Oral Literary and Historic Echoes from the Novel, Bound To Violence, by Yambo Ouologuem

Malian writer, Yambo Ouologuem's most famous novel Bound to Violence first published in 1968 satirically portrays Africa before and during colonial subjugation whilst assessing the role of local overlords who in league with Arab slave dealers, sold their subjects into bondage. After winning the prestigious French literary prize, Prix Renaudot, Yambo received much media attention, being widely reviewed, appearing on T.V. shows and being interviewed and featured in many prominent publications and with the book being translated into numerous languages. .

Despite allegations that it contained materials drawn from other works, Bound to Violence has been widely read and acknowledged as a wonderful book which this writer himself affims makes quite a compulsive as well as a gripping story though with too horrible revelations to make.

Born in 1940 in Bandiagary in the Dogon country, in Mali to a ruling class family, Ouologuem, the only son of a land owner and school inspector, quickly learnt several African languages and gained fluency in French, English and Spanish. After matriculating at a Lycee in Bamako [capital of Mali] Yambo went to France to continue his education at Lycee de Charenton in Paris and then continued his studies for his doctorate in Sociology. Upon returning to his home country in the late 70's he was made director of a Youth centre near Mopti in central Mali where he remained until 1984. He has led a secluded religious life in the Sahel ever since.

This novel, his first and only, has been widely hailed as the first truly African novel. 'It fuses legend, oral tradition and stunning realism in a vision arising authentically from black roots.' He draws on the history and culture of the great medieval empire of Mali in which Nakem was central in the 13th century, and dominated onwards by the Saif dynasty, whose rule was characterized by ruthlessness marked with bloody and tragic adventures. After a brief, violent fresco depicting Nakem's past, the story moves into the 20th century with the Saifs still in power. But when the French arrive as colonizers, they unwittingly become puppets in their astute hands. But still these native rulers continue to dominate by shadowy and occultic means.. Scenes of violence and eroticism, of sorcery and black magic appear as natural parts of human activity there. From this frightful and horrific background emerges the book's main protagonist, Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, the son of slaves who was sent to France to be educated and groomed for a political post which could well be the next step to his becoming another puppet to the Saifs.

Ouologuem goes on to show how the ancient African emperors, the Moslems, and finally the European colonial administrators were responsible for the black African's 'slave mentality.' They produce'negraille' a word coined by Ouologuem himself to indicate this servility. His skepticism over the potential for liberation through struggle was also pronounced.

The first part of the novel compresses the history of the first seven hundred years of the Nakem Empire starting from around the year 1200 A.D. with brutality, violence, oppression and corruption,. Slavery iwas also widespread there with 'a hundred million of the damned ... being carried away. This went on along with :' Cannibalism: 'one of the darkest features of that spectral Africa ...'

The Arabs had conquered the land [settling over it 'like ......and the common black] man ... suffers for it. Religion - Islam -is abused in order to consolidate and keep power. It 'became a means of action, a political weapon.'

The brief second part captures the coming of the whites at the close of the 19th century. The empire is 'pacified and divided up by the Europeans, with the French controlling whatever remains of Nakem. Hope that life will improve is seen as:

Saved from slavery, the [negroes] welcomed the white man with joy, hoping he would make them forget the mighty Saif's meticulously organized cruelty.

But the exploitation continues unabated as each side uses the blacks to suit their own ends. The Saif remains influential and powerful even under the French administration whilst the subjugated commoners still have little chance of living tolerable lives.

Much of the book, contained in the third section titled 'Night of the Giants', is set in the first half of the twentieth century where horrific incidents such as the Saif's indiscriminate wielding of whatever power he has left, lots of ugly violence like the Saif's curious assasination technique through trained asps proliferate.

Shrobenius adds another dimension to the exploitation. Learning lately about Nakem, he comes there to buy relics, masks and other cultural artifacts. The Saifs themselves contributed to spreading this exploitation and fraud by making up stories and selling whatever cultural legacy can be procured. Tons upon tons more are thus donated towards the further spread and intensification of what became known as 'Shrobeniusology'. This explicitly shows the mechanism by which the new elite came to invent its traditions through the science of ethnography. Later after Shrobenius has popularized African art in Europe many others came to purchase pieces. No originals now left, Saif had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight and then dug out later and sold at exorbitant price.

