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Tasty, comestible men: metabolic poetics in Senegal

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Tasty, comestible men: metabolic poetics in Senegal

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Content TASTY, COMESTIBLE MEN:
METABOLIC POETICS IN SENEGAL
by
Jesus Javier Garcia
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
May 2023
Copyright 2023 Jesus Javier Garcia
ii
EPIGRAPH

In some manner or another all forms of life eat some other living things and then, in
turn, are eaten by someone else.
1

Jack D. Forbes (2008)

1
Forbes, Jack D. “Consuming Another’s Life: The Wétiko Cannibal Pyschosis.” Columbus and Other
Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. 1979. Seven Stories
Press, 2008, pp. 9-26.
iii
DEDICATION

For my parents, Margarito and Maria.

For my siblings, especially Elisa and Pablo. I could not have done this without your ceaseless
cheerleading.

To my extended queer family, near and far.

To my two Weimaraners, Velcro and Zipper. Your continuous companionship kept me
healthy and sane through it all.

And finally, to all the misfit and miss-fit women and men I am honored to call friends. You
are the heart that pumped life into this work. You are also its soul.

iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not have been possible without Lydie Moudileno’s unabating guidance,
advisement, and care. Her tutelage, expert supervision, and “tough love” over the years
contributed immensely to bringing this dissertation to fruition. I aspire to emulate her
mentorship and professionalism someday soon. Je vous remercie infiniment pour votre aide et
surtout pour votre infatigable patience. Olivia C. Harrison and Neetu Khanna, whose
respective cutting-edge scholarship in-/directly informs my own, are equally owed much
thanks and gratitude. Their perceptive comments at the nascent stage of this project’s
inception, and their wonderful comments at this project’s final (nerve-racking) defense, were
dutifully noted. I am forever indebted to these three scholars for their generous time, labor,
and stewardship.
I owe endless thanks and appreciation to the Graduate School, the Comparative Studies of
Literatures and Cultures Department, and the Department of French & Italian for their
generous financial support. To all faculty in the French Department at the University of
Southern California, additionally, I am especially grateful. Thinking with and alongside every
one of you over the years has been immeasurably formative. I owe much thanks, moreover, to
two seasoned Master Lecturers in the the Department of French & Italian: Atiyeh Showrai
and Julia Chamberlain. Their years of counsel in French language pedagogy equipped me
with invaluable, marketable skills in foreign language teaching. And finally, to my many
fellow graduate student colleagues, friends, and fellow Assistant Lecturers – but especially
Katherine Hammitt and Brieuc Gerard – I owe you all my sanity. Our informal exchanges in
in the Taper Hall 350 office, during shared car rides, and numerous short trips to and from
Downtown L.A. on the Metro Expo Line – in innumerable ways – provided the “tasty meaty
matter” for this project. I am forever thankful.

v
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph………………………………………………………………………………………..ii
Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………..iii
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………iv
List of Figures…..……………………………………………………………………………..vi
Abstract……..………………………………………………………………………………...vii
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….1
Chapter 1: MUSCLES
Malleable Bodies, Metabolic Minds: Muscles & Masculinity
Aminata Sow Fall, L’appel des arènes (1982)……………………………………12
Muscle-Fat Bronze Baby………………………………………………………….12
Unsettling Domesticity……………………………………………………………19
The Muscle (and Sociocultural) Building Power of Milk………………………...32
The Fine Motor Muscles of Feet………………………………………………….39

Chapter 2: MEAT
Resisting Meatification: A Beefy Leading Man
Djibril Diop Mambety, Touki Bouki (1973)……………………………………...44
Thematic Overlap: Aminata Sow Fall versus Djibril Diop Mambety……………44
Men and Livestock, Livestock and Men: Mory Among Men……………………50
Aborted Flow……………………………………………………………………..58
Resisting Meatification…………………………………………………………...67

Chapter 3: CIRCULATION
Circulating (Afro-Centric) Queerness
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, De purs hommes (2018)……………………………....78
Snapshots of Male Miss-fits/Misfits……………………………………………...78
Refracted Reflexive Hegemonic Masculinity…………………………………….87
Unmooring Binary Thought via Dizzying Circularity…………………………....94
Embracing Your Inner Goor-jigéen………………………………………………99

Chapter 4: EATING
Metabolic Transubstantiation: The Trouble with Swallowing Senghor’s
Transformative Poetics of Relation
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Hosties Noires (1948)…………………………………103
Like-Minded “Eaters”: Roland Barthes and Léopold Sédar Senghor…………...103
Eating Culture: Addressing the Elephant in the Room………………………….111
Metabolic Voicing and Silencing………………………………………………..116
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..128
References…………………………………………………………………………………...136
vi
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, Dakar, Senegal………………………..…..12
Figure 2: Senegalese Wrestler number 1, drenched in milk, Denis Rouvre, Lamb (2012).…....37
Figure 3: Senegalese Wrestler number 2, drenched in milk, Denis Rouvre, Lamb (2012)…….37
Figure 4: Senegalese Wrestler number 3, drenched in milk, Denis Rouvre, Lamb (2012)…….37
Figure 5: On The Run 2 (OTR II) promotional poster versus Touki Bouki (1973) film still…...44
Figure 6: Mory and Anta spent, film still, Touki Bouki (1973)…………………………...……57
Figure 7: Symbol of stasis and decay, film still, Touki Bouki (1973)………………………….67
Figure 8: Structural stasis, film still, Touki Bouki (1973)……………………………………...76
Figure 9: Structural im/mobility, film still, Touki Bouki (1973)……………………………….76
Figure 10: Acoustic cameo, film still, Touki Bouki (1973)……………………………………91
Figure 11: Acoustic cameo, film still, Touki Bouki (1973)…………………………………….91
Figure 12: Film still, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Table Matters (2014-2019)…………………………113
Figure 13: Film still, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Table Matters (2014-2019)…………………………116
Figure 14: Film still, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Table Matters (2014-2019)…………………………116
Figure 15: “uMakhosi Gadisa, 2004,” by Mlangeni Sabelo………………………………….128
Figure 16: “Thiaroye” by Omar Victor Diop………………………………………………...135

vii

ABSTRACT

Tasty, Comestible Men: Metabolic Poetics in Senegal maps the underexplored
connections between metaphors of consumption and representations of men and masculinity
in Senegalese literature, film, and poetry. By combining metabolism’s figurative pathways –
specifically, anabolism (buildup) and catabolism (breakdown) – and adopting a principally
queer theoretical framework, this dissertation nuances readers’ perceptions of the male body,
men, manhood, and concepts of what it means to be a man. Thematically, its emphasis is on
breakdown. Organizationally, via “Muscles,” “Meat,” “Circulation,” and “Eating” (its four
chapters), it foregrounds the myriad, subtle ways men of varying ages (and to varying
degrees) are consumed by destructive catabolic networks of relational power. “Muscles,”
chapter one, presents a queer reading of Aminata Sow Fall’s third novel L’appel des
arènes (1982) and explores domesticity’s force in suppressing non-normative men. The
structural, relational violence via which marginalized men are metaphorized into comestible
“flesh” is the subject of chapter two, “Meat,” and the leading man in Djibril Diop Mambety’s
1973 cult classic Touki Bouki serves as an illustrative case study. Chapter three, “Circulation,”
underscores the ordering, normalizing power of bedrooms, while arguing such spaces also
afford productive instances in which readers/viewers cognize their explicit or implicit role in
cycles of gendered violence. Lastly, “Eating,” the final chapter, extends the meditation on
tasty, comestible men, by exploring the sounds of alimentary consumption, and arguing for a
renewed ethics of relationality among men centering on troubling power’s incorporative,
metabolic force.
1
INTRODUCTION

Perceiving, Reading, Theorizing Metabolically

Adopting a primarily queer theoretical framework, this dissertation mobilizes the energy-
converting process routinely associated with nutritional, scientific discourse, and stemming
from continuous breakdown (catabolism) and build-up (anabolism) known as metabolism, to
read, interpret, and combine texts of French expression from Senegal in an unconventional
and unconstrained way. Inspired by Jack Halberstam’s notion of “wildness,” my study and
analysis resist the ordering impulses of normative and normalizing scholarship to embrace a
“wild” experientially and experimentally metabolic praxis of reading the selected corpus
anew. Arguing throughout these pages that there is a generative anabolic energy that arises
from combining and juxtaposing cultural texts in a queer fashion,
2
I embrace misalignment
and non-linearity – opting instead for an unexpected course – to focus on what few scholars
have yet to take sustained notice of: the ‘eating culture’
3
permeating Senegalese literature,
film, poetry, and photography. Moreover, I focus on the queer instances this culture combines
with sexed males’ gender expression, men’s sexuality, masculinity, manhood, and concepts of
what it means to be a man. As an illustrative example of this ‘queer amalgamation,’
4
consider
an intriguing clip in Djibril Diop Mambety’s ominously titled film, Hyènes (1992), [Hyenas].
5

The scene (0:32:06) opens with a relatively large group of people – many of them men –
convened at an open-air courtroom in Colobane, the Senegalese town where the action of the
film is set. Though the focus of the camera’s lens are the ten men standing in the center

2
By queer, I mean both ‘odd’ and ‘sexually non-normative.’
3
See Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19
th
Century. New York
University Press, 2012. Eating culture or all that pertains to eating, is how Tompkins defines the term.
Likewise, I too use the term in this sense.
4
See Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19
th
Century. New York
University Press, 2012
5
Hyènes. Directed by Djibril Diop Mambety, performances by Ami Diakhate, Djibril Diop Mambety,
Mansour Diouf, Calgou Fall, Faly Gueye, Mamadou Mahourédia Gueye, and Issa Ramagelissa Samb,
California Newreel Productions, 1992.
2
running the length of the frame horizontally, it is the scene’s prominent foreground –
overflowing with baskets filled with mouth-watering fruit – that are, through my food-
obsessed metabolic prism, what draws and fixes my eye. Considering the many symbolic
references to drought, hunger, mass famine, and starvation, as well as Colobane’s hot and arid
conditions, the juicy, succulent, imported fruit – most notably the large and lush yellow
pineapples – appear oddly out of place. Brimming with tantalizing ripe fruit, the baskets
signal the preparations made for a large feast, and thus a fascinating, multi-layered instance of
consumption in Hyènes, propelling the action of the film in motion by spurring competing and
opposing desires and ensnaring the whole Colobane community in an exploitative web of
relational consumption.
Summoning court is Linguère Ramatou (played by Ami Diakhate), a wealthy, aging
woman, whose body has been ravaged by the global sex trade. “I became a whore. From
continent to continent. A prostitute.” Returning to Colobane after a long absence to reclaim
justice and clear her name, Linguère Ramatou offers to rescue the town from bankruptcy by
gifting the local authorities an enormous sum of cash and dolling out an equally prodigious
amount to each of Colobane’s residents. Signaling Linguère Ramatou’s great wealth,
affluence, and power are the opulent clothing she and her silent entourage don, as well as
(ironically) her ‘butchered metabolized body,’ outfitted with prosthetic limbs made of gold.
Additionally, at various moments in the film Linguère Ramatou is likened to the
“International Monetary Fund,” the financing arm of the United Nations, as well as “The
World Bank.” But Linguère Ramatou’s magnanimous bailout is conditioned on her former
lover’s murder: she wants, at all costs, Dramaan Drameh’s head (played by Mansour Diouf).
Driving Linguère Ramatou’s desire for Dramaan Drameh’s liquidation, is the latter’s rejection
of Linguère Ramatou in her greatest time of need – when she was pregnant with Dramaan
Drameh’s child. Overcome with a greed that overpowers his love Linguère Ramatou,
3
Dramaan Drameh, however, refuses to acknowledge his paternity and instead profits
financially by marrying a woman of a wealthier family, resulting in the conservative town’s
branding of Linguère Ramatou “a whore,” which consequently led to her social death, and
global sexual exploitation. What ensues, is the hunting and tracking down the world-over of
the two men who colluded with Dramaan Drameh, claiming too to have had intercourse with
Linguère Ramatou, further casting doubt on the unborn child’s true father. As retribution for
their perjury before the high court of Colobane – what seals Linguère Ramatou’s social
demise – she castrates the two corroborating male witnesses and condemns them to repeated
sexual assault by “handing them over to the men in the black Orient.” “They made women of
us!” they cry. As for Dramaan Drameh’s disciplining, Linguère Ramatou envisions something
far more sinister than castration and sodomy. She envisions Dramaan Drameh’s
metabolization – his total annihilation and erasure. Eventually, Dramaan Drameh’s
liquidation comes to pass, when, surrounded by a hyena-like horde of men, he is “eaten” and
devoured in the film’s penultimate scene, his overcoat the only remaining trace of him just
before the scene cuts to a bulldozer razing the ground, intimating further the community’s
murderous cover up.
These powerful metabolic vignettes are illustrative of how consumptive, eating culture –
routinely overlooked in the critical scholarship – symbolically permeates Senegalese cultural
expression in dramatic ways. Likened to meat, for instance, Linguère Ramatou’s body is
consumed in a matrix of international trafficking of sexualized bodies; exploited, used, and
extracted of their labor and “energy,” bodies are routinely broken down, regurgitated and/or
eliminated and left for dead. As for Linguère Ramatou, her body is quite literally “ground
up,” dismembered, and monstrously reassembled, bearing little resemblance to her former,
youthful, and vital self. Her intention to metabolize Dramaan Drameh in turn, evidences the
cyclical nature of these consumptive acts. Furthermore, interspersing the open-air courtroom
4
scene convened by Linguère Ramatou, are frames of a black zebu steer being led to slaughter,
lassoed, tugged, and prodded before being slain by a group of men, an irrefutable
foreshadowing of Dramaan Drameh’s fate in the film’s finale. But there are also far less
sensational scenes of consumption peppering Senegalese cultural forms; it is on these subtle
scenes evidencing the invisible workings of power, and the subject-forming networks of
metabolic power I call catabolic webs of destructive breakdown
6
that I wish to focus on in this
project.
In other words, what is most fascinating to me is not the prevalence of fruit and other food
items, but how this alimentation coalesces with Senegalese writers’, filmmakers’, poets’, and
photographers’ creative narrative elements to signify something sinister. It is the mere
mention and promise, for example, of an unimaginable “sweet” flow of cash that incites an
insatiable ‘thirst’ and ravenous ‘hunger’ for, among other things, a larger and grandeur city
hall, finer and more ostentatious articles of clothing, larger mechanized fans and home
appliances, vehicles, and other conspicuous goods signaling middle-class consumption and
status in the West, despite the official lip-service to the contrary. “In the name of Colobane. In
the name of humanity. I refuse your [Linguère Ramatou] offer. We’d rather starve, than have
blood on our hands.” It is this incitement that triggers catabolic breakdown, resulting in the
dissolution of the horizontal relationality needed for community-building and political action
and change that I aim to examine, and I am particularly interested in how this catabolism both
centers on, ensnares, and subjugates men. Furthermore, sustainedly, I wish to meditate
collectively on how we might collaborate on troubling – by disrupting and weakening – these
catabolic webs of destructive breakdown to instead invest in an anabolic praxis of build-up –
a far more productive, ecosystemic, and life-sustaining relationality that centers on

