“La Belle Initiative”¹

I advertised the first meeting of what was then “Le Magazine Littéraire de l’Université Gaston-Berger” (“The Literary Magazine of Gaston-Berger University”) in a very American way: I used a lot of paper. I posted 100 flyers at the academic buildings, the cafeteria, and in the student residence villages. I personally handed out, with the help of another American student, 900 small slips of paper, bookmark sized, printed with information about the meeting and quotations that I hoped would attract and inspire students with writerly sensibilities. Among the quotations that I distributed were the following from El Hadj Kassé, Allen Ginsberg, and Marguerite Duras.

Elle écrivait vite, très vite sans se lire ou se relire en même temps, elle écrivait sans arrêt et sans vraiment une grande attention pour le sens de ce qu’elle écrivait (Kassé, 10).

She wrote swiftly, very swiftly without reading or rereading herself at the same time, she wrote without stopping and without really paying much attention to the meaning of what she was writing (Kassé, 10, my translation).

I write poetry because it’s the best way to say everything in mind within 6 minutes or a lifetime (Ginsberg).

Ecrire c’est aussi ne pas parler. C’est se taire. C’est hurler sans bruit (Duras).

Writing is also not speaking. It is being silent. It is screaming without noise (Duras, my translation).

With these quotations, I wanted to convey that this project would be unacademic, unconventional, creative, and free—qualities that Senegalese students do not associate with university writing and activities.

Because the few other clubs and organizations at the university usually publicized with single, handwritten posters near the academic hallway that most closely pertained to the event or meeting they were planning (the French club had posters near the French professors’ offices; sociology events were announced in the sociology building), I had the distinct advantage of reaching students from all disciplines. One of my other advantages in recruiting students for the magazine was that I was one of only ten American students; many UGB students knew me by name and nearly all of them recognized my face. Still, as I hung and distributed a baobab tree’s worth of paper, I thought of how UGB students much preferred napping and drinking tea on Wednesday afternoons—any afternoon, really—to attending an event with an academic bent.² I consoled myself by saying I would be happy if even five students came—and harbored at the same time the faint fear that I would be confronted with more than 100.

The first meeting was scheduled for 3:00 PM on Wednesday, April 16, 2003. At UGB, there are no classes on Wednesday afternoons because they are reserved for sports and exercise. I spent the afternoon buying bottles of orange soda, disposable cups, cookies, and breaking up blocks of ice to cool the soda that would be warm by the time students arrived. A few American friends accompanied me to this first meeting, in case no one showed up or I forgot how to speak French. Knowing that the students would arrive after 3:00 PM because Senegalese people adhere to l’heure sénégalaise (“Senegalese time”), I decided to begin the meeting with a writing exercise. On the blackboard I wrote, “Ecrivez un conte, une histoire, un poème, un essai, ou une histoire autobiographique qui est intitulé ‘L’histoire d’une cicatrice’” (“Write a fable, story, poem, essay, or an autobiographical story entitled ‘History of a Scar’”).³ At 3:15, the first girl, Yaye Mara Diouf, walked in, sat down quietly, and looked up at the board. I was in the midst of explaining that I wanted them to try this exercise while we waited for others to arrive when Ass Malick Diallo walked in. I began my explanation again and finished before other students walked in. By 3:30, there were five students. By 4:00 PM, an hour after the meeting was scheduled to begin, there were nearly fifteen students sitting and writing histories of scars.

My agenda for the meeting was to, as a group, establish the magazine’s goals, discuss how we were to accomplish these goals, recruit a core group of students to help with the magazine’s pragmatic concerns, distribute questionnaires for this independent study, and develop a schedule and timeline. We established four main goals:

• To form a group of young writers to discuss their work and ideas

• To write—together and on our own time

• To publish the works in a literary magazine

• To invite professional authors to our meetings to share their writing experience

We decided that we would meet every Wednesday night at 9:30 PM and I suggested that we use workshops as the structure through which we would share our work at these weekly meetings, in addition to discussing business, doing writing exercises, and hosting authors. By 4:30, students were still arriving, and the final count for the first meeting was just over twenty students.

The Workshops

To prepare for the following week’s meeting, I developed the format for the workshops with the very specific goal of opposing the Senegalese/French academic methods and habits that I had observed as a UGB student. Senegalese students are accustomed to academic activities that are competitive rather than exploratory. For example, classes often require students to prepare exposés (“presentations”) that they write in the form of the French dissértation⁴ with the expectation that the exposé will be followed by a débat (“debate”). During these débats, students address one another as Mademoiselle and Monsieur and use the formal vous instead of the familiar tu with their classmates. Rather than real displays of respect, these are devices employed to disguise their efforts to intellectually annihilate one another. I saw students exchange personal attacks, introduce obscure and irrelevant literary allusions to demonstrate the scope of their own reading, and criticize misplaced punctuation in bibliographies that the presenters wrote on the board. I even heard a student say to another about her presentation, “Je suis désolé, mais vous prenez des vessies pour des lanternes” (literally: “I’m sorry, but you’re confusing bladders with lamps” or “You’re completely wrong—you must think the moon is made of green cheese”). Because the students were so accustomed to this cutthroat academic interaction, I wanted to create workshops that would be helpful, nurturing, and non-competitive.

To accomplish this, I adapted the format for our weekly workshops based on creative writing classes of which I had been a part in the United States. Though I called these workshops ateliers, they were different from French ateliers d’écriture,⁵ which use exactly the kind of competitive format that I wanted to avoid. I decided that we would form small groups of four authors, each of whom would have a copy of each other author’s workshop piece. Each author would read his work aloud as the others followed along and the reading would be followed by a discussion of the work’s strong and weak points. I established every Monday as the deadline for authors to submit work to me in my room so that I could make enough photocopies for the workshop groups by the Wednesday meeting. In addition, because I knew that students had never done this sort of work before, I wrote up a list of rules for the workshop, adapted from Grant Farley’s “The Workshop Process.”⁶

Over the seven weeks of regular meetings before the final deadline, we held workshops nearly every week. As I was bringing in pieces in English to workshop as well—which I read and discussed with other students writing in English—I did not have as wide a view of workshop process as I might have were I simply the coordinator of the project with the opportunity to listen to all the groups during each session. However, I think that my regular experiences in the English language workshop group and in two French language groups are representative of what was taking place in all the groups.

The most striking contrast between what I would have expected and what happened during these workshops was the lack of self-deprecation. What I have observed in every other creative writing workshop of which I have been a part is that students—myself included—preface the reading of their work with remarks such as, “Well, I don’t know if this is any good, but . . .” or “So, anyway, this isn’t really finished and I think I ramble too much on the third page and I just sort of wrote it stream-of-consciousness so it might be really bad and I’ve never really written anything about nature like this . . . .” “Many novice (as well as veteran) writers feel anxious prior to reading. They experience a need to gain sympathy through explaining, apologizing or discounting their own work” (Farley). What was so refreshing about these Senegalese students is that they simply announced the titles of their pieces and began to read—proudly.

This pride evoked the general admiration of the other authors in the workshop groups. For example, in my notes from one group’s critique of a prose passage that I wrote I recorded nearly entirely positive comments. “Realistic—shows knowledge of Senegal. Good description of minute detail. Interesting flashback technique. Funny to start with the image of the cigarette. Simple, clear language. Creative. Very original style. Lots of suspense.” The only critical feedback I received from this half-hour discussion of my work was, “One can’t always depart entirely from traditional style,” a mild critique that was opposed by the rest of the group with the comment, “Very original style.” All of the groups in which I took part had a similar aversion to negative feedback. Any real critique was countered by admiring comments, leading the author to leave the text as it was.

Though this mutual admiration and pride was nurturing and encouraging, it more often than not defeated one of the workshops’ main purposes: to provide feedback for revisions and improvements to the pieces. However, that the criticism was absent from what were supposed constructively critical workshops is in keeping with the uncritical, indirect comportment of Senegalese people. In Helen Fox’s Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing, she describes world majority students’ (who she identifies as students from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America [xiii]) penchant for indirection and hesitance to criticize. One of her students, Surya, a Nepalese girl, explains her frustration grasping “critical analysis” required in her American academic classes: “In Nepal, our style of analysis is different, because people feel pretty much bad about criticizing others” (69). Earlier, Fox recounts what was for me a very familiar frustration during my time in Senegal: people’s unwillingness to tell me something I did not want to hear. She writes that she remembered her “Peace Corps service in India, to [her] exasperation with friends who were reluctant to give [her] a ‘no’ for an answer when they thought [she] really wanted to hear a ‘yes,’ regardless of [her] need for information” (16). It is in part for these cultural reasons—difficulty giving criticism and desire to say what others what to hear—that the workshops rarely led to students revising their work.

However, the workshops did lead to sharing personal experiences among group members. For example, Hapsatou Wane’s short prose poem “Autobiographie” (“Autobiography”) was particularly provocative in this vein. Her piece is about an afternoon she spent at the beach where she met an attractive boy when she was just on the cusp of puberty and missed the opportunity to speak to or kiss him. All of her group’s members enthusiastically followed the reading of her piece with their own accounts of bittersweet romantic encounters as teenagers. Caroline E. Heller describes similar experiences with the Tenderloin Women Writers Workshop that she observed for three years. “Often the experiences contained in the work read by participants inspired storytelling sessions, as other workshop participants remembered related stories from their own lives that they’d rarely, if ever, had occasion to tell.” She adds that this “story-spawning-story” happened more often when “participants had become closer to each other” (46). What I observed was that the storytelling in the workshop groups served to draw the students closer—students from all disciplines, all years (first through maitrise [fourth year students]), and all regions of Senegal. This was perhaps the most beneficial element of the workshops; it created shared memories—a common history—that allowed this group of students to identify themselves as a community of writers and members of the literary magazine.

