Tag Archives: Senegal

Book of the month: Fatou Diome

May 30, 2024 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Don’t judge a book by its cover, the saying goes. Frankly, though, if I were assessing Fatou Diome’s The Belly of the Atlantic, translated by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz, on its appearance, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. The pictures of the figure in the boat and the foot on the ball feel wearily familiar, if not a little clichéd.

Besides, although I’ve read and enjoyed football novels in the past – and know that a great writer can make any topic absorbing – I usually do so in spite rather than because of such subject matter. Not being a sports fan, I rarely find knowing a book is built around a particular game tempting.

But I did pick up this novel, which came out in French in the early 2000s and in English in 2006, for two reasons: partly because Senegal was one of the nations that had relatively few novels available in translation when I did my original Year of Reading the World, but also because I’m a particular admirer of the work of one of its translators: Ros Schwartz. Seeing her name on the title page suggested to me that this would be worth a try.

In fact, this book subverts the apparently familiar tropes of its cover in powerful ways. Narrated by Salie, who lives in France, the novel crystallises around a series of phone calls from her younger brother, Madické. A football fan with a difference, Madické is obsessed not with the French team beloved of his peers but with the exploits of the Italian player Maldini and needs to hear how every match he plays turns out. The one television on their home island of Niodior is temperamental to say the least, hence his SOS calls to his sister to fill him in. These conversations prove the catalyst for a series of reflections on and memories of Salie’s life, the immigrant experience, and the gulf that travelling from one world to another opens up between those who leave and those who stay behind.

The female perspective is part of what makes the book so striking. The opening descriptions of football mania and boys revelling in the beautiful game invite us to assume a male narrator. It is only gradually, with the repeated presence of strong, female characters, and strikingly direct observations about discrimination and the hypocrisy of patriarchal society, that the narrator’s position becomes clear. Indeed, it is only some pages into the narrative that Salie reveals herself as ‘a moderate feminist’ who ‘wouldn’t want testicles for the world’, and who looks with some disdain on the standards her brother is expected to conform to in order to satisfy her home society’s conception of ‘man’.

This covert disruption of what might be thought of as the default narrative voice for a book like this makes much about it fresh and startling, even twenty years after its publication. Familiar ideas are presented from new angles. And the tales of those who remain on Niodior, trapped in cycles of poverty and prejudice, gleam with troubling brilliance. The story of Sankèle, who pays a terrible price in an effort to escape an arranged marriage, is particularly memorable.

For a reader in the UK, the novel may seem uncannily prescient. In its exploration of the desire that many young people have to leave Niodior and try their luck in Europe, and its presentation of the grim reality and crushing obligations that await those who make the leap, the book seems to anticipate the stories that flooded Western media years later of African migrants braving horrific risks in search of a better life. For example, here’s Salie reflecting on the gap between Madické’s idea of her daily life and the reality:

‘It was no use telling Madické that as a cleaning woman my survival depended on the number of floor cloths I got through. He persisted in imagining I wanted for nothing, living like royalty at the court of Louis XIV. Accustomed to going without in his underdeveloped country, he wasn’t going to feel sorry for a sister living in one of the world’s great powers after all! He couldn’t help his illusions. The third world can’t see Europe’s wounds, it is blinded by its own; it can’t hear Europe’s cry, it is deafened by its own. Having someone to blame lessens your suffering, and if the third world started to see the west’s misery, it would lose the target of its anger.’

Of course, the fact that these words written in the early 2000s read as prescient to someone like me also shows up the selectiveness of the anglophone world’s storytelling: the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ is not a new phenomenon, Diome’s novel reminds us, regardless of what prevailing accounts of it may lead us to assume.

Structured as it is, the book can feel a little static. Salie is relatively passive – partly because she is trapped by her situation and partly because she is trapped by the past. As such, she is perhaps more in the position of one of the oral storytellers of her homeland, recounting rather than participating in events. The writing, however, brims with energy. Like its perspective, the novel’s imagery is fresh and striking, melding Senegalese traditions, nature and computer technology to paint the world in bold colours. If, occasionally, the narrative tips over into polemic, well, who are we to argue?

Reading The Belly of the Atlantic made me reflect on many things. It reminded me of the valuable way stories from elsewhere can disrupt, problematise and reshape the narratives that surround us. It also helped me remember how important older books are in anchoring us and counteracting the kneejerk impressions of the now. If we only ever read new titles – no matter how brilliant they may be – we can easily become detached from the threads of history, and lose sight of the lines and grapnels cast back down the decades that bind us to the world and to one another.

The Belly of the Atlantic by Fatou Diome, translated from the French by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz (Serpent’s Tail, 2006)

Book of the month: Boubacar Boris Diop

June 30, 2020 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

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This book came onto my radar thanks to award-winning translator Jennifer Croft, who mentioned on social media recently that she was obsessed with it. The novel had another claim on my attention too, being the first work to be translated into English from the north-west African language Wolof (although, as co-translator Vera Wülfing-Leckie explains in her introduction, the English version comes from a francophone text also created by celebrated author Boubacar Boris Diop, who usually writes in French rather than his mother tongue).

The premise of Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks is deceptively simple. Coming to the end of his life in Dakar, Senegal, Nguirane Faye sets about recording his thoughts and recollections for the benefit of his absent grandson, Badou, who he hopes will one day return to his native Senegal and unearth his notebooks. What follows, however, is far from straightforward, as time, language and the written form itself bend and snap beneath the weight of Nguirane’s experiences and ideas.

