The cannon bewitches the body…the school compels the soul.”
-Ambiguous Adventure

Some ten years ago, while my mother and I lived in Dakar, Senegal in an overlarge white concrete building between the grandiose villa of a corrupt politician with three wives and a squatter settlement covered in weeds and rocks, I first came across a copy of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Aventure Ambigue. It stood slightly askew on our mahogany shelf among several dozen thicker, newer books purchased in airport boutiques in Paris or New York. Until that afternoon, I had somehow overlooked the meager, slightly torn white Paris Poche cover featuring a small brown mask with closed eyes and an impenetrable expression.

My daily walk to and from school is impressed in my head like the memory of any process repeated so often it required no presence of mind. Thermos and lunchbox in hand, book-bag on my back, I walk past the neighborhoods guards and say bonjour—a must around here—I listen to the pentatonic birds singing the same six notes in thirty second intervals. I take a left onto a walkway paved with cheap blue chalk that leads to the Route de Ouakam, which links downtown, to my left, with the airport to my right, and divides Mermoz, into two neighborhoods, Sotrac (named after the buses) and fenetre, meaning “window,” where the light enters onto the Dark Continent from the West. As I cross, with the help of a gendarme, whistle in mouth, his hands gesticulating in every direction, I can taste the tang of exhaust fumes from the Sotrac bus company on my left. On the other side lies a fou- foot wall with no perceivable purpose. I walk through the car entrance and stick to the side, occasionally waving at my friends and their parents as they drive past me. All Along the short path between the low wall and the school gate, unkempt reeds grow from under trash heaps and soundless ecosystems emerge centered on decaying rodents. Behind the last landfill on the right is a long colonial building, supposedly an abandoned hospital, where entire families—whose children I have often played soccer with stones as goalposts and torn sandals as cleats—live huddled underground rather than come out into the light. On the left stands my school: the International School of Dakar, run and operated by the American embassy. It shares a wall with the Americans-only “American Club,” a beautiful spot by the ocean with outdoor tennis, volleyball, pool, a basketball court and an Americans-only commissary replete with Jiffy Peanut Butter and Blockbuster Video. If I had kept walking for another minute, rather than turn into the school, I would find the cliffs at the very edge of the continent, bordering on the Atlantic and the dim morning sky stretching out to the West. I wouldn’t dare though—that’s where the bandits roam, along with the fiends, the lepers and who knows what kinds of unseemly people. Instead, I spend the day at the International School oblivious to my surroundings, where students from eighty countries and nine grade levels gather to learn. In eight years at ISD, I didn’t have a single Senegalese classmate. Not one.

I flipped through the pages to catch a glimpse of this Cheikh Kane’s world, which seemed so strangely detached from the ones I was used to perceiving on screens and pages. Here was a book by a living African, with a short dédicace to my mother from the author, on our shelf, littered with dense philosophical ideas summarized on the back cover—including the angoisse (anxiety) of our age and the Meaning of Life. It told the story of a young writer named Samba Diallo, a muslim trained at the traditional Coranic schools of the Diallobé people, who left for France to study and came back a torn shadow of himself.
That was about all I could grasp at that age and limited fluency in the language. It occurred to me then that I would have to improve my French, not my Wolof (which was nonexistant, since I am Ethiopian and not Senegalese) in order to understand what this book meant and why it was on my shelf in the first place. I would have to use a mediating colonial language to bridge the gap between the so-called Darkness of the West and that of the East, between where I was and where I was from. This book was nothing like any of the others around it: subtle, it seemed the sole representative of the world in which we lived and ate, bought peanuts from the peanut woman on the corner, played soccer with the squatters’ children on the semi-paved streets and watched the neighborhood guards ritualistically sip sweet Mauritanian tea at the villa gates.

Cheikh Kane only ever wrote one novel of any note. But since then, every generation of African writers writing in French, anyone who employs the former master’s craft and code must feel ashamed in front of the griots, the story-singers who memorize and recite hours worth of lyrics on their impassioned journey from town to town, taking each place with them into the past. They must feel ashamed in front of the oral historians of St. Louis—the present ghost of a once-prominent colonial capital, where migratory birds and old jazz legends annually converge—who nourish their visitors with local spices and anecdotes. Every generation of écrivains noirs (Ba, Barry, Diome, Mabanckou, Tchack) quotes, reflects on, imitates or somehow acknowledges this work, which appeared, like a miracle brought by the beaks of southbound warblers, one dry afternoon in Dakar.