6
Catabolism – or destructive metabolism – is one of two pathways comprising metabolism. The other
is anabolism, or build-up.
5
interdependency, sentient-being-hood, and social justice. Finally, I wonder how Senegalese
cultural expression might serve as an impetus, a force, and an energy for the promotion of this
fruitful transformative, anabolic shift.
Despite this cursory, impressionistic reading attesting to the signifying potency of
alimentation in Djibril Diop Mambety’s Hyènes, and because Senegalese literature, film,
photography, and poetry have yet to be studied for its prominent eating culture, opportunities
to productively exploit the generative promise and potential of metabolism have gone
untapped. And while I might wish to take credit for identifying metabolism as a dynamic and
creative metaphor through which to analyze my chosen primary corpus, exploring and
understanding the self’s ecosystemic relationship to the world via the leitmotif of metabolism
have been explored intriguingly by many others before me. Pioneering thinkers in the fields
of sociology and economics, for instance, have been notable frontrunners in expanding
metabolism’s meaning figuratively to theorize the inter-societal and environmental flow of
energy and materials in, between, and within communities.
7
In the areas of building and
planning, post-war Japanese architects, additionally, envisioned spectacular structures that
fused architectonics and organic biology. And while the ideas espoused in Metabolism: The
Proposals for New Urbanism (1960),
8
a manifesto written by a group of young and innovative
architects of the period remained largely conceptual, the ideas of fluidity, impermanence, and
continuous transformative change contained therein continue to inform the management of
urban space (and speculative literature) in Japan, albeit subtly and indirectly.
9
In relatively
recent years too, a flurry of 21
st
century scholars and theorists in the humanities have vied to,
in my view, further endeavor to recuperate the particular qualities of metabolism
imaginatively – relationality, renewal, assimilation, transformation and the like – to explore

7
See Chapter One.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
6
the meaning of life;
10
to champion an ethical reading praxis that undercuts practices of
cannibalistic cultural appropriation and consumption;
11
to understand the mechanics of
audition;
12
and finally, to theorize about the poetics of metabolic artistic expression.
13

Collectively, therefore, it is this macédoine (pun intended) that in/directly informs my
approach to the evidentiary, primary texts presented in this project: two novels, a film, stills
and short clips of performative acts of eating, photography, and a slim volume of poetry.
Theoretically leaning, moreover, on the pioneering work of queer and queer of color theorists,
interdisciplinary critical food studies scholars with a queer bent, and literary theorists and
critics intervening in the fields of men and masculinity and black studies, my project, Tasty,
Comestible Men: Metabolic Poetics in Senegal, vies to enact, first and foremost, a praxis of
perceiving the world metabolically through perceptive reading. In other words, how might we
read with a metabolic eye, and what might such a mode of reading offer culturally, socially,
and politically? Put yet another way, to perceive and to read metabolically is to relate to the
world with a keen attentiveness to representations of eating culture (as defined as all that
relates to eating)
14
that move beyond simply cataloguing instances in which bodies,
metaphorized as food, are ingested. More sustainedly, it requires meditating on the
uncomfortable, odd, and queer moments – like the instances I have chosen in the selected
primary sources of this project – that evidence the properties comprising the life-enabling
processes contributing to the energy conversion known commonly as metabolism: muscular
ticks and twitches; the fusing of protein-building alimentation to flesh; observing how
destructive metabolism (or catabolism) circulates; and finally, how the corporeal transfer and

10
See Garrido, Juan Manuel. On Time, Being, & Hunger: Challenging the Traditional Way of
Thinking Life (2012), Fordham University Press.
11
See Loichot, Valérie. The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (2013),
University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
12
See Butera, Michael. “Sound for Thought: Listening for Metabolism.” Sound Effects, vol. 1, no.1,
2011, pp. 52-66.
13
See Rankine. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2004.
14
See Tompkins, Kyla Wazana.
7
union of eater and eaten via nutritive assimilation that centers on, what I call, metabolic
relation power, short-changes men’s ability to thrive, and hence, their ability to be truly free.
Organizationally, the next four chapters aim to do the following. In Chapter One, as
imaginatively presented in Aminata Sow Fall’s third novel L’appel des arènes (1982), I
explore the incorporative metabolizing force of bourgeois domesticity in post-independent
Senegal – particularly its power to consume, catabolize, and eliminate non-normative, queer
homo-sensibilities. Next, focusing on the over-determined, oft-times sexualized linking of
men’s bodies to thewy meat in Chapter Two, I focus on the extraction and utilization of
meat’s muscle-building capacity to sustain power-laden relational exchanges fueled by the
consumption of subaltern men’s energy, calling this process meatification. I furthermore
ponder on how we might resist the force of this interlocking, structural meatification.
Beginning where Chapter Two concludes and inspired by Sara Ahmed exquisitely written
trailblazing work Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), Chapter
Three considers men’s subjection to the productive effects of normative and normalizing
space. Intriguingly, bedrooms figure prominently in the primary sources I have selected
(Chapters One – Three); it is with this in mind that I analyze conjugal bedrooms’ “ordering”
power. But if bedrooms are productive “straightening” spaces, disciplining male miss-fits and
their misfit homologues, fixing them dead in their tracks, bedrooms are also productive spatial
arrangements inciting moments of what I call refractive reflexivity, moments in other words,
when readers/viewers are incited to consider their metabolized/metabolizing role(s) in
reproducing the exploitative and incorporative dynamics of power. Lastly, the concluding
fourth chapter begins where Chapter 3 suggestively ends, by returning, revisiting, and
reconsidering Léopold Sédar Senghor’s ambivalent engagement vis-à-vis the black
infantrymen he likens to black Eucharistic hosts. If as Elizabeth Harney suggests, all cultural
production of the contemporary moment in Senegal is figuratively shaded by the cast of
8
Senghor’s shadow,
15
what are we to make of this smorgasbord of tasty comestible men that
dissolve on the tongue as one silently reads Senghor’s verse?
Collectively, by reading the primary works presented in this project against the normative
and normalizing scholarly grain, I hope to make a few modest unabashedly queer
contributions to the growing scholarship aiming to understand the ‘condition of men,’
masculinities, and concepts of what it means to be a man in the contemporary moment. First
and foremost, I propose an intervention in the field of men and masculinity studies to
problematize the continuously shifting concepts of manhood in Senegal, West Africa, via a
rereading of a few canonical cultural texts.
16
Of the nearly two dozen contributions to African
Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Ninetheenth Centruy to the Present (2005), to my
knowledge one of only two edited volumes dealing explicitly with men and masculinity in
Africa, only four contributors write about fiction or film – and of these, one contribution is an
interview with Guinean film maker Mohamed Camara.
17
My project, Tasty, Comestible Men:
Metabolic Poetics in Senegal, joins and advances this small group of global scholars’ research
on men and masculinities in Africa. Additionally, my project aligns with the work of leading
scholars in the West who combine research in masculinities studies and the fields of French
and Francophone studies. For Todd W. Reeser and Lewis C. Seifert (the editors) and the
contributors of Entre Hommes: French and Francophone Masculinities in Culture and
Theory (2008), masculinity is anything but straightforward and linear. Rather, it is historically
determined and constructed.
18
And yet, despite the increased institutional recognition of the

15
Harney, Elizabeth. In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995.
Duke University Press, 2014.
16
I envision this corpus expanding to include other works, particularly graphic novels and
photography in a forthcoming book-length project.
17
See Ellerson, Beti. “Visualizing Homosexualities in African – Dakan: An Interview with Filmmaker
Mohomedd Camara.” African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Ninetheenth Centruy to the
Present. Palgrave McMillan, 2005.
18
Reeser, Todd and Lewis C. Seifert, Editors. Entre Hommes: French and Francophone Masculinities
in French and Francophone Culture and Theory. University of Deleware Press, 2005.
9
field’s importance to departments of gender and sexuality studies, if the edited volume Entre
Hommes is any indication, French and Francophone studies scholars’ concern with the
‘condition of men,’ and specifically, how narrative, “shapes, reshapes, contests, and dissects
masculinity”
19
on the African continent is lamentable (there is only one contribution in Reeser
and Seifert’s edited volume on Francophone Africa (Guinée)). Albeit minor and modest, my
project, Tasty, Comestible Men: Metabolic Poetics in Senegal, aspires to change this by
enjoining others to collaborate with me in seeking out new avenues of investigation and
research.
Over and above all this, the labor I imagine the rereading of this small corpus doing goes
beyond just an ‘inclusionary’ move of re-interpreting, representing, constructing, and
contesting concepts of men and masculinity in Senegal, West Africa. I envision (perhaps
naively) my project doing much more. Despite its seemingly narrow focus on Senegal, for
example, my investigation on the representational ways men’s bodies are routinely
metabolized, and the exceptional and exemplary means political violence is exacted on the
male body of color finds affinities with intercontinental, cross-continental, and cross-
linguistic scholarship. Finding a home, and an especially keen connection with thinkers
writing about men, masculinities, and gender and sexuality in Hispano-phone and Lusophone
Africa,
20
for instance, I envision this project establishing a long, overdue nexus
intercontinentally with thinkers from Hispanophone (Equatorial Guinea) and Lusophone
(especially Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Angola) nations in Africa, as well as globally in
the diaspora (particularly with Brazil and the Caribbean) . And academics, who envision
‘thinking’ and ‘writing’ about Africa anew via the prism of food today would agree. Célestin
Monga, one of a select number of scholars writing critically (albeit tangentially) about eating

19
Ibid, p. 35.
20
See Quinlan, Susan Canty and Fernando Arenas, Editors. Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the
Portuguese-speaking World. University of Minnesota, 2002.
10
culture in Africa today, is a fine example. In an article and chapter, respectively titled,
« Penser la famine et la peur, »
21
and “I Eat Therefore I Am: Philosophy of the Table,”
22

Monga reflects on the importance of paying attention to representations of alimentation in the
day-to-day, and in expressive African culture more broadly. As one might anticipate, judging
from his contributions’ titles, readers might expect Monga, a trained economist – as Western
and Western-trained economists writing about Africa usually do – to either, attribute Africa’s
present ills to its exploitative and oppressive history at the hands of the West, or alternately, to
claim Africans themselves are at the origin of their political, social, and material woes.
Monga does neither. Instead, neglecting famine and other forms of material poverty for
Monga, are a consequence of thinkers’ inability to escape the structuralist-relativist binary
trap and an inability to think beyond normalizing/normalized interpretive grains. He proposes
– among other things – an analysis of consumption as a tool for deepening our understanding,
connection, and valorization of Africa cultures, and more that, a means of reflecting on our
collective interspecies condition. This is especially important, argues Monga, for economists
and other researchers, whose job it is to assist decision-makers in devising equitable and just
means of distributing wealth and resources.
23
“Eating is…an aesthetics of the self. In the
African context, it is an act that casts light on several kinds of radically different
moralities…[a] morality centered on ethics and whose principle is to enjoy oneself by
transforming one’s life, constantly instilling it with aesthetic concern.”
24
I would add that the
study of eating culture, for literary and cultural theorists, is also an intriguing lens through
which to study catabolic breakdown, that is to say how certain men’s bodies and masculinities
(non-affluent, undereducated, socially and politically marginalized men) are routinely

21
Monga, Célestin. « Penser la famine et la peur.» Penser et écrire l’Afrique ajourd’hui. Seuil, Paris,
2017, pp. 32-49.
22
_____________. “I Eat Therefore I am: Philosophy of the Table.” Nihilism and Negritude:Ways of
Living in Africa. Harvard University Press,
23
See notes 20 and 21 above.
24
_____________. “I Eat Therefore I am: Philosophy of the Table,” p. 73.
11
remodeled and reshaped, taken up, swallowed, and figuratively transmuted and consumed
without so much as a trace. Tasty, Comestible Men: Metabolic Poetics in Senegal proposes to
deepen our understanding of this transfiguration, and hopes, thereby, to contribute to
troubling structural power’s incorporative, metabolic force.

