A Chain of Voices: a “masters and slaves” Narrative
p. 155-176
Résumé
Because no less than thirty different narrators take turns to tell us the story of a slave revolt, A Chain of Voices can be read as Brink’s attempts at revisiting the classical “slave narrative”, turning it into a polyphonic “masters and slaves” narrative in which everyone is given a say.
This article examines how this polyphonic, and even multifocal, mode of narration enables Brink to write back to both classical slave narratives and to their twentieth-century counterparts, the neo-slave narratives. What it suggests is that although A Chain of Voices bears many resemblances to neo-slave narratives in terms of form, especially because of its recourse to polyphony, it is also extremely close to traditional slave narratives in terms of function, since by implicitly drawing parallels between slavery and apartheid, it seeks to convince readers of the necessity to fight such evils, and therefore also establish intertextual connections with contemporary accounts of life under apartheid.
Texte intégral
1André Brink has often explained how crucial his discovery of the House of Slaves at Gorée, near Dakar, was in terms of his perception of his own “Africanness”—a founding experience echoed in his novel An Act of Terror, in which the main protagonist, the aptly named Thomas Landman, makes the same kind of discovery:
And Gorée. Gorée, the island of tears. [...] The place where, with such a sense of physical shock, I rediscover my own past in the history of my most distant known ancestral mother, Catharijn. [...] In the heavy dust of the place, among these silent peeling stone walls—the casual rustling of water at the fountain, the bleating of a goat, the murmur of melodic voices from the girls gathered in the shade to wash their smooth dark legs (my own Catharijn might have been one of such an arch group: if she had been free and not a slave)—I acknowledge irrevocably, fatally, that I belong to Africa1.
2It may certainly seem paradoxical for a white writer to see in Gorée’s House of Slaves such a founding place for himself and for his own people. Yet, that slavery was a defining experience not only for black and coloured South Africans, but for the whole South African nation, cannot be denied. Like most of its counterparts all over the world, colonial South African society came into being mostly thanks to—or because of—the exploitation of native and/or imported slaves by their white masters.
3As a dissident twentieth-century Afrikaner writer, André Brink could not but want to explore slavery’s shaping influence on contemporary South Africa. He did it in two novels which were published respectively in 1976 and in 1982, An Instant in the Wind and A Chain of Voices. While the former was based on an Australian story—which also inspired Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves2— and focused on two characters, a white woman and a black slave, lost in the wilderness, the latter adopts a much broader scope and clearly proclaims itself as an attempt at understanding how central slavery was to nineteenth-century South Africa. One only has to quote Ma-Rose’s opening sentence, immediately after the “Act of Accusation”—a historical document which merely serves an introductory function in the novel, grounding it in historical reality—and functions as the novel’s actual incipit: “To know is not enough. One must try to understand too”3.
4 The specificity of Brink’s novel lies in its form—more than thirty different narrative voices coalesce to tell the story of an actual slave uprising which took place in the Bokkeveld in 1825 after a group of slaves led by a man called Galant, saw their hopes of being freed over New Year shattered by their masters and decided to murder them in retaliation. My point in this article will be to examine how Brink’s narrative technique helps him shape a new kind of neo-slave narrative. I will particularly try and establish to what extent it may be termed a South African neo-slave narrative—or rather, a South African slave narrative, since neither the Cape region nor South Africa as a whole, can provide any model that could be written back to:
In contrast to the United States and the Caribbean, there were no written slave testimonies by ex-slaves at the Cape. Such narratives were usually encouraged by missionaries and abolitionists; neither paid attention to Cape slaves4.
5This is why I will be relying mostly on American slave narratives and neo-slave narratives to analyse Brink’s achivement in A Chain of Voices.
6Literally speaking, A Chain of Voices is a slave narrative—a narrative about slaves and slavery. But if we are to rely on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s now famous definition5, Brink’s novel cannot in any way be incorporated into the body of texts that serve as a canon for the genre, since it was not written at a time when slavery existed, nor is it a “first-person contemporary account of the reality of slavery as it was experienced”6.
7Strictly speaking, it is a first-person account, though, but what makes it completely different from traditional slave narratives is, first, the shifting reference of the first-person pronoun—although the reader is never at a loss regarding its reference since if one excepts the opening and closing historical documents, each chapter bears the name of its narrator as a title—and second, and perhaps more importantly, the fact that it was written a long time after slavery was abolished in South Africa.
