203 – Écriture, différence et recalibrage

To browse the vast and varied panorama of works devoted to postcolonial literature is to face the invocations of a largely amorphous project, indefinable, loaded with ambiguity, resistant to consonance, calibration, resolution and, as such, sub-stretched by irrevocable hindrances. The narrative discourse that comes from it – labyrinthine, unstable – can only engender many variants of an insidious defeat. But «the postcolonial experience», so envisaged, inextricably rushes into a state of constant mutation, always embryonic, always adrift, deprived of identity markers, and therefore painfully subjected to the contortions of the unspeakable. Whatever the hermeneutic justifications, they neither trace nor represent a single dimension of a deeply complex and plurivalent enterprise. Indeed, the postcolonial text- rooted in wandering, in precariousness, in the formless, and certainly less complacent than subversive, rejects a priori all attempts at univocal, minimalist decoding, however numerous they may be. In order to remedy these acts of degradation, a previously obstructed path should be opened. What was unspeakable must be questioned and transgressed in order to open a new space where the long silence of the past is supplanted by exhumed voices, previously absent and unknown, too long anchored in submission. Little is it necessary that this word now found, freely stated wins the victory, realizes a true redeeming conquest. For Joseph Zobel, Ferdinand Oyono and Sembène Ousmane, the struggle for metaphysical and linguistic liberation is eloquently metaphorized and filled with regenerative signifiers, although marred by the past. From the vestiges of the immobility of yesteryear emerges a counter-discourse: a new and irrevocable poetics of the post-colonial triumph.