“Invités”

During the course of the project, we hosted two professional writers and were guests on Radio DUNYA of St.-Louis. The first of these events was the May 7, 2003 visit of St.-Louisian poet and fable-writer Louis Camara, accompanied by his friend, philosopher and critic Charles Camara and a French poet, who I remember only as Madame Blaise. We advertised the event as open to the entire campus—and indeed, some of the students who attended were not a part of the literary magazine. I asked Louis Camara to prepare some brief remarks, after which we would open the floor to questions.

Though I implored the students to be on time since we would be receiving a visitor, they arrived for the most part at 10:00 PM, a half an hour after the presentation was scheduled to begin. However, Messieurs Camara and Madame Blaise were at ease smoking outdoors and conversing. When we had enough of an audience to begin, Louis Camara announced that he had prepared a short text entitled “J’écris parce que” (“I Write Because”). It was the most miraculous coincidence because only the previous week, I had asked the students to write poems comprised of only of lines beginning with “J’écris parce que,” inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Improvisation in Beijing.” A group poem comprised of verses from all of their exercises would later become the introduction to the magazine.⁷

I was particularly pleased with his prepared remarks and with his answers to student questions because he emphasized his opposition to censure and avoidance of taboo subjects in writing and his belief that writing is a labor and not a purely creative, mysterious act—and an act that is often ugly. He demonstrated his opposition to taboos particularly during his “J’écris parce que” presentation. He wrote, “J’écris parce que écrire des sujets sexuels était censuré aux Etats-Unis” (I write because writing about sexual subjects was censured in the United States”). In another line of his poem, he again expressed his resistance to the idea that some subjects are forbidden in stating, “J’écris parce que la vie est un MST impossible à soigner” (“I write because life is an STD that is impossible to treat”). During the question-and-answer session, Mamadou Sow, a high school student from St.-Louis, explained his conviction that writing poetry was a divine, mystical experience, supporting his viewpoint with several literary and philosophical allusions. Louis Camara listened politely, then responded that he did not believe in “the Muse”—and that to write, one really had to “enlèver le mystère” (“remove the mystery”). He noted that writing is a discipline, one that required real labor. Later, Paul Mignone Sarr, a fourth-year student, said that he was only able to write when he was depressed or disturbed: “Je ne peux écrire que quand je suis dans un état anormal” (“I can only write when I’m in an abnormal state”)! Louis Camara responded by stressing again that one must write even when he is not in the mood—but gave the students permission to write “quelque chose de villain” (“something ugly”).

One week later, the students were again encouraged to permit themselves to write ugly things during Université Gaston-Berger’s Professor Mwamba Cabakulu’s visit. He urged them: “Soyez vous-mêmes. Ecrivez ce que vous vous ressentez réellement” (“Be yourselves. Write what you really feel”). He said that if a writer wants to describe something repulsive that happened to him like “un cafard dans son ceebu-jën”⁸ (“a cockroach in his rice”), he should do it. Other of Professor Cabakulu’s remarks touched upon his personal writing philosophy and others were in response to a meeting I had with him during which I raised some of my concerns about the students’ writing habits. He especially invited them to delight in their texts aesthetically, to play with their imaginations, and to tap into their own emotions. In all of this, however, he cautioned them to be simple and avoid clichés and neologisms.

The third experience that made the students’ work a part of a non-university context was local radio station Radio DUNYA’s feature of the magazine on May 18. St.-Louisan author and radio host Alioune Badara Coulibaly invited five members—Cheikh Saadbou Sèye, Idrissa Kâ, Ibrahima Mbaye, Jimtan Dackoy, and me—to be interviewed about the initiative. In addition to describing the project, discussing our identities as writers, and answering specific questions posed by M. Coulibaly, we were also given the opportunity to read our work. Jimtan read an excerpt from his “Le Tournant Décisif” (“The Turning Point”), a short story about high school kids smoking marijuana that was later published in the magazine; Ibrahima read a poem beginning “Il est 2 H du mat” (“It’s 2 in the morning”) and a poem in English about Malcolm X; I read my response to a writing exercise to create a poem entirely of questions⁹ and Hapsatou Wane’s prose poem “Autobiographie” (“Autobiography”). Idrissa read his poem “KEEMTAAN” and performed an impromptu recitation of a rap that he had written in high school.

The two occasions where we received visitors during our meetings and the invitation to the radio station were among the most significant experiences that the magazine’s members shared. Louis Camara and Professor Cabakulu’s honesty about the experience of writing helped the students demystify the process. The appearance on Radio DUNYA was a sort of first publication for the students who participated; it validated that their writing was more than just something that they kept in notebooks and shared with other university students. Most importantly, the discussions with the authors and on the radio aided the young writers in connecting the work they were doing—before, simply writing for “that American girl’s” literary magazine—to real, creative production of interest to professional Senegalese authors.

Exercises

Because the writing collected for this study was not simply gathered from a body of existing student writing—indeed, much of the work was created during the course of the project—it is important to describe the influence the magazine’s activities exerted over the content of the samples. In the first chapter, “The Project,” I have already described the workshop process and the insights divulged by visiting authors that almost certainly affected the students’ writing. In this section, I will discuss pieces produced specifically for spontaneous writing exercises that I gave during meetings and for an autobiography assignment.

Spontaneous Writing Exercises

At nearly every meeting, as I had at the first with “L’histoire d’une cicatrice” (“History of a Scar”)¹⁰, I began with a writing prompt. I do not have most of the students’ responses to these exercises, as most did not finish by the time we began the meeting and took them home to complete. However, the spontaneous works that I do have are interesting to examine first in their context as a response to an exercise, as they will appear in the following chapters in comparative contexts. In addition, there are two exercises for which I provided examples, and it is important to consider how (if) these examples affected or directed what the students wrote.

The exercises had various levels of success and the least successful exercise was a story-starter that I adapted from dialogue in Senegalese writer Ken Bugul’s novel Le Baobab Fou.¹¹ I wrote on the board:

Ecrivez une histoire, un conte, ou un poème qui commence avec ou qui s’inspire de ce dialogue:

– Qu’est-ce qui vous amène ici?

– Ce qui amène toutes les femmes qui viennent ici (adapted from Bugul, 57).

Write a story, fable, or poem that begins with or is inspired by these lines:

“What brings you here?”

“That which brings all the women who come here” (adapted from Bugul, 57).

Several male students approached me after sitting, puzzled, at their desks and asked, “Are you trying to get us to write about women or something?” I had not even considered that it seemed like a very intentional choice on my part to specify the gender of the barely existent characters in the zygote of dialogue. But when I thought about male students’ reactions in my comparative literature class on feminine literature at UGB, it made sense that they would be wary of my potential for feminist sensibilities. The general opinion of the men in that class was that Senegalese women had rights equal to those of men and therefore the efforts of feminists were no longer necessary or relevant. They suspected women writers and writers who wrote about women of having political designs and making a point of deliberately using women characters—in the same way recent American sitcoms seem to make a point of having gay or ethnic characters. Despite their wariness, two male students wrote poems about women, in part to prove to me that they could and would. Both wrote in English and both are similar in reverent tone to Papa Cheikh Bèye’s poem “Tribute to All the Women of the World.”

The vagueness in the original dialogue fragment that I proposed was intended to give a lot of freedom for choice of setting and characters in their pieces. However, the two other submitted responses maintained the vagueness of the dialogue in creating nameless characters in unremarkable settings. Aly Sambou’s untitled poem is about a character “parachuté dans [un] univers où tout lui était étranger” (“parachuted into a universe where everything was strange to him”). Utterly alienated, an interior voice cries, « Qu’est-ce qui vous amène ici ? » (“’What brings you here?’”) to which he responds sadly, « Je suis ici parce que je croyais/Qu’ici c’était meilleur que nulle part ailleurs . . . /Mais hélas ! Que je ferais-je pour rentrer chez moi ! » (“’I am here because I thought/that here was better than anywhere else . . . /But alas! What wouldn’t I do to go back home!’”) Idrissa Kâ submitted a dialogue in which a woman convinces a skeptical romantically injured man to give her a chance to love him.

The first exercise to which I have already referred, “L’histoire d’une cicatrice” (“History of a Scar”)¹², was considerably more successful than the “What brings you here?” prompt. In general, the students chose to write about hidden emotional scars rather than physical scars. One student, Papis Ly, took the opposite approach of most of the students, writing about a physical scar and revealing the scar in the first sentence of his story, rather than building suspense to a revelation at the end.

Un jour, en jouant au basket ball, je me suis cicatrisé à la jambe. Elle me faisait très mal, mais la gêne dans l’histoire n’était pas le mal mais plutôt la tête que ferait ma sœur. Car j’étais en vacances à Dakar chez ma sœur. Elle m’avait interdit de jouer au Basket car selon elle c’était un jeu trop violent. Cependant je ne pouvais pas rester éternellement dehors. Mes cigarettes étaient finies et je devais rentrer prendre de l’argent pour en acheter. J’ai pris mon courage à deux mains et j’ai décidé d’y aller. Seulement arrivé à la porte, j’ai trouvé qu’elle était fermée. Je ne pouvais pas sonner de peur qu’elle me voit dans cet état. Ensuite, j’ai pris l’initiative de faire le tour de la maison, pour sauter du côté du mur le plus court. Figurez-vous en sautant, j’ai non seulement cassé le jouet de mon neveu qui était aux alentours mais aussi je me suis encore cicatrisé. Et cette fois au front. . . . En tenu de Basket plus le ballon à la main, ma sœur était en haut du balcon, en train de m’observer.