8These two features immediately conjure up another type of narrative, the now familiar “neo-slave narratives” defined by Ashraf Rushdy as “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative”.7 Because A Chain of Voices writes back to traditional slave narratives, adopting some of the conventions of the genre, it can indeed be defined as a neo-slave narrative. It is therefore not surprising that in his review of the novel Julian Moynaham noted striking parallels between A Chain of Voices and one the most famous neo-slave narratives, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, “a work to which it is substantially superior in insight and artistry”. According to Moynahan, “whereas Styron’s Turner seems to be used as an outlet for the author’s neo-romantic rhetoric and white liberal opinion, Brink’s characters, though they do not speak in the precise dialect of the time, seem to express feelings authentic to their condition”.8
9Although Brink himself explained that the use of first-person narrators was literally imposed on him by the historical documents which originally inspired the novel9, the polyphony thus achieved also appears as a way of restoring the voices of the losers of history, those who did not have any opportunity to speak in official history. A Chain of Voices therefore resorts to a strategy not uncommon in other neo-slave narratives, for instance in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River or in Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory and Feeding the Ghosts. These rewritings of slave narratives heavily rely on polyphony as a strategy of reinscription of the initial genre, as Benedicte Ledent showed in an article aptly entitled ‘Slavery Revisited through Vocal Kaleidoscopes’:
By giving a voice to the different parties involved in slavery— not only the slaves and their descendants, but also their masters or traders—they obviously subvert the grand, master narrative of History. But they do so not through a mere reversal of the centre and the margin, but by individualizing the speakers and replacing the original exclusiveness by a new inclusive approach which involves as many standpoints as possible10.
10 This description of D’Aguiar and Phillips’s neo-slave narratives could perfectly fit Brink’s inclusive approach in A Chain of Voices, whose title is taken from a passage in which Ma-Rose explains what the novel is about:
Now out of the shadow of death we’re all looking back over the past. And perhaps someone will hear us calling out, all these voices in the great silence, all of us together, each one forever alone. We go on talking and talking, an endless chain of voices, all together yet all apart, all different yet all the same, and the separate links might lie but the chain is the truth. And the name of the chain is Houd-den-Bek. (419)
11What is striking here is the contrast between the inclusiveness of the project—giving a voice to every single person involved in the slave revolt, from the soft-headed slave woman Lydia to the now-impotent patriarch Piet Van der Merwe—and the meaninglessness of each voice when taken separately from the others. Brink clearly wants to make it plain that what the voices tell us can achieve meaning only if the reader links them together.
12But the frailty of such an attempt is also suggested by the author, both through the ironic use of the name of the farm, Houd-den-Bek—in Afrikaans, “Shut Your Trap”—and through the paradoxical image of the chain, which “evokes the contradictory notions of the imprisoning nature of ‘dialogue’ and of the interdependency and interrelation of speech acts”,11 but also, on a more down-to-earth level, the intricate relationships between slaves and masters in a world where slavery defined not only the various modes of interaction between people, but also their very identity.
13The novel constantly reminds us that the masters are as oppressed by the system as their slaves—which is, as we shall see, by no means innocent on the part of Brink, and certainly problematic—so that all the characters think of their relationships with others in terms of power and ownership, even the most oppressed of them. Almost all the female characters, for instance, think of children in terms of ownership: they consider children as objects which can be owned, and seem to think that such ownership gives them power not only over the children themselves, but also over their fathers. Even Hester, in spite of the fact that she is presented throughout the novel as a mysterious and independent person, thinks of her son in terms of ownership and power: “And yet, in his very independence he was mine, formed and shaped by myself; in him I had a hold on the man he would be one day” (239, emphasis added). These words seem to echo Alida’s perception of her own children: “He was the first thing I had ever owned for myself”, “he was mine”, she writes about Barend (63, emphasis added); “But this one you won’t touch. Not ever. She’s mine now” (69, emphasis added), she tells her husband when he tries to beat Hester after her father’s death. Giving the reader access to the masters’ narratives thus enables Brink to show that they, too, are oppressed by slavery, which controls the way they perceive others.
