Robert Alvin Miller

 

 

Moussa Konate’s Fils du chaos lends itself to a process of rereading, a first reading as socio-cultural representation and a second reading based on its suggestive and self-questioning narrative framework. While the second reading does not necessarily deny or erase the life-image displayed in the first reading, it does focus the reader’s attention on the mediate character of this image, on the historical roots of  past events in our present memory and on the uncomfortable relationship between postcolonial educated classes and their remembered experience of an earlier period perceived as something closer to traditional socialization.

Fils du chaos contains five chapters, the first and last of which are partly or entirely in the present of the narrative voice. The three middle chapters contain the story of a period of the narrator’s childhood. The problem central to both the framing and framed narratives is, as indicated by the title, that of sonship, but the interpretative challenge hinges on the second element of the title: where and what is the chaos that determined the narrator’s sonship? Is this sonship’s relation to chaos cosmic, cultural, socio-political or psychological?

We are told little in the first chapter about the narrator’s personal life. His emphasis is on the elements, extreme sun followed by inevitable extreme storms and darkness. “Les éclairs fulgureront, le tonnerre ricanera, la bourrasque se déchaînera et le monde livré aux forces des ténèbres semblera une planète morte. La nuit s’installera, pleine de fureur et d’angoisse.”(6-7). Early mention is made of the “city” as backdrop and the narrator refers to neon lights and to the decor of his office, suggesting that he is now a bureaucrat established in that unnamed city.

We begin to know more of the narrator through his suggestive rhetoric. He opens with the sentence: “Mais oui, il fallait s’y attendre...” The chaos experienced at the cosmic level cannot surprise this narrator who already knows chaos and only observes without wonderment something that is already lived reality. He later uses preterition (“Si j’étais poète... je dirais...”) to introduce forms of interpretation: cosmic chaos is associated with “l’annonce du Déluge”, human fears, shames, drunkenness and pride, and the necessity of suffering. But not being a poet, only having vague memories of French poetry learned years earlier in school, he can only promise bitter but unforgettable memories that form the basis of his perceptions. He feels constrained as the night descends on his office to go down into the depths of himself, not to disclose any beautiful and ineffable past, but to re-encounter what he sees as a flat and uninspiring quotidian.

It is in the closing paragraphs of the first chapter that we realize that this bitter memory of the everyday is also tied to his interpretation of his present daily existence. He sees before him the “profil quelconque” of his wife and declares that nothing can protect him from the memories that define for him the quality of life, his image of women and the history of his socialization.

Throughout the framing chapter, the narrator remains anonymous, a nameless modern bureaucrat whose condition and character are reduced to a jaundiced voice. The second chapter begins with his brutal transition from the nameless to the named-by-the-other. The Chapter opens with the insistent and repeated calling of  “Hamabi”, the narrator’s name, called out in anger and authority by a powerful and oppressive father.

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