Saif made up stories and the interpreter translated. Madoubi repeated in French, refining on the subtleties to the delight of Shrobenius, that human crayfish afflicted with a groping mania for resuscitating an African universe - cultural autonomy, he called it, which had lost all living reality;...he was determined to find metaphysical meaning in everything...African life, he held, was pure art. Then,'...henceforth Negro art was baptized 'aesthetic' and hawked in the imaginary universe of 'vitalizing exchanges.'

Then after describing the phantasmic elaboration of some interpretative forgeries by the Saif he announces that '...Negro art found its patent of nobility in the folklore of merchantile intellectualism..'Thus comes the exposure of the network of fraudsters starting from Shrobenius himself, the anthropologist, as apologist for 'his' people; that swallows enthusiastically and unquestioningly these exoticized products; African traders and producers of African art, who understand the need to maintain the mysteries that render their products as exotic; traditional and contemporary elites who require a sentimentalized past to authorize their present power. All of them are thus exposed in their complex and multiple mutual complicities.

'Witness the splendor of its art - the true face of Africa in the grandiose empires of the Middle Ages, a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity,order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it's here that one must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization.

Ironically, all this earns Shrobenius a two-fold benefit on his return home. He mystified his people well enough to get them to raise him enthusiastically to a lofty Sorbonnical chair. He also exploited the sentimentality of the coons, who were only too pleased to hear from the mouth of a white man that Africa was the womb of the world and the cradle of civilization. The ordinary blacks thus gladly donated masks and art treasures by the tons to the acolyte of 'Shrobeniusology'.

Ouologuem then goes on to precisely articulating the interconnections of Africanist mystifications with tourism and the production, packaging, and marketing of African art works.

An Africanist school harnessed to the vapors of magico religious cosmological, and mythical symbolism has thus been born: with the result that for three years men flocked to Nakem- ..middlemen, adventurers, apprentices, bankers, politicians, salesmen, conspirators - supposedly 'scientists,' but in reality enslaved sentries mounting guard before the Shrobeniusological monument of Negro pseudo symbolism.

Already it had become more than difficult to procure old masks, for Shrobenius and the missionaries had had the good fortune to snap them all up. And so Saif - had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight or sunk into ponds, lakes, marshes, and mud holes, to be exhumed later on and sold at exorbitant prices to unsuspecting curio hunters. These three-year-old masks were said to be charged with the weight of four centuries of civilization.

Ouologuem in this way forcefully exposes the connections in the international system of art exchange, the international art world, and the way in which an ideology of disinterested aesthetic value - the 'baptism' of 'Negro art' as 'aesthetic' meshes with the international commodification of African expressive culture which requires the manufacture of Otherness . [ Appiah, Kwame Anthony]

There is Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, a child of poverty who takes advantage of French schooling and achieves academic success through advanced studies in France. There also he experiences failure . He discovers the particularly inescapable long reach of Saif. On his return home his thoughts of a triumphant return were broken by his discovery that he and his country were again being manipulated by the ruling Saif.

Some hope however comes from the brief concluding section 'Dawn'. Abbe Henry, the hunchback priest obsessed by the tragedy of the Blacks, half-crazed with the christian duty of love is humbly beautiful as the despair of a Christian soul is now a bishop. The last section consists almost entirely of a dialogue between Abbe Henry and Saif, both philosophical discourse and power struggle. This Saif appears vanquished, but Ouologuem reminds us:

one cannot help recalling that Saif, mourned three million times, is forever reborn to history beneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics,

Using various elements of oral literature Ouologuem enriches the narrative in exploring a wide span of African history to establish how Africa was like before and after the onslaught of the Arab and European slave dealers and colonizers. there

