Bound to Violence – Yambo Ouologuem
Read: Feb. 18th 2024
Published: 1968
Country: Mali
Length: 262 pages
Really liked it. Pretty weird and wild book. An anti-nationalist, anti-idealist, anti-materialist anti-epic was a description I found to be accurate. Not super knowledgeable about the whole plagiarism accusations/situations around it but gotta say.……this is probably one of the most original and unique books I’ve ever read I think.
Brief Summary:
An engrossing, tragic tale spanning the thirteenth to the twentieth century, Bound to Violence recounts the fate of the imaginary empire of Nakem and the dynasty of the Saïfs who reign there as devious masters.
While the novel was initially praised as an insider’s guide to and critique of African history, with its vivid descriptions of the brutality of local rulers and the slave trade, Yambo Ouologuem’s biting satire goes far beyond his native land. Through the society of Nakem, he paints a universally relevant portrait of sex, violence, and power in human relationships.
Quotes:
- “To the discourse of his predecessors, i.e., the generation of the founding fathers and of the Négritude movement, in which precolonial Africa was often celebrated as the pristine paradise that preceded the intrusion of the white colonizer, Ouologuem counterposed an Africa not unlike other parts of the globe, where sex, greed, and lust for power bred barbarism among humans and turned them into wolves toward one another. Ouologuem simply wanted to prove that Africans are human.”
- “Our eyes drink the brightness of the sun and, overcome, marvel at their tears.”
- “Amid the mounds of corpses left by the passage of Saif Moshe Gabbai of Honain (God’s curse upon him!) the noble ardor of Isaac al-Heit (God refresh his couch) awoke to new life.”
- “Thus at the death of the just and gentle Saif al-Heit (salvation upon him!), his blessed son Saif al-Hilal mounted the imperial throne, but—great the misfortune!—only for thirteen days. For Saif al-Haram proclaimed that the royal pair must consist of the queen mother and her son; all in one night he married his late father’s four wives—including Ramina, his own mother—and seized power, after throwing his younger brother, the legitimate heir to the throne, into a dungeon, bound hand and foot. There Saif al-Hilal was reduced to satisfying his needs in his clothes and, on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back, to lap up the food that was tossed in through the barely opened trapdoor. On the twelfth day of Ramadan the worms began to eat him alive and on the twentieth day of the same month he died…. A prayer for him.”
- “Fascinated by the bodies of the slaves or by their quivering sex organs (it happened time and time again), a young girl whose beauty outmarveled her finery, with the piping voice, the restless eye, the fluttering throat of a guinea hen, would turn to her pink-and-white mother, if not for consolation then at least for a sign of interest or an authoritative opinion on black sexuality. One of the charming replies was: “The Holy Father doesn’t approve of café au lait….””
- “The Empire was crumbling…. The Saif dynasty went from bad to worse with the grandsons of Saif Rabban Johanan, the eldest of whom, Jacob, so the griots relate, “spent his nights expounding all manner of abstruse theological problems to his cat.” The animal’s discretion was such that, to spare Jacob any excessive fear of the horrors that awaited him here below, it crept away at daybreak.”
- “Saif Tsevi and his two other brothers, Sussan and Yossef, who—guided by the insolent penis of Satan—were present that night, were found by peddlers the next day, all three naked, their throats ripped open by the she-dogs they had been copulating with, which lay strangled in their arms. After that the sole survivor of the male line of the Saifs was Jacob, who, as humble and wise as he was luminously poor, was counting the stars at the hour of his death eight years later. A desolation on his tomb.”
- “Later, addressing the people, Saif declared: “No one denies the constructive aspects of colonization: but even the greatest of its benefits, education for instance, brought grave evils in their train, so-called assimilation, contempt for native culture, etc. Moreover, one cannot help wondering whether these benefits are not due rather to a beginning of decolonization than to colonization itself. Universal suffrage, labor laws, self-determination, a more equitable distribution of the profits between the colonizers and the colonized, are the fruits not of colonialism but of the struggle against colonialism.””
- “…But History has mysteries compounded of silence, cowardice, and slow-moving tragedy, followed by appeasement and sudden about-faces.”
- “The woman carried the man as the sea carries a ship, with a light rocking motion, which rises and falls, barely suggesting the violence below.”
- Remember the fairy tale: Destiny had an appointment with God in the Land of Love. On the way, he saw some men fighting in an open field. He tried to reconcile them, but in vain. Exasperated, he said to them: ‘There is no justice without love, or injustice without necessity.’ And in the name of necessity, Destiny massacred the men.