Introduction by Abioseh Michael Porter.

On the surface, Olympe Bhely-Quenum seems to share some distinct affinities with Ahouna, the protagonist of his major work of fiction, Snares without End. Bhely-Quenum, like Ahouna, became convinced of man's inhumanity to man quite early when, at about ten years of age, he saw an accused mur­derer who was not only shackled to a cross but also was pa­raded in front of a vengeful and bloodthirsty crowd calling for the accused man's immediate death. One can also surmise, based on the evidence of Bhely-Quenum's other works, that the author, like his leading characters, believes in the over­whelming power of forces beyond human control as well as the need to blend the positive aspects of both traditional Af­rica and modern Europe. But this is where the resemblances between Bhely-Quenum and Ahouna, Kofi-Marc (in L']nitii), and the other leading characters end.

In spite of Bhely-Quenum's constant references to and fond­ness for the countryside and rural folk, he was born into a middle-class household in the city of Cotonou, Benin (then Dahomey) on September 26, 1928. His father was a school­teacher. After graduating from elementary school in 1942, he traveled for quite a while within Dahomey itself before set­tling down for three years in Ghana, where he learned English while working for a British firm, John Walkden and Co. Bhely-Quenum went to France in 1948, and although he be­came ill and was bedridden for about a year, he was able to complete the various stages of the prestigious baccalauriat by 1954.

A man of encyclopedic learning and very widely traveled, Bhely-Quenum has been awarded several university degrees and diplomas, including one in literature from the University of Caen in 1957, and others in diplomacy, journalism, and so­ciology from the Institut des Hautes-etudes d'Outre-Mer and the Sorbonne.

In addition to writing for several journals and newspapers, Bhely-Quenum served as an editor for two journals, La Vie africaine (1962-65) and L'Afrique actuelle (1965-68). In 1962 he also held administrative positions with the French foreign service and the Dahomeyan diplomatic service in Italy (Genoa, Milan, and Florence) before finally joining UNESCO, for which he still works in Paris.

To students of West African fiction, it may seem strange that Bhely-Quenum's works-unlike those of his contempo­raries such as Camara Laye of Guinea, Sembene Ousmane of Senegal, Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, Mongo Beti and Ferdi- .. nand Oyono of Cameroon-have received very little critical attention. What might make this lack of attention even more surprising is the fact that not only was Bhely-Quenum among the pioneering writers of modern francophone African fiction, but he was also one of the few such writers whose works spanned the decade of the sixties through the late seventies.

On closer examination, however, it becomes obvious that, from the moment he started writing, Bhely-Quenum's fiction did not fit into what might be called the dominant mold of francophone African fiction; and critics have consequently treated his works with benign neglect. But in order to under­stand the full implications of this statement it is necessary to look briefly at the sociohistorical environment from which Bhely-Quenum and most of his francophone colleagues came and some of the major themes found in ~the works of these other authors.

Historically, the French began their colonial conquest of West Africa with the appointment of Louis Faideherbe as Governor of Senegal in 1854. From that time right on to 1910, the French overpowered other countries in the region such as the Ivory Coast (1886), Guinea (1887), and Dahomey (1894).

recolonial Dahomey was divided into three kingdoms­Abomey or Dahomey and Porto Novo in the south and Bariba in the north-which were peopled, in turn, by the country's three major ethnic groups: the Fon, the Goum, and the Bar­iba. The north-south division of the country (which is quite evident in Snares without End) came about as a result of mi­gratory movements and settlements of the various inhabitants of the country and its surrounding regions.

The north was settled by people of almost the same cultural and ethnic background; the southern regions were populated by members of different ethnic groups who nonetheless­through conflict, subjugation, and interethnic marriage-be­came a cohesive group, even though ethnically heterogeneous. Furthermore, the north-south division became even more apparent with the introduction of French colonialism and the French system of education. Because the north was pre­dominantly Moslem-which meant that there were Koranic schools already in place-and because the area was more rural and conservative, it was more difficult to establish West­ern-type schools and attitudes there than in the coastal south.

One other issue about precolonial Dahomey that is of sig­nificance to readers of Snares without End is that of political administration. Because in traditional Dahomeyan society the ruler of a clan, ethnic group, or even kingdom had to have an­cestral ties with both the place and the people he was govern­ing, he shared a certain sense of belonging and understanding with his subjects.