Oral literature enriches the texture of Ouloguem's narration thus giving it its vivacity, its uniqueness, its semblance of authenticity and its immediacy. Given the wide span of African History explored encompassing well over 700 years from 1202 to 1947 the narrative method has of necessity to exceed the bounds of the conventional. The narrative thus reads like an epic oral tale told from a communal point of view. The reader thus feels as if he is listening to a tale being related by a Griot which starts like a legend being told in the village square:

Our eyes drink the brightness of the sun and overcome, marvel at their tears. Mashallah! war bismillah!... To recount the bloody adventure of the nigger... - shame to the worthless paupers - there would be no need to go back beyond the present century, but the true history of the Black begins much earlier, with the Saifs, in the years 1202 of our era, in the African Empire of Nakem, south of Fezzan long after the conquests of Okba ben Nafi al-Fitri

The figurative expressions as 'our eyes drink the brightness of the sun', the frequent interjections and exclamations in the middle of sentences and the religious incantations give the work its distinctive oral Griot-like timbre. In reading, we could easily imagine ourselves listening to the emphatic and dramatic delivery of the story teller. Through his incantations and his comments interlarding the tale, he shows his emotional reactions to the details being narrated, thus giving us the illusion of being part of an audience keenly listening in the village square with our attention being drawn, as it goes on, to particular details. This effect could best be seen in how our attention is drawn to the way the black commoners are ill-used:

They promised their serfs, servants and former captives that, pending the hostilities which the neighbouring tribe was no doubt plotting, they would be 'looked upon - hear! - as provisionally free and equal subjects.' Then, once peace was restored among the various tribes, for the war had failed to break out - out - hee - hee - the same notables promised the same subject that after...hum...hum...a brief' apprenticeship of forced labor, they would be rewarded with the Rights of Man.... As to civil rights, of them no mention was made. Halleluyah.

The interjections throughout this passage are tinged with mockery as well as scorn. The reader is thus alerted to the insincerity of the promises.. The narrator's dismay is captured in the closing exclamation: 'Halleluyah!'

Ouologuem then invokes the lofty and grandiose style and tradition of the African chronicler, the Griot.:

How in profound displeasure,with perfumed mouth and eloquence on his tongue, Saif ben Isaac al - Heit endeavored to mobilize the energies of the fanatical people against the invader; how to that end he spread reports of daily miracles throughout the Nakem Empire - earthquakes, the opening of tombs, resurrections of saints, fountains of milk springing up in his path, visions of archangels stepping out of the sunset, village women drawing buckets from the well and finding them full of blood; how on one of his journeys he transformed three pages of the Holy Book, the Koran, into as many doves, which flew on ahead of him as though to summon the people to Saif's banner; and with what diplomacy he feigned indifference to the gods of this world: in all that there is nothing out of the ordinary.

In this grand sweep of a sentence Ouologuem gives force to the eloquence of Saif ben Isaac al- heit whose 'profound displeasure' allied 'with perfumed mouth and eloquence' mobilized the people to frenzied and fanatical onslaught against the invaders. Through parallel structures and repetitions he also shows the prowess of the Saif in spreading a propaganda of terror to further give vent to the furore of the people in attacking the invaders.

Ouloguem also creates the impression of narrating legends based on factual historical occcurences. This is through his constant recourse to historians and griots as suggested in: ' Afterwards, wild supplications was heard from the village square...Then pious silence and the griot Kituli of cherished memory ends his tale as follows .'and 'The consequences of his audacity are related by Mohamed Hakmud Traore descended in an unbroken line from griot ancestors and himself griot in the present-day African Republic of Nakem-Zuiko.' The impression is thus often given of a teller sifting through the various details from various sources to get at the kernel of the truth. Many a time he would indicate this by either naming the various griots and historians concerned or by merely introducing them as 'according to one version' 'in another version', 'still others claimed that' and so on. His inability to get one authentic report on Isaac al - Heit is explained thus:

At this point tradition loses itself in legend for there are few written accounts and the versions of the elders diverge from those of the griots, which differ from those of the chroniclers.

