Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Author(s): Adele King
Review by: Adele King
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Winter, 1998), p. 185
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40153687
Accessed: 06-05-2016 23:25 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to World Literature Today

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Fri, 06 May 2016 23:25:47 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 AFRICA & THE WEST INDIES: GENERAL AREA 185
the good and the bad of our lives as daughters and moth-
ers."
Of interest too is the use and merging of religious
thoughts. Sanjoaquin is the patron saint of the communi-
ty, and the Festival of San Joaquin "is a prayerful week of
solemn processions, church services, candles and in-
cense." Additionally, the same residents who observe the
festival also believe in life after death in a world of spirits,
the H'men who knows the prayers and medicines that
would keep them safe, and an evangelical church which
accepts sinners "into the fold." Mama Sofia embraces it all
in her one statement "It's the same God," in her avid be-
lief in prayer, and in her fidelity to the idea that "life is
large."
As with Edgell's other works on Belize, The Festival of
Sanjoaquin considers the political realities of the time - in
the land-grabbing deals executed to sell to foreign in-
vestors for sizable profits, and in the personal dramas of
the residents of Sanjoaquin (the sexual corruption of Sal-
vador as well as the maiming of Luz's father during the
festival) . The multiethnic society that is Belize is unobtru-
sively accounted for in the presence of the Creole attor-
ney, the Mexican fortune hunter, and the Indian descen-
dants. In short, the work has enough intrigue, twists, and
depth to qualify it as a fine achievement.
Adele S. Newson
rlonda International University
Congo
Henri Lopes. Le Lys et le Flamboyant. Paris. Seuil. 1997. 431
pages. 130 F. ISBN 2-02-020096-1.
Le Lys et le Flamboyant is presented as the work of Vic-
tor-Augagneur Houang, of mixed African, Euro-
pean, and Chinese parentage; it purports to be a first-per-
son account of the life of a beautiful and talented singer
whom Victor knew as a child and with whom he later had
a brief love affair in Paris. This woman, whose stage name
is Kolele, became an almost mythic symbol of the African
artist who played a part in revolutionary movements, espe-
cially encouraging the participation of African women in
building a new society. Victor, however, as the reader
learns in the final pages, cannot publish the book we have
just read. It was rejected by the Editions du Seuil, which
accepted another version of the story, written by "Henri
Lopes" twenty years ago, a version much improved, ac-
cording to Victor, by the labors of its American translator.
Victor refers frequently to how his account differs from
that of "Lopes," a childhood friend of Victor's, who ap-
pears in the story, usually as a figure of some ridicule,
even when he is part of the government of Congo-Brazza-
ville. (The real Henri Lopes was for a time prime minister
of Congo-Brazzaville and is now associate director of
UNESCO.)
The major difference between Victor's account and
that attributed to "Lopes" is in the importance Victor
places on the fact that Kolele was a mulattress. Kolele is
not so much a symbol of Africa as a symbol of all those of
mixed parentage, or simply of mixed allegiances, who do
not belong to any one country, who have no fixed home,
no fixed address, whose fidelity is to the human race. Vic-
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Fri, 06 May 2016 23:25:47 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
tor is rejected by the parents of white children with whom
he wants to play and is told by his mother not to play with
African children. Where does he fit? As an adult he shows
more sympathy for African victims of racial injustice than
for any other group, but he is cynical toward all political
groups. He describes the pretensions and hypocrisy of
modern African rulers, and the lack of liberty in Maoist
China, as well as the evils of the colonial and neocolonial
era.
The situation of the mulatto has been a recurring
theme in Lopes's work. Le chercheur d'Afriques (1990) tells
of a young man who goes to France to find his father, who
had abandoned his African family. (Lopes has often re-
ferred to his own family, in which both grandmothers
were African and not married to his European grandfa-
thers.) Another recurring theme is the need to "disap-
pear" in order to remake one's life in a new environment.
Kolele frequently abandons family and friends, as did the
heroine of Sur Vautre rive (1992; see WLT68:1, p. 187).
Victor usually relies on his own memories, but recog-
nizes their limitations; as he is a filmmaker, he is happiest
with photographs as a means of recalling the past. His rec-
ollections of a revolt in the Central African Republic,
when he was a schoolboy, are, he realizes, colored by the
reactions of the adults of mixed race with whom he lived.
"Lopes's" version of the revolt, however, is said to be a
mere copy of events of the 1848 revolution in Paris. How
does one escape from literature? How does one find any
truth?
Although the story is often fascinating, the novel is
overlong, with too many events, an excess of detail, too
many references to political movements. After Kolele has
fought with Lumumba, supported the newly independent
government in Guinea, sung in Algeria in the presence of
Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Myriam Makeba,
and Angela Davis, and refused to sing for Bokassa, the
reader feels overwhelmed.
Adele King
Ball State University
General Area
Ronald Gerard Giguere. Ecrivains noirs d'Afrique et des An-
tilles. New York. Peter Lang. 1997. xv + 304 pages, ill.
$36.95. ISBN 0-8204-0990-1.
Ronald Gerard Giguere 's anthology is "an initiation
to the culture and literature of the Black world." As
an initiation to (upper-) intermediate college French, the
book is a gentle rite of passage to twentieth-century black
African and Caribbean writing, which does not require of
its adherents the incision of ankles and wrists as with the
young Wole Soyinka in Ake. The Nigerian recipient of the
1986 Nobel Prize in Literature here brushes shoulders
with Senghor, the eminent founder of the 1930s Paris-
based Negritude movement and former President of
Senegal. That Senghor was a member of the Academie
Franchise suites Giguere 's agenda to present respectable
giants who contributed to French and English literature
yet helped decenter English and French by relocating
them within francophonie or the "new" or "postcolonial" lit-
eratures in English.