Of Monkeys and Covers

Rather than bore you with some highbrow academic dissertation about the interrelationship between Victor, Lola and the monkey Alexis, I'll instead offer some callow and half-formed thoughts on what White Spirit's cover promised.

When the book came in the mail and I examined its cover, I expected a rather goofy novel involving a monkey, perhaps with a serious undercurrent (implied by the little hands clasped against the cute monkey's mouth).  I had conjured up a strange notion that this book would invovle monkeys and would be, in some sense, hilarious -- even in a minor way.  Of course, when I read the book, these notions were quickly dispelled.  And it soon became swiftly apparent that I had lived a reading life where I had assumed monkeys were either comic foils or, at worst, cartoonish villains like that diabolical Nazi monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The monkey in question (Alexis) isn't a completely cute monkey, but he is not entirely serious. And he is not without interest.  I am taken in particular by this passage from Page 46: "The monkey displayed utter boredom interrupted by monstrous scratching.  It scratched itself lethargically, for no particular reason, with a long bony index finger." 

I took an anthropology class many years ago and I had, of course, observed monkeys scratching. But it had never occurred to me that the scratching was so systematic -- much less conducted out of a strange ennui.  Call this a moment of human arrogance on my part.

It is helpful to note that the monkey is at least partially symbolic here.  And I am grateful to both Paule Constant and the more than able translator Betsy Wing for allowing me to readjust my perception of monkeys.  This is one picayune reason why you should check out this book.

Perhaps the other LBC members might wish to chime in with their thoughts on the monkey -- hopefully, without reference to that Peter Gabriel song.

Comments

[Megan]

What if we refer to the Beastie Boys instead? I believe they have a lovely ballad called 'Brass Monkey'....

[Betsy Wing]

I sent these two questions to Paule Constant and I have just received her reply. I’ll do a very quick translation—no polish, or searching for the perfect word!
1. How conscious an influence was *Heart of Darkness*?

Paule replies:
To my great regret I have never been able to get into any of Conrad’s books. I’ve frequently been told that I reminded readers of him but I don’t know to what extent. However, I believe that landscapes dictate their own laws to literature. That’s how all novels, American, Japanese or African are written.

2. This one is harder to word but one that I'd like to hear more
about. I'm wondering about the *cultural* translation of the book's
theme of skin lightening. It's my sense that, in the current cultural
climate, talking about differences in skin tone is pretty taboo,
underground--not absent, but cautious. Certainly, I would suspect that
white American writers would face some pretty loud objections from all
corners if they wrote a novel about blacks wanting to lighten their
skin. It's easy to find literature in the states by African Americans
from the twenties (Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer) about
the significance of various skin tones, but since "black is beautiful"
in the seventies, the conversation about skin tones seems to have gone
underground. How is the topic of skin color and race treated in France
and postcolonial French Africa?

Paule replies:
I spent almost all my life in Africa which is like a motherland to me. My entire formation is African. It’s natural that like any writer I return to the sources of myself. If I have no tabous in respect to Africa it’s because in my first novel, OUREGANO, published in 1980, I forcefully denounced colonialism. Though, taking into account sociologists and philosophers, I was not the first to do so, I was certainly one of the first novelists who did. Consequently, when WHITE SPIRIT came out nobody thought to criticize me. All literature transgresses (otherwise it is called journalism), but the transgression in WHITE SPIRIT isn’t the fact that a Black woman (actually mulatto) wants to lighten her skin, always a widespread practice (see, for example, the dermatologists’ repeated cautions about the dangers of the products used). The WHITE SPIRIT in this book is a symbolic product; it represents a false Holy Spirit given to humanity to make up for its hardships. As in most of my novels the real transgression takes place on a religious plane. What I find most troubling in the novel is the erasure of the borders between human and animal. The White Spirit, which destroys the young woman’s skin and kills an entire village, symbolizes western evil imposed on a natural world. If taken in that way my novel is very “politically correct.”
But your question concerns censoring and self-censoring. As you know we, particularly in France, have had to fight religious censorship. In libraries there was always a “hell” composed of forbidden books, in which you’d find great writers such as Francois Mauriac and Julien Green. Writers have also had to fight erotic censorship (Proust, Julien Green). One begins to realize that in every period the writer has been accused of immorality by society, which means that he or she has not gone along with the morality of that period. Is political correctness, perhaps, the new morality of the contemporary world which believes its freedom is demonstrated in relation to religious or sexual issues? Here too, of course, one feels the pressure to be politically correct, but I believe it necessary to refuse to do this and not write communal literature. The novelist’s freedom has to be the ability to talk about everything, even about things he doesn’t know. I even believe that one becomes a writer when one dares talk about things one doesn’t know on the basis of what one is not. WHITE SPIRIT marks an important stage for me; it represents the moment in which I am no longer recounting the Africa I experienced (as I did in OUREGANO and BALTA), but begin to invent it. And this, of course, is where (this is the novelist’s secret)—