‘The tales of tomorrow’: towards a futurist vision of Wolof tradition

Abstract

Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Doomi Golo (2003)/Les Petits de la guenon (2009) elaborates a specifically futurist aesthetic of traditionality. Drawing on the shift in anthropology towards understanding traditionality as a construct rather than an intrinsic trait, I show how this novel strongly thematizes the inventedness of Senegalese oral traditions and calls for their reinvention in order to help imagine a more democratic society in the future. Oral traditions serve here to critique forms of domination based on gender and age, which have been identified by some scholars as ‘traditional’ power structures. Diop's novel, which I read both in its Wolof original and in the French adaptation made by the author, thus imagines a liberation from tradition-as-power through tradition-as-genre: because the category of tradition always depends to a certain extent on an act of invention, it can be reinvented to justify liberation rather than patriarchal domination, thereby serving the needs of the future rather than the past. This futurist vision parallels the novel's status as a call to constitute a future Wolof-language readership which remains, for now, limited.

Keywords:

• Boubacar Boris Diop
• Wolof language
• tradition
• Senegalese literature
• francophone

Notes

1. Original quote: ‘Je conçois la littérature écrite dans les langues européennes par des Africains comme une littérature de transition’ (Diop in Zanganeh 2010).

2. Soyinka (1968, 19).

3. See the novel Murambi, le livre des ossements (2000), translated into English as Murambi, the Book of Bones (2006), but also the first several essays in Diop (2007).

4. I make this claim as a response to Susanne Gehrmann's reading of Diop, according to which his ‘new model of written orature [ … ] emancipates itself from the weighty heritage of traditional orature by adopting a subversive stance towards traditional forms and content’ (Gehrmann 2005, 178). I agree, but we can go farther: for Diop, tradition is not a monolithic amalgam of conservative ideas that needs to be subverted. Rather, it already possesses a subversive capacity on its own. Conservative uses of tradition are what need to be subverted through novelistic writing.

5. James Clifford's exploration of ‘traditional futures’ (2004) takes a different approach from what I am conceptualizing here. For him, ‘[t]he language of “articulation”’ of traditions through difference, contact with other cultural forms, and identity politics ‘gets at the practical deconstructive, and reconstructive, activities of indigenous traditions better than the demystifying discourse of “invention”’ (2004, 158). This turn away from ‘invention’ also alludes to the debate over discursive authority provoked by scholarship on invented traditions: the authority of the Western academy to delegitimize people's claims to traditional authenticity by calling them invented was itself put into question (Briggs 1996). Nonetheless, the ‘demystifying discourse of “invention”’ is apt for Boubacar Boris Diop's writing. The specific process by which historical figures become remembered in new, often distorted, ways through traditional discourse is a major concern of his fiction. At any rate, tradition is celebrated here, and indeed ‘articulated’ in new ways, as much as it is demystified.

6. See, for example, the essay ‘Ecris et … tais-toi’ (Write and … shut up) in Diop (2007).

7. In-text citations to Doomi Golo and Les Petits de la guenon are marked as DG and PG, respectively, followed by the appropriate page number.

8. Konaté (2005) discusses the provenance and proverb-like quality of this sentence, which Bâ expressed in different variations on different occasions, yet which has come to be generally remembered in this form I quote here. According to Konaté, Bâ first used the formula in a speech before the executive board of UNESCO in 1962: ‘Apprenez que dans mon pays, chaque fois qu'un vieillard meurt c'est une bibliothèque qui a brûlé’ (Know that in my country, every time an old man dies, it's a library that has burned) (quoted in Konaté 2005, 58). However, an even earlier variant appears in a speech that Bâ delivered to UNESCO's Programme Commission in December 1960: ‘Pour moi, je considère la mort de chacun de ces traditionalistes comme l'incendie d'un fonds culturel non exploité’ (For my part, I see the death of each of these traditionalists as the destruction by fire of unexploited cultural wealth) (Bâ 1960, 16′43), where ‘fonds’ can allude metaphorically to economic resources or indeed to a collection of materials in a library or museum. Throughout his work representing Mali at UNESCO, which lasted from 1960–1970, Bâ called for international aid to countries like his own for the purpose of preserving oral traditional knowledge.

9. From Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Purple Hibiscus (2006).

10. Specifically, Diouf's presentation was part of a workshop held in January 2012 on the research results of a study entitled ‘Participation politique des jeunes femmes d'Afrique de l'ouest francophone’, conducted by Afriques-Créatives and several other organizations. His presentation is documented in the final report of this event (see Afriques-Créatives et al. 2012).

11. See issues 2 and 3 of the Senegalese review Demb ak Tey [Yesterday and Today] (1975 and 1976), directed by Djibril Tamsir Niane, which are devoted specifically to oral traditions surrounding Kocc Barma. Niane argues that Kocc's historical existence is certain.

12. For a complete transcription, French translation, and analysis of the folktale from which this proverb is drawn, see Kesteloot and Mbodj (2006, 165–177).

13. See Seye (2003, 152–156) and Serbin (2004, 158–163) for published versions of the Talaatay Ndeer story. Alioune Badara Bèye dramatized the incident as a play entitled Nder en flammes (1990). The notebooks of the colonial Senegalese functionary Yoro Dyao, which were written between 1902 and 1908 and published in pieces in colonial publications by Raymond Rousseau and Henri Gaden, contain a brief account of the Talaatay Ndeer story amid other historical information on the kingdom of Waalo (Rousseau 1929, 142).

14. This is the case, for example, of Serbin (2004) as well as Diaw (2010).

15. Personal communication from Paap Alsaan Sow, 14 August 2013.

16. The theme of the invented hero whose feats are remembered differently from how they actually happened is a recurring one for Boubacar Boris Diop. In Le Cavalier et son ombre (The Knight and his Shadow) (1997), a government committee is forced to invent a national hero from thin air, the ‘Cavalier’, since no historical figure is authentic or flawless enough to serve in that role. The imaginary Cavalier's statue comes to life but is eventually killed and replaced by a lowly functionary named Dieng Mbaalo, who then occupies the position of hero. For Diop, heroes of the past are only heroic because they are imagined as such.

17. Wolofal refers to Wolof written in Arabic characters. See Warner (2012, 98, n. 4).