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Birago Diop (1906-1989) |
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Senegalese poet and story-teller, a prominent African francophone writer, who recorded traditional oral folktales of the Wolof people. Birago Diop's work helped to reestablish general interest in the African folktales published in European languages. Among his most famous poems are 'Souffles' (Breaths / Forefaters) and 'Viatique' (Viaticum). Ecoute plus souvent Birago
Diop was born in Ouakam outside Dakar, French West
Africa (now in Senegal), into an influential Wolof family. Diop's
father, Ismaël Diop, who worked as a master mason in the construction
of a military camp, disappeared two months before his birth.
Diop's mother, Sokhna Diawara, settled with her children at her
mother's residence in Dakar. Diop's new extended family was largely run by females,
grandmothers, mothers-in-law, aunts, half sisters, and
cousins much older than he was. From birth, Diop was a French citizen. He grew up in the
Islamic faith, as the majority of Senegalese, but he felt no attraction in reading and studying the Quran,
and
eventually developed a kind of animistic view of the world, in which
nature and the spiritual realm are closely connected. His brothers,
Youssoupha, who became a physician, and Massyla,
encouraged from early on his
scholarly and literary pursuits. Massyla, half-brother twenty-one years
Diop's senior, was a journlist and the author of an locally printed
novel, Le Réprouvé. His other works never reached print. ('West African Prose Fiction' by Priscilla P. Clark, in European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa: Volume. 1, edited by Albert S. Gérard, Budapest: Akadémia Kiadó, 1986, p. 121) Diop attended a Qur'anic school and in 1921 he moved to Saint-Louis, then the capital of Senegal, where studied on a scholarship at Lycée Faidherbe, and wrote his first poems. A voracious reader, he frequented libraries. His favorite authors included Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. After obtaining his baccalauréat and serving a year in the colonial army, Diop went to France to study veterinary medicine at the University of Toulouse, where he took his doctorate in 1933. In Paris Diop met many African, Black American, and Caribbean
students. Among them was his fellow countryman and poet Léopold Senghor, who later became the first
president of independent Senegal. Diop participated actively in the
Négritude movement created by these young poets, artists, and
intellectuals – the concept of négritude
was elaborated by Aimé Césaire, Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas, and
defined as "affirmation that one is black and proud of it". In addition to contributing to Léopold Senghor's newspaper
L'Etudiant noir,
several of Diop's early poems appeared in Senghor's famous
Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache
(1948), a
landmark of modern black writing in French. 'Souffles,' with the theme
of unity of all things – living
and dead – with nature, became one of the most anthologized poems of
the French speaking Africa. Woyle Soyinka considered it "the poetic
exegesis of animism within the Négritude movement, that unoque
spirituality of the African that establishes a continuum between the
worlds of of the living, of the ancestors and the unborn." (The Burden of Memory, the Muse of
Forgiveness by Wole Soyinka, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999, p. 171) "Listen more
often to things rather than beings. / Hear
the fire's voice, / Hear the voice of water. / In the wind hear the
sobbing of the trees, / It is our forefathers breathing." ('Forefathers' by Birago Diop,
An African Treasury, selected
by Langston Hughes, New York: Crown Publishers, 1960, p. 183) In
Diop's Africa, the dead are not dead, but we can hear them in "the
rustling tree," "in the murmuring wood," and "in the flickering
fire". The poem has sometimes been translated into English as "Breaths" and "Spirits," or "Forefathers," as in Langston
Hughes's anthology. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that "the tom-tom tends to become a genre of black poetry, as the sonnet or the ode were of ours. . . . The calm center of this maelstrom of rhythms, of songs, of cries, is, in its majestic naivete, the poetry of Birago Diop. It alone is in response because it speaks directly from the tribal story-tellers and in the same oral tradition." (Black Orpheus by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by S. W. Allen, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976, p. 32) After postdoctoral research at the Institut d'Etudes
Vétérinaieres Exotiques in Paris, Diop
left France for Senegal. As head of the government cattle inspection
service he traveled around western Mali. In 1934 he married
Marie-Louise Pradére, an
accountant from Haute-Garonne; they had two daughters. Marie-Louise was
a
white French woman – such marriages were
rare in those days. During the early 1940s, following the Nazi occupation of France, he spent involuntarily two years in Paris, assigned again to the Institute for Exotic Veterinary Medicine. Because of the travel restrictions, he was unable to return to his home country until after the Liberation. Diop contacted again his old friends, Damas, Senghor, and Alioune Diop and devoted his time to writing folktale adaptations, which first were published in literary journals. 'Un Jugement' and Sarzan' appeared in La Revue du Monde, edited by Paul Morand and Ramon Fernandez. In May 1944 he gave a talk on 'Le folk-lore noir' and the tales and legends of the Afrique Occidentale Française. Diop returned to West Africa to inspect cattle and treat sick animals in French Sudan, Côte d'Ivoire, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger, and Mauritania. After a long career as a government veterinary surgeon, Diop served as Senegal's ambassador to Tunisia from 1961 to 1965. He then settled in Dakar and opened a veterinary clinic in Point E. Some of his new tales appeared in local periodicals, such as the women's magazine Awa. Here, far from my home in Senegal, my eyes are surrounded by closed horizons. When the greens of summer and the russets of autumn have passed, I seek the vast expanses of the Savannah, and find only bare mountains, sombre as ancient prostrate giants that the snow refuses to bury because of their misdeeds. . . . ('The Humps,' Tales of Amadou Koumba by Birago Diop, translated by Dorothy S. Blair, London: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 1; original title: Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba, 1947)
