Picaros and shapeshifters: the postcolonial picaresque style in GauZ’s Standing Heavy

Abstract

I read GauZ’s Standing Heavy in connection with the postcolonial picaresque style, as GauZ’s Ivorian immigrant characters are robust survivors who see through the French system and criticize it through their anti-idealist viewpoints. This cynical view, often disclosed through roguish language, provides the author the possibility of expressing aggression toward the unfair system and highlighting the characters’ need to find their agency within its unequal structures. Meanwhile, the publisher’s marketing techniques and the author’s media appearances have contributed to the novel’s great success on the literary market; however, I argue that the novel’s success on the market should not diminish our understanding of its cultural criticism. Instead, the author himself may act as a shapeshifter in the competitive cultural marketplace, since his engagement in strategies of self-exotism exposes our sanctimonious need as readers to expect authenticity from African authors in Western contexts when they have to conform to Western codes.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial picaresque novel
• bildungsroman
• precarity
• irony
• GauZ
• Standing Heavy

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 One of the first advocates of this approach was Richard Rorty (see Rorty 123).

2 Regardless of their major focus on class divisions and societal hierarchies, picaresque narrative forms have proven to be difficult to define, because several different understandings of the style remain. My intention here is thus not to insist upon a reading of GauZ’s novel as a picaresque novel per se. In fact, there are several elements in the novel that do not support the definition of it as a picaresque novel: it does not have a strictly autobiographical form or a first-person narrator, and it does not focus on the life of one picaro, but instead follows the lives of three protagonists whose experiences are recorded by a third-person narrator.

3 Elze thus wishes “to establish the ‘precarious’ as a generic marker of the picaresque” (10). Like Elze, Nixon has noted how the picaresque genre has re-emerged from postcolonial, fragile existence to depict the experiences of the global poor, bearing witness to an ever-growing economic discrepancy between the poor and the rich (56).

4 It has been recently discussed how both the market for postcolonial fiction and its reading audiences are complex and nuanced (see Benwell et al. 11).

5 GauZ is very critical of the sans-papiers movement, which usually is considered revolutionary. Geoffroy de Laforcade, for instance, notes that “a broad solidarity movement with the sans-papiers drew religious, trade union, and civil rights organizations to the defense of undocumented workers for the first time” (395). Even if GauZ’s cynical view creates a dark picture of the movement in the novel, in reality some positive changes have taken place as well. For instance, Jennifer M. Wilks writes that in 2012 “Guianese legislator Christiane Taubira became justice minister” (91). Taubira has acted as a progressive politician in France throughout the twenty-first century, and Wilks maintains that for “Taubira, the goal is not to reify blackness or dismantle French republicanism but to deconstruct the essentialism behind the latter’s purported colorblindness and challenge the persistence of antiblack racism” (92).

6 GauZ is referencing a historical figure with the same name. Diop acted as a spokesperson for the movement, published his book Dans la peau d’un sans-papiers in the following year (2017), and afterwards managed to capitalize on the movement, making several million euros (see Scopsi 175–76).

7 As Prem Kumar Rajaram notes, “Undocumented migrants may be a surplus population, but they are not outside of the political economy of the neoliberal state…. [instead, they are, paradoxically], at once locally embedded in economies and societies and excluded from a territorially inflected account of belonging” (78).

8 This technique is used, for instance, by Ousmane Sembène in Le Docker noir (1956) and by Fatou Diome in La Préférence nationale (2001). I thank the anonymous peer reviewer for making this observation.

9 Huggan and Sarah Brouillette have focused on questions of the literary marketplace in the context of anglophone postcolonial writing, but Xavier has demonstrated a similar trajectory in the French literary marketplace (The Migrant Text 70, 91). Sabo has also discussed these matters in the French context and writes that “a profitable market for migrant fiction informs and sustains literary production in contemporary France” (3) and that “migrant novels are an integral part of the French literary mainstream” (10). In other words, the novels’ depiction of potentially marginalized social themes is however firmly anchored in mainstream literary production.

10 As Brouillette writes, summarizing David Harvey’s thinking, “one of the most attractive ‘variations’ for capitalist repurposing is anything which seems antimarket and anticommercial” (132; see Harvey 409).

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Minna Niemi

Minna Niemi is associate professor in the English literature section at the Arctic University of Norway. Her book Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited was published by Routledge in 2021. Her earlier work has appeared in Callaloo, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the South African Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Southern African Studies and ARIEL. She is currently co-editing a collection of essays focusing on Zimbabwean politics of the past and working on her second monograph on western complicity in the postcolonial political arena.