14This notion can particularly be detected in the way Cecilia feels oppressed by the slaves’ constant presence, epitomized by their inescapable gaze:
Wherever one came or turned or went they would be hovering in the background or shuffling past soundlessly on their bare feet, eyes gleaming in the half-light. Like shadows, like cats; everywhere. Looking down as one came past—except for that Galant— or suddenly busying themselves very conspicuously; but as soon as you’d passed you could feel the eyes following you again. One wasn’t free to be mistress in one’s own home while they were around. In their meekness and ubiquitousness they ruled over hearth and home. Because they knew, and I knew, that they were indispensable. (115-116)
15This rather lengthy quote not only shows the guilt (unconsciously) felt by the masters, it also states explicitly how interdependent the slaves and the masters are—an interdependence which Brink chose to mirror in the very form of the novel thanks to the use of polyphony. In A Chain of Voices, masters and slaves all tell the story, and a number of key scenes are narrated several times and seen through several characters’ eyes, so that the reader may get a better grasp of what happens. The eponymous “chain of voices” is also a chain of eyes/ “I” s—however weird the image may seem: thanks to the juxtaposition of two or more versions of the same episode, the text becomes not only polyphonic, but also multifocal, since we share the characters’ perception of things as well as listen to their voices.
16The effect of the juxtaposition is usually to show how estranged to one another the characters are. One could give many examples, but the most striking one is probably the childhood memory of the lion hunt, shared by Galant and Nicolaas, because it symbolises the moment when the young master betrays his slave friend and becomes “one of them” (50). This episode also shows that slavery forces people to define themselves as either masters or slaves, as Nicolaas puts it in his final section: “I here: you there. Master: slave” (464). The repeated use of colons suggests causality, emphasizing the interconnection of the two groups: masters can be masters only if there are slaves, and vice versa. “It was the moment, the irreparable moment, when I changed from your friend into your master that I finally destroyed my own freedom” (464), Nicolaas adds, which implies, again, that masters and slaves are all similarly oppressed by the system—although, of course, the physical suffering is not shared.
17The fact that all the characters, blacks and whites alike, are prisoners of categories, and defined only as members of a specific group, as well as their consecutive lack of freedom, also points to another prominent feature of the novel: the parallel it implicitly draws between slavery and apartheid. This should not come as a surprise, since the neo-slave narratives’ “pivotal relationship to the present” is a defining feature of the genre, which Fred D’Aguiar described as “a prism through which the present is examined”.12
18It is indeed difficult to forget or to ignore the fact that A Chain of Voices was written under apartheid, and, significantly, not long after the 1976 Soweto uprisings, which it seems to comment on indirectly. The first obvious link the novel establishes between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century South Africa is the suggestion that from a historical perspective the roots of the apartheid system partly lie in the slave system—white people exploiting and oppressing black people. The parallel is quite clearly drawn, and explains why in A Chain of Voices Brink insisted so heavily on the fact that masters are as oppressed by the system as their slaves: as an Afrikaner writer, he both belonged to the twentieth-century group of oppressors and strongly disagreed with them—without altogether rejecting his Afrikaner heritage, which is not the least of his contradictions. Showing that the masters are victims of the system they implemented implictly suggested that Brink himself, and other Afrikaners, were, in a way, victimized by apartheid.
19But the novel also holds a mirror to the apartheid society in a more indirect way, emphasising the need to act against slavery in a section seen through Ma-Rose’s eyes: “In the beginning, I thought it is not enough to know: one must also understand. Now I’m not so sure. Is it enough to understand unless you also try to change it?” (418) As Ma-Rose, who is a free Hottentot, often acts as a mouthpiece for Brink himself13, the reader is led to understand that the answer to her question is the necessity to act. In this regard, A Chain of Voices does not differ from Brink’s other apartheid novels, in which the Camusian figure of the dissident, the rebel, has always been central:
The most abiding influence on my work, however, has been Camus, notably in his view of man in a state of incessant revolt against the conditions imposed upon him, and reacting creatively to the challenge of meaninglessness. In much of my work this is linked to an element of mysticism derived from the Spanish writers of the seventeenth century. The other most abiding influence on my writing is the study of history. All my work is pervaded with a sense of “roots,” whether in the collective history of peoples or in the private history of an individual14.
