The tilka's red for the brow of a bride / And betel-nut's red for lips that are sweet; / But, for lily-like fingers and feet / The red, the red of the henna-tree.
Sarojini Naidu
Friday, March 21, 2008
presidential endorsement
Really moving piece by New York Times Op Ed Columnist, Roger Cohen. (With a foot on two continents, Cohen makes the connections that distance, economics, civil rights, etc ... have obscured but not eroded).
Beyond America’s Original Sin
March 20, 2008
There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.
As a child, experience is wordless but no less powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!
The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my grandfather’s house and I wondered.
Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.
The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.
A “For Sale” sign was up on what had been the family house. I inquired if I might visit and received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed the mountain behind where my father hiked and where I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.
Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.
Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.
Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman.
A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America’s “original sin.” Of course, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.
Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.
It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.
I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”
Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?
Yes. It. Can.
The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.
Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.
The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”
But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
Like countless others, I came to America because possibility is broader here than in Europe’s narrower confines. Perhaps it’s my African “original sin,” but when Obama says he “will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow receding before the still riveting idea that “out of many we are truly one.”
Beyond America’s Original Sin
March 20, 2008
There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.
As a child, experience is wordless but no less powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!
The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my grandfather’s house and I wondered.
Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.
The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.
A “For Sale” sign was up on what had been the family house. I inquired if I might visit and received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed the mountain behind where my father hiked and where I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.
Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.
Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.
Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman.
A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America’s “original sin.” Of course, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.
Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.
It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.
I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”
Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?
Yes. It. Can.
The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.
Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.
The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”
But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
Like countless others, I came to America because possibility is broader here than in Europe’s narrower confines. Perhaps it’s my African “original sin,” but when Obama says he “will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow receding before the still riveting idea that “out of many we are truly one.”
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
This post is the latest in my own series of desultory responses to a fascinating and broad-themed New York Times series on global migrations. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/world/asia/17remit.html?pagewanted=1)
This one is about Dilip Ratha, the once shoeless Brahmin country boy turned Ph.D-touting World Bank man, who’s life work exposed the major impact of remittances (the money sent home by immigrants) in developing countries.
To highlight some outstanding points in the article:
- The International Monetary Fund said the Philippines received $122 million [per year in remittances]. Mr. Ratha produced an estimate 51 times higher: $6.2 billion. His tallies, first published in 2003, showed that remittances, once dismissed as the equivalent of a rounding error, were nearly three times greater than the world’s combined foreign aid.
- In subsequent work, Mr. Ratha has argued that the importance of the money exceeds its sheer size. Unlike foreign aid, it cannot be skimmed by potentates. Unlike investors who flee crises, migrants increase their giving during hard times. The money is directed to the needy. And Mr. Ratha contends it is well-monitored, too, by intimates on the sending end. “It comes with a lot of goodwill, advice, knowledge and punishment if necessary — keeping in mind the welfare of the recipient,” he said.
- Mr. Ratha agrees that migration is wrenching and the economic forces that drive it are often unjust. But, “Once people decide to migrate, benefits can occur for local development — that’s the point,” he said.
The matter at hand here is immigration and how it pertains to development in the home country. To me, at the heart of it lies this fundamental dilemma: on the one hand, immigration is key to development. Giving money - and whatever other psychological/social boosts - directly to the people who need it most is essential. On the other hand, immigration has a somber side. Starting with the population left behind, the receiving end I guess, remittances may alleviate the symptoms of poverty but not the embedded causes. Whether they invest or squander the money is up to them. (Freedom to spend has got to be an important aspect of development I haven’t yet fully thought through). Even then, they aren’t getting 100% of remittances. Money-transfer companies like Western Union can claim as much as 10% of funds sent home.
On the giver’s end, the impacts of migration are a heavy weight to bear. I don’t even mean economically or social justicely, we all know that immigrants who come from the developing world - whether they lack language skills or “papers” - take on the dregs of job barrel. (And their family members left behind don’t always understand this).