I had a very pleasant, peaceful childhood in Dakar in the 1990s. It was the last term of Abdou Diouf’s presidency, and even though everyone in Dakar hated him, and everyone everywhere knew he had stolen the election of 1993, and would not get away with it again in 2000, calm reigned in the urban center of Senegal, out on a peninsula, perfect topography for a port-city, centuries apart from the villages inland. Nevertheless, I often had nightmares of the beach at sunset. I was a poor swimmer, so the water often summoned fear of death. I still taste the traces of salt-foam waves at the tip of my tongue, ten years on. I build little sand-castles in the simple angular shapes of mosques and village huts. A sudden burst forward by the ocean—which, in waking life, would erode half the beaches I used for my sand castles by the time we left Senegal, that is within eight years—washed the little structures away, but the giant overhanging tourist lodgings beyond the beach were immovable. They knew how to tie wood to wood.

The reverence afforded to Kane’s masterwork is the reverberating effect of a psychic nerve struck at the core of the African’s perception of his world and himself. It evokes the shock of awaking to an age that will be defined by someone else’s tools, someone else’s images and sounds. The character of the Fool–le Fou, the madman, the sound translates better, in this case, than the actual meaning—as the Diallobé villagers take to calling him, embodies this shock with his hunched posture and the “histrionic art” he performs for those who have yet to notice the sky falling. A former rifleman in the French campaign in Southeast Asia, like so many real-life traumatized young “French West African” men in the era of so-called de-colonization, the Fool babbles incoherently and beautifully throughout the novel, recalling visions of sensory failure and the ground crumbling beneath his feet.
At his side, by novel’s end is the religious schoolmaster of Samba Diallo’s home village, whose practice of prayer and self-flagellation becomes an active means of non-resistance as history gradually escapes his once firm-as-baobab-bark grasp. As the novel opens, the Schoolmaster hovers over Samba Diallo and his classmates forcing an entirely oral mastery of the Qu’ran in Arabic—yet another mediating language, revealing nothing of meaning in the midst of a deluge of sound. He brutalizes his students, especially Samba, the disciple he loved most, for every error and hesitation, shouting his furious faith and love at each pupil. “The teacher thought that man had no reason to exalt himself,” Kane’s narrator explains, “save definitely in the adoration of God. Now it was true—though he fought against the feeling—that he loved Samba Diallo as he had never loved any disciple. His harshness toward the boy was in ratio to his impatience to rid him of all his moral weaknesses, and to make him the masterpiece of his own long career” (23). And yet real pain, for Samba and thus Kane, comes in the absence of lashes and furious admonishments, now replaced by quiet reflection on Diderot and Montesquieu. The Schoolmaster’s  texts are no longer lone wonders in a world  of stories told aloud, as his pupils are sent to new colonial schools, so that they may learn to “tie wood to wood.” But as Samba learns in France, from a traditional point-of-view, wood, like the woodworker, was made to rot in the Earth, while faith in the infinite wisdom and coherence of the universe is paramount. Geometry, like medicine, can make or save life, but death is of equal if not greater concern, while new scientific practices pose an immediate threat to the infallible teaching of God.

A hundred yards from where I lay my head, I can hear the waves of the Atlantic crash against the cliffs. They appear, spatial images of feeling, in dreams about nuclear war with savages from islands visible from our cliffs. One of those islands, l’ile aux serpents served as a backdrop for the imagination of all the city-dwellers, raised on spoken stories, on the parole of elders—which denotes both truth and speech, because, even in French, the two are meant to be inseparable. On the other side from the Island-of-many-snakes is the island of many restaurants, French cannons, and slave houses—Gorée. You took a ferry to get there. Only sometimes the ferry sank. Countless ill-fated rides to the Island sink together into one disaster constantly laying siege to my sleep. I imagine washing ashore—one of hundreds now each scrambling for themselves against the cold current. I twist my half submerged face up to the Island’s crest, my eyes barely avoiding the salty sting of the water, and see one of the slave houses where they sometimes crammed sixty people into a one cubic meter cell and mercilessly threw some of them out the window into the sea right there in front of me, where the sharks did the rest with them and now they’re liable to come for you. In waking life, I wander around Fenetre Mermoz at sundown, saluting the guards as they sip tea and sweep the streets free of leaves. I glance over at the calm, stirring sea, feeling both afraid and at home.