20 In most of Brink’s novels, the central figure is that of the Afrikaner dissident. In A Chain of Voices the rebels are slaves, but basically the “message” is the same: revolt is at the core of the human condition. Galant, the leader of the revolt, therefore takes on a universal significance—which is suggested from the outset by his dubious parentage: “Galant has many fathers. No one is his father, and everybody is” (23). Galant, the Rebel, epitomizes the necessity of revolt as a way of life, illustrating Camus’s words: “What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself”15. Significantly, one of the articles published about A Chain of Voices when it was first released was entitled “Slaves Who Said No”, with an obvious reference to the Camusian “Rebel”’s influence on Brink—an influence the writer often claimed, underlining how much his work owed the French philosopher:
I was particularly attracted to the concept of the rebel which he had shaped through the metaphor of Sisyphus. When I read Camus, I understood how futile it was to want to escape the society in which we were born. Camus helped me to assume responsibilities in my own society16.
21 As a writer, Brink could “assume responsibilities” in apartheid society through his work. In A Chain of Voices, the neo-slave narrative mode helped him shed indirect light on the evils of apartheid, thus escaping the censorship a more direct denunciation would probably have owned him. As Anthony J. Hassall puts it: “There are clear parallels with the 1980s, when apartheid, the Boers’ replacement for slavery, is under worldwide attack, and the winds of political change gather strength”17. In an article entitled “Of Slaves and Masters”, Brink himself pointed out the obvious parallels between the slave revolt which inspired A Chain of Voices and contemporary South Africa: “it is part of the horror of the South African situation in 1978 that the slave-owner mentality exemplified in the case of 1825, still forms a main ingredient in the social and political thinking of this Government”18. Although Brink was aware of the numerous differences between the two situations, he wanted to make it clear that he was not only writing about historical events, but also about contemporary South Africa, in which the Soweto uprisings had been as fiercely repressed as the 1825 slave revolt depicted in A Chain of Voices. Using the historical novel as a tool for criticizing the apartheid system was at the time common practice, since indirectness enabled writers to escape censorship. Brink himself denounced apartheid by alternately writing novels set in contemporary South Africa, such as A Dry White Season, and historical novels—although, of course, taking a stance against apartheid was far from being his only goal in writing such novels.
22This is why I would like to suggest here that although A Chain of Voices bears many resemblances to neo-slave narratives in terms of form, especially because of its recourse to a polyphonic and multifocal mode of writing, it is also extremely close to traditional slave narratives in terms of function. Originally, slave narratives were written to bear testimony to the evils of slavery, and thus convince white people that slavery had to be abolished and that it was worth fighting against it in spite of a bleak immediate future. The very structure of A Chain of Voices, inspired by the judicial form of the archives used by Brink as a basis for his work, seems particularly apt to achieve such an aim, since the novel is literally composed of a kaleidoscope of reinvented testimonies, and the reader is put in the position of judge and jury. The fact that the voices themselves are only reconstructions mediated through the author’s imagination is in itself an echo of traditional slave narratives, which were more often than not largely co-written, if not entirely written, by white abolitionists, and aimed at convincing readers that slavery had to be abolished. This desire to convince readers accounts for the novel’s so-called manipulative nature:
Despite the intended polyphony of the text and Brink’s use of the narrative strategy of providing several versions of the same incident viewed through different people’s eyes, the reader’s responses are carefully guided, so that there is little respite from the representation of colonizing activity and from auctorial presence. (Kossew 1996: 136)
23Brink’s guiding of his readers is part and parcel of the author’s anti-apartheid, abolitionist-like rhetoric. Brink’s desire to convince readers of the evil nature of slavery and, therefore, of its contemporary offspring, apartheid, accounts for the incorporation into the individual narratives of elements clearly not idiosyncratic to the characters:
What must be grasped is that characters in this book don’t so much speak according to their condition - apart from passages of direct dialogue—as they are given utterance that reflects the author’s large intentions. These are to explore in depth, and with a reach of knowledge that extends to such figures as Marx and Engels, Hegel and Roland Barthes, the fullest meaning of slaveholding as a social and human phenomenon. Practically speaking, that means that an illiterate agricultural worker such as Galant gives voice at times to reflections and concepts and finds words to which, realistically, he would not have had access. (Moynahan 1982)
24I would like to suggest that such deliberate anachronism or manipulation is not only reminiscent of canonical slave narratives, in which the white abolitionist’s editing impulse often superimposed itself on the voice of the slave who was supposed to be telling his/her story, sometimes almost silencing it, but it also contributes to make the nineteenth-century characters more accessible, more easy to understand, perhaps closer to twentieth-century readers, therefore increasing the novel’s political effectiveness. Like traditional slave narratives19, A Chain of Voices had to win its readers to the cause it defended, and showing what the nineteenth-century characters had in common with them, that is, their common humanity, was a powerful way of convincing readers that the anti-apartheid struggle was a just cause.
