Diop Beyond the Door of No Return

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78227-840-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED FICTION 'Stunningly realized... A spellbinding novel' MAAZA MENGISTE, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Shadow King'Diop has opened a new way of thinking about the eighteenth century and its hideous cruelties' ABDULRAZAK GURNAH, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature'A compelling romantic adventure... Through an act of remembrance, Diop seeks to build a repository of lives and histories lost to the slave trade' FINANCIAL TIMES __________ The captivating new novel from David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize Paris, 1806. Michel Adanson is dying. The last word to escape his lips is a woman's name: Maram. Who was she? Why, in the course of his long life, has he never spoken of her before? As Adanson's daughter sorts through his things, she discovers a notebook. It reveals a secret history both fantastical and terrible, of his time as a young botanist travelling in Senegal. How Adanson first heard of the 'revenant': a young woman of noble birth, abducted and sold into slavery across the seas, who then did the impossible-she came back, to live in hiding. How he became obsessed with finding her, embarking on an odyssey that would lead to danger and destruction. How a man who longed to solve the mysteries of nature instead found himself faced with the uncontrollable impulses of the human heart. Tragic and tender, alive with feeling, this is a story of adventure, revenge and impossible desires, one which subverts our every expectation about who we are and who we love.

DAVID DIOP was born in Paris in 1966 and grew up in Senegal. He now lives in France, where he is a professor of Eighteenth Century Literature at the University of Pau. David's second novel, At Night All Blood is Black, has been translated into more than 30 languages, winning the International Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Prize, as well as major prizes in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and was chosen by Barack Obama as one of his summer reads. Beyond the Door of No Return was longlisted for the Goncourt Prize, has sold over 120,000 copies in France, and was shortlisted for the National Book Award in the US.SAM TAYLOR is a translator, novelist and journalist. He is the author of four novels and the award-winning translator of more than 60 books from French, including Laurent Binet's HHhH, Leïla Slimani's Lullaby, and Hubert Mingarelli's A Meal in Winter.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Diop, David

Weitere Mitwirkende

Taylor, Sam

Leseproben

XII

I first heard about the revenant a little more than two years after my arrival in Senegal.

It happened one night while I was in the village of Sor, located about an hour’s walk from the island of Saint-Louis. Ndiak and I had left the fort at daybreak with the intention of collecting plants before traveling to that village, which was extremely difficult to reach from the river. Protected by thorny creepers, barely visible behind its barricade of undergrowth, the path leading to Sor seemed to me unworthy of its proximity to the island of Saint-Louis, where, at the time of my visit to Senegal, more than three thousand people—Black, white, and mixed race—lived around the fort belonging to the director general of the Concession. The lack of care given to maintaining a path that could have massively increased trade and profits between the island of Saint-Louis and the village of Sor seemed, to me, proof of the Africans’ negligence. But that very evening, I learned just how wrong I was.

Baba Seck, the chief of the village, to whom I had on several occasions made remarks about the inconvenience of the path leading to Sor, had always been content to reply with a smile that, if it pleased God, the day when Sor would become easier to reach would soon arrive. Even though I found his response lacking, I did not insist because I had warm feelings for Baba Seck, who had, several times, demonstrated to me his wisdom and open-mindedness. He was a tall, affable, and very fat man, about fifty years old, whose natural authority in the eyes of the villagers, his subjects, was heightened by his eloquence.

It was his words that saved me during one of my first visits to the village, when I had killed a sacred serpent in the middle of a village assembly—a viper that was moving dangerously close to my right thigh as I sat there cross-legged on a mat of woven bulrushes. With a single phrase, Baba Seck brought a halt to the wooden staff that his eldest son, Galaye Seck, was about to bring down on my head. With a second phrase, he silenced the roar of the audience as he picked up the serpent’s corpse and nimbly slipped it into one of the deep pockets of his tunic. So I accepted his evasive answer, until the night when I realized that the story of the revenant which he told us was a response to my criticisms.

In almost all the Senegalese villages that I visited, there are broad, square stages, about three feet above the ground, supported at their four corners by thick, solid acacia branches. These stages can hold about ten people at most, sitting or lying, and they are made of latticed branches covered with several layers of woven rush mat. They are open-air refuges, not from mosquitoes, of which there are always too many, but from the torrid heat that builds inside the huts during the warmest nights of the year: from June until October. It is there, beneath the starry vault—whose constellations the Africans know just as well as we do—that they go to breathe fresh air and talk away half the night, ignoring the mosquito bites, before finally falling asleep. Taking turns to tell short tales or brief jokes, or to test their skills in long verbal jousts, the villagers will also sometimes recount darker stories. And it was one of those stories that silenced the laughter, the story about the revenant, that Baba Seck, eyes raised to the stars, told for my benefit while appearing to address the entire assembly:

“The last I heard, my niece, Maram Seck, succeeded in returning from an impossible land. And if that place is not death, it is at least adjacent to hell. She was abducted three years ago on the path that you take to come to Sor, Michel, when you travel here from the island of Saint-Louis. Back then, one did not require machetes to cut through the vegetation. There was no need to crawl under thickets; there were no thorns to scratch your skin. After Maram was abducted—by whom, we do not know—we let the path close up behind her. We abandoned it to the bush that protects us from kidnappers and slave traders.

