Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Frivolous Literary
- 1 “Pas de littérature”: Abasse Ndione and the Rise of Crime
- 2 Minor Mistranslations: Simon Njami and the Making of a Parisianist Himes
- 3 Crime Pays: Achille Ngoye and the Série noire
- 4 Ethnographic Erotics: Bolya and the Writing of the Other
- 5 Terreur Rose: Kouty, mémoire de sang and the Gendering of Noir
- 6 Going out Blazing: Mongo Beti's Last Two Novels
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Crime Pays: Achille Ngoye and the Série noire
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Frivolous Literary
- 1 “Pas de littérature”: Abasse Ndione and the Rise of Crime
- 2 Minor Mistranslations: Simon Njami and the Making of a Parisianist Himes
- 3 Crime Pays: Achille Ngoye and the Série noire
- 4 Ethnographic Erotics: Bolya and the Writing of the Other
- 5 Terreur Rose: Kouty, mémoire de sang and the Gendering of Noir
- 6 Going out Blazing: Mongo Beti's Last Two Novels
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If Ndione's swirling linguistic play and Njami's minor (mis)translations open up the possibilities of African noir, Achille Ngoye's three novels, Agence Black Bafoussa (1996), Sorcellerie à bout portant (1998), and Ballet noir à Château-Rouge (2001), represent the first works of the mature Francophone African crime genre. All three appeared in the Série noire on which Himes had a significant generic influence, and this is evident in Ngoye's writing in different ways and to varying degrees; in particular, the Congolese author blends the American's use of the absurd while exploring in evolving fashion the aesthetic potentialities of a vernacular diasporic/African subculture. While some of the familiar tropes of the crime novel, such as speed, material culture, women, and violence, are present, these texts focus most intently on describing their urban worlds, experimenting with linguistic expectations, and making these textual forays communicate the fraught relationship between France and Africa while also maintaining the necessary distance and humor critical to the frivolous literary. Framed theoretically, Ngoye's novels play with and assess the ways in which the cultural and the political intersect under the banner of “Francophonie.” Agence Black Bafoussa recycles in absurdist fashion the French slang used to translate Himes; Sorcellerie à bout portant continues to experiment with literary representations of spoken language while revisiting the subject of Ngoye's first (non-noir) novel Kin-la-Joie, Kin-la Folie. Finally, Ballet noir à Château-Rouge fleshes out, through a linguistic emphasis, the possibility of a Parisianist crime fiction proposed by Njami's rewriting of Himes. In this final work, Ngoye posits a fully formed Parisian diaspora established in the French capital, one that might be equated in productive ways to Himes’ black vernacular Harlem, yet doing so in a way that works beyond or around the specific linguistic limitations of the necessarily failed translations of the American author described by Njami.
A handful of critics and reviewers have spoken about Achille Ngoye and genre, including Sylvère Mbondobari, who situates Ngoye within the broader context of the emerging African crime novel. His argument is that the genre bypasses the disingenuous representation of immigration by African authors for whom that experience has generally been relatively easy.
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- The Noir AtlanticChester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel, pp. 91 - 117Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011