A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization: Love, mobility and

International Journal of Francophone Studies Volume 17 Number 1
© 2014 Intellect Ltd
Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijfs.17.1.31_1
A romantic fairy tale in the era
of globalization: Love, mobility
and cosmopolitanism in Elizabeth
Tchoungui’s Je vous souhaite la pluie
Anna-Leena Toivanen University of Eastern Finland
Abstract
Elizabeth Tchoungui’s Je vous souhaite la pluie (2006) is a pronouncedly
cosmopolitan novel as it acknowledges the intertwined character of the local and
the global. The novel could be defined as a romantic postcolonial fairy tale that is
as much informed by the African predicament as it is by global inequalities. In the
face of the fiasco of the postcolonial nation state, hopes for more viable future prospects are invested in western diasporic spaces. In this context, love represents an
important element of transnational mobility for the underprivileged protagonist
who eventually becomes the heroine of a diasporic African Cinderella tale in the
global age. The article focuses on the novel’s ways of representing intercultural
love affairs against the canvas of globalization, pondering also on the possibility of
a truly cosmopolitan future and the obstacles on its way.
Résumé
Je vous souhaite la pluie (2006) d’Elizabeth Tchoungui est un roman à tendance
cosmopolite dans lequel l’auteure révèle la nature imbriquée des sphères locales
et globales. Le roman est apparenté à un conte de fées romantique postcolonial
marqué tout autant par une sensibilité à l’embarras africaine que par les inégalités causées par la mondialisation. Face aux échecs de l’état-nation postcolonial,
l’Occident est devenu l’espace d’espoir dans l’imagination postcoloniale africaine.
Dans ce contexte, l’amour représente un aspect central de la mobilité transnationale pour la protagoniste, une Cendrillon africaine des temps contemporains. Le
présent article s’attache à définir la manière dont le roman dépeint les relations
amoureuses interculturelles dans le cadre de la mondialisation, et envisage également l’éventualité d’un avenir véritablement cosmopolite ainsi que les obstacles
qu’il rencontre.
The implications of the transnational turn mark the field of contemporary
francophone African literature in terms of thematic issues and authors’
locations. In the works of third-generation African writers, the boundaries
of the African continent and the postcolonial nation state are continuously transcended and more global approaches to style and vision adopted
(Okuyade 2013: 7). In the words of Alain Mabanckou, ‘Africa is no longer
IJFS 17 (1) pp. 31–50 © Intellect Ltd 2014
31
Keywords
Africa
cosmopolitanism
Elizabeth Tchoungui
globalization
mobility
romance
1. See for instance
Monique Ilboudo’s Le
mal de peau (1992),
Fatoumata Fathy
Sidibé’s Une saison
africaine (2006),
Nathalie Etoke’s Je
vois du soleil dans tes
yeux (2008), Marie
NDiaye’s Trois femmes
puissantes (2009) and
Fatou Diome’s Celles
qui attendent (2010).
solely in Africa’ (2011: 87, original emphasis). While migrancy is by no
means a new theme in African literatures, there has, nevertheless, been a
change in the ‘scale of the global political economy in which the new writers [...] function’ (Adesanmi 2004: 236–37). Transnational mobility has
also become a focal element in francophone women’s writing, where
fictional characters interpellated by the lures of diaspora are driven to faire
la France under diverse conditions. The contexts in which mobility and
dislocation are embedded vary from the experiences of the upwardly
mobile national elite to the predicament of illegal immigration and human
trafficking. The flip side of the migratory flows, that is, the failures of the
postcolonial nation states to provide more hopeful future horizons to their
citizens, is also often addressed. As the works of writers such as Fatou
Diome demonstrate, not everyone has the possibility to emigrate, and
there are always those who are mobility-poor and stay behind without
entering the flows of global movement (Toivanen 2011). It can hence be
argued that not all diasporic narratives leave the local/national scale
unaddressed. Indeed, as Tanure Ojaide (2008: 46) argues, there is actually an ongoing ‘phenomenon of Africans abroad writing about Africa and
African experiences’. Yet, the diasporic distance together with the fact that
many African writers are addressing mainly western audiences can result
in ‘a lack of realistic reflection of the place, people, worldview, and sensibility of Africa’ (Ojaide 2008: 45). In this sense, a text’s setting on the
African continent can, according to Ojaide (2008: 45), become ‘a convenient tool rather than a true reflection or relevant milieu toward an artistic
function’. At best, however, in transnational African writing, the local
and the global become so genuinely intertwined that together they generate a perspective that could be defined as cosmopolitan awareness.
The francophone African women writers’ diasporic narratives expose
the gendered and class-sensitive nature of migrancy and dislocation. One
important aspect of transnational mobility in the gendered African
diasporic narratives is the love/sex factor.1 There are novels in which
underprivileged African characters actively seek contact with Europeans
in order to marry and emigrate, or if they are in the position of an illegal
immigrant, to secure a more stable position in their new homelands. Then
there are romances that take place during the character’s stay in Europe.
These stories sometimes entail a return to the homeland with the new
partner. In either case, the Euro-African romances face several challenges
that are posed by the cultural and social clashes that result from the
romantically and/or sexually motivated encounter. These intercultural
love stories and the hindrances they meet serve as a literary terrain on
which to explore the effects of globalization in the colonial aftermath, as
well as the possibilities of a cosmopolitan dialogue. Issues such as location,
race, gender and sexuality are woven into the fabric of global inequality
that marks the fissure between the West and the Global South.
Consequently, these postcolonial romances are loaded with complex meanings, good intentions and benevolence, as well as conflicts and power
struggles.
In this article, I focus on Elizabeth Tchoungui’s novel Je vous souhaite la
pluie, published in 2006. The novel can hardly be said to belong to the
mainstream of francophone African women’s literature or the postcolonial
32
Anna-Leena Toivanen
literary canon as it has been largely neglected by both postcolonial and
francophone literary discourses.2 Besides the work in question, Tchoungui
also published the novel Bamako climax in 2010 and featured in a short
story collection Sept filles en colère together with six other women authors
(Bricoult et al. 2007). Tchoungui is probably better known for her extraliterary career as a journalist and television presenter. The author has
partly African origins – Tchoungui was born in 1974 of a Cameroonian
father and a French mother – but is currently living outside the continent,
being hence a somewhat typical representative of mobile third-generation
African writers. Je vous souhaite la pluie is a novel that is strongly informed
by diasporic conscience in the way it intertwines African and European
realities. The novel’s narrative voice is humoristic and witty, and the
language particularly rich, mixing standard French with words and
expressions common in the Cameroonian setting in which part of the
action takes place. The novel’s language use is a stylistic means of evoking
a sense of Cameroonian locality in a francophone context, thus contributing to the intertwinement of the local and the global. On a general level, it
can be said that the novel is very entertaining despite the fact that it
discusses difficult issues. The novel embodies elements that could be
described as fantastic and fairy tale-like, for despite the obstacles standing
in the way of the heroine’s love relationship and her professional success
story, she eventually finds herself rewarded for her sacrifices and hardships. In my reading of the novel, I focus on its ways of representing EuroAfrican love relationships against the canvas of globalization. I am
particularly interested in the novel’s efforts to articulate a cosmopolitan
perspective in which the local and the global become seamlessly intertwined and which, while not ignoring the imbalances marking the global
world order, may also suggest a truly cosmopolitan horizon beyond the
colonial legacy and its neo-colonial aftermath. This vision of the future
would be extremely difficult to realize; the novel seems to be aware of this
difficulty despite its highly romantic motivations. The novel’s way of
exploring a Euro-African love story in a context, which actively entwines
the local with the global does not happen at the expense of an African/
Cameroonian locality, but rather by rewriting the local into the texture of
the global. This diasporic love story does not leave unaddressed the predicament of the postcolonial African nation state in the era of globalization,
although towards the end of the novel, the focus is placed on the professional diasporic success story of the protagonist.
