Almost overnight, David Diop, the Franco-Senegalese literature professor and writer, rose to international fame when he won the British International Booker Prize 2021 for his novel “Night is Our Blood Black”. Born in Paris in 1966 to a French mother and a Senegalese father, Diop grew up in Senegal and teaches French-language African literature at the University of Pau in south-west France.
His award-winning novel is dedicated to a little-known chapter in the history of the First World War – the use of the so-called “Senegal riflemen” in the trench warfare of the First World War, i.e. the black soldiers from the French colony of Senegal, who recruited for military service on the side of their colonial masters and by the thousands killed on the battlefields of Verdun. In the form of a prose poem, the novel presents the complaint and self-accusation of a young Senegal soldier, who is driven mad by the cruelty of the fighting and turns into an inhuman butcher, until he corresponds to the caricature of the barbaric savage that the whites drew of him from the start .
In his new novel “Journey Without Return”, David Diop once again addresses a chapter from Senegal’s colonial history – this time the slave trade that the French colonial power operated from the coast of Senegal in the 18th century, with the island of Gorée as the notorious center for shipping African slaves to America. This is told from the perspective of a white man, the French botanist, ethnologist and explorer Michel Adanson.
Historically, Linnaeus outstripped him: the French botanist Michel Adanson (1727-1806).
(Photo: imago/Leemage)
Adanson is a historical figure. He traveled to Senegal in the mid-18th century to research the native flora and fauna and to study the way of life of the African coastal tribes. His travelogue “Michael Adanson’s message from his trip to Senegal and in the interior of the country”, which was published in 1773 in the German translation by the Erlangen botanist Johann Christian Schreber, describes the flora, fauna and people of Senegal in a vivid and detailed manner. David Diop was inspired by this travelogue for his novel. He almost plundered it. He owes him the locations and the materiality of his novel: the topography, the tropical local color and the exotic descriptions of nature. A number of people mentioned by name in Adanson’s report, local village elders as well as heads of the French colonial administration, appear as characters in Diop’s novels. However, the tragic love story at the heart of the novel is Diop’s own invention.
Forgotten documents as a literary trick, also in David Diop’s new novel.
(Photo: JOEL SAGET/AFP)
The novel takes a circuitous detour before getting down to business. A failed father-daughter story is told in the first fifty pages. On his deathbed in Paris, the aged botanist Adanson recapitulates his life as a researcher and questions his life’s work, the systematic description of the plant world in the manner of a universal encyclopedia. He suspects that the revolutionary methodology of another botanist has devalued his own life’s work: it is the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné who historically won the race for systematics in botany. Adanson’s daughter accompanies her father’s death and silently accuses him of having neglected the family through his monomaniacal, meticulous research work and that he is to blame for their unhappy marriages, which were basically a search for surrogate fathers.
But the main interest of the novel is not the scientific failure of a forgotten natural scientist of the 18th century. David Diop uses a somewhat well-worn literary trick to finally get to his actual topic: after Adanson’s death, his daughter discovers his father’s notebooks in a secret compartment of his secretary, which reveal the secret of his life. “Of course, an old manuscript,” the Umberto Eco reader sighs nostalgically. In these secret notebooks, Adanson reveals the pivotal experience of his life – the love affair with the beautiful young African woman Maram during his stay in Senegal. With her name on his lips, the old man died.
David Diop: Journey of No Return or The Secret Notebooks of Michel Adanson. Novel. Translated from the French by Andreas Jandl. Construction, Berlin 2022. 236 pages, 22 euros.
The main part of the novel is devoted to Adanson’s account of this love passion that ended in tragedy. After the young explorer found out about the mysterious disappearance of Maram, the niece of the village elder, in a jungle village, he decided to stop researching flora and fauna in order to get to the bottom of this mystery. In fact, he finds Maram, who is hiding from the slavers as a spirit-knowledgeable village healer and shaman, and falls in love with her. What she has to tell is an adventurous story of sexual violence, slavery, exploitation and colonial crimes. David Diop garnishes this performance of cruel colonial politics with the exotic flair of archaic sorcerer practices, which his novel hero gets to know thanks to Maram. Her totem animal, a giant constrictor, comes into play as well as all sorts of manifestations of magical thinking, all against the background of the brutal slave trade on the island of Gorée, which the naive naturalist Adanson has not even noticed until now. It is only now that his lover has fallen into the clutches of the slave hunters that he realizes what has been happening in front of his eyes from the very beginning.
The novel is an odd hybrid. Mixing criticism of European colonialism and racism with fragments of a disemboweled natural history travelogue, he turns it into a tropical adventure story that taps into white man’s fantasies about the dark practices of the black continent. The historical sufferings of the enslaved Africans are combined with an exotically flavored black and white love story that comes dangerously close to the kitsch edges of the colportage. To call this narrative cocktail downright wholesome would be a lie.