ON PLAGIARISM

8 pages I made for a book project on plagiarism (Cheryl Penn, South Africa).
Because of the beauty of the handmade paper I limited the text bits to 2 pages.
This is the text:

PLAGIARISM IN LITERATURE

We live in an age of "intertextuality", which makes it quite difficult to accuse writers of plagiarism when they use fragments in their books of other writers. The real problem starts when there is no mentioning at all of the sources they are using.

It's almost a plague in contemporary African writing! A few examples:
Sony Labou Tansi's novels retells the stories written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One hundred years of solitude/ The autumn of the patriarch) in his own magical reallist books

Yembo Oudologueur used passages from Graham Greene and Simone Schwartzbart in his 1968 novel "Bound to violence"

Calixte Beyala copycats passages from Ben Okri's famous novel "The famished road" in her own book "Lost honors" (what's in a name?). She got a prestigious literary prize while at the same time she was condemned in a Paris court. Isn't it sick that one African writer copies from the other without giving him the credit of his work. Beyala's reputation was already quite damaged because she had done this before in other books like her own version of Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince.
She defended herself in 2 ways:
In Europe the writers of some centuries ago often used large passages of writers before them without giving them the credit (has been done in music also by the way) and then the ultimate defense was the ethnic angle. We Africans have an oral tradition and retell the stories of others all the time. There is no copyright in Africa.
Beyala forgets she's not in Cameroun anymore but has made a career in literary and cultivated France.

A close friend of mine, writer and artist Laurent d'Ursel, has always "crazy" projects. Some years ago he had written a book based only on quotes of other writers who were mentioning "grelot". He asked for my help to find more passages on grelots. It was A French word I did not understand. A grelot is a small bell but enclosed in a sphere. My help was limited to making the cover for his book (a collage where I used for the first time 19th century graphics). Laurent tried to find a publisher for his book but nobody was interested. He became very frustrated. What's the matter with these editors today? We live in an age of intertextuality! Don't they know the work of Solers?. I said to him that I found the work of Solers extremely boring and his book suffered from the same handicap: there is no story or structure, there is nothing in fact. It's a huge text collage of passages of writers mentioning this type of bell. I like the idea, it is modern or postmodern or whatever term or label you would like to wear as a medal but it can't hide the fact that such books are unreadable for a larger audience than that of the writer and some close friends and admirers.
Laurent and I are still friends. His wife is a professional translator of books, movie scripts and theatre plays, which makes the situation even funnier.

Guido Vermeulen, August 2011