Notes on cosmopolitanism
Recently, the notion of cosmopolitanism has become the subject of growing
critical attention in many scholarly fields, including that of postcolonial
studies. Most of the current understandings of cosmopolitanism are, essentially, critical revisions of its more classical forms that were often motivated
by western universalist ideals (Delanty 2009: 51, 69). In order to distance
themselves from the legacy of the preceding, admittedly elitist, cosmopolitanisms, their contemporary counterparts are often called either new or critical cosmopolitanisms. At the core of the notion of cosmopolitanism lies the
idea of world citizenship, or as Timothy Brennan’s (1997) book title expresses
it, the idea of ‘being at home in the world’. Cosmopolitanism also entails the
A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization
33
2. With the exception
of Marie-Rose
Abomo-Maurin’s
(2011) article ‘Je vous
souhaite la pluie, le
français ­camerounais
dans tous ses états:
Manifestation
d’une appartenance
nationale évidente’
focusing on linguistic
issues, not on literary
­analysis as such.
idea of a global perspective that is informed by the local but simultaneously
exceeds its boundaries. Essentially, cosmopolitanism refers to ethical responsibility and awareness of the world. The way in which the notion of cosmopolitanism breaks down the binary opposition between the local and the
global and the national and the transnational seems to be particularly relevant in the contemporary postcolonial and globalized context in which
‘conventional hegemonies and polarizations are revealed to be insufficient to
explain cultural transformations’ (Arapoglou et al. 2014: 1).
While cosmopolitanism is aware of the divisive nature of the colonial
heritage, it nevertheless looks for unity beyond such divisions. As the
German sociologist Ulrich Beck (2002: 17) maintains, in ‘the 21st century
the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only
globally’. What is central in Beck’s (2002: 18) understanding of cosmopolitanism is that it represents a ‘dialogic imagination’ in contrast to
the ‘monologic imagination’ that marks merely national perspectives. The
dialogic imagination, according to Beck (2002: 18), ‘corresponds to the
coexistence of rival ways of life in the individual existence, which makes it
a matter of fate to compare, reflect, criticize, understand, combine contradictory certainties’. Beck (2002: 19) also stresses the importance of locality in understanding the notion of cosmopolitanism by arguing that ‘there
is no cosmopolitanism without localism’. This point is also underlined by
the postcolonial literary scholar Neil Lazarus (2011: 121), according to
whom a ‘cosmopolitanism worthy of the name’ that Brennan (1997: 309)
has been calling for would consider local specificities more carefully. In a
similar vein, Ranka Primorac (2010: 52) writes about local cosmopolitanism, by which she refers to ‘an awareness of the transnational and/or the
universal situated within a condition of local embeddedness’. These kinds
of conceptual revisions are relevant indeed, as in the postcolonial field, the
notion of cosmopolitanism has been criticized for turning its back on the
sometimes uneasy local material conditions of the Global South. Robert
Spencer’s (2011: 2) words summarize the critiques as follows: ‘Cosmopolites
are viewed as free-floating and ethereal creatures: recklessly, deludedly
and perhaps even selfishly indifferent to the travails and responsibilities of
those who are confined through choice or necessity to the local sphere’.
Cosmopolitanism’s elitist biases have been pointed out by postcolonial
scholars with Marxist emphases in particular, for example, Brennan,
Lazarus, Benita Parry, Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, San Juan and Andrew
Smith (Spencer 2011: 24–32). As Spencer (2011: 25) maintains, the main
concern in the critiques against the notion of cosmopolitanism has to do
with the unevenness of globalization and the homogenized understanding
of mobility, which does not take into account the various contexts in which
transnational mobility actually takes place, in other words, the ‘uneven
access to the privileges of travel’. A true cosmopolitanism, as Spencer
(2011: 4) stresses repeatedly throughout his book, Cosmopolitan Criticism
and Postcolonial Literature, is not only about idealistic virtues such as critical self-awareness, responsibility and ‘sensitivity beyond one’s immediate
milieu’, but also an acknowledgement of the political and material conditions that define the unsymmetrical nature of the global world order that
connects the so-called citizens of the world to one another. A true cosmopolitanism, in other words, ‘entails cognizance of those impoverished and
34
Anna-Leena Toivanen
immobile citizens presently prevented from helping to shape the world
order’ (Spencer 2011: 33). This is an important point to emphasize: while
mobility seems to be an important aspect in understanding cosmopolitanism, it cannot be its prerequisite, since cosmopolitanism must be constantly
revised from the viewpoint of those who lack the privilege of taking part in
global movements. Moreover, the diversity of the mobile subjects themselves is a point that needs to be stressed. Achille Mbembe, who highlights
the importance of cosmopolitanism as a counter-force to African nativisms, identifies both elite and non-elite forms of cosmopolitanisms. The
latter category is called ‘practical cosmopolitanism’, by which Mbembe
(2008: 109) refers to the petit migrants/small migrants, that is, people
‘involved in the spatial strategies of various networks build around trade,
religion or prostitution’. Practical cosmopolitanism often entails irregular
conditions related to access to land or immigration and is marked by
constant instability (Mbembe 2008: 109). Mbembe’s acknowledgement of
the existence of different kinds of cosmopolitanisms is an important point
that Simon Gikandi has also underlined. Gikandi (2010: 23) conceives
cosmopolitanism primarily as an elitist notion and argues that disenfranchised subjects such as refugees represent a threat to its logic. Gikandi
(2010: 24–25) rightly points out that mobility has become a paradigmatic
feature of contemporary postcolonial discourses, and draws attention to
the fact that mobility in itself does not automatically generate a cosmopolitan vision. Refugees, or ‘the rejects of failed states’ as Gikandi (2010:
26) calls them, challenge the redemptive narrative of cosmopolitanism by
reproducing parochial forms of locality in metropolitan spaces, which can
be seen as a refusal to adopt cosmopolitan ideals of openness and boundary-crossing dialogue. This very point is also underlined by Ali Behdad
(2000: 399), who claims that in postcolonial studies, there seems to be a
very strong ‘tendency to generalize the oppositional, redemptive, and
transformative possibilities of displacement’. Gikandi’s (2010: 28) account
of the darker side of global migratory movements draws attention to the
fact that these flows remain ‘dominated by […] coerced migrants rather
than the free-willing cosmopolitan subjects’, even though the former often
gain less critical attention than more fortunate latter counterparts. In
other words, it is important to take into account the fact that mobility does
not automatically denote freedom, but, instead, deracination generated by
inhospitable circumstances ‘back home’ (Schoene 2010: 3).