But when it comes to the immigrants themselves, I’m less interested in the economic aspects than the cultural and psychological ramifications of it all. What impact does it have when families are broken up by oceans? When new families are merged across language and ethnic barriers? How great is the sense of displacement - in the sense that the immigrant is at home neither here nor there? And finally, how do new immigrants relate to or alter existing immigrant minorities? For example, how do new African immigrants to the US fit into the African-American community. (Which is not really to suggest there is one homogenous African American community).
Just a couple weeks ago, a Senegalese friend of mine from Boston came home to Senegal for the first time in four years. It was funny to see him, because when I left Boston he was still living a little under the radar shall we say and I just didn’t imagine I would see him here. (Also kind of a bizarre clash between my past and my present, but that’s another story). We went dancing, it was fun. But I got him talking, about some things I’d never even thought to ask him six months ago, and he told me what it’s like, coming home. If not so much in words, in action. The pressure to prove success, to feign it if need be … the inability to express isolation with loved ones here - where no indigenous word for “lonely” even exists.
I guess this was sort of all over the place - starting with immigration and economic development and ending with immigration and identity crisis. (well, kind of). But at the end of the day it’s all part of the parcel isn't it?
Tonight I'm making a religious pilgrimage to Tivouane ... more on that to come...
This one is about Dilip Ratha, the once shoeless Brahmin country boy turned Ph.D-touting World Bank man, who’s life work exposed the major impact of remittances (the money sent home by immigrants) in developing countries.
To highlight some outstanding points in the article:
- The International Monetary Fund said the Philippines received $122 million [per year in remittances]. Mr. Ratha produced an estimate 51 times higher: $6.2 billion. His tallies, first published in 2003, showed that remittances, once dismissed as the equivalent of a rounding error, were nearly three times greater than the world’s combined foreign aid.
- In subsequent work, Mr. Ratha has argued that the importance of the money exceeds its sheer size. Unlike foreign aid, it cannot be skimmed by potentates. Unlike investors who flee crises, migrants increase their giving during hard times. The money is directed to the needy. And Mr. Ratha contends it is well-monitored, too, by intimates on the sending end. “It comes with a lot of goodwill, advice, knowledge and punishment if necessary — keeping in mind the welfare of the recipient,” he said.
- Mr. Ratha agrees that migration is wrenching and the economic forces that drive it are often unjust. But, “Once people decide to migrate, benefits can occur for local development — that’s the point,” he said.
The matter at hand here is immigration and how it pertains to development in the home country. To me, at the heart of it lies this fundamental dilemma: on the one hand, immigration is key to development. Giving money - and whatever other psychological/social boosts - directly to the people who need it most is essential. On the other hand, immigration has a somber side. Starting with the population left behind, the receiving end I guess, remittances may alleviate the symptoms of poverty but not the embedded causes. Whether they invest or squander the money is up to them. (Freedom to spend has got to be an important aspect of development I haven’t yet fully thought through). Even then, they aren’t getting 100% of remittances. Money-transfer companies like Western Union can claim as much as 10% of funds sent home.
On the giver’s end, the impacts of migration are a heavy weight to bear. I don’t even mean economically or social justicely, we all know that immigrants who come from the developing world - whether they lack language skills or “papers” - take on the dregs of job barrel. (And their family members left behind don’t always understand this).
But when it comes to the immigrants themselves, I’m less interested in the economic aspects than the cultural and psychological ramifications of it all. What impact does it have when families are broken up by oceans? When new families are merged across language and ethnic barriers? How great is the sense of displacement - in the sense that the immigrant is at home neither here nor there? And finally, how do new immigrants relate to or alter existing immigrant minorities? For example, how do new African immigrants to the US fit into the African-American community. (Which is not really to suggest there is one homogenous African American community).
