Paris Calling: Common and Uncommon Experiences

of Latin American and African Diasporas

Lecture (Final Text)

Topography of Paris
Paris is always worth traveling to, in the summer as well as in the winter. But it
is not only in this regard that the metropolis has fascinated so many people.
Paris became the capital of the 19th century, as Walter Benjamin called it, a
center of modern times, of cultural and industrial renewal exemplified in the
World Expositions. However, as a capital of a great colonial empire, Paris also
attracted generations of colonial and post-colonial subjects, especially from
Africa. As a wider literary horizon this black Paris has been an object of
research since the thirties. To a lesser degree, studies have discovered the
metropolis as a hub of Latin American authors, such as Carlos Fuentes, Vargas
Llosa, Zo Valds and their European partners.
1
Paris, therefore, developed into a transcontinental meeting place of world
literature, where the success and boom of Latin American novels had a deep
impact on authors of Francophone Africa: thus Amadou Kourouma or Sony
Labou Tansi acculturated the genre in ways differing from the epic traditions so
highly appreciated throughout the continent.

Apart from these intertextual influences, however, is there really a common

place for the self-discovery of Latin-American and African immigrants in such a
heart of European self-arrogation and arrogance? Paris, a living museum of
white triumph and disaster, has always been an object of fascination, but also
of inferiority complexes imposed on people outside Europe, such as Amado
Nervo, a Mexican journalist at the beginning of the 20th century.

There is on the one hand this image of a pale reflection of a brilliant colonizing
sun, stimulated by a discourse related to a subconscious faith that France is
bearer of the universal idea (Gordon 1978, 6f), and, on the other hand, a core
of colonial emancipation, which Lopold S. Senghor refers to in the 1930s
(Hauser, Michel, 1988, 23). Is there any chance then for a common ground,
where memories from elsewhere can be exchanged, along with their attendant
demons and angels? In discussing two novels, one by a Cuban author, Zo
Valds Caf Cuba and the other by a Congolese writer, Alain Mabanckous
Black Bazar, we will try to point out that even if there are common grounds,
they originate in uncommon experiences. The titles of both of these books, by
the way, evoke open places, bazaar and caf, where people are likely to meet,
consciously or casually.

The Two Authors

Zo Valds
Born in 1959, the year of the Cuban revolution, Zo Valds began as a child of
the establishment, working in the Cuban delegation at UNESCO in the 1980s
and then as an editor of the magazine Cine Cubano between 1990 and 1995.
But this career definitively ended with her novel La nada cotidiana, published
in 1995. Besides some explicit sex scenes denounced by official Cuban
propaganda as cloying pornography, it depicts the life of the young lady Patria
who wants to build a paradise on a Caribbean island. But instead, the island
becomes an unlivable place from which one cannot leave and on which one
cannot stay, foreshadowing the motifs worked through in Caf Nostalgia. 2
Cubas cultural institutions reacted to the novel with boycotts and smear
campaigns, calling Zo Valds an ungrateful seudo escritora (Granma 22 May
2010), que viven del panfleto contrarrevolucionario (28 Nov 2009). She
consequently turned her back on her native country, and presently lives with
her third husband and daughter in Paris.

Alain Mabanckou
A native of Congo-Brazzaville, where he was born in 1966, Alain Mabanckou
immigrated to France, where he studied law and worked in the civil
profession for about ten years. Since his first novel Bleu Blanc Rouge,
published in 1998, he has won several literary prizes and is considered to be
one of the most talented French writers. He is also the first francophone
sub-Saharan African author to be published by Gallimard in its prestigious
collection La Blanche. As his literary works have been published in many
languages, including English, Mabanckou is an author whose reputation has
transcended a pure career as literary creator. He has taught French-
speaking literature both inside and outside of France at US-American
universities, attesting to the growing importance these works hold for
academic investigation. The subjects of novels like Les Peits-fils ngres de
 Vercingtorix from 2002 or Black Bazar also give evidence of the rising of an
African diaspora which has gained a higher self-esteem in the last decades.