While cosmopolitanism is understood as a dialogic perspective and an
ethical gesture towards a ‘meaningful and viable world-communal future’
(Schoene 2010: 1) in which the local and the global become profoundly
intertwined, cosmopolitanism’s relation to globalization is not always that
clear. Even though globalization is a condition that further emphasizes the
importance of boundary-crossing responsibility, globalization and cosmopolitanism are not the same thing. In Walter D. Mignolo’s (2002: 157)
thinking, these two are, indeed, opposing forces: while globalization strives
at homogenizing the planet from above, cosmopolitanism represents a sort
of a globalization from below that ‘invokes […] the reactions to globalization from those populations and geohistorical areas of the planet that
suffer the consequences of the global economy’. In other words, if globalization can be conceived as a western capitalist and neo-liberal project of
A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization
35
managing the world (Krishna 2009: 2–3), cosmopolitanism is directed
towards ‘planetary conviviality’ (Mignolo 2002: 157). With its ideology of
world power, globalization can be seen to represent a sequel to colonialism. This very link to colonialism makes postcolonial theoretical discourses
particularly well positioned to scrutinize the inequalities of globalization
(Behdad 2005: 77; Krishna 2009: 2; Xie 2006: 64–65). Globalization,
then, could be conceived as a condition whose unethical and unequal
consequences necessitate a counter-discourse which, besides scrutinizing
and criticizing the imbalances, also sets out to imagine a better future
(Spencer 2011: 39). As Spencer (2011: 11) and Schoene (2010: 15),
respectively, argue, literature is a realm in which this sort of critical and
utopian activity can take place. Spencer’s and Schoene’s approaches to
literature differ in that while Schoene implies that some texts articulate a
more cosmopolitan approach than others, Spencer (2011: 7) argues that
cosmopolitanism is not a feature of the text as such, but in a more general
sense an impulse that invites the reader to read the text through a cosmopolitan lens. What is more, while Schoene (2010: 10) sees cosmopolitanism firmly rooted in present realities ‘rather than mobilising for the future
fulfilment of any one or another set of utopian ideals’, Spencer cherishes
cosmopolitanism’s utopian and future-oriented qualities. In my reading of
Je vous souhaite la pluie, I am more inclined to follow Spencer’s train of
thought as I am less interested in trying to prove whether the novel in
question is in itself cosmopolitan than in how it may be expressing cosmopolitan ethics and global responsibility, or, the other way around, how it
represents elements that can be seen as obstacles on the way to a truly
cosmopolitan future.
Male hunting versus real love
Tchoungui’s Je vous souhaite la pluie is a very entertaining novel despite the
fact that it deals with the gap between the realities of underprivileged
subjects of the Global South and those that lead more fortunate lives in
western metropolizes. The story in itself is a rather banal one: it is essentially a love story that involves immigration and professional/artistic fulfilment. The narration is marked by a humorous and witty overtone whose
bite is directed against all figures almost equally, although towards the
end of the novel, it eventually takes the protagonist’s side in a more
pronounced fashion. In terms of the narrative structure, the novel is
divided into two parts: the first part is entitled ‘Hivernage’ and the second
‘France mirage’. The first part consists of chapters depicting the protagonist’s life in Cameroon, whereas the second is focused on her experiences
in the French diaspora. These subtitles convey the idea of a transition from
an unsatisfactory stasis to a reality that does not correspond to one’s
expectations. Yet, it is obvious that despite some failed expectations, the
novel constructs the diasporic space of France as a space of hope and
movement forward: if in Cameroon the protagonist simply hibernates and
waits for her moment to ‘bloom’, France has professional fulfilment to
offer. Thus in one way, Je vous souhaite la pluie represents mobility as closely
connected to the process of gaining a new subjectivity (see Cresswell and
Uteng 2008: 2). The novel’s way of dealing with both African and diasporic
contexts exposes the intertwined character of the local and the global
36
Anna-Leena Toivanen
by shedding light on the reasons that motivate emigration. The story is
not so much about the protagonist’s journey to France as about her life
balancing between the two interconnected yet very different realities; nor
is it simply about leaving, but also about the horizonless conditions left
behind. This idea is also partly conveyed by the structuring of the novel
into two parts of equal length. Moreover, the fact that the protagonist’s
future husband is a Frenchman she meets during his stint in Africa means
that the novel is also about Europeans’ experiences in Africa. In other
words, the novel represents practices of travel from different viewpoints:
first, there is the privileged and trouble-free journey of the protagonist’s
future lover/fiancé from France to Cameroon, and then there is the protagonist’s more challenging travel from Cameroon to France that reads as a
much more ‘threatening, transgressive and abject’ form of mobility (see
Cresswell 2006: 178).
The novel’s protagonist, a young Cameroonian woman named Ngazan,
is a true heroine in the proper sense of the word: not only is she beautiful,
intelligent, virtuous and brave despite her poverty, but also an aspiring
writer whose glorious future as an artist is overshadowed by her day-today struggle to provide for her mother and her younger siblings. In other
words, the narrative draws a picture of a postcolonial African Cinderella
figure from the very outset. The novel’s opening sentence captures the
protagonist’s dilemma of being poor, beautiful, virtuous and proud: ‘Elle
avait trop d’orgueil pour faire boutique mon cul’ (Tchoungui 2006: 13).
As the narrator suggests, Ngazan could easily obtain a higher standard of
living by merchandising her looks as a prostitute as so many of her
companions in misfortune have done. This, however, is never an option
for Ngazan who is extremely proud of her family tree: ‘Elle n’est pas
n’importe qui, elle ne descend pas de n’importe quel arbre’ (Tchoungui
2006: 15). These two features, beauty and pride, are central in defining
the heroine and her struggle from postcolonial predicament to diasporic
success. Later it is revealed that Ngazan’s strict views on sexuality result
from the trauma of having been sexually abused in her early youth, which
also explains her refusal to have sex with Alexandre in the beginning of
their relationship.