While working in the colonial service and traveling in the
rural areas by canoe, horseback, car and foot, Diop encountered bush
people and learned of the Wolof traditions and oral literature. Many of
the tales Diop incorporated in the award-winning Les Contes
d'Amadou Koumba (1947), Les nouveaux
Contes d'Amadou Koumba (1958), which included an essay by Senghor,
and Contes et lavanes (1963),
which contained new material,
Wolof riddles, and aphorisms. (The Wolof is the most prevalent
indigenous language spoken in Senegal.) These tales made Diop highly popular in Africa, and were translated into several European languages. In Europe, Diop became one of the most acclaimed African writers. Critics and even specialists in African literature believed the 60-year-old family griot to be a real person, a professional storyteller and oral historian. However, Diop acknowledged in 1976 that "Amadou Koumba was only a borrowed name, a useful roof to cover goods which had come to me from several sources, of which the first and last were familial. For as to subject matter I owe more to my brother Youssoupha than to my maternal grandmother's griot." ('Diop, Birago,' in World Authors 1975-1980, edited by Vineta Colby, New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1985, p. 188) Diop reworked myths and tales he had heard in his childhood and on his travels. He used the griot's style, rhythm, daily expressions, puns, and repetitions, and was also faithful to the typical performance principles alternating prose with poetry and songs sung by the audience and the narrator. Diop explained that he only transcribed the tales and made them accessible to the French public. In speaking of his method he once said: "Whenever, while transposing my stories, a word or expression in Senegalese did not come spontaneously in French to my satisfaction, I did not look for the equivalent in some contemporary author. But, falling back on the little I had learnt, I hurried to Rabelais and Montaigne, sometimes to Corneille, rarely to Voltaire, occasionally to Anatole France." (African Literature in French: A History of Creative Writing in French from West and Equatorial Africa by Dorothy S. Blair, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 39) Diop's tales blended realism, humor, and fantasy and expressed in allegorical form the human condition. The protagonists are men, supernatural beings, and animals like in the Fables of La Fontaine or tales of Aesop; also the tales often have a moral or ethical undercurrent. One central cycle of stories dealt with the eternal combat of Leuk, the cunning and malicious hare, and Bouki, the dull-witted and cowardly hyena. In 'Mother Crocodile,' structured as a tale within a tale, precolonial period and Western colonialism is viewed anthropomorphically from an animal point of view. Diassigue, the Mother-Crocodile, tells the little crocodiles of warriors, gold, of the first white men, and the upcoming war. One of the youngest asks: "What difference does it make to us crocodiles if the Wolofs of Walo fight against the Moors of Trarza?" ('Mother Crocodile,' in Tales of Amadou Koumba, p. 49) In the following war the heir to the Moorish kingdom is wounded. An old woman prescribes an effective remedy to the sore – a fresh brain of a young crocodile. The lesson of the tale is that children should listen to the wisdom of their elders. Diop's collected poems, Leurres et lueurs,
written
between 1925 and 1960, was published by Présence africaine in 1960. Though his subject
matter was African, the poems were cast in classical style and form of
the French tradition. In the long poem 'Viatique' (Viaticum), which
drew from his experiences in Congo between August and October 1960,
Diop
recounted a tribal initiation rite: "With her three fingers red with
blood, / with dog's blood, / with bull's blood, / with goat's blood, /
Mother touched me three times. / She touched my forehead with her thumb, / With
her index my left breast / And my
navel with her middle finger." ('Viaticum' by Birago Diop, in Modern African Poetry, edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 65)
Number three is commonly used in rituals, it has a sacrifical
importance. The symbolism of blood is rich, it is associated with
sacrifice, life, purification, and so on. The first volume of Diop's memoirs, La Plume raboutée, came out in 1978. It was followed by A Rebrousse-temps (1982). Birago Diop died in Dakar on November 25, 1989. He was awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Afrique Occidentale Française for the Contes d'Amadou Koumba in 1947 and the Grand Prix d'Afrique Noire in 1964 for Contes et lavanes. For further reading: 'The Significance of the African Cultures and Traditions from the Negritude Perspective: A Critical Analysis of Birago Diop's "Viaticum"' by Kolawole Mathew Ogundipe, JETIR, Volume 7, Issue 1 (2020); 'Towards New Readings of Neo-traditional Tales: Birago Diop Through the Prism of the Local' by Eileen Julien, in The locations and Dislocations of African Literature: A Dialogue Between Humanities and Social Science Scholars, edited by Eileen Julien and Biodun Jeyifo (2016); 'Diop, Birago Ishmael' by Eileen Julien, in Dictionary of African Biography, Volume 2: Brath-Haile, edited by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2012); 'Birago Diop's Contribution to the Ideology of Negritude' by Sana Camara, in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter 2002); 'The Animal Trickster as Political Satirist and Social Dissident' by James Gibbs, in The Growth of African Literature: Twenty-Five Years After Dakar and Fourah Bay, edited by Edris Makward, Thelma Ravell-Pinto & Aliko Songolo (1998); European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa: Volume 1, edited by Albert S. Gérard (1986); 'Diop, Birago,' in World Authors 1975-1980, edited by Vineta Colby (1985); Mythology and Cosmology in the Narratives of Bernard Dadie & Birago Diop: A Structural Approach by Marie Sherrod Tollerson (1984); African Literature in French: A History of Creative Writing in French from West and Equatorial Africa by Dorothy S. Blair (1976); "Les contes d'Amadou Koumba": Du conte traditionnel au conte moderne d'expression française by M. Kane (1968); Birago Diop: écrivain sénégalais, edited by Roger Mercier, Monique Battestini and Simon Battestini (1964); 'Préface d'Amadou Koumba à Birago Diop' by Leopold Sédar Senghor, in Les Nouveaux Contes d'Amadou Koumba by Birago Diop (1958) Selected works:
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