Common grounds
Though both living in Paris, these two authors dont seem to have much in
common at first glance. While Zo Valds residence in Paris is more motivated
by political issues, Alain Mabanckou has his place in a diaspora that evidently
goes back to the French empire and the social grievances caused in the post-
colonies after their independence. The French metropolis, however, marks a
common topography, as shown by Zo Valds in the autobiographical account
The Tribulations of a Cuban Girl in Paris published in the volume Paris was ours
(2011). And in another collection, Huit nouvelles (2008), where both authors
contributed short stories (the Caribbean with La main ouverte, the African with
Le Huitime Confrencier), the reader finds, much more than a common place,
a common ground: les portraits de femmes, dhommes et denfants qui
mettent en lumire lurgente ncessit dagir pour un nouveau modle de
dveloppement.
3
Trauma Loss
In the two novels mentioned above the heroes have, however, more in
common than just this commitment. Both suffer from a trauma that is likely to
provoke a chain of other traumata effecting their lifes continuity and integrity.
As a feeling of being very upset, afraid, or shocked after a bad experience, a
trauma is a severe psychological cut, unforgettable, but also invincible, a steady
reminder of an unprocessed past. In both cases the protagonists must deal with
the severe loss of a beloved person by death or abandonment. And their
primary instrument is indeed memory, the subject of a wide field of research
by such renowned cultural scientists as Maurice Halbwachs and Jan and Aleida
Assmann. They agree upon the collective basis of memory, les cadres sociaux
de la mmoire, shared by a community, a family, a school-class, an urban
environment or a nation. Both integrated into different Diasporas, which are
also imagined communities, the personal traumata of these characters are
deeply connected with this collective ground of memories.

It is obvious that fiction is a privileged means of dealing with memory which

after all is based on the written code of language, a fact already pointed out by
Plato. In the Cuban novel this mnemonic function is conducive to the healing of
a wounded soul. In our next novel we will see, however, that this denouement
is not the only one possible. Although the main character will finally reveal
himself as an author, recreating the somber reality of a Congolese immigrant in
Paris, the memory encrypted in written or oral codes can easily record
preliminary fixings. Reconsidering Ludwig Wittgensteins skeptical comments
on the nature of language, we become aware that language can indeed inscribe
the fading of time in its own terms. But it is impossible to fix this very act of the
passing of time, encompassing the consistency and continuity of human life. In
his notebooks, Wittgenstein writes that no linguistic code can put into words
that which belong to the essence of the world. Language, therefore, cannot
express that all is flowing. Though a sentence may raise an issue and make it
accessible to the minds of debating people, it is used to describe a moment
that has already passed. As such, it risks the perpetuation of a sudden state, an
empty-headed remark, a mood. The character of language thus provides a
possibility for circumventing the forgetfulness of the mind, but also forms the
base of all types of prejudices, as shown in the discursive roulette of Black
Bazar.
4
Central question: Different aspects of memory

Writing as a possibility to reconquer ones own biography reestablishing a new

view on ones past Memory as a chance to get rid of ones own traumata, as an
access to rationalize them
In the Cuban novel we can easily detect an inter-text largely determined by
Marcel Proust and his experience with a time where present and past are so
intertwined that chronology is no longer able to dictate its logic. Taken up by
French novelists such as Flaubert and Proust, Kants notion of time and space
as mere products of mind may be a good starting point for narrations of a
diaspora entangled in the web of the past and the present, between here and
there. In the case of the Cuban diaspora dispersed between Miami, New York,
Paris and Madrid, migration has an almost dominant political aspect. There
may be lots of Cafs Nostalgias in Miami or elsewhere, but the one particular
to Marcelas life is a virtual network in which Cuban immigrants all over the
world are connected via e-mails, postcards, faxes or letters. Because reminders
of an exiles native country have almost no reference to space and concrete life
on foreign shores, and thus cant be reconstructed, communication plays an
outstanding role (Milich 2005: 53).

Even though this community shares a common political background its

members are separated by different traumata, anxieties and pains, fueling a
collective memory.