From the very start, the narrative displays ways in which the local and
the global are essentially intertwined with each other. The local reality
represented in problems that are crystallized in the clause ‘le Président
[qui] a décidé d’en finir avec le pays’ (Tchoungui 2006: 15) is contrasted
against the lures of globalization by which the disenfranchised postcolonial
subjects are tempted through the constant offerings of different electronic
media. Ngazan’s teenage sister’s dream of becoming a celebrity like her
idol Beyoncé conveys the idea of a homogenized global culture where
people share the same dreams and desires no matter what their geographical location may be. Ngazan’s sister’s naïve, materialist dreams of a wealthier life that can be obtained simply by being beautiful and at the disposal of
the right people – or, to put it more bluntly, sugar daddies – at the right
time signals an opportunism that is in striking contrast to Ngazan’s strict
moral backbone. Ngazan is represented as an incorrupt heroine who
remains loyal to her principles and, to a certain extent, resists the temptation of what Evan Mwangi has so aptly called ‘postcolonial self-delusion’
A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization
37
(Tchoungui 2006: 132), referring to the unrealistic dreams that disenfranchised postcolonial subjects cherish about diasporic life in western
metropolizes. Ngazan is too busy dealing with the constant uncertainties of
a life that consists of feeding her family and avoiding any additional distress
that could drive their already precarious existence further to the edge. For
her, a good day is one without unexpected catastrophes; the next day, the
same struggle starts all over again. It is in this context of constant struggling that many of Ngazan’s friends have undertaken the effort to find a
‘Whitie’ to marry in order to escape their current miseries by emigrating to
France, which is naïvely imagined as a paradisiacal promised land. This
‘hunt’ for a Blanc, as the novel represents it, is a sort of national sport
among the young underprivileged and uneducated Cameroonian women
who conceive it as the only way they can strive for what they see as a
more valuable life. Of course, Ngazan’s high moral standards prevent her
from engaging in this activity. From this perspective it is interesting that,
in the end, it is the virtuous Ngazan who gets her white prince, not the
‘promiscuous’ women actively and somewhat professionally hunting them.
In this sense, the novel conveys a surprisingly conservative and judging
message concerning women’s sexuality. In like manner, the narrative
contributes to the conventional imagery of feminine travel as a passive
enterprise (Bredeloup 2013: 175) by portraying the protagonist’s mobility
as dependent on the benevolence of her French fiancé.
Instead of hunting a Blanc, Ngazan has adopted a more ‘noble’ way of
escaping her harsh realities: writing. In the beginning of the novel, she
writes mainly for herself because there are no realistic prospects for publication. Her negotiations with a publisher have ended up in a humiliating
way, with the publisher asking for her sexual services in exchange for
advancing her writing career. This episode is one of the wrongdoings
against the protagonist that will be recompensed at the end of the fairy
tale-like novel. Indeed, in addition to the love affair, writing and literature
are a central thematic concern in the novel. Besides representing an escape
from reality, literature is represented as a realm through which the reader
has a chance to encounter different worlds beyond her own immediate
and familiar surroundings. Ngazan is both an enthusiastic writer and
reader, and while in her own texts she focuses on Yaoundéan slum life,
reading world classics has enabled her to widen her perspective beyond
the local. The novel thus articulates the idea of literature promoting
cosmopolitan awareness. When Ngazan’s own work of fiction is finally
published, an ironic twist is generated by the fact that the publisher is also
engaged in arms trade. This rude reality behind the idealistic aspiration of
enhancing global awareness through literature is illustrative of the novel’s
overall vision of the material hindrances that stand in the way of a truly
cosmopolitan future.
While Ngazan does not participate in the hunt for a white male, she
ends up falling in love with a Frenchman just as the romance genre of Je
vous souhaite la pluie requires. The narrator continues to stress that their
relationship cannot be compared to those of the others: while Ngazan’s
friends are represented as opportunistic women with no sexual morals,
Ngazan is a woman genuinely in love, wondering ‘Dans quelles tables de
la loi est-il écrit qu’une femme africaine n’est avec un Blanc que pour son
38
Anna-Leena Toivanen
argent ?’ (Tchoungui 2006: 81). Yet, when Ngazan meets her future
husband, a ‘joli Whitie’ called Alexandre, the context of their encounter is
loaded with meanings that are far beyond their control. Their love story is
continuously haunted by the fact that, in many respects, they represent
two worlds far apart. While Alexandre is constantly aware of his privileged
status, essentially tied to the colonial legacy and thus a cause for guilt feelings, Ngazan is prone to see herself as a perpetual victim, or alternatively
believes that she is taken for a mere opportunist seeking the easiest way
out of the country and the continent under the wing of a white lover. The
love story between Ngazan and Alexandre is marked by misunderstandings or, rather, a constant fear of becoming misunderstood because of the
thick net of historical, cultural and political meanings that informs their
intercultural romantic encounter. As a case in point, Ngazan accuses
Alexandre of maintaining ‘[un] discours de Blanc généreux’ (Tchoungui
2006: 74), whereas Alexandre reproaches her for her repeated ‘crises
d’orgueil’ (Tchoungui 2006: 85). Mutual feelings of guilt that surface
regularly betray the weight of the historical heritage that the couple
unavoidably drags along within the intimacy of their relationship. Indeed,
there is a certain colonialist versus colonized configuration that maintains
its grip and that cannot be undone simply by loving each other.
When Ngazan sees Alexandre for the first time, she is enjoying a night
out with her friend. Ngazan, who observes Alexandre’s movements on the
dance floor, sees in this ‘joli Whitie’ something refreshing and new that
she has not seen in a man before: ‘[il] a l’air un peu perdu, à peine descendu
de l’A 340 d’Air France. […] Il est vierge, il est appétissant’ (Tchoungui
2006: 52–53). As these words suggest, it seems that Alexandre awakens
a male-hunter in Ngazan in some unintended way. However, Alexandre’s
virtues have been noticed by some ‘hyènes éminemment cambrées’
(Tchoungui 2006: 53), that is to say some other local women with a
much more professional and ‘immoral’ grip on the white male hunt than
the virtuous and innocent Ngazan. Despite the hyènes, Ngazan succeeds in
catching the Whitie’s attention, and as the reader may expect, they meet
again when Alexandre suddenly comes to dine at the restaurant where
Ngazan works as a waitress. When Ngazan tells her colleague about her
interest in that particular Whitie, the colleague’s first comment betrays a
common idea concerning Euro-African love stories, an idea that makes
Ngazan feel guilty: ‘Eh, les femmes d’aujourd’hui ! […]
����������������������
Toi aussi tu cherches ton visa pour la France ?’ (Tchoungui 2006: 57). White equals a
single ticket out of misery, and this is something of which even Ngazan’s
youngest siblings are already aware: ‘Tu joues ta coupe du monde ce soir,
tu dois nous ramener le trophée, moi je veux aller étudier aux States.
