Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's La plus secrète mémoire des hommes - one of his objectives was to be original without being original

La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (2021) by Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, published in English as The Most Secret History of Men (2023), is the first imitation of Roberto Bolaño I have seen outside of Latin American literature.  Many reviews note that Sarr’s novel is “Bolañoesque,” but I have not found one that notes that it directly imitates The Savage Detectives (1998).  La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, like The Savage Detectives, is about a writer’s search for the forgotten author of a single work (an entire novel this time, not a single poem), it shares Bolaño’s three-part structure, with a many-voiced middle section (it does shift more voices into the third part), and is thematically about the link between writing – publishing, really – and death.

Also, the title of the novel is from the French translation of The Savage Detectives.  Sarr uses a paragraph of Bolaño, with the title, as the epigraph of his novel.  He is not hiding anything:

Charles reproached Elimane for having pillaged literature; Elimane responded that literature was a game of pillaging.  He said that one of his objectives was to be original without being original, since that was one possible definition of literature and even of art, and that his other objective was to show that everything could be sacrificed in the name of an ideal of creation. (232, tr. mine)

Sarr is not as radical an avant-gardist as his creation Elimane, whose novel is explicitly a collage novel.  Or at least I don’t think La plus secrète mémoire is a collage novel.  If I missed all the hidden quotations how would I know.  Anyway.  Elimane and his fictional 1938 novel with the Borgesian name, Le Labyrinthe de l’inhumain, have some distant parallels with Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem’s 1968 Bound to Violence, perhaps the angriest novel I have ever read, which its merits aside ran into trouble for plagiarism.*  But again, the imaginary Elimane is a deliberate conceptualist, not a plagiarist but a collagist, a trickster.  Plus the difference between an African novel appearing in 1938 versus 1968 is enormous.  The narrator passes a single copy of Elimane’s lost novel around to the entire African literary diaspora in Paris, while Ouologuem’s novel, although banned from sale for a time, is in French libraries.  American libraries for that matter.  I don’t want to push the parallel too far.  But Ouologuem is another bookish ghost in this bookish novel.

It takes him a while, until page 275, but Sarr does hit on a variation or extension or argument with Bolaño’s literary death cult that would likely have made him happy, or angry, and Sarr extends the idea to a good twist all the way at the end.  I thought La plus secrète mémoire had some dullish patches, but persist, I advise.

It’s because of all this, of all this promoted and prize-winning [promue et primée] mediocrity, that we all deserve to die.  Everyone: journalists, critics, readers, editors, writers, society – everyone.  (308)

I don’t agree with this, but that is a separate issue.

I found Sarr’s settings – Paris, Amsterdam, Bueno Aires, Dakar – bland, thinly described.  I’ve been to Dakar – gimme some Dakar, man.  The narrator is in the central market, which “overflows with shouting, arguments, laughter, honking horns, bleating sheep, religious chants” (348) etc., still pretty generic, I was thinking, until this:

I had before me the proof that the most ordinary spectacle of the streets of this city rendered the novel pointless.  Try to exhaust a Dakarian place?  Perec could return and try.  (348)

All right, fine, never mind.  I don’t believe Perec had been mentioned before.  One more writer in a writer-packed novel.

 

* Michael Orthofer’s review of Bound to Violence goes into the details well. And his review of Sarr’s book is here. 

Yiddish and West African literatures - a topic for a Comparative Literature dissertation

Meaning, not for me. For someone else. One thing I've noticed reading Yiddish literature is its similarity to Senegalese literature, to West African literature. Saving the difference, as they say.

My little insight sometime last winter was that 19th century Yiddish literature was a colonial literature. The colonized people were the Jews of the Pale of Settlement; the colonized lands are, now, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and part of Poland. The colonizer, the empire, was Russia. The rule of the imperial power was heavy (the draft, especially), inefficient, bizarre, and at times murderous.

Just as an example, the reason that Yiddish stories concentrate so much on town life is that almost no Jews were allowed to be farmers.* Tevye the Dairyman was unusual in that he worked in agriculture, but if he wanted to buy a field and grow some wheat, he would have had to apply for a special permit, for which there were strict quotas.

The cultural similarities are so striking. In Senegal and in the shtetl, boys went to religious schools and spent hours memorizing ancient passages of Arabic or Hebrew. The pious life of study and prayer was or is a male ideal. Underemployment is rampant - hence the number of middlemen, peddlers, and matchmakers. Beggars are treated with surprising respect, since charity is a pious act. Some of these similarities go back, I presume, to common roots in the Near East.