Through the paradigm of the Jewish people we are aware of the importance of
traditions in written form. Exchanging and fixing biographical memories
ensures the existence of collective identity, a concept often mentioned yet
seldom explained within academic literature. In Marcelas case, the
reconstruction of the Cuban legacy originates from the painful experiences her
body, her sexuality, has suffered. Though criticized for its abundant 5
pornographic passages detailing descriptions of female orgasms, these
references are grounded in the conflicts the young woman is exposed to. The
experience of her vital instincts therefore corresponds to the affirmation of a
self, lost in a foreign metropolis. While diaspora is perceived in a collective way,
exile plays an individual role. Marcela has to retire into an inner exile, el
insilio, which affects her far more than that geographical exile she shares with
so many other compatriots. Like a diary, the novel constitutes a sort of alter-
ego to which she confides her secrets in order to rid herself of the sexual
trauma she has had to deal with. Just as the Cubans forced into exile are
mentally confined to their island, the young woman is kept imprisoned in her
own body, completely reduced to its most existential needs and no longer able
to feel love or joy. Both the diaspora and Marcela are captives of a past that
does not release them, and both are condemned to free themselves from their
demons.
Marcelas biography refers to a special trauma. Prior to losing her home and
her parents, she falls in love with a married man, Jorge, whom she meets while
he is playing with his young son in the park. She sends him enthusiastic love
letters that his very jealous wife happens to discover. The tragedy takes its
course when the wife burns her husband alive while he is asleep during the
siesta. Confronted with Jorges carbonized corpse, Marcela is overwhelmed by
her conscience and never succeeds in bearing the guilt that she is actually
innocent of.

At the age of nineteen Marcela meets a seventy year old Frenchman, with
whom she celebrates a fictitious marriage. Some years later she finally leaves
Cuba, following him to France where she unsurprisingly does not find the
happiness she longs for. After a difficult time with occasional jobs Marcela
discovers her talent for photography, and builds a great career in New York.
6
She nevertheless retires from a prominent life of success, moving to Paris
where she lives in a house with other Cuban compatriots. There she becomes
attached to Samuel, who happens to be the son of her unfortunate love, Jorge.
Unable to admit her proper feelings, she discovers her body as the source of
joy and sorrow. Also a victim of his mothers crime, Samuel gradually puts her
trauma into new perspective, relieving Marcela of the burden she has had to
bear. Shifting the blame onto Marcela her old school-friend really had an
affair with Samuels father.

The new life begins with a return to the origins where new origins are to be
found. Until the end of the novel, Marcela suffers under the burden of a never-
ending trauma that urgently needs to be resolved with the help of those
related to its origins. Recalling Nietzsches Thus spoke Zarathustra, we realize
that becoming familiar with origins means searching for new sources in the
future (Wer ber alte Ursprnge weise wurde, siehe, der wird zuletzt nach
Quellen der Zukunft suchen und nach neuen Ursprngen). Creating an initially
platonic then erotic relationship with Samuel, she returns to the roots. The text
is thus ultimately the itinerary of a young lady, coming into her own, step by
step, without that kind of progress assumed by the concept of a civil
personality as carried out in 19th century novels of education such as David
Copperfield or Wilhelm Meister. The pornographic style dominant in the
narrative discourse elucidates that the senses do not submit to the mind in this
case, and this is one of the typical accusations Zo Valds is confronted with,
also by the Cuban authorities.

Within the Proustian inter-text marked by Marcelas own literary preferences,

she swings back and forth, between past and present. Although her artistic
genius obviously lies within the visual arts, literature and especially La
recherche has a beneficial therapeutic influence on her emancipation from
7
personal trauma. As the literary critic advocates (Alvarez Borland, 346), not
only contemporaries in the Orgenes group, but also later generations of Cuban
writers including Zo Valdss follow Lezama Limas idea of a reading of the
tradition in the text by means of the mediating function of memory (Santi 537-
39). This technique finds its particular legitimacy in the diasporic aesthetics
which has to deal with the fact that Cubans are dispersed all over the world,
detached from their natural community on the island. Cada vez somos ms
numerosos los desperdigados por el mundo. Estamos invadiendo los
continentes; nosotros, tpicos isleos que, una vez fuera, a lo nico que
podemos aspirar es al recuerdo (Ponte 102, s. a. Borland 347).

