The photograph on the cover of Ferdinand Oyono's
Houseboy depicts a serving tray with two roses and a full glass of some liquid (water, maybe, or white wine). Between the flowers and the libation is a blond woman's head. She's looking up; her mouth is pinched; the overall expression is one of long-suffering exasperation, the appeal to God to help her endure all that is beneath her. The tray is held by a black man, but the picture depicts only his chest and arms - his head is also cut off.
The picture is great fun and an aggressive act of political art (you could see Cindy Sherman coming up with a similar tableau if she was interested in colonial issues), but the photograph has only the most tangential relationship to the book.
Houseboy is an account of how the colonial system served up black people's heads on platters, not the other way around.
Whether the photograph is an example of
typical marketing practices that use a book's cover the way a pimp uses a whore, I have no way of knowing.
I like to think, though, that George Hallett - the photographer - was supporting Oyono by making explicit a perspective that Oyono leaves the reader to infer. Hallett's photograph is a portrait of a white colonist's fear:
if you don't watch the servant, he'll be serving your head on a plate .
By providing this interpretation, Hallett is adding a layer of flesh to the
skeletal characterization Oyono has provided . If Oyono's colonial Madame harbored this fear about Toundi,
Houseboy 's protagonist, it would go some way towards explaining why she targeted him, alone among the servants who knew of her infidelity.
Why Toundi triggered such a fear and other servants didn't, of course, remains an unanswered question. But answering such questions is rightfully the author's job, and looking to the cover artist for help is, if not unfair, an act in which one should engage with limited expectations. Hallett's contribution is an impressive example of visual and word collaborating to complicate one's understanding of the whole.
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