One day, while playing basketball, I got a scar on my leg. It really hurt, but the real problem wasn’t the hurt, but the fit my sister would throw, because I was on vacation at her house in Dakar. She had forbidden me to play basketball because according to her, it was a violent game. Nevertheless, I couldn’t stay outdoors eternally. My cigarettes were finished and I had to go back to get money to buy more. I took my courage in both hands and I decided to go. Right at the door, I found it was locked. I couldn’t ring the bell for fear that she would see me in this state. Then, I took the initiative to go around the house to jump over the shortest wall. It figures that in jumping I not only broke my nephew’s toy that was in the vicinity, but I also scarred myself again. And this time on my forehead. I was in my basketball uniform plus I had the ball in my hand, and my sister was above the balcony, watching me.

This funny, personal story contrasts dramatically with other students’ work. The following three responses all revolve around solitude being a scar or the result of a scar. Papa Moussa Coulibaly wrote “Sa Solitude ma cicatrice” (His Solitude, My Scar”) about a rich man name Amadou who works at a big bank in the capital. One day, near the bank, he sees a homeless man eating breakfast. When Amadou approaches to speak with him and ask if it bothers him to be eating in the street, the homeless man responds that he does not have the choice—that he is alone.

Le mot fait mal à Amadou comme si on a touché une cicatrice qu’il s’est toujours gardé. Ce mot qui fait mal c’est ‘seul.’ En réalité Amadou s’est toujours senti seul malgré sa richesse. Il est né orphelin et n’a jamais été aimé. Sa solitude est une ancienne blessure qui s’est cicatrisée avec le temps et que sa richesse camoufle.

The word pains Amadou as if someone had touched a scar that he always kept to himself. This word that hurts is ‘alone.’ In reality, Amadou always felt alone despite his wealth. He was born an orphan and was never loved. His solitude is an old wound that scarred over time and that his wealth camouflages.

The two women, Fatou Bâ Sène and Yaye Mara Diouf both wrote about female characters being raped and how their silence and solitude was an effect of their shame. In Fatou’s short story, she recounted the story of a young woman named Ken, a Wolof word that means “no one,” who is wandering the streets outside of a dance club in deep depression. She encounters a man who is similarly depressed and confesses to him her scar—that she was raped a year before. He, too, shares a scar: he lost his family in the Joola¹³ and is, like her, utterly alone. Yaye Mara’s story is about the solitude of a young, beautiful Peul woman who is considered scornful by her village. In the last two lines, however, the narrator reveals that she is solitary and stand-offish because she is guarding a secret, her “mongol” son who is the physical manifestation of the emotional scar left by a rape by her uncle.

The most successful exercises—some of which were published in the magazine—were those which encouraged repetition of a phrase or construction. For the April 30 meeting, I proposed the followed exercise and wrote the following poem as an example:

Ecrivez un poème, un dialogue, ou une bande dessinée¹⁴ composé seulement des questions.

Write a poem, dialogue, or comic strip composed only of questions.

Est-ce que mon père invitera ma mère à sortir ce soir, comme c’est son anniversaire ?

Est-ce que mon copain m’a invité à sortir la nuit do mon anniversaire ?

Est-ce que les poils sur mes jambes sont apparents d’une distance d’un mètre ?

Si les allemands ont colonisé les Etats-Unis, est-ce que nous serions encore plus gros ?

Comment dit-on « toenails » en français ?

Si j’avais une co-épouse, est-ce que j’essayerais de cuisinier mieux qu’elle ?

Est-ce que les yeux blues sont comme l’eau, le ciel, ou comme des myrtilles ?

Si je faisais l’amour avec le président de la Société Sénégalaise des Nattes en Plastiques, est-ce qu’on utiliserait un lit ou bien une natte en plastique ?

Si les oiseaux mangent des myrtilles, est-ce qu’ils mangent des yeux bleus ?

Will my father invite my mother out tonight, since it’s her birthday?

Did my boyfriend invite me out the night of my birthday?

Is the hair on my legs obvious from a meter away?

If the Germans had colonized the United States, would we be even fatter?

How do you say “toenails” in French?

If I had a co-wife, would I try to cook better than her?

Are blue eyes like water, the sky, or blueberries?

If I made love with the president of the Senegalese Society for Plastic Mats,

would we use a bed or a plastic mat?

If birds eat blueberries, do they eat blue eyes?

I wrote this example because I thought that the students might feel confined to Lofty, Big Questions and I wanted to convey that they could ask a question about anything. Many were still much more interested in Lofty, Big Questions, such as Idrissa Kâ in this excerpt from one of his poems that he wrote for this exercise:

Est-ce que la vie mérite d’être vécue?

Est-ce que l’amour pur existe de nos jours ? . . .

Est-ce que la tyrannie, un jour, cessera ?

Est-ce que mourir ce n’est pas renaître ? . . .

Does life deserve to be lived?

Does pure love exist these days? . . .

Will tyranny one day cease?

Isn’t dying really being reborn? . . .

However, this excerpt from Hapsatou Wane’s response to this exercise is an example of how students were able to ask questions about the more mundane, the more personal, the more fantastical and imaginative:

Est-ce que le ciel est bleu aujourd’hui ?

Est-ce que tes yeux le voient ?

Est-ce que la nuit va tomber ?

As-tu vu cette étoile qui brille là-bas ?

Iras-tu la chercher ?

A qui la donneras-tu ?

Est-ce que ta mère est là ?

As-tu mis son parfum ? . . .

Me regardes-tu ?

Que disent tes lèvres ?

Pourquoi suis-je aveugle ?

Est-ce que tu m’aimes ?

Dis-moi, le ciel est-il vraiment bleu aujourd’hui ?

Is the sky blue today?

Do your eyes see it?

Will night fall?

Did you see that star shining over there?

Will you go to look for it?

Is your mother there?

Did you put on her perfume? . . .

Are you looking at me?

What are your lips saying?

Why am I blind?

Do you love me?

Tell me, is the sky really blue today?

Another prompt, to which we kept returning throughout the course of the project, was an exercise inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s “Improvisation in Beijing,”¹⁵ a poem comprised of lines that begin, “I write poetry because. . . .” I proposed that the students write their own lines. As an example, I posted my own effort in French:

J’écris parce que je fume—il y a un délai.

J’écris parce qu’on dit : « Il faut écrire ce que tu connais »--et je connais quelque chose.

J’écris parce que j’ai vu mon père pleurer pour la première fois il y a deux ans.

J’écris parce que je voyage et j’ai peur des avions.

I write because I smoke—there’s a deadline.

I write because they say, “Write what you know”—and I know something.

I write because I saw my father cry for the first time two years ago.

I write because I travel and I’m scared of airplanes.

In this example, as in my example for the questions exercise, I was trying to show the students that they could permit themselves to write about the trivial, the personal—I wanted to relieve them from the obligation to save the world that so many seemed to feel as they wrote. I wanted to furthermore offer that details can hint at the more universal without actually stating it. Still, overarching themes that were presented overtly in these first poems included solitude/silence and writing, finding oneself or meaning in life in one’s writing, idealization of literature, and correcting injustices and healing through writing.

J’écris parce que je me sens seul dans ma chambre.

J’écris parce que la monotonie des sentiments de la vie m’efface.

J’écris parce que je rêve de décrire un monde meilleur que celui où nous vivons.

J’écris parce que je veux dénoncer une certaine injustice qui sévit dans ma société.

I write because I feel alone in my room.

I write because the monotony of life’s feelings fades me.

I write because I dream of describing a better world than the one where we live.

I write because I want to denounce a certain rampant injustice in my society.

–Sidy Massaly

J’écris parce que tout est littérature.

J’écris parce que je lis plus que je dis.

J’écris parce qu’en littérature, je lis mes ratures. . . .

J’écris parce que je vis à travers mes écrits. . . .

J’écris parce que j’adore ce silence bavard des écrits.

J’écris parce que je me retrouve dans mes écrits.

I write because everything is literature.

I write because I read more than I say.

I write because in literature, I read my erasures.

I write because I live through my writing.

I write because I love the talkative silence of writing.

I write because I find myself in my writing.

–Al Hassane Bâ

J’écris parce qu’il y a beaucoup d’injustices.

J’écris parce que ces injustices terroisent les faibles. . . .

J’écris parce que seul l’écriture agit sur la conscience de l’homme.

J’écris parce que l’homme conscient est incapable d’être injuste.

I write because there are a lot of injustices.

I write because these injustices terrorize the weak. . . .

I write because only writing acts upon the conscience of man.

I write because the conscientious man is incapable of being unjust.

