Waiting for Bakayoko
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Waiting for Bakayoko By Stanley Edgar Hyman Imagine A proletarian novelist of the '30s, emerging after a quarter-of-a-century sleep in a Catskill cave, publishing a strike...
...When they beat up strikebreakers, we are told merely that they "administered their rough form of justice.' They live on vultures and garbage, and they and their families endure starvation and suffering with no weakening of spirit...
...Dejean shouts at the strike committee: "You are led by a bunch of Bolsheviks...
...An educated Europeanized girl, N'Deye Touti, thinks: "She was curiously drawn to this hard man who seemed sometimes to live in another world, but who was he, after all...
...In this battle of the forces of Negro light against the forces of white darkness, no middle position is possible...
...When the native women improvise a poetic chant on the strike, Isnard denies that possibility...
...Provoked by Bakayoko, Dejean slaps his face, and "the big trainman" starts to throttle him and has to be pulled off the director, who is "already half dead with fear...
...The thought of whole schools of proletarian fiction springing up in Africa and Asia in the future chills the blood...
...More steel rails, obviously, to carry Lenin's locomotive of history into the future...
...WRITERS & WRITING Waiting for Bakayoko By Stanley Edgar Hyman Imagine A proletarian novelist of the '30s, emerging after a quarter-of-a-century sleep in a Catskill cave, publishing a strike novel in 1962...
...To match such idealized heroes, the bosses are melodramatic villains...
...It's just shouting and yelling as usual," he says...
...Even his voice seemed turned to steel...
...Eventually N'Deye Touti proposes that she become his second wife, and is refused...
...In the course of the book, every character is thus polarized...
...I know nothing of Ousmane's political identifications, if any, but his novel has the disingenuous references to the Communist party that kept popping to the surface in our strike novels of the '30s...
...A workman...
...Nigerian fiction, with which I am more familiar than I am with French West African, is of two sorts...
...The proletarian novel, William Empson showed us, is Pastoral, an idealization of the worker not unlike the idealization of the shepherd in traditional pastoral poetry...
...Ousmane's fictionalization of the 1947-48 strike on the Dakar-Niger railway in Senegal is quite typical, although a few African features set it apart from its American fellows...
...God's Bits of Wood is unlike American proletarian literature in a few African respects...
...The most striking West African feature of the book, making it quite unlike our puritanic proletarian fiction, is its earthiness, its freedom regarding the body...
...The remarks of the white bosses have the exaggerated obtusity that characterizes the class enemy in proletarian fiction...
...This strike is like a school, for all of us," one of the union men says...
...In a symbolic gesture, she gives up her notebooks when there is no other paper to light the fires...
...N'Deye Touti, who for all her education "had never read a book by an African author," identifies with her people and chooses the forces of light...
...In Senegalese tradition, it is bad magic to number people, except anonymously as the "God's bits of wood" of the title...
...Sounkar?©, an old watchman who refuses to join the strike, falls to his death and is, with poetic justice, eaten by rats...
...There are suggestions, too, of the Marxist view of strikes as means rather than ends, educating the workers in class struggle and solidarity, and thus successful even if defeated...
...Ah, Gastonia...
...He is off organizing the strike elsewhere on the line and does not appear until the last third of the book, but he is quoted, built-up and awaited like an absent Lefty...
...They speak their tribal languages among themselves, and their speech is ceremonious and proverbial...
...I hope that Sembene Ousmane is the tail end of our parade, not the vanguard of theirs...
...Panicked by their slingshots, Isnard shoots and kills three boys...
...These women are all Communists," someone in the crowd says when the Thi??s women inarch to Dakar in support of their husbands...
...Now we can see that it is and always was a despairing and death-intoxicated existentialist manifesto, but Senegal as yet cannot...
...When the strike is first discussed, a whitecollar black worker who opposes it is asked to decide where he really belongs, "with the workers" or "with the bosses...
...She tells her husband: "If you go back to work before the others, I'll cut off the only thing that makes you a man...
...Another difference is the inferior position of women in Senegal...
...Dejean, the regional director of the railroad, is a P?©tainist scoundrel who rose to power by crushing an earlier strike...
...When an attempt is made, by a treacherous white supervisor who says he likes the workers, to bribe the secretary of the strike committee, he recalls Bakayoko's warning: "Anyone who says, 'I like the Negroes,' is a liar...
...They are faithful Moslems, although the strike leaders eat pork...
...Firemen tum their hoses on the women, killing a poor old lady...
...The old Imam of Dakar, a Moslem religious leader who tries to mislead the people, tells the women: "It is the Communists who are really directing this strike...