Just a couple weeks ago, a Senegalese friend of mine from Boston came home to Senegal for the first time in four years. It was funny to see him, because when I left Boston he was still living a little under the radar shall we say and I just didn’t imagine I would see him here. (Also kind of a bizarre clash between my past and my present, but that’s another story). We went dancing, it was fun. But I got him talking, about some things I’d never even thought to ask him six months ago, and he told me what it’s like, coming home. If not so much in words, in action. The pressure to prove success, to feign it if need be … the inability to express isolation with loved ones here - where no indigenous word for “lonely” even exists.
I guess this was sort of all over the place - starting with immigration and economic development and ending with immigration and identity crisis. (well, kind of). But at the end of the day it’s all part of the parcel isn't it?
Tonight I'm making a religious pilgrimage to Tivouane ... more on that to come...
Thursday, March 13, 2008
points of view: black on white and white on black ... the very coolest artist Faith Ringgold mixes it up!! http://www.faithringgold.com/racialquestions/
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Again I'm wrapping up another mission in the field.
Darkness falls as soon as the sun slips under the horizon, and the unlit room around me has as sunk silently from the blue shadows of evening to pitch black stain of night in as little time as it took me to write it. Up and down the corridor fluorescent light spills out of doorways. The cry of the muezzin marks the end of day as always, it just briefly interrupts the white noise of the quartier - bleating animals, tvs blaring soccer matches and repeated soaps, hushed, fast voices of women. I can hear Coumbis, the little girl who lives next door, suffering some awful fit of giggles. She has a barbie doll she calls Madame Toubab … something like the equivalent of Mrs. Whitey. Her little brother Abdoulaye is about as small as a peanut and he imitates everything she does.
I’m writing this from Tambacounda. Work has brought me once again out in the bush, and though I wasn’t much looking forward to this mission, it’s been pretty good. I’ve really been on the go since New Years, moving from here to there, never staying in one place for place for more than two weeks. It’s been wonderful to see as much as I’ve seen of the country but I’m looking forward to staying put for a while when I finally get back to Thiès. It’s getting hot, too.
I spent last week in in the northwestern region of Matam, right up there on the border with Mauritania in a small town called Ourosogui.
Old Ourosogui with your vaguely Japanese sounding name,
You old stomping grounds of traders and herders and tumbleweeds,
You dusty truckstop prelude to the three and a half million square miles of desert beyond you.
The winds are hot there and when there is no wind, the sitting heat warps the view into the distance. There is another volunteer who lives out there - a super Argentinean girl with a bad back but beautiful in all other regards. A breath of fresh air as they say if you can imagine … we spent one night up on the roof, sleeping under the stars, though I didn’t do much of that after all the café touba we drank beforehand. The people that live in the region are mostly Pular, it’s as if the border with Mauritania might well enough not exist. Islam and tradition weigh heavily in these villages that bake in the sun. A great many people have been resistant to our NGO’s presence in the area. You have to understand the education program that we implement in each village; while it brings truly great changes, in terms of health, literacy, alleviation of poverty, etc. - the image it’s gained within Senegal, and even more so internationally, is primarily as a combatant against female circumcision. A lot of people see that as an attack on their traditions, on Islam; a lot of people just don’t want to abandon a custom so integral and so meaningful to their cultures, histories … so not everyone welcomes our presence warmly and unconditionally.
Tamba was really good. Despite my protests, I left the village of Lounthji loaded wi
th presents - calabashes, wooden spoons, indigo cloth, and a SHEEP! Oh little baby, he was soo cute and dyed BLUE. They must have cleaned him to where he was white as the day he was born, and then wrapped him up in indigo clothes because his wooly coat glowed in this lovely iridescent way. He had Xs carved into his ears. He cried a lot :( When I brought him back to the office, they asked me when we were going to eat him, but I told them as a rule I don’t eat anything I’ve known for over a half hour. I’ll have to leave him here, because he wouldn’t do so well on the long trip back west.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Bush & Africa
It seems a president in his final year of office is a little innocuous. We can almost disregard all of his delusional worldviews and warviews, his inadequate response to a drowning New Orleans (and a drowning economy), his nod of approval to secret prisons, massive infringements on privacy, and funding for faith-based anything. As well as his multi-billion dollar cuts in domestic spending on health care and education, even his goofy pride in his one great domestic success (no child left behind) in face of sinking educational achievement rates as our peers in Europe and Asia outperform us.