25The fact that A Chain of Voices held a mirror to the 1980s apartheid society also explains why, although the novel is partly informed by the Judeo-Christian mythological structure in which Frances Smith Foster saw the core of traditional slave narratives20, it does not entirely fulfill the pattern of rebirth through liberation that characterized narratives written by former slaves:
In the slave narrative the mythological pattern is realized in four chronological phases. First comes the loss of innocence, which is objectified through the development of an awareness of what it means to be a slave. This can be compared to the descent from perfection or mortification. The mortification process includes purgation, for as the slave learns the meaning of slavery, he also tries to purge himself of those elements that would facilitate enslavement. Second is the realization of alternatives to bondage and the formulation of a resolve to be free. This decision begins the ascent to the ideal, or invigoration. The resolution to quit slavery is, in effect, a climax to a conversion experience. The third phase is the escape. Whether it occurs between two sentences or forms the largest portion of the narrative, it is part of the struggle to overcome evil. The interest at this point is in the details, the pitfalls and obstacles, the sufferings and moments of bravery encountered in the process of achieving freedom. Although the first attempt sometimes ends in capture, the outcome is never in doubt. The narrative, after all, was written by a freeman. The fourth phase is that of freedom obtained. It is the arrival at the City of God or the New Jerusalem and it corresponds to the jubilation period of ancient ritual. (Smith Foster 1994: 85, emphasis added)
26In Brink’s novel, the first three phases are realized: childhood, with its blissful s between masters and slaves, is presented as a lost Paradise both by Nicolaas and by Galant. Then comes Galant’s resolve to be free, triggered by persistent rumours about abolition coming from Cape Town and by his shattered hopes. The third phase is not escape in its traditional sense, since the slaves seem to be aware that their revolt will no doubt be short-lived—and, indeed, they are caught and sentenced to death, and their voices seem to come from beyond the grave.
27Thus, Galant and the rebel slaves do not completely fulfil the traditional pattern that led the slaves to freedom. Galant does think that he has achieved some kind of freedom through his sexual encounter with Hester, which enabled both of them to escape the pre-defined categories of slaves and masters: “In that loft I was free: a man; and she a woman” (483). But such a freedom, achieved through sex—an aspect which critics have often reproached Brink for in their readings of the novel—is only individual, not collective, and the slave revolt was thwarted: the closing “Verdict” section leaves no doubt about it. The reason for the incompleteness of the Judeo-Christian mythological structure described by Smith Foster is probably that A Chain of Voices drew parallels between slavery and apartheid, which was far from being over when the novel was published in 1982.
28I am not suggesting here that A Chain of Voices was only an anti-apartheid novel. What I am trying to point out, conversely, is the resemblances and differences it bears with slave narratives. Besides, it cannot be denied that the novel also makes a powerful statement about the human condition in general, as Brink’s own analysis of the novel suggests:
... slaves, all of them, locked in an inescapable chain of voices, sprung from earth, cleansed in water, seared in fire, wanton with wind. Only in the leap from history to story, and from world to word, does literature as a form of cultural opposition find its true voice: opposition to the lie, opposition to injustice, opposition to the unfreedom which in one form or another holds us all21.
29But if A Chain of Voices is undeniably first and foremost a literary work, it also achieves some sort of effectiveness, and indirectly comments on apartheid South Africa. This is why I would like to suggest that it is not only a rewriting—or, rather, a writing back to—US or Caribbean slave and neo-slave narratives, but that it also echoes the various narratives circulated at the time to bear witness to life under apartheid. One should note in passing that a number of critics have noted the undeniable resemblances between slave narratives and narratives about life under apartheid: “like the American slave narratives, they have political, historical, social, economic, and literary significance”22.