–Hapsatou Wane

The first efforts at this poem served as a warm-up for the much longer poem we would write as a group shortly before compiling the literary magazine. At our final formal meeting, I returned to the students the examples of this exercise that they had given me, and proposed that we write a “J’écris parce que” poem as a group as the introduction to the magazine. The group was slow to begin, but three hours later, we had exhausted four people who volunteered to record the verses on the chalkboard—and the paper version was over thirteen pages long. At one in the morning, someone asked what time it was, we called out a few last verses, and Amadou Bâ finished the poem with “J’écris pour me taire” (“I write to silence myself”)—and we went home. I later edited a three-page version for publication in the magazine.¹⁶

The Autobiography Assignment

In the first weeks of the magazine, the writing that the students were producing discouraged me. I would neither be able to remember nor put into words what expectations I had that led to my initial disappointment. However, I suspect my relatively privileged experience with creative writing in America instilled somewhat narrow ideas about “good” contemporary writing. I thought that it involved bridled, subtle recounting of stories, original images in the place of the words that represent feelings, and exquisite detail that extracted and intensified truth, making what the writer wrote in some way more real than reality. In contrast, the works I had collected were undetailed, impersonal, and revolved around events with which the students were personally unfamiliar, like the September 11 attacks and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s¹⁷ death. According to Professor Cheryl Savageau who teaches a creative writing course called “Poetry, Politics, and Spirit,” at the University of New Mexico, “just getting students to believe that their lives are the stuff of literature is so important” (Mooney). To counter the seeming obligation to write about Worthy Subjects, I took the most basic piece of creative writing advice that I had retained—“Write what you know”—and asked the students to write autobiographies.

I gave them a very liberal definition of autobiography—it could belong to any genre and be written in any language; it simply had to be about them. I also said that a chronology of major events in their lives—birth, births of siblings, deaths of relatives, beginning school, receiving the baccalaureate—would be less interesting and choosing something specific to recount creatively would be more interesting.

Two male students, Idrissa Kâ and Amadou Bâ, wrote poems about their identities, which were less about concrete experiences than I had hoped. Idrissa’s poem, “Miroir” (“Mirror”), begins with “Qui suis-je ?” (“Who am I?) and ends with “Ah, que suis-je ?” (“Ah, what am I?”) Between these two lines, he numbers experiences that he considers universal—that he loved and was loved, that he was often lucky and often his merits went unnoticed—and writes about his hopes and ideals—like wanting more equality and more justice. Amadou’s “Rêve inachevé” (“Unfulfilled Dream”) compares his own loss of innocence to humanity’s fall in Eden:

J’ai connu l’enfance, cette seconde de vrai bonheur

J’ai exploré l’Eden cette demeure sans nuls pleurs . . .

Et je part de cet endroit idyllique pour aller mâcher de cette pomme

Legs de grand-mère Eve, des erreurs de l’humanité en somme

I knew childhood, that second of real happiness

I explored Eden, that dwelling without tears

And I leave that idyllic place to go chew that apple

Legacy of Grandmother Eve—in short, humanity’s errors

Two other autobiographies were specific and concrete—among the most successful writing that students produced throughout the course of the project. Hawo¹⁸ wrote a prose piece, “Début d’une vie” (“Beginning of a Life”), about the day she found out that she had been married to a man she did not know. A brief narrative paragraph recounts the afternoon that her mother called her:

Un jour, alors que je rentrais de l’école, ma mère m’appela. C’était un jour ordinaire mais qui ne tarda pas à deviner extraordinaire. Elle me dit d’une voix tremblante : « Maly, je t’ai appelée pour te dire que tu es mariée maintenant. Fais attention à toi. » Elle détourna les yeux et se tut.

One day, when I was coming back from school, my mother called me. It was an ordinary day but it didn’t take long for it to become extraordinary. She said to me in a trembling voice, “Maly, I called you to tell you that you’re married now. Take care of yourself.” She turned her eyes away and was quiet.

The rest of the piece is a series of rhetorical questions, as Hawo struggles with her shock and familial and cultural obligation. Her conclusion is one of compromise and hope:

Que pouvais-je ajouter ? Sinon qu’au fond de moi, ni mon cœur, ni mon esprit n’étaient d’accord mais que, par respect pour ces êtres que j’aimais tant et qui m’avaient donné tant de choses, je me sacrifierais ; je me marierais.

Que pouvais-je ajouter d’autre ? Sinon que je n’avais pas oublié mon idéal et que je le suivrais où que ce fût et que mon sacrifice ne signifierait pas la résignation, mais le début d’une autre vie, une vie pleine de surprises.

Pourquoi pas.

What could I add? Only that deep inside, neither my heart nor my spirit agreed to this decision, but that out of respect for these people who I loved so much and who gave me so many things, I would sacrifice myself; I would get married.

What else could I add? Only that I hadn’t forgotten my goal and that I would pursue it wherever that would be and that my sacrifice did not signify resignation, but the beginning of another life, a life full of surprises.

Why not.

Hapsatou Wane’s “Autobiographie” (“Autobiography”) tells a story in a prose poem with a bittersweet tone similar to Hawo’s and a search for identity common to Idrissa and Amadou’s poems. She writes about an afternoon swimming at beach where she meets a young man named André. They exchange words and she imagines what would happen if he kissed her. As she waits, imagining, he leaves, and she wonders:

. . . Et s’il revenait.

Et si je n’étais pas maigre. Et si ma poitrine ne flottait pas dans mon maillot. Et si je n’étais pas Coura . . .

Peut-être que . . .

Je sors de l’eau. Et j’y laisse mes « si » et mes « peut-être ».

Dès fois, une vague les ramène. Alors, le parfum des regrets embaume le jardin secret de ma vie où, sur le sable, s’est inscrit un nom, André . . .

. . . And if he came back.

And if I weren’t skinny. And if my chest didn’t float in my bathing suit. And if I wasn’t Coura . . .

Maybe . . .

I leave the water. And I leave my “ifs” and my “maybes” there.

From time to time, a wave brings them back. And the perfume of regrets hangs heavy in the secret garden of my life where, in the sand, a name is written: André . . .

Much later, in a personal e-mail that Hapsatou wrote to me, she said about this piece, “J’étais vraiment inspirée quand je l’ai écrit et ça m’a fait du bien de le mettre par écrit car au moins ça me libérait un peu l’esprit.” (“I was truly inspired when I wrote it and it did me some good to get it down on paper because at least it liberated my mind a little bit.”) What she described was exactly what I hoped to do with the autobiography exercise: to allow the students a little liberty of the mind and freedom from the burden of writing about “the stuff of literature” (Mooney).

Form

Most of the students who participated in the magazine identified themselves as poets and as a result most of the works I collected for this study were poems. The subjects of these poems ranged from loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden to women (individuals and “Women”) to romantic love to the quest for knowledge. However, despite the diversity of content, the students—with some exceptions—had in common a tendency to write poetry with distinct form. Most poems had a rhyme scheme and the poets made an effort at maintaining uniformity in the number of syllables per line. Other poets imitated sonnet forms or wrote in sonnet-like stanzas. Still others wrote acrostic poems. Repetition was also used as a very effective device to form and frame poets’ stanzas.

I was surprised that so many students wrote using any poetic form at all. In my experience with American student creative writing, students have almost always written poetry in free verse. “It is nowadays generally agreed that a distinguishing characteristic of modern poetry is its radical refusal of formal rules. Since the ‘revolution’ in poetic language effect by Rimbaud and Mallarmé . . . the writing of poetry has undergone the gradual elimination of every trace of classic versification” (Baetens, 1). In addition, Senegal’s most well known poet, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a poet who many students named as a major literary influence, did not use a particular form in his poetic works. Indeed, he has even been called an “African Whitman” for his “rhythm finding expression in like lines of freed verse . . . , what D.H.Lawrence called ‘poetry of the immediate present,’ a poetry of spontaneous form” (Oxley). Because most contemporary poets reject form—inasmuch as it is a constraint—I did not expect to find it in Senegalese student poetry, particularly as they were writing in English or French, which for them are second, third, fourth, and fifth languages.

The most obvious examples of form in the magazine members’ poetry are fixed rhyme schemes. The strictness of these rhyme schemes ranged from occasional attempts to rhyme—even in prose, in one case—to sonnets to a handful of poems whose purpose seems to be to play with a particular sound.

The least rigorous rhyme schemes were those that involved series of simple rhymed couplets. In addition to being a form chosen by students writing in French, rhymed couplets were the only scheme that students writing in English attempted, as in this excerpt from “Nervous Without You!” by Al Hassane Bâ, a fourth-year English student:

As the sky cries,

One of my eyes flies,

Until my sights steal a burning style;

You must not compound such a pile.

In a lightening, opening the sky,

Under the sky that I myself spy,

Come and watch such weeping space,

Within the blue shining sun over my face,

And the yours, in a many-colored rainbow.

Bellowing sky, scattering all stars, thunderbolts follow,

Sweet air, in a sunshade, empty hearts allow;

Our feelings, no more alive, neither up, nor below.

Crazy or nervous without you,

Nothing is curious, once with you,

Then, I’m not serious, even beside you.

Love is just furious, towards me and you.

Reading this poem, one struggles with its meaning, a problem that can be partially attributed to his choice to write in English, a fourth language (he also speaks Pulaar, Wolof, and French). However, it also seems that in constraining himself to rhyming, he first thought of a pair of rhyming words, then filled in the rest of the lines to fit in with the words he had already chosen, an order-of-operations that makes ideas and meaning secondary. Still, his rhyming lends a sort of charm to his writing, particularly when one considers how much he enjoys playing with language. This enjoyment is confirmed in the internal rhymes in his prose autobiography, “Me, My Brother and the Frogs!”: “So far, what pleased me the most from [my family’s] reaction [to my ‘impolite behaviour’] was that they cried more than they tried, I mean, they disdained me more than they sustained me.” Here, the words he uses are essentially nonsensical to an anglophone ear, but one appreciates the fun in the language, even so.