Through his comments and religious incantations, the narrator conveys the impression that he and his audience share common norms and values. A shared ancestral background is also alluded to through his frequent recourse to such phrases as 'our era'

Ouologuem repudiates the negritudinist glorification of Africa's past by portraying it as an unending cycle of violence, greed, debauchery and exploitation, as reaffirmed in the title Bound to Violence and in this extract from an interview of Ouologuem by Linda Hiecht:

....black people in Africa were oppressed. He has enemies too among what they all black aristocracy, and the black man never was a Negro before the black aristocrat sold him as a slave. It was the black aristocrat who made black people become Negroes. If you look at the entire history, you find there were three stages of oppression: blacks oppressing blacks, Arabs oppressing blacks,and whites oppressing blacks. Look, it took me a lot of courage to write this book which is about oppressors who were my own family and I did my best to be as universal as possible.

Ouologuem's position is then unlike Armah's anti-negritudinist. For he holds Africans as much responsible for the indignities they suffered as the foreign forces,Arabs and Europeans. Thus, he neither idealizes nor endorses either party. His African world has no political system. Traditional religion too seems absent here. Everything is left in a state of chaos and turmoil with the rulers using people at will. The system of justice evident in Two Thousand Seasons could not be seen here. Ordinary people are continually being misused by the notables. Immoralities of the worst kinds are widely practiced. The history of Africa is thus shown as one unending flow of violence which in turn kept them under such dread that they were scared stiff of even rebelling. Thus Appiah's submission that it is a repudiation of national history makes much sense though perhaps it could be more apt as a denunciation of racial or continental history.

RELATED ARTICLE:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Looking-Back-Through-2000-Seasons-of-Slavery-of-Africans-by-Various-Other-Races-in-Ayi-Kwei-Armah&id=990966

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appiah, Kwame Anthony , In My Father's House

Ouologuem, Yambo, Bound to Violence, translated by Ralph Manhein, A Helen and Kurt Woolf Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, New York, 1971

Palmer, Eustace, The Growth of The African Novel, Heinemann

Educational Books , London, 1979

Wise, Christopher[ed], Yambo Ouologuem Postcolonial Writer,Islamic Militant, 1999

'De l'histoire a sa metaphore dans Le Devoir de Violence de Yambo Ouologuem '

By Josias Semajanga in Etudes Francaises, vol 31, no1,etc[1995]

'Fiction and Subversion' by A. Songolo in Presence Africaine no 120 [1981]

Interview of Yambo Ouologuem

'Ouologuem's Blueprint for 'Le Devoir de Violence'' by E. Sellin in RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURE 2 [1971]

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Gay Men's Influence on Fashion, Style and Popular Culture

Popular culture is constantly evolving. There are many influences on what is considered fashionable and stylish at any one time. Some tend to dominate, however. And one growing trend is the effect of gay male sensibilities on many aspects of mainstream culture including films, television and fashion. No longer on the margins of mainstream culture, gay men are often making its rules.

Take the breakout show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. This entertaining television program took the (often true!) stereotype of gay males being more fashion conscious, cultured and aesthetically adept than straight males and made it the central idea. These witty gay men ran amock, giving advice to clueless straight guys on everything from their choice of swimwear to their behavior with the opposite sex. The show was a huge hit in the USA and globally, and even spawned localized versions in different countries.

There are other, more general examples. Take the gay ideal of masculinity, which has a focus on good grooming and physical fitness. While gay male icons are often Adonis like, their heterosexual counterparts have long been able to get away with being less than fit and sometimes downright slobby. But this seems to have changed in recent years.

A couple of recent "sword and sandal" epics illustrate this well. In Troy, both main stars (Brad Pitt and Eric Bana) were fitter, stronger and more muscular than in any of their previous roles. A similar look was required for the movie 300 about Spartan warriors. All of the principal actors, as well as the extras, had clearly spent a lot of time at the gym. The star, Gerard Butler, followed a punishing training regime for four months prior to filming, often working out with a well known body builder.

One wonders how many of the original Spartans would have looked so buffed. They certainly didn't have the benefit of digital blood sugar monitors, isometric gym equipment, protein bars and all the rest. (Though they would have been far more lethal, of course!)