These single members live like tiny islands in the brush of the metropolis, cities
or even villages disconnected from daily life in Cuba with its rituals,
celebrations, holidays and commemoration days. A communication based on
common memory therefore has to be established, to be transmitted through
the media and ultimately through the literary text, itself a creation involving
multiple voices. Some critics mention the influence of Rilkes Notebooks via
Lezama Limas poetical concepts formulated in his theoretical work
Confluencias.

We may find certain access to Marcelas promenades through Paris by relating

them to the trials and tribulations of the Russian writer Andrei Gortschakow in
Andrei Tarkowskijs Film Nostalghia (1983). There, images of a mellow Italian
panorama interfere with visual reminiscences of snow-white landscapes,
topographically so distant but virtually so present in the mind of a traveler who
has had to flee his country and remains stricken by nostalgia for home. While
Marcela is wandering through Paris like a flneuse mapping scenes and
memories of Cuba onto her Parisian streets and signs, making the landscape of
her exile comprehensible, and making her Cuba accessible (Scarano, Zamora,
8
Loyola, 340), she keeps thinking of her childhood in Havana, of the streets with
its crumbling houses and lost illusions. A wide-spread slogan in the peaceful
East German revolution against the bureaucratic rgime stated that Where
houses are in decay, people also get ruined. But as we know from these and
other historic experiences, ruins do not only stand for a past with unsatisfied
promises. They also imply a blank to be filled in with new hopes and projects.

In this novel too, we deal with visual overlays, which tend to create a tension
between lived and living experiences. Marcela has to seek a new self-image in
order to recover from the traumata of the past depicted in the landscapes of
Havana formed by the ruins of people and houses. This quest even includes the
search for her own name, which she has forgotten during the turmoil of the
years passed by.

As an invisible crossing-point of multiple voices reaching Marcela through

letters, faxes, mails or phone calls, Caf Nostalgia itself corresponds to an
interlace of interacting texts. The novel, therefore, is a type of laboratory of a
diasporic conscience in permanent flux, discontinuous and broken, only united
in the rejection of the Cuban rgime which has held power for more than fifty
years. Among these heaps of texts and scrambles of news Marcela finds a
movie script revealing Samuel as the son of that unfortunate man ignited by his
spouse. Ultimately, this document summarizes the mental state of a whole
generation of artists, students, authors and intellectuals, straying around the
globe, with a migrant mentality and a sense of hopelessness for themselves
and their countrys future (Borland, 353).

As the common background of these displaced persons remains Cuba, there

are numerous analeptic segments related to the island. The chronology of the
narration connected with Paris as the theater of Marcelas daily yearnings and
reflections is often interrupted by these narrative atolls moving back to the
9
events in Cuba prior to her Parisian life, to her origins and to the base of her
traumata. It is well known that memory tends to reinterpret former
impressions in light of the actual conditions the subject has to suffer (cpr. Tadi
2004). Memories are reconstructed according to the present situation in order
to adapt to the subjects current self-image. We may follow Soren
Kierkegaards impression that life cannot only be understood in a retrospective
way, but must be lived by looking ahead, straight to the things to be done.

In her context, and unable to establish any relationships with other people,
Marcela is forced to do so. Though she is the addressee of much good and bad
news, she does not reply to her correspondents, and keeps a firm distance to
all people, especially those who are dearest to her. The letters Marcela
tirelessly writes remain unsent and consequently become the text of the novel.
The incapacity to communicate with certain correspondents directly implies a
growing potential for literary communication that approximates, in some
respects, a message in a bottle. As Goethe advocates, writing is nothing less
than the effort to come to terms with oneself. In being transformed into a
poem, a picture or a concept, our inner agitation keeps us grounded. Starting
with a lecture on Proust, Marcela goes on to compose texts of her own,
thereby reshaping a world in which she has been restricted to be an object of
others instead of master of her life.