A plethora of techniques are at work here. There are stories within stories, proverbs, voices that interrupt or take over the narrative and digressions galore. Historic events jostle with folklore, hallucinations and memories. Often, Nguirane will pause, mid-flow, to chide or tease his reader for getting exasperated with his meanderings. Sometimes, he will imagine his grandson’s responses and embark on an argument with him – a mechanism that is as touching as it is funny.

At the root of it all, lies the oral tradition (a tradition to which Diop has said he belongs ‘with every fibre of [his] being’). And though the writing is exceptionally deft, sidestepping many of the problems that often beset novels framed as accounts directed at imaginary recipients (which are often weighed down by expository passages too obviously penned for the benefit of the real-world reader), there is a tension between written and spoken that Diop clearly intends us to feel: ‘I would have preferred to talk to you face-to-face, of course, like any storyteller worthy of that name.[…] But, I am writing to you, since that’s my only option,’ laments Nguirane in the opening pages.

This idea of people and stories being forced into frameworks that don’t serve them is a central theme. Time and again, we encounter characters who are obliged to work against their nature and interests, both in terms of the contemporary political system, their own identities and Senegal’s colonial history. ‘Our chains are in our heads, you see,’ cart driver Ousmane Sow tells Nguirane.

With plain speaking often impossible, satire and allegory are the order of the day. Revelling in a mischievousness that once again draws strongly on the oratorical daring of West Africa’s griots, Diop creates a corrupt fictional president, Daour Diagne, only to substitute him with another fictional figure, Dibi-Dibi, who, we are told, will stand in for the former. The implication is clear: by making so much of the fictional figure and its double, Diop is inviting us to draw parallels with Abdoulaye Wade, Senegal’s actual president at the time of the novel’s writing. The double substitution underscores this, while seeming to deny any comparison, thereby emphasising  the threat to free expression that Diop – co-founder of Senegal’s first independent daily newspaper – is keen to highlight. Similar techniques are at work when it comes to Europeans and colonial figures, with monkeys often standing in to bear the brunt of the bitterest truths.

And this is only the start – there are layers within layers in this book. As Wülfing-Leckie explains, many of the incidents and walk-on characters bring with them a train of associations and references to other African novels and key cultural figures. The articulateness of the cart driver Ousmane Sow, for example, is unsurprising when you realise that he is intended to represent the celebrated author and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène.

The genius of this novel, however, is that it does not require you to know any of this to be thoroughly engrossed. The writing is so good – rendered in an accessible, conversational and witty register, with sporadic flights into breathtaking lyricism, by Wülfing-Leckie and El Hadji Moustapha Diop – that it sweeps you along regardless of who or where you are. The storytelling – fractured, thrawn and divorced from its natural framework as it is – keeps the pages flying. Unlike so many clever novels that use their references as barriers to keep out the hoi polloi, this book opens the door to a rich world of ideas and invites the reader in. Marvellous.

Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks by Boubacar Boris Diop, translated from the French/Wolof by Vera Wülfing-Leckie and El Hadji Moustapha Diop (Michigan State University Press, 2016)

Picture by Toon van Dijk on flickr.com

Senegal: the other woman

February 15, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Discovering that your middle-aged husband has fallen for one of your teenage daughter’s school friends has got to be pretty high in the nightmare stakes for most married women. In British novels, such a scenario usually has one of two outcomes:

  1. aggrieved woman ditches the bastard, reconnects with the vibrant, inner self her marriage has stifled all these years and realises she’s better off without him
  2. aggrieved woman thinks about ditching the bastard and reconnecting with her vibrant, inner self, but, after much soul-searching, and after her husband has realised the folly of his ways, finds a complex, unconventional peace with what has happened and moves forward as a beautiful, seasoned character.

But what about countries where your husband is not only expected to fall for another, younger girl but also legally entitled to bring her into your home and family as his second wife?

Mariama Bâ’s partly autobiographical 1980 novel explores just such a predicament. Written in the form of a letter from schoolteacher Ratamalouye to her old friend Assiatou, the novel’s series of reminiscences sets out the ‘slender liberty granted to women’ and in particular the plight of first wives who are ‘despised, relegated or exchanged… like a worn-out boubou [robe]’ under Islamic polygamy.

Ratamalouye’s husband of 25 years, Modou, has just died. As the rituals of the 40-day mourning period throw her together with his extended family, she relives the hurt and indignity of losing his affections and support to one of her daughter’s friends three years previously. She rehearses these thoughts in her letters to Assiatou, who took the unconventional step of leaving her own husband when he married a second wife, and her descriptions become a prism through which Bâ is able to illuminate the frustrations of many Senegalese women.

Bâ’s work might easily tip into a rant if she weren’t so for aware of the complexity of living through the issues she describes. Though clearly a passionate believer in the importance of education for all, she tempers this with reflections on the toll academic aspirations have taken on rural life with ‘the disappearance of an elite class of traditional manual workers’ because ‘The dream is to become a clerk. The trowel is spurned’. Similarly, though full of admiration for Assiatou’s hard-worn career and independence and though she rejoices ‘every time a woman emerges from the shadows’, Ratamalouye is prevented by her love for her husband and sense of duty from following her friend’s path.

Interestingly, So Long a Letter is the first book I’ve read so far this year where Western influence is presented as a largely positive thing. Ratamalouye writes with unqualified affection of the French headmistress who strove ‘to lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own’. Given the choice of novel endings facing women in western Europe and women in West Africa, perhaps that’s not such a surprise.

So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ (translated from the French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas). Heinemann International Literature & Textbooks (1989)