12
CHAPTER ONE

MUSCLES

Malleable Bodies, Metabolic Minds: Muscles and Masculinity
Aminata Sow Fall, L’appel des arènes (1982)

Muscle-Fat Bronze Baby

Figure 1: Monument de la Renaissance Africaine,
Dakar, Senegal.

metabolism, n. 1. a. Biology. Structural change in a tissue. Obsolete. rare. 2. Biology and
Biochemistry. The chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to
maintain life; the interconnected sequences of mostly enzyme-catalyzed chemical
reactions by which a cell, tissue, organ, etc., sustains energy production, and synthesizes
and breaks down complex molecules; anabolism and catabolism considered together; the
overall rate at which these processes occur. Also: the chemical changes undergone in an
organism by any particular substance.

metabolize, v. 1. transitive. To change, edit (a text). Obsolete. 2. transitive. To process (a
substance or food item) metabolically; to cause (a substance or food item) to undergo
metabolism. Also figurative. 3. Intransitive. Of an organism, cell, etc.: to perform
metabolism. Of a substance: to undergo metabolism.

DERIVATIVES:
metabolized adj. that has undergone metabolism.
metabolizing adj. that metabolizes.
25

***

25
Oxford English Dictionary online: www-oed-com.libproxy2.usc.edu
13
Power is not something one has, nor is it something one wields. Rather, power works
incorporatively, swallowing you whole, absorbing you into its organic system.
26
I would add
that power is also metabolic; that is, power, stemming from an abnormal metabolism, is
capable of engendering disease and, or disorder.
27
Despite its contemporary and somewhat
restrictive association with biology and nutritional science, metabolism’s figurative and
extended uses are rich, dating back to the early 20
th
century, when the term ‘perverted
metabolisms’ was first used by Sidney and Beatrice Potter Webb to describe the increasingly
profit-driven logic of capitalism in their seminal work, Decay of Capitalist Civilization
(1923).
28
In the 1960’s, metabolism became the inspiration for an architectural movement that
fueled the utopic visions of metabolists,
29
Japanese architects who sought to fuse the science
of organic biology and the construction of architectural megastructures in post-war Japan.
30

Like these trailblazing predecessors, I propose, in this chapter,
31
to figuratively extend
metabolism’s connotative meanings by examining how muscle is representationally mobilized
in Aminata Sow Fall’s novel L’appel des arènes (1982).
While all bodily organs contribute directly or indirectly to the maintenance of life (or
metabolism), there are five without which metabolism would be impossible.
32
The liver,
housing over 600 metabolic functions, is by far, the most important of these.
33
One’s

26
Halberstam, Jack. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020): “Fantasies of incorporation…are
both fantasies of power and recognitions of the way that power works incorporatively, vertiginously
even; power is not something to have or to wield…it is something that will swallow you whole,
absorb[ing] you into its organic system” (137).
27
Oxford English Dictionary online: www-oed-com.libproxy2.usc.edu. This disorder is nearly always
perceived negatively. I shall recuperate this meaning of the metabolic to read it positively.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Japanese literary scholar William O. Gardner has revived academic interest in the Metabolism
movement in a recently published work titled The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in
Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction (2020).
31
I return to metabolism and its association with the Eucharist in my final chapter on Léopold Sédar
Senghor’s Hosties Noires.
32
The liver; the adrenal, pituitary, and thyroid glands; and substance, one’s bodily fat and muscle
makeup are essential to a well-functioning metabolism.
33
Consult any introductory level science book on biology or nutrition.
14
substance – that is, one’s body muscle and one’s fat – also, however, plays a vital role in the
sustaining of organic life. Circulating far and wide of late, muscle and fat are quite literally
everywhere.
34
Indeed, it is the continuous beating, pushing, pulling, contracting, and relaxing
of fatty-film-covered muscle, and the resulting chemical build up (anabolism) and break-
down (catabolism) that, when combined, are responsible - via divergent, yet intimately linked
metabolic pathways – for an optimal functioning metabolism. Often, however, represented in
gendered and binary ways, fat and muscle, are consistently presumed to be antithetical, and
have occasionally been depicted as such. Roland Barthes’ Geertzian description
35
of wrestling
in the “dingiest of Parisian halls,” is a fine example.
36
Despite, for example, stating that all
wrestlers’ bodies are like algebraic texts of and “keys”
37
to otherworldliness, it is only the
victorious, brawny, sexually normative wrestler, with “his wife on his arm,” that incarnates
the transmutational power to signify and to, in the words of Barthes, ““open [us] up” to
Nature.”
38
The fleshy, inert, fat, and feminized bodies, personified by the only wrestler
Barthes ever names, Thauvin, meanwhile, are of a constitutionally ‘sickly, flabby, dead’ and
burnt flesh (‘la barbeque’) that functions solely to induce nausea.
39
The most interesting thing
about the un/normatively sexed athletes, however, is their stark nakedness, which, via a
process of heroization and, or demonization, as well as through an innate “parapolitical”
essence, serve to sometimes, powerfully represent entire groups of people and nations.
40

In an analogous way, muscles, masculinities, and men’s herculean bodies in Senegal in
recent years, have come to metaphorically represent national interests, as well as national

34
Via advertisement, circulating internationally, for example.
35
See Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.”
36
Barthes, Roland. “In the Ring,” 3.
37
Ibid, 5.
38
Ibid, 14.
39
Ibid, 5.
40
Ibid, “In America wrestling represents a kind of mythological combat between Good and Evil (of a
parapolitical nature, the “bad wrestler” always being presumed to be a Red [read the communist
Soviet Union, and particular Russia],” 12, emphasis added.
15
anxieties. Consider, for a few moments, the imaginative power with which Le Monument de
la Renaissance Africaine, a 161 ft tall bronze statue in Dakar, Senegal’s bustling capital,
suggestively aims to freeze and map muscle onto the Senegalese landscape.
41
Without a
doubt, the bronze male figure of the towering statue is what any onlooker is expected to fix
their sights on, as he is poised prominently and stands imposingly erect, thus centering the
monument. The largest in scale in the mother-father-child triad sitting atop one of two breast-
shaped mountains known locally in Dakar as Les Collines des Mamelles, the male figure
stands squarely and firmly. Indeed, when the statue was first conceived by former Senegalese
President Abdoulaye Wade, it was envisioned that the male figure would appear as if
springing from the earth, and as if exiting an erupting volcano. That the monument sits
securely and loftily on one of the two, twin Collines des Mamelles (also of volcanic origin),
on an otherwise flat plateau overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, the imaginative and eruptive
power volcanic allusion is heightened. Representationally lean, the man’s body is lissome, yet
muscular and strong. With a well-defined trunk, a brawny and broad chest, and a muscly and
visibly defined upper- and lower-midsection, the bronze male figure, irrefutably, commands
attention. Additionally, his protective right arm circles the lithe female figure, while his left,
secures an infant, nestled in the crook of his “shredded” (that is to say, well-defined) bicep
and forearm. With arms flung backward and with wind-blown hair and clothing, it is
emphatically clear that the force the couple and babe are moving toward and against is a
strong one, as the woman’s feet do not appear as stable as her mate’s. Comparatively then, the
male figure is assumed to be the stronger of the two. Her affective posture, meanwhile, is one
that signals imbalance, as she appears, from the ever so slight arch of her back, as if she is
being propelled forward by the stronger, more valiant man. And while all the figures are

41
Le Monument de la Renaissance Africaine is a 161 ft tall bronze statue towering over Les Collines
des Mamelles, just outside Dakar, Senegal. Former Senegalese President, Abdoulaye Wade, has been
credited for conceiving the idea for the monument. It was designed by the Senegalese architect Pierre
Goudiaby, and it was built overseas by a North Korean company, Mansudae Projects.
16
scantily clothed (or nude, in the case of the baby), in a predominately Muslim country that
espouses modesty in dress, the female figure was the only one of the trio to come under fire
for her near nudity, when the statue was first unveiled on the 4
th
of April, 2010, Senegal’s
National Independence Day, commemorating the country’s 50
th
anniversary of independence
from France.
42
As expected, the male and child’s nakedness, (again) went unchecked. To sum,
while the male figure stands courageously and defiantly bare-chested, a symbol of the new,
reborn Africa, the female figure’s nudity recurrently elicits outrage, all the while, the infant’s
bareness, as is usually the case with representations of African children, is systematically
ignored and normalized.
Heeding Achille Mbembe’s call to move beyond binaries,
43
I want to read Le Monument
de la Rénaissance Africaine’s child in a manner that they have yet to be read before turning to
the subject at hand, Sow Fall’s novel, L’appel des arènes.
44
My use of the gender non-
determinate pronoun they here, is deliberate; only one scholar, to my knowledge, has keenly
and astutely observed that the child on the male figure’s shoulder is nearly always, tacitly
assumed to be male.
45
For Mbembe, binary oppositions (i.e. male : female, child : adult) are
not only unhelpful, “they cloud our understanding of postcolonial relations,” as well as “the
nature of domination and subordination.”
46
In this vein, the figurative metabolic make-up or
substance of the monument’s child, and not only their indeterminate sex and, as of yet to be
culturally determined gender, offer a promise that transcends binary modes of classification
and thinking. Neither sculpted and chiseled like the body of the trio’s male figure, nor
voluptuously fleshy and sexualized like the triad’s female figure, the bronze infant presents an

42
See De Jong, Ferdinand and Vincent Foucher. “La tragedie du roi Abdoulaye ? Néomodernisme et
renaissance Africaine dans le Sénégal contemporain.”
43
See Achille Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity,” 103.
44
The inspiration for “reading” and interpreting the child’s body like a text comes from Barthes notion
of the body as text. See, “In the Ring.”
45
See Joseph Underwood discussion of Le Monument de la Renaissance.
46
Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity,” 103.
17
ambiguous, fatty-muscly element that is – despite its seeming bronze fixity and permanence –
neither binarily sexed, nor culturally gendered. Moreover, their nudity is suggestive of a
dangerous element capable of unsettling the presumed stability of domesticity that this bronze
nuclear family implicitly represents. Put another way, in the words of Jack Halberstam, “they
[the bronze baby] are naked, exposed, committed neither to covering up their wildness nor to
performing stability…they will not be tamed.”
47
Moreover, as Mbembe argues, turning our
attention to the materials used to create new “worlds of meaning”
48
(in this instance, metal),
opens the small cherub bronze figure to a host of subversive metaphorical meanings.
“L’opération qui se poursuivait sous mes yeux, n’était une simple fusion d’or qu’en
apparence ; c’était une simple fusion d’or, assurément c’était cela, mais c’était bien
autre chose encore : une opération magique que les génies pouvaient accorder ou
refuser ; et c’est pourquoi, autour de mon père, il y avait ce silence absolu et cette
attente anxieuse.”
49

As the above brief excerpt demonstrates, taken from the second chapter of Camara Laye’s
L’enfant noir (1953), literature from West Africa of French expression is rich with depictions
melding precious metals, metal workers, the art of metal work, and transgressive, ‘wild,’ and
‘feral’ children. Despite steeping the opening scenes of metal work in an orientalist exoticist
frame of the occult (‘une operation magique’), Laye’s text hints at the powerful and agentive
properties of metals. In this scene, for example, Laye (the child protagonist, not to be
confused with the author) insinuates metals possess an exceptional, preternatural quality that
cannot be harnessed by men, hence the reverential silence reserved for metals, as they
congeal, harden, and take on new and indeterminate forms. Indeed, what Laye the child
protagonist witnesses here, is something more, something beyond a facile fusing of seemingly

47
Halberstam, J. “Where the Wild Things Are: Humans, Animals, and Children,” 136.
48
Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity,” 103-4.
49
Laye, Camara. L’enfant noir, 29.
18
innate matter. Put another way, the art of metal work is something abstract that transcends
language, it elicits marvel, awe, and child-like wonder. And it is this “intense intimacy with
their material,” according to Jane Bennett, that has allowed metal workers for centuries to
discern the vibrant life contained by metal.
50
In the bronze monument standing as testament to
a future Africa modeled (yet again) on domesticity, the normative, and normalizing power of
the nuclear, bourgeois family, I discern a glimmer of what Bennett calls “a [vibrant, agentive]
life.”
51
Moreover, I esteem an intimation and “wild” indeterminable promise that resides in
the sexually and gender non-determinate bronze baby. Afterall, it is the adult duo’s child that
exhibits the most self-assured posture; though not standing, the baby sits erect – confidently,
defiantly. Furthermore, the infant’s gaze is not averted skyward. Unlike their parents, the
baby does not stare off into the heaven, nor are they fixed permanently in the volcanic rock
(like the male figure); neither do they appear, like their mother, to be off balance. Rather, they
sit securely balanced on their father’s shoulder, with a posture that is neither forward nor
backward leaning, gazing off into the horizon. Lastly, the child’s tiny index-finger too, points
somewhere out there, anywhere but the insularity of his parents’ domestic union.
In this way, Nalla, the chief protagonist of L’appel des arènes, presents an unbridled, non-
normative, queer energy.
52
In what follows, I argue, in the first section, that Nalla, the twelve-
year old child presents a disruptive element that unsettles the domesticity of the nuclear unit
despite his smallness, or petitetesse. In the second section, I make a case for interpreting this
disruptiveness via the properties of a grassroots form of Senegalese liquidity, figuratively
represented by the leitmotif of lait caillé
53
that, quite literally, floods the pages of L’appel des

