Moorings and mythology: Le Ventre de l'Atlantique and the immigrant experience

Abstract

Analyzing Fatou Diome's 2003 novel Le Ventre de l'Atlantique, this article explores its treatment of the international migration system, particularly the causes of migration between Senegal and France and the social ills that go along with this, as well as the novel's location in the genealogy of Francophone literature. It argues that Diome's position is ambiguous, portraying the principal causes of migration as intellectual and cultural, rooted in a mythologized image of France, yet prescribing an economic solution to the problem: Diome depicts the (largely autobiographical) protagonist, Salie, financing a local business with French capital for her brother in an effort to dissuade him from leaving Senegal. This article also examines the novel's exploration of identity, belonging, and memory through the protagonist's engagement with the act of writing. It argues that, in particular, Diome illuminates the lesser-known marginalization faced by ‘failed’ migrants in their home society, and how migration can lead to a persistent state of alienation even among those who return home.

Prenant comme sujet le roman Le Ventre de l'Atlantique de Fatou Diome paru en 2003, cet article analyse sa conception du système international de la migration, notamment les causes de la migration entre le Sénégal et la France et les inconvénients sociaux qu'elle peut entrainer, ainsi que la place qu'occupe le roman dans la lignée de la littérature francophone. L'article propose que la pensée de Diome au sujet de la migration est quelque peu troublée, mettant l'accent sur les motifs culturels et intellectuels du problème tout en cherchant une solution économique: au juste, Salie, la protagoniste assez autobiographique du roman, arrive à convaincre son frère de rester au Sénégal en raison d'un transfert de fonds qu'elle effectue de la France pour lui financer une boutique. Cet article considère également la figuration des idées de l'identité, du sentiment d'appartenance, et de la mémoire, que le roman aborde à travers l'écriture pratiquée par la protagoniste. Particulièrement, l'article propose que Le Ventre de l'Atlantique rende plus nette la réalité plutôt méconnue de la périphérisation que peuvent subir les migrants dits ‘échoués’ une fois rentrés chez eux.

Mots-clés: migration; littérature francophone; périphérisation; mythologie de la migration; France; Sénégal; Fatou Diome

Keywords:

• migration
• Francophone literature
• alienation
• immigrant mythology
• France
• Senegal
• Fatou Diome

Acknowledgements

This article has benefitted from the useful feedback of a number of readers, and I am thankful in particular to its two anonymous reviewers and to the journal's editorial team for providing valuable criticism and suggestions.

Notes

‘At home? In the Other's place? A hybrid, Africa and Europe wonder, perplexed, which end of me belongs to them.’ [Translations by author]

‘Exilée en permanence, je passe mes nuits à souder les rails qui mènent à l'identité.’

‘Je vais chez moi comme on va à l’étranger.'

‘Having chosen a path completely foreign to my people, I was determined to try to prove its validity. I needed to “succeed” in order to fulfill the role assigned to all children from our country: to act as social security for your own. This obligation of assistance is the greatest burden emigrants carry.’

‘renvoient dos-à-dos l'Europe (en l'occurrence la France) et l'Afrique dans le processus de désenchantement subi par leurs héros’.

‘Ici, on n'a pas besoin d'une pompe à eau, même japonaise.’

‘la malaria, ils s'en remettent grace aux decoctions’.

‘After the colonization traditionally recognized, now prevails a sort of mental colonization: the young players venerated and still venerate France. In their eyes, all that is enviable comes from France.’

‘Take, for example, the only television which allows them to see the games, it comes from France. Its owner, who has become a village dignitary, lived in France. The teacher, very learned, did a portion of his studies in France. All those occupying important positions in the country studied in France. The wives of our successive presidents are all French. To win an election, the Father-of-the-nation wins France first. The few Senegalese players who are rich and famous play in France. To train the national team, they always get a Frenchman. Even our ex-president, to prolong his life, granted himself a French hideaway. So on the island, even if they can't distinguish France from Peru on a map, they know, however, that it rhymes clearly with chance.’

‘Nul n'attend… quelques kilos de riz français; cultivateurs, éleveurs et pêcheurs, ces insulaires sont autosuffisants.’

‘Ndétare's eyes bulged: he had just realized that Madické, the one he found the most sensible, the only one he thought to have turned away from the path of emigration, was in no less of a hurry than the others to pack his bags.’

‘L'instituteur, très savant, a fait une partie de ses études en France… Les quelques joueurs sénégalais riches et célèbres jouent en France. Pour entraîner l’équipe nationale, on a toujours été chercher un Français.'

‘sans gêne, vient gonfler son chiffre d'affaires jusque dans ces contrées… où l'eau potable reste une luxe’.

‘Moi, j'aime mieux vivre chez moi, surtout maintenant que j'ai ma boutique.’

‘Like his counterfeit Rolex, which he doesn't know how to set, like his leather living room, always balled up in a cotton sheet, like his freezer and fridge, padlocked, like his third wife, eclipsed by the fourth, that he only notices those evenings his conjugal rotation demands it, that television was there, in his vast abode, to signify his success.’

‘devenu l'emblème de l’émigration réussie'.

‘les récits de l'homme de Barbès suivaient le sillage de l'imaginaire, emportant avec eux le cœur des jeunes insulaires’.

‘faramineux par rapport à la moyenne de l’île'.

‘How could I make these young men understand that living in France is not straightforward, despite the fact that I myself have been living there for so many years? There are situations where it is easier to let the other go to the end of the road; discouraged, he will certainly have wasted some time, but the necessity of turning around will appear more clearly than through the intervention of a speech.’

‘But who can multiply themselves like the bread of Christ without falling from the arms of kin?’

‘l’écriture a constitué non seulement une arme de combat, mais également un refuge et un réflexe de survie'.

‘Je cherche mon territoire sur une page blanche; un carnet, ça se tient dans un sac de voyage.’

‘Enraciné partout, exilée tout le temps, je suis chez moi là où l'Afrique et l'Europe perdent leur orgueil et se contentent de s'additionner : sur une page, pleine de l'alliage qu'elles m'ont légué.’

‘writing offers me a complicit maternal smile because, free, I write to say and do what my mother dared not say and do. Papers? All the folds of the Earth. Date and place of birth? Here and now. Papers! My memory is my identity.’

‘Ma mémoire est mon identité.’

‘naître de soi’.

‘L'exil, c'est mon suicide géographique.’

‘Other places attract me because, virgin to my history, they do not judge on the basis of errors of destiny, but as a function of what I have chosen to become; they are for me a gauge of liberty, of self-determination.’

‘To leave is to die of absence. You come back, but you come back an other. Upon return you look, but you never find those you left behind. A tear in your eye, you resign yourself to the observation that the masks you had carved for them no longer fit. Who are these people I call my brother, my sister, etc.? Who am I for them?’

‘I owe him Descartes, I owe him Montesquieu, I owe him Victor Hugo, I owe him Molière, I owe him Balzac, I owe him Dostoyevsky, I owe him Hemingway, I owe him Leopold Sédar Senghor, I owe him Aimé Cesaire, I owe him Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Mariama Bâ and the others.’