Someone has to make dinner, though. That's for the women, who have to earn a living while their husbands and sons pray in the study house. The abandoned wife is a central theme of both literatures. The social details differ - in Senegal, the mechanism is not just divorce but polygamy - but the underlying problems are so similar.

Another similarity, of central importance to readers - both literatures, at least in their earlier stages , consist almost entirely of short books, because of the constraints of publishing and the low literacy level of the population. I would hypothesize that this pattern would repeat itself in many "early" literatures. Pushkin and Gogol and Lermontov wrote short books, too, come to think of it.

So I asked ma femme, I asked her "Why hasn't anyone done this?" to which she replied "Who needs the grief?" A good point. But look, here's one Professor Marc Caplan, a Johns Hopkins professor who specializes in both Yiddish and West African literatures. What do you know? Here we see him in action, running a conference panel titled "Deterritorialization After Deleuze." Um. His own paper is “The ‘Minor’ as Methodology: Deterritorialization in Yiddish and African Narrative.” This is not exactly what I had in mind, but I guess that's the way things are done now.

* One of the Yiddish plays I read, Peretz Hirschbein's "Green Fields," was about a little cluster of Jewish farmers. It was written for people living in Lower East Side tenements who had immigrated from the shtetl, and had never set foot on a farm.

A Senegalese reading list

Here is an annotated version of my Senegalese reading list. I want to save future Googlers the work I did. It's an English-language list. French readers can expand it by a factor of 50 or so.

Especially useful books - books that really helped me prepare for Senegal - have been marked with an asterisk. This is entirely independent of literary merit. If there's no comment, I haven't read it. If there's a comment, I have. No Senegalese movies or music here, despite the quality of both. Most of the novels are extremely short, often 100 pages or less.

Suggestions and corrections are still welcome. Thanks to those who helped out with the original list.

Books by Senegalese authors

Ousmane Sembène: The Black Docker (1956) - Angry first novel, set in Marseilles.

*God's Bits of Wood (1960) - An account of a 1948 railway workers' strike. An epic in 240 pages, and a masterpiece. I'm amazed at how much Sembène stuffs into the novel.

*Tribal Scars (1962) - Short stories, some in the village, some in Dakar.

*The Money Order (1966) - A villager receives a money order from his relative in France. Then his troubles begin. Worthy of Chekhov.

White Genesis (1966) - Something horrible happens in a village. Only the griot will speak the truth. Perplexing, but illuminates the role of the griot in Senegalese society.

*Xala (1973) - A bigshot is struck with an impotence curse on the night of his marriage to his third wife. The funniest Sembène I've read, easily.

Also by Sembène: The Last of the Empire (1981), Niiwam & Taaw (1987)

Cheikh Amadou Kane: The Ambiguous Adventure (1961) - A didactic novel on the conflicts between tradition and modernity. I don't pretend to understand it well.

Mariama Bâ: *So Long a Letter (1979) - A reasoned feminist argument for women's autonomy and against multiple wives. A masterpiece of rhetoric, if not of art, and the best-selling novel in West African history.

Also by Mariama Ba: Scarlet Song (1986)

Aminata Sow Fall: *The Beggars' Strike, Or, The Dregs of Society (1981) - The Dakar government wants to get rid of the beggars. The beggars go on strike. Consequences ensue. Ingenious. In Senegal, I actually saw a news report in which a government official said she wanted to crack down on the children who beg as part of their religious schooling. Strike! Strike!

Birago Diop: Tales of Amadou Koumba (1947/1958) - Fine adaptations of traditonal stories, often animal fables. Diop was also a distinguished poet.

Myriam Warner-Vieyra: As the Sorceror Said (1980) - Not actually about Senegal at all. Warner-Vieyra is Gaudeloupan now living in Senegal. This one is a good girl-pushed-to-the-edge story, about a Gaudaloupan girl in France.

Juletane (1982) - A different Guadaloupan girl in France marries a Senegalese man, and goes to Senegal with him. Things don't go well. Another sharp feminist novel, the crazed alternative to Mariama Ba's rationalism.

Ken Bugul: The Abandoned Baobab (1982)

Fatou Diome: The Belly of the Atlantic (2001)

Djibril Niane: Soundjata (1965)

Leopold Senghor: Poems - A Collected Poems has been published, but the 1964 Selected Poems is probably better suited for most of us. Also see the Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry.

Books about Senegal by non-Senegalese authors

Mungo Park: Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799) - An all-time great travel book. One young Scot attempts to be the first European to visit Timbuktu. He doesn't make it on this trip, lucky for him, emerging from the bush with nothing but rags and his enormous hat, stuffed with his notes. The first place to go for a look at pre-colonial West Africa.

Mark Hudson: *The Music in My Head (1998) - See here. A great book about Senegalese music, and about Dakar.

Reginald McKnight: *Moustapha's Eclipse (1988) - A short story collection of high quality. Three of the stories are inspired by McKnight's experiences in Senegal, the others are about American racial complications. I need to read more of his work.

Also by Reginald McKnight: I Get on the Bus (1990), He Sleeps (2002), and others.

Michael Palin: Sahara (2002) - Senegal is passed through. Well-observed and funny, with good photos.

Jean Baptiste Henri Savigny and Alexander Corréaud: Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 (1817) - A great account of a famous shipwreck, with some incidental historical information about Senegal.

Peter Biddlecombe: French Lessons in Africa

Akihiro Yamamura: Senegal

Peter Matthiessen: African Silences

Ryszard Kapuscinski: The Shadow of the Sun

Susan Lowerre: Under the Neem (1990)

Katharine Kane: *Lonely Planet Guide to Senegal and The Gambia - The best written Lonely Planet guide I've used. Meine frau had lunch with the author, while I went out looking for a place to buy shampoo. For a city of 3 million people, Dakar is a small place.

Being an Old Africa Hand: the First Steps

I have spent a total of four weeks in West Africa, two weeks in Mali (my honeymoon), and now two weeks in Senegal. On these trips, one sort of person I met was the Old Africa Hand, the outsider who had really put in the time in Africa, learned the language, suffered the stomach flu, traveled around, who really knew something. They were a varied bunch, none of them resembling Graham Greene characters.

Four weeks is a necessary but trivial start on four years, or whatever it takes to achieve Old-Africa-Handage. It takes time. West Africa is complicated. Difficult. Different. That steer up above - he's just standing across from our hotel in central Dakar. A little strange. Some tips, from my own experience, and borrowed from others.

One can visit Senegal to go to the beach. This makes no economic sense for Americans, but is not so crazy for Europeans. ("Italian? Espagnole?" asked the touts at the resort town of Saly. American? They're incredulous. Americans don't come here).

One can also go to see nature (on the left, a green-faced monkey at the Bandia nature reserve, overlooking our lunch). Our half day in a pirogue in the mangrove swamps of the Siné-Saloum Delta made me wish for a week. During migration season, every species of Asian and European migratory bird passes through a national park on Senegal's northern border. But West Africa is not South Africa, and not Kenya. Nowhere close.

One goes - I go - to West Africa to meet people. To see how they live, to see what they do. To talk to them, hear their views of things. So the language problem is critical. If you don't have any French and are understandably nervous, go to Ghana. "West Africa for beginners," an Old Africa Hand calls it.

Don't be nervous, though. There's a solution. Go with a group. At a minimum, hire a driver. In Bamako, in Dakar, you can struggle your way around with cabs (next time, I'm learning how to use the public transit. Next time). But to leave the big city, you need a car and driver. Specify that you need a car with seatbelts. Specify that you need a driver with English. He may cost more. He's worth it.

As a tourist, your driver becomes your best friend. He knows everyone, he knows everything. Just ask him. You want to have tailored shirts made - he'll take you to the fabric stall, get you a price somewhere between tourist and local, then take you to his cousin who is a tailor. Just go shopping without him, and tell him how much you paid - the look of agony!

Perhaps you will feel conflicted, not used to hiring servants. That's good. It will be one guilty feeling among many. The developing world is a difficult place to visit for many reasons - be sure to look up per capita income and literacy and schooling rates before you go. But your driver (and your hotel manager, and any number of other people) are also ambassadors to their country, a country of which they are very proud. And you're paying them. It all works out.

Senegal and Mali are poor, unhygienic (expect to be sick, feel lucky if you're not), and badly maintained. The air in Dakar is appalling, and at any time a truly hideous odor may cross your path. The souvenir sellers are endlessly irritating.