Ngazan, tu dois scorer ce soir’ (Tchoungui 2006: 64). The potential
increase in her standard of living – and that of her family – that the relationship with Alexandre may entail is an issue that profoundly disturbs
Ngazan. Her family is openly excited about Ngazan’s relationship with a
Whitie; they already imagine her sending them la manne from France
(Tchoungui 2006: 111). Ngazan herself acknowledges the fact that
Alexandre represents ‘une poule aux œufs d’or’ (Tchoungui 2006: 75), a
new horizon (Tchoungui 2006: 77) and a ticket to la terre promise. Ngazan
is also ‘curieuse de connaître ce pays qui la faisait tant rêver enfant et
A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization
39
adolescente’ (Tchoungui 2006: 84), but is unwilling to openly admit her
emigration aspirations to anyone, even to her future husband. In short,
while Ngazan is as much aware of the advantages that the romantic relationship entails as everyone else, she simultaneously feels uncomfortable
about it:
Avec de l’argent, je pourrai le [petit frère] mettre dans les meilleures écoles,
puis l’envoyer à l’université, et qui sait en France … Ngazan balaye aussitôt
cette pensée qui parasite son attirance pure pour Alexandre. Elle refuse de
songer aux conséquences heureuses d’une histoire avec lui.
(Tchoungui 2006: 65)
This is one of the rare passages in the novel in which the narrator gives
voice to Ngazan’s guilty consciousness concerning this issue. For the rest
of the novel, the narrative falls silent about the potential moral dilemma
that casts its shadow on Ngazan’s motives for becoming involved with
Alexandre. Instead, Ngazan starts to take any implicit misgivings as direct
accusations against which she strenuously defends herself. In the end of
the novel, when Ngazan has made her breakthrough as a writer in France,
she is interviewed in a TV show by a host she considers extremely hostile.
When the host starts to make presumptions about the link between her
relationship with Alexandre and her blooming literary career in the
diaspora, Ngazan makes no allusions what so ever in her answers to
the ‘happy consequences’ that her marriage to a Frenchman may have
entailed. This could signal as much Ngazan’s coming to terms with her
background as her unwillingness to be identified with the kind of opportunistic female compatriots she does not respect, but also, more importantly, her continuous unease with the issue.
Dialogues and the gaps between
While Ngazan is critical towards her sister’s admiration of global cultural
products, her own references concerning romantic relations draw ironically from similar sources: she compares Alexandre’s way of speaking to
discourses she knows from French soap operas and applies Cosmopolitan’s
instructions as to how not to ‘monopoliser la conversation’ (Tchoungui
2006: 70) during their first date. These superficial and homogenizing
articulations of globality in the form of consumerist popular culture are
not, however, the novel’s only way of exposing the intertwined nature of
the global and the local. There are several instances in the narrative that
expose an awareness beyond one’s immediate surroundings, an adoption
of a cosmopolitan vision of the world. One good example of this is the
following breathtakingly long passage describing the route of a used
motorcycle from Belgium to Yaoundé, where Ngazan takes one of her
regular taxi rides on her way to work:
Reuteuteu, reuteuteu, l’engin doit en être à sa douzième vie. Né en Belgique il y
a une bonne vingtaine d’années, vendu à un Wallon puis à un Flamand puis
à un Liégeois, racheté par un routard pour traverser le Sahara, avec l’idée de
le revendre pour payer son billet de retour, mort étouffé sous une dune aux
abords de Nouakchott, ressuscité par un Mauritanien débrouillard, repéré
40
Anna-Leena Toivanen
par un grossiste d’occasion sénégalais, expédié dans un conteneur à destination de Douala, détourné par un douanier, revendu à une cousine commerçante, que ses affaires de plus en plus florissantes ont conduite à acheter une
Mercedes Kompressor – un véhicule à la hauteur de son nouveau standing –
et, moyennant quelques liasses de CFA, à se débarrasser de cette inconvenante épave, qui pour finir est venue grossir la flotte de taxis improbables de
Tchouangang Kontchou Victor Célestin, heureux propriétaire d’une dizaine
de brouettes motorisées que maudiraient les experts du protocole de Kyoto
susceptibles d’aventurer leurs fesses sur les sièges défoncés, tant elles contribuent à la pollution générale de la planète.
(Tchoungui 2006: 32–33)
The existence of a world beyond the local is conceived here in terms of
circulation of goods, which is of course one central element of globalization. Another instance worth citing concerns more directly cosmopolitan
ethics, that is, an awareness of the existence of others who do not share
the same environment but to whom one is necessarily connected. These
are the words of a village chief who gives his blessing to Ngazan’s and
Alexandre’s marriage despite the disapproval of Ngazan’s father:
Nous voici maintenant au troisième millénaire. Nous devons nous habituer aux peuples plus lointains, tu n’entends pas tous les jours sur RFI que
la mondialisation est déjà là ? Les hommes qu’on appelle astronautes vont
même voir s’il n’y a pas des étrangers sur la Lune, au risque de déranger
Dieu dans son ciel ! Et toi tu refuses quelqu’un sous prétexte qu’il n’est pas
noir comme toi ? Ecoute d’abord ce que le Blanc de Ngazan a à dire.
(Tchoungui 2006: 102)
The words of the village chief to Ngazan’s reluctant father bespeak a truly
cosmopolitan awareness, which is further fortified by the invitation to a
dialogue addressed to Alexandre, ideally a world citizen just like the locals.
Here, it becomes obvious that mobility as such is no prerequisite or measure of cosmopolitan sensibility: cosmopolitanism is essentially about openness to hear what the other has to say despite the cultural and ethnic
differences between the interlocutors.
More often than expressing a sense of cosmopolitan unity, however,
the novel gives voice to the gap that lies between the Global South and the
West in numerous respects. This inevitable disparity is expressed through
the tensions that mark Ngazan’s and Alexandre’s relationship. Instead of
claiming the position of equal world citizens, the couple is constantly driven
apart by the fact that they represent two very different worlds. This distance
is obvious in the following passage describing Alexandre’s accommodation
during his stay in Cameroon: ‘Du balcon d’Alexandre qui surplombe les
bas quartiers et leur perpétuel tohu-bohu, elle goûte l’air frais des collines,
celui qui n’atteint jamais les ghettos de misère coincés dans la touffeur des
vallées’ (Tchoungui 2006: 77). Alexandre has the chance to breathe fresh
air and observe city life from a privileged tourist perspective that Ngazan
can only dream of. Even their honeymoon is filled with similar tensions;
the Cameroonian nature reserve that they visit is a dream destination for
western tourists yearning to see exotic African wildlife. The nature reserve
A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization
41
that Ngazan has never visited before is an ironic reminder of the fact that
tourism is a pastime that only the privileged can enjoy. Most disenfranchised postcolonial subjects do not even have the possibility to travel inside
the boundaries of their home county, not to mention forms of mobility
with transnational dimensions. Indeed, as Aedín Ní Loingsigh (2009: 28)
observes in her study on francophone African travel writing, one needs to
pay specific attention to the privileges of travelling as well as to the realities
of travel in an immigrant context ‘where the type of mobility involved
appears most irreconcilable with the travel practices of tourists and recreational travellers’. In effect, the question of mobility lies at the heart of the
social distance that in a profound way marks Ngazan’s and Alexandre’s
relationship: it is Ngazan who eventually emigrates while Alexandre is
positioned as a tourist. As Sankaran Krishna articulates it,
the different life prospects between first and third worlds is indicated by the
large numbers of people in the latter desirous of emigrating – legally or illegally – to the former, and the marked absence of a movement of people in
the opposite direction, except for tourism.
