Massa Makan Diabate: Un griot mandingue a la rencontre de l'ecriture (review)

Although griots figure in many West African novels and plays, it is rare to find an author who can claim a link with a griot clan—for example, Seydou Badian Kouyaté. It is rarer still to come across a writer of griot origin who draws heavily on his or her own verbal tradition to convey both the verbal art and the social function of the profession. Massa Makan Diabaté (1938-88) exemplified this unusual situation because he came from a family of distinguished jeliw in Kita, Mali, a city that remains today an important center of training for these wordsmiths. His uncle Kèlè Monson Diabaté, one of the country's most respected griots, was a major source of information and inspiration for him. But in a complex manner understandable only in the context of Mandé social values, Kèlè Monson Diabaté was also his nephew's greatest rival.

Cheick M. Chérif Keita's study of Massa Makan Diabaté goes a long way toward helping the scholar in African literature to grasp the nature of that relationship. It also enables readers interested in this fascinating but insufficiently studied author to appreciate the largely binary nature of the jeli-author's writing. He started with a series of versions of the Sunjata epic and later shifted to the novel, a change that marked both a break from tradition as well as an attempt to give that heritage a new shape.

In a literary career that spanned little more than two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Diabaté produced 15 books, but he never quite reached the international audience enjoyed by two other Mandé writers, Laye and Kourouma. As scholars begin to understand more clearly the complex relationship between the oral and written traditions in West Africa, however, it is likely that Diabaté's reputation and profile will rise. A small but growing body of research on the Malian writer is beginning to emerge since his untimely death in 1988. At the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Bamako there are likely to be more than a few mémoires devoted to this son of Mali, while in other parts of West Africa and in Europe one can expect numerous doctoral theses. In the United States, James McGuire included Diabaté in a dissertation on "Narrating the Mande: West African Identity Production and the Mande Francophone Novel" (Northwestern, 1994), a project that led to an excellent article in RAL ("Narrating Mande Heroism in the Malian Novel: Negotiating Postcolonial Identity in Diabaté's Le Boucher de Kouta," 24.3 [1993]: 35-57). Eliza Nichols (Yale) is currently completing a thesis on the Malian writer. But we are still awaiting a "Critical Perspectives" type of volume on Massa Makan Diabaté that can provide a detailed overview of the author's life and works.

Keita explains that the corpus of scholarship on Diabaté is slim in part because scholars were not interested in the "traditional" nature of the writer's early works and could not grasp the link between the oral forms and the themes they found there. Keita is one of a handful of researchers who have been interested in Diabaté for a long time, and this book is, to my knowledge, the first scholarly work of more than article length to appear on the Malian author.

The unusual nature of Diabaté's situation as a writer of jeli origin lies at the heart of current discussion about him, and it is this aspect of his unusual career that concerns Keita. He focuses with great intensity on the difficult social and artistic role of a young man who must reconcile conflicting social values: the need to make his own mark in life, often cited as the Mandé value of fadenya, while following a path that is true to his own cultural heritage, or fasiya. Keita...