That being said, Africa-wise he hasn’t done all too bad. Not outstanding either.
During his six day tour of Ghana, Liberia, Tanzania, Benin, and Rwanda, Bush visited several AIDS treatment centers that his own investment initiatives have helped fund. Writing for the Nicholas Kristoff (aah, my heart flutters ...) blog, Josh Ruxin claims the US has invested over $19 billion to date, 4 billion higher than what Bush committed in 2003. But who can really say which numbers are rosy and which are realistic? The breakdown isn’t as luminous as it may seem. PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) spends only about 55% on treatment of individuals infected with AIDS, mainly through the distribution of antiretroviral drugs. 20% goes to prevention programs; of that, an absurd 33% is spent on programs that promote abstinence. (One of the several reasons abstinence education is so futile in Africa is that in societies that condone men's polygamy and infidelity, and silence women's voices, married women contract the virus all the time.) None of the funds are expressly apportioned to improving the health systems in Africa which, in their crumbling state, have dangerously thwarted the good intentions of donors aid organizations.
On other fronts … While Bush hasn’t sent American troops into Darfur (should we, could we?), he has announced just this week he would free $100 million from his foreign aid budget to assist African countries that send peace-keeping troops to the region. He needs to back this kind of military support with harsher diplomatic efforts with the government in Khartoum. It might be too little too late, but it’s more than the Clinton administration did for Rwanda.
Africa's never been a fast-lane kind of place. Love it or hate it, the pace of life, maybe the pan-African philosophy, is ndank ndank (slowly, slowly). That's not how our country rolls, but it seems we've let it define our foreign aid.
That being said, Africa-wise he hasn’t done all too bad. Not outstanding either.
During his six day tour of Ghana, Liberia, Tanzania, Benin, and Rwanda, Bush visited several AIDS treatment centers that his own investment initiatives have helped fund. Writing for the Nicholas Kristoff (aah, my heart flutters ...) blog, Josh Ruxin claims the US has invested over $19 billion to date, 4 billion higher than what Bush committed in 2003. But who can really say which numbers are rosy and which are realistic? The breakdown isn’t as luminous as it may seem. PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) spends only about 55% on treatment of individuals infected with AIDS, mainly through the distribution of antiretroviral drugs. 20% goes to prevention programs; of that, an absurd 33% is spent on programs that promote abstinence. (One of the several reasons abstinence education is so futile in Africa is that in societies that condone men's polygamy and infidelity, and silence women's voices, married women contract the virus all the time.) None of the funds are expressly apportioned to improving the health systems in Africa which, in their crumbling state, have dangerously thwarted the good intentions of donors aid organizations.
On other fronts … While Bush hasn’t sent American troops into Darfur (should we, could we?), he has announced just this week he would free $100 million from his foreign aid budget to assist African countries that send peace-keeping troops to the region. He needs to back this kind of military support with harsher diplomatic efforts with the government in Khartoum. It might be too little too late, but it’s more than the Clinton administration did for Rwanda.
Africa's never been a fast-lane kind of place. Love it or hate it, the pace of life, maybe the pan-African philosophy, is ndank ndank (slowly, slowly). That's not how our country rolls, but it seems we've let it define our foreign aid.
warning to readers. someone has been commenting on my postings, and in the comment they leave a link which contains a virus. So don't click on any links you might find in these comments! I have the feeling this could be a blogspot-wide trend soooo, as if we need reminding, best to not click on or open anything that looks suspicious ...
Sunday, February 17, 2008
quelles vacances
The mosque in Djenne, the largest mud-structure in the world. (why you should love mud architecture: highly sustainable, locally acquired, thermally efficient, and limitless in design possibilities)
Mali is a lot like Senegal, particularly areas of Senegal outside of its capital region. But the differences, of course, are there - understated, pale; like sisters.