(2009: 8)
This somewhat unidirectional form of mobility is an aspect of globalization
to which Je vous souhaite la pluie gives voice.
The issue of limits set on mobility becomes even more glaring in a
chapter that depicts the couple’s visit to the French Embassy in order to
obtain information concerning Ngazan’s voyage to France. The clients of
the embassy are divided into two queues according to their national and
racial affiliations: ‘L’une des entrées est réservée à la masse négroïde des
quémandeurs de visa, l’autre au personnel, aux Français et aux ressortissants de pays dignes d’être exemptés de l’attente interminable’ (Tchoungui
2006: 87). The embassy is described as ‘la forteresse tricolore’, and the
officials working there as the almighty gatekeepers of France. In short, the
premises of the embassy do anything but encourage boundary-crossing
dialogues about the cosmopolitan ideal:
Les deux guichetières officient derrière une vitre blindée, probablement là
pour leur éviter de subir les représailles des multiples demandeurs de visa
éconduits sans motif. La vitre est percée de deux hygiaphones, car ‘les maladies tropicales sont vicieuses, ma p’tite dame, ces sauvages, on ne sait jamais
quelles cochonneries ils peuvent traîner !’.
(Tchoungui 2006: 90)
The staff at the embassy is represented as merely concerned with acquiring a tan at the swimming pool of the local Hilton hotel, and their decisions concerning visas are haphazard. The hostile treatment that Ngazan
receives at the embassy is just one of the setbacks on the path of the
couple’s love affair. Besides the challenges that forteresse France poses to
Ngazan’s practical ‘being at home in the world’, once in France the attitude of her parents-in-law implies that their son and Ngazan cannot possible have anything in common because of their different cultural, social
and racial backgrounds. The argument that takes place between Ngazan
42
Anna-Leena Toivanen
and the parents-in-law is symptomatic of the difficulty to engage in a
genuine dialogue in a situation that is strongly informed by historical
power relations and wrongdoings. While Ngazan’s parents-in-law resort
to colonialist clichés on Africanness, Ngazan uses their feelings of guilt as
a weapon against them. The dispute causes a break in their relationship
that further widens the gap between the two worlds and marks a retreat
from any attempt to establish a dialogue.
La terre promise
Ngazan’s arrival in Paris is shadowed by deceptions as the ‘paradis
présumé de millions d’Africains’ (Tchoungui 2006: 123) proves to be a
mere illusion. Ngazan becomes immediately aware that her skin colour is
wrong, and as the narrator states, she feels ‘plus perdue’ (Tchoungui
2006: 127) than the father of her close friend Princesse when he arrived
in the colonial metropolis some 50 years earlier. This suggests that the
link to the colonial heritage has hardly all but loosened its grip in the era
of globalization. Symptomatically, the first chapters of the second part of
the novel remain silent about Ngazan’s relationship to her husband and
focus instead on her adventures among the Parisian cultural elite with her
friend Princesse, who has lived in the metropolis for several years. In this
sense, the novel’s thematic focus shifts from a romance to the pursuit of
the heroine’s professional and artistic aspirations and eventual fulfilment.
Paris is represented both as a hostile and cold city but also as a place in
which one’s dreams can come true – in contrast to what was totally impossible back ‘at home’. Adopting a similar mocking tone of racist anthropological and ethnological discourses as the narrator in Bessora’s novel 53
cm (1999), the narrator of Je vous souhaite la pluie depicts Ngazan as a
modern day Stanley Livingstone ‘en mission ethnologique dans la jungle
parisienne’ (Tchoungui 2006: 146) during which she becomes acquainted
with what she considers the strange features of Parisian life. The narrative’s emphasis on Ngazan’s observations of local life in Paris position her
as an African female traveller, contributing thus to the discourse on
cultural encounters between Africa and Europe. In studies on travel writing, this position as active observer and participant has often been denied
African travelling subjects, which results in ‘a vision of them as somehow
incapable of contributing authoritatively to transcultural debate’, as Aedín
Ní Loingsigh (2009: 9) argues. In Je vous souhaite la pluie, it would be hard
for the reader to dismiss the protagonist’s authority and agency in this
respect. Moreover, the gendered aspects of travel are also taken into
account in the novel, for as Sylvie Bredeloup (2013: 175) maintains,
migratory adventures are often associated with masculinity. Ngazan as a
fictional figure is certainly an African woman who ‘claim[s] the status of
the adventurer for [herself]’ (Bredeloup 2013: 176). Ngazan’s adventurous journey into the realities of the Parisian cultural elite is filled with
absurdities and bewilderment, but also more serious accounts of her growing awareness of the inequality that separates Africa from Europe. This
awareness is exemplified in the words Ngazan addresses to Princesse:
Tu vas encore me dire que je pose une question de villageoise, mais pourquoi
les Parisiens seraient-ils malheureux alors qu’ils vivent dans la plus belle
A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization
43
ville du monde et ne risquent jamais de souffrir de la faim, ni de mourir de
maladie faute d’argent pour payer les soins, merci la sécurité sociale ?
(Tchoungui 2006: 150)
Princesse, who is addicted to cocaine and suffers from an eating disorder,
makes Ngazan see beyond her own perspective and understand that people
all around the world have their problems irrespective of their standard of
living: ‘En Afrique on a le ventre vide, en Europe on a le cœur gros. Tant
que tu n’auras pas compris ça, tu resteras dans ta brousse’ (Tchoungui
2006: 189–90). This striking realization is truly cosmopolitan in spirit.
Ngazan’s perspective is further widened as she realizes the relative privilege of her own position compared to those Africans who immigrate under
irregular conditions. She meets an old friend of hers in a nightclub, and
finds out that she supports herself by working as a prostitute. Once again,
Ngazan resorts to her discourse of dignity and moral. Her friend, living in
France with a false identity, tells Ngazan to ‘descend[re] de [s]on nuage
rose’(Tchoungui 2006: 180), for she has had the chance to ‘trouve[r] to
Blanc qui [la] protège’ whereas her friend has to ‘[se] débrouiller toute
seule’ (Tchoungui 2006: 180–81).
