THE RADIANCE OF THE KING
Camara Laye
New York: Vintage International, 1989
305 pp., $9.95
“The writer is a feeble man who takes the burden of society upon his shoulders."
These words by Camara Laye (pronounced lie), an African writer who died in 1980, more than adequately describe the life on the man himself, as well as the major metaphor of his work. The poet, the artist, is someone we hardly deserve, and yet he willingly bears the burdens of his society even as they threaten to weigh him down.
Camara Laye, who was born in Guinea in 1924, never intended to become a writer or the conscience of his people. His first book, The African Child (L'enfant noir), 1954, was composed in loneliness and isolation when Laye was a student in Paris in the early 1950s. When Laye told his government that he wanted to earn a baccalaureate instead of the trade school degree that he had been sent overseas to acquire, his funds were abruptly cut off. The purity of The African Child (which includes a loving portrait of the author's mother) has usually been attributed to the accident of its origin. Laye began writing the account of his childhood because he feared he would forget the beauty of his traditional life.
When he eventually retuned to Guinea at the end of the decade, he was already heralded in Europe as an important African writer, a profession that was virtually unknown on the sub-Saharan continent. The African Child was followed in 1956 by The Radiance of the King (Le regard du roi), his recently reissued first novel and masterpiece. Laye was given a relatively innocuous position in the civil service by his government, but it wasn't long before he ran afoul of Sekou Toure's tyranny.
Tourie, Guines's president who had broken away from the French in 1958, caught wind of the defamatory nature of Laye's work-in-progress, which criticized the president's ruthless leadership. Laye was given a choice: He could remain in Guinea if he removed certain "offending" passages in the manuscript, or, if he decided to publish his work as written, he could go Senegal where he was welcomed by a more sympathetic leader: Leopold Sedar Senghor, not only the president of his country but, one of his continent's major poets. Laye's A Dream of Africa (Dramouss), the disputed work, was published in Paris in 1966.
The thirteen years that Laye lived in exile in Senegal were sad ones indeed. Sekou Toure retaliated against the internationally respected writer by placing his wife (who had remained in Guinea) in jail. Laye held a research position at the University of Dakar, the intent of which was to provide him time for his own creative work. Battered in spirit and suffering from repeated illnesses, Laye found it increasingly difficult to write, however.
A promised novel never appeared, though a fourth book, The Guardian of the World (La Maitre de la Parole), was published in 1978. The Guardian of the word might best be called a praise song - both for Sundiata, the first emperor of the ancient Malian empire, who was born in 1202, and for Babu Conde, a famous Malian Griot (oral historian). In his preface to the
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