The rhyme scheme becomes a bit more complicated when students formed the couplets into quatrains and more complicated still when they vary the scheme of the quatrain from aabb, ccdd, etc. to abab, cdcd, etc. or the more sonnet-like abba, cddc, etc. Amadou Bâ most consistently wrote in quatrains with an aabb, ccdd rhyme scheme, as in this example from “Et le cœur fut profané” (“And the Heart was Defiled”).

Laide beauté qu’hébergea mon cœur

Ô désir intense qui en mon sein demeure

Vierge qui subtilisa ma sève puberte¹⁹ d’antan

Effritant ainsi, les roses de mon premier temps

Je demeure seule dans le monde de mes désirs, sans repères

Cheminant les sombres sentiers du salut à la lumière de mes vers

J’étreins avec délicatesse mes mots qui tissent avec art mes peines

Pour conjurer les vains désirs malsains, pièges de cette sirène . . .

Ugly beauty that my heart housed

O intense desire that resides in my breast

Virgin who stole my long-lost adolescent sap

Crumbling thus the roses of my youth

I live alone in the world of my desires, without any bearings

Trudging through the somber paths of my verses’ greeting to the moon

I delicately clasp the words that artfully weave my pain

To conjure my vain, unwholesome desires, this Siren’s traps . . .

Again, the rhyme scheme seems to impair his meaning by forcing unnatural syntax, unnecessarily prolonging his address to his desires in the first stanza, and end-stopping his thoughts since he does not make use of enjambement. Ass Malick Diallo’s “Quête de Savoir” (“Quest for Knowledge”) is perhaps more successful because of its less personal nature. Because he plays with French literary figures’ names rather than trying to communicate a complicated interior experience and rhyme at the same time, his result is more informal, more fun.

Je suivrai la trace des savants

Pour égaler le savoir de Sand

Passe-moi alors mon trousseau

Désormais j’écrirai comme Rousseau . . .

I will follow the tracks of scholars

To equal the knowledge of Sand

Hand me, then, my pencil case

From now on, I’ll write like Rousseau

The students who chose the strictest forms and rhyming constraints were the ones who encountered the most problems. Only one student, Mohamadou Sidy Diouf, wrote “true” sonnets in the French tradition, using an abba, abba, ccd, eed rhyme scheme. His problems were similar to those of Amadou Bâ: the form ended up being primary to the content.

An even more extreme example in which the form completely clouds the meaning is “La vacaille”²⁰ by Ibrahima Mbaye. In this poem, he plays with two syllables, “aille” and “ille,” and seemingly randomly terminates each verse with a word ending in one of these sounds.

La vacaille, c’est la pagaille ;

La vacaille sème la pagaille ;

La vacaille n’a pas de gouvernail ;

Elle étale et verse les fausse grisailles.

Crainte ! Crainte ! Crainte aux réprésailles !

Où sont les fiançailles ?

Je veux des fiançailles !

Des fiançailles sans graille !

Où sont mes retrouvailles ?

Je veux mes retrouvailles !

Ah ! que je veux mes retrouvailles !

Je les veux vaille que vaille !

Il me les faut vaille que vaille !

Sans aucune odeur d’ail.

Où sont les tenailles ?

Où sont les sales tenailles ?

Aux enfers les aiguilles !

Où sont mes billes ?

De quelque anguille

Dans mes fortes, très fortes entrailles,

Je sens les moteurs d’un GI

Menant vers les voluptés de Versailles.

The vacaille is chaos;

The vacaille sows chaos;

The vacaille has no rudder;

It spreads out and pours out false dullness.

Fear! Fear! Fear to retaliations!

Where are the betrothals?

I want betrothals!

Betrothals without food!

Where are my reunions?

I want my reunions!

Ah! how I want my reunions!

I want them somehow!

I have to have them somehow!

Without any smell of garlic.

Where are the pliers?

Where are the dirty pliers?

To hell with needles!

Where are my marbles?

From some eel

In my deepest entrails

I sense the motors of a GI

Heading toward the sensual delights of Versailles.

Despite the apparent senselessness of this poem, the stream-of-consciousness guided by the “aille” sound results in effectively conveying the meaning of his invented word, “vacaille.” The result is confused, disordered, and nonsensical, which is what he states in the first verse as the meaning of “vacaille”: chaos.

A very different use of form was that of the acrostic, which Ibrahima Kane and Al Hassane Bâ employed with less constraint than the poets who rhymed. Al Hassane doubled his acrostic form with the use of rhymed couplets and wrote the poem in English; the combination of the three was more than the poem, which was about the World Trade Center attacks, could bear. However, Ibrahima wrote three acrostics with some success—that is to say, the acrostic did not hurt his writing, since it is less rigorous than a rhyme scheme. He wrote one of these poems about Senghor’s death, one about a girl he admired from afar, and one about his girlfriend; all three used the letters of the full names of the people as the initial letters in each line. Still, the acrostic form was more a trick than a form that lent more meaning to the poem.

Whereas the rhyme schemes generally hindered the poems and the acrostic was a device that announced the subject of the poem, the students who used repetition found real ways to shape their poems and frame their ideas. These poems are almost invariably examples of “form following content”—and more importantly, they are examples in which the form advances the content. In the following excerpt from Amadou Bâ’s “Afrique” (“Africa”), he recreates the rhythms of the “tam-tams” (“drums”) he describes by repeating the word “tam-tam” followed by a verb.

Les tam-tams rigolent

Les tam-tams dansent

Les tam-tams parlent . . .

Les tam-tams pleurent

Les tam-tams crient

Les tam-tams hurlent

The drums laugh

The drums dance

The drums talk . . .

The drums cry

The drums scream

The drums shriek

Hapsatou Wane uses repetition very differently in her poem “I Have a Nightmare.” She uses the repetition of “I have a nightmare” at the beginning of each stanza to accomplish the goal of what Olga Broumas, writer-in-residence at Brandeis University, calls “The Yellow Elephant Exercise.” In this exercise, she asks students to improvise poems that begin with a yellow elephant. The writer’s challenge is to create a believable poem beginning with this fantastical image, no small task because the poem can only get more outlandish. She uses this exercise to demonstrate the power of the writer to create an imaginary, outrageous, incredible image or universe—and convince the reader to believe in it. In Hapsatou’s poem, she follows a thread of thought from waking up without coffee to flying to senseless, incessant smiling. The repetition allows the reader to ground himself and easily follow her through her yellow elephantesque nightmares.

I have a nightmare

One day I’ll wake up

And there won’t be any coffee left

I’ll drink a cup of milk and go to work

I have a nightmare

One day I’ll go to work

And there won’t be any bus

I’ll wear my tennis shoes and I’ll walk

I have a nightmare

One day, I’ll walk

And there won’t be any roads

I’ll wear my swimming suit and I’ll swim

I have a nightmare

One day, I’ll swim

And there won’t be any water

I’ll close my eyes and I’ll fly

I have a nightmare

One day, I’ll fly

And there won’t be any weightlessness

I’ll open my eyes and I’ll fall

I have a nightmare

One day, I’ll fall

And there won’t be any link

I’ll yawn my head off and I’ll sleep

I have a nightmare

One day, I’ll sleep

And there won’t be any nightmare

I’ll have a dream and smile

I have a dream

One day, I’ll smile

And there won’t be any reason for that

I’ll keep on smiling and smile . . .

The above examples suggest that the relationship between form and Senegalese student poetry is somewhat complicated. As is evidenced by the examples of poems using rhyme schemes, use of a too-strict form muddied the clarity of the students’ images and feelings. However, use of a less-strict formulaic device, such as repetition, helped advance the poem and illustrate its meaning in a stronger way.

Content

By reading only the preface to the magazine, one begins to sense that what is contained in the pages is serious business. The preface, written by UGB French professor and poet Boubacar Camara, introduces the magazine as having been driven by the desire to write. He describes this desire as “un puissant impératif, celui de se déployer en paroles étoilées dans l’angoissant infini” (“a powerful necessity, that of unfurling oneself in starry words in the agonizing infinite”). He invokes the brilliance of Gustave Flaubert’s writing, defining it as an ability to live “comme un condamné à mort vivrait ses derniers jours” (“as one condemned to death would live his last days”). Camara goes on say that “écrire . . . c’est se transférer dans le corps féminin violé . . . c’est souffrir la souffrance de l’Autre” (“writing . . . is putting oneself in the body of a woman who has been raped . . . and suffering the suffering of the Other”). In his concluding paragraph, Camara underlines the writers’ responsibility, stating, “Sans nul doute, avec le temps, à force de travail, d’essais et d’erreurs, ces talents mûriront pour, demain, participer à l’émergence d’une littérature nouvelle qui répondrait aux besoins de l’Afrique du XXIe siècle” (“Without a doubt, with time, as a result of work, trial, and error, these talents will ripen so that tomorrow they can participate in the emergence of a new literature that will response to the needs of 21^st century Africa”).

