Flesh of the Sahelian Sylvan Realm

Ousmane Sembène's trees are neither decorative nor symbolic. Les bouts de bois de Dieu calls out for recognition of a Sahelian view of nature woven seamlessly into the récit , beyond the overt and gripping story of human empowerment . People and trees merge beyond metaphor: Sembène's writings assume the intimate interchangeability of forms made possible by Sahelian ontology. Tree bark and human flesh become one, literarily. At the edge of the Sahara desert, trees resonate vitally, practically and culturally for West Africans of the Sahel region; wood and human bodies share metaphysical souls and substance. A typical reader's Western lens obscures and often unconsciously even eliminates the presence of Sahelian spiritual beliefs built into the literary text. For example, in Les bouts de bois de Dieu, the narrator makes explicit the intense strength of the Sahelian sun in a description of Aziz, a shopkeeper's father-in-law: “The heat which killed the grass and sucked the earth dry seemed to have wiped him out” 1 (Sembène 247). Francis Price's English translation of this sentence in God's Bits of Wood erases references to both the grass and to the land (“The early afternoon heat seemed to have overcome him completely”) even though the balanced parallelism in the original French -- consisting of grass, earth and a man -- establishes each element of nature's connected and comparably depleted status in the face of inescapable heat (Price 243). Even before the problems of translation, how often does the Western-educated reader similarly read past such elements, blind to the metaphysics, and thus the literary originality, captured on the page?

R. Horton argues in his article “African Traditional Religion and Western Science” that African systems of belief attribute stabilizing, explanatory powers to spirits much as Westerners attribute these ordering principles to material substances and energy. And yet, unless blessed, religious symbols in Western religion remain just that, symbols. For example, whether a European Christian cross is wooden, bronze or plastic may be of no consequence to a Christian since the actual cross represents something else that was real at one time for that believer. By contrast, in the West African tradition, the equivalent cross might carry a life force of its own, were it a product of nature such as wood or bronze. In West African traditions, natural elements are themselves present, not as stand-ins for something else; one can feel their presence, in their own right. Once released from the practices of daily life, how then would a Western religious symbol and a West African natural element manifest themselves on literary pages? The Western symbol would remain a symbol while the West African belief element would participate in the story, not quite in the manner of a character (unless the literature is a folk tale) but certainly with all the presence and importance of a human character in that novel. This consistently inscribed voice of Sahelian metaphysics in the writings of Ousmane Sembène has been overlooked due primarily to a Western critical predeliction to see literary nature as decorative, as symbolic metaphor, or as advocacy for environmental protection.

Sembène does not limit himself to so-called “local color” by merely inviting the reader into the lives of his characters where trees, often baobabs, frequently serve as shaded meeting places for social gatherings of all kinds. Even as a traditional interconnectivity between humans and nature, often seen as the antithesis of the former, permeate the text, Sembène's novel demands modern civil and human rights inspired by a Western model of “progress.” In Sembène's language, tree crowns fill the liminary space on the horizon of sky slipping into the intermediary space just below (or vice versa) in which the trees stand rooted. Soaring tree heights share in the Sacred since “the ‘Koro-ta' -- or the fact of ‘being raised up' or ‘being high...' -- is also a sign of the presence of the ‘Sé,' sacred force, from which, by extension, there is divine presence” 2 (Hampaté Bâ 120).

On the depleting march for workers' rights to Dakar in a desperately arid landscape, the women protestors see the land merge with the sky as “[Only thorny plants with their desiccated souls seemed to live] and, far off toward the horizon, the lofty baobabs, to whom the comings and goings of seasons meant nothing” 3 (Sembène, God's 290). Branches reach upwards into the sky as the exhausted women watch threatening clouds race “across the horizon, throwing the bony fingers of the cade trees into stark relief” 4 (298). Bernadini, a sadistic French commander, scalds a group of his union prisoners; Fa Keïta, an elderly railroad crew chief, considers the choices he has made as he stares out “...beyond the reach of the savanna and the great trees shouldering the sky, far off to the line of the horizon. His eyes were lifted toward a meeting with the only thing truly worthy of any form of suffering -- a faith in God” 5 (344). In each of these examples, the sky and the middle sylvan space meet through the treetops, bridges in Sembène's “topographical aesthetic” 6 of land, sylvan realm and sky.

