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
4 - Ethnographic Erotics: Bolya and the Writing of the Other
- 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
As I noted in my Introduction, Michel de Certeau's “Ethno-Graphy” from The Writing of History shows how the West prepares its other for consumption. He maps the relationship between Europe and its other(s) as an epistemological construct sustained by metaphors (and the reality) of geographical distance and/as cultural difference. In particular, de Certeau emphasizes the West's insistence on a radical opposition between writing's historicity over and against the evanescence of a protean oral immediacy. Achille Ngoye's experimentations with the vernacular ultimately engaged with the second part of this equation, showing how orality as a distinct aesthetic-expressive medium conditions the literary, and how the binary opposition is also a constitutive convergence. Implicit in Ngoye's writing is the idea that this process of transcription and translation participates in the broader scientific project that gives value, place, and meaning to the other's otherwise naturalized un-self-conscious speech. Whereas Ngoye stressed the local processes of adaptation and transformation that produce a specific literary vernacular, the Congolese (Kinshasa) author Bolya (Bolya Baenga, 1957–2010) comments instead on the broader scientific processes that gather and order data—of which oral testimony is one important part.
Significantly, Bolya's two crime novels, only the first of which I will examine at any length here, use the crime fiction of Chester Himes to establish an elaborate—and highly entertaining—critique of ethnography. Still, the American's precise influence is not immediately obvious. That is, if with each of the previous authors one or more particular aspects of the Himesian oeuvre served as an important reference, where do we find it in Bolya? Himes’ ambiguous statement: “The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted to take it away from the white men if only in my books” is worth extrapolating to help explain Himes’ influence. As a number of critics have noted, and contrary to the author's claim, Himes’ Harlem is the product of a particularly refined sociological gaze in which features such as a distinct vernacular, a close eye to the material conditions of existence, and a keen awareness of the relations of power that structure this particular social universe constitute a local specificity that the author is at pains to render accurately.
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- The Noir AtlanticChester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel, pp. 118 - 139Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011