Nevertheless, the auto diegetic narrator deals with a language that constantly
attacks the mental restrictions imposed on her. The proliferation of sexual
details and images only emphasizes the lack of real affection and attachment,
the impotence of giving and receiving love. In one passage, Marcela admits that
she confounds sex with love, a confession which clearly points out the chaos in
her emotional life.

This disorder presents itself in the structure of the highly fragmented text, a 10
cocktail of partly funny, partly tragic, partly eccentric hodge-podges, which, in
the view of some critics, lacks coherence. Like the central characters in Severo
Sarduys Cocuyo (1990) or Reinaldo Arenas novella Viaje a La Habana (1990)
the protagonist engages in a fruitless search for home, remembering and
returning only to find it impossible to fuse the fragments of her identity as an
exile (Scarano/Zamora 322) Only Marcelas recovery at the end of the novel
can piece together the different components of the puzzle.

Leaving Cuba for New York and Paris, Marcela first and foremost covers the
topographical distance necessary to deal with her traumatic experiences. Her
exile is therefore not entirely motivated by political reasons. As oblivion
belongs to the effect of memory, Marcela has to keep a distance in space and
time between her past and her present life. Her Cuban home, abandoned by
her indifferent parents, turns out to be as ill-omened as the streets of Rome in
Natalia Ginzburgs Famiglia for the male hero Carmine Donati, who must avoid
certain parts of the city because a lost and tragic love has turned them into
tainted and devastated region.

Far away from her desolated home, in a place that is not as poisoned, Marcela
succeeds in retrieving her memory by rediscovering sensations that had been
neutralized by the shocking events in La Habana. Step by step, according to the
titles of every chapter, she learns the different senses and a corresponding
sentiment or condition: 1) el olfato, desasosiego, smell, uneasiness, 2) el
gusto, peligro, taste, danger, 3) el odo, olvido, the ear, oblivion, 4) el tacto,
duda, touch, doubt, 5) la vista, armona, sight, harmony (Scarano/Zamora
339). The last chapter is reserved for the open question of Marcelas sixth
sense, a mi nico deseo, the only sense that enables her to return to her
origins in a way that does not leave her alone, threatened, or adrift (ibid.). Her
longing for the island thus stands for the desire to stay at home again, in Cuba.
11
And in a very literal way this also includes feeling comfortable in her own skin.
Finally, she finds her love to Samuel in the sharing of a Cuban meal, a feast
which transcends mere food. In German food means life resources, and as
their physical existence is fundamental for their own survival, they start
consuming each other, cutting slices into their bodies, frying and tasting organs
like cannibals. By liberating and exchanging their blood, their tongues, their
entrails, their bodies disintegrate on a metaphorical level, consequently closing
the painful period of their exile. Reclaiming her senses, her joy and her love of
life, Marcela is able to accept the exile imposed on her, together with
companions who suffer a similar misfortune. Caf Nostalgia converts into a
Caf Cuba, where a community of friends and lovers may dance, sing and have
fun, a transformation the German translation seems slightly to miss.

Now the exchange between Marcelas individual memory and its collective
counterpart, in the terms Maurice Halbwachs posits as most essential for the
mnemonic structure of every social being, is no longer hampered by trauma.
Communication between the self and others takes on the purpose of finding a
mutual base, and the young lady is likely to reply to her friends, swapping
impressions. Traumatic events tend to stabilize an experience by encrypting it,
by keeping it inaccessible to conscious inspection and reconstruction
(Assmann, 247). In Marcelas case, too, the trauma calls for a highly
fragmented nature of events separated from original context in place or time.
Establishing a relationship with Samuel, she manages to relate her trauma to
other moments and other people important in her life.

