Maria and Batouala
The face of Batouala is the face of Esau but the voice is the voice of Jacob. Paris speaks through René Maran, as it spoke recently through Louis Hemon and his Maria Chapdelaine: the Paris which is subtle yet bored with subtlety and cruel yet bored with cruelty and eager for art yet bored with art. Such complex towns are hungry for idyll and for epic, the more so if, sitting at the centre of an empire, they can look out toward dim provinces and see idyll and epic transacting on their own soil. Paris, looking into French Canada, is thrilled along unfamiliar nerves at the sight of the girl of Peribonka who, having lost her dearest lover, chooses rather to stay in that hard native wilderness than to take what comfort may be found in softer regions: it is as if some Arcadian maiden had preferred Arcadia to Athens or some Shropshire lass had preferred Shropshire to London. So Paris, looking into French Africa, exults over the deeds of the black chief Batouala, who loves and fights and loses and dies, like a bison or an eagle, without a thought deeper than sensation and without a future longer than quick oblivion. Batouala is no primitive piece of art: no naïve ballad of the people; no saga, remembering the harsh conflicts of actual men; no epic even, calling up the large days of Agamemnons and Aeneases and Rolands and Siegfrieds and Beowulfs for the edification of smaller days. It is a document of civilization, of civilization turning, with a touch of nerves, from the contemplation of itself to a vicarious indulgence in the morals and manners of the jungle which, whether they exist in Africa or not, exist somewhere beneath the surface of every civilized person.
To say this is to say that René Maran, though himself of Batouala’s race, has learned in Paris to make Parisians understand him and that the fame of his book depends upon his skilful use of a sophisticated idiom. But there is more to be said than that. Batouala is a document as well upon the process by which an inarticulate section of mankind is beginning to be articulate. Out of the heart of a dark continent comes a tongue which uses neither the rant of the imperialist nor the brag of the trader nor the snuffle of the missionary. That tongue is hot with hatred for what Europe has done to Africa through the exercise of a greed which is the more malevolent because it is incompetent. The world of Batouala is a world spoiled by alien hands and laid waste as fever and tribal wars never laid it waste. Back of the quiet accents which M. Maran uses is the impact of a whole race’s wrongs and resentments. And yet those accents are quiet, for the book, though not primitive art, is art of a high order. It is, says M. Maran in his preface, “altogether objective. It makes no attempt to explain: it states.” Being a genuine work of the imagination, Batouala, of course, is less impersonal than its author believes it to be; its material is shaped at every point by a hand which, beating with the pulse of Africa, loves these contours and expresses its passion through them. Its passion, however, has been so guided by principle that it is emphasized by reticence much as that reticence is warmed by passion. In the circumstances, a plain story is enough, given, too, merely as a series of etchings from the career of Batouala, and only partly concerned with his relations to the whites. Candid pictures (considerably softened in this translation) of his daily life and final tragedy pass vividly by: all the customs and rites and sounds and stenches of his village, the throbbing of drums, the ferment of sexuality, the conflict of races, the pressure of nature upon man, the irony of primitive plans, the pity of primitive defeat. A great novel? Not quite, because it is febrile and fragmentary. But it has some of the marks of greatness upon it: energy, intensity, vitality.