In addition to Samba, the teacher, and the mad returnee, Kane’s book offers a series of archetypal characters, each of whom represents a way of understanding and reacting to the colonial encounter. Samba’s “father,” the dark chevalier, is a mythic and wishful apparition at a climactic point in the novel when the African imagination must seek connections to the past for guidance and pride. Like any other culture, these foundation myths, in the Light of science-history, reveal themselves as mere story. Still, Cheikh Anta Diop and Leopold Sedar Senghor, the two most celebrated public intellectuals of post-colonial Senegal, built their intellectual endeavors on establishing lineages to the relative light of the East—the Ancient Egyptians, the Coptic Ethiopians, the lost Nubians of the Sudan. Diop and Senghor were significant people, powerful even—Senghor presided over the Republic of Senegal in its first twenty years—but like the Knight, they wielded there consoling might and intellect with a generous realism. There was once again a home, a father-figure, a guiding light—but its scope was narrow, and its shining path beset by flickering contradictions.
Senghor wrote a famous book of poems entitled Les Ethiopiques, which as an Ethiopian, I read with curious interest and complete lack of recognition: I saw neither my ancestral homeland, nor my adopted hometown. Then again, the afro-pessimists, the late great Ousmane Sembéne prime among them, disparaged the poet-president as un assimilé, a man who invented a national pantheon by borrowing from the Egyptians, and the Frnech, advocating a “universal humanism,” while vaguely posturing at some proud state-of-mind called négritude. A liberal and a Francophile, he crushed the popular ideology of African socialism and lived out his last years in a mansion in France with his very French wife. The Village Chief—poet and president—gutless wonder–how could you not blame him? Then again, Senegal has never had to suffer the fate of Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire and countless other neighbors who, throughout the 1990s and well after my family and I left Senegal for good, suffered coups, revolutions, civil wars—all forms of chaos. The Village Chief—poet and president—realist and savior—how could you not honor him?

The day Abdoulaye Wade won the presidency in the Spring of 2000, a month before I left my hometown forever, I remember walking back from school, crossing the route de Ouakam—the longest single commuter road in town—and noticing, to my amazement, the pure pristine silence. For that day alone, the funny papers contained no cynical cartoons, only simple matter of fact headlines like “Wade Président,” one way to make the past still living in the present. There were no riots; nor were there celebrations. The people I spoke to, the guards from the quartier and the woman who sold us peanuts at the street corner, normally loud and opinionated when it came to politics and the need for le changement, all seemed suddenly quiet, pensive. I remember sitting down to tea with two neighborhood regulars and talking almost exclusively about football and going to the beach—anything but politics. This was unprecedented. As was the event itself. It was the first peaceful power transition from one party to another in Senegal’s history, and one of only a handful in the region as a whole. Looking back, I’m reminded of the spirit behind Kane’s characterization of that first rupture, “those who had no history were encountering those who carried the world on their shoulders.” The RFI announced the election results and lack of mayhem matter-of-factly. CNN, which reported anxiety in the capital leading up to the election, said nothing after the storm had passed over us and Dakar was left, once again, dry and silent. Apparently it wasn’t worth reporting.

Whatever one might say about the Chief, the same goes for the Most Royal Lady, la Grande Royale, a grand, beautiful, Mama Africa in her flowing gown who, alongside the village Chief, the meekest authority figure in the novel (the local kingdoms were the first to be sacrificed to the irrepressible foreign spirits of progress), eases the transition to a new world order. They choose to send their sons (nothing here on the daughters) to French schools, leaving the Schoolmaster, like the Fool, dispossessed and crazed. Something about that initial journey to the colonial center leaves the African intellect irretrievably shaken. He spends the rest of his days praying–his body contorted, his joints creaking, his soul soaring. He and the Fool hold each other in the empty schoolroom, laughing and crying.
Some of us discovered the book in Paris, where an entirely different audience greeted the novel with a slightly different, though equally enthusiastic, reception. We understood the disillusionment of being away from home, but knew relatively little about distance from one’s past. Emigration is certainly a form of rupture, but its psychological effect pales compared to being lifted up from the ground right where you stand, were born, raised and will die, to find that the earth which the ancestors inhabit is suddenly unrecognizable. Worse yet, you realize, even at birth, the place you knew was probably nothing like what came before it, just a generation or two ago—and the rule of seven generations no longer applies. Worse than forgetting itself is forgetting that one has forgotten, which is why the Fool’s forgetfulness is a virtue, the blissful state of being aware of one’s amnesia, wide awake at every new moment.
But for the émigré, those “lucky ones” who made it, often after suffering the humiliating rite of passage of sleeping in airports and shelters that stink of urine and sweat, a more direct contrast presents itself. The center, the middle, the power crux, blasts its bright lights and noises full of information and entertainment right at you, buries the malleable mind in mounds of texts relaying everything it knows. The wide-eyed African watches increasingly mixed peoples teeming through giant iron mazes. For those of us who weren’t making the occasional giant leap anymore, who moved back and forth and back and forth between the continents, mobility becomes a source of comfort, a source of smugness that aggravates the mental divide between normal people living the life of instinct and the cosmopolitan creature enduring the life of intellect.