The fairy tale-like effect that the novel conveys is not uniquely generated by the heroine’s glorious journey from misery to limelight: the theme
of fairy tale is also a meta-literary element that the narrative employs. To
put it differently, the narrative comments overtly on its own fairy tale-like
character. There are several allusions to romantic novels, fairy tales and
their fantastic heroines. For instance, when Alexandre tells Ngazan that
she should continue to struggle to realize her dreams, Ngazan replies that
‘on n’est pas dans un roman de Barbara Cartland, mais au Cameroun’
(Tchoungui 2006: 73), a statement that, peculiarly enough, contradicts
the fact that the novel openly draws from the romantic narrative genre, as
well as with Ngazan’s observations in which Alexandre is compared to a
soap-opera hero. Ngazan herself, on the other hand, is on several occasions referred to as Cendrillon (Tchoungui 2006: 83, 191) to indicate not
only her love story with a white prince but also her diasporic literary
breakthrough. Significantly, when at the end of the novel Ngazan is invited
to a TV interview, a white limousine picks her up from her front door in
Barbès. The arrival of this fantastic white steed seals the Cinderella narrative, although the heroine has one challenge yet to face: a direct TV interview with a hostile host. Ngazan emerges from the interview as a winner,
leaving the studio during the live broadcast once she finds out that the
interviewer has not even bothered to read her novel. Thanks to the global
media network, Ngazan’s victory is beamed directly to her mother in
Cameroon. Her exit from the studio in front of an applauding audience is
not only Ngazan’s personal victory over the interviewer, but can also be
read as a sort of a collective victory for mistreated and merchandised
African female sexuality. The list of Ngazan’s attractive physical attributes
that appears in the very beginning of the novel, ‘la plus belle chute de
reins du quartier Essos, les pommettes les plus saillantes de Yaoundé 4e
arrondissement, le sourire le plus dévastateur de la province du Centre, et
la peau la plus veloutée du Cameroun’ (Tchoungui 2006: 13), is referred
to in the end when Ngazan walks out of the direct broadcast. While in the
44
Anna-Leena Toivanen
beginning these attributes are listed simply to demonstrate that Ngazan
could easily support herself and her family by merchandising her body, in
the end of the novel the allusion to ‘[l]a plus belle chute de reins du
Cameroun’ (Tchoungui 2006: 221) marks Ngazan’s sexual empowerment
and self-determination – even though she is still aware of the value of her
beauty to enhance book sales by ‘fai[re] bander les acheteurs’ (Tchoungui
2006: 205). In effect, the TV interview passage also illustrates the fact
that writers have become products on the book market and that in the
marketing and consumption of postcolonial literatures, the notion of the
exotic plays an important role, as Graham Huggan (2001) has so aptly
pointed out.
As to the possibility of boundary-crossing dialogue and understanding,
however, the novel’s ending is rather discouraging. The host’s biased
comments and Ngazan’s walking away from the broadcast suggest that
there is only room for a monologue. Furthermore, the ending places
emphasis on the ongoing mutual hostility and transforms the novel into a
kind of revenge narrative where the mistreated heroine is compensated for
all the wrongs and hardships she has encountered on her way. In this
sense, the novel finally stops short of imagining a future that could have
moved beyond the divisions generated by the colonial project, adhering
instead to a world-view that seems to further strengthen this undesirable
heritage. The hostility and biased views of the interviewer on the one hand
and Ngazan’s unyielding pride and her ‘crises d’orgueil’ on the other can
be read as parochialisms that stand in the way of an equal dialogue in
which the existence of other worlds beyond one’s own is genuinely
acknowledged and taken into account. From the viewpoint of the romantic nature of the novel, it is also noteworthy that the love aspect has by the
ending of the novel become obliterated: Alexandre’s absence from the
narrative is strikingly remarkable compared to the importance his figure is
given in the first part of the novel. This reduces him into a mere vehicle in
the protagonist’s journey from the Yaoundéan slum towards her professional fulfilment as a diasporic writer. This implicit message once again
stands in curious contradiction with the overall message of a ‘true’ and
‘sincere’ inter-cultural love that the novel wishes to convey explicitly.
Moreover, if the intercultural romantic relationship between Ngazan and
Alexandre is understood as an allegory of the possibility of a genuinely
cosmopolitan dialogue, Alexandre’s relative absence in the latter part of
the novel is a rather discouraging symptom. In the end, it seems that the
climax of the novel is Ngazan’s professional fulfilment with its slightly
revengeful overtones, as she makes her literary breakthrough in the
‘enemy territory’ of the former colonial mother country.
The novel’s narrative tone is humoristic and easy-going, and despite a
portrayal of the protagonist that is at times overly romanticizing, she is
not spared from its bite. Indeed, some of the most humorous passages in
the novel are those which expose the protagonist’s ignorance or astonishment, inviting the reader to laugh at her – benevolently. Humorous effects
are often generated when Ngazan encounters a cultural practice that is
unfamiliar to her so that she lacks the capability to successfully interpret
its meaning. These instances, besides stirring laughter in the reader, also
mark one important fact stressed throughout the novel: the globalized
A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization
45
world is fractured, not united. Before their first date in Yaoundé, Alexandre
asks Ngazan whether she knows decent restaurants. The narrator states:
‘Involontairement, Alexandre avait commis son premier impair. Comment
pouvait-il imaginer que Ngazan n’avait jamais mis pied dans un restaurant, un vrai, là où vont les Blacs […] ?’ (Tchoungui 2006: 66). The only
restaurant that comes to Ngazan’s mind at that moment is a restaurant
called Les baguettes d’or, obviously a Chinese one, although Ngazan seems
to be unaware of this. When Alexandre starts to speak about how Chinese
restaurants all over the world ‘s’adaptent à la cuisine locale’ (Tchoungui
2006: 68), Ngazan does not understand how he has come to the conclusion that the restaurant she mentioned was a Chinese one: ‘Ngazan ne
voit aucun rapport entre les baguettes et la Chine. La baguette lui évoque
plutôt la France. Elle ne s’est d’ailleurs jamais demandé pourquoi, curieusement, une enseigne chinoise utilise un symbole de la gastronomie française’ (Tchoungui 2006: 68–69). Another similar example comes later,
when Ngazan meets her future brother-in-law, a somewhat comic stereotype of a white Rastaman. The brother-in-law’s first words on his arrival
to Africa read ‘So this is motherland’ (Tchoungui 2006: 112, original
emphasis), which Ngazan finds simply absurd:
Ngazan, qui a réprimé un rire en le voyant, se demande pourquoi ce Blanc
saugrenu a l’impression d’être revenu sur la terre de ses ancêtres. Certes c’est
en Afrique il y a fort longtemps que les singes sont devenus des hommes, mais
tout de même, ne remonte-t-il pas un peu trop loin dans sa généalogie ?
(Tchoungui 2006: 112)
It is obvious that cultural elements that may seem to belong to a sort of
global communal knowledge base may not be that global, after all:
Ngazan’s brother-in-law’s romanticized ideals of Mother Africa do not
make sense to Ngazan. Instances of misinterpretation are repeatedly
present throughout nearly the entire the novel. The depictions of Ngazan’s
first moments in Paris are especially full of them. For instance, she is not
aware of the social value scale of different Parisian quartiers and suburbs.
Towards the end of the novel, the number of these humoristic misunderstandings decreases as Ngazan becomes more aware of different cultural
codes. In so doing, then, the novel probably unwittingly fosters the somewhat conventional view of cosmopolitan awareness resulting from migration to the metropolitan centre.
