Engendering Violence.

Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi: le livre des ossements (2000), Tierno Monnembo's L'an des orphelins (2000), Alain Mabanckou's Les petits-fils ngres de Vercingtorix (The negro grandchildren of Vercingtorix, 2002), and Emmanuel Dongala's Johnny-chien-mchant (2002), allow us to consider how the shaping of violence in francophone African literature stems from a metaphorical tradition that is currently being rethought along new themes. Categories in which such "creative" violence was grounded (the universal scope of violence, a broken historicity, genealogy, memory, utopia, and gender), are being reshaped by others, notably the child soldier, rape, ethnic polarization, humanitarianism, and the media. Along with Ahmadou Kourouma's 2000 novel, Allah n'est pas oblig, these four works carved a new space in the francophone African literary landscape, pushing the representation of violence further. Although Kourouma's and Dongala's works are more clearly thematically related to a form of violence associated with the child soldier, Monnembo's protagonist, Faustin, is similarly inscribed in a violating present. That Murambi and L'an are parts of the Duty of Memory Project should not limit our

understanding to that frame alone nor obscure the fact that they too participate in the general re-configuring of the inscriptions of violence in francophone African literature. While the titles of the four works seem to put them in two different categories, one resolutely tragic (L'an, Murambi), the other more ironic (Johnny, Les petits-fils), all of these books are pressing interrogations about a possible future for the young generations in the war-torn regions of Central Africa. L'an is the most concise of the four books and contains no chapters. It is a first-person narrative recounted by Faustin Nsenghimana, a fifteen-year old native of Nyamata, who has been imprisoned at Kigali's Prison Centrale for three years when the book opens. Sentenced to death, he is awaiting execution. The story scans his existence from age ten when he lost his parents to the genocide (although he refuses to acknowledge the fact of their death) to age fifteen. It proposes various avenues for trying to understand who Faustin is, what his choices might have been or meant. His is the story of a life denied by violence, of a denial enforced from the outside but also internalized by the protagonist, and put to use, at times as a posture. That denial is therefore not a simple sign of violent oppression but also the basic element of Faustin's

increasingly sharp understanding of the world he finds himself in. We follow him as he evokes the rawness of life in the prison, his meeting with Claudine Karemera, a Tutsi born "at the border" in 1959 in Uganda while her family was fleeing the first genocide (31). Claudine wants to rescue Faustin from his marginality and then from jail. Through her intervention, Faustin who has become a member of a gang of homeless children, a family of sorts in Kigali, is taken to an orphanage and reunited with his traumatized younger siblings. But, unwilling to adapt to the rules of the orphanage, Faustin runs away and meets his destiny as his past slowly unravels. L'an closes on one of the most gripping representations of violence in African literature, a provocative re-working of a nativity scene: Faustin remembers and acknowledges the death of his parents in the Nyamata massacre as well as the circumstances in which an old woman found him alive, under a pile of corpses, sucking on his dead mother's bloody breasts "like a newborn" (157). Dongala's Johnny is also a first-person narrative, and is set over forty-eight hours. The two fifteen-year old protagonists, Laokol and Johnny, speak alternatively in one chapter after another, one vision of the civil war-and of life--following, introducing, and contrasting with the other. Laokol represents the experience of the common

people, women and children mostly; Johnny represents a young manhood gone astray, at once horrendously and pathetically cruel. Dongala offsets the regularity of the double voice through an intricate system whereby: first, Lao and Johnny enter each other's story (chapters 7 and 10), second, at times two chapters in a row are in Lao's or Johnny's voices, thus disrupting the alternation between their respective discourses, third, the first and final chapters of the book transmit Lao's voice so that the narrative is framed by her evolving perspective, fourth, Lao and Johnny pronounce the same three sentences at different times in the story with the results that either their unique circumstances are enhanced or the universal quality of their human frailty is brought to the foreground, beyond moralistic judgment (70, 157, 230-231). Through its story of the displaced and their pursuers, Johnny-chien mchant features the human tragedy and fractiousness that are the products of civil war. Johnny, the out-of-control "mean dog," sows despair and feeds on it. He lives in a virtual reality. His points of reference

and those of his motley crew of fellow murderers, Caman, Idi Amin, Mle-lourd and other Double-ttes, are so Rambolike that they have a cartoon quality (31). Johnny wants recognition, no matter how, and no matter the cost to

others. Over-determined by his drives, Johnny vaguely justifies his destructive aimlessness, and that of his gang's, the Mata-Mata, by the necessity of ethnic struggle, an obvious excuse for looting. Laokol is the counterpoint to Johnny's utter craziness. An excellent student before the war and an affectionate daughter, she is a female example to be added to the positive set of young male characters found in other books by Dongala, notably the young Matapari in Les petits garons naissent aussi des toiles (1998). Like Matapari, Laokol delights in science and abstraction; left-handed like him--which will save her life at the end--she loves to gaze at the stars, a symbol for transcendence and the future in Dongala's work. Trying to flee the fighting with her brother and her injured mother, she pushes her around in a wheelbarrow from one ordeal to the next until Laokol loses both family members and fights alone for her life. Johnny's and Lao's characters are means through which Dongola expresses a number of critical ideas about his country's and Africa's civil wars. Through Johnny, Dongala evokes the theme of the responsibility of African intellectuals. Lao serves to articulate the political state of the country (178) and the aspirations of its youth. Her character gives a blunt edge to the theme of immigration,

as she relays many African youths' desire to leave: "To leave, to get out of this godforsaken country--this was the dream of every young person of my generation" (159).

