Métissages: Williams Sassine’s Saint Monsieur Baly, Wirriyamu and Mémoire d’une peau

While the concept of métissage has appeared in numerous discourses throughout history to refer to cultural encounters and the mixing of races, it has also been recognised as a profoundly problematic concept. As Gloria Nne Onyeoziri notes, métissage is “a term which [...] still carries significant traces of historical practices of oppression, psychological disturbances, sexual exploitation and struggles for the survival of cultural identities” (43). In colonial Africa, mixed race individuals problematised the relationship between Self and Other, and the figure of the métis became inextricably intertwined with colonial histories of domination and exclusion. In the postcolonial era, the objectified figure of the métis emerged as a liberated and free-speaking subject, and new models of métissage have become available. Francoise Vergès acknowledges that “the continuing contest about métissage, its unstable foundations and constant renegotiation, shows how the term remains fundamentally charged with ambivalence” (9). Métissage has materialised as a site of purposeful ambiguity, leading Françoise Lionnet to define it as “the site of undecidability and indeterminacy,” a position “from which to challenge hegemonic languages” (6). While the malleability of cultural hybridity is attractive, Shalini Puri underscores the misuses to which theories of hybridity have been put in recent critical literature and reminds us of the power relations with which the term is loaded (1-10). It is with the complex evolution of understandings of métissage in mind that this article focuses on three novels by Francophone Guinean writer Williams Sassine, Saint Monsieur Baly (1973), Wirriyamu (1976) and Mémoire d’une peau (1998). This study examines different manifestations of métissage in Sassine’s fictional work, which highlight the tensions and paradoxes underlying postcolonial identity in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. Sassine described his personal experiences of métissage in an interview with Landry Wilfrid Miampika: