From Phillis Wheatley to Léopold Sédar Senghor
The sum of African oral literature is so great that the work of scholars such as Veronika Görög may only scratch the surface. We will focus here on written literature, and on its first Senegalese representative, Phillis Wheatley, whose story is as fascinating as it is tragic. Born around 1753, the girl was a victim of the triangular trade and was landed in Boston in 1761. Bought by a man who bequeathed his name to her, she nevertheless received a certain education from Mrs. Wheatley and her daughter, and proved her great intelligence from her early teens.
She amazed Bostonian society with her translations of Ovid, and at fourteen she made an equal impression when she wrote her first poems. In 1773, she published in London - the work having been refused in the United States - a collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, not without having had to prove the previous year, during what could be likened to a trial, that she was indeed the author of her verses. After the Wheatleys' death, Phillis was freed and married in 1778. Neither her talent nor this union prevented her from sinking into poverty and death in 1784. Some fifty years after his death, two works were published and are still considered classics today.
On the other side of the Atlantic, literature also began to be written in the language of the colonists, French, which is still the official language, but coexists with six national languages and as many vernacular idioms. If we can cite the travelogue written by the Métis Léopold Panet, who died in 1859 after a life that was epic, to say the least, when it comes to novels, some still argue about the first work to deserve the title. The Reprobate of Massyla Diop wins the favor of some, others prefer the autobiography of Bakary Diallo (1892-1978) who, in Force bonté, relates his experience as a Senegalese soldier during the Great War, some favor La Bataille de Guilé , written in 1908 by Amadou Duguay Clédor, while others favor Les Trois volontés de Malic, in which Amadou Mapaté Diagne (1886-1976) evokes his village, Diamaguène, and the cohabitation between African heritage and Western influences.
In any case, it is thanks to a world-renowned poet that Senegalese literature truly gained its letters of nobility. Born on October 9, 1906 in Joal, Léopold Sédar Senghor had an extraordinary destiny, both literary and political. Son of a good family who found fortune in trade, he left for France to study at the age of 22. He was the first African to win the Agrégé de grammaire competition and became a teacher. The Second World War interrupted this brilliant career; he narrowly escaped death and was sent to prison camps.
At the end of the world war, he entered politics. Elected as a member of parliament in France, he also exercised functions in his native country, and at the time of its independence, in 1960, was unanimously designated to preside over the Federal Assembly. But Léopold Sédar Senghor is also the representative of a literary trend that he will contribute to forge with Aimé Césaire, his friend who first in 1935, in the third issue of the magazine L'Etudiant Noir, will use the term "negritude". The definitions are otherwise complex and raise many positions more or less radical, Senghor will not cease to reflect, to weigh and to balance the rejection of colonialism with the assimilation of a language that he made his own and which allowed him to express a poetry that is discovered in the editions Points. A member of the Académie française since 1983, his funeral in 2001 suffered from the painful absence of the country's high political officials who had nonetheless saluted his intellectual audacity.
From the 20th to the 21st century
If it is difficult to compete with the fame acquired by Senghor, the literature of Senegal remains so dynamic and fertile that it is admirable by its richness. Thus, Senghor's contemporary, Ousmane Socé Diop (1911-1973), was awarded the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique occidentale in 1947 for Karim, a Senegalese novel published in 1935. Two years later, he recounts his impossible love for a white woman in Mirages de Paris. It is finally for his Contes et légendes d'Afrique noire - published in 1938, but still available at the Nouvelles éditions latines - that he becomes known.
He endeavored to collect myths from the oral tradition, then referenced the chansons de geste in Rythmes du Khalam. This approach will continue thanks to Birago Diop (1906-1989), close to Senghor, who will publish in 1947 Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba and an enriched version with a preface by his friend barely ten years later. His Contes et Lavanes won the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 1964.
The writers oscillate between the desire to explore the Senegalese heritage and the attraction for a France that they describe in their works. Thus, Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007) made his mark in 1956 with Le Docker noir (available from Présence africaine), the fruit of his experience on the docks of Marseilles. He will have a remarkable career, both in literature - several titles are easily found in bookstores - and in cinema, being noticed from his first feature film, La Noire de... (Jean-Vigo Award 1966).