This idea of a desperate attempt to carve a measure of agency and self-respect runs through all the novels, although as mentioned before, in Johnny the young heroine who faces rape defends herself, matches the violence menacing her, and triumphs. Murambi's considerations about the "pitiful" quality of the "assassins" are dismissed in Dongala's novel. Laokol's liberation, her intended departure to the United States to study, and the survival of her adopted daughter, Kiess [joy], come to be possibilities through her eradication of Johnny. None of these books hold tradition to be a lost Eden. Their relation to a revolutionary utopia is, however, qualitatively different. Laokol's castration of Johnny is a clear break in the order of things, a symbolically definite crushing of a destructive male supremacy.

In the world the four books construct, the child soldier is the other signifier of social and ontological

collapse. Both he and adult women are the primary markers of the violence born of economic plunder, and forced ethnic and gender identification. In Johnny the child soldier serves as the emblematic figure of a world riddled by the obsession of domination. He is the scapegoat of a society increasingly blind to its humanity. Because childhood tends to be universally equated with innocence and thus holds a sacred value, the child soldier paradoxically represents the radicalization of evil as well as the profanation of childhood. The child soldier blurs the social reference points culturally associated with age: childhood, adolescence, youth, and maturity. A child by age, he is a man through oppression and murder. He is the ultimate figure of victimization and cruelty, of the oppressor/oppressed dyad that haunts African literatures. He makes no sense and will not be explained away through moralistic reasoning. Johnny and Faustin are two strong illustrations of this phenomenon, and Monnembo has succeeded in creating in Faustin a particularly subtle literary example of this schizophrenic conglomerate of "values." Through his dealings with Claudine, his benefactor, Faustin shows that kindness and righteousness are no longer points of reference in the life he has had to live. Claudine's wanting to adopt Faustin and her certainty

that that should--naturally--be his desire as well, demonstrate how privilege qualifies the meaning of childhood. Her failure to see that he is not a child but an adolescent forced to grow up too fast, and her denial of his sexuality represent other forms of violation, albeit contextually more benign. A narrative reality where the sexual norm is rape may cause the reader to wonder about the perverse and voyeuristic implications of the story. What indeed guaranties a critical interpretation of the type of sexual violence permeating these books? How does the writer ensure that his narration does not eroticize "evil"? One obvious answer to these questions is that these books are not mere testimonials, but artistic interrogations of complex situations. Another answer is that they contain definite instances whereby the problematic of a literary use of violence is staged through a cataclysm of narrative events halting the reader's progression by their puzzling and tragic incoherence. This causes a double reaction on the part of the reader: first, the suspension of her/his critical sense, and then the beginning of a questioning process to explain what it signifies. This is best represented in Johnny when Lovelita, Johnny's girlfriend, wakes up and does not know if she has made love with him or

been raped by him, and in L'an, when Faustin, who routinely sleeps with the young girls in his gang kills his accomplice and alter ego, Musinkro, when he finds him having sex with his younger sister. Faustin's unquestioned exercise of droit de cuissage [free and legal sexual access to women] coupled with his righteous revolt against it when it concerns his sister could be explained away as a classic instance of male supremacist confusion, but other characteristics of the protagonist, notably the fact that he is twelve years old when he kills his friend, as well as an orphaned survivor of a genocide, complicate the issue and make it hard for the reader to come to a clear-cut moral evaluation of him. This near-impossibility of judgment is played out on another level through Faustin's trial and its preparation. Determined to save the adolescent, Claudine has hired a lawyer Faustin despises at first sight for the law, lies and social class he vainly represents. As Faustin sabotages his chances for a lesser prison sentence, the reader is left to wonder if Faustin's last revolt was prompted by his understanding of his historical circumstances and his conscious refusal to be further degraded by the system, or if his insults to the lawyer and to the court constitute a symbolic form of

suicide, a violent peroration by which he paradoxically confirms himself as the emblematic Other of his society. Humanitarian aid workers and foreign media operatives are a new set of characters in francophone African literature's dramatization of violence. As the foreign expert was one of the supporting characters denoting neocolonialism earlier on in African literature (see for example Mongo Beti's Dzewatama chronicle), aid workers and media operatives represent the current context of globalization. They provide a broader imaginary background, one where the role and presence of international institutions signify the current tensions between North and South and question the meaning of progress and conflict resolution anew. While L'an, Johnny and Murambi propose a range of fictional constructions of such themes, Les petits-fils does not. This text constructs the foreign as a process of othering that is internal to the protagonists' society and born of the violent instrumentalization of ethnicity by ruthless and ignorant opportunists.