Compare these films with the Roman epics of the fifties and sixties. In films such as Ben Hur and Spartacus physical perfection was not nearly as important. Stars such as Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston were certainly fit, but hardly the perfect physical specimens we've seen parading across the screen lately.

The evolving character of James Bond is another case in point. Sean Connery, the original movie Bond, was a masculine icon. He had an imposing physique and was hairy chested. He certainly wasn't overweight, but he wasn't toned either. While he did get around in his swimming trunks in at least one film, this was as much to serve the plot as it was to give the women something to ogle.

Then there was Roger Moore. While he was dapper and stylish, he was not very athletic. He was most comfortable in a suit, and seemed to have an aversion to swimwear.

The latest Bond, Daniel Craig, is more fit and muscular than any of his predecessors. He's probably been training with Gerard Butler! In one purely ornamental scene in Casino Royale he rises from the surf to display his (hairless) barrel chest and washboard stomach. Needless to say, when dressed he's always wearing the most stylish attire.

It's interesting that these are all big budget movies that are made appeal to a broad demographic. They are guy films; not gay films. Yet the action men in them look fit, sleek and often fashionable while killing all the bad guys. While the rising influence of gay male aesthetics isn't the only reason for this phenomenon, it is certainly a major factor.

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The Spear of Longinus

The prime mover in the assassination of Julius Caesar was married to a Brutus but I suspect he was less interested in restoring power to the Senate (and in some small way the people of Italy) than he was in his own power. The movie Spartacus does see it as I see it. His persona was played by Sir Laurence Olivier. Cassius, who is later called Longinus, dies at his own hand after a defeat in the homeland of Alexander at a city named after the father or another in the family of Alexander.

"The Spear of Destiny, also known as the Spear of Longinus and the Heilige Lance -- Holy Lance -- is one of the most important Christian relics of the Passion of Jesus Christ. As first described in John 19:31-37, the Spear was used by a Roman soldier (Gaius Cassius, later called Longinus) to pierce the side of Christ as he hung on the cross. The Spear, bathed in the blood of the Lamb and playing a significant role in the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, is believed to have acquired tremendous mystical power. The first sign of that power was the purported healing of Gaius Cassius's failing eyesight by blood from the wound.

The centurion later become an early convert to Christianity. The Spear subsequently passed through a multitude of hands, coming into the possession of many of Europe's most important political and military leaders, including Constantine I, Alaric (the Visigoth king who sacked Rome in the year 410), Frankish general Charles Martel, Charlemagne, Frederick of Barbarossa, and Frederick II. A leader who possessed the Spear was said to be invincible; Charlemagne and Frederick of Barbarossa were undefeated in battle until they let the Spear fall from their hands. A legend arose that whoever claimed the Spear 'holds the destiny of the world in his hands for good or evil.'

As a young man Adolf Hitler was fascinated by the Spear of Destiny, which he first saw displayed in the Hofsburg museum in Vienna, Austria in 1909. Hitler was familiar with the legend of the Holy Lance. His interest in the relic was further amplified by its role in the 1882 opera Parsifal -- by Hitler's favorite composer, Richard Wagner -- which concerned a group of ninth-century knights and their quest for the Holy Grail. Hitler's fascination with the Spear was pivotal in sparking his interest in the occult, which gave birth to his ideas on the origins and purpose of the Germanic race and contributed to his belief in his own destiny as a world conqueror.

{This is the spearhead of the Holy Lance of Hapsburg and they spend millions trying to authenticate these things but always end up finding out they are not as the myths do tell us. History may soon have to answer to forensics, I hope.}

On October 12, 1938, not long after the German annexation of Austria, Hitler ordered the S.S. to seize the Spear and other artifacts from Vienna. They were taken by train to Nuremberg, where they were stored in St. Katherine's Church. The Spear remained in St. Katherine's until 1944, when it was moved to a specially constructed vault beneath the church, built in secret and at great expense, intended to protect it and the other stolen relics from Allied bombs. Nuremberg was captured by Allied troops in April of the following year. The vault was subsequently discovered by American Army officers. The Spear was confiscated by American forces on the afternoon of April 30, 1945, less than two hours before Hitler's suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin. Like the Spear's previous owners, Hitler perished after the relic was taken from him.

