Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de Violence in the context of end-less post-colonialism

Abstract

This paper outlines the problematic relationship between the enduring colonial legacy that persists, both in theories of the postcolonial and geo-political post-colonial state practices. Considering the ambivalent relationship between discourses of postmodern and postcolonial theorists, Yambo Ouologuem's seminal work, Le devoir de violence (1968), serves as a literal roadmap of the complicit power dynamics involved in postcolonial political and discursive practices. The implications of Ouloguem's tactical textual composition underscore a relationship of mutual culpability in a metaphorical chess game in which both sides ultimately compromise for the game to continue. Read in the context of contemporary post-colonial and post-modernist discourses on African literary productions, Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence embodies an aesthetic of ambiguity that not only reveals the extreme violence of colonial encounters, but also the subversive complicity of a sustained violence fundamental to discourses of a post-colonized condition vacillating between liberation and subservience.