‘Out’ in Africa!
Chantal Zabus
I will concentrate on two francophone African texts – Guinean Saïdou Bokoum’s Chaîne (1974) and Doumbi-Fakoly’s La révolte des Galsénésiennes (1994) – in an attempt to show how the representation of homosexuality in francophone fiction has fared in over two decades. Such concerns can also be traced in other African novels, such as Sierra Leonean Yulisa Amadu Maddy’s No Past, No Present, No Future (1973). Daniel Vignal and Chris Dunton have provided pioneering studies of male and female intimacies in African literature but, writing in the 1980s, they could not have had the vantage point that we now have.
Chaîne depicts an abysmal “descent into hell,” where homosexuality is synonymous with moral depravity and ranks fourth in an implicit sequence involving three other assumed “aberrations”: sex with a white woman; masturbation; and sex with (female) prostitutes. Chaîne’s protagonist, Kanaan Niane, who was born in Conakry, Guinea, roams through a racially segregated United States, where there is “a third sex or a second human species,” then through Algeria, before becoming a Law student at Nanterre-la-Folie, a parody of the University Paris X. There he slips into a depression after his failed relationship with a young French woman because of, as he later confesses, “an ontological masochism” (50).
Kanaan Niane’s existential despair is very much influenced by Sartre’s La Nausée, which he reads ad nauseam. As an insomniac, he starts hallucinating and is doomed to walk the night in endless meanderings through “Paris by night” (58) — from Saint-Denis, to Pigalle or Saint-Lazare. He at first takes an interest in the obscene graffiti on bathroom walls; then he lapses into a true cult of the phallus. After placing coy tabloid advertisements such as “Young man seeks young man” (59), his personals quickly escalate in vulgarity and self-deprecation, as he signs them “Black slave” (60) and, in self-loathing, embraces ithyphallic views of black sexuality. He then begins to indulge in mutual masturbation with anonymous partners in public urinals and sodomises himself with the gauzed handle of a knife smeared with Vaseline. While wallowing, by his own reckoning, in “a profound metaphysical desolation,” his nightly wanderings take him to the banks of the Seine, which murmurs not with the vows of proverbial heterosexual lovers but with the din of hurried homosexual intercourse. He drags himself to a cabaret tellingly called “Le Néant” (after Sartre’s famed essay on phenomenology, Being and Nothingness) or to Barbès, a meat-market full of “Hottentot Venuses” oozing with fat on sale (68). Sperm mixes with urine and diarrhea in this liquid no exit, where hell is boundless desire. Subsequently, he is gang-raped by hooded youths in the woods of Fontainebleau.
Now that Kanaan Niane has sunk low enough to be ostracised even by those he refers to as the banlieue marginals, it seems his adventures will come to a halt as he contemplates suicide from the heights of the Sacré Coeur. But from the promontory, he sees a Pentecostal flame, a kind of divine sign which draws him to the South-Eastern slum of Montreuil, where he is shaken out of his torpor by some African immigrants (mostly Soninke and Bambara) trying to save their meagre belongings from a derelict house on fire. He almost dies in this ordeal by fire, having refused the helping hand of a white fireman. In these primitive dwellings filled with “black troglodytes” (110), Kanaan ruminates, as insinuated in the symbolic title of Maddy’s novel, that Africans are “without a past, without a future. Present, zero” (116). Since he has ‘lived by the rectum’, which is definitely, a ‘grave’ for him, Kanaan reaches an anal degree zero. He has to start all over again from this existential hole, his ontological nullity. He is buoyed psychologically by the griot, Kouyaté. The latter points to Kanaan’s grand Njãn ancestry; this inspires the protagonist unto a path of self-discovery. He becomes an activist – an advocate for immigrant workers’ rights in France. His activism takes him abroad with a newly formed travelling theatre group. Kanaan then gets involved with a bourgeois Senegalese militant Sana, who reveals that she had homosexual affairs with women – just to spite her mother – even if they “filled her with physical disgust” (182).