Entre littérature érotique et critique politique: Suburban Blues de Yémy (2005) à la croisée de ‘Wonderwoman’ et ‘Black Panther -- La charité romaine et ses incarnations queer: politiques et érotiques de l’allaitement. Queer Incarnations of Roman Charity: The Politics and Erotics of Breastfeeding.
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The French-Cameroonian novel Suburban Blues, which is in fact a 390-page long prose poem, mixes suburban language and canonical literary French, which makes it interesting to study from a strictly Bourdieusian point of view. The aim of the present article is to demonstrate how the (multiform) recurrence of the theme of breast-feeding in the work advances the author’s activism in favour of the legalisation of cannabis and better integration of immigrant minorities in France in a wholly original way. I suggest that it is possible to detect a progression between “desire/want for breast” and the pathetic “need for breast”, designed to raise awareness of the absolute urgency of the situation in the so-called difficult neighbourhoods of the post-colonial era. This nurturing breast, incidentally, is alternately feminine (a fantazised woman whose ‘liquid reminiscent of flower nectar [fills the] mouth’ of the weakened narrator to restore his strength) and masculine (a complete stranger), since, towards the apocalyptic end of the novel, where everyone is eating each other alive, one of the few characters who has retained his humanity finds a last baby and feeds it ‘from [his] man’s breast’, ‘curiously hairless in the middle of this stringy, threadbare forest’. The article situates Suburban Blues at the junction of powerful global/French cultural currents (Edouard Glissant’ relation, feminism and negritude), and, from a multidisciplinary perspective, examines how Yémy makes a literary statement a year after the film Banlieue 13, while at the same time being seen as a precursor to the blockbusters Wonder woman and Black Panther. In Suburban Blues, Yémy develops his own mythology, which leads to a republican ethic whose convergences and divergences are established, in the final analysis, with that of another postcolonial writer who has expressed affinities with Baudelaire: Abd al Malik.
