From the oral tradition to the first novels
The Internet is the new memory of mankind, offering access to works as precious as Claude Savary's 1976 thesis on La Pensée symbolique des Fō du Dahomey (Symbolic Thought of the Fō of Dahomey), a Swiss intellectual born in 1939 and former curator of the Musée d'Ethnographie in Geneva. This freely accessible document helps us to grasp all the subtleties of the settlement of the future Benin, by transcribing the history of the country as transmitted by oral tradition, and describing its economic, religious, social and political realities. In addition to the marvelously reproduced and translated songs, we recommend reading the Contes du pays tammari, published in 2003 by Editions Karthala under the direction of Sylvain Prudhomme, a French writer who, before gaining notoriety with his novel Par les routes (Gallimard), which won the Prix Femina in 2019, devoted himself to collecting the legends of the continent where he grew up. This collection of 48 tales invites us to see the world through the eyes of the Beninese, and to measure the content of their mythology, in which the animal kingdom skilfully blends with the human kingdom. Those who prefer history to stories should read the Diary of Francesco Borghero, first missionary to Dahomey, 1861-1965 (published by Karthala). This is more a testimony than an allegory, although Satan makes a few furtive appearances. Finally, another story, that of Alabama Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the last slave convoy which, in 1859, traded slaves between Dahomey and America. Collected by anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), this otherwise fundamental document is available in French from Lattès under the title Barracoon.
If the 19th century heralded - at least officially - the end of slavery, the following century saw the birth of Beninese literature written in French. L'Esclave is considered the country's first novel, but it was also the first work of Félix Couchorou, born in 1900 not far from Cotonou, who published it in Paris in 1929 with the Dépêche africaine publishing house. Contrary to what the title might suggest, Couchorou does not portray a man as a victim of the yoke placed on his shoulders by his fellow human beings; on the contrary, he evokes the troubled figure of Mawoulawoè, a slave freed by Komlangan, who is about to fall in love with the wife of Komlangan's son. This painting of human passions - the relationship turns dramatic and is punctuated by numerous deaths - was written at a time when Benin is still under French domination, so it's not easy for the writer to take sides, sticking to a critique of incest. In hindsight, Couchorou's work will be described as the result of a certain "assimilation" - which in no way detracts from his style or the flavor of his fiction. The same applies to Paul Hazoumé (1890-1980), on whom the Revue d'Histoire des colonies (1938) passed an ambiguous but rather explicit judgment on his time: "if his complexion did not betray his origin, one would take him for a Frenchman, both in his person and in his writings". Indeed, his major work - Doguicimi, which depicts the sad fate of the eponymous character who allows herself to be buried alive upon hearing of the death of Toffa, her husband, and which takes the former Dahomey as its backdrop, with well-documented descriptions of customs and rivalries - still provokes debate as to the author's position vis-à-vis the colonial power. Nevertheless, it is now a classic, and was awarded the Prix de Littérature Coloniale in 1938 and the Prix de la Langue Française by the Académie Française the following year.
Social criticism
It's no coincidence that Paul Hazoumé's ethnological approach is intrinsically linked to his work as a writer. Anatole Coyssi (1915-1954) - author of Quelques contes dahoméens - also associated these two axes, as did Maximilien Quénum (1911-1988), who published Trois légendes africaines à destination de la jeunesse and Au Pays du Fons : us et coutumes du Dahomey (Prix de langue française 1938). Indeed, Beninese culture and oral tradition served as sources of inspiration. Without denying this invaluable contribution, his nephew - Olympe Bhêly-Quénum - dug deeper into the breach left by Louis Hunkanrin (1886-1964) - a militant journalist who was exiled for ten years to Mauritania by the colonial administration for his articles and his participation in the anti-tax uprisings in Porto-Novo in February 1923 - by devoting himself, perhaps for the first time in Benin, to social criticism. His first novel, published by Stock in 1960 and now available from Présence Africaine, is still a tenuous and indirect attempt at social criticism. Un piège sans fin is terrifying more for the furious jealousy of its "heroine", but it would be pointless to reduce Olympe Bhêly-Quénum to this text alone. In fact, in addition to being a complex writer encouraged by André Breton and imbued with the existentialist model, Olympe Bhêly-Quénum, although he declares himself to be more realistic, even contemplative, than political, is also a militant, and it's not for nothing that when the time comes for independence, the President will ask him to return to Benin after the studies he will have pursued in France. As editor-in-chief of the magazine La Vie Africaine and founder of L'Afrique actuelle, he drew on his country's rich cultural material for his writings, as demonstrated by Le Chant du lac (Grand Prix de Littérature d'Afrique Noire 1965) and the collection Liaison d'un été, but he also saw himself as a poet of the possible reconciliation of the two worlds he had encountered(L'Initié, 1979).