50
Bennett, Jane. “A Life of Metal,” 60.
51
Ibid.
52
I define queer here not as a sexual, political identity as it is understood in the West, but as any non-
normative and non-conforming way of being in the world that counters local, normative/normalizing,
social and culture norms authoritatively prescribed.
53
Wolof term for curdled, fatty milk.
19
arènes. It is in the margin of the intimacies and “conviviality”
54
afforded by the unique
properties of the curdled and fermented milk produced in Senegal, that one might observe,
what I will attempt to theorize is the vitality sapping, extractive power of metabolism that
renders postcolonial
55
male subjects simultaneously empowered and impotent.
56
And lastly, in
the third and final section, I focus on the complex musculature and properties of feet. Figuring
prominently in both the novel and the film adaptation of L’appel des arènes (2005), as well as
in key canonical theoretical texts like Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (2008),
57
feet,
as I see them, are metaphorical representations signifying the forked social, cultural, and
political trajectories that characterized the context of 1980s postcolonial Senegal in which the
novel is firmly entrenched, as well as the divergent models of national “development” that
Senegal contemplates today.
Unsettling Domesticity

Despite its positive reception and comparison to such classics like Charles Dickens’s Hard
Times (1854),
58
Aminata Sow Fall’s third novel, L’appel des arènes (1982), has not garnered
much scholarly attention or praise. Understandably, the text’s throughline is a lot like a few
canonical West African Bildungsromane, as it, like its somewhat dated predecessors, relates a
young boy’s encounter with Western education and the ensuing identarian crisis he
experiences. Much like earlier novels that focused on male children – of which, Cheik
Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë (1961)
59
and Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir (1953)
60
are
exemplary – Nalla, Sow Fall’s protagonist, likewise, can be characterized as a child

54
Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity.”
55
I adopt Mbembe’s definition of the postcolonial to characterize a society (like Senegal’s) that has
recently emerged from the experience and violence of colonization and the relationality therein that
this “progress” entails (102).
56
This reading is in part inspired by Mbembe’s, “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity.”
57
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.
58
Henderson, Heather. “Hard Times in an African Eden: Aminata Sow Fall’s L’appel des arènes,”
Contributions in Black Studies: A Journal of Afro and African American, 9/10, 1990-2, 147-53.
59
Kane, Cheik Hamidou. L’Aventure ambigüe. Pocket, 2003.
60
Laye, Camara. L’enfant noir. Pocket, 1976.
20
“divided,” torn between his Senegalese heritage rooted in “tradition” and an encroaching
concept of “modernity” premised on the culture of the West. Whereas however, Laye and
Kane’s young protagonists attempt to reconcile their cultural dissonance on a spectrum of
hybridity, Nalla rejects Western inculcation outright,
61
opting instead to defiantly embrace his
Senegalese heritage unabashedly, to the oft times vehement disapproval of his professional,
upward-bound, middle-class parents, Ndiougou and Diattou. But it is not solely this snubbing
and agentive break with Western “modernity” by a 12-year-old that makes L’appel des arènes
unique. Rather, it is the distinctive way tradition, culture, and nation in 1980s postcolonial
Senegal are legibly inscribed in and through the sinewy bodies of the men permeating the
pages of Sow Fall’s text.
While critics have long observed the importance of the institution of education to L’appel
des arènes,
62
as underscored by the novel’s opening scene relating a lengthy exchange
between Nalla and his private tutor, Monsieur Niang, about the intricacies of French
grammar, none have explored the connections between schooling and the underpinning theme
of domesticity, as well as domesticity’s connection to surveillance prominently marking the
first chapter. “Ce dont je suis sûr est que ce garçon a besoin d’être surveillé.”
63
Odile
Cazanave’s analysis, for example, centers on the changing status of the child in Africa, and
shifts critical attention onto Nalla’s parents, Ndiougou and Diattou, claiming it is their “re-
education” (read: re-discipling) not Nalla’s that is important to interpreting Sow Fall’s text.
64

What is lost, I wonder, in continuing to overlook the normalizing impetus of domesticity’s

61
For a discussion of Nalla’s resistance of hybridity see Sougou, Omar, “Resisting
Hybridity.” Matatu, v. 25, 1, 2002, 213-27.
62
Cazanave, Odile. “Gender, Age, Reeducation: A Changing Emphasis in Recent African Novels in
French, as exemplified in L’appel des arènes by Aminata Sow Fall.” Africa Today, v. 38, 3, 1991, pp.
54-62.
63
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 11.
64
Cazanave, Odile. “Gender, Age, Reeducation: A Changing Emphasis in Recent African Novels in
French, as exemplified in L’appel des arènes by Aminata Sow Fall.” Africa Today,
21
intimate link to surveillance and the combined determinate role this nexus plays in ensuring
children’s growth, maturation, and ‘development?’
In her novel reinterpretation of Michel Foucault’s panopticism through the archive of
slavery and the lens of black feminist scholarship, Simon Browne, “draws,” what she calls, a
theoretical “black line” through the field of panoptic studies to examine contemporary
iterations of surveillance on black life.
65
Wishing to further refine Browne’s “black line,” I
want to finely trace alongside Brown’s analysis of panopiticsm by gendering it to scrutinize
boys’ identity formation. In so doing, I wish to draw attention to the unique ways in which
young boys are subjected to the surveilling power of adults (especially male adults) whose
finely orchestrated and calculated motivations are aimed at safeguarding all that relates to the
smooth functioning of the home, and by extension the reproduction of domesticity at both
local and national levels. Arguably, such a move is not without problems, especially
considering Foucault’s unequivocal silence on black subjectivity and subjecthood in The
History of Sexuality (1990).
66
Like Brown, however, I wish not to throw the baby out with the
bathwater, and seek instead to mobilize Foucault’s theory of panopticism in order to analyze
its normative and constitutive power “to [quite literally] make” bodies, particularly
children’s,
67
advancing in the process that Nalla’s body presents an exemplary constitutive
substance of muscle and fat, as his body slowly becomes narratively ‘legible’ over the course
of the novel. Moreover, it is the panopticon’s original visionary investment in the “training”
of “the rising race[s] in the path of education,” articulated by the plan’s creator Jeremy
Bentham in 1786,
68
that is of interest to my analysis of Sow Fall’s novel.
“Diattou…tient à assumer pleinement son rôle de mère … « Il faut t’habiller
correctement ! La chemise laissée comme ça, ça fait débraillé ! » C’est elle qui gronde, punit,

65
Brown, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, 42.
66
Ibid, 42.
67
Ibid, 41.
68
Ibid, 33.
22
corrige, dans la mesure de ses moyens.”
69
As expected, and as implied by this short excerpt,
the day-to-day running of the home, including the duties of childrearing, are supported by
Nalla’s mother, Diattou, who, in this short exchange, forcefully orders Nalla to dress
appropriately, underscored herein by the imperative subjunctive syntax “il faut...!.’” And
while such commonplace behaviors like a mother fussing over her boy’s ensemble appear
benign (in this case, Nalla’s formal, button-down shirt is incorrectly tucked into his pants),
there is a normative, disciplinary current that undeniably frames such everyday exchanges
where boys are concerned. Here, for example, a mundane article of clothing (‘la chemise’)
becomes simultaneously charged by the semantics of order (‘correctement’) and disorder
(‘débraillé’). One might be quick to assume, for instance, that it is the final line of the excerpt
that most clearly illustrates the corrective, relational power that tethers boys to their mothers,
considering Diattou’s “grounding, punishing,” and “correcting” (‘C’est elle qui gronde, punit,
corrige’). Nevertheless, it is the adjectival form of the verb ‘débrailler’ that, ironically, best
illustrates the troubling disruptive force that rivals Diattou’s fastidious vestimentary ordering.
Moreover, the many meanings of the French verb ‘débrailler’ (in addition to its adjectival
forms in French, ‘débraillé/e/s’) index ‘indecency,’ ‘disorder,’ and ‘neglect,’ as these relate to
one’s clothing, but also to one’s psychic and somatic constitution and substance. In addition,
to be ‘débraillé’ (‘être débrailler’) is to embody a nature that is ‘free,’ ‘shocking,’ and
characterized by ‘excess’ (‘Des manières débraillées’).
70
It is then, when read against the
grain this way, that seemingly banal representations of parents fussing over their young
children’s attire appear symbolic of something larger, like parents’ apprehensive, yet
calculated investment in the body politic. “Diattou avait tenu à faire de son fils un modèle
conforme à sa propre conception de l’âge moderne.”
71
Stated otherwise, the ordering of boys’

69
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 24.
70
Larousse online dictionary.
71
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 65.
23
bodies, premised on models of presentational concealment and containment of corporeal
excess(es), is part and parcel to the project of nation-building in the postcolonial universe
presented in L’appel des arènes, and Senegalese mothers, like Diattou, play a chief role in this
enterprise.
“Coupe la viande avec le couteau, pas avec tes dents…Oh là là, n’y mets pas les doigts, tu
vas souiller la nourriture, mon petit chéri…Tu vas l’infester de microbes qui provoqueront
ensuite des maladies…N’avale pas d’un trait ! Par des petites gorgées…Voilà, par petites
gorgées.”
72
Additionally, overtones of modernity, mothering, and alimentation combine
interestingly in the novel, signaling boundaries children ought not to cross. As some scholars
have rightly noted, anxieties about cleanliness are often metaphors associated with the
propriety, morality, and purity of the family – and by extension, the nation.
73
But perceived
manners of eating, modeled on the etiquette of restraint and discipline centering on the mouth
(‘Par petites gorgées…Voilà par petites gorgées’), might also be elementary lessons premised
on new modes of consumerism shaping the growing middle class in African nations that
began in the post-independence era of the 1960s; anthropologists have long argued that, when
studying the semiotic power of food, commodities should be mined individually.
74
In this
vein, Nalla’s consumption of meat indicates several things. For one, while all the flora and
fauna are perishing in the drought-affected town in which the novel is based, Louga, the
readily available amount of meat in Nalla’s household (usually reserved for feast days and
special occasions in the novel), symbolically cues one to assume that Nalla and his parents do
not experience hardship in the same way as the residents of Louga do. The economic status
and power of bourgeois domesticity, in other words, buffers the household from experiencing
privation like the households of the masses. While the locals in the novel consume a plant and

72
Sow Fall, L’appel des arènes, 65-6.
73
D’Almeida, Irène Assiba. “W/Riting Change: Women as Social Critics,” 142.
74
Koenig, Dolores. “Food for the Malian Middle Class: An Invisible Cusine,” 63.
24
grain-based diet (millet and corn are mentioned often), Nalla and his parents (particularly
Nalla’s father Ndiogou) are repeatedly described in the novel – in befitting bourgeois fashion,
seated around a dinner table – as consuming meat-based, Western-styled meals. “Les grillons
emplissent la véranda de leur grésillement. Ndiougou coupe son beefsteack [sic] sans
conviction.”
75

But such insistent references to the consumption of meat-based, Western-inspired dishes in
the context of domestic decorum in L’appel des arènes, reveals more than a facile have /
have-not duality. Literary representations of alimentary consumption in this novel also gesture
toward the development of the worldwide food-chain pipeline that began with global
economic and agricultural restructuring in the 1960s, thus situating the text in a globally,
transnational context, despite its presumed insularity and periodicity.
76
For Senegal, like the
whole of West African countries, structural adjustments in the 1980s resulted in increased
poverty for many, while at the same time providing others with newfound sources of income
77

– in particular, public servants (or fonctionnaires), like Nalla’s parents in Sow Fall’s novel,
Ndiougou and Diattou.
78
In L’appel des arènes, this new source of cashflow, regardless of
seasonal availability, becomes a means via which resources like food are horded and
stockpiled in the face of scarcity. “Monsieur Niang, comme tous les fonctionnaires lougatois,
savait que Ndiogou possédait un verger…ce verger se trouvait…dans un îlot à senteur de
goyaves mûres et de papayes dorées, coloré de tomates, de concombres et de melons, et
continuellement bercé par le chant des flots sur la berge.”
79
Moreover, Diattou’s fastidious
concern with what and how Nalla consumes gets at something Foucault has known all along,
but that scholars have paid little mind to : food plays a key role in the relations of power. The

75
Sow Fall, L’appel des arènes, 109.
76
Koenig, Dolores. “Food for the Malian Middle Class: An Invisible Cusine,” 49-51.
77
Ibid, 51.
78
I will discuss the macroeconomic restructuring of the 1980s in further detail in chapter two.
79
Sow Fall, L’appel des arènes, 12.
25
management of ““people” and “populations,” rates of birth and death, life expectancy,
fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, etc.”
80
not only center on diet, according to
Foucault, they are in his words, proportional to the production of and access to [alimentary]
resources.
81
Diattou’s insistence on small, bite-size portions of meat and sips of drink then,
are not simply commands that Nalla ought to heed, they are also deliberate and calculated
techniques of power deployed measuredly in order to ensure (quite literally) Nalla’s “proper”
growth and development. That Diattou, repeatedly chooses to selectively center this technique
of power on the consumption of the protein-rich, muscle- and fuel-building matter of sinewy
morsels of meat, only underscores the idea that Diattou is heavily invested in ‘constructing’
her vision of modernity modeled on the West, not only from ‘without,’ as represented by her
insistent concern with Nalla’s dress, but also deeply from within, in Nalla’s very substance,
his corporeal fat, but especially, his energy-producing metabolic muscles.
As for men, they do more than simply model ways of being ‘manly men’ through
alimentary modes of consumption. Male figures in the fictional world of Sow Fall’s novel
play a vital (and perhaps even, a more important) role in ensuring the constitutional
development of young boys, precisely because their regulatory power extends beyond the
domestic sphere. Men’s power to domesticate, tame, and ensure “proper” development and
growth of children’s substance is characterized by a constellation of relations with non-kin
men that extends broadly, beyond the confines of the home via a powerful, tentacle-like
reach.
82
Western-educated; often observed at the wheel of a speeding a Land Rover; owner of
a primary and secondary residence; chief veterinarian for the entire region of Louga; married,
and the father of a male child: Ndiogou, Nalla’s father, might at first glance appear to embody
the established cultural ideal of what it means to be a man in the postcolonial, “modern era” in