Mali is immense, Mali unrolls the dusty tapestry of its territory in all directions interminably. Mali has so much space, so much void. And how we traipsed and retraipsed it ...
Salif Keita headlined the Festival on the Niger concert we went to in Segou. Salif Keita is an albino, and something about that suggested to me - irrationally I suppose - an infirmity. Which is why the strength of his voice and his heavy presence on stage blew me away. His voice is like a heavy harmattan wind that picks up all the murmurs and whispers and cries breathed across the Sahara and blows it at you with such a force, you’ve got no defenses against it.
I wish we had more time in the desert, but we only spent a couple days up in Timbuktu. We stayed with a young Tuareg married couple who were super friendly, if not a dysfunctional (arranged) match … we rode camels straight towards the red setting sun, as if we could meet it on the horizon. Spent the night in their cousins’ encampment, under a moonless sky and ten thousand stars. From the highest private dune I watched the desert come back to life in the morning. I thought about what it must be like to know your way through the desert by the stars and the dunes, so identical looking to me. The desert is like the ocean in many ways, fierce but traversable in the same way. Frightening and alluring in the same ways. The city of Timbuktu itself is really cool, a special blend of African and Arab. Magic lamps and flying carpets for sale. Definitely a trace of the grandiose center of learning it was so many many years ago. Getting there and back was a drag though! After the return trip, we crashed for 24 hours in a sleepy little town at the foot of a mountain that seemed made just for that purpose.
We spent a lot of time on the road, which was a really good chance to see the environment but tiring too because transportation tends to be a little uncomfortable … Laura and I spent a lot of time thoughtfully ranking the worst rides. The time we squeezed 13 people in a “public” 4WD vehicle and flew across the rocky desert might have been the worst. The busride from Djenne to Segou felt luxurious by comparison, until we got peed on by the sheep on the roof.
Mali is archaic and artistic and magical. It was incredible, really.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
For those of you who didn't know (I didn't know), 2008 is the International Year of Languages. A fitting time to learn a new language and to ruminate over the babel that both separates and connects us.
When I studied abroad in Senegal, I was lucky to meet Boubacar Boris Diop, a Senegalese novelist who published for years in French before switching to his native language, Wolof. This is a really thought-provoking interview with him that touches on so many interesting, if problematic issues concerning African writers and readers. (For more on UNESCO's International Year of Languages: http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=41344&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html)
Interview by Jasmina Šopova
You wrote a dozen books in French before choosing Wolof, your mother language. Why this reversion?
Actually, my language was always there, inside me. The only problem I faced was the ability to write in my language. I was “corrupted” by French. I spoke everyday Wolof, but I didn’t possess it intimately.
Then there was Rwanda. A group of writers I belonged to went there after the genocide, in 1998, as part of the operation “Rwanda: writing as a duty to memory”. I said to myself that if we’d let 10,000 Rwandans get killed per day for three months, if nobody had done anything, this conveyed a certain contempt for Africa…
At that moment I felt even more strongly the desire to write in my mother language. It became essential. Oh, at first it was painful…I was very afraid of writing a French novel in Wolof. I had to fight against myself, but the Diops are stubborn! Then I began to hear voices – voices that came up out of the past. And writing became very easy. I am certain that my first novel in Wolof, Doomi golo (the she-monkey’s young), is my best piece of writing.
Is writing in Wolof therefore also a political act?
Absolutely. Coming back to the title of my novel The she-monkey’s young: what’s a monkey? It’s an imitation of the other. The passage that best sums up the book is the one in which you see a huge mirror in the middle of nowhere. Two gorillas find themselves in front of the mirror and they see their own images. They start fighting their reflections and as a result of hitting the mirror, they hurt themselves and die. What we call hatred of the other is in fact self-hatred. You have to be able to tolerate your image in the mirror, assume your identity.