But once Dahomey and other countries became colonies of France, absolute power was vested in the hands of the colonial administration headed by the governor and, to some extent, his subordinates (the district commissioners, commandants, and local chiefs). The latter, who often were chosen by the French to represent French interests, were also at the mercy of their overlords, as we see in Bhely-Quenum's description of the treatment meted out to Hourai'nda-the local chief of Ahouna's village":"'by the local commandant. The introduc­tion of forced labor, payment of poll taxes, and military con­scription (all of which figure significantly in Snares without

End and the sequel to that novel, The Song of the Lake), was a direct consequence of the absolute power the French and their allies held over the majority of the Africans.

Furthermore, French colonialism pursued the policy of as­similation, whereby an artificial and pernicious distinction as l'indigenat ("the natives") or as les citoyens ("the citizens" of France) was made among African inhabitants of these coun­tries. According to this division, l'indigenat (who actually were the majority of Africans in the colonies) were unedu­cated, dispossessed, and hence unworthy of either representa­tion in the French National Assembly or French citizenship. The citizens, also called the assimi/es (who represented only a tiny fraction of the population), on the other hand, were the educated Africans who were trained for middle-level positions in teaching, administration, and other areas in their respective countries. As part of their training, however, this group of Af­ricans was taught untruths, such as the absence of any history or culture in Africa. In brief, they were encouraged not only to exalt everything that was French but to look down on Africa and its culture.

But the years preceding and succeeding the Second World War (especially between the thirties and the fifties) brought a complete change in attitude among these formerly franco­phile colonials. Beginning in the 1930s, black African and West Indian intellectuals (such as Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, Aime Cesaire of Martinique, and Leon-Gontran Damas of Guiana)-who, as we can expect, had been thor­oughly schooled in their native countries about the virtues of French (and European) rationalism, common sense, and order-found themselves in a Europe where fascism and rac­ism were on the rise and where evidence of man's inhumanity to his fellow man was manifesting itself in very frightening ways. Not surprisingly, these highly sensitive, educated, and articulate colonials started expressing views that not only ne­gated the hitherto-accepted (even though false) notions of white supremacy but also praised quite highly the virtues of black cultural values through the philosophy of negritude.

The decade of the sixties was, of course, one of great expec tations for Africans. As subsequent history has shown, how­ever, due to both internal and external forces, many of the as­pirations and hopes of the African peoples were not realized. Consequently, African novelists such as Chinua Achebe in No Longer at Ease (1960) and A Man of the People (1964), Sembene Ousmane in The Money Order and White Genesis (1965), Wole Soyinka in The Interpreters (1968), Ayi Kwei Armah in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Robert Serumaga in Return to the Shadows (1968), and Ahma­dou Kourouma in The Suns of Independence (1968) all turned their ironic focus on postindependence Africa. Through vary­ing degrees of self-examination, these authors presented a picture of the continent that was not pretty-indeed, they showed Africa as a place where the "Beautyful Ones [Were] Not Yet Born." But even a sketchy summary of The Song of the Lake (1965)-Bhely-Quenum's second novel-will show that, there again, the Beninois author was not to subscribe to the dominant thematic thrust of the time.

The Song of the Lake is set years after the conclusion of events in Snares without End. In the introductory section of the novel, we meet Houngbe who, as one of the conspirators in the burning death of Ahouna in the earlier novel, had been "punished" by being sent to fight for the French during World War II. Just before Houngbe dies on board a boat that is taking him back to Dahomey from France, he expresses to a dozen young Dahomeyan students going home on holidays his desire to liberate his people from the superstitious knots that have tied them to the lakeside gods that have not only been occupying the peoples' lake but have actually been in­timidating them. Although the students vow to end this form of religious enslavement (thereby fulfilling the wishes of their newfound hero), and although a local politiCian, Cocou Ou­henou, also attempts to bring about a politically independent and superstition-free world for the people, it is the politician's wife, Noussi Ouhenou who, with her children and a boatman, is finally able to expose the "gods" of the lake as nothing more than water snakes.