Not simply an effet du réel where we might be treated to a charming, ostensibly “real” picture of village life, trees, walls and people comingle in symbiotic verticality in a community group scene early in Les bouts . Set in a courtyard packed with people attending a union meeting, “...some squatted on their heels, while others remained standing, or leaned against the wall. There were men in the branches of the trees, and sitting astride the [top of the] wall” 7 (40). The trees, the people and the wall share a common orientation and densely packed space; one gets the sense that the crowd is seamlessly composed of people, trees and walls blurring together. Sembène's prose draws attention to the vertical stretch of a person's body, from feet touching the ground when crouching to full body extension upward when standing. Yet humans and walls also blend across one another: people lean against walls, they climb on top of them. Likewise, trees and wall merge linguistically in Sembène's récit as people await the meeting's speaker “in the branches of the trees” and “sitting astride the [top of the] wall.” In French, “top” ( faîte ) is as readily applied to trees (the treetop: le faîte d'un arbre) as it is to walls (a clumsy English neologism could capture the exact parallelism: “the walltop,” le faîte d'un mur). Though awkward, a more structurally faithful English rendition of this feature of Sembène's aesthetic might be “There were some [people] in the treetops or on the walltops [sic].” People, trees, walls made of earth all coexist effortlessly in the intermediary realm. Tops of people, trees, and walls suggest the boundaries of the sylvan realm even as the strong rooting of its residents allows them to reach upwards and beyond.

Strange for its very consistency, even as the tree tops brush the boundary of sky and middle space, the trees regularly take on human qualities as well. The afore-mentioned “thorny plants with their desiccated souls,” “bony fingers of the cade trees” and “great trees shouldering the sky” suggest anthropomorphization. While the trees connect intimately with humans through the latter's qualities, the reverse is also true: humans absorb the characteristics of trees. In Sembène's Le docker noir , Diaw Fall expresses his deep affection for the white owner of a Marseilles bar, by teasingly proposing to dedicate his book to her, “. . . this tree, which in the depths of my solitude, thwarted the glint of vice . . .” 8 (Sembène, Le docker 137). Even living in France and writing in French, Diaw Fall retains the ontology of his childhood as he suggests that the owner has played the role of adoptive mother. This kind of anthropomorphization of trees to humans, and then the reverse dynamic, might be one of these heretofore unexplored literary techniques launched by this Sahelian writer with a Sahelian metaphysical background. Sembène seems to use the Western form of the novel, and a Western language, French, to give his nature elements huge importance even if not fully-blown character roles such as one often finds in folktales.

Sometimes the sylvan connections are more concrete as in the case of Mor Ciss, a central elderly character in Sembène's Guelwaar . He appears so wrinkled as to have a “ . . . body made of dry wood” 9 (Sembène, Guelwaar 88). The connection between tree and human is not age-specific; just as an old man's body shares the qualities of a tree, so too can a tree share its identity with that of a newborn in the eyes of his mother. Maïmouna, nursing little “Grève,” states that she is watering “one of the great trees of tomorrow” 10 (Sembène, God's 326). What appears at first glance to be a simply symbolic or metaphoric parallel in fact speaks to the shared intimacy of trees and humans in their sylvan realm. In the first few bone chilling pages of Sembène's L'Harmattan , Digbé's sweat dribbles down “between the bark of the tree and his skin” as he awaits the paralyzing prospect of deliberately murdering a white man in the forest (13). This metonymic construction between man and tree demonstrates that the “skin” of the tree and his own are viscerally connected; his skin is not merely against the tree but rather, against that of the tree. The parallel structure highlights the closeness of the two beings. Sembène's writing elaborately showcases the heretofore unnoticed metaphysical interchangeability of tree and humans in the Sahel, far beyond the mere telling of a good story and so commonly lost in critical reading or in translation.11