30That Brink himself had read such accounts makes no doubt, and that he found them inspirational is also quite obvious, as the following lines from an article on fiction in South Africa clearly show:
The first-hand, yet fictionalized accounts of black suffering and anger in the stories of Mtutuzeli Matshoba (Call Me not a Man, 1979) are indelibly inscribed on the South African mind. And it is significant that his harrowing fictionalized account of a labour farm in “A Glimpse of Slavery” marks the reader more unforgettably than its early factional model, the eyewitness report Henry Nxumalo wrote in the fifties for Drum on the horrors of a Bethal prison farm23.
31Similarly, Brink’s account, which is almost a first-hand one since he read extensively the original records— “They were there,” he wrote in an article about the genesis of the novel, “speaking to me: speaking, indeed, across a divide of a hundred and fifty years, but speaking in their own voices, telling their own stories, exposing whatever truth of their tortured lives they could grope at”24— might make a deeper impression on the reader than the archives themselves, mostly because, like slave narratives, A Chain of Voices “demonstrate [s] the subjectivity of a human being whose humanity had been negated” (Sharpe 2003: xxiv). A Chain of Voices therefore simultaneously writes back to the “foreign” genres of slave and neo-slave narratives and to the “local” genre of apartheid narrative, trying to establish a counter-memory for South Africa as well as to explore more fundamental components of the human condition, in particular the notion of freedom.
32In guise of conclusion, I would also like to insist on the notion of polyphony, which deeply informs the novel. First, the polyphony works at the narrative level, since masters and slaves are given a say in the narrative, as I tried to show in this article. It also functions at the intertextual level, since the novel weaves threads leading to various genres and texts: slave and neo-slave narratives, apartheid narratives, but also Brink’s own novels, and even novels by Faulkner25.
33But the polyphony is even deeper, since in the original manuscript—or rather manuscripts, since there were several successive versions—Brink worked both in English and in Afrikaans, using English for the white characters and Afrikaans for the black ones, so that they literally did not understand one another. In the end, of course, Brink came out with two versions of his novel, one written in his native language and the other in English, as he has been doing for all his novels since Kennis Van die Aand was banned in 1974. Echoes of the dialogue between the two languages can still be heard in the final English version, and if masters and slaves all speak in the novel, which thus becomes a “masters and slaves” narrative, the dominant voice remains that of the bilingual author. A Chain of Voices therefore remains first and foremost a South African neo-slave narrative—thematically, formally and linguistically speaking.
Bibliographie
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Works cited
Boyce Davies, Carol. “In Their Own Words: Life and Work in South Africa”. College English, 51-1 (Jan. 1989): 88-94.
Brink, André. A Chain of Voices. London: Minerva Paperbacks, 1982.
Brink, André. An Act of Terror. London: Minerva Paperbacks, 1991.
Brink, André. “Interview with Jim Davidson”. Overland, 94-95 (1984): 24-30.
Brink, André. “Literature as Cultural Opposition”. Reinventing a Continent. Writing and Politics in South Africa. Cambridge (Ma.): Zoland Books, 1998; 185-202.
Brink, André. “Reimagining the Real: English South African Fiction Now”. Reinventing a Continent. Writing and Politics in South Africa. Cambridge (Ma.): Zoland Books, 1998; 144-163.
Brink, André. “Speaking in Voices”. Reinventing a Continent. Writing and Politics in South Africa. Cambridge (Ma.): Zoland Books, 1998; 13-24.
Brink, André. “Of Slaves and Masters” in Mapmakers. Writing in a State of Siege. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983; 154-162.
Brink, André. “Writers and Writing in the World” in Mapmakers. Writing in a State of Siege. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983; 41-53.
Camus, Albert. “L’Homme révolté” in Essais. Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 1965.
Chanda, Tirthankar. “André Brink en quête d’un avenir pour les lettres d’Afrique du Sud”. L’Humanité, 11 Septembre 1999. Available on www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/1999-09-11/1999-09-11-295768.