I do not know if the preface was written as a response to the content of the magazine (which Professor Camara was involved in selecting) or as what Professor Camara considered an appropriate introduction to any selection of writing. Whatever the motivation, the preface accurately reflects the gravity of both the published and unpublished works that I collected for this project. The only less serious works are seven pieces out of more than two hundred pages of writing. These are almost entirely depictions of daily life: Papa Moussa Coulibaly’s comic book about university life, Papis Ly’s story of injuring himself while playing basketball²¹, Al Hassane Bâ’s two short poems and his autobiography comprised of frog stories²², Jimtan Dackoy’s “Le Tournant Décisif” (“The Turning Point”) about his friends smoking marijuana, and Omar Diouck’s monologuesque anecdote about his German teacher trying to sleep with an old white woman. A selection of titles of the rest of the pieces will illuminate the serious nature in the body of the collected writing:

As is evidenced by this partial list of titles, the students generally chose to write on Worthy Subjects.²³ Though there is a significant difference between “Plainte d’une réfugié” (“Complaint of a Refugee”) and “Tribute to All the Women of the World,” testifying to the range of Worthy Subjects, several themes appeared a notable number of times. I will discuss the following three, to which I have given titles: The Demise of Africa, Reverence of Women, and Loss of Innocence.

The pieces concerned with The Demise of Africa are nearly all poems. I include in this category not only poems about Africa’s problems in general, but also work concerning the capsizing of the Joola and its tragic effects in Senegal and more specifically, in the Casamance.²⁴ These poems tend to identify the same general problems on the African continent like violence, war, racism, and unnecessary death; however, the poets grapple with the issues differently. Amadou Salmone Fall argues for the beauty of diversity in the opening stanza of his poem “Et quand la pirogue reflète l’arc-en-ciel” (“And When the Pirogue Reflects the Rainbow”) before mourning the present-day problem with diversity in Africa: racism and resulting war.

Voyez-vous cette bande aux couleurs multiples ?

Voyez-vous comme elle peint le ciel de bonheur ?

Quelle merveille ! Quelle splendeur !

Et pourtant elle n’est que diversité,

Elle n’est que symbiose.

N’est-ce pas ce qui fait sa force ?

Et oui peuples ! diversité et symbiose

Pour vivre le meilleur.

Alors, que les pollens de la paix soient semés

Dans la tolérance de nos dissemblances. . . .

Et ces maux indignes, infâmes et ignobles, ne seront que simples souvenirs.

Hélas ! Xénophobie, guerres religieuses et raciales, racisme et autres fléaux,

Obscurcissent notre héritage, à savoir le monde de demain.

Do you see this multi-colored band?

Do you see how it paints the sky with happiness?

How marvelous! What a splendor!

And even so it’s nothing but diversity,

It’s nothing but symbiosis.

Isn’t that what makes it powerful?

And yes, peoples! diversity and symbiosis

To live as best we can.

That the pollen of peace be sown

In the tolerance of our differences. . . .

And that these undignified, infamous, ignoble evils will be nothing but simple memories.

Alas! Xenophobia, religious and racial wars, racism and other plagues,

Cloud our inheritance, to know tomorrow’s Africa.

Paul Mignane Sarr handles his dismay and astonishment at the way, according to him, Africa is governed corruptly by denying that he belongs in this world:

Non, ce monde de conflits et de tensions

N’est pas le mien car la passion,

L’argent, le pouvoir et le sexe

Le gouvernent et cadrent son contexte.

No, this world of conflicts and tensions

Is not mine because passion

Money, power and sex

Govern it and frame its context.

Where most of The Demise of Africa pieces indignantly announce Africa’s issues and declare the speaker’s distress, Jules Mansaly offers a more understated personal account. In his prose autobiography, “Ces moments-là” (“These Moments”), he writes about himself in third person, sitting in front of his residence hall at the university, lost in thought. He reveals the source of his detachment and melancholy in the last paragraph of his prose piece.

Mais ce soir, tout semblait se perdre dans sa tête . . . pendant qu’il fut absorbé par cette scène qui se passait devant lui : Bocar venait juste de passer, s’embrassa longuement avec son ami de classe d’année antérieure et d’interminables salutations et voeux s’ouvrirent. C’est justement ce qui faisait revivre à Jules le souvenir de ses tant d’amis qu’il avait perdus lors du naufrage du Diola. Il se trouvait seul devant cet univers nouveau même s’il a dû bénéficier de l’accueil chaleureux que lui ont reservé ses nouveaux amis étudiants de Sanar.²⁵

But this evening, everything seemed lost on him . . . while he was absorbed in this scene that took place before him: Bocar had just passed by, embraced his friend from the class ahead of him for a long time, and the two exchanged unending greetings and best wishes. It was exactly what revived in Jules the memory of so many of his friends that he had lost in the sinking of the Joola. He found himself alone in this new universe, even if he should have benefited from the warm welcome that his new student friends in Sanar25 had reserved for him.

Unlike Amadou Bâ, who wonders if the accident was a “hallucination, rêve, ou cauchemar” (“hallucination, dream or nightmare”) in his “Casamance,” Jules knows the real effects of the tragedy eight months later: solitude and pensiveness.

In another of The Demise of Africa poems, Ousmane Diop is repentant and accepts responsibility for Africa’s condition by using “we” instead of “you,” claiming the continent as his own in the latter half of the poem.

It’s high time we became aware of our barbaric deeds

We must wake up!

And together we’ll raise our dear Grandmother nearly laid down

Those guns I hear thundering must fall silent

They must keep silent forever

In the first half, however, he addresses his continent directly, respectfully as “Grandmother Africa.” In personifying Africa as a woman, Ousmane enters his poem into the category of the Reverence for Women pieces.

You have educated us and taught Tolerance and Openmindedness

You have suckled us with the milk of your breasts

A milk holder of perseverance, abnegation and daring

And you have dressed us with PEACE

Grandmother Africa!

You have guided our first steps

And with your finger you’ve shown us the right way

My voice is full of softness and Happiness

Because my thought is diven into the beautiful ancestral memories

Grandmother Africa!

Ousmane’s characterization of Grandmother Africa as a stabilizing, nurturing presence, a guiding figure, and a link to what is ancient is similar to Papa Cheikh Bèye’s characterization of women in his “Tribute to All the Women in the World.”

Lifeblood which defines each generation:

Woman, you are the headlamp in my hard life;

Woman, you are the big tree with gorgeous fruits;

Woman, with your lively leaves, I am always longing for your fresh air;

Woman, you presence at my side is cheering me up;

Woman, you are the linchpin of an actual and eternal life;

Woman, you are the gold pearl of confidence when times get tough. . . .

Woman, you are really the luxurious milestone I was awaiting;

Your softness and brightness envelope me;

Woman, you are actually the sun, the sea, and the life; . . .

Woman, I am fond of you. I am keen on you. I am sweet on you. I love you.

That’s why I’ll never keep you from blowing your own trumpet.

As is evidenced by his unbridled worship of “Woman,” Papa Cheikh’s relationship with “Woman” is ostensibly uncomplicated and clear: she is a guiding force, a comforting presence, a stabilizer, a trophy, an object of love, and finally, someone who has earned the right to freedom of creativity and action.

In Yaya Mara Diouf’s poem, “A celle qui m’a donnée le jour ! Mère mienne !” (“To the Woman who Gave Life to Me! My Mother!”), her relationship with an individual woman—her mother—is more complicated.

Auprès de toi, j’oublie ma maturité

Auprès de toi, je nage dans un tourbillon

De bonheur, de plénitude et d’extase

Compagne de mes nuits d’insomnie

Compagne de mes moments de doute

Compagne de mes instants d’angoisse

When I’m with you, I forgot my maturity

When I’m with you, I swim in a whirlwind

Of happiness, of fulfillment and ecstasy

Companion during my nights of insomnia

Companion in my moments of doubt

Companion in my instants of anguish

Here, Yaye Mara’s relationship to her mother is more complicated than Papa Cheikh’s to “Woman” because Yaye Mara is a much more central character in the poem. They are her nights of insomnia; they are her moments of doubt; they are her instants of anguish during which her mother is her companion. Rather than simply idolizing her mother, she introduces aspects of the very complex mother-daughter relationship, particularly when she juxtaposes the image of herself nestling her head in her mother’s breast with that of her mother as “femme de la personalité imposante” (“woman with the imposing personality”).

Yaye Mara also wrote a story that occupies a place in the Loss of Innocence category and is a representative example of women’s portrayals of relationships between men and women in this body of collected writing. A response to the “Histoire d’une cicatrice” (“History of a Scar”) exercise,²⁶ her short story about a Peul woman who is raped by her uncle, resulting in a loss of innocence so shameful and apparent that it manifests itself in a “Mongol” child. The other women who write about a loss of innocence also write about losing innocence in traumatic ways: there are two other rapes depicted and a surprise marriage. The most overtly stated instance of rape as a loss of innocence is in Fatou Bâ Sène’s “Histoire d’une cicatrice” (“History of a Scar”). Her character, Ken, confesses to a stranger that she was raped—the reason for her melancholy—and then, in the midst of two sobs, blurts out, “Cet homme venait d’emporter avec lui ma joie de vivre, ma jeunesse et ce qui était plus chère en moi : ma pureté” (“That man took away with him my joy of living, my youth, and what was dearest to my: my purity”). The stark equation of innocence with virginity and virginity with purity indicates that the Loss of Innocence works are works about the tragically irretrievable.