What is particularly impressive about this story is the way Bhely-Quenum has skillfully developed a Fon myth into a modern novel dealing with the conflict between the tradi­tional, at times superstitious, world of a people and the out­side world of strictly rational, scientific thought. He also in­troduces a dilemma that will not be foreign to most educated Africans, when, at the end of the story, he leaves the clear impression that even though the forces of modernity have won and the people can no longer fear the "gods" of the lake, there is still some lingering doubt about tampering with time­honored traditions or beliefs in such a manner.

The conflict between the forces of good and evil is given an additional twist in Bhely-Quenum's most recent novel, L'Initie, published in 1979. In this work, the struggle is be­tween Kofi-Marc Tiongo, who-as a French-educated medi­cal doctor and a locally trained expert in parapsychology and traditional African medicine-represents the true forces of progress, and an old villager who also claims to be practicing traditional medicine and parapsychology, but who is actually a charlatan.

Kofi-Marc who, when quite young, had demonstrated some extraordinary qualities as an abiku (i.e., a spirit-child who is born to die but who is reincarnated several times in the womb of his mother), is endowed with some supernatural powers by his uncle, Atche-a man whose name means power. From the outset, the old man makes it strictly clear to his nephew that a major criterion for the favorable use of such powers would be the need to use them only for serious purposes (in other words they should be used as life-giving or life-preserving instru­ments and not as mechanisms for intimidating or exploiting people).

After his return from studying in France, Kofi-Marc and his French wife, Corinne (who is also a medical doctor), set up a clinic where they offer genuine medical assistance to the local people. In fact, Kofi-Marc (whose name is, no doubt, sym­bolic of the cultural synthesis he is trying to achieve) combines his knowledge of both traditional African medicine and para- psychology with Western medicine to cure the sick. It is because of this, however, that he comes into direct conflict with Djessou (whose name means death), a religious fraud, who has been using his pseudoparapsychology to exploit the people.

The clash between Kofi-Marc and Djessou comes to a head not too long after a local religious ceremony, when Djessou realizes that his fraudulent conduct will soon be exposed by the more sincere Kofi-Marc. In several scenes involving the use of fabulous and inexplicable powers, the charlatan seems to be winning this classic battle (for example, in one episode Djessou apparently deprives Kofi-Marc of all flesh, leaving him only as a skeleton), but in the end it is the forces of good (represented by Kofi-Marc) that win. Bhely-Quenum obvi­ously makes the point in this novel that a sincere blend of good traditional African culture and beliefs and Western sci­ence can produce only good results.

As we can see from these examples taken from his major novels, Bhely-Quenum has often refrained from dealing with purely topical (or even the most popular) themes. Thus, even when he decided to use a theme that has remained quite popu­lar among African authors-tradition versus modernity-as the main subject of The Song of the Lake, he did it at a time when most of the other writers were increasingly turning their attention to the more overtly political themes of African litera­ture: political and economic corruption, inequality in the dis­tribution of wealth, social and class stratification, neocolo­nialism, and so forth.

The point is not that critics of African literature merely fol­low the fashion of the moment and ignore works that do not conform to the dominant or most popular thematic pattern. Indeed, criticism has served African literature very well. Con­sequently, some scholars might be quick' to maintain that there are now so many different "schools" of critical thought that it is absurd to suggest (as I have done) that a writer like Bhely-Quenum has not received his due share of critical at­tention because he has refused to jump on any thematic bandwagon.

The point, however, is that critics of the African novel have developed a tendency to focus almost exclusively on only a few, well-established authors. In addition, and perhaps more significantly, even though one publishing house (and it is still just one publisher among many) has published more than a hundred and twenty novels by Africans, scholars still have the inclination either to treat only a few masterpieces as "the Af­rican novel" or to regard all African works of fiction as having uniform characteristics. In other words, because most critics of African literature have continued to look at this literature only in terms of the major divisions into fiction, poetry, and drama, they seem to forget the contributory role the gamut of genres and sub genres can play in the creation of uniquely African literary types. Thus, a critic like Eustace Palmer, in his two volumes introducing and discussing the growth of the African novel, does not give even one example of the existen­tial novel-a category that certainly would have taken into account at least one of the following: Snares without End, Malick Fall's The Wound (1968), and Peter Palangyo's Dying in the Sun (1967).

