“Diop’s style imposes itself as a dignified edifice built on a pristine rainforest of language”
Clad in the colours of France is the inimitable David Diop, winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize. With Beyond the Door of No Return, he is back to compete for — and conquer — our hearts, this time in English translation by Sam Taylor.
In any bid to renew the enduring literary dominance of France, Diop seems a smart bet. Of course, by ancestry as well as by birth— he spent his childhood in Senegal — he’s just as much Senegalese as French, granting him an unflinching grasp of Europe’s self-proclaimed dominion over the rest of the world.
Diop thrusts Aglaé (an 18th-century French woman) into the emotional wake of a Senegalese voyage undertaken by her botanist father. Michel Adanson, having finally ‘poured out’ and ‘strung together’ his words in a letter to his daughter, ‘like the beads of a rosary’, stumbles down the thicketed path of reverie, specifically of his entanglement with Maram (an alleged Senegalese revenant), and into the moral wastes of the slave trade — all from a Christian perspective. Thus devoured by his own reminiscence, Michel reveals the struggle of a scientific mind trying to make sense of a tortuous and inextricable web of human dynamics.
Diop’s style imposes itself as a dignified edifice built on a pristine rainforest of language (hardly surprising, given his background as a professor of 18th-century French literature). But for readers wishing to luxuriate in the language alone, no retreat is offered from the emerging moral paradoxes. Diop cuts through his story in an imperturbably straight path. But then, ‘a good man finds no honor in following a well-trodden path, but in clearing a new path,’ as the charmingly youthful — and youthfully bold — Ndiak, (a Senegalese prince), remarks.
Once readers have submitted to walking this epistolary jungle straight through, Diop drops no unreasonable amount of botanical knowledge on them, and invokes the natural world with practical sensuality. His is a realism earned by experience (presumably in his Senegalese childhood) as much as imagination.
But ultimately, although Beyond the Door of No Return is (at least partially) a love story, the elephant is still in the room — and is in the room to stay. The slave trade, in Diop’s telling, is presented without hysteria or performativity. It’s as though left intentionally to simmer over a smouldering fire: Diop clearly doesn’t do extremes, to the possible disappointment of his cultivated western readers, all prepped to atone for past crimes. Michel Adanson is neither good nor bad, and his relationship with the slave trade, his daughter, and his own morality is — to say the least—inconclusive.
Diop’s refusal to cast blame might sound like a good deal for the guilty, but it also precludes the possibility of atonement by fire. Whether we go cold or are consumed by our own private forest fire, Diop takes no responsibility for our colonial guilt. He’s here neither to interfere nor to judge. The Senegalese character Maram’s story is, for him, neither personal nor political.
But, for us, it might just turn out to be all personal, and all political.
N’est-ce pas?
Words: Ágnes Fodor
Beyond the Door of No Return