At the moment I’m translating this novel into French. It will be published in France in September 2008.
Why didn’t you decide to publish it in French in Senegal?
Because now there are only publishers in national languages. That’s good news, anyway…even if their tongues are hanging out! They work with enthusiasm, but with immeasurable difficulties too: no way to make a profit, no distribution…True, the state occasionally steps in. The “Direction du Livre et de la Lecture” (book and reading administration) funded, for instance, a second edition of my book Doomi Golo after the first run of 3000 copies was sold out.
Besides my publisher Papyrus, there’s the « Organisation Sénégalaise d'Appui au Développement » (OSAD) that does remarkable work. And also ARED publishers, but they’re specialized in research and in education for development.
How many readers can you have in Wolof?
If I’d asked myself that question, I would never have started writing! It’s true that where I come from, many people don’t know how to read and don’t buy books. And they have other priorities: their children’s health, feeding their families….There’s also another phenomenon: rich people who live in poor societies generally prefer buying a fancy car, because you can’t show off a book….
We have to accept this situation and bet on the long term. It will take a while for books written today in the African languages to prevail, but they’ll eventually find acceptance. Thirty years ago, literature in national languages didn’t exist, except for a few isolated cases. Today the situation is the opposite: hundreds of books have been published in Wolof and Pulaar, definitely more than in French.
There are two writers’ organizations in Senegal, one composed of writers in French, the other of writers in national languages. The latter are far more numerous, but they have no visibility, because we live in a society where French is the language of prestige.
Do you count on diaspora readership?
A great deal. But although the younger generations of the diaspora speak their mother languages, they don’t know how to read or write them. This is why I had the idea of organizing a Wolof workshop with young people whose background is Senegalese immigration in France. At first the parents didn’t necessarily see any benefit in their children learning their mother language, but there was great demand from the young people. We’re starting in Bordeaux on 25 February. It’s an idea that seems odd initially, but if it works I’ll be very proud of it.
Often when one travels from one African capital to another, one has to stop off in a European capital. Does this also happen in the world of African literature?
It would be fantastic if I could translate the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo directly form Kikuyu into Wolof, without going through English and French….To my knowledge there’s almost no translation from one African language into another. My novel Doomi Golo is translated into Pulaar now. But who will translate it into Swahili? Do we have to wait two or three centuries? Not necessarily, but that’s what I fear, alas.
You know, Africa was divided up by the colonial powers in Berlin in 1885. Africans speak to each other through the colonial languages. And me, making fun of it, referring to the Berlin Wall of the Cold War, I call it our “Berlin Wall”. It is invisible but terrible – it separates the English-, French- and Portuguese-speaking countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
With Moussa Konaté, Malian writer who heads the French-speaking festival “Etonnants voyageurs” (amazing travelers) in Mali, I’ve often discussed the idea of organizing a big meeting of African writers who write in national languages. A way of at least making cracks in this wall. But it’s easier to find sponsors for French-language writers than for those who write in national languages. UNESCO could be the perfect venue for such a pan-African encounter, particularly this year, international year of languages. And it’s an international space. Without walls.
When I studied abroad in Senegal, I was lucky to meet Boubacar Boris Diop, a Senegalese novelist who published for years in French before switching to his native language, Wolof. This is a really thought-provoking interview with him that touches on so many interesting, if problematic issues concerning African writers and readers. (For more on UNESCO's International Year of Languages: http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=41344&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html)
Interview by Jasmina Šopova
You wrote a dozen books in French before choosing Wolof, your mother language. Why this reversion?
Actually, my language was always there, inside me. The only problem I faced was the ability to write in my language. I was “corrupted” by French. I spoke everyday Wolof, but I didn’t possess it intimately.