It is necessary to stress this dearth of genre criticism prop­erly adapted to written African literature because it helps to explain not only why so little has been written on Bhely­Quenum but also why even some of the few critics who have written on Snares without End have at times been only luke­warm in their praise of the novel. One suspects that because some of these critics have not given enough consideration to the subject of genre in their interpretations of the work they have not been able to appreciate it in its entire perspective. Thus, Dorothy Blair, in an otherwise fine and detailed discus­sion of the original French edition of the novel, states that "the incoherence, the unconvincing nature of some of the episodes, the lack of focus on the main character might be attributed to a deliberate attempt to propound the theme of the absurd, which has no consistency."¹ Similarly, Willfried F. Feuser

^IDororhy Blair, African Literature in French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 255.

(who, like Blair, recognizes affinities between Bhely-Quenum's work and those of European existentialist writers such as Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, and Sartre), suggests that "de­spite certain deficiencies in psychology, style and structure, ... this first novel is powerful evidence of human anguish suf­fered by homo africanus." 2 Still another critic, Franc;ois Sa­lien, goes even one step farther than Feuser, who does not bother to give Snares without End much discussion. Writing in a French-language dictionary of African literature, Salien maintains that this Bhely-Quenum work-despite its existen­tialist leanings-is not really a novel. Deploring the lack of proper character development and an inordinately long and incoherent second half of the text, Salien sees this book as an essay focusing on the emptiness of human existence.3

This is not the place to enter into a discussion of what con­stitutes a novel. It is my opinion, however, that Snares without End is Bhely-Quenum's attempt to wrestle in fictional form with the problem of existentialism-a peculiarly twentieth­century phenomenon-in an African context. In order to see why I think this work succeeds best as an existentialist novel, we should perhaps look at some of the more fundamental traits of existentialism as a philosophical concept.

Reduced to its bare minimum, existentialist philosophy has the following general characteristics: (a) it emphasizes exis­tence rather than essence; (b) it rejects the certainty of an ex­ternal universe; (c) it views life as something meaningless, since it leads only to death; (d) it does not accept human rea­son as being capable of explaining the puzzle of the universe; (e) there is also a feeling of complete meaninglessness in a world that only breeds loneliness, anguish, and despair; (f) fi­nally, existentialists try to objectify or externalize nothing­ness, i.e., they attempt to reify the state of nonbeing.

Even a brief consideration of Snares without End in the context of these basic characteristics of the existentialist novel would show why this BheIy-Quenum work succeeds as an ex­ample of the genre. In addition to specific events and state­ments in the text, Bhely-Quenum gives us some cues right at the beginning of the novel to the kind of fictional universe he has created.

It is no coincidence that the three epigraphs he uses are from authors who stress existential themes. They appear throughout the writings of Thomas a Kempis and Omar Khayyam. In the specific passages quoted from The Imitation of Christ and The Rubdiydt (with their emphasis on the rejec­tion of determinism), as well as the quotation from Baude­laire, one finds a good number of themes characteristic of modern literary existentialism: the futility of life and the tenu­ousness of hope among them. In The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis lists, among other things, several virtues that any true Christian should practice: modesty, humility, selflessness, prudence, obedience, mutual love, and so on. He also suggests that in order to receive divine love, humans must be prepared to accept God as the only source of real consola­tion in this otherwise perilous world. If one has the under­standing that earthly pain and injustice are just fractions of Christ's suffering for all humankind, it becomes easy to see why one's "life must be a continual death." It is this kind of selfless devotion, shown by Abraham in the Old Testament or Christ in the New Testament (and suggested by the epi­graphs), that is often stressed in the writings of Christian existentialist philosophers such as Saren Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel.

Because Bhely-Quenum is a devout Catholic and is thor­oughly familiar with European culture, it should not surprise readers of Snares without End that he uses the Thomas a Kempis and Baudelaire quotations to hint at an essentially religious, especially Christian, form of existentialism. We should remember, however, that Ahouna is a northern Mos­lem (who, in the midst of his tribulations, even exhibits some agnostic tendencies). Thus, to forestall any potential objec tions Bhely-Quenum also quotes from The Rubdiyat, a piece of devotional literature from the Moslem world that, like The Imitation, emphasizes religious existentialism. But it is the events that take place in the novel, coupled with Ahouna's be­havior, that provide and sustain the work's existential bent.