80
Foucault, Michel. “The Incitement to Discourse,” 25.
81
Ibid.
82
Clowes, Lindsay. “To Be a Man: Changing Constructions of Manhood in Drum Magazine, 1951-
1965,” 89.
26
which L’appel des arènes is set. But if nationhood and fatherhood are frequently coupled in
Sow Fall’s novels,
83
as Irène Assiba d’Almeida so astutely puts it, Ndiogou’s supreme place
as “father,” as represented in this novel, is extremely unstable and shaky. In fact, in L’appel
des arènes, fatherhood appears to be in “crisis,” as it is repeatedly “outsourced.” Not only
does Nalla attend a junior high school suggestively named “College des Pères,”
84
for
example, but non-kin men (albeit, holding positions of inferior authority and power) are
recruited and tasked with assisting in Nalla’s rearing, evidencing an ailing hegemonic
masculinity.
85

“Mon travail, mes nombreux déplacements m’empêchent de le suivre correctement. Je
crois que vous, monsieur Niang, vous pourrez m’aider.”
86
Monsieur Niang, a well-known
local teacher in the town of Louga – hired to tutor (and indirectly track and monitor) Nalla’s
movements and intellectual development – is one of those men enlisted. The ensuing
negotiation, backroom-dealing, and subsequent conniving, and agreement to ensure Nalla’s
constitutional formation through close monitoring via journaling is sealed by an implied and
symbolic handshake. “Ndiogou et monsieur Niang s’étaient mis d’accord.”
87
But it is Nalla’s
subject-position, following the men’s secret and somewhat shady covenant, that harks back to
the novel’s opening grammar lesson on subject-object ontologies. Metonymically, Nalla’s
corporeal petitesse is symbolically equated to a cigarette butt, whose metaphorical light and
fire are forcefully ‘put out’ by Monsieur Niang’s powerful muscular hand, further signaling
the stifling effect and insularity of Nalla’s classroom. “Ndiogou, pendent ce temps, regardait

83
Assiba d’Almeida, Irène. “W/Riting Change: Women as Social Critics,” 141.
84
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 11.
85
Sylvester Mutunda, in a similar vein, also argues that “hegemonic masculinity” (the established
view that there exists one supreme, reigning model of what it means to “be a man”) is continuously
contested in Sow Fall’s novels. See Mutunda, Sylvester. “Hegemonic Masculinity and Emasculation
in Aminata Sow Fall’s The Beggar’s Strike.” International Journal of Education Investigations, v. 5,
6, 2018, pp. 23-36.
86
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 11.
87
Ibid, 13.
27
les grosses veines qui sillonnaient l’avant-bras du professeur et se ramifiaient sur le dos de la
main toujours posée sur la coquille et pressant encore le mégot déjà éteint.”
88
As this excerpt
shows, boys’ subjecthood is often much like that of small objects (in this case a tiny cigarette
butt) ; they are repeatedly impressed upon (whether they realize it or not) by stronger, older,
more socially influential men. Nevertheless, moreover, this quote reveals the instability of
Ndiogou’s place as the ‘ideal’ hegemonic male figure. By focusing his gaze intently on
Monsieur Niang’s muscly and veiny forearm, Ndiogou, Nalla’s father, comes to the
realization in this instant that his power and role as father are not only unstable, but he must
now also figuratively ‘wrestle’ and contend with other men, whose competing concepts and
ideas of what it means to be a man will have an indelibly important imprint and impression on
his growing and maturing child, Nalla.
Such metaphorical allusions to wrestling, wrestlers, and wrestlers’ bodies, while figuring
prominently in Sow Fall’s text, have not been accorded the important scholarly attention they
deserve. Moreover, the symbolic depth of the term wrestling, to my knowledge, has of yet to
be explored fully. The contentious triadic relationship between Mr. Niang, Ndiougou, and
Diattou, Nalla’s private tutor and Nalla’s father and mother, respectively, for example, is one
among many instances in which the various meanings of wrestling arise (i.e. wrangling,
struggling, battling, brawling, and clashing). At the beginning of the novel, Nalla’s parents
consider the wrestlers and wrestling a puerile obsession, a pastime, that Nalla will eventually
and hopefully, with time, surveillance, and careful schooling, outgrow. “Diattou et Ndiogou
s’attendaient à tout, sauf à ça. Le tam-tam des arènes ! Ils n’y auraient jamais pensé. « Mais
oui c’est vrai, de temps en temps des échos arrivent jusqu’ici ! Le tam-tam ».”
89
The “tout,
sauf ça” in this excerpt, signals the little attention Diattou accords the wrestlers and wrestling.

88
Ibid, 12.
89
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 17.
28
In fact, for Diattou, all that exists outside the cordoned off space of the home is of absolutely
no concern to her. The community, the inhabits, and all the goings on there, are for Diattou,
the backdrop on a stage, where she, her husband, Ndiogou, and her child, Nalla, are the
principal actors. Her foci, modeled on Western notions of success, modernity, and futurity,
center on the domestic and professional domains. Diattou is interested solely in the clinic, for
example, where she is responsible for overseeing local women’s birthing, as well as their pre-
and post-natal care, “en sa qualité de sage-gemme [sic] principale à la Maternité.”
90
In other
words, not only is Diattou concerned with the normative growth and development of her
child, Nalla, Diattou is figuratively invested in the “production,” “expansion,” and
“management,” of subset groups of “people,” namely children, in the postcolonial nation, as
imagined in L’appel des arènes. Put another way, with Diattou’s expert stewardship as
intermediary chief midwife to the modern Senegalese nation, the country will not only
flourish but grow – exponentially. “Chaque jour…Dieu faisait des dizaines de mamans…dix,
vingt, trente fois par jour, elle célébrait la fête de la naissance avec un sourire toujours
émerveillé.”
91

For Diattou, however, growth, development, and modernity must be “normative” and,
above all, “normalizing.” Indeed, “normalcy, “normativity,” and “normalization” are all that
preoccupies Diattou, as “standards” and “norms” are the key themes underpinning the novel’s
entire second chapter. As a matter of fact, it is Nalla’s suspected “abnormality” that is the
subject of a contentious and heated argument that creates an irreparable rift between Ndiogou
and Diattou, Nalla’s parents. “Dès demain je téléphone à Dakar pour prendre un rendez-vous
avec un psychologue. Il faut que nous le fassions voir. Il n’est pas normal.”
92
The thought of
enlisting a mental health professional to evaluate Nalla’s emotional substance, incites nothing

90
Ibid, 17.
91
Sow Fall, L’appel des arènes, 17.
92
Ibid, 19.
29
but a violent physical reaction in Diattou. “Rien que de penser à la possiblité de voir son fils
dans le cabinet du psychologue provoque en elle une immense repulsion.”
93
The idea that
Nalla might not be “normal,” furthermore, occasions powerful muscular reflexes and tics that
Diattou is incapable of mastering. “Diattou s’est mordu les lèvres. Avoir un fils, et subir
l’extrême humiliation, l’atroce douleur de s’entendre dire qu’il n’est pas normal !
Inconcevable idée d’avoir mis au monde un fils qui n’est pas comme les autres.”
94
From this
point in the novel forward, Diattou becomes anxious, both preoccupied and obsessed with
ensuring Nalla’s normativity, that is to say that Nalla be emphatically “réglé.”
The gender variable adjectival form of the transitive French verb ‘régler,’ deployed
throughout the second chapter in its passive form (as in, ‘être réglé’) merits our attention, as
its frequent usage suggests several things. For one, ‘réglé/e/s’ variations imply regularity,
order, submission, and above all, discipline. Additionally, ‘être réglé’ suggests that ‘one’s
progression, development, and maturation’ are neatly plotted and planned out in advance.
Moreover, the passive form of the transitive French verb implies something that is clearly
traced, outlined, and well-defined, both literally and figuratively. Finally, ‘être réglé’ alludes
to and is frequently associated with a highly efficient ordering, a mechanism, an apparatus, or
smooth-running machine. But as ‘réglé’ and ‘être réglé’ are used in the second chapter of
L’appel des arènes, however, the terms take on grandeur connotative power. “Les autres,
pour Diattou, ce ne sont pas ces flopées d’enfants déferlant à longueur de journée sur la ville,
laissés à eux-mêmes, se détendant dans la bagarre, dans la vadrouille ou dans les parties de
football en pleine rue. Ce sont les enfants réglés, ceux à qui on a inculqué des principes
propres à les isoler de la masse. Diattou avait toujour rêvé d’un fils à l’image de son mari :
digne, intelligent, rangé et distingué.”
95
The notion of a finely traced and outlined

93
Ibid, emphasis added.
94
Ibid, emphasis added.
95
Ibid, emphasis added.
30
development and path of progression implies filiation, lineage, and an implicit desire that
Nalla be a carbon copy of his father. ‘Être réglé,’ furthermore, suggests a distinction rooted in
class that will set Nalla apart from the masses. Moreover, ‘être réglé’ is charged with notions
of purity. That Nalla’s general malaise, apathy, despondence, and dissonance is rooted in
wrestling – while initially a huge relief for Diattou (Voilà la prevue, se dit-elle, que mon fils
n’est pas malade. Il concentre son attention ailleurs.”
96
) – quickly becomes the germ at the
origin of Diattou’s own progressive mental deterioration, her neurosis climaxing the instant
Nalla declares that he desires to be a wrestler.
“Je veux être un grand lutteur comme Malaw.”
97

If Diattou views Nalla’s wish to become a wrestler as the root of her family’s slow and
progressive regression (“Elle a ressenti la détresse d’une mère qui assiste, impuissante, à
l’anéantissement de son fils.”
98
), Nalla’s father’s attitude is not so clear cut. He vacillates and
shifts from and between an initial indifference, to acquiescence, to outright distain, to an
eventual acceptance of his son Nalla’s resolve to be a wrestler. But Ndiogou’s journey to
acceptance of his son’s decision to join the local community of wrestlers is a rocky one that
begins with a refracted glimpse of himself in a mirror, a reassessment of self that requires he
consider how much he has been transformed by his Western education. “Une lueur de joie
éclaire tout le visage de Nalla. L’enthousiasme le gagne. Brusquement il se lève du lit. Il est
en face de Diattou. Ndiogou à qui il a tourné le dos à présent l’observe à travers la glace de
l’armoire et est frappé par ses yeux pétillants.”
99
The sight of his son Nalla’s excited and
enthusiastic reenactment of a wrestler’s bakk
100
despite appearances to the contrary, sparks a
slow but steady change in Ndiogou that comes to a head at the novel’s conclusion when he

96
Ibid, 26.
97
Ibid, 112.
98
Ibid, 94.
99
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 27.
100
The Wolof term for the poetic recitations in which Senegalese wrestlers engage in.
31
suggests that he and Diattou attend the much-anticipated, highly-mediatized wrestling match
that has the entire town of Louga a buzz in the final chapter of the book. “Diattou, et si on
allait aux arènes…Rien que pour voir la mine de Nalla...Pour nous assurer qu’il est encore
capable de s’amuser.”
101
Of his two parents, Ndiogou appears to be the most malleable, the
less rigid and set in his ways, and therefore, is the most willing to entertain, what Mr. Niang
believes attracts Nalla most to wrestling. “Je vais peut-être vous surprendre, dit monsieur
Niang…mais je crois que votre fils a un certain penchant pour l’esthétique de la forme, de la
couleur et des sons, magnifiée par le courage et la force en mouvement.”
102
But what Nalla
perceptively understands about wrestling, however, is far greater than what his teacher Mr.
Niang suggests. Seeing perceptibly clearer than most what Barthes calls wrestling’s
“emphatic function,”
103
Nalla is swept away by the grappling matches’ “germ,” a germ that
proliferates and that kindles Nalla’s rebellious, transgressive nature to break free from a
carceral-like home and the normalizing yolk of his parents’ domesticity.
104
“Je veux être un
grand lutteur comme Malaw.”
105
Indeed, the intimacy of the homosocial circle of wrestlers
Nalla discovers is, in Barthes words, powerfully transmutational, opening Nalla up to another
way of relating and being in the world. In short, “Nalla venait de découvrir un autre monde.”
Nalla as just discovered another world.
In L’appel des arènes then, the domestic sphere and domesticity are powerful life-sapping
forces that risk swallowing Nalla whole, consuming and metabolizing him, and thus,
figuratively depleting him of all his energy and life force. As chief veterinarian of Louga, a
large and expansive region in the novel, Ndiogou, Nalla’s father, is unable to save hundreds
of ailing and dying cattle despite his extensive Western training and expertise in veterinarian