Another milestone was reached when Jean Pliya (1931-2015) published Les Tresseurs de cordes, a novel that recalls real events in the guise of fiction, particularly the "Revolution" initiated by Marxist president Mathieu Kérékou at the dawn of the 70s. Before devoting his books to religion, Jean Pliya also made a lasting mark on his country's literary history with two plays, one satyrical, La Secrétaire particulière, and the other historical, Kondo le requin, which focused on the history of Béhanzin (1967 Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique Noire). The period saw the emergence of less committed literature - for example, the poetry, an ode to nature, of Agbosssahessou (1911-1983), who published Les Haleines sauvages in 1971, or the writings of Eustache Prudencio (1922-2001), who preferred to adopt a certain neutrality towards the ruling power - but some writers did not hesitate to be critical witnesses of their time, this is confirmed by Fleur du désert (Desert Flower ) by Jérôme Carlos, born in Porto-Novo in 1944, which raises the delicate question of identity, a novel that is bound to resonate with the first Beninese autobiographical account by a woman's pen, Une citronnelle dans la neige (Lemongrass in the Snow) (1986), in which Gisèle Hountondji, born in Cotonou in 1954, looks back on her painful European experience.
The contemporary era
The 80s were a time of real effervescence, with publishing output accelerating. These included Paulin Joachim (1931-2012), who published Oraison pour une renaissance in 1984, Bernabé Laye (1941-2024), who began an international career with Nostalgie des jours qui passent (Nostalgia of Days Passing), followed in 1988 by Une femme dans la lumière de l'aube (published by Seghers) and Mengalor (published by Seghers the following year), to Blaise Aplogan, who published his first novel in 1990(La Kola brisée), and above all to Moudjib Djinadou, who was one of the first African writers to dare to evoke AIDS in Mo gbé, le cri de mauvais augure in 1991. Similarly, Florent Couao-Zotti, born in Pobé in 1964, began his literary career in 1995 in the pages of the fine magazine Le Serpent à Plumes, and confirmed his talent by winning the Prix de littérature africaine pour l'enfance with Un enfant dans la guerre, published in 1998. This important writer is widely accessible in our latitudes: Ce soleil où j'ai toujours soif is available from L'Harmattan, for example, while Gallimard published Western Tchoukoutou in 2018 and Sarbacane offers Le lance-pierres de Porto-Novo for younger readers.
The new generation is not to be outdone, and the literary genres explored by Beninese authors are multiplying. Daté Atavito Barnabé-Akayi first made a name for himself with his theater, and while his first play - Amour en infraction - tackles a universal theme, the second - Les Confessions du Pr - portrays an African head of state as deplorable in the management of his country as in his human relations. In his collection of short stories, L'Affaire Bissi (2011), the young author born in 1978 doesn't hesitate to evoke homosexuality, but it's thanks to his poetry that he has achieved notoriety(Solitude mon S, Noire comme la rosée, etc.).three years his junior, Ryad Assani-Razaki has published in France(La Main d'Iman, éditions Liana Levi, 2013) and in Quebec, collaborating on a collection of erotic short stories published by Quebec Amérique, a daring tone that Elena Miro K will also adopt in Miel Sacré (éditions Tamarin, 2016). For her part, the very young Harmonie Dodé Byll Catarya (born 1991) enters literature through slam poetry, while her contemporary, Domingo Gilchrist, also born in 1991, prefers comics with his heroine, Houefa, daughter of Caméléon. Last but not least, Beninese literature also inspires intellectuals such as Adrien Huannou, who has devoted several reference works to it(La littérature béninoise de langue française, des origines à nos jours published by Karthala, Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi and his Introduction à la littérature béninoise published by L'Harmattan).