...Again, we are back in the '30s, when L?©on Blum concluded a political meeting by sending his audience off to read the book, and it was generally taken to be a revolutionary manifesto...
...when the soldiers appear, she and her friends pull the platoon leader off his horse and push his face into the latrine ditch...
...they marched in well-ordered ranks, ten abreast, and without any masculine escort now...
...But now we can see another possibility for the literature of the new nations, not both but neither: Pastoral novels neither authentically native nor authentically European...
...we think immediately of Twain and James, Gogol and Turgenev, Synge and George Moore...
...They're just making noise because they like to make noise...
...When the women fight the police, she grabs one policeman by his genitals and orders another woman to urinate in his mouth...
...When the strike finally ends in a total victory, an old man who had been tortured in the concentration camp gives the moral: "Hatred must not dwell with you...
...But of course Bakayoko has a heart, a great big steel one beating only for the workers...
...Strikers are put into a foul concentration camp, where they are beaten and tortured in Nazi-like atrocities...
...Isnard, the supervisor who tries bribery, is a hypocrite and liar...
...These unionists go barefoot, and their faces are decorated with tribal scars...
...Ousmane writes, when the women reach Dakar: "Their long journey together had been an effective training school...
...An extraordinarily distressing idea...
...Troops charge gatherings with bayonets drawn, killing women and babies...
...In a few respects, where God's Bits of Wood is unlike our own proletarian fiction, the difference comes from French rather than African sources...
...The chief of these is Malraux's La Condition humaine, which a striker borrows from Bakayoko's library with the statement, "Everything we need is in this book," and which has visibly influenced the author as well as his characters...
...At its best, perhaps in The Grapes of Wrath, it can be good Pastoral...
...When injury and death in his family call him home, he refuses to leave the strike: "We must fight for the living and not give our time to thinking of the dead...
...more typically (and there seems no point in resurrecting the forgotten names) it is sentimental, caricatured and melodramatic Pastoral...
...When Bakayoko finally appears, we discover that he is mystically one with the people: "His heart held neither spite nor malice, but he had traveled over a thousand miles among the strikers and their families, and the sufferings, the privations, and the tragedies he had witnessed had shaken him more than he realized...
...What do you think they know about the strike...
...The other is typified by the work of Chinua Achebe, who writes in the tradition of the European novel...
...She too charges that he has no heart...
...To anyone old enough to remember the novels about the Gastonia strike, such images are suggested by God's Bits of Wood (translated from the French by Francis Price, Doubleday, 333 pp., $4.95), a strike novel by a Senegalese Negro, Sembene Ousmane...
...The savage brutality of the bosses may or may not have occurred in reality, but it is unconvincing in the book...
...In the greatest writers, these alternatives merge, and we get Melville, Dostoevsky and Joyce, at once native and European...
...A striker's wife named Marne Sofi is an example...
...The workers' response to this is equally unconvincing heroism and fortitude...
...One is typified by the work of Amos Tutuola, who writes Yoruba folklore in narratives that are like proto-epics...
...Dejean says of the workers: "But I know them, I assure you, they are children...
...They are ethically superior to their exploiters...
...Better still, imagine a tiny extinct one perfectly preserved in amber all these years, fixed in a characteristically lifeless and grotesque posture...
...For the idealized proletarian, take Ibrahim Bakayoko, one of the union leaders...
...In the book, women addressing strike meetings are "unfamiliar and disturbing," since no woman has ever spoken in public before...
...His old uncle wonders if he has a heart...
...They sing legendary ballads as well as strike chants...
...It is a lovely native equivalent for Marx's secularization of the mystical Body of Christ, the consubstantial proletariat...
...Searching Bakayoko's house, brutal policemen kick his adopted daughter in the stomach and kill his old mother...
...The women's march is thus a feminist revolution as well as strike support, as the women of Dakar show by receiving the marchers like victorious warriors...
...The chief of police tells another European that "a couple of pounds of rice" will buy him any native girl: "Right now they'll go to bed with you for less than that...
...He was astonished to note now that his pulse was beating in the same rhythm as the drums in the street" Bakayoko is "the soul of this strike...
...When Bakayoko turns the tide in a speech to the workers of Dakar, we are told: "It was no longer the crowd he saw in front of him, but two shining rails, tracking a path into the future...
...These have been the alternatives of every new nation or literary renaissance in a provincial nation...
...When they meet with the strike leaders, Dejean is so frightened that his eyeglasses break in his hand...
...It is as though our cultural past, instead of disappearing properly, went off to wait for some younger nation and be its future...
Vol. 45 • October 1962 • No. 21
