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©2010 Mahriana L. Rofheart ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©2010 Mahriana L. Rofheart ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DON’T ABANDON “OUR BOAT”: SHIFTING PERCEPTIONS OF EMIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY SENEGALESE LITERATURE AND SONG by MAHRIANA L. ROFHEART A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Comparative Literature written under the direction of Richard Serrano and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2010 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Don’t Abandon “Our Boat”: Shifting Perceptions of Emigration in Contemporary Senegalese Literature and Song By MAHRIANA L. ROFHEART Dissertation Director: Richard Serrano The dissertation argues that contemporary Senegalese novelists and hip-hop artists articulate local and global connections as a strategy to address the difficulties of emigration from Senegal. The project examines the way that novelists Aminata Sow Fall, Ken Bugul, and Fatou Diome as well as several hip-hop artists including WaGëblë, Awadi, 3GGA, and Simon Bisbi Clan approach emigration and return. The works of these authors and artists are set in contrast to earlier texts from Senegal that examine migration, wherein it is difficult and often impossible to maintain connections either in Senegal or abroad, resulting in tragic outcomes. Earlier works examined include those by Ousmane Socé, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Ousmane Sembene. Using literary and visual analysis of the written texts and hip-hop songs and videos, the dissertation demonstrates how the recent works strategically utilize local, national, and global affiliations to address emigration productively. Ultimately, the project demonstrates that these texts point to the need for a revised critical understanding of migration narratives from Senegal that takes ii into account the full complexity of the affiliations and backgrounds that are often central to the texts. iii Acknowledgements I would first of all like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for all of their help and support: Richard Serrano, Ousseina Alidou, César Braga-Pinto, and Eileen Julien. I am also thankful to Elin Diamond for her concern and work as Graduate Director and to Marilyn Tankiewicz, whose administrative support is indispensible. And I am especially grateful for the attention to my work that has been generously given by Rutgers faculty members outside the Program in Comparative Literature, particularly Renée Larrier and Barbara Cooper. Finally, I am indebted to Abdoulaye Niang and Mamadou Dramé, two scholars at the Université Gaston-Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal, both of whose correspondence has been instrumental in the development of my project. Abdoulaye Niang provided essential insight into Senegalese hip-hop, and Mamadou Dramé carefully and painstakingly transcribed for me the Wolof lyrics of the hip-hop songs that I examine here. This project was completed with the support of a Mellon Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities from Rutgers University. iv Table of Contents Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgements iv List of Illustrations vi Introduction: Nation and Trans-nation 1 Chapter 1. Soldiers, Scholars, and Servants: Migration to France in 12 Early Senegalese Texts Chapter 2. Rereading Migration in the Novels of Aminata Sow Fall 46 Chapter 3. Ken Bugul’s First Three Novels and Beyond: A Progressive 79 Exploration of Migration Chapter 4. Fatou Diome’s Reconfiguration of the Migration Narrative 114 Chapter 5. Making Connections in Senegalese Hip-Hop 149 Conclusion 189 Works Cited 192 Curriculum Vitae 204 v List of Illustrations Figure 1. Police pat-down and discomforting light and shadow 162 in Simon Bisbi Clan’s “Jeul seen kagn” Figure 2. The young man attempts to sell CDs in 169 Eyewitness’ “Faudra leur dire que” Figure 3. The jogger stops to give money to a white beggar 169 in “Faudra leur dire que” Figure 4. The young men pull up alongside the fishing boat 178 in Awadi’s “Djow sa gaal” Figure 5. Graffiti-style writing on-screen in WaGëblë’s “Sénégal” 184 Figure 6. The Senegalese flag in the process of expanding 186 on-screen in 3GGA’s “Jotna” vi 1 Introduction Nation and Trans-nation In his seminal essay published in 1991, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” cultural scholar Stuart Hall writes, One of the things which happens when the nation-state begins to weaken, becoming less convincing and less powerful, is that the response seems to go in two ways simultaneously. It goes above the nation-state and it goes below it. It goes global and local in the same moment. (26) While written nearly two decades ago, the processes that Hall identifies are still of significance, particularly as global mass media intersects with the work of local producers who can effectively use digital technology to disseminate their creative works both locally and globally. In a context of shifting global migration flows as well as the availability of increasingly diverse forms of media, the role of global and local affiliations continues to be important as artists and authors navigate migration, language, and media from home and abroad. In his essay, Hall approaches globalization with an eye towards the local that enables room for a rooted sense of place in the contemporary interconnected world: “the moment of rediscovery of a place, a past, of one’s roots, of one’s context, seems to me a necessary moment of enunciation” (36). And recognizing the theoretical trends that work against conceptions of identity that address origins and roots, Hall points out, “What emerges from this is nothing like an uncomplicated, dehistoricised, undynamic, uncontradictory past” (38).1 Recent novels and hip-hop songs from Senegal affirm Hall’s assertion of the way that local identities can become increasingly important alongside global exchange and movement. Authors including Aminata Sow Fall, Ken Bugul, and 1 While not a direct response to it, one thinks here of Homi Bhabha’s work in The Location of Culture in contrast, which argues against narratives of identity and origin in a contemporary context (2-3). 2 Fatou Diome as well as several hip-hop artists have responded to the phenomenon of emigration from Senegal by articulating local as well as global connections. But where Hall argues that the nation has become increasingly less important, some of these works from Senegal also indicate a continued attention to national identity. This varied and overlapping set of associations is similar to what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih describe in their version of transnationalism termed “minor” that “is not bound by the binary of the local and the global and can occur in national, local, or global spaces” (6). Lionnet and Shih suggest many productive possibilities with this type of transnational navigation, but it is also important to remember that such exchanges can also carry with them experiences of loss and pain that too must be addressed. The work in the 2002 volume New Approaches to Migration?: Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home edited by Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser also points to the importance of continuing to address the context of the nation in contemporary studies of migration. In their introduction, Al-Ali and Koser argue, [W]hereas global processes are often decentered from specific national territories, transnational processes are anchored in but also transcend one of [sic] more nation-states. Implicit in this distinction is a rejection of the fairly common assertion that transnationalism is ringing the death-knell for nation-states. (2) Lionnet and Shih similarly work against this understanding of transnationalism as entirely contrary to the concept of nation, wherein they recognize that “minor transnational subjects are inevitably invested in their respective geopolitical spaces” and often await citizenship or recognition (8). Both of these arguments affirm that concepts of the nation and national identity cannot easily be done away with in the contemporary global moment. The articles in Al-Ali and Koser’s book are based on social scientific research, but the assertion is equally true for literary and artistic representations of 3 migration that similarly continue to deal with the nation as such. Al-Ali and Koser insist, “the legal, social, political and economic context of nation-states cannot be ignored . it appears pivotal to pay attention to the specific contexts in both sending and receiving states” (5). Though individual nations are, as Saskia Sassen argues, increasingly unable to deal with international migration (5), it is important to acknowledge that national – not only local and global – contexts are still significant. Indeed, the novelists and hip-hop artists examined here often point to economic and political concerns at the national level even as they stress the value of locally-based affiliations. The nation, if presented as problematic, is nonetheless of concern in these texts, though they move well beyond the nation-building incentives of earlier works. The texts are instead able to reconfigure relationships between those in Senegal and those in France or elsewhere in Europe in way that moves beyond a reaction to colonialism or neo-colonialism evident in earlier works. Contemporary research on the literature of migration in French often identifies a “new generation” of African writers in French who have a different approach to their places
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