I wish I understood why I like the place so much. I'll go back whenever I can.

The Music in My Head and my new career in Senegalese hiphop promotion - You couldn’t do it. No chance.

I mentioned at the beginning of the week that I spent part of my time in Senegal in meetings with rappers. Let’s hold that thought for a moment. This is from Mark Hudson’s 1998 novel The Music in My Head:

“The sound was like a great black hole, out of which the splintering shards of Salifou Nyang’s guitar ushered in an itchy, scratching rhythm that went undulating endlessly up and down, while Papa Gorgi came down like the wolf on the fold – letting rip with a fierce, apocalyptic grandeur, colliding immediately with the talking drum, which came booming and reverberating right into the middle of your brain, knocking you totally off balance, while the tumbas and timbales went on rattling away, like a relentless hammering on hub-caps and dustbin-lids – and miles above it all, a single sax, mildly distorted by reverb, floated like a fading star.” (121)

You can hear this song, almost, if you can find it.* It’s “Boubou N’Gary” by Etoile 2000. Hudson tells a story about it – that it was delivered to a radio station two hours after it was recorded, unmixed, and was an instant smash – that allows identification. “Boubou N’Gary” does not have a saxophone, but otherwise the description is spot on.

The Music in My Head is full of this sort of sleight of hand. Youssou N’Dour is a main character in the novel. Peter Gabriel and Salif Keita are in the background. Wole Soyinka makes a cameo appearance. But they’re all renamed, concealed. Senegal becomes Tekrur; Dakar becomes N’Galam. So Hudson has room to play around.

Still, this novel gets everything right. Detail after detail. I don’t want to say that there’s no better Dakar novel – remember that table of novels at NEA Senegal – but if you know one, I’m begging you, translate it for me.

“But I’m not fully taking this in, any more than I’m noticing the fact that the windscreen is shatterd into a great spider’s web, that the passenger door doesn’t close properly, that there are wires hanging out everywhere, that the foam is bursting out of the seats, or that everything is covered in that grey encrustation of dust and indescribable other matter that is Africa, or indeed than I’m paying attention to the driver’s amiable but meaningless small talk, which I can’t understand.” (31)

I was in that cab, that exact cab, still on the streets of Dakar ten years later. Hudson’s Dakar is a scarier place than the one I visited. Maybe safety has improved over the last ten years. Maybe Hudson is borrowing pieces of other cities, Lagos, say. Maybe the menace is in the head of the narrator. All three, I think. But otherwise, this book is it.

As a novel, Hudson’s book has some problems, first-novel stuff. He sets up some problems for which he never quite finds solutions. But as a book about Dakar, it’s first-rate, and as a book about African music, it’s a classic. Headlong, ecstatic, compulsive.

The novel is about a burned-out English music promoter, Andrew Litchfield, who gets a second chance at the big time through African music and the “world music” boom. We join Litch just at the moment when the ride ends. He became a Senegalese music promoter just by wanting to do it, just by showing up. One of the novels uncanny accuracies.

Ma femme is trying to bring Sen Kumpë to the U.S. for a little tour of college campuses next year. They’re good – you can hear them on African Underground Vol. 1, available here, or at their Myspace page. We met another young guy, Hot Rebel, by pure coincidence. He gave me copies of his demos.** He’s good, too. We visited his studio, a little box with a microphone, keyboard, mixer, and computer. First album coming out soon. Here's a video of his, which I watched on his computer, in his studio. Now I'm bragging.

“Oh yes. It always used to be that if you were white in Africa, you were automatically a VIP. It’s not so much like that now, but you can still play it to your advantage if you so choose. Isn’t that neo-colonial, I hear you ask. Well, it is and it isn’t, because not anyone can do it. You couldn’t do it. No chance.” (258)

This is the only inaccuracy in the book. I’m nobody. But if I could have stayed, if I had wanted – it’s all very seductive, and completely ridiculous. I could do it. You could do it. Hot Rebel's manager is a Jamaican life coach who is in Dakar because his wife works at the British Embassy. He just showed up. Dakar is an exciting place.

* A CD was released along with the novel. The novel never came out in the U.S., but the CD did. Baffling. It's an all time great African record, ranking with The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, and Guitar Paradise of East Africa, and The Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara.

