Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem

Author:Yambo Ouologuem [Ouologuem, Yambo]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

Denounced by Kassoumi, repudiated by the notables, imprisoned by Vandame, Sankolo was banished by Saif, who, shrewd ideologist that he was, raised (to avenge himself for the scandal created by the murder of Awa) the prices on the Negro art exchange, cooking up, to the sauce of tradition and its "human values," a stew of pure symbolic religious art which he sent to Vandame, who passed it on to his correspondents who (may the Lord bless their innocence) peddled it to the curiosity seekers, tourists, foreigners, sociologists, and anthropology-minded colonials who flocked to Nakem. Qualities of lax, sterile, anachronistic redundancies; henceforth Negro art was baptized "aesthetic" and hawked in the imaginary universe of "vitalizing exchanges."

"Ever so often," Saif improvised, "the tools used to carve a mask were blessed seventy-seven times by a priest, who, all the while flagellating himself, gave blessings until the third day of the seventh year after the tree to be felled was chosen amid incantations revealing the genesis of the world."

"The plant," Shrobenius went on, "germinates, bears fruit, dies, and is reborn when the seed germinates. The moon rises to fullness, pales, wanes, and vanishes, only to reappear. Such is the destiny of man, such is the destiny of Negro art: like the seed and the moon, its symbolic seed is devoured by the earth and is reborn sanctified — imbued with the power requisite to its fulfillment— in the sublime heights of the tragic drama of the cosmic play of the stars." Negro art found its patent of nobility in the folklore of mercantile intellectualism, oye, oye, oye. . . .

But the audience of the All-Powerful is infinite; to the vast satisfaction of all concerned, He inspired Shrobenius to make known — a notion stamped with the genius of lunacy — the civilization and past of Nakem: "But these people are disciplined and civilized to the marrow! On all sides wide, tranquil avenues where we breathe the grandeur, the human genius of a people... It was only when white imperialism infiltrated the country with its colonial violence and materialism that this highly civilized people fell abruptly into a state of savagery, that accusations of cannibalism, of primitivism, were raised, when on the contrary — witness the splendor of its art — the true face of Africa is the grandiose empires of the Middle Ages, a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity, order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it is here that we must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization."

Thus drooling, Shrobenius derived a twofold benefit on his return home: on the one hand, he mystified the people of his own country who in their enthusiasm raised him to a lofty Sorbonnical chair, while on the other hand he exploited the sentimentality of the coons, only too pleased to hear from the mouth of a white man that Africa was "the womb of the world and the cradle of civilization."

In consequence the niggertrash donated masks and art treasures by the ton to the acolytes of "Shrobeniusology." O Lord, a tear for the childlike good nature of the niggertrash! Have pity, O Lord! .

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