Ecriture romanesque et cultures regionales au Senegal: Des origines a 1992 (review)

This study by Papa Samba Diop is without a doubt the most serious work to date devoted to Senegalese literature. Diop proposes nothing less than an archeology (in the Foucaultian sense) of that country's novelistic production since 1920. He begins, of course, with a solid description of the cultural context in which the national identity is elaborated; he then reviews the various castes and the resultant endogamy, the social imaginary concerning the beautiful, the mythical imaginary linking principal Wolof clans to a common ancestor, Ndiadiane Ndiaye, and finally the framework giving rise to the religious brotherhoods that make up Senegalese society: Mourides, Tidjanes, Khadres, Niassènes, and Layènes, all good Muslims in Allah's eyes.

To this hypocultural environment, which, according to Gilbert Durand, establishes the "anthropological structures of the imaginary" (but which may equally establish a sociocriticism, according to Lucien Goldmann), Diop adds a glossary indicating social status, professional identity, places of origin, stages in upbringing (childhood, circumcision, French schooling, completion of the cycle of intellectual training), and ways of life. He shows the impact of these "symbolectal indices" on what he calls thearchitext, that is, the body of novelistic texts, without distinction of merit or literary level, thus making allowances for the accounting of minor works such as Force-Bonté (B. Diallo), Matraqué par le destin (A. Samb), Le fort maudit (N. Diallo), Pas si fou (B. Ly), Le débrouillard (N. G. Faye), Le monde des grands (A. B. Seck), Le royaume de sable (M. S. Mbengue), L'impossible compromis (M. Dia), Le collier de cheville (A. B. Ndiaye), or Aïda-Mbène (D. Badiane), which reveal this hypoculture as much as the great novels by Aminata Sow Fall, Sembène Ousmane, or Cheikh Ndao. Indeed, the eye of the anthropologist, the linguist, the psychoanalyst, or the sociologist finds in the naive or mediocre texts as many significant indices with information relevant to their discipline, as they do in the works where the art is highly developed. Since the entire corpus of novelistic work is explored in this study, the problem of literary quality raised by performance is only touched upon, in the final chapters, in relation to the "hypoculture." In fact, Diop focuses his attention on several works, in which he studies thematics, characters, and narrative processes. But in so doing, he intends to situate them firmly within history and local culture and he uncovers the mythical substrata and the traditional onomastic and stylistic referents in them.

These "Contextual Readings" of stories as diverse as Ousmane Sembène's Les bouts de bois de Dieu, Ahmadou Diagne's Les trois volontés de Malic, or Aliou Ndao's Buur Tilleen are true examples of a literary archeology for each work. In particular, the manner in which Diop examinesthe novel of Cheikh Ndao in his two (Wolof and French) versions is entirely remarkable. A true work of a comparatist, it is a sort of microthesis inside a macrothesis, where reductions, elisions, transformations, and other digressions from one text or another are identified; where, moreover, modes, tones (epic and derisory), the combinative of narrative schemas, in short, the relationships with "the same and the other" and the perilous compromises of transculturality are all studied.

In chapter five, Diop dwells at even greater length on the ideological tendencies of the Senegalese novel and its predilections related to the hypoculture's incontrovertible specificities, such as maslaa ("making a compromise"), as seen in Aminata Sow Fall, Nafissatou Diallo, Abdoulaye Faye, Abasse Dione, and Ken Bugul in Le baobab fou. (I imagine that these positions will be reconsidered in her second novel.)

In sum, Diop's epistemological project aims at enlarging and renewing...