I have never been lonelier or more frightened than I was during those three months spent in Paris. That’s where I first read L’Aventure Ambigue and its successors, the “afro-pessimists,” as the academy, somewhat awkwardly, calls them. That same year a young Senegalese woman living in France wrote a beautiful little book called Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, about a Senegalese girl who moves to France and becomes disillusioned with the life of intellect. Isolated from her own community at home as well as abroad, she returns to Senegal to find a host of sad stories of misguided ambition and wasted talent. Thematically, we haven’t come very far. But why change, when the storyline is so apt, and the experience of disillusionment carries over so easily from generation to generation. Afro-pessimism: the literature of those afraid of having to visit museums someday in order to experience exhibits of their former selves on display—spear in one hand, modern machete in the other, faces beckoning forth, large and colorful. Imagine having to learn from such a thing.

Compared to the Chief, the Knight, and the Most Royal Lady, the dispossessed Schoolmaster and Fool react with an appropriately endless reservoir of indignation and chagrin. And yet they come from opposite ends of the social spectrum for Senegalese men in the midcentury. One is a traditional beacon of rectitude and strength, the other a modern symbol of trauma and internal conflict. The former confesses to the latter, “we have turned ourselves into hybrids, and there we are left….filled with shame” (113). As if to perform the Schoolmaster’s narration on the village stage, the Fool would go into a frenzy recounting the moment an Indochinese piece of lead tore through the cheap fabric of his French uniform and pierced his abdomen, leaving a gaping hole at the center of his being. Alone with Samba Diallo, he relates the haunting experience of a nervous breakdown, several months after the war, on the hard concrete of a crowded city sidewalk. His histrionic art at once recalls and reaffirms the lost power of spoken history. Unaware of just how diffuse the Fool’s post-traumatic stress truly is, the villagers conceal themselves from the modern world and go on living in silence.

We are all always seeking the silence of the schoolmaster’s corner in the midst of the senseless violence we remember. What I remember—what images the television burned into my mind–weave together with the sounds of baritones booming facts from Radio France International in the mornings, and the cynical cartoons of Afro-pessimists embedded in Dakar newspapers, inciting disillusionment. We were there, but we weren’t there for the American soldier dragged around the streets of Mogadisho (and the countless, photo-less Somalis he took with him). We were there but we weren’t there for Kabila posing for Jeune Afrique in khaki shirt besides his smiling troops, two months before the takeover. The ominous shadow of two mass murders, one pre and one post this particular photo-op (which like some things slipped into the long-term register from the short-term habitat of curiosities dwelling and fading at the surface of the mind) and his own assassination loom over the sunny poses of his conquest. We were there but not there to see—on the eight o’clock news—the last boat leaving Guinea-Bissau after their coup. Our whole city welcomed and befriended the refugees, most of whom had one or two people who stayed behind. Senegal was an exception to this continental maxim of chaos—it saw itself kneeling, immobile in the Schoolmaster’s safe enclave–except for the Casamance, where one of our house-workers lost a brother, ambushed, mutilated by insurgents, and served up as a tragic story in the Dakar papers for our living-room consumption the next morning. Later that same year, Ethiopia, no exception either, descended into war with Eritrea. We listened to the news of mutual airstrikes and press conferences with presidential sound bites. Virtual war—the kind that creates the illusion of proximity when things are being kept far away from each other—had come to our little corner, where we could no longer hide like the Schoolmaster, but suddenly felt compelled to pray.

Today, the vast oceans separating the continents no longer represent the gap between past and present—instead the few miles of savannah between the city African and the quiet villager (often his distant cousin) enact the turbulent history of several centuries. Since the book’s publication, the initial rupture between past and present, faith and science, has become more remote. Its full impact has worn off in the African collective memory. According to many “indigenous” traditions, it takes about seven generations to cross that fine line between history and myth, fact and fiction, that which is transferred over dutifully and that which is invented on the spot. With new tools at hand to sever the old constriction of seven generations, Kane and his disciples have had to remind us of a lost world. Otherwise, not only are Africans forgetting who we once were, we are forgetting how we came to change in the first place.