Writing as a possibility to finish with own resentments establishing a new view on

the future Memory as a chance to expose individual and collective traumata, as
an access to racial prejudices which belong to collective memories, indeed.
The anonymous hero, known only by his sexist nick-name fessologue, because
he is a connoisseur of young womens back-sides, spends his days and nights in 12
the Afro-Cuban bar situated in Chteaurouge. This Parisian district is home to a
large African community whose nostalgia relates in a lesser degree to their
native continent than we might suppose with Marcela and her Cuban
compatriots. Even the motive of immigration constitutes a matter of conflict,
not only treated by the narrator, but also by his deep black true love Couleur
dOrigine, his rival LHybride, the black racist Monsieur Hippocrate, Paul of the
Greater Congo and finally the Haitian author Louis-Philippe, his master in
political consciousness and in writing novels.

This novel, then, is also a workshop for the composition of novels, as the title
Black Bazar suggests. As Elias Canetti tells us, a bazaar differs from a
department store in that customers are able to watch how goods are
manufactured without succumbing to the charms of anonymous production. In
this context we learn how discriminating linguistic codes construct sense and
identity by dealing with racial categories, old and new, which are sustained and
recreated in the metropolitan life of African people. Explicit resentments
between black and white people seem to be on decline due to a political
correctness which tells us that racism is outdated, anachronistic, and old-
fashioned. But this white mythology has in fact maintained its racial arrogance
by adapting itself to new forms of social behavior. Classic racism may indeed
fade away, but at the price that antagonisms between black and white are
likely to disintegrate into a sophisticated hierarchy of many different nuances,
without giving up their inherited character of exclusion.

Instead of disproving racist arguments, the narrator struggles to confront us

with the image of wild, primitive, black savages; images so connected with our
cultural memory that they can still imply violence or even mortal hatred
between the races. In Michel Houellebecqs novel Lextension de domaine de la
lutte f. i. a sexually motivated rivalry between young men nearly provokes the
death of an African, un animal, probablement dangereux. As such archetypes
are still at work in our minds, the so-called process of civilization described by 13
Norbert Elias seems to have reached its limits. In representing himself as a
sapeur and a perfumed sexual object attractive for white women, the narrator
takes into account that a real destruction of old prejudices has not happened.
While he boasts about the splendor of his genitals, a friend from the Ivory
Coast is convinced that African men have the right to infiltrate the former
colonial power by biological means, conceiving children with white women.

But African men are not as the champions of international solidarity, as

traditional third world discourses may suppose. Showing rather racial
prejudices, themselves, they rather prefer fresh gazelles to satisfy their sexual
appetite than young self-confident black ladies they consider being too
quarrelsome sex maniacs. In order to advance they choose light-skinned
partners. And this racial motivated behavior explains the position the narrator
adopts.

De and increasing with the color of the skin, the cultural degree is geared to a
white mythology identified with the only possible form of civilization. Having a
quick look on the history of the multi-ethnical society in Brazil, we have to
come to the conclusion that the ideals of whiteness have not lost their
universal claims. As Europeans we can learn from this experience that
diversifying the base colors into thousands of shades does not necessarily
coincide with a multi-cultural utopia. In fact, a diffuse racism is on the arising to
produce even more sophisticated and invisible effects in the light of whiteness.
Related to this confusing situation Mabanckous bazar resembles a negotiating
table where different discourses are to be treated by the interviewer: the
alleged inferiority of the black race, the anti-colonial resistance, the self-
affirmation of black people, the codified anti-imperialism of Third World
speeches, all these text modules are like spices shown to a curious public which
has to taste them in order to select its favorites.

Although the aroma of spices has little to do with discursive catego-ries,

verified in the light of our interests and our reflections, the metaphor of the
bazar avoids the statics of standpoints, so often defined by the irreversibility of
ideological dogmas or traditions. On the other side it also prevents us from
adopting the consumers attitude at rummaging distractedly around the
shelves, as the reader have to deal with a bazar comme somme de clichs non
orientalists, mais africanistes (Anyinefa 290). Similar to Flauberts Dictionnaire 14
des ides recues, Black Bazar helps us to exorcise an omnipresent phraseology
arisen from a language that always has been a source originating old and new
predefinitions, prejudices, rancor and resentments.