At the same time, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, born in 1928, published an emblematic title, L'Aventure ambiguë (1961), which never ceases to provoke debate and essays. This novel, to be read in 10-18, remains very current, it evokes the initiatory journey and the tearing between two cultures of the young Samba Diallo, brought up according to the Koranic teaching then studying in France. The difficulties of women are the subject of two important books by Abdoulaye Sadji, who died prematurely in 1961: Maïmouna and Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal, also published by Présence africaine. Finally, in the field of theater, Cheikh Aliou Ndao has won awards for his plays that resurrect the ancestral history of his country, and also gives to read in Wolof a novel, Buur Tilleen.
This effervescence is carried by the will to transmit affirmed by a group which since 1947 publishes a literary review, Présence Africaine, which two years later will become the eponymous publishing house, then a bookstore which is visited since the 60s in the French capital, 25 bis, rue des Ecoles.
At the head of this initiative, a man, Alioune Diop, born in 1910 in Saint-Louis, who dreamed of pan-Africanism and cultural emancipation. Under the patronage of intellectuals, Sartre, Camus, Gide ... - Diop is then a senator and lives in Paris - and thanks to its prestigious contributors, the publication, which is published simultaneously in France and Senegal, wins all the votes. This talent for bringing people together, sometimes to the detriment of the development of a personal work, was hailed at the time of his death in 1980, and will continue to be exercised well beyond it. In his close team was also the poet Lamine Diakhaté (1928-1987) who will also be one of the singers of the negritude but whose texts are unfortunately today more complicated to find.
The place of women
The independence of 1960 also rhymes with female emancipation, a notable fact that women are particularly well represented in Senegalese literature. The first attempts were made by Kiné Kirama Fall, who wrote poetry(Chants de la rivière fraîche, 1975), Nafissatou Niang Diallo, who tried her hand at autobiography in De Tilène au plateau the same year, and Annette Mbaye d'Erneville, who launched a women's magazine, Femmes de soleil, and began writing for children(Chansons pour Laïty, 1976).
But it was Aminata Sow Fall, born in Saint-Louis in 1941, who really engaged in a critical literature and who, with a sharp pen, did not hesitate to scratch the flaws of the society in which she was raised. In La Grève des bàttu ou Les Déchets humains (published by Le Rocher), she imagines the rebellion of beggars opposing a ministry in charge of clearing the streets to meet tourist requirements. Acclaimed by her peers, awarded prestigious prizes, and a self-proclaimed feminist, Aminata Sow Fall is already considered a classic author whose every novel is a must-read.
Equally important, Mariama Bâ (1929-1981) wants to highlight the inequalities between men and women. Born and bred in Dakar, orphaned by her mother, she grew up under the rule of a father who was to become a minister, in a traditionalist environment oriented towards Islam. Only one of her novels was published during her lifetime, Une si longue lettre (Such a long letter ), which, in 1979, described in epistolary fashion what had been taboo until then: the fate of widows under the weight of customary invective.
This tidal wave of success was a response to the suffering of women subjected to patriarchal diktats, and it gave way to a second wave, that of illness, which took her away even before the publication of her second novel, devoted to the irreconcilable differences of a mixed couple. Women's literature is also represented by Mame Younousse Dieng, who writes in French and Wolof, Sokhna Benga, author and literary director of the Nouvelles éditions africaines du Sénégal, and Khadi Hane, who lives in France and whose novels are published by Denoël(Des Fourmis dans la bouche, 2011) and Grasset(Demain, si Dieu le veut, 2015). A new generation that has emerged under the tutelage of a strong woman, with a thousand lives and a thousand struggles, Ken Bugul, who in her autobiographical work has described both the abandonment of her mother(De l'autre côté du regard), her artificial paradises of young adulthood in Belgium(Le Baobab fou) and her wanderings in love and death(Cendres et braises).