The profound relationship between trees and humans in the middle sylvan realm of Sembène's topographical aesthetic illuminates the title of his most well-known novel, God's Bits of Wood . The novelist explains in a footnote that “A superstition demands that one count ‘bits of wood' in place of human beings in order to avoid shortening the course of their lives” 12 (Sembène, Les bouts 77). This explanatory footnote appears in a description of Ramatoulaye's household; the narrator feels her enormous responsibility for twenty members of the family (“twenty of God's bits of wood”), given that she is the eldest. In her mind and everyday speech, the “bits of wood” must substitute for the family members in order to ensure their well-being. Here there is a powerful implied equivalence in the substitution of one for the other; they both belong to the same community. This rhetorical equivalence of “God's bits of wood” and human beings affirms that the two do not exist in two separate worlds; they are of one world. Form and content merge in Sembène's treatment of the landscape since human and tree are already, and always, culturally of the same place. As God's Bits of Wood and Sembène's other novels demonstrate, community solidarity (or the lack thereof) in village and neighborhood pervades the author's work. Indeed, the fact that we are speaking of “bits” of wood implies a multitude of constitutive parts of the same matter. The origins of the “bits” reside in the identical substance (wood) of each piece even though each piece also becomes identifiable in its own right; separated, it is “a bit.” A fundamental interchangeability exists at the level of substantive material for humans and trees. An American might metaphorically equate a child's character and behavior to gold with the cliché “he's as good as gold.” To an American, gold is valued so highly within the culture that the very best a person can be must surely be like gold. In the case of the Sahel, a deep belief in the real consequences of careless naming of people transports us into a realm of deadly seriousness. And the chosen material standing between human life and death itself is wood. To the extent that wood and human life are equated, traditionnal savannah cultures have deeply prized the former.

Les bouts de bois de Dieu offers, in the mortar and pestle scene, the most compelling and extended example of Sahelian reverence and compassion for the shared inner soul of our element of nature in question, wood. The narrator describes a mortar, the traditional wooden receptacle holding the millet, a grain, which, as a part of meal preparation, the women pound with a pestle. This mortar, standing in Mamadou Keïta the Elder's compound, happens to be carved from the stump of a dead tree rather than the more prevalent mobile, traditionally carved wooden container.

In the old days, the singing of the pestles had begun even before the morning star disappeared in the first light of dawn... the same echoes which announced the birth of the day presaged a peaceful day. They had both a function and a meaning.

The old mortar [of the] courtyard had been a tree; its roots [still plunged into the earth]. [The felled tree had been hollowed out, and pestles had been made from its branches]. Mills, whether they be turned by wind or by water, [have their language; the mortar, likewise, has its own.] It vibrates beneath the blows of the woman who holds the pestle, causing the earth around it to tremble. [Neighbors sitting or reclining on their mats felt this vibration which transmitted itself to their bodies.] But now the mortar is silent, [and the sad trees announce only dark days to come.] Deprived of the oils from the pounded grain, the mortar and the neatly aligned pestles lay baking in the sun [and splitting, from time to time emitting a dry little sound. Anxiously, the women kept watch over the fissures, running up from the base of the stump, zigzagging toward the rim.] 13 (Sembène, God's 161-2)

