Rereading Camara Laye

In this controversial new study, Adele King retracts her earlier scholarship defending the single authorship of Camara Laye's L'Enfant noir (The Dark Child) and unearths new evidence to suggest that not only did Laye have more help writing L'Enfant noir than earlier believed but may in fact not have written his second novel Le Regard du roi (Radiance of the King) at all. Camara Laye arrived in France from his native Guinea in the early 1950s at the propitious moment when many African writers and intellectuals who favored the ideal of trying to build a union of France and its territories were welcomed and often supported by the Ministere de la France d'Outre-Mer (Ministry of France Overseas). Upon his arrival in France, Laye was encouraged by a member of the Assemblee de l'Union Francaise and other government agents to write a novel depicting his life in Guinea. With the resulting L'Enfant noir, he became one of the earliest modern African novelists. When a year later he published another novel, Le Regard du roi, both novels became seminal works of African fiction in French. Almost from the beginning, however, there were rumors that Laye had had more than a little help with L'Enfant noir, but they remained rumors only. In 1980 King herself wrote a defense of the author's independent work; but, in recent years new circumstantial evidence has surfaced that seriously calls into question Laye's authorship of Le Regard du roi and raises doubts about how much help he may have had in writing L'Enfant noir. Rereading Camara Laye contributes to our understanding of the terms of cultural production many African writers had to negotiate in France. King's findings also raise important questions about the collaboration, manipulation, personal ambition, political opportunism, and pragmatism which were significant factors in the survival of African writers and many others in the years following World War II. Adele King is an associate professor of French at Ball State University. She is the author of several books, including The Writings of Camara Laye.