N’Deye Touti

Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. (Franz Fanon)

I am offering a close reading of a passage from Ousmane Sembene’s novel, God’s Bits of Wood, wherein I locate a prime example of the effects of a crisis of representation (as discussed in class) played out on an individual level. In the passage I have selected, the damage wrought to the minds and the hearts of colonial subjects is exemplified in its introduction to one of the works central characters – N’Deye Touti. She, like every other figure in the novel, depicts a certain vantage point through which differing experiences and responses to colonialism are explored. In N’Deye Touti’s case, the site of her engagement, her suffering, occurs within her mind, her self, her identity. 

A member of Ramatoulaye’s household, N’Deye is young, beautiful, and most importantly, educated – and that is her burden. Her education has opened up her mind as a space to be annexed by colonial modes of thought – modes that further their cause for effective domination of their colonial subjects. An epistemological conquest over local modes of thinking, as we discussed in class, is part and parcel of any colonial endeavor. The language and worldview of the colonizer’s has been fed into N’Deye, imprinted upon her by way of her education, and at this point in the novel, she has not learnt to resist or respond to it critically – she indiscriminately absorbs racist, discriminatory discourse through the western-centrism of her education. Being black herself, this manifests in enormous internalized racism and hatred towards herself, her people, and her world.

This damage is wrought, as seen in the passage, by her education emotionally and imaginatively distancing her from her world. The text cites how “N’Deye herself knew more about Europe than Africa” – and laments that  “she lived in a kind of separate world: the reading she did, the films she saw, made her part of a universe in which her own people had no place, and by the same token she no longer had a place in theirs”. Her education plies her with experiences she cannot and will not ever have access to as a black woman – she is in awe of western, eurocentric ideals she can never attain. An extensive reader of romance novels – she is taught what love is through the words, images and experiences that exist nowhere near her own lived experiences – “love was something that went with parties and costume balls, weekends in the country and trips in automobiles, yachting trips and vacations abroad, elegant anniversary presents and the fall showings at the great courtiers. Real life was there: not here, in this wretched corner, where she confronted beggars and cripples at every turning”. Her education, naturally, gives no explanations as to why she is surrounded with so much poverty, grief, and ugliness. All she knows is that an idealized, perfect world – the world of the colonizer – exists, and her world, her Senegal, her Africa, cannot ever come close to matching it. Africa’s polygamous marriages have nothing to do with love, and this confirms in her the “lack of civilization” of her own people – they who do not live by eurocentric ideals that she deems necessary for any kind civility. She has never been taught to appreciate the ideals of her own. This existence inspires internalized hatred and disdain for her way of life for – “she would be seized with a kind of nausea, a mixture of rage and shame” at the sight, the recognition of it.    

That N’Deye has the capacity to resist colonial modes of thought is hinted when the story tells of how, by accident, she watches a European documentary film on an African tribe of Pygmies. In watching it, “it was as if she were hurled backward, and down to the level of these dwarves, and had an insane desire to run out of the theatre, crying aloud, ‘No, no! These are not real Africans!’” It is the first real representation of Africa by the West she sees, and she innately recognizes it as a false, generalized depiction. And yet, she cannot accept that they, the West, could be wrong. The extent to which her mind accepts the West as the only veritable source of knowledge is clear in that she still shrinks, that she describes her desire to correct, to decry their false depiction as insane. Her response to the film is bodily, almost – the desire to scream, to run – she knows what her mind refuses to accept. And yet, the story shifts immediately to another film screening in the theatre, where she turns on some men speaking loudly in the audience with “avenging fury and cried in French, ‘Be quiet, you ignorant fools! If you don’t understand, get out!’” The experience of the documentary film inspired little resistant or critical thought – only further turmoil – its almost as if her “avenging fury” is meant to make up for these men’s inherent African fault – their ignorance, their lack of decorum. She does not wish to investigate the aberrance – indeed, “she had never read a book by an African author – she was sure it would teach her nothing”.

N’Deye benefits from this education only in that she becomes an unofficial scribe and translator for the people in her village of N’Diayene. They need people like her to get educated – to allow the ones who cannot read, write, or speak the colonial language access to communication in a world where the the colonizers demand it as a prerequisite. But she is otherwise ridiculed for her European ways and fashions. Accidentally caught wearing a brassiere, her Mame Sofi ridicules her, crying “There is a cow in the house, walking on two feet, and all dressed up!” Her ways are other to her own people – and she will always be other to the West. The damage wrought by colonial control of the colonized’s understanding of themselves, their promotion of their world as an inaccessible ideal, leaves its victims exiled and alienated on both fronts. After the ridicule subjected to her in her own home, “she considered herself a prisoner in the place that she should have been her home”.

Thus, Sembene paints the cognitive devastation of the colonized subjects mode of apprehending and appreciating the world. I am sure many of us can see ourselves in the struggles, the emotions, and the experiences described above.