Kaveena

Boubacar Boris Diop, Sara C. Hanaburgh, Bhakti Shringarpure

Description

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This dark and suspenseful novel tells the story of a fictitious West African country caught in the grip of civil war. The dispassionate and deadpan narrator, Asante Kroma, is a former head of Secret Services and finds himself living with the corpse of the dictator, a man who once ruled his nation with an iron fist. Through a series of flashbacks and letters penned by the dictator, N'Zo Nikiema, readers discover the role of the French shadow leader, Pierre Castaneda, whose ongoing ambition to exploit the natural resources of the country knows no limits. As these powerful men use others as pawns in a violent real-life chess match, it is the murder of six-year-old Kaveena and her mother's quest for vengeance that brings about a surprise reckoning.

Sujets

• African Studies
• Political
• Politics
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 21
• EAN13: 9780253020567
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

KAVEENA
Global African Voices
DOMINIC THOMAS, EDITOR
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KAVEENA
BOUBACAR BORIS DIOP
Translated by
Bhakti Shringarpure Sara C. Hanaburgh
Foreword by Ayo A. Coly
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Original publication in French
2006 Editions Philippe Rey
English translation
2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Diop, Boubacar Boris, 1946- | Shringarpure, Bhakti, translator. | Hanaburgh, Sara, translator.
Title: Kaveena / Boubacar Boris Diop ; translated by Bhakti Shringarpure and Sara C. Hanaburgh ; foreword by Ayo A. Coly.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Series: Global African voices
Identifiers: LCCN 2015033962| ISBN 9780253020437 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253020482 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253020567 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Africa, West-Fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ 3989.2.D553 K3813 2016 | DDC 843/.914-dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033962
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
To Koulsy Lamko, the Obstinate Hopeful
For Adja B and Bintou Ndiaye
CONTENTS
FOREWORD / Ayo A. Coly
KAVEENA
FOREWORD
The Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti (1932-2001), one of the foremost African writers of the twentieth century and a virulent, often caustically opinionated, critic of African literatures, wrote the preface to Boubacar Boris Diop s first novel. Beti lauded Le temps de Tamango (1981) for its audacious aesthetic experimentations and political savvy about postindependence governance in Africa. The acclaimed novel set the tone for Diop s rich plays, short stories, and dynamic corpus; he is a prolific author whose output includes novels, screenplays, and collections of essays on writing and the role of literature, neoliberalism and globalization. His sought-out opinion pieces on current events have secured his standing as a noted public intellectual and one of the most incisive commentators on African affairs and global geopolitics. In his works of both fiction and nonfiction, Diop exerts a dexterous intellectual vigilance that has roots in a sociocultural and political background that spans colonial and postindependence Senegal.
Boubacar Boris Diop was born in 1946 in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, a country that gained its independence from France fourteen years after Diop s birth. Diop first taught literature and philosophy, and later contributed in significant ways to the development of an independent press in Senegal through his activities as a journalist. He launched his literary career with Le temps de Tamango and went on to publish several award-winning novels, including the highly acclaimed Murambi: Le livre des ossements (2000; Murambi, The Book of Bones , IUP 2006), about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and Doomi Golo (2003), a novel written in his native Wolof as a political act. Diop s writing is unflinchingly political in its relentless critique of African totalitarian regimes, its meticulous unraveling of official history, and its minute attention to the politics of cultural and collective memory. His novels may intimidate the more pedestrian reader because of their intricate narrative composition characterized by an incessant deferment of meaning and a stubborn inconclusiveness and refusal of narrative closure. Indeed, Diop tasks readers with seeking out meaning for themselves. Compelling them to assume responsibility in this way, never letting them off the hook, and holding them accountable for their elucidation of the problematic posed by the novel are functions of Diop s appropriation of the oral tradition of storytelling. In that tradition, the storyteller and audience collaborate in the process of producing meaning.
It is therefore fitting that Diop selected the genre of the detective novel as the narrative framework for Kaveena (2006), a political fable which lays the postcolonial situation in the form of an intricate and aberrant puzzle for the reader to figure out. The novel clearly exposes the travesty of political independence and denounces postcolonial African dictatorial regimes. The candid admission, in the very first sentence of the novel, that the narrator has missed out on crucial information, appropriates the oral storytelling technique of seeking complicity with the audience. In fact, the narrator is relying on letters left behind by a deceased African president. And, simultaneously with the reader, the narrator is trying to make sense of the letters. The narrator often engages in suppositions and speculations as he combs his way through the archival maze of documents. Diop s choice to incorporate at full length and reproduce in italics some of the letters for the eyes of his readers is clearly an invitation to the latter to formulate their own independent interpretations and possibly reach different conclusions than the more tentative narrator. The device of the non-omniscient narrator thus mobilizes competent readers of the novel and entrusts them to fill in the narrative gaps and sort out the complex lay of the postcolonial situation. Furthermore, the implication of the narrator in the political matters he is recounting renders him unreliable. Diop deliberately leaves readers on their own, inciting them to seek a self-transformative reading of the novel. This plotted reading experience clearly underpins a pedagogy of critical thinking conducive to the creation of an aware reader-citizen of the postcolonial nation.
Kaveena is set in an unnamed African nation. By all indications, this nation is a former French colony. That it could be any former French colony in Africa speaks to the particular form of French neocolonialism known as Fran afrique , which has been a constant target of Diop s novels, essays, and journalistic writings. Fran afrique is an economic and political structure that France engineered in 1960, in the immediate aftermath of the independence of France s former African colonies. This setup was the brainchild of Jacques Foccart, an established businessman and influential advisor to French presidents Charles de Gaulle, George Pompidou, and Jacques Chirac. Foccart, whose identity is barely disguised in Kaveena , was the architect of gangster-style French policies in Africa between 1960 and 1995 that resulted in the overthrow of recalcitrant presidents and the rescue of embattled presidents, as well as numerous rigged elections aimed at installing friendly dictators. This hands-on approach allowed France to continue funneling resources out of its former colonies.
Discussions of France s neocolonial interventionism in Africa are still very much alive today under the presidency of Fran ois Hollande. In 2013, France launched military interventions in Mali to liberate the country from Al Qaeda-linked Islamists. France also intervened in the Central African Republic to stop sectarian conflict. Two years earlier, in 2011, France helped oust Ivory Coast s Laurent Gbagbo when he refused to surrender the presidency to his democratically elected rival. France still maintains important military bases in Senegal, Gabon, and Djibouti, and in January 2014 announced plans to increase its military presence in order to more effectively fight terrorism. Perhaps the most damning evidence of neocolonial practices exposed by Kaveena concerns the fact that former French colonies in Africa have yet to achieve monetary sovereignty. The Franc CFA currency used by Francophone African countries is no more than a derivative currency controlled by the French treasury. Kaveena is thus a timely and crucial novel exploring the unfolding neocolonial present in Africa in the broader context of globalization and shifting geopolitical alignments.
Ayo A. Coly, Dartmouth College
KAVEENA
I DON T KNOW WHAT HIS LAST WORDS WERE .
He twitched his lips when he saw me come in. T