101
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 147.
102
Ibid, 71.
103
Barthes, Roland. “In the Ring,” 4.
104
Ibid, 6.
105
Ibid, 112.
32
science. In this vein, fatherhood is despairingly linked metaphorically to an impotence and
inability to foster life, as local and national production diminishes due to a severe and
prolonged drought. Motherhood too, is painted as unfavorably sterile. Physically and verbally
abusive and exceedingly severe with all their neighboring children, Diattou is rumored to be
indirectly responsible for the sudden and unexplainable death of Nalla’s young playmate,
Birama.
106
“L’ère de la prison commença. Après les funérailles de Birama, invectives et
pluies de pières régulières sur ces «toubabs Njallaxaar» qui ne sont en réalité que des
« démm ». « Ils ont mange Birama, et ils le paieront. »”
107
Rumors quickly spread that
Diattou’s “white” family (“toubabs,” read: Western, white) is at the origin of an evil, occult,
and cannibalizing force, capable of consuming the town’s young children (“demm”:
devourers of spirits). Thus, motherhood, as modeled on Diattou’s adherence to Western
ideals, is equated with a powerful consumptive, metabolizing force. Finally, after women stop
coming to the local clinic to give birth because of Diattou’s rumored appetite for children’s
fleshly substance and spirits, her career implodes, as her status as chief midwife is forever
blemished. Failing then, to engender the supportive and nurturing space Nalla so desperately
needs as a growing and developing young boy, Nalla searches desperately for alternatives to
“family” as modeled on Western notions of bourgeois domesticity; and he finds it among,
fierce herculean wrestlers and a homosocial, queer community of kinship.
The Muscle (and Socio-cultural) Building Power of Milk
Mentioned at regular intervals a dozen times,
108
one could say that milk floods the pages
of L’appel des arènes. Occasionally, milk is framed in predictably gendered ways. In one
instance, for example, “laax”
109
is provocatively linked to a group of young girls’ breasts. “A

106
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, chapter 8.
107
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 68.
108
Milk, and milk-like, fatty substances are referenced a total of twelve times in the text (28, 34, 44,
53, 62, 74,75, 96, 121, 136, 141, 152).
109
Wolof term for boiled millet drenched in curdled milk.
33
l’heure du repas, des jeunes filles au pas ferme et au buste ondulé apportaient des calabasses
de « laax ». L’agréable odeur de lait caillé !”
110
Ironically, however, though one’s impulse
might be to equate such allusions with the objectification of women’s bodies given the
indirect, yet irrefutable association of young women’s breasts to the pronounced roundness of
milk-filled calabashes, overall, women – with the exception of Nalla’s grandmother and
mother – occupy minor roles in the novel.
111
Interestingly, moreover, sexualized
representations of women are frequently paired with equally eroticized portrayals of men.
And very often, the descriptions of women pale in sexual suggestiveness when compared to
those of their near-naked male counterparts. Immediately following the mention of “laax,” for
instance, a reference to a wrestler’s sweaty laboring body appears. “Et André, après être
régalé et avoir bu quelques gorges de l'outre qu’il venait de plonger dans le puits, piochait,
piochait, trempé de sueur sous l’éclatant soleil qui cuisait sa peau hâlée.”
112

Vacillating fluidly between the presence of an omniscient third-person narrator,
intermittent direct dialogue between characters, and the internal thoughts, emotions, and
desires of the novel’s key protagonists, the mention of “laax” in L’appel des arènes is a
notable one. While not the first time milk is named, it is, notwithstanding, an important
moment in the text in which to index milk, especially when contextualized in the novel’s
narrative arc. It is at this juncture in the book, Andre, the seasonal laborer, street vendor, and
wrestler with whom Nalla has forged a meaningful intergenerational friendship, has left Nalla
behind in Louga, and has returned home to his native Saalum, in anticipation of the rainy
season to begin laboring in his village’s fallow fields. “Nalla avait fait demi-tour, la tête
baissée, le cœur gros. Il avait senti la solitude l’éteindre intensément.”
113
Feeling weighed

110
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 53.
111
Indeed, one might characterize L’appel des arènes as a “masculinist” text, given the small number
of female protagonists and, or the pejorative way women are depicted in the novel. (I will discuss this
further when I examine the portrayal of Nalla’ mother, Diattou.)
112
Ibid, 53.
113
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 52.
34
down by sentimentality, and overcome with an unbearable loneliness after seeing his friend
Andre off at the local transportation hub, Nalla abruptly recalls Malaw, a friend of Andre’s
who resides in Louga, and with whom Andre and Nalla frequently visited and shared stories,
“où étaient mis en relief la force, le courage et la dignité des hommes d’autrefois.”
114
To sum,
Malaw becomes a surrogate buddy to Nalla in his friend Andre’s long absence.
Nourished on food, goblets of a milk-like drink known locally as “conkom,”
115
and
Malaw’s mythical tales of muscular men during Andre’s absence, storytelling, food, and
especially frothy milky drinks combine and flow generatively, provoking several out-of-body
experiences that transport Nalla to the heart of the Saalum, where he “imagines,” “sees,” and
“hears” Andre, tilling in the sunbaked fields. “Nalla s’est mis à attendre André. Souvent son
imagination le transportait au cœur du Saalum…Il « voyait » alors des hommes, torse nu,
suant sous le soleil ardent, défrichant une terre que des longs mois d’abandon avaient
desséchée. Des pioches viriles remuaient le sol meuble.”
116
Key moments like this one in the
novel offer a glimpse of the important place Sow Fall reserves for all forms of liquidity, both
literal and metaphorical. In Un grain de vie et d’espérance (2002),
117
in a mini-chapter titled
“Les liquides,” for example, Sow Fall theorizes about liquidity’s subliminal quality in
transcending its intended material and physiological functions; drink, she writes, nourishes
the social body, fortifying it at its deepest and profoundest roots.
118
But the crossroads at
which narrative, liquidity, and bodies converge in L’appel des arènes, are also suggestive of
something else, something that surpasses the normative properties fluidity is presumed to
possess. Beyond simply nourishing bodily forms, liquidity (sweat), social bodies (shirtless

114
Ibid.
115
Wolof term for a local, milky, Senegalese drink derived from palm trees that, in the narrative, is
routinely consumed by Nalla, Andre, and Malaw.
116
Ibid.
117
Sow, Fall. Un grain de vie et d’espérance. Françoise Truffaut éditions, 2002.
118
Sow, Fall. Idem: “Le boire dépasse largement son rôle physiologique. Il est l’essence (au propre
comme au figuré) qui, au dela de l’individu, arrose le corps social et le fortifie jusque dans les
profondeurs de ses racines” (54).
35
men), nation (la terre), men and masculinities (phallic and virile pickaxes) blend in a non-
normative and erotic amalgamation that, in the words of self-described queer Black
troublemaker, Alexis Pauline Gumbs,
119
“spills” and “overflows” in unimaginable and
unorthodox ways, challenging readers’ habitual ways of taking in the world, sometimes in
questionable and problematic ways:
“Une chose est fantastique par-dessus tout : c’est quand Malaw fait son entrée dans les
arènes ! Tu vois maman, il y pénètre comme un tigre échappé d’une cage, tout couvert
de lait caillé, de la tête jusqu’aux pieds.”
120

As (Western) readers, how are we to interpret Nalla’s eroticized gaze of shirtless sweaty men?
Or alternately, as in the above excerpt, Nalla’s enraptured descriptions
121
of ferocious, feline-
like men, covered from head to toe in milk, as they make their way onto the sandy arena
where grappling matches take place? While on the surface, for instance, Malaw’s black,
curd-covered body might appear innocuous – indeed, not a single critic, to my knowledge has
mentioned it to-date – his advent onto the scene at the conclusion of chapter three is
significant. Covered in fermented, thick white curd (known locally in Senegal as lait caillé),
this flashback vignette of Malaw’s glistening, muscly body doused in milk is one, that has up
to this moment in the novel, been veiled and shrouded in mystery, no doubt because it harks
back to the furtive and “inconsequential bucolic pleasures” of Foucauldian scenes of “village
sexuality.”
122
Indeed, this black body covered in milk is the event inciting Nalla’s apathy in
the novel’s opening pages, as well as marking the secret that Nalla (from the introductory first
chapter thru to the third) has for a long time been aching to disclose. “Nalla a laché sa réponse

119
I was inspired by Gumbs’ metaphorical and poetic treatise on spilling. See Gumbs, Alexis Pauline.
Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. Duke University Press, 2016.
120
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 28.
121
There are two such descriptions, one appearing at the close of chapter 3 (28) and again in the final
chapter (152), as if bookending the novel.
122
See Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality (1990), 31, and the “game called “curdled milk.””
36
comme une lourde charge dont il voulait ardemment se débarrasser depuis longtemps.”
123
And
while hinting at a twelve-year old boy’s sexual objectification of his male elders at this
juncture might shock any reader, it is not implausible when Nalla’s descriptions are read
alongside the portraiture of contemporary French photographer Denis Rouvre.
One of several of Rouvre’s many collections centering on athletic men to be published in a
stylized coffee table book format,
124
Lamb: Lutteurs du Sénégal (2012) is a large, bulky, and
unusually sized text, shaped in a near perfect square. Adding to its aesthetic uniqueness, its
pages are unnumbered and, apart from the “Preface,” “Introduction,” and a final page of
“Thanks” penned by Rouvre himself, all the pages are jet black – a black of the blackest,
glossiest, and shiniest hue. Framing the pages are the cropped, chiseled faces, and equally
well-defined, scantily dressed bodies of Senegalese Laamb wrestlers. The upper- and mid-
trunk (abs, chests, arms, and shoulders) are clearly the photographer’s focus, as only a handful
of photos picture the men’s powerful legs. Splashes of colorful men’s underwear, headbands,
shells, leather necklaces picturing the men’s spiritual leaders known as marabouts, military-
like dog tags, beads, leather armbands, leather body-straps, and mystical-looking amulets or
gris-gris pepper the photos. The men’s black bodies appear, through seemingly uncanny
professional editing and photoshopping to intentionally and effortlessly, blend with the
foreground and background of the pages’ razor-sharp edges, rendering the boundaries
between the corporeal and the spatial frustratingly impossible to delineate. Except for a few of
the wrestlers pictured,
125
all signs of individuation have been erased, and the near entirety of
the men photographed are simply called “lutteurs,” rendering the men unidentifiable and
indistinguishable. In short, in the words of Christina Sharpe (2016), the photographed

123
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 26.
124
Rouvre, Denis. Lamb : Lutteurs du Sénégal. Somogy Editions d’Art, 2012.
125
The men who are named, like Bombardier, Ousmane Coma, Babacar, Youssou Ndour 2, Porro, and
Madou Wade, are those exceptional men who have made a name for themselves via wrestling in the
bidonvilles of Dakar. Bombardier, the largest and most muscular of the men, appears more powerful
than the rest, as he is often introduced by “chef.”
37
wrestlers have been “transubstantiated” and made into “fungible commodities that retain only
a semblance of flesh and blood.”
126

And yet, despite the wrestlers’ transubstantiation, there are signs of gushing excess that
resist fungibility, like facial scars and beads of perspiration that disrupt the smoothness of the
book’s glossy black pages. Or a wrestler’s playful bulging eyes, as he attempts to exteriorize
his inner ferociousness. Or the glistening golden sand of the Senegalese coast covering the
men’s bodies like glitter that serves to buffer and define the men’s silhouettes against the jet-
black backdrop with which they seamlessly fuse. Or finally, the indisputably uncanny
liquidity of curdled white milk that appears, as if painted on the muscular bodies of the
Laamb wrestlers:

Figures 2, Figure 3, and Figure 4 : Senegalese Wrestlers of Laamb, drenched in
milk, Denis Rouvre, Lamb (2012).