Surprisingly, the male students also wrote poems that fit into the Loss of Innocence category, but their work is very different; it is less specific. They nearly invariably compared the personal loss of innocence to the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden. Ndongo Niang Bâ wrote the opening poem in the magazine, “L’homme” (“Man”), that essentially retells the Eden story in verse. Amadou Bâ, as I have already described, wrote two poems comparing his loss of innocence to that of humanity. Perhaps his most “fallen” stanza is in “Rêve inachevé” (“Unfulfilled Dream”):

Perdu dans l’attirance de ce monde aux plaisirs je me suis convertis

Alors j’ai couché avec toutes ces innocents fleurs que la vie a flétris

Avec toutes ces âmes fébrils qui ont cru à moi à mes trippes

Toutes ces putes légitimes auxquelles je suis attaché comme à ma pipe

Lost in the seduction of this world, I turned to pleasure

So I slept with all those innocent flowers that life withered

With all these feverish souls who believed in my bullshit

All these legitimate whores to whom I became attached, like to my cigarette

In this excerpt, it is apparent that Amadou’s feelings toward the Loss of Innocence are those of cynicism, bitterness, and self-blame, whereas the female students seemed to be more concerned with characters who lost their innocence by being victims of taking of innocence.

The gravity and seriousness of the students’ writing, as illustrated by The Demise of Africa, Reverence of Women, and Loss of Innocence pieces, is as evident in the magazine’s conclusion as it was in its preface. The magazine closes with a poem in English by Ousmane Diop, mirroring the “J’écris parce que” (“I Write Because”) poem that opens the magazine. His reasons for writing are grave and serious—but infused with hope because he seems to be writing to correct problems like The Demise of Africa and the Loss of Innocence:

I write because deeply inside I am wounded.

Yes, I write because I don’t want to carry all this heavy suffering alone.

I write to denounce all this hatred in the world and, above all, in my dear continent, Africa.

Africa is not what it use to be, a so peaceful country where people consider one another as brothers and sisters . . .

Yes, I am writing.

I am writing because now in my continent resounds the horrible symphony of guns. . . .

Just to be safe, people must abandon their dear motherlands.

I am writing because I am about to believe that

“Man is a wolf for Man.”

Yes, this is why I am writing today.

Discussion

When I first wrote to Jim Delehanty, my University of Wisconsin-Madison advisor for this independent study, I was disheartened and cynical. I had just returned to the US from Senegal and the last few chaotic days in St.-Louis involved me trying to cement connections for future research and trips to Senegal, saying goodbye to dozens of friends, giving away dozens of bottles of mosquito cream, hand sanitizer, iodine tablets, travel stain remover, etc. because they didn’t make the “suitcase cut”—and I’d barely used them—and frantically trying to print the magazine. The printer I chose was affiliated with the Alliance Franco-Sénégalaise and kept assuring me things were advancing steadily. The magazine was due to come out the Tuesday evening before I left for Dakar to take a plane to Brussels and then to Chicago, arriving in Cleveland on the Fourth of July. I scheduled a meeting of the literary magazine that evening at 9:30 PM, despite the students’ exams, so that I could personally hand them their copies of the magazine and say goodbye. However, at 9:00 PM, I was still waiting outside the printer’s cybercafé in St.-Louis, asking his assistants where he and my magazine were; they denied knowing where he was printing and claimed that his cell phone had “problems.” They said over and over that they were sure that the magazine would be ready within a half an hour—whenever the last half-hour increment had expired. When it occurred to me that his assistants had no idea when the magazine would be ready, I called one of the magazine’s assistants, Papis Ly. I asked him to explain to the other members that I no longer knew when the magazine would be ready and that they should go back to the rooms and continue to study. I took a taxi back to the UGB campus, carrying bags of clothes I had just had made at the tailor, and ran into several members of the magazine, to whom I defeatedly explained that the magazine was still being printing—and I was going to the States the following day. At three in the morning, the printer finally knocked on my dorm room door and dropped off the 500 copies of the magazine, which I dragged to an assistant’s room for distribution after my departure.

When I got home and had to write this paper about this experience I had with the literary magazine, I was overwhelmed and utterly without secondary sources. Jim Delehanty, however, encouraged me to “be charitable throughout” and find out what particular circumstances in Senegal make the student writing what it is. And so I have come back to appreciating the writing that I collected and appreciating the students—my best friends at UGB—who produced it.

“Avoiding Bad Habits”

Concerning the surprising use of form in poetry that I presented in “Form,” there are a number of reasons that students chose to or felt obligated to place constraints on their poems. It is first useful to look at the dozen questionnaires that students handed back to me. Though these questionnaires did not end up playing a big role in this study, it is useful to look at the question, “Quels sont vos œuvres littéraires et vos auteurs préférés” (“What are your favorite literary works and authors”)? To this question, there were only a handful of repeated answers: Hugo, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Zola, Rousseau, Molière, Verlaine, and Senghor. If one considers the poetic works of these authors (with the exception of Senghor), all wrote with some degree of formal constraint. If this has been the only poetry to which they have been exposed—and this is not at all an outrageous assumption—then Senegalese students would have the conception that what defined poetry was its form.

During my interview with Oumar Sankharé, Senegalese author and professor at UGB and Unversité Cheikh Anta Diop²⁷ of Historical French Grammar, I discovered that high school and university curriculums were specifically designed to exclude contemporary works. When I inquired as to why a curriculum would intentionally be so narrow, Professor Sankharé said that the study of contemporary writers would give students already struggling with French, a second or third language, more problems because they would pick up “bad habits”—like slang words, vulgar words, words not accepted by l’Academie Française, and informal grammatical constructions. With so little access to books, students would have no means by which to obtain contemporary works in French even if they knew they existed, if they were not taught in school. In addition, more than half of the students who wrote constrained poetry were second-year French students, a year during which students study Mallarmé, a poet who takes form very seriously, even if seemed rebellious in his 19^th century context.

If a student’s access to books and his conception of poetry can explain why students were using strict rhyme schemes, what, then, pushed them to use repetition so effectively? The best answer I have to this question is that it is an inextricable part of the oral culture. For example, repetition is a part of each greeting. Take the following greeting sequence, in which Senegalese students engage dozens of times per day:

That the kind of repetition in the above dialogue is so instrumental to Senegalese communication, it follows that the students would have a facility with it that would advance rather than hinder their creative writing. In addition, my choice of two exercises (the questions exercise and the “J’écris parce que” exercise) that involved repetition may have influenced some students to incorporate repetition into their poetry.

“J’écris parce que j’ai appris ces mots à l’école.”

The second, perhaps more complicated trend that I found in these works was that they were so serious—the themes and subjects were Worthy, the tone was sentimental, cliché, and affected. Students seemed to be afraid, even in light of the autobiography exercise, to “write what they knew”—to explore their daily lives in creative ways. I suspected at first that their preference for Worthy Subjects had to do with an obligation to write what was worthy of literature and that it was common to young writers everywhere. “Even if [young writers] sometimes suspect that life comes down to variations on doing laundry, they nevertheless believe that poetry should be dedicated to those imagined higher climes where such honorable abstractions as Innocence, Beauty, Truth, Constancy, and Love reign without adulteration or evidence” (Saltzman 332).

However, Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, in his article “Quand la plume trahit ta bouche” (“When Your Pen Betrays Your Mouth”), describes a much more relevant and significant problem: that of language. He explains his decision to write in Wolof for the first time after having written in French for years. He writes, “Je ne parle jamais français dans la vie quotidienne. Dans la société sénégalaise où je vis, cela n’aurait absolument aucun sens. Le français est pour moi une langue de cérémonie, ma langue du dimanche, en quelque sorte” (“I never speak French in everyday life. In the Senegalese society in which I live, that would have absolutely no sense. For me, French is a ceremonial language, my Sunday language, if you will”). He also remarks that when the African author writes in French, “le fait que les mot se refusent à lui rend souvent sa démarche maladroite. Parole d’emprunt, donc empruntée, parsemée de trous de mémoire. Ce dernier point est capital : Il permet peut-être de comprendre pourquoi nos œuvres, même quand elles essaient de jouer su le registre de l’humour, ont bien du mal à ne pas être ressenties comme graves et sérieuses” (“the fact that the words evade him often renders his work awkward. Borrowed words sprinkled with holes in the memory. This last point is capital: It perhaps allows one to understand why our works, even when they try to play on the register of humor, have a hard time not being felt as grave and serious”).

The problem of writing in a colonial language that Diop brings up here is perhaps the most important reason that the student writing is of serious tone and theme. As I have already remarked, the students rarely wrote about the personal and at the same time, the most successful pieces were concerned with their daily lives. However, Diop makes it clear that one cannot really recall in writing that which takes place in another language. Language is linked to memory and as the students were writing in either French or English, and not their first languages (Wolof, Pulaar, Sereer, etc.), they certainly had a hard time writing something true. Rather, they donned their “Sunday languages” and wrote fiction in the truest sense—stories and poems that were entirely invented.

Indeed, these texts lend themselves to many other analyses—among those I considered was Senegalese gender culture reflected through student writing—but the first analysis that literary texts should undergo is a literary analysis. I have tried, in this paper, to fairly represent the large body of texts that I collected, in showing how students responded differently to given exercises and by describing the students’ tendencies with regard to form and content, while also representing those works that made up the exceptions to the “rules.”

What drove the students to write—whether simply or loftily or movingly—varied greatly, though, as a careful reading of “J’écris parce que”²⁸ will reveal. The most important common reason, however, was that we could write and so we did. No matter how insufficient the tools were for the work we took on (colonizing languages, very few books—even chalk was rare), we all had access to the essential implements: a pen and a sheet of paper. As Amar Mbacke says in the group poem, “I write because this evening Mara offered me a sheet of paper and Fatimata lent me her pen”—and our access to even these most basic tools was enough of a reason to write for all of us.