While the novel’s narrative focus turns from the intercultural love
story into the protagonist’s triumphant breakthrough as a writer in the
middle of the novel, its overall vision remains romantic and fairy tale-like.
Indeed, the novel could be described as a postcolonial African Cinderella
tale that, at least occasionally, makes gestures towards the genre of chick
lit while set into the context of the colonial aftermath and globalization. Of
course, the novel also brings up themes that disturb the romantic
Cinderella narrative, but in the end, it is above all a story about a miraculously successful uneducated African immigrant. Consequently, the novel’s
view on transnational mobility is somewhat rosy: while the protagonist is
well aware of the difficulties that many African migrants face in their aspirations for a more prosperous life in diaspora, these difficulties do not seem
46
Anna-Leena Toivanen
to be of great relevance when it comes to Ngazan’s own success story. In
her case, love has enabled her to benefit from the ‘privileges of travel’
(Spencer 2011: 25) that are out of reach of many of her fellow citizens,
and of uneducated Africans more generally. Thus the novel articulates a
very optimistic view of immigration by turning the potential ‘reject of a
failed state’ (Gikandi 2010: 23) that Ngazan represents in the beginning
into an upwardly mobile cosmopolitan subject who, since her arrival to
the presumed promised land, has learned how to master ‘les règles du jeu’
(Tchoungui 2006: 220). Hopes that were invested in immigration and in
life in the metropolitan diasporic space are claimed, and the final section of
the novel offers only cursory and shallow insights into the original location left behind, such as the banal and tired observation Ngazan makes on
her way to a meeting with her publishing editor: ‘Si nos dirigeants donnaient le bon exemple, et travaillaient dur au lieu d’aller faire des cures thermales à Baden-Baden avec l’argent du contribuable, nous n’en serions
sans doute pas là, à sciencer pour émigrer’ (Tchoungui 2006: 194). In a
similar vein, Ngazan ‘defends’ Africa during the TV interview by resorting
to a positive yet admittedly clichéd reflection on how Africans are happy
despite the predicaments they face in their daily lives. Admittedly, these
instances remain superficial ways of evoking Cameroonian locality in the
western metropolis. The protagonist’s strongest link to her original home
country is her family, but the second part of the novel remains relatively
silent about this dimension apart from an episode in which Ngazan’s
mother falls seriously ill and Ngazan travels to Cameroon to see her in the
hospital. For the rest of the novel, Ngazan’s mother is positioned as a mere
bystander in her now-cosmopolitan daughter’s success story. The same
goes for her siblings, who become the immobile blind spots of the diasporic
narrative, their lives confined to the Cameroonian locality.
Postponed futures
Je vous souhaite la pluie is essentially a postcolonial African Cinderella tale
in the context of globalization: the underprivileged yet beautiful, brave
and talented female protagonist fights her way from the African predicament to the European limelight. The Euro-African love story of the fairy
tale-like heroine Ngazan and the French Alexandre serves as a site for
observing the complexities of intercultural interactions in the globalized
aftermath of colonialism. Together the novel’s two parts, respectively,
concentrating on the realities in a Yaoundéan slum and on the lives of the
Parisian cultural elite ideally create a context for cross-cultural dialogue
that encourages global awareness and cosmopolitan vision. This cosmopolitan awareness remains, however, in many senses, rather shallow and
cosmetic in nature. In the end, the novel suggests that a truly cosmopolitan dialogue and global responsibility remain mere ideals in the contemporary globalized world – a world that is continuously divided along the
boundaries set up by the colonial enterprise and its aftermath.
In Je vous souhaite la pluie, the local and the global are represented as
closely intertwined. Simultaneously, however, the novel emphasizes the
disparity between different worlds, that is, the realities of underprivileged
and mobility-poor citizens of a failed postcolonial African nation state and
those leading more privileged lives in the West. The novel’s characters
A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization
47
seem to be unable to detach themselves from the historical heritage of the
colonial divide in order to embrace a truly cosmopolitan future that moves
beyond juxtapositions, not least because of the fracturing nature of
the processes of globalization. The novel makes a distinction between the
homogenizing yet unequal effects of globalization and cosmopolitan
awareness, and this is probably its most effective way of inviting the reader
to read the text through cosmopolitan lenses.
The novel’s romantic register is intertwined with a pronouncedly
humoristic tone which is a particularly efficient tool in exposing the
hindrances that stand in the way of a truly cosmopolitan dialogue.
The hopes for a better future are quite unambiguously invested in the
metropolitan diasporic space: hope, in other words, is equated with transnational mobility and displacement from the Global South towards the
West. The novel embodies the often inaccessible dreams of many underprivileged African subjects to emigrate and pursue more favourable paths
in the promised lands of the West. Observed from the viewpoint of these
often unrealizable postcolonial dreams in the global era, the novel conveys
a rosy and fantastic image of the possibilities of immigration. Simultaneously,
the novel makes it clear that a truly cosmopolitan future is threatened by
the burden of the colonial heritage as well as the inequalities inherent to
the global world order. On a general scale, it seems that the novel’s ways
of portraying cosmopolitanism are restricted to the critical activity of
exposing obstacles on its way than on the utopian, future-oriented vision
of imagining the outlines of a genuinely cosmopolitan future yet to come.
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A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization
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Suggested citation
Toivanen, A.-L. (2014), ‘A romantic fairy tale in the era of globalization: Love,
mobility and cosmopolitanism in Elizabeth Tchoungui’s Je vous souhaite la pluie’,
International Journal of Francophone Studies 17: 1, pp. 31–50, doi: 10.1386/
ijfs.17.1.31_1
Contributor details
Anna-Leena Toivanen is a literary scholar currently working as a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. Her ongoing study focuses on
the tensions between the postcolonial nation state and globalization in Angloand francophone Sub-Saharan African women’s writing. She is a member of the
Postcolonial Literatures Research Group at the University of Antwerp. Her recent
publications include ‘Celles qui attendent et l’engagement diasporique de Fatou
Diome’, RELIEF Revue Electronique de Littérature Française, 5:1 (2011); ‘Diasporic
romances gone bad: Impossible returns to Africa in Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s
Juletane, Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père’, Journal
of Postcolonial Writing, 49:4 (2013); and ‘Daddy’s girls?: Father-daughter relations
and the failures of the postcolonial nation-state in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
Purple Hibiscus and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père’, ARIEL, 44: 1 (2013).
She has also contributed chapters to the following volumes: ‘Writing bodies: Vera’s
insights into empowering female corporeality’ in Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne
Vera, Helen Cousins and Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo (eds) (2012) and ‘Grotesque intimacies: Embodiment and the spirit of violence in “House of Hunger”’ in Reading
Marechera, Grant Hamilton (ed.) (2013.)
Contact: University of Eastern Finland, Philosophical Faculty, School of Humanities,
Agora 226, P.O. Box 111. 80101 Joensuu, Finland.
E-mail: [email protected]
Anna-Leena Toivanen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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Anna-Leena Toivanen