One might ask how these subtle analyses on writing, the perception of history, or on the condition of blacks and the related themes that you develop in “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—along with that of sexuality, themes that would become recurrent in your work over time — how all of that was relegated to the background behind your conflict with Wright. James Campbell is correct in affirming that “Everybody’s Protest Novel” is “a piece of remarkable literature” that confirms the maturity of your style.62
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The protest in question, the one you rally against, is in some ways reminiscent of the literary production from black, French-speaking Africa in the colonial and post-colonial periods. Several of these books — not necessarily written by Africans, but also by western writers discovering the “tropics”—fall back on some of the same sentimentality that can be found in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
At the very least they resemble each other in their desire to speak out against colonial atrocities or the treatment of blacks under colonial rule. In this case it is not the writer’s implication “in the tropics” that is at stake, but rather his vision of his own society. The emotion the author infuses into his work more or less ruins any chance of achieving the objectivity and distance necessary for real intellectual work.
However there still exists this other danger, specific to the black writer: he is expected to put the “black issue” at the center of his work, expected to crowd his pages with characters of color, to adopt a confrontational tone, with the white man as his sole target. These unspoken watchwords are used to prompt African authors — especially the acolytes of negritude — to praise black civilization through frenzied incantations, or to rebel at the eleventh hour against the colonizers, or imperialism in general. And so this literature appears to be a vast campaign against the colonial system, counterbalanced by praise of African roots. But this criticism of the colonial system always results in predictable fiction: a backdrop of cities divided between whites and natives, and a message of bitter condemnation of Christianity and western civilization. Europeans, only, are responsible for Africa’s sorrows.
Guinean novelist Camara Laye, for example, gets caught in the crosshairs of the self-righteous who saw his portrait of a “different Africa,” a happier, more intimate, more personal Africa, such as the one that emerges in his masterpiece, African Child,63 as a mark of carelessness and irresponsibility at a time when the known enemy was the colonial system. Countless authors would go down the anti-colonial path, as illustrated in the first works of Cameroonian Eza Boto, better known by the name Mongo Beti.64 This man, like you, Jimmy, lived for a long time in France. He was known for his rebel spirit, his intellectual courage, and his willfulness. He believed that a writer should stand up, place blame where it is due and roar in the face of current events, and should not adopt “the sterile attitude of a spectator,” to borrow from Aimé Césaire.65 Considering it inconceivable to write during the colonial period about a young, African man, happy amongst his loved ones, he openly attacks his colleague Camara Laye with the following words: “Laye stubbornly closes his eyes to the most critical realities in his novel African Child. Did this Guinean not see anything other than a peaceful, beautiful, maternal Africa? Is it possible that Laye was not witness a single time to any atrocity of the French colonial administration?”66
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I hold in high esteem the independence of the writer, Jimmy, and am weary of “herd-mentality literature.” A writer should always share his own vision of the human condition, even if it runs counter to commonly held, moralizing beliefs.
A variety of African literature known as “child soldier” literature — or as “Rwandan genocide” literature, when it was created more in protest than in an effort to truly understand the tragedies — convinced me definitively that we were not yet free of the vortex of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and that the sentimentality and moralizing current that runs through some of these works does harm to African literature. If we are not careful, an African author will be able to do nothing but await the next disaster on his continent before starting a book in which he will spend more time denouncing than writing.
People will loudly remind me of our duty to be politically engaged, to tell the tale of Africa’s woes, to publicly accuse those who drag the continent downward. But what is the value of political engagement if it leads to the destruction of the individual? Many hide behind this mask in order to teach us lessons, to impose upon us a vision of the world where there would be the true children of Africa on one side, and, on the other, the ingrates — meaning the latter are considered Europe’s lackeys. By nature I distrust those who brandish banners; they are the same people who clamor for “authenticity,” the very thing that submerged the African continent in tragedy.
In the introduction to her anthology of works from black Africa, the academic Lilyan Kesteloot pointed out “it is in fact preferable to confine oneself to the little world of me than to make a great deal about negro unanimity without believing in it. . The issue of political engagement is decided in the conscience of each individual, and is not an aesthetic criteria. .”67
Protest, if we broaden its meaning to include political engagement, should transform the outcry, the emotion and the exacerbation, into a timeless, creative act. In this very way, Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land will never age a single day. Conversely, I have only to open certain works from the negritude era to notice that they have not withstood the test of time. And if their wrinkles are deep, it is because their authors forgot that protest for protest’s sake will never be a creative act, but only a short-lived bleating. Protest — oh, pardon me, political engagement — must simultaneously gather strength from personal experience and communal destiny. Art cannot escape from being bound by violence. And this is the bond, Jimmy, that extends from the beginnings of your work to the end, as the Cameroonian Simon Njami would illustrate in a biography he would dedicate to you.68
5. black, bastard, gay and a writer
You brushed off labels like “Negro,” “ghetto boy,” “bastard,” and, more than anything, “faggot.”
If James Campbell, in his biography of you, fights against the latter label in particular — an easy insult for most of your adversaries — it is because he is aware that your homosexuality for you is the expression of your freedom, a way of being yourself, and not the expression of some deviation or, in his terms, of some “genetic ambivalence,” definitions that distort the understanding of any individual.69
In your day, the contradiction was obvious: on the one hand, your country held up individual freedom to the level of a democratic ideal, but, on the other, sanctioned racial segregation. Consequently, as Dwight A. McBride attests, the ideological confrontation between capitalist and communist factions would alter the discourse on sex, race and the African-American community.70 You would have a voice in this discourse. .
In fact, after welcoming your article “Everybody’s Protest Novel” into its first edition, the journal Zero published another of your articles in the following issue, entitled “Preservation of Innocence.”71 It is a brief text with philosophical leanings that revolves around the notions of normality and abnormality in human nature. The saga of the homosexual, according to your analysis, is that he must always confront the most profound grief: that he is abnormal because he has opted to turn himself away from his original function, that of a procreator, for a relationship bound to sterility. Since homosexuality is as old as the human race, the most suitable attitude would be to consider it as a material component of normality. Sex, with its myths, confronts us with the complexity of our behaviors and our beliefs. You remind us that men and women have imperfection in common, and are indivisible. Because of this, tampering with the nature of one has an impact on the nature of the other. Their absolute separation — man having to comfort himself in his masculinity, and woman assuring her own function as a woman — would destroy each of their souls. Although it is often repeated that women are more gentle, legends insinuate that they may be “mythically and even historically, treacherous.”72 Novels, poetry, theater, and fables have sometimes entertained this paradox, which only personal experience is capable of first clarifying, then blocking you in your tracks. “This is a paradox which experience alone is able to illuminate and this experience is not communicable in any language that we know. The recognition of this complexity is the signal of maturity; it marks the death of the child and the birth of the man.”73