Therefore the act of writing is more than a pure amusement for our narrator.
As his Franco-Ivorian friend, a mulatto, suggests, black African people are not
so endued with composing novels or texts in other literary genres, for they look
more about oral traditions, in higher gear in languages that do not come with
fixed codes. The lightness of the skin seems to stand for the acuteness of
thought, for the clearness and lucidity of expression, undeniably so
characteristic for the trend-setting bon usage franais, effective from the 17th
century. As European I am not going to evaluate idioms based on oral
traditions. But in our occidental context written codes have the advantage of
putting into question all conventions, rituals and habits running our daily life.
Exposing these social standards especially literature is able to initiate a
counter-discourse likely to reject them by illustrating how people break norms
or how they are broken by norms.
So Black Bazar does not only constitute a space of conflicting discourses. It is
also a self-staging of an artist getting involved with a workshop of writing, to be
considered as a process, which enables him to acquire full creative skills. He
overcomes anachronistic restrictions imposed on black people, proving that
they comply with the intellectual and linguistic requirements indeed the
composing of fictional texts has to fulfill. Implicitly he rejects the idea that
Africans are still colonized subjects limited to the humiliating petit ngre, [ce]
franais lmentaire qui est usit par les Ngres des colonies (Larousse 1928),
a simplified French slang which has neither the expressiveness of African
languages nor that of Standard French. But the lucidity of his expression
evidently does not depend on the lightness of his skin. He constructs what
Martin Heidegger calls the house of language,

In a similar way personal and collective traumata are tied together. As the
narrator is full of rancor against his rival, he does not feel free to address
himself to a reader who would be really interested in his message. More than
an ugly and despiteful ideology to be fought by enlightened minds, racism is
the product of conflicting interest, envy or rat race. And the reader is well 15
aware of these very resentments play an enormous role in the narrators point
of view, characterized by the racist depreciation of the other.

Getting rid of this excess of scorn and hatred, he manages to create the first
novel of his life to be by recomposing what has been ruined since his
companion had abandoned him. Writing and living, dis-course and practice are
both to give him and us an orientation by producing a new sense and
significance.

Conclusion
Memories are essential for our existence. Through them we constitute an
identity that gives our life the coherence and continuity necessary to overcome
crisis and trauma. In Marcela's case, the Proustian intertext lends memories a
nostalgic accent, implying, that is to say, a past which was not ideal, yet
remains a means of sharing common interests and hopes. A trauma, a
disruption of life that is originally taken for granted, can be healed through a
community of people sharing a common ground, a common environment, a
common cultural basis. Caf Nostalgia explicitly displays the chances of a
community coping with an uncertain future by looking back. Under these
conditions, traumata are not only psychological maladies, but also
opportunities to review one's life conception, to challenge those norms and
settings which have implicitly played a part in its construction. In this context
we evoke the ambiguity of memory, which in the words of Aleida Assmann is
badly in need of prejudices or preconceptions. Like Marcela in her Parisian
diaspora we cannot begin with a tabula rasa. Prejudices are necessarily a basis
for our orientation and our self-definition. They tell us to prefer this or that
cultural norm, not because it is necessarily better than others, but because we
command it better than that of our neighbor. Preconceptions are likewise
connected with the character of language, which, as Hegel points out, always
tends to generalize the complex as a result of the law of the least effort.

However Black Bazar shows us that prejudices, defying control of verification,

can distort our judgments. They are, then, self-imposed thought controls,
occupied by unquestioned feelings, values and interests. By exposing the racist
character of his preconceptions, the fessologue, traumatized by the loss of his
love, plays with our own resentments. But as an African in Paris he also
demonstrates that no race is free from baser human instincts resulting from 16
conflicting interests, jealousy and distrust, as opposed to from an evil ideology.

Literature evidently presents the best way of challenging the generalizing

character of language. By means of language, it puts into a biographical context
what would otherwise remain an object of abstraction.