“Maram was like you, Michel: she enjoyed solitude. From an early age, she would talk with animals and plants. She knew the secrets of the bush, and we do not know how it happened that this girl—who could hear us coming from a distance, who knew how to read signs—could have let herself be taken by surprise. I, Baba Seck, chief of the village of Sor, her mother’s older brother, her only family since the death of her parents, I ran to Saint-Louis to find her. I questioned the laptots who go fishing on the river at dawn, the washer-women, even the children of Saint-Louis who play by the water every day. I visited the prison of the fort; I questioned the guards. None of them had seen Maram.

“I was ready to pay her ransom, even if it meant selling myself to her captors, but they had disappeared before anyone could find out who they were or where they had come from. No doubt they had fled south without passing any of the nearby villages, because, despite the messengers that we sent in that direction, we discovered no trace of Maram. So it was that, three months after her disappearance, after beating the bush in every direction around the village to make sure she had not been taken by a lovelorn djinni in the form of a wild animal, we organized her funeral. I, Baba Seck, who should have married her to a healthy young man when the time came, I decided, since she had left without saying goodbye to us, that she would marry death. We wept, then we sang and danced for two days, as is our custom, to help her find serenity after the violence she had suffered, and so that she should leave us in peace, wherever she was, among the living or the dead.

“God is my witness that not a day has passed since then when I did not think about my niece, Maram Seck. And this is why we decided to close the path to Saint-Louis behind her, why we abandoned it to the bush. It is a tribute of inactivity that we pay to the bush so that it will defend us from kidnappers and slave traders.”

Baba Seck fell silent then, and, like those who had known Maram Seck and were thinking about her, I meditated on what I had just heard. Who could have abducted her? Moorish horsemen coming from the right bank of the river would have been seen, as would warriors paid by African kings to ransack their own villages and abduct people to be sold as slaves to the Europeans. Had Baba Seck talked to the right people on the island of Saint-Louis? Had those people lied to him?

In unison with Baba Seck, who had been staring upward throughout his story, we raised our eyes to the stars, as if in those constellations we might discern the fates of the women and men on our Earth, as if our questions could be answered by looking up at the immensity of the universe.

I thought then, contemplating the African sky, that we counted for nothing, or almost nothing, in the universe. One must be in a state of some despair over its fathomless depths to imagine that any of our little actions, good or bad, could be weighed in the balance by an avenging God. That thought crossed my mind in more or less the same form as the one that you described to me, my dear Aglaé, during one of your recent visits to my home on rue de la Victoire. Beneath the stars of the village of Sor, listening to the story of Maram’s mysterious disappearance told by her uncle Baba Seck, I had the sudden intuition that never in my life would I have enough intelligence to understand one millionth of the mysteries of our Earth. Far from paining me, however, the idea that I was nothing more than a grain of sand in the desert or a drop of water in the ocean exalted me. My mind had the power to locate my place, however minuscule it might be, amid that immensity. The awareness of my limits opened up infinity to me. I was now conscious dust, capable of thoughts as complex as the universe.

After a few moments of meditation, Baba Seck returned to his story. Everyone but Ndiak and myself had heard it before, but they all listened attentively even so.

“For three years we did not think about Maram. We had performed our last duties to her with a pain rendered more acute by our ignorance of her fate. But one fine morning, barely a month ago, a man came out of the bush. He was like you: tenacious enough to cut his own path through to us, indifferent to the thorns, brambles, and undergrowth that protect us. This man, who is one of the Serer people, is called Senghane Faye, and he told us he was a messenger from Maram, who had taken refuge in Ben, a village in Cap Vert, a peninsula not far from the island of Gorée. She had returned alive from beyond the seas, from that land where, for slaves, there is no return. Maram wanted to know if we had held her funeral. If so, she would never return to Sor and begged us not to try to find her because, if we did, a great misfortune would befall our village.

“Although we questioned Senghane Faye, Maram’s envoy, he told us nothing else about her, nor why she had chosen him as her messenger. Although we begged him to tell us in detail about the fate of our daughter, Senghane Faye remained silent. Some of us, including my eldest son, were—and I understand them—astonished by his attitude, to the point that they doubted the veracity of his story. Why wouldn’t he tell us more? What if he was an impostor who, having learned by chance of Maram Seck’s...