Critics have uniformly praised Bhely-Quenum for his depic­tion of both characters and events in the first half of the novel. Reflecting what is perhaps the majority view among critics of this work, Dorothy Blair says: "The first part [of Snares] has more unity of action and of tone than the second part, where the interest that should be intensified with the tragedy closing in on Ahouna is dispersed over a number of incidents, with secondary characters taking the centre of the stage."⁴

²WiJIfried F. Feuser, "The Works of Olympe Bhely-Quenum: From Black Anguish to the Mastering of Dark Forces," Presence africaine 125 (1983): 187 (my English translation).

³FraOl;:ois Salien, Un Piege sans fin, in Dictionnaire des oeuvres litteraires negro-africaines de langue fran~aise, ed. Ambroise Kom (Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1983), pp. 601-4.

⁴Blair, African Literature, p. 254.

It is views such as these that convince me that critics have misinterpreted Snares without End because they have failed to give consideration to its genre. If the assumption were true that this is just another tragic novel written in the realist tradi­tion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European fiction and dealing with a heroic individual who is either over­whelmed by ill luck or (in the manner of Thomas Hardy's he­roes) destroyed by hostile forces inherent in a society that he cannot understand, then such criticism might be valid. Bhely­Quenum makes it obvious from the outset, however, that we are not merely going to be dealing with a protagonist whose life in an almost idyllic, pastoral setting is brought to a pre­mature end through a series of vicious setbacks. The novelist shows that the question of existence is going to be the central concern for Ahouna when, at quite a young age and in the bucolic and peaceful surroundings of his hometown, Kiniba, the boy evokes existence in a song he learned from his Fon playmate. In it he makes this comparison be~een himself and the elephant:

It's just the same with the elephant: He is happy just to exist and is unconcerned with the little creatures round him. He asks no more than to live with his father to a certain age. What can others do with me or against me? Men who are by nature bad, what can they do against me in this world I live in? Nothing! They too are mortal creatures like me. (p. 8)

Indeed, this preoccupation with what constitutes existence and with other issues such as the meaninglessness of human activity, the failure of reason to explain human behavior, the attempts to codify nothingness (all existential themes) per­meates the novel.

When, at the beginning of the novel (but much later in the story's chronology), Ahouna is providing information about his family background to Monsieur Houenou, Ahouna launches quite unexpectedly into a short philosophical dis­course: "How I envy those people whose existence is un­eventful, even and transparent as the panes of glass in your window, set between two rows of metal bars; a life devoid of misery and misfortune such as they say the abode of Allah to be. I also admire those people who deny that evil exists at all, and think themselves clever enough to convince others that this is so" (p. 15). It was probably passages such as this one that led Salien to conclude that Snares without End is merely aphilosophical essay. But unless we want to restrict ourselves to the traditional and rather narrow definition of the novel as an extended piece of realistic prose fiction that has a coherent beginning, middle, and end and in which the problems regard­ing the central characters are all resolved at the end, we should have no problems accepting Bhely-Quenum's work as a very good existential novel.

Whether it is Mariatou, Ahouna's mother, consoling the young boy after his father's suicide by describing life as a "se­ries of nameless absurdities" or as a "wasteland of rotting re­fuse, in which men devote their energies to futile, vain things" (p. 38) and Mariatou again affirming that "everything in life is cruel, inhuman and unreasonable" (p. 44); or Camara making comments such as "life is quite ridiculously absurd" (p. 40); or Ahouna himself speaking of "the vanity of man's existence, of the futility of all the reasons we give for our exis tence, of the meaninglessness of everything in human life" (p. 108), Bhely-Quenum constantly has the characters articu­late the existential themes of the work.

Furthermore, we notice that, like other existentialist au­thors such as Sartre in Roads to Freedom and Camus in The Stranger, Bhely-Quenum views the determination of human destiny as something irrational; and like his fellow novelists also, he allows his protagonist to conquer absurdity itself by gradually gaining knowledge of the absurd fate that plagues all human life.