10.4000/books.pulm.11280 :D’Aguiar, Fred. “How Wilson Harris’s Intuitive Approach to Writing Fiction Applies to Writing Novels About Slavery”, in Revisiting Slave Narratives, Judith Misrahi-Barak ed., coll. Les Carnets du Cerpac no 2, service des Publication de l’université Paul-Valéry, 2006; 21-35.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Hassall, Anthony J. “The Making of a Colonial Myth: The Mrs. Fraser Story in Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves and André Brink’s An Instant in the Wind”. ARIEL, A Review of International English Literature, 18-3 (July 1987): 3-28.
Hassall, Anthony J. “André Brink: The Lives of Adamastor” in International Literature in English. Essays on the Major Writers, Ross Robert L. ed. Chicago and London: St James Press, 1991; 181-192.
10.1163/9789004484757 :Kossew, Sue. Pen and Power. A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, Cross/Cultures no 27, 1996.
Ledent, Bénédicte. “Slavery Revisited through Vocal Kaleidoscopes. Polyphony in Novels by Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips” in Revisiting Slave Narratives, Judith Misrahi-Barak ed., coll. Les Carnets du Cerpac no 2, Montpellier: service des Publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, 2006; 281-293.
Misrahi-Barak, Judith, ed. Revisiting Slave Narratives. coll. Les Carnets du Cerpac no 2. Montpellier: service des Publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, 2005.
Moynahan, Julian. “Slaves Who Said No”. New York Times, June 13, 1982. Available on: www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/specials/brink-chain.html.
Ross, Jean W. “André Brink”. Contemporary Authors, Christine Nasso, ed. vol. 144. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982; 54-59.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Sharpe, Jenny. Ghosts of Slavery. A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Ward, Kerry and Nigel Worden. “Commemorating, Suppressing and Invoking Cape Slavery” in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds. London and Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998; 201-217.
Notes de bas de page
1 Brink, André, An Act of Terror (London: Minerva Paperbacks, 1991): 442.
2 See Hassall Anthony J., “The Making of a Colonial Myth: The Mrs. Fraser Story in Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves and André Brink’s An Instant in the Wind”, ARIEL, A Review of International English Literature, 18-3 (July 1987): 3-28.
3 Brink, André, A Chain of Voices (London: Minerva Paperbacks, 1982): 17.
4 Ward, Kerry and Nigel Worden, “Commemorating, Suppressing and Invoking Cape Slavery”, Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds. (London and Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998): 204.
5 “Rather arbitrarily, we have defined as a slave narrative only those written works published before 1865, after which time de jure slavery ceased to exist”. (Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): xii.
6 Misrahi-Barak, Judith, ed., Revisiting Slave Narratives. coll. Les Carnets du Cerpac, no 2 (Montpellier: service des Publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, 2005): 15.
7 Rushdy, H. A., Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 3.
8 Moynahan, Julian, “Slaves Who Said No”, New York Times, June 13, 1982. Available on:
www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/specials/brink-chain.html
9 Brink explained in an interview that he used archives on the actual slave revolt, “consisting of all the depositions made by the accused and the witnesses and everybody even remotely connected with the incident. That in fact suggested the form, with the different voices speaking, each putting his own point of view” [ “Interview with Jim Davidson”, Overland, 94-95 (1984): 28].
10 Ledent, Bénédicte, “Slavery Revisited through Vocal Kaleidoscopes. Polyphony in Novels by Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips” in Judith Misrahi-Barak ed., Revisiting Slave Narratives. coll. Les Carnets du Cerpac no 2 (Montpellier: service des Publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, 2005): 281-293; 291.
11 Kossew, Sue, Pen and Power. A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, Cross/Cultures no 27, 1996): 139.
12 D’Aguiar, Fred, “How Wilson Harris’s Intuitive Approach to Writing Fiction Applies to Writing Novels About Slavery”, in Judith Misrahi-Barak eds., Revisiting Slave Narratives (coll. Les Carnets du Cerpac no 2, service des Publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, 2005): 22.
13 All the characters act as mouthpieces for Brink, since the reason why he resorts to polyphony in the novel is precisely to try to literally become each and every one of them.
14 Ross, Jean W., “André Brink”, in Contemporary Authors, Christine Nasso ed., vol. 144 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1982): 55.
