Brotherhood of Victims

By Melvin Maddocks

BOUND TO VIOLENCE by Yambo Ouologuem. Translated by Ralph Manheim. 182 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $5.95.

For animals and humans it is fate Either to be victim or the bait.

Nothing less savage--or less funny --than Anthony Hecht's couplet commentary on Aesop, the slave as moralist, should introduce this small masterpiece on man's ingenious cruelty to man. Yambo Ouologuem (pronounced Oo-o-lo-guem), born 30 years ago in the French Sudan, now the Republic of Mali, writes from the point of view of victim. But what a victim!

Too raging to be merely satirical, too exuberant to be tragic, his first novel (the first African novel to win one of France's top literary honors, the Prix Renaudot) begins as a sort of mock epic outlining in blood red the very real history of an imaginary African empire, Nakem.

Ouologuem manages his tableaux with a violent compression of energy, as if he were staging Marat/ Sade played by the Keystone Kops. Over the centuries, in the name of Allah, in the name of Christ, in the name of the god of self-interest, "that precious raw material, the niggertrash" of Nakem is conquered, exploited, then "freed" by new conquerors --Arab, French, even, alas, black.

No scene is complete without its obligatory corpses: various Old Massas die from fire, asp and poison (stomach "exploding like an infernal machine"). Sensuality, in turn, has an almost murderous force. Always there are the users and the used. Slave caravans seem to march across the top of every page like an endless frieze.

Suddenly the cast of thousands disappears. The brilliant--and clearly well-researched -- pageant of 7 1/2 centuries of "galloping inhumanity" (1202 to 1947) drastically slows its tempo. African Everyman becomes specific--one Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi of a Nakem that increasingly resembles Mali. Nakem's black rulers have already decided that only slaves will be exposed to corrupt French schooling. Raymond comes of a slave family. He studies hard and, as his reward, ends up in Paris receiving an elite--and not so elite--education. To Ouologuem, Kassoumi is the ultimate sophistication of slavery: the black man imprinted with a white soul. African history--and the novel--reaches a supremely ironic climax as Kassoumi, with his white wife, returns to become puppet leader of his emerging Third World nation. The slave disguised as master is a new breed of victim.

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" cried T.S. Eliot. At the conclusion of his bloody bloody chronicle Ouologuem does not presume to forgive either blacks or whites. But in the remarkable final chapter--having turned from historian to novelist--he turns from novelist to mystic. "Politics," he writes accusingly, "does not know the goal but forges a pretext of a goal." Negritude or colonialism, black power or white power--on these terms, history makes victims, if not slaves of us all. With a skepticism nearly as pure as faith, Ouologuem concludes: one ought to despair of men's ancient compulsion to rationalize tyranny and "believe one is right to despair. Love is nothing else." That is the way a victim can triumph, even as victim. It is the way Ouologuem at last turns his back on his past--without for a single moment turning his back on life.

Melvin Maddocks

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