Shaming Colonial Africa

An examination of the ways in which shame was used during the colonial period both to encourage submission to the colonial project and to resist that oppression. The primary texts to consider are Le vieux nègre et la médaille by Ferdinand Oyono for its depiction of shame’s utility in maintaining social hierarchies and how, ironically, a shameful narrative can contest that power, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu by Ousmane Sembène, for its more strident shaming and addition of economic and legal aspects of shame, and Le pauvre Christ de Bomba by Mongo Beti and L’Aventure ambiguë by Cheikh Hamidou Kane for their inclusion of the role religious shame plays in colonial oppression.

Ni bonne ni mauvaise : Ferdinand Oyono en traduction allemande

This paper examines the German translation of two novels by the Cameroonian author Ferdinand Oyono and goes against the normative approach adopted by so many critics of translations of African literary texts. It argues that if the German translation of Ferdinand Oyono is bad in the Bermanian conception, it is mainly because it is a good translation of an original text which means to be read as translation. Hence it is neither good, nor bad.

Un regard oblique : « L’œil du sorcier » dans Une vie de boy de Ferdinand Oyono

Ce texte remet en question la lecture réaliste qui a généralement été faite d’Une vie de boy (1957), premier roman de la trilogie de Ferdinand Oyono. Partant d’une étude du regard, il vise à montrer que celui-ci détermine autant un contenu qu’il met l’accent sur une forme, une esthétique littéraire. En effet, dans le récit, si le regard renvoie à un instrument de pouvoir (celui qui oppose les colons et les colonisés) et constitue un enjeu de subversion, il se traduit aussi par une écriture allusive, alliant la distance, l’ironie et l’insolite. Par son caractère indiciel, voire figural, cette « écriture du regard » dont témoigne le journal intime de Toundi en fait une sorte de « récit-forme », où l’espace du texte et le hors-texte (le social) se convoquent mutuellement.

Ferdinand Oyono in Vietnamese: Translation after Socialism and Colonialism

Of the fourteen translations of Ferdinand Oyono's une vie de boy published to date, the Vietnamese translation, Đới Làm bồi, dates last, despite Vietnam and Cameroon's shared past under French colonialism. Nguyễn Như đat, the novel's Vietnamese translator, had anticipated that his version, published in 1997, would not find much of a market. The translator's pessimism was warranted, since the Vietnam of the late 1990s drastically differed from the two Vietnams of 1956, when Oyono's novel was originally published. Partitioned after the 1954 Geneva Accords and fighting against each other in the Second Indochina War, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south were unified at the war's end, in 1975, under a socialist government. But since 1986 Vietnam has been engaged in the capitalist world market, albeit under the banner of socialism. Given this context of market socialism, the Vietnamese translation of Oyono's anticolonial novel seems to have lagged temporally: it was published at a time when literary translations in Vietnam began trending away from anticolonialism and toward, for example, Raymond Carver's minimalism, Haruki Murakami's surreal handling of alienation, and, more recently, Vladimir Nabokov's perversely defamiliarizing style.