"Don't Let Yourself Be Made Game Of": Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence and the Game of Genre

Abstract

Yambo Ouologuem knows the rules of postcolonial writing; he simply chooses to break all of them. This article about Ouologuem's key 1968 novel Le devoir de violence explores how Ouologuem manipulates existing ideological underpinnings of postcolonial genre use in order to undermine the project of postcolonial writing. He manipulates genre, orality and expectations in order to disorient the reader of his novel, exposing the theoretical ideology of postcolonial writing as just as much a fiction as colonial ideology.