15 “Qu’est-ce qu’un homme révolté? Un homme qui dit non. Mais s’il refuse, il ne renonce pas: c’est aussi un homme qui dit oui, dès son premier mouvement”, Albert Camus, “L’Homme révolté”, Essais (Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 1965): 423. Translation mine.
One could also quote this other passage from Camus: “Dans l’épreuve quotidienne qui est la nôtre, la révolte joue le même rôle que le ‘cogito’ dans l’ordre de la pensée: elle est la première évidence. Mais cette évidence tire l’individu de sa solitude. Elle est un lieu commun qui fonde sur tous les hommes la première valeur. Je me révolte, donc nous sommes” (Camus 1965: 432, emphasis added).
16 “J’étais particulièrement attiré par le concept de l’homme révolté qu’il avait élaboré à travers la métaphore de Sisyphe. En lisant Camus, j’ai compris combien il était futile de vouloir fuir la société dont nous sommes issus. Camus m’a aidé à assumer mes responsabilités envers ma société” (Tirthankar Chanda, “André Brink en quête d’un avenir pour les lettres d’Afrique du Sud”, L’Humanité, 11 Septembre 1999. Available on:
www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/1999-09-11/1999-09-11-295768,
www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/1999-09-11/1999-09-11-295768; translation mine).
17 Hassall, Anthony J., André Brink: The Lives of Adamastor. Ross, Robert L. ed., International Literature in English. Essays on the Major Writers (Chicago and London: St James Press, 1991): 185.
18 Mapmakers. Writing in a State of Siege (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983): 154-162; 162.
19 See, for instance, Jenny Sharpe’s analysis of Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative, which drew on the language of the sentimental novel because she was “writing for white middle-class Northern women” [Ghosts of Slavery. A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): xix].
20 “The plot of the nineteenth-century slave narrative is informed by the Judeo-Christian mythological structure on both the material and the spiritual levels. The action moves from the idyllic life of a garden of Eden into the wilderness, the struggle for survival, the providential help, and the arrival into the Promised Land. In addition, the plot of the slave narrative incorporates the parallel structure of birth into death and death into birth which also distinguishes the Judeo-Christian myth” (Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives [2d. ed., 1994]: 84).
It is worth noticing, though, that in A Chain of Voices the recurrent Christian imagery does not reflect the slave narrative model, but rather the imprint of Calvinism on Afrikaners.
21 “Literature as Cultural Opposition”, Reinventing a Continent. Writing and Politics in South Africa. (Cambridge Ma.: Zoland Books, 1998): 198. The unifying themes of “Earth. Water. Wind. Fire” (A Chain of Voices: 463) inform the imagery of the four distinct parts of the novel.
Such an analysis is characteristic of Brink’s conception of literature: “The work of art cannot—and need not—be justified on religious, political, moral or other grounds. But it satisfies a need in man which is as vital as hunger, even though it may not be recognized as readily. Like hunger, it is a personal need. But in its intimacy it is extremely significant. For it can expand an awareness of the human condition”, “Writers and Writing in the World”, Mapmakers. Writing in a State of Siege (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983): 46, emphasis added.
22 Boyce Davies, Carol, “In Their Own Words: Life and Work in South Africa”, College English, 51-1 (Jan., 1989): 88-94; 88.
23 “Reimagining the Real: English South African Fiction Now” (Brink 1998: 144-163).
24 “Speaking in Voices” (Brink 1998: 17-18).
25 “A far more important connection can be made between A Chain of Voices, Brink’s fifth novel, and those major fictions of William Faulkner—for instance, Absalom: Absalom and Go Down, Moses—in which Faulkner counts the moral cost of white racism, both before and after Emancipation, in terms of the tragic spoliation of all relationships, not merely those between white oppressors and their nonwhite or partially white victims. Brink also owes a technical debt to Faulkner for the device of telling a story entirely through a series of first-person monologues, the chain of voices of the title. Brink even has a Dilsey, though an unrepentantly pagan one. She is the elderly slave and conjure woman, Ma-Rose, who endures to see the beginning and the end of a hopeless uprising organized by Galant, a young slave foreman whom Ma-Rose had raised from infancy after his young mother was sold away from him” (Moynahan 1982).
Auteur
Université de Bourgogne
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