Upon disembarking from the plane that brings her from Paris to Africa, Véronica is entrusted to one of her“futurs élèves Birame III”[future students, Birame III (8)] (named the “Third” because there happen to be three students“with the same name in the class from the same village”). Birame attempts, in vain, to interest her in the political situation of the country in which she has just arrived. He is also assigned the task of teaching her Mande (36/17), and calls her his “grande soeur” (90) [big sister (47)], revealing the faith he puts in her, and the possibility of kinship that as a black “coopérante” she is led to communicate. She experiences Birame’s reactions as unwelcome demands, feeling overburdened by his expectations. Being too self-involved to become fully aware of the true nature of these expectations, she cannot adequately recognize, let alone acknowledge, that his wishes and his insights are mirror images of her own selfdeprecating quest for identity and community. Birame plays the part of a native informant who can“translate”the local culture for her. Their relationship presents the promise and the possibility of reciprocal exchange and learning. Yet it is not until after the students’ strike and the disappearance of Birame—who becomes the first “Martyr de la Révolution Africaine” (134) [Martyr of the African Revolution (73)]—that Veronica begins to pay attention to the historical part he plays in a crucial counternarrative, the one that haunts her own narcissistic quest.

When the seriousness of the situation pierces through to her lulled consciousness, she finally recalls (with a glaring sense of disconnection) her callous indifference to his earnestness about history and politics: “Bizarre comme je recommence à penser à Birame III après l’avoir longtemps tenu éloigné. J’ai rêvé de lui. Notre première sortie quand il me servait de guide à travers la ville et que je l’écoutais si peu” (238) [Strange how I’m starting to think of Birame III again after having kept him at a distance for such a long time. I dreamed of him. Our first outing across the town when he acted as my guide and I hardly listened to him (134)]. She also evokes the forty young men, her class of eager students, who had started out so well disposed and full of affection toward her, but who end up being thoroughly disappointed by her irresponsible connection with corrupt power in the person of her lover, Ibrahima Sory. Veronica’s failure to be an

enlightened questioner in the classroom links her to the criminals, the politicians whose reign of terror masquerades as law and order, and who perpetuate a form of violence “sourde et secrète qui s’exerçait quotidiennement et en toute impunité sous les masques de l’Ordre et de la Loi” (299) [underhand and secret, that has become a daily occurrence carried out with impunity under the guise of Law and Order” (168)].

As a pedagogue, Veronica is in the ambiguous position of having to enforce rules while also being expected to encourage her students to develop critical thinking—the task of philosophy—and to question authority in a way that can ultimately lead to disorder and revolution. Having failed to live up to this challenge, she is left with a sense of emptiness and loss, a “Rien” (312) [Nothing] (175) which, at the conclusion of the novel, leaves her trapped as a subject whose identity has been shaped on a postcolonial historical stage of guilt and shame. Although she is able to escape back to Paris, her inability to translate her experiences into the language of grief condemns her to be “Piégée . . . Parmi les assassins” (314) [Trapped . . . in the arms of an assassin (176)], who has managed to corrupt the process of independence. The novel delivers us a character that is numb, unable to grieve for the loss of her friends and students, and unable to take a stance with regard to the injuries that have been perpetrated against them. Her ironic posture incorporates an ambiguous relationship to the politics of victimization and violence, and the patterns of passivity and fatalism (252/141) that she suspects she is misreading into the behavior of the local population. She is trapped in a narrative of guilt but continues to blame others around her for her own passivity and inertia, all the while projecting a discourse of grievance onto the Africans themselves.