One feels initially that the carved stump is dead. First and foremost, the mortar's arboreal ancestry, that of a felled tree, is solemnly honored. The obituary reads: “The old mortar [of the] courtyard had been a tree . . .” . Suddenly, momentarily, we are made to pulse with that former tree, a more recently lively, thumping mortar and pestle. While the narrator begins by denying the present life of the felled tree, he suddenly also brings the tree back to life, our window into a more recent past. These days, however, due to the food deprivation and hunger brought on by the workers' strike, “ . . . now the mortar is silent, [and the sad trees announce only dark days to come].” To which “sad trees” does the narrator refer, except to the ones he has just described, those transformed into mortars throughout the neighborhood? The “sad trees,” and “the mortar” form a parallel structure; “the sad trees,” a periphrastic reference to the mortars themselves, vibrate under the pounding of the pestle in better times. In other words, the mortar, a manufactured wooden product, still retains the living quality of a tree. The life force of the tree is not lost once its wood has been carved. On the contrary, were the residents not experiencing dire food conditions due to the strike, the spirit within would typically speak volumes to the villagers, and participate centrally in their lives.

The nature of the connection between people and mortars is visceral; communication from the trees resonates deep within human bodies. This scene takes place at the beginning of the novel, when the human characters' suffering compares readily to the desiccated condition of the mortar. Lack of food has silenced the mortar and it now evokes a dying patient fearfully monitored by loved ones. Likewise, the strikers are voiceless in the eyes of the French colonial powers and their physical health is suffering. The dry and silent pestle mimics the human condition: wood and people are both hungry for grain and dehydrated due to lack of nourishment: the precise raison d'être of the mortar and pestle is to crush grain in one of the earliest steps of the food preparation process. And, likewise, human survival depends on food. Sembène's language expressing the concern that the women feel for this mortar and pestle echoes what a human being might express towards another human being in these difficult times.

Invariably reinforced in Sembène's prose, people and trees (or products from the latter's wood) share a practical and spiritual bond in the sylvan realm. Until now, literary nature has faded into the background as largely unexplored. Yet Ousmane Sembène's original literary contribution, inspired by traditional metaphysical beliefs, blends the Sahelian flesh of humans and trees. For Sembène, the landscape rivals the presence of his human characters. In the Sahel, natural elements like trees harbor a life force, and thus a literary force incomparable to that of a mere Western metaphor vis-à-vis the rest of the text.

A Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia, V. Natasha E. Copeland received her B.A. in Latin American Studies & International Relations from Goucher College in 1990, her M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago in 1993, her Ed.M. from Harvard University in 1994 and her M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia in 2000. Her dissertation explores nature and landscape in the novels and films of Ousmane Sembène, and more generally, in contemporary West African Sahelian literature.

Notes:

1 All translations mine unless otherwise indicated. “La chaleur qui tuait l'herbe et pompait la terre semblait l'avoir anéanti.”

2 “Le ‘Koro-ta' -- ou le fait ‘d'être élévé' ou ‘d'être haut' (montagne, arbre, ou position royale) -- est également un signe de présence de la ‘Sé,' force sacrée, d'où, par extension, présence de la divinité.”

3 I have modified Francis Price's translation where bracketted to more accurately capture the idea of the plants' souls expressed in the original French, as opposed to her “The only things that seemed alive were the thorny plants that thrived on drought...” “Seuls semblaient vivre les épineux à l'âme sèche, et, loin vers l'horizon, les baobabs hautains que les allées et venues de saisons ne dérangent guère...” (Sembène, Les bouts 297)

4 “...à l'horizon de petits nuages couleur d'ivoire dahoméen et cernés de gris foncé couraient à toute vitesse au-dessus des bosquets de cades qui dressaient en l'air leurs doigts décharnés;” (Ibid., 306)

5 “...au-delà de la savane et des grands arbres qui épaulaient le ciel, loin à l'horizon; ses yeux allaient à la rencontre de la seule chose qui méritait vraiment la souffrance: la foi en Dieu.” (Ibid., 361)

6The term is mine.

