Read Online Under African Skies by Charles Larson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Charles Larson
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ancestorsâ spirits
The trumpeting elephants hoot
Above the cursed drums,
Black night, black night!
Â
Sap freezes in the anxious trees
In trunks and leaves
That no longer can pray
To the ancestors haunting their feet,
Black night, black night!
Fear lurks in the hut
In the smoking torch
In the orphaned river
In the weary, soulless forest
In the anxious, faded trees
Â
Trumpeting elephants hoot
In the darkening woods
Above the cursed drums,
Black night, black night!
No one dared call him by his name anymore for the spirits and the ancestors had made another man of him. Thiemokho Keita was gone for the villagers. Only Sarzan was left, Sarzan-the-Mad.
Â
â1961
Sembene Ousmane
(BORN 1923) SENEGAL
Although he is known internationally as Africaâs most important filmmaker, Sembene Ousmane began his artistic career as a writer. At the beginning of World War II, he was drafted into the French Army. Following the war, after a brief return to Senegal, he lived for a number of years in Marseilles. His first novel, Le docker noir ( The Black Docker ), published in 1956, was influenced by Claude McKayâs Banjo (1929). Both novels are concerned with black stevedores living on the fringes of the white manâs world.
Ousmaneâs most widely read novel, Les bouts de bois de Dieu (Godâs Bits of Wood ), was published in 1960. Events in the novel are based on the famous DakarâNiger railway workersâ strike in 1947, in which Ousmane participated. In the early 1950s, when Ousmane lived in France, he met other important Francophone writers, including those who had formulated the tenets of negritude, twenty years earlier. A decade later, Ousmane relocated again, to Russia, where he studied at the Moscow Film School.
Ousmane turned to film because of his realization that in Africa in the early 1960s his reading audience was limited by illiteracy; with the cinema, he could reach many more people. His first narrative film was based on the story published here, âBlack Girlâ (âLe Noir de â¦â), which originally appeared in Voltaïque (1962), a volume of the writerâs early stories. Black Girl was followed by nearly a dozen films, widely shown across the African continent and in Europe. Because of their strong political content, some of these films have aroused the hostility of officials in Ousmaneâs native Senegal.
Yet he has continued to pursue controversial subjects in both his fiction and his films.
He has compared his role as filmmaker to that of the traditional African storyteller, remarking: âThe artist must in many ways be the mouth and the ears of his people. In the modern sense, this corresponds to the role of the griot in traditional African culture. The artist is like a mirror. His work reflects and synthesizes the problems, the struggles and hopes of his people.â
Besides the movie Black Girl , Sembeneâs later films include Mandabi ( The Money Order ), 1968; Emitai , 1971 ; Xala, 1974; Ceddo, 1976; and Le Camp de Thiaroye, 1988. He has continued to write novels and short stories. Le Dernier de lâEmpire ( The Last of the Empire ), a two-volume novel about a fictitious Senegalese president, was published in 1981. Two earlier novellas, Niiwan and Taaw , were published in English translation in 1992.
Anny Wynchank, who has called Sembene the âvoice of the voiceless,â has stated: âSembeneâs driving concern has been to denounce hypocrisy, stupidity and injustice, as well as to expose the consequences of ignorance, superstition, and fatalistic passivity. His goal has always been to restore a sense of honor and dignity in the poor and the exploited of Africa ⦠.â
BLACK GIRL
Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy
Â
It was the morning of the 23rd of June in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred fifty-eight. At Antibes, along the Riviera, neither the fate of the French Republic
The trumpeting elephants hoot
Above the cursed drums,
Black night, black night!
Â
Sap freezes in the anxious trees
In trunks and leaves
That no longer can pray
To the ancestors haunting their feet,
Black night, black night!
Fear lurks in the hut
In the smoking torch
In the orphaned river
In the weary, soulless forest
In the anxious, faded trees
Â
Trumpeting elephants hoot
In the darkening woods
Above the cursed drums,
Black night, black night!
No one dared call him by his name anymore for the spirits and the ancestors had made another man of him. Thiemokho Keita was gone for the villagers. Only Sarzan was left, Sarzan-the-Mad.
Â
â1961
Sembene Ousmane
(BORN 1923) SENEGAL
Although he is known internationally as Africaâs most important filmmaker, Sembene Ousmane began his artistic career as a writer. At the beginning of World War II, he was drafted into the French Army. Following the war, after a brief return to Senegal, he lived for a number of years in Marseilles. His first novel, Le docker noir ( The Black Docker ), published in 1956, was influenced by Claude McKayâs Banjo (1929). Both novels are concerned with black stevedores living on the fringes of the white manâs world.
Ousmaneâs most widely read novel, Les bouts de bois de Dieu (Godâs Bits of Wood ), was published in 1960. Events in the novel are based on the famous DakarâNiger railway workersâ strike in 1947, in which Ousmane participated. In the early 1950s, when Ousmane lived in France, he met other important Francophone writers, including those who had formulated the tenets of negritude, twenty years earlier. A decade later, Ousmane relocated again, to Russia, where he studied at the Moscow Film School.
Ousmane turned to film because of his realization that in Africa in the early 1960s his reading audience was limited by illiteracy; with the cinema, he could reach many more people. His first narrative film was based on the story published here, âBlack Girlâ (âLe Noir de â¦â), which originally appeared in Voltaïque (1962), a volume of the writerâs early stories. Black Girl was followed by nearly a dozen films, widely shown across the African continent and in Europe. Because of their strong political content, some of these films have aroused the hostility of officials in Ousmaneâs native Senegal.
Yet he has continued to pursue controversial subjects in both his fiction and his films.
He has compared his role as filmmaker to that of the traditional African storyteller, remarking: âThe artist must in many ways be the mouth and the ears of his people. In the modern sense, this corresponds to the role of the griot in traditional African culture. The artist is like a mirror. His work reflects and synthesizes the problems, the struggles and hopes of his people.â
Besides the movie Black Girl , Sembeneâs later films include Mandabi ( The Money Order ), 1968; Emitai , 1971 ; Xala, 1974; Ceddo, 1976; and Le Camp de Thiaroye, 1988. He has continued to write novels and short stories. Le Dernier de lâEmpire ( The Last of the Empire ), a two-volume novel about a fictitious Senegalese president, was published in 1981. Two earlier novellas, Niiwan and Taaw , were published in English translation in 1992.
Anny Wynchank, who has called Sembene the âvoice of the voiceless,â has stated: âSembeneâs driving concern has been to denounce hypocrisy, stupidity and injustice, as well as to expose the consequences of ignorance, superstition, and fatalistic passivity. His goal has always been to restore a sense of honor and dignity in the poor and the exploited of Africa ⦠.â
BLACK GIRL
Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy
Â
It was the morning of the 23rd of June in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred fifty-eight. At Antibes, along the Riviera, neither the fate of the French Republic
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