Beyond the Door of No Return
by David Diop
Translated by Sam Taylor
David Diop won the 2021 International Booker Prize with At Night All Blood is Black, a translation by Anna Moschovakis of his 2018 novel Frère d’âme. Diop is of mixed parentage – his father is Senegalese, his mother French – and grew up in Senegal. At Night All Blood is Black described the horrors of the First World War through the eyes of a Senegalese soldier in the French army. English-language readers will soon have the opportunity to savour another novel by David Diop, which once again explores uneasy relationships between France and Senegal. This is La porte du voyage sans retour, originally published in 2021, and soon available in an English translation by Sam Taylor.
Beyond the Door of No Return is a work of historical fiction which takes its
cue from actual persons and events – specifically, French botanist Michel Adanson
(1727 – 1806) and his travel expedition to Senegal funded by the Compagnie
des Indes, a French trading company which did business in the colonies and
had, at one time, a monopoly over the slave trade from Senegal.
The novel starts with Adanson’s death, and with Michel’s daughter Aglaé (herself a botanist) discovering, among the few movables left to her as part of her father's meagre estate, a written account of this voyage. It is here that fiction takes over, as we read, through Michel Adanson’s deathbed confession, of his quest to meet an elusive Black Senegalese woman, Maram, with whom he falls in love. Adanson learns of Maram’s existence from her uncle, a tribal leader, who describes how a niece of his was taken as a slave but, miraculously, managed to return to Senegal and is now living in a distant village. Intrigued by this story, Adanson seeks this mysterious “revenant”, guided in his travels by Ndiak, the son of a local king. Adanson’s expedition, and the tragedy which ensues, forms the core of this novel.
As in At Night All Blood is Black, the themes and concerns at the heart of this work are shaped by Diop’s personal background as well as his expertise as a scholar of representations of Africa in French literature. On one level, Beyond the Door of No Return is an unashamedly “old-fashioned” adventure story, typical of popular literature of the past, featuring intrepid travellers risking life and limb against an “exotic” backdrop, and a love interest who is attractive to the white male protagonist both because of and despite the fact that she is Black. Obviously, Diop is very well aware of the racist and colonialist worldview which underpins such literature, and he knowingly undermines its tropes in various ways. Adanson, for instance, carries with him both a personal guilt (stemming from his love/lust for Maram) and a collective guilt (the involvement of his people in the slave trade). Tellingly, in the very last chapter, Michel’s daughter Aglaé tries to assuage her late father’s guilt by seeking to offer gifts to the slave Madeleine, the subject of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of Madeleine. For Aglaé Madeleine is a stand-in for her father’s lost love, but Madeleine will have none of it, frustrating a simplistic “happy ending”.
Although the story remains Michel’s, Diop infuses it with the myths, legends and beliefs of the Senegalese, which gives the novel a magical-realist flavour. I also liked the way in which Diop suggests that speaking the language of a particular culture is a key to understanding it. Michel, for instance, is aware of his limitations in speaking the Senegalese Wolof language, and hopes to speak it better to make himself attractive to Maram. And when he is back with his French countrymen, from whom he now feels alienated, he realises that he is speaking French with a Wolof accent. This is, of course, not a novel idea (as I’ve noted elsewhere), but it’s done very well in this work. Another beautiful touch is the way in which Maram and Ndiak speak through the imagery of their culture, while Michel uses, as a recurring metaphor or analogy in his narrative, the final act of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (which Michel has watched, probably in its French version). Greek myth and opera are therefore presented as the counterparts to the traditions of the Senegalese.
Beyond the Door of No Return is, in my view, less ambitious and less hard-hitting than At Night All Blood is Black. But it is readable and thought-provoking and will surely win Diop new fans who might have found his earlier novel too violent for their tastes.
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| Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of Madeleine |
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