“A l’opposé de la puissance virile des lutteurs sénégalais de la série « Lamb, »
c’est ici la délicatesse presque féminine des sumos qui retient notre attention.”
127

The above epigraph, taken from another of Rouvre’s collections – “Sumo” – suggests, that on
a spectrum of virility, Senegalese Lamb and Japanese sumo wrestlers are polar, binary
opposites. Whereas the Senegalese men embody “la puissance virile” for Mathieu Oui, the
Japanese sumo wrestlers, with their “longs cheveux de jais relevés en chignon, lèvres fines et
ourlées, silhouettes rondes et voluptueuses,"
128
are the epitome of femininity. In the example

126
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 30.
127
Oui, Matthieu. « Sumo » de Denis Rouvre. Commentateur :
http://www.rouvre.com/fr/gallery/19/sumo
128
Ibid.
38
above, it is for me the unsettling presence of curdled milk, however, that exhibits an
unanticipated ability to disrupt and trouble the presumed hyper-masculine ranking in which
Oui freezes and fixes the Senegalese Laamb wrestlers.
As one turns the pages of Rouvre’s text, Lamb: Lutteurs du Sénégal, the wrestlers’
portraits progress steadily from full-frontal shots of chiseled faces and trunks, to culminating
scenes of men bathed in milk, to then climaxing photos of men grappling, their bodies freeze-
framed in suggestive poses, intimately and erotically locked. But it is the appearance of the
men drenched in milk, and the strategic placement of these photos just shy of the coffee table
book’s conclusion that are reminiscent of pornographic “money shots,” those scenes in which
men’s “semen, as much as the [male] actors…has a starring and very important role to
play.”
129
These explosive milky photographs, much like the “money shots” they suggestively
mimic, are what Lisa Jean Moore would term “opiates,” illusory images erroneously
signifying liberatory release. In fact, Moore argues, because such displays occur within
oppressive patriarchal systems of male domination, they bolster the false belief such acts are
agentive, and instead signal how some men (poor, undereducated, disenfranchised) are
subjugated to “the control of other men deemed more worthy, esteemed, or powerful”
130

(think white French photographers, older men of more social capital, sports managers,
promoters, advertisers, and the like). This begs a troubling question: how are we as readers
(and scholars), through our refracted gazes (via Rouvre’s lens and, or Nalla’s exhilarating
milky narratives), complicit in commodifying, objectifying, and subjugating subsets of men
deemed less than powerful? In other words, as a bearer of a powerful gaze, is Nalla culpable
of thingifying Andre and Malaw? Or is Nalla’s look, a transgressive, oppositional gaze?
131

129
Moore, Lisa Jean. Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid (2007),78.
130
Ibid, 90.
131
For more on the oppositional gaze, see bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female
Spectatorship.”
39
Echoing Foucault, bell hooks advances that the eyes present “margins, gaps, and locations
on and through the body where agency can be found.”
132
Though she applies this theory to
black women spectators who resist the objectifying male gaze, one might extend her argument
to include children. As a subset of the population, children are, to some degree, socially
invisible; that is to say, that surrounded by a complex network of adults with greater relational
power, children possess very little social leverage. Such is the case for Nalla, who throughout
L’appel des arènes must constantly defer to elders, primarily his parents, Ndiougou and
Diattou, and to his teacher, Monsieur Niang. But Nalla’s subject position is also quite
complex. As a child of a bourgeois, middle-class, upwardly mobile, normative couple, Nalla,
despite his young age, also simultaneously occupies a position of power, as he possesses
social and cultural capital, the poor, marginalized, adult male wrestlers lack in the fictional
world of Louga. Is Nalla then, reproducing the relational power to which he himself is
subjected, or is he (figuratively) “courageously looking, [while] defiantly declar[ing]: “Not
only will I stare [at these men]. I want my look to change [their/our reality].”
133

The Fine Motor Muscles of Feet

Si un jour tes pas te portent au pied de ce Monument, pense à tous ceux qui ont
sacrifié leur liberté ou leur vie pour la Renaissance de l’Afrique.
134

The principal functions of feet, to support one’s weight and to ensure one’s balance, are by
now universally known.
135
Recently, researchers have discovered, that feet also play an
important role in generating, storing, and dissipating energy.
136
A mechanical paradox, the
human foot is abnormally stiff; nevertheless, it is supple and flexible enough, allowing for

132
Hooks, Bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship,” 116.
133
Ibid.
134
O’Toole, Sean. “Made in Pyongyang.” Frieze, no. 147, 2012.
135
Any introductory college-level physiology course text.
136
See Smith, Ross E. et al.. “The energetic function of the human foot and its muscles during
accelerations and decelerations.”
40
forward propulsion, all the while possessing limber, spring-like characteristics that are
constantly producing and recycling mechanical energy.
137
Feet, in other words, are
powerhouses of vitality, and their physiological complexity is matched only by their intricate
musculature. Metaphors associated with feet are equally, if not more, elaborate. Consider the
active and agentive quality feet take on in the above epigraph, for example, taken from the
engraving found at the foot of Le Monument de la Renaissance. The “si un jour tes pas te
portent au pied…” of the principal clause subtly implies that it is feet, that one day might
reorient the body to which they are attached, to the foot of the Le Monument de la
Renaissance. Put another way, it is not you that will decide to visit the statue; rather, it is your
feet that may decide to direct you there. Memory, moreover, links the principal and
subordinate clauses: the memory of those that have fallen in the struggle for liberation, and
the memory housed in one’s feet, are both memories capable of guiding one back to a place
where one has no recollection of ever having been. Suggestively, the epigraph infers a mind /
body disconnect, wherein the body (via one’s feet) has usurped one’s ability to ‘act’ of one’s
own free will.
Despite the chapter’s allusion to discourse and language in its title, Frantz Fanon’s “The
Black Man and Language” too mobilizes feet prominently. In the postcolonial era, where
disalienation is the key,
138
via a “liberation of the black man from the arsenal of complexes
that germinated in a colonial situation,”
139
it is important we pay attention to feet, as they
reveal a “weakening of relations with others,”
140
as well as a “breakdown in judgment.”
141
To
adopt “aerial way[s] of walking,” for example, is to put on theatrical airs of distinction and

137
See Kelly, Luke A. et al.. “Intrinsic foot muscles contribute to elastic energy storage and return in
the human.”
138
Fanon, Frantz, “The Black Man and Language,” 20-1.
139
Ibid.,14.
140
Ibid., 16.
141
Ibid., 20-1.
41
superiority,
142
that weaken our relationality and being for others. Instead of posturing, it is
important to “stand” committed, and to remain firmly “grounded” in a relationality that resists
perpetuating power differentials originating in the colonial era. For postcolonial subjects,
particularly men, where one walks, the assuredness of one’s step, the firmness with which one
stands, and the “cultural” weight one assumes
143
– literally and figuratively – all determine
one’s volition to change the relational and racialized dynamics of power.
144
Furthermore,
taking a “stand” and adopting a “stance,” is in many ways associated with the concept of
becoming a “man.” Sow Fall’s, L’appel des arènes, considers repeatedly such thematics,
however, one needs simply to carefully “track” feet and how they ambulate in novel.
What follows, are just a couple of salient examples.
“Nalla lui avait renvoyé le ballon. Ainsi s’était engagé une partie de football à deux entre
Nalla et l’homme qui pouvait avoir trente ans…Nalla avait été frappé par l’épaisseur et la
forme démesurée de ses pieds.”
145
Marking Nalla’s first contact with the wrestlers, this
excerpt is a notable one for a few reasons. The scene marks a connection between a rather odd
duo, a twelve-year-old boy, and a thirty-year-old man, who engage in an impromptu and
playful game of soccer. “Nalla était émerveillé. André lui apparaissait comme un être irréel et
il se sentait fortement attiré par la simplicité et la bonté de cet homme.”
146
The volleying back
and forth, the synchronous movement of bodies, the powerful extension of legs and feet, the
ball that serves as a buffer, absorbing the impact of kinetic energy : all of these, are evocative
of a poetic scene that signals the beginning of a budding intergenerational friendship, a
kinship that transcends the relationality of the nuclear family unit. The scene also marks the
first time Nalla exits the confines of his family’s courtyard, hinting at his innate curiosity to

142
Ibid., 4.
143
Ibid., 2.
144
Frantz, Fanon. “The Black Man and Language.” Black Skins, White Masks. Translated by Richard
Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.
145
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 31.
146
Ibid., 33.
42
explore and connect with the world of Louga, despite his parents many attempts to surveille
him and insulate him from all that is ‘outside.’ “Nalla l’avait accompagné sur une distance de
cent mètres environ. Ils ne s’étaient rien dit. Nalla…marchait tête baissée et regardait le
mouvement de ses pieds en les comparant à ceux d’André.”
147
A contemplative walk at the
conclusion of their impromptu soccer game, as Nalla, walking alongside André, sees his new
friend off on his way, further intimates Nalla’s wish to relate to others differently.
If Nalla’s transgressive mode of navigating the world gestures at hope and change,
founded on new ways of relating to others across differences, the promise is rather short-
lived, as Nalla’s parents, Diattou and Ndiogou, vie continuously to reorient Nalla’s energy in
a manner that reproduces the status quo and its normalizing relationality centering on the
reproduction of bourgeois, middle-class domesticity. Indeed, the couple’s mode of moving
through the world repeatedly undercuts their son’s receptive manner of being for others. “Le
refus de Diattou et de Ndiogou, leur obstination à vouloir détourner Nalla des tam-tams, c’est
le rejet d’une partie de leurs racines…ils se trouveront alors dans la position inconfortable de
celui qui trébuche éternellement sur un fil suspendu dans le vide, ne pouvant poser le pied ni à
droite, ni à gauche…c’est cela l’aliénation, et c’est ce qui guette ce couple…déséquilibre
physique…déséquilibre spirituel…déséquilibre mental…”
148
And though diverging with his
parents by seeking connections with a large and expansive kin group of wrestlers seemed, at
the novel’s outset, to offer an alternative to the vitality-sapping and normalizing unit of the
family, Nalla slowly comes to realize that the world of wrestling and the wrestlers offers
different sets of relations that manifest distinct and unique hierarchies premised on a complex
social organization founded on a style of restrictive patronage with which he must now
contend and wrestle. This then begs the question: is one ever able to circumvent completely

147
Ibid., 35.
148
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 73.
43
incorporative and metabolic networks power that menace to swallow one whole? I seek, in
chapter two to meditate on this question at length.

44
CHAPER TWO

MEAT

Resisting Meatification: A Beefy Leading Man
Djibril Diop Mambéty, Touki Bouki (1973)

Figure 5 : The Carters’ On The Run 2 (OTR II) promotional poster
versus Touki Bouki (1973) film still.

Thematic Overlap: Aminata Sow Fall versus Djibril Diop Mambéty

In the freeze-frame shot on the right, taken from Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 avant-garde
film Touki Bouki (Wolof for The Journey of the Hyena), Magaye Niang, in the film’s lead
male role as Mory, a cowherd, is pictured driving a bull-horned, skull-mounted motorcycle;
Mareme Niang (no relation to her co-star), cast in the role of Anta, Mory’s university-student
girlfriend, is seated immediately behind him. The pair stare off into the distance while driving
in the rural outskirts of Dakar, Senegal’s capital. In the black and white promotional poster
for their On The Run 2 (OTR II) World Tour on the left that began in June 2018, Shawn
Corey Carter and Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter (known artistically as Jay-Z and Beyoncé)
sit atop a near-identical motorbike, a delicate grey screen serves as an artistic backdrop.
Reproducing the arresting poses of Mambéty’s young Senegalese stars to near perfection, the
Carters (as Beyoncé and Jay-Z are collectively known), by varying news sources, are reported
45
to have been attempting to channel the renegade Senegalese couple’s cool, wild energy.
149

Indeed, traces of the vintage image on the right undeniably surface in the modernized version
on the left.
Sutured and repeatedly framed together to heighten their likeness, the twin images were
posted and retweeted thousands of times online. Many people, commenting on the repeated
pairing, praised Beyoncé and Jay-Z for propelling a near-forgotten African classic back into
the spotlight some 50 years after its initial screening at the 1973 International Film Festival in
Cannes, France. Others, however, took the Carters to task for their seeming blatant cultural
appropriation that initially failed to credit Mambéty as inspirational muse for the OTR II
World Tour’s promotional campaign. To sum, that there was, in the words of bell hooks, “no
trace”
150
or mention of Mambéty (or his film Touki Bouki, for that matter) only serves to
support hooks’ “over-riding fear…that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be
continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance [consumers’] palates [and]
that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten.”
151
The Carters’ appropriative act of
stylizing and fashioning anew the distinctive, quintessential iconography of Mambéty’s 1973
film would have, no doubt been for hooks, an example of what she calls a consumptive
cannibalistic exchange that eradicates the Other (and otherness) by displacing difference,
denying Others’ cultural and historical specificity via decontextualization.
152

I would not go quite so far, however. For if the Carters’ unacknowledged, appropriative act
is, as hooks suggests consumptive and cannibalistic, I would add, that “swallowing up”
Mambéty’s stars, Mory and Anta, is also metabolic. That is to say that while culturally
appropriative acts are indeed incorporative, one never fully masters the effects (try as one

149
See Ryan Gilbey, “How Beyoncé and Jay-Z put a Visionary African Film Back in the Spotlight.”
The Guardian, June 17, 2018.
150
Inspiration for cultural appropriation “that leaves no trace” is derived from bell hooks’ essay
“Eating the Other,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (2015).
151
Ibid, 39.
152
Ibid, 31.
46
might) the ‘consumed’ Others will have on those doing ‘the devouring,’ either creatively (as
in the case of the Carters) and/or visually (for the viewers), even if it is tacitly assumed the
Others being ‘eaten up’ and ‘consumed’ representationally occupy only a passive role in the
cannibalistic exchange. Put another way, difference is never fully eradicated and never quite
forgotten, as traces always and forever remain. Moreover, traces and, or trace quantities –
presumed to be small and insignificant – are agentively powerful, as they often tend to take on
a life of their own, acting and impressing on, transforming and transfiguring organisms doing
the “swallowing up” from the inside in unruly, wild, and un-manageable/-imaginable ways.
In this vein, the present chapter, “MEAT,” picks up where the first, “MUSCLES,” left off, at
a crossroads not much unlike the one at which the non-normative character Nalla, the central
protagonist of L’appel des arènes (1982), finds himself at the conclusion of Sow Fall’s novel.
In the final pages leading up to the long-awaited battle between rival champion wrestlers,
Malal and Tonnerre, readers learn that the much-anticipated match on which all the tension of
Sow Fall’s novel centers is rigged, engineered in favor of the local champion, Malal. Past his
prime, lacking the physical conditioning required to win the match, and having not grappled
in an arena for years, Malal, the wrestler of rural Louga, will, despite all these important
shortcomings, triumph over his younger “foreign” rival, Tonnerre. What’s more, the
organized exhibition fight is not the point here; an affirmation of a specific kind of manhood
and masculinity is. Indeed, in collusion with the aging village patriarch and his supposed
opponent, Tonnerre, Malal’s sole purpose in putting on the spectacle is to draw all the young
men who have left the rural province for the city, Dakar, back to the rural hamlet, Louga. The
intended goal is to tap and harness the men’s energy in a reinvestment in and redevelopment
of the countryside. ‘Culture,’ via wrestling in other words, is mobilized in the service of
47
‘village,’ and is slated to become the driving impetus for the development of the
disenfranchised rural zones, and thus, by proxy, the Senegalese nation.
153

