Batouala

First edition, one of 30 numbered copies on vergé pur fil, the only large-paper copies.
"Collection Goncourt" ex-libris pasted to a flyleaf.

"When Batouala was first published in Paris a half-century ago, it was not only an event of major literary importance, but also a turning point in both the intellectual and political history of contemporary Africa. A creation of Rene Maran, an Afro-Caribbean who had years of direct experience in Africa as an employee of France's colonial service, Batouala was the first great novel about Africa by a Black writer." (Donald E. Herdeck, preface to the American translation, Heinemann, 1987).

The publication of this novel cast Maran in cultural opposition. His name became a symbol and this "véritable roman nègre" (as mentioned in its subtitle), created a scandal when the Goncourt Academy chose it instead of the well-respected Chardonne as the winner of the 1921 edition. Batouala provoked a counter-offensive from colonial writers. From 1922 onwards, they rushed to produce their own "authentic" biographies on the model of "The rise and fall of the Black man who believed he mastered the French language", as Janos Riesz ironically notes (De la littérature coloniale à la littérature africaine).

It was perhaps far from mainland French readers that the novel found its greatest influence. Naturally, the future writers of the Négritude movement such as Césaire, Damas, and Senghor all claimed Maran as a forebear. A handful of foreign authors such as Hemingway also recognized its undeniable importance: "You smell the smells of the village, you eat its food, you see the white man as the black man sees him, and after you have lived in the village you die there. That is all there is to the story, but when you have read it, you have seen Batouala, and that means that it is a great novel." (Toronto Star Weekly, 25 March 1922).

This first "cry from the Negro" (Dominique Chancé) would be followed by a great silence of the Goncourt Academy for seventy years, finally broken by Chamoiseau's brilliant Texaco, and more recently by the Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. A century after Maran he was awarded the prize for La plus secrète mémoire des hommes. Sarr also contributed the preface to the reissue of Maran's Un homme pareil aux autres.

A rare deluxe issue of the first edition of the novel that "marks the beginning of French-African prose" (Abiola Irele).