Now, if we accept that a work of existentialist fiction is one in which (among other things) human reason does not ex­plain everything and the irrational side of human nature and the meaninglessness of human activity are emphasized, then Snares without End is indeed a fine African example of that type of fiction. Numerous references are made to characters questioning the very nature of existence; moreover, we also see how many actions and events that take place within the text cannot simply be explained away by logic and common sense. There are, of course, the natural disasters, including the deaths of the livestock by anthrax disease and the destruction of the plants by locusts, but events start taking a more bizarre and inexplicable dimension soon after Bakari is driven by his tormentors to commit suicide.

It is ironic that, in an almost perverse way, Bakari's death temporarily brings harmony and bliss into his household:

Seitou, Ahouna's long-departed sister, rejoins the family fold with a husband and children who are loving, caring, and understanding. Ahouna himself gets married to Anatou, a belle from a neighboring village, and they soon begin raising what looks like an ideal family. But a few years after Ahouna's marriage to Anatou, he discovers that (to use his own meta­phor) the "orange" known as Anatou (pp. 60, 64) is a very bitter one. Quite suddenly and inexplicably she wrongfully ac­cuses Ahouna of infidelity, becomes extremely hostile toward him, and harangues him until he finally has to abandon his home and family.

These series of unmotivated actions continue to manifest themselves in an ever graver manner after Ahouna's departure from Kiniba. First, he notices how "a veritable army of tiger­beetles" (p. 109) senselessly devour a dead man; then, in a state of utter confusion and irrationality, he murders Kinhou, the woman from Zounmin, whose cry he mistakes for his wife's. From this point on, Bhely-Quenum's protagonist con­fronts a world that becomes more and more devoid of inher­ent meaning to him (and perhaps the reader). The novelist uses incidents such as the weird dream of the archaeologist, Monsieur Houenou, about excavating in Ahouna's native Kiniba, Ahouna's strange (even if modern) journey to Calvary, the insensate behavior of some of the jailers (Toupilly espe­cially) and prisoners (Boulin and Affognon), as well as the be­havior of some of Kinhou's survivors, to stress the lack of logic that pervades Ahouna's universe.

In Bhely-Quenum's hands, the young, sensitive, and artistic Ahouna becomes a convenient instrument for examining (as he has Ahouna say) "the futility of [one's] existence, the vanity and vacuity of all the actions [one] had ever performed and [is] still performing" (p. 85). In truth, Ahouna seems to be calling attention to at least one major theme (if not the major theme) It should be understood, however, that in stressing the novel's existentialist qualities, one is not somehow overlook­ing its weaknesses or the possibility of reading it as a work belonging to another subgenre, such as the domestic novel. Even if one is not prepared to go so far as to suggest that sen­sitive, intelligent, but illiterate African farmers cannot phi­losophize, it is obvious that Snares without End has some serious flaws.

Some of the characters' statements and actions strain credu­lity. Let us, for example, look at M. Houenou's appeal (trans­lated from the Fon'language) to Ahouna to come back after the latter has fled from Houenou's house in the dead of night:

"I was telling Abouna to come back. We are all strangers on earth, seeking everywhere for true happiness. Where is it? How can one recognize it and grasp it? No one knows! But come back Ahouna, my brother, come back. You must make a fresh start, and it is here in Zado, that the path to happiness opens up for you, maybe" (p. 117). One also finds it difficult to grasp the significance of the "acute knowledge" that Houenou claims to use in apprehending some local thieves (p. 119). In addition, Dorothy Blair rightly points out that the "digres­sions into ethnic lore, as with the descriptions of different fu­neral rites and the introduction of the moral fable told by Dako to his family to warn them not to play with danger also detract from the desired atmosphere of terror and tension in a world dominated by invisible, inimical powers." ⁵

But, while it is true that Snares without End is not a flawless novel, it is also no exaggeration to say that Bhely-Quenum has attempted to create a world in which the very nature of the African's existence (on both the literal and the philosophical level) becomes the primary subject of discussion, and that, to a large extent, he has been successful. This makes the novel, even for now and certainly for the time it was written, worthy of more consideration. Dorothy Blair deserves our highest commendation for an excellent translation.

Abioseh Michael Porter

Drexel University

⁵_Ibid., p. 256.