7I have added “top of the” to Francis Price's translation which, while inelegant, retains more closely the original parallelism in the implied double usage of “top” as applied to both trees and walls. “Les uns étaient accroupis sur leur talons, les autres debout dans la cour ou appuyés au mur. Il y en avait dans les branches des arbres ou à califourchon sur le faîte du mur.” (Sembène, Les bouts 22)

8 “...cet arbre qui au milieu de ma solitude, arrêta les rayons du vice...” Ros Schwartz changes the tree metaphor so as to be unrecognizable, offering a pale poetic turn of phrase more comfortably familiar to a Western audience yet inappropriate to this cultural context: “To this rock, who in the middle of my solitude, stopped the tentacles of vice.” (Sembène, The Black 75)

9 “...corps de bois sec.”

10 At times, when the parallel between trees and humans is absolutely inescapable, Francis Price honors somewhat the traditional conception of the tree as in this case where, if anything, she overstates the case in a poetic flourish, not recognizing that mere association with any tree makes the baby great; it is redundant to add the adjective ‘great.' “...un arbre pour demain.” (Sembène, Les bouts 339)

11 For a more in-depth discussion of the unknowing facility with which Western educated critical minds overlook, distort and even eliminate this foundational aspect of Sembène's writing, see the author's dissertation in progress, working title “The Nature of Sahelian Literary Landscapes: Novels and Films of Ousmane Sembène,” to be defended August 2005 at the University of Virginia.

12“Une superstition veut que l'on compte des ‘bouts de bois' à la place des êtres vivants pour ne pas abréger le cours de leur vie.” Even in a straight-forward statement of enormous cultural importance set deliberately apart from the text by the author, Francis Price takes extraordinary poetic licence not only in incorporating her version of that information into the text itself, ascribing thoughts to one of Sembène's characters and implicating the tradition as “old,” but in altering the meaning of the cultural expression from an actual shortening of a human's life to a merely fateful change in the course of a life: “It would never have occurred to Ramatoulaye to count the members of her household in any but the old way; to give them names might attract the attention of some evil that would fatefully alter their lives.” (Sembène, God's 84) The irony is that Sembène's footnote was an effort to communicate better his literary language and culture to a Western audience.

13I have modified Francis Price's translation where bracketted. “Aux temps anciens, avant même que l'étoile du matin eût disparu dans les premières lueurs de l'aube, commençait le chant des pilons... Ces échos répétés qui annonçaient la naissance du jour présageaient une heureuse journée. Ils avaient à la fois un sens et une fonction. Le vieux mortier de la cour avait été un arbre; ses racines plongeaient encore dans la terre. L'arbre abattu, on avait creusé, évidé la souche, et de ses branches on avait fait des pilons. Les moulins ont leur langage qu'ils soient à vent ou à eau; le mortier a aussi le sien. Sous les coups de la pileuse, il vibre et fait vibrer la terre tout autour de lui. Les voisins assis ou couchés sur leurs nattes sentaient cette trépidation qui se communiquaient à leurs corps. Mais maintenant le mortier est silencieux et les arbres tristes n'annoncent plus que de sombres journées. Privés de la pulpe grasse des graines pilées, le mortier et les pilons arrimés côte à côte cuisaient au soleil et se fendillaient en produisant de temps en temps un petit bruit sec. Anxieuses, les ménagères surveillaient les fissures qui, parties du bas de la souche, montaient en zigzaguant vers le rebord” (Sembène, Les bouts 158-9).

Works Cited:

Hampaté Bâ, Amadou. Aspects de la civilisation africaine. Paris: Présence africaine, 1972.

Horton, R. “African Traditional Religion and Western Science.” Africa 37 (1967): 50-71.

Price, Francis, trans. God's Bits of Wood . By Ousmane Sembène. Garden City: Anchor, 1970.

Schwartz, Ros, trans. Black Docker . By Ousmane Sembène. London: Heinemann, 1986.

Sembène, Ousmane. Guelwaar. Paris: Présence africaine, 1996.

---. Le docker noir. 1956. Paris: Présence africaine, 1973.

---. Les bouts de bois de Dieu . Paris: Le Livre contemporain, 1960.

---. L'harmattan: référendum . Paris: Présence africaine, 1980.

---. O pays, mon beau peuple! Paris: Presses pocket, 1957.