** The Senegalese music business is a disaster, and the glory days of tape shopping may be in the past. But I came home with multiple copies of Sen Kumpë’s new record, and Hot Rebel’s demos. And a mbalax mix CD made for me by the bartender at the Pen’Art nightclub. Senegal is awesome.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, founding father, poet

Léopold Sédar Senghor, first president of independent Senegal, is also the country's most famous and respected poet. In the statue to the left, which is in Senghor's childhood home in Joal, Senghor is standing on an antique tome. Our guide emphasized that the statue was lifesize, and that Senghor was very short.

The poet-statesman is a less rare figure than one might think. The Athenian Solon was a poet, as was Queen Elizabeth I, and Radovan Karadzic. The latter example should make one wary of attributing any particular virtue to the fact that a politician writes poetry.

Senghor is a complex figure, a genuine intellectual hero and statesman, but also an actual politician, with all that that entails. Many Senegalese regard him ambivalently - they had to live with him, with policies that worked and policies that failed. Senghor himself was ambivalent about Senegal. He had a French education, a French wife, and preferred Normandy to any place on earth, an opinion that I regard as entirely justified.

Most tourists, interested in neither poetry nor politics, visit Joal in order to cross the footbridge to Fadiout, a fishing town of 8,000 people built on an island of shells. The cemetery, on an adjacent island, is one of the strangest, most beautiful places I have ever seen. Surrounded by the sea, on the edge of a mangrove swamp, buried in shells. Click to enlarge - you'll get the idea.


One of the shell mound graves. The region south of Dakar is now primarily Christian, the fruits of Portuguese missionary work dating back to the 16th century. The Fadiout cemetery also has a Muslim section. The residents of the region take great pride in their religious comity. So several people told us, and why not believe them?





Another reason for tourists to visit Joal, less intellectual or artistic, but nonetheless worthwhile:


A Senghor poem, from the 1961 Nocturnes, tr. John Reed and Clive Wake:

I have spun a song soft as a murmur of doves at noon
To the shrill notes of my four-stringed khalam.
I have woven you a song and you did not hear me.
I have offered you wild flowers with scents as strange as a sorcerer's eyes
I have offered you my wild flowers. Will you let them wither,
Finding distraction in the mayflies dancing?

La Maison des Esclaves - The House of Slaves

On Gorée Island, a short ferry ride from Dakar, one can visit the Maison des Esclaves, the House of Slaves. The building, a merchant's house, is small and pink. A series of cells on the ground floor held a variety of cargo, including slaves.

This is the view from outside one of the mens' cells. There's nothing in it now. As a guess, at its most crowded it held 20 to 25 adult men. The slit in the back is a window.






Here I am standing in the corner of the men's cell, looking into the courtyard. The room is very small. I also went into different, essentially identical chambers reserved for women, and for children. I did not take any pictures of those. Squeamishness?




Yes, quite possibly. Under the two central, symmetric, staircases are storage holes that were used as punishment cells, perhaps for up to six slaves. I took a photo of the stairs, not of the cell itself. A guide told us that Nelson Mandela entered one of the cells and fainted. The guide was subtly warning us away from the punishment cells. If you have endured the sufferings of Nelson Mandela, feel free to enter. No one did.

The punishment cell just to the right has air slits. This one does not.

The way out. One has to imagine the now absent dock, and a longboat, and, further off, a one- or two-masted ship, possibly a slaver, but more likely an ordinary cargo vessel, picking up a few slaves for the trip to Brazil or Bermuda or Georgia. One must also imagine the packed bodies, the odors, the chains, the misery. The relief of the air and sun, the bewilderment of the ride to the ship, the horrors of the trans-Atlantic passage, the lifetime of chattel slavery.


The House of Slaves is itself an act of imagination, created by its "conservateur au chef" Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye. He has pasted messages, admonishments, penseés, here and there throughout the building. A strange kind of historical curation. But the House of Slaves is now as much a memorial to the human costs of the slave trade as a historical site. The building itself was part of the slave trade for less than thirty years (off and on from 1780-1810, say), and Gorée Island was never an important slaving center. Maybe a few thousand slaves passed through this building, perhaps many fewer.

The smaller scale is probably useful for most visitors. This is just a house. Yet how much suffering was there at this minor outpost of the slave trade? Then try to imagine the giant slave markets on the banks of the Gambia, or in Ghana. Impossible, but we keep trying.