Then there was Rwanda. A group of writers I belonged to went there after the genocide, in 1998, as part of the operation “Rwanda: writing as a duty to memory”. I said to myself that if we’d let 10,000 Rwandans get killed per day for three months, if nobody had done anything, this conveyed a certain contempt for Africa…
At that moment I felt even more strongly the desire to write in my mother language. It became essential. Oh, at first it was painful…I was very afraid of writing a French novel in Wolof. I had to fight against myself, but the Diops are stubborn! Then I began to hear voices – voices that came up out of the past. And writing became very easy. I am certain that my first novel in Wolof, Doomi golo (the she-monkey’s young), is my best piece of writing.
Is writing in Wolof therefore also a political act?
Absolutely. Coming back to the title of my novel The she-monkey’s young: what’s a monkey? It’s an imitation of the other. The passage that best sums up the book is the one in which you see a huge mirror in the middle of nowhere. Two gorillas find themselves in front of the mirror and they see their own images. They start fighting their reflections and as a result of hitting the mirror, they hurt themselves and die. What we call hatred of the other is in fact self-hatred. You have to be able to tolerate your image in the mirror, assume your identity.
At the moment I’m translating this novel into French. It will be published in France in September 2008.
Why didn’t you decide to publish it in French in Senegal?
Because now there are only publishers in national languages. That’s good news, anyway…even if their tongues are hanging out! They work with enthusiasm, but with immeasurable difficulties too: no way to make a profit, no distribution…True, the state occasionally steps in. The “Direction du Livre et de la Lecture” (book and reading administration) funded, for instance, a second edition of my book Doomi Golo after the first run of 3000 copies was sold out.
Besides my publisher Papyrus, there’s the « Organisation Sénégalaise d'Appui au Développement » (OSAD) that does remarkable work. And also ARED publishers, but they’re specialized in research and in education for development.
How many readers can you have in Wolof?
If I’d asked myself that question, I would never have started writing! It’s true that where I come from, many people don’t know how to read and don’t buy books. And they have other priorities: their children’s health, feeding their families….There’s also another phenomenon: rich people who live in poor societies generally prefer buying a fancy car, because you can’t show off a book….
We have to accept this situation and bet on the long term. It will take a while for books written today in the African languages to prevail, but they’ll eventually find acceptance. Thirty years ago, literature in national languages didn’t exist, except for a few isolated cases. Today the situation is the opposite: hundreds of books have been published in Wolof and Pulaar, definitely more than in French.
There are two writers’ organizations in Senegal, one composed of writers in French, the other of writers in national languages. The latter are far more numerous, but they have no visibility, because we live in a society where French is the language of prestige.
Do you count on diaspora readership?
A great deal. But although the younger generations of the diaspora speak their mother languages, they don’t know how to read or write them. This is why I had the idea of organizing a Wolof workshop with young people whose background is Senegalese immigration in France. At first the parents didn’t necessarily see any benefit in their children learning their mother language, but there was great demand from the young people. We’re starting in Bordeaux on 25 February. It’s an idea that seems odd initially, but if it works I’ll be very proud of it.
Often when one travels from one African capital to another, one has to stop off in a European capital. Does this also happen in the world of African literature?
It would be fantastic if I could translate the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo directly form Kikuyu into Wolof, without going through English and French….To my knowledge there’s almost no translation from one African language into another. My novel Doomi Golo is translated into Pulaar now. But who will translate it into Swahili? Do we have to wait two or three centuries? Not necessarily, but that’s what I fear, alas.
You know, Africa was divided up by the colonial powers in Berlin in 1885. Africans speak to each other through the colonial languages. And me, making fun of it, referring to the Berlin Wall of the Cold War, I call it our “Berlin Wall”. It is invisible but terrible – it separates the English-, French- and Portuguese-speaking countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
With Moussa Konaté, Malian writer who heads the French-speaking festival “Etonnants voyageurs” (amazing travelers) in Mali, I’ve often discussed the idea of organizing a big meeting of African writers who write in national languages. A way of at least making cracks in this wall. But it’s easier to find sponsors for French-language writers than for those who write in national languages. UNESCO could be the perfect venue for such a pan-African encounter, particularly this year, international year of languages. And it’s an international space. Without walls.
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