Like most holy relics, the history of the Spear of Destiny is complex and difficult to authenticate. The earliest reports of the Spear were circa 570 A.D., when it was said to have been on display in the basilica of Mount Sion in Jerusalem alongside the Crown of Thorns. The point of the spear's blade was apparently broken off following the Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 615 A.D. The point, set into an icon, found its way to the church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople and later to France, where it remained in the Sainte Chapelle until the 18th century. It was briefly moved to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris during the French Revolution, but it subsequently disappeared. Meanwhile, the rest of the spearhead was transferred from Jerusalem to Constantinople sometime in the eighth century. It was taken by the Turks in the 14th century and sent by Sultan Bajazet as a gift to Pope Innocent VIII in 1492. Innocent ordered the relic placed in Saint Peter's in Rome, where it remains today, although the Catholic Church makes no great claim as to its authenticity.

There are several other competing relics in different locations. One such "Holy Lance" was allegedly unearthed by Crusader Peter Bartholomew in Antioch in 1098. That Lance is now at Etschmiadzin in Armenia; scholars believe that it is not actually a Roman lance but the head of a standard, although it may have an interesting history of its own, separate from the legend of the Lance. Another claimant has rested in Krakow for about eight hundred years.

Hitler's lance was the fourth Spear, called the Lance of St. Maurice and the Holy Lance of Hapsburg, which is part of the Reichkleinodien (Imperial Regalia) of the house of Hapsburg. This spearhead is bound with gold, copper, and silver threads to a nail -- purported to be one of the nails of the Crucifixion. The earliest verifiable account of this Spear was its use in a coronation ceremony in 1273. It rested in Nuremberg during the Middle Ages, but by the early 20th century it was placed on display at the Treasure House of the Hofsburg museum in Vienna, where Hitler saw it in 1909.

This Spear has no greater claim to authenticity than any of the others, although Hitler -- who conducted his own less-than-rigorous investigation into its history -- was firmly convinced that it was the genuine article, leading to its confiscation by the S.S. in 1938. In 1946 the Spear and the rest of the Imperial Regalia were returned to Austria. Today they are once again on public display at the Hofsburg museum." (2)

The people mentioned as having had possession of the spear are all Merovingians (Family of Jesus) and they had built a ritual energy Construct around the spear regardless of whether or not it is or ever was authentic. I cannot expect academicians to understand that and I am not going to address it in this book. I will have to do a book called The Jesus Conspiracy. I have explained these things in other books as far as the ritual acts of these Merovingians.

I wonder why this Spear is called the Spear of Longinus in so many places. Maybe I just missed something but if Joseph of Arimathaea is the Roman Minister of Mines, (slavery) as well as a member of the Sanhedrin which was bought by Rome as was Herod, what is going on? When you know that Paul/Saul is a Roman from Tarshis and he was out stoning St. Stephen and he worked for the Sadducee Temple priests of the Sanhedrin you start to see things fall in place. Joseph takes the body of Jesus to his family crypt where Jesus had brought Lazarus back from the dead (or out of a near coma caused by drugs just as Jesus had been given when on the cross to appear dead. Joseph had to be related to Jesus or Pilate (From Scotland perhaps according to current archaeological digs there.) could not have released the body to him despite the fact that Pilate would be from the area Joseph's tin mines had been central to an enormous money-making machine for his Benjaminite family. It is the Roman law that the body can only go to the family and that would include the father of Mary Magdalene/Bethany (same person - he owned homes in both cities plus in Egypt where Mary and Jesus had studied while growing up).

Do you think Gaius Cassius was stupid when he refused to do what other Senators wanted as he fought to defend Rome? Do you think he was in on the supposed death of Jesus or whatever actually happened there? There are many dots worth connecting here. I think there were powerful people who wanted to build the kind of Empire that Rome shortly became. Their purpose or plan was an Empire with ever fewer numbers of actual participants in the decision-making. It continues long after the so-called fall of Rome. Cassius knew the Senate was a paper tiger or mere façade.

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