In Senegalese epistemology, the living and the dead are bound together, indistinguishable, throwing into question the very translatability of being in African notions of the cosmos. Water is the origin of both life and death. Water ebbs and flows everywhere alongside the cliffs of Mermoz and the homes of several, now intermixed, descendants: Peuls, Touaregs, Wolofs. The true origins of these (like any other) people, are mysterious, well beyond seven generations of fathoming. They came from somewhere between the sea and the desert, between water and scorched earth—this is as much as we know. To mediate between the two, just as rivers flow through the savannah plains naming the kingdoms they nourish—Senegal, Congo, Niger—so poetry and metaphor flow between the wealthy sea and the barren land, the living and the dead.

Those who have died are never gone/They are in the water that flows/They are the water that sleeps/The dead have not died/Listen more often/To things than to beings/Hear the voice of water.
–Birago Diop, Les Contes D’Amadou Koumba
The ebb and flow of the Atlantic current takes fragments of our memory and brings new myths, often from distant lands where wide-eyed children settle and become riflemen and writers. In Birago Diop’s Les Comtes D’Amadou Koumba, another classic from the first generation of indigenous writing, the animals join the wind, the water, and the earth in speaking and interacting. Bouky the hyena, a clever and enterprising protagonist and a whole cast drawn from the local animal kingdom, animates an amusing, lyrical world of play—a welcome relief of lighthearted entertainment compared to the dense and dreary ruminations of Schoolmaster and Fool. The whole of Diop’s oeuvre was supposedly chanted to him by a griot named Amadou Koumba, whom he heard as a child. The oral frame of these tales is, not surprisingly, also the theme of the book. You’d be more likely to believe me, Diop seems to be saying, even when I told you about trickster hyenas and idle lions, if you had heard it from him rather than read it from me. If you still had faith—in the larger sense, the sense, which Schoolmaster and Fool preserve and mourn—if you were young and receptive, you would be able to learn about human nature from the inanimate realm as well as the animated creatures around you. Our fate is so tied to the things that precede and surround us that we (not necessarily Africans, but pre-modern people everywhere) use their experiences to guide our own, and more importantly, those of our children. We gather round, tell stories in which animals play people, and reflect on ourselves.
In the years since the emergence of Birago Diop, Ousmane Sembène, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Mariama Ba, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, an entire industry, beyond the stuffy boundaries of bookishness, has sprung up around the arts of re-memberance–an industry of recovery. The stories behind old Mouride ornaments and pre-colonial artifacts, the narratives of guided tours of St. Louis and Gorée, anthropological societies and linguistic projects aimed at recovering lost dialects all emerge and dissolve, shape and re-shape the past, ebb and flow.

Remembering requires making matter of the immaterial. Nebulous pictures of fleeting light immerse the mind in tidess that like the Atlantic rise up at night under the mysterious guidance of the moon. Screen-less projections of darkness play out in the non-space of dreams. I recall the dusky afternoon in ’93 when we first drove around our new quartier, one third villas, one third tenement homes, one third makeshift squatter homes with corrugated iron haphazardly tacked to the fences. The villa part of Mermoz was inhabited by foreigners mostly—Americans Lebanese, Africans—inhabiting art-deco and middle-eastern style homes–many designed with the exact same blueprint, so that you could walk into a stranger’s house and approximate your way around the place. Old men with wooden toothbrushes and ragged shirts swept the sidewalks along quiet streets in the daytime. Blue plastic bags caught up by weeds in the dirt roads shook and leapt in the humid wind. I haven’t been back in years—eight, to be precise—but I am often told I would not recognize it. Four-lane highways and sky-rises have replaced the unassuming paths we used to take. The earth is covered in newness, and soon people will forget what it was like to taste the dust clustered underfoot and lowly clouds. Somewhere the Fool is performing his histrionics along the amateur theatres that spring up by the cliffs of the corniche as the tides rise and the sun recedes.  The Schoolmaster is in the back-row of the audience, reciting his prayer, oblivious to the show, having already internalized the plot.
Then as now, I have a recurring dream of standing on the side of the beach, overwhelmed by wave after wave, my head constantly crashing against the black rocks.