Every American should visit the House of Slaves - it is part of our heritage. Every citizen of Brazil, Holland, Jamaica, France, etc., as well, I suppose. I know, the list of places we should all visit is an unfeasibly long one.

Oddly, the island itself is one of the most charming places in Senegal, a great relief from the activity and bad air of Dakar. It's also the symbolic center of Senegalese feminism because it was the home of Mariama Ba. There is now a free boarding school for girls that bears her name, and a Museum of the Woman. A complicated place.

Gorée Island is a UNESCO World Heritage site. So click the link for better photos than mine.

Senegalese bookstores

Something easy to start the week's tour. Here we are inside Clairafrique in downtown Dakar (there's another by Cheikh Diop University):



What's here, on the blurry shelves (I was trying to be polite with the flash). Montesquieu, Yourcenar, Bahktin, Sony Labou Tansi. Everything is in French, except for a few childrens' books, speaking of which, see right. A nice French bookstore, state of the art, in a country with a 40% literacy rate.



A real treat: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines du Sénégal. NEAS is a Dakar-based publisher - lots of schoolbooks, math books, and French grammars, but also novels, lots of novels, by West African writers. They said they have a website now, but heck if I can find it. Let's go inside.




We're looking into the NEAS bookstore/warehouse. The photos are of celebrated Senegalese novelists, Aminata Sow Fall (left), author of the ingenious The Beggars' Strike, and Mariama Ba (right), author of the bestselling novel in West African history, So Long a Letter.




The latter, in its Wolof translation.







For the French-language reader (not me), this entirely unprepossessing space is a treasure trove, full of novels available almost nowhere else.

Almost none of the novels published by NEAS have been translated into English. Think of similar shelves in similar stores in Indonesia, Peru, Romania. A reminder to be humble about pronouncements about what literature is and is not, what writers are doing and not doing.

Back from Senegal

So I go away for a while, and I find the Wuthering Expectations comments stuffed with useful information about German literature in translation, the chronology of Jane Eyre, and who knows what else. "What's been going on here?" I thought. Lots of good stuff to sort through, thanks.

Senegal is an amazing place. You should all go. Especially if you earn a living in a currency that other than dollars, in which case, go now. No, not now, since the weather is getting worse. In the fall, or next spring.

As a vacation, our trip had some odd features. Activities included, for example:

Powerpoint presentations by college students.
More than one meeting with Senegalese rappers.
Helping haul in a fishing net (for which I earned a fish).
Catholic Mass in French and Wolof, with kora accompaniment.

There was also more tourist-like tourism. And great food, great art, and, mostly, great people. Especially the latter.

I think I'll use the American holiday to gather my thoughts on this strange, rich trip.

1. On vacation in Senegal, 2. Read Adam Bede

I'm either on my way to, in, or returning from Senegal, depending on when you are reading this. I will return July 2.

One book coming with me is Adam Bede. Prof. Novel Reading is hosting a George Eliot summer book club at The Valve. Here's the leisurely reading schedule, and here is the first discussion. I don't understand about 50% of what is written over there, but Prof. Maitzen should be a trustworthy guide.

My travel makes my participation unlikely, but I am happy to read along and catch up. An advantage of being an Amateur Reader is that one can read this 600 pager over the summer just as well as that one. Take the opportunity, and read Adam Bede.

One comment, having only read a few chapters. Since I had recently been thinking about the influence of Walter Scott, I was amused to see that Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel, begins in 1799, exactly 60 years before its year of publication. The long title of Scott's first novel is Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since. So whatever Eliot's many reasons might be for choosing that date, there's also a little nod to Scott.

Then, in Chapter 3, there's a long paragraph of landscape description that has a suspicious resemblance not only to the description of a landscape painting, but specifically to the sorts of description I have been reading in Modern Painters:

"And directly below them the eye rested on a more advanced line of hanging woods, divided by bright patches of pasture or furrowed crops, and not yet deepened into the uniform leafy curtains of high summer, but still showing the warm tints of the young oak and the tender green of the ash and lime." And so on. This is Eliot, not Ruskin.

Eliot uses more metaphorical language than Ruskin, but compare to his chapters on "On Truth of Vegetation" or "On Truth of Earth." Eliot's probably not the only great writer of her generation who learned about nature description from John Ruskin.

Always interesting to root through a writer's toolbox.

