SOURCE: “Text, Identity, and Difference: Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence and Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons,” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1987, pp. 387-402.

In the following essay, Lang compares Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence and Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons, arguing that Armah's book appears to be a rebuttal to the violence and negativity found in Le Devoir de violence.

Elective or not, the affinity between Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence and Armah's Two Thousand Seasons has struck various critics, as has their common ancestry with André Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des justes.¹ Ouologuem's use of Schwarz-Bart verges upon plagiarism, though it is but one of his manifold allusions to and brazen borrowings from other texts. Armah responded more to Le Devoir de violence than to Le Dernier des justes and, apparently, intended his text as a repudiation of the negativity of the former, though...