Sonship and Chaos
Robert Alvin Miller
The father first names him and creates his identity as memory and bitterness of life. But his father, Badian, is not only an oppressive figure of authority but also the symbolic centre of a complex cluster of cultural, social and sexual structures that have become for the speaking Hamadi of the frame-story a fixation and a fixed configuration of memories. The structures begin with the express paternal interdiction of cauri-divination that Hamadi had begun to learn from an old woman and from which he had intuitively shown an uncanny inclination by spontaneously predicting the death of a close friend of the father. As if he has taken this intuition as an implicit threat of violence toward himself, the father violently forbids Hamadi any further use of the cauris. After Badian’s outburst, “[p]ersonne n’a protesté, personne n’a pris mon parti”, suggesting that Hamadi’s hatred of his father is not simply “classical” Oedipal rivalry with this father’s power of life and death over others, but a sense of social isolation within a family structure that marginalised him at the very moment of his first attempts at self-realization.
The father is also the central figure of a system of sexual control and disempowerment. As a polygamist who shows little interest in Hamadi’s mother (a second wife) and marries a young third wife at a relatively advanced age, Badian comes to represent the power of sexual control and the challenge of a desire to cross sexual and cultural boundaries. It is for example immediately after an unequally matched confrontation with his father that Hamadi engages in sexual touching with his maternal cousin Raba and incurs the wrath of his maternal aunt. Since his mother is of Peulh origin and her sister can only express her outrage in a language not commonly understood in the compound, Badian’s reaction is largely one of indifference. In this sense, the father as symbolic castrator is perceived more profoundly as a distant, indifferent authority represented by subaltern feminine agents but always standing in the background as the ultimate source of oppression and interdiction.
The most direct mediation of this authority however resides in Hamadi’s disillusionment with his own mother. Although he shares his mother’s sense of victimisation and disenfranchisement in relation to other branches of the family, he is finally unable to reconcile his need for maternal affection with sense of repulsion and scorn in the face of the indelible image of her submission to patriarchal authority. As the mother is central to his conceptualization of women, the image of victimization will eventually be transferred to the “modern” bureaucratic narrator and echo in his image and treatment of his own spouse: “Maintenant encore, chaque fois que je m’efforce de voir en la femme autre chose qu’une femelle, l’image de ma mère à genou devant son mari me revient en mémoire et m’ôte toute illusion.” (84).
Hamadi tells us that in the lorry that carried him off to school and a different life he believed he was turning his back on the world as he knew it. He repeats a litany of negative stereotypes of superstition, misogyny, patriarchy and intra-familial hatred, a litany he will pronounce again in the final pages of his text to show its influence on his present consciousness. He goes on to tell us how he dreamt of marriage with an educated woman, a villa with a swimming pool in the living room, children who would speak only French and lavish holidays spent in Europe. Then his teachers introduced him to Marx and Mao: he began to believe in ideals of solidarity and self-sacrifice for one’s neighbour and for the people. But as he struggled to establish himself in the civil service he gradually saw that the self was the only legitimate centre of interest: “la seule vérité qui vaille d’être défendue, c’est moi!” As he began to live out this new principle, he gradually found himself reenacting many of the traits of his father’s lifestyle that he had so passionately hated as a child, so that the framed story he had “left behind” has become a part of his modern bureaucratic existence. It is at this point in his reflections on the past that he gives himself the new name “fils du chaos”: “J’éprouve la douloureuse impression de n’avoir rien compris, je veux comprendre, mais j’ai peur de comprendre: je suis le fils du chaos.” To be the son of chaos is not merely to be the product of a civilization/world in transition that has either passed away or been shaken in its foundations. Nor is it to be a part of a new world order that lacks valid moral foundations. It is also to be literally the son of a father one has rejected as an oppressor and to be at the same time a figure of return, to remember an oppressed mother as a figure of women and to oppress women precisely because they seem to mirror a maternal image one cannot accept. Hamadi’s failure to name himself, having once been named by the Other, can only be expressed in the ambiguous and indeterminate terminology of chaos.
Moussa Konate’s Fils du chaos is a complex and risky form of self-representation. In the hands of an enthusiastic Afropessimist it could serve as evidence of a profoundly negative assessment of many aspects of African traditional life and of post-colonial adaptations. Careful study of the text’s narrative structure and rhetorical stances reveals a very different picture.