Appendices

A.

Workshop Rules

B.1.

Improvisation in Beijing

Allen Ginsberg

I write poetry because the English word Inspiration comes from Latin Spiritus, breath, I want to breathe freely.

I write poetry because Walt Whitman gave world permission to speak with candor.

I write poetry because Walt Whitman opened up poetry's verse-line for unobstructed breath.

I write poetry because Ezra Pound saw an ivory tower, bet on one wrong horse, gave poets permission to write spoken vernacular idiom.

I write poetry because Pound pointed young Western poets to look at Chinese writing word pictures.

I write poetry because W. C. Williams living in Rutherford wrote New Jerseyesque "I kick yuh eye," asking, how measure that in iambic pentameter?

I write poetry because my father was poet my mother from Russia spoke Communist, died in a mad house.

I write poetry because young friend Gary Snyder sat to look at his thoughts as part of external phenomenal world just like a 1984 conference table.

I write poetry because I suffer, born to die, kidneystones and high blood pressure, everybody suffers.

I write poetry because I suffer confusion not knowing what other people think.

I write because poetry can reveal my thoughts, cure my paranoia also other people's paranoia.

I write poetry because my mind wanders subject to sex politics Budhadharma meditation.

I write poetry to make accurate picture my own mind.

I write poetry because I took Bodhisattva's Four Vows: Sentient creatures to liberate are numberless in the universe, my own greed ignorance to cut thru's infinite, situations I

find myself in are countless as the sky okay, while awakened mind path's endless.

I write poetry because this morning I woke trembling with fear what could I say in China?

I write poetry because Russian poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin committed suicide, somebody else has to talk.

I write poetry because my father reciting Shelley English poet & Vachel Lindsay American poet out loud gave example–big wind inspiration breath.

I write poetry because writing sexual matters was censored in United States.

I write poetry because millionaires East and West ride Rolls-Royce limousines, poor people don't have enough money to fix their teeth.

I write poetry because my genes and chromosomes fall in love with young men not young women.

I write poetry because I have no dogmatic responsibility one day to the next.

I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.

I write poetry to talk back to Whitman, young people in ten years, talk to old aunts and uncles still living near Newark, New Jersey.

I write poetry because I listened to black Blues on 1939 radio, Leadbelly and Ma Rainey.

I write poetry inspired by youthful cheerful Beatles' songs grown old.

I write poetry because Chuang-tzu couldn't tell whether he was butterfly or man, Lao-tzu said water flows downhill, Confucius said honor elders, I wanted to honor Whitman.

I write poetry because overgrazing sheep and cattle Mongolia to U.S. Wild West destroys new grass & erosion creates deserts.

I write poetry wearing animal shoes.

I write poetry "First thought, best thought" always.

I write poetry because no ideas are comprehensible except as manifested in minute particulars: "No ideas but in things."

I write poetry because the Tibetan Lama guru says, "Things are symbols of themselves."

I write poetry because newspapers headline a black hole at our galaxy-center, we're free to notice it.

I write poetry because World War I, World War II, nuclear bomb, and World War III if we want it, I don't need it.

I write poetry because first poem Howl not meant to be published was prosecuted by the police.

I write poetry because my second long poem Kaddish honored my mother's parinirvana in a mental hospital.

I write poetry because Hitler killed six million Jews, I'm Jewish.

I write poetry because Moscow said Stalin exiled 20 million Jews and intellectuals to Siberia, 15 million never came back to the Stray Dog Café, St. Petersburg.

I write poetry because I sing when I'm lonesome.

I write poetry because Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

I write poetry because my mind contradicts itself, one minute in New York, next minute the Dinaric Alps.

I write poetry because my head contains 10,000 thoughts.

I write poetry because no reason no because.

I write poetry because it's the best way to say everything in mind within 6 minutes or a lifetime.

–October 21, 1984

B.2.

J’écris

Poème de groupe

J’écris parce que j’aime.

J’écris parce que j’aime lire.

J’écris parce que j’aime l’odeur des livres.

J’écris parce que ceux qui écrivent m’ont beaucoup appris.

J’écris parce que c’est ma drogue.

J’écris parce que le monde semble se briser de milles éclats.

J’écris parce que je dois tout ordonner.

J’écris parce que mes droits sont bafoués.

J’écris parce que je représente une jeunesse hypothétique.

J’écris parce que les mots me brûlent les doigts.

J’écris parce que les mots se disputent un portion de mon âme.

J’écris parce que je me souviens.

J’écris parce que je veux être un repère.

J’écris parce que je veux mettre sur le papier mes pensées les plus minimes.

J’écris parce que la vie est éphémère mais les mots ne le sont pas.

J’écris parce que je veux dire tout ce que je veux.

J’écris parce que je ne peux pas tout dire.

J’écris parce que Maman ne savait pas le faire et elle continuait de faire pour que ses rejetons n’ignorent pas cet Art.

J’écris parce que l’enfant a besoin de sa mère.

J’écris parce que je suis envoûté par les yeux de Suzanne.

J’écris parce que de toute les femmes, c’est l’écriture que j’ai choisi.

J’écris parce que l’innocence est faible.

J’écris parce que le stylo est phallique.

J’écris parce que je me sens en moi l’impérieux besoin d’un petit ammi.

J’écris parce que mon âme est bouillante de voix intérieures pour demeurer.

J’écris parce que je suis fou.

J’écris parce que c’est plus intéressant que faire le linge.

J’écris parce que le monde est immensément riche.

J’écris parce que je veux refaire le monde en l’habillant de mots qui chantent, de mots qui pleurent.

J’écris parce que sans écriture ma vie s’efface, se fane, s’arrête.

J’écris parce que je veux me divertir et les mots me semble le plus appropriés pour ce jeu.

J’écris parce qu’avec l’écriture, je peux être éboueur, mendiant, féministe, macho, aveugle, président, et même, fou.

J’écris parce qu’on ne peint pas du blanc sur du blanc.

J’écris parce qu’on m’a volé mon poème.

J’écris parce que je veux m’envoler vers un meilleur monde.

J’écris parce qu’il fait si bon là-bas.

J’écris parce qu’il y très, très longtemps en Egypte antique j’étais scribe.

J’écris parce que je veux voyager et les billets d’avion coûtent chers.

J’écris parce qu’il a fait beau toute la journée et je ne suis pas sortie.

J’écris parce que demain je ne pourrai peut-être plus écrire.

J’écris parce que j’etais belle quand j’avais quatorze ans et je ne le suis plus.

J’écris parce que je ne suis plus la petite fille passionnée qui respirait la vie.

J’écris parce que je veux montrer ma soif d’aimer et d’être aimée.

J’écris parce que je veux être quitte avec moi-même et avec les autres.

J’écris parce que ce soir Mara m’a offert une feuille et Fatimata m’a prêté son stylo.

J’écris parce que j’ai appris ces mots à l’école.

J’écris parce que le tangible est rigide et l’intelligible est flexible.

J’écris parce que la science est solide et que l’art est liquide.

J’écris parce que j’ai déjà mûri ma réflexion. Maintenant, ne dois-je pas prendre le chemin de retour ?

J’écris pour me taire.

I Write

Group poem

I write because I love.

I write because I love to read.

I write because I like the smell of books.

I write because those who write taught me a lot.

I write because it’s my drug.

I write because the world seems to be shattering itself into thousands of fragments.

I write because I have to arrange everything.

I write because my rights are flouted.

I write because I represent a hypothetical youth.

I write because words burn my fingers.

I write because words fight over a part of my soul.

I write because I remember.

I write because I want to make my mark.

I write because I want put my most minimal thoughts on paper.

I write because life is ephemeral but words are not.

I write because I want to say everything I want to.

I write because I can’t say everything.

I write because Mom didn’t know how to and she continued to do so that her kids wouldn’t ignore this Art.

I write because a child needs his mother.

I write because I am bewitched by Suzanne’s eyes.

I write because out of all the women, I chose writing.²⁹

I write because innocence is weak.

I write because the pen is phallic.

I write because I feel in myself a pressing need for a boyfriend.

I write because my soul is boiling with inner voices.

I write because I’m crazy.

I write because it’s more interesting than doing laundry.

I write because the world is immensely rich.

I write because I want to remake the world by dressing it in words that sing, words that cry.

I write because without writing, my life erases itself, fades, stops.

I write because with writing I can be a garbage man, a beggar, a feminist, macho, blind, the president, and even crazy.

I write because one doesn’t paint white on white.

I write because someone stole my poem.

I write because I want to fly toward a better world.

I write because it’s so good over there.

I write because a very, very long time ago in ancient Egypt, I was a scribe.

I write because I want to travel and airplane tickets are expensive.

I write because it was beautiful all day and I didn’t go out.

I write because tomorrow, maybe I won’t be able to write anymore.

I write because I was beautiful when I was fourteen years old and I am not anymore.

I write because I am no longer the little, passionate girl who breathed life.

I write because I want to show my thirst to love and be loved.

I write because I want to be square with myself and others.

I write because this evening Mara offered me a sheet of paper and Fatimata lent me her pen.

I write because I learned these words in school.

I write because the tangible is rigid and the intelligible is flexible.

I write because science is solid and art is liquid.

I write because I have already ripened my reflection. Now, don’t I have to take the way back?

I write to silence myself.

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