A Voyage to Senegal in 1816 - at length daylight came, and disclosed all the horrors of the scene

A Voyage to Senegal in 1816 (1817) is not the account of just any voyage to Senegal – see left. It’s that voyage to Senegal. H. B. Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard are two of the fifteen (or eleven) survivors, out of 150, who were abandoned on a raft when the Medusa, bound for Senegal, foundered on a shoal off the coast of modern Mauritania. Géricault’s painting was based directly on this book.


The book is, in part, a legal brief against the incompetence of the captain and the malfeasance of others. The five boats of the Medusa, some barely seaworthy themselves, were insufficient for the number of crew and passengers, so a large raft, twenty meters by seven, was constructed for the excess, mostly soldiers doomed, or anyway assigned, to colonial service. Savigny, a surgeon, and Corréard, a geographer, were among the non-soldiers. Despite the size of the raft, 150 people plus minimal supplies filled it enough that most people had little room to move. The other boats were supposed to tow the raft, but they had troubles of their own, and abandoned the raft almost immediately. This is not, mostly, an edifying story of heroism.

Two things I had never understood. First, between the wave action and the raft’s poor buoyancy, most people on the raft were up to their knees, or waist, in seawater much of the time. The small raft in the painting is a platform that the survivors had built to keep themselves (barely) out of the water – the bulk of the raft was actually underwater.

Second, almost all of the deaths were caused not by exposure, disease, or privation, but on the battlefield. On the second night adrift, the soldiers, mostly criminals forced into military service, many probably half-crazed by liquor, dehydration, and exhaustion, staged a mutiny. The battle for control of the raft raged for about two days. Fifteen people survived the battle. These fifteen then survived almost another two weeks on the raft, although four died soon after they were rescued.

An alternative to Géricault’s horror, which does at least depict a moment of hope, is to picture a pitched battle with sabers and clubs (the gunpowder is all ruined), waist-deep in seawater, at night, during a storm. Much of A Voyage to Senegal is what they call a page-turner.

One stylistic note: On the rare occasions when dialogue is reported, it is always in the form of a declamation, as if it were from a Racine play. “Believe me, Major, France can also boast of a great number of men, whose patriotism and humanity may rival those which are found so frequently in Great Britain. Like you we are formed to the sentiments, to the duties which compose” and on and on for another page or so (p. 243-4), all in the finest French classical style. This helps one appreciate the innovations of the French Romantics, the relative realism of Balzac and Stendhal, Alfred de Vigny and Hugo. That classical bombast gets old fast.

A reading list for a trip to Senegal

With any luck, I will be visiting Senegal this summer, as a tourist.

I would like advice and recommendations for reading - novels, poems, non-fiction. Advice about anything, really. It all has to be in English. I have to start working on my French. I don't want to think about that. Ein, zwei, drei. No, no. Un, deux, trois. Quatre-vingt-un. Je voudrais le yassa de poulet.

Any help is much appreciated. Here's a start. Some I've read, some I ain't:

Books by Senegalese authors

Ousmane Sembène: The Black Docker, God's Bits of Wood, The Money Order, White Genesis, Xala, The Last of the Empire, Niiwam & Taaw
Cheik Kane: The Ambiguous Adventure
Mariama Bâ: So Long a Letter, Scarlet Song
Aminata Sow Fall: The Beggars' Strike
Birago Diop: Tales of Amadou Koumba
Ken Bugul: The Abandoned Baobab
Fatou Diome: The Belly of the Atlantic
Myriam Warner Vieyra: As the Sorceror Said, Juletane
Leopold Senghor: Poems

Books about Senegal by non-Senegalese authors

Mungo Park: Travels in the Interior of Africa
Mark Hudson: The Music in My Head
Reginald McKnight: I Get on the Bus, Moustapha's Eclipse, He Sleeps
Michael Palin: Sahara
Peter Biddlecombe: French Lessons in Africa
Akahiro Yamamura: Senegal
Jean Baptiste Henri Savigny and Alexander Corréaud: Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816
Peter Matthiessen: African Silences
Susan Lowerre: Under the Neem Tree

That one's a little short (but growing - many thanks).

A complaint directed at publishers, who are complicating my work. A recent book by Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Meets the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, looks pretty interesting. It's entirely about Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is not Africa. Anyone interested in reading African memoirs knows this. Sales will not suffer if you put the word "Zimbabwe" in the title.

I'll post this in some permanent spot and update as needed.