Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire by Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel

Author:Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel [Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: :, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Women's Studies, Black Studies (Global), Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9780252051791
Google: NiTADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-12-30T06:00:00+00:00

Textual Hybridity in Narratives of Belonging

My Country, Africa is a hybrid text in several ways. Generically speaking, it encompasses autobiography, biography, and oral history. Blouin’s autobiographical “I” that narrates much of the story gives way to MacKellar’s intervention as biographer, translator, and transcriber in the epilogue. This shift exposes the fiction of a unified identity of author and subject that underlies traditional autobiographies.20 It also highlights the contest between representation and self-representation that is at the heart of both the book’s production and Blouin’s anticolonial activism. As Boyce Davies asks, “What are the implications of editorial intervention and ordering processes in the textual production of a life story?”21 Accounting for the implications of the unseen biographer/transcriber/translator’s hand illuminates the central idea of autobiography as the construction of the subject. Blouin’s story of anticolonial resistance in My Country, Africa is constructed (this does not mean fabricated) through her collaboration with MacKellar. But beyond that, if, as Philippe Lejeune argues, “the autobiographical form is undoubtedly not the instrument of expression of a subject that preexists it, nor even a ‘role,’ but rather that which determines the very existence of ‘subjects,’”22 then My Country, Africa is not just the construction of Blouin’s life story but also of Blouin herself as the subject of this story.

Because the genre of fiction allows the author to highlight with more transparency the different voices and texts present in collaborative life writing, the intertextuality between My Country, Africa and Le lys et le flamboyant is crucial for examining this process of constructing the subject. Henri Lopes is himself a political protagonist who stands at the point of overlap between public politics and literary production. Born in Leopoldville in 1937, Lopes, like Blouin, moved between Oubangui-Chari and the French and Belgian Congos throughout much of his early life. From the late 1960s onward, he occupied several ministerial positions in the Republic of Congo, including a brief tenure as prime minister. Lopes served as the country’s ambassador to France from 1998 to 2016. As a writer, his novels have largely focused on métis communities in Central Africa. He received the Grand prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire in 1972, joining the ranks of such distinguished African writers as Léopold Senghor, Aoua Kéita, and Ahmadou Kourouma. He was also awarded the Grand prix de la francophonie in 1993.

Henri Lopes frames his novel Le lys et le flamboyant as a corrective to the Blouin/MacKellar production.23 Through the paratext, Lopes crafts an alternative history of the production of My Country, Africa that moves away from the singular “I” that stakes its claim in Blouin’s narrative and instead takes a polyvocal approach to life writing. The blurb on the back cover, rather than provide biographical information on the author Lopes, introduces three fictional characters. Simone Fragonard, alias Kolélé, is the protagonist whom the reader cannot help but identify as Blouin, given the remarkable similarities in their biographies. Victor-Augagneur Houang is the narrator, who speaks in the first person. “Un certain Henri Lopes” is the obscure

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