In the spirit of development and progress, and in an era noted for the stringent
restructuring measures under the aegis of global financial institutions like the World Bank and
the International Monetary Funding (IMF), the message of ‘growth’ stimulated by a
transformation of the nation through a reinvestment in territory and agriculture, was an
important one in the sociopolitical context of postcolonial Senegal in the 1980s, the period
marking the publication of Sow Fall’s L’appel des arènes.
154
Furthermore, with the rise in
volatility of the separatist movement in the southern region of the Casamance and the then
anticipated violent fallout following the transition of presidential power from Léopold Sédar
Senghor to his hand-picked successor Abdou Diouf in 1981, the coming together of an
intersectional group of diverse Senegalese men “venant de toutes les regions”
155
at the
wrestling sands in the novel’s finale, is an exceptionally powerful and symbolic scene, as it
espouses a call for homogeneity and national unity. Indeed, the narrative focus in the final
chapter of Sow Fall’s text shifts dramatically, from what readers might have imaged all along
to be the central subject of the novel (wrestling and the culminating fight between Malal and
his opponent, Tonnerre), to a lengthy description of the socially representative group of male
spectators in attendance, to allusions to what it means ‘to be a man,’ and finally – and perhaps
most importantly – to the transformational, interior, and reflexive change experienced by
Nalla and his father, Ndiogou.
“Ndiogou transpire abondamment. Il se passe quelque chose de confuse en lui. Surprise ?
Angoisse ? In craint d’avoir trahi le trouble qui l’assomme. ”
156
This turn inwards marks the

153
Such is, I theorize, the hype around wrestling today.
154
In a cyclical fashion, this theme has reemerged, and characterizes today’s political discourse around
economic development.
155
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes, 148.
156
Ibid, 153, emphasis added.
48
divergent paths to national building and development that are the subject of the present
chapter. For privy to the men’s plotting to machinate the outcome of the wrestling match in
favor of his friend Malal, Nalla, faced with opposing options, must decide to either engage or
withdraw from participating in and promoting the exhibition fight, all the while rejecting his
father, and aligning himself with the wrestler and surrogate father and kin figure, Malal.
Recognizing the economic future and viability of Louga is at stake after serious reflection,
Nalla decides to participate in the orchestrated combat as an intermediary fetish boy. Among
other ceremonial duties, like bathing Malal in mysterious concoctions and dousing his body
with goblets full of curdled milk, as fetish boy and master of ceremonies, Nalla is also
charged with arousing, inciting, and sustaining the crowd’s frenzied and fevered passion. Put
another way, at the center of the circulation of the spectators’ fervor and desire, Nalla plays a
salient role, contributing symbolically, albeit indirectly, to stimulating growth, development,
and economic prosperity through the sale of tickets, the waging and betting on the match’s
anticipated victor, and the reaping of profit to be had at the conclusion of the match. And
while on the surface this might appear benign, Sow Fall’s casting of Nalla in this role is
problematic, as it suggests that national boom and progress ultimately resides in the hands of
the burgeoning middleclass. Nalla and Ndiogou, Nalla’s father, in other words, become, by
the novel’s end, embodiments of the ideal men needed to spearhead Senegal’s future, while
the wrestlers fade into the background, swallowed-up by the text.
“Ndiogou et Nalla sont encore dans le salon qu’ils n’ont pas quitté depuis leur arrivée.
Diattou est passée près d’eux ; les yeux cernés, le visage flasque et le dos courbé. Son rouge à
levres débordé. Elle est vêtue d’une chemisette et d’une jupe plisée.”
157
Perplexing still, is the
novel’s troubling final page that, at least representationally, further implies a male-centered,
bourgeois national renaissance. In the final few lines of L’appel des arènes, the paternal-filial

157
Ibid, the book’s final page, 156.
49
bonds uniting Nalla and Ndiougou have been resutured and renewed, while the filial-maternal
bonds have been forever severed, as Diattou, Nalla’s mother, exits the home through the
living room in a crazed and deranged daze. What’s more, that Nalla and Ndiogou return home
from the match without it having ever concluded to reclaim the salon, “qu’ils n’ont pas quitté
depuis leur arrivée,” is reminiscent of the plotting and planning behind closed doors with
which the novel so ominously began, when Ndiougou, Nalla’s father, and Monsieur Niang,
Nalla’s teacher, schemed and conspired to surveille Nalla in order to plot and chart his
‘development.’ Put another way, all the Others outside, not privy to what is and will be
organized, planned, and discussed on the inside, are symbolically excluded from the social
fold, marginalized – as is the case of the precariously vulnerable wrestlers – and metabolized
(i.e., used) for political ends. Bringing this idea to the fore, is the final note of the novel that
alludes to entire subcategories of men that will inevitably be kept metaphorically ‘outdoors.’
What might it mean to shine a critical light on these marginalized men, to the liminal
bodies on the periphery of a bourgeois, male-centered national project underpinned by a
process of elimination targeting undesirables (symbolized by Nalla and Ndiogou’s takeover of
the domestic space)? Such is the goal of Chapter II, in which I will argue that it is a particular
class of men, via powerful interlocking structures and institutions, that is especially
vulnerable to a social metabolization that consigns them permanently to the outside. Djibril
Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, and the non-normative Mory, will serve to support this claim.
Frequently compared with Touki Bouki, however, I want also to consider the final scene in
Mambety’s Hyènes (1992). Analyzed alongside each other, the two films, often considered a
continuum by critics, share much in common, despite the nineteen-year gap separating the
films’ debuts.
158
As they are repeatedly appraised and contrasted in scholarship, money, debt,

158
Dima, Vlad. “Trauma and Zombie Narratives in Hyènes.” Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety’s
Films, Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 106-43.
50
exploitative relations of power, and revenge are just some of the themes the two films have in
common. Less evident, however, are the themes of stasis and stagnation, powerless
resignation, consumption, and as already alluded to several times above, metabolization.
Beginning specifically with the representations of slaughtered animals permeating the two
films, I wish to analyze and plot the symbolic mapping of the interspecies metaphors, and
argue that subclasses of men undergo a unique type of objectification I will call
meatification.
159
It is in other words, by first meatifying men deemed undesirable –
symbolically transforming their bodies into (animal) flesh – that a socio-political
expendability is achieved, facilitating in turn, their relational consumption by elite subgroups
of men.
Men and Livestock, Livestock and Men: Mory Among Men
One might not think to pause and consider the juxtaposition of men and livestock in Touki
Bouki, Mambéty’s first feature-length film screened in 1973 in Cannes, France. After all,
scenes of cattle, goats, lambs, and chickens do not figure prominently in Mambéty’s film
centering on a young Senegalese couple seeking to leave their native Senegal on an ocean
liner for Paris, France, by ingenious scheming, plotting, hustling, and thieving. Nevertheless,
it is difficult not to be taken by the symbiotic relationality between the human and non-human
animals in the rural setting in the first five or so minutes of the film. Serenaded by the
melodious cadence of a Fulani flute playing gently in the background, the viewer is invited
(or enticed?) to sit back and take in a peaceful pastoral scene of a boy riding a cow, a herd of
cattle following closely behind, and a group of men, circling and guiding the group. Almost
immediately, the viewer is struck by a lush green rural space overrun by a slow-moving drove

159
The term ‘meatification’ comes to us from food scholar Tony Weis. Meatification, in Weis’ view,
describes a global agricultural model of production, as well as a rise in alimentary consumer habits,
that center on meat. I use this term metaphorically to describe how this model of production and
practice of consumption ensnares men, meatifying them, metaphorizing them as meaty, and relegating
them to a subject position I will call, further on, meathood.
51
of livestock kicking up a cloud of dirt, as it meanders and makes its way toward them. As the
slow-moving herd of predominately white oxen comes prominently into focus, one notices
that a bare-chested boy and the cow he is riding are the filmmaker’s focus, as the pair,
through a slow-progressing close-up, eventually take over the frame, appearing as if they are
being “devoured” by the camera. But the boy atop a cow and the herd of cattle behind them
are not alone. A group of thin, older men (2, possibly 3?) draped in loose-fitting, traditional
Fulani herdsmen attire, following alongside and at the rear of the herd, are also present. As
they corral the herd, orienting and guiding the beasts (and the boy?), the viewer imagines the
boy and the cattle are being led to verdant pastures for grazing.
Suddenly, however, the frame cuts from lush green fauna to a dry, sunbaked terrain, and
eventually, to a building with a white ceramic-tiled interior. The structure, the viewer quickly
realizes, is an abattoir, where one of the white heifers (from the herd led by the boy in the
previous scene?), lassoed at the horns and strung by rope at its hoofs, is being led to slaughter,
the stark sunshine of the preceding rural landscape contrasting ominously with the structure’s
dark, bloody, and noisy interior. In a rapid, three-to-four-minute sequence that follows, a
second group of men – this time, more numerous, musclier, and dressed in blood-soaked
clothing – tug at the cow by its horns, topple it by knocking it off balance, take hold of its
head, twist its neck, and then, rather quickly, slit the animal’s throat. Aiming the camera
directly at the site of the gash on the animal’s outstretched muscly throat, Mambéty
overwhelms his viewers, flooding the frame with a viscous vision of spurting blood. It is
difficult not to imagine the viewer seeing Touki Bouki for the first time involuntarily flinching
in their seat at this sight, as they take in the sentient beast’s final moments of fleeting life,
underscored by the camera’s focus on the animal’s twitching limbs, as its bloody life source
(quite literally) drains from its body. Ending the slaughtering, the group of five men circle the
massive animal, attach it by one of its hind legs to a mechanical apparatus, and then slowly
52
lift and hoist it vertically to drain it of as much blood as possible before presumably cleaning,
butchering, and preparing it for distribution and final sale.
As viewers, how are we to interpret this butchery? What are we to make of being brought
within reach of the spasming loss of sentient life? Finally, what does any of this – if at all –
have to do with “being a man,” manhood, and manliness in Senegal, just thirteen years post-
independence?
For one, the abrupt shift from a pastoral landscape to an abattoir outfitted with hoists and
pulleys is notable because it hints at a radical and brutal mechanization of the rural space.
Formerly one of wild and untamed flora and fauna, rural Senegal, as intimated by Touki
Bouki’s opening pastoral scene, has rapidly become a domesticated and ordered space
systematized and developed to maximize the production and supply of energy (albeit this
energy is symbolically caloric) and capital. The large number of cattle awaiting slaughter
framed by the camera just before the film cuts to Mory on his motorbike, suggests that the
large amount of meat that will be produced from a day’s slaying exceeds the village’s daily
nutritional needs, and will require that it be quickly transported elsewhere to avoid spoiling.
As a matter of fact, it appears as if the herd being butchered is one in a series of droves that
will be slaughtered on this morning, thus creating a sizeable surplus of meat intended (no
doubt) for mass sale through a tentacle-like network of regional distribution. Such a
representation depicting the rise in meat production and eventual consumption is indicative of
what food scholars call the global ‘livestock revolution,’ one in a myriad of dramatic dietary
changes that began at the end of World War II.
160
And though the scope of production
represented in Touki Bouki is nowhere near the scale of today’s complex, agro-industrial meat
manufacturing plants, by drawing viewers’ attention to such wanton destruction of sentient

160
See Sidney Mintz’s Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past
(1997), especially Chapter 2, “Food and Its Relationship to Concepts of Power,” 17-32, in which
Mintz details the role of power in shifting alimentary consumption habits.
53
life, Mambéty connects consumption with the capitalist world order taking hold of the post-
independent Senegalese landscape. To be sure, critical geographers like Tony Weis are
challenging dominant critical food narratives claiming that a rise in meat production and
consumption are simply the assumed natural result of economic progress and the increased
affluence of growing middle classes (also evident in Mambéty’s film). Rather, Weis (and, no
doubt, the likeminded Mambéty), understand (and understood) the role of alimentary
production (especially meat processing) in the global economy to be an essential element of
the capitalist logic through and through.
161

But if altering modes of alimentary consumption can be attributed to the nascent capitalist
order taking hold of Senegal, the new economic order might also be credited for the shifting
relations of power between men. Or at least, that is how I wish to read Mory’s subjectivity, by
analyzing his place among the oscillating representations of grouped men in Touki Bouki’s
opening scene. If the film’s introductory pastoral and subsequent abattoir scenes present a
representative transition from an agrarian economy to one founded on increasing
mechanization and industrialization, the opposing scenes also represent a dramatic recasting
of what it means to be a man. Often analyzed as a flashback of Mory as a young child,
162
the
boy riding atop a cow in the film’s opening vignette should not be un-sutured from the social
milieu in which he is imagined. The male-centered socialization to which the child is
undoubtedly subjected, symbolized by the close-knit group of men moving alongside and
behind the boy, guiding and symbolically orienting the boy along a well-treaded path toward
slaughter, for example, should not be forgotten. Put another way, while the boy at first glance
appears to be leading the herd of cattle while riding atop a brown cow, this agentive role is
transitory, as he moves through the world as a member of a larger, stratified community of

161
Weis, Tony. “Meatification and Accumulation.” Animal Liberation Currents,
https://animalliberationcurrents.com/meatification-and-accumulation/. Accessed 30 May 2022.
162
See Dima, Vlad. “Aural Space and the Sonic Rack Focus in Touki Bouki.” Sonic Space in Djibril
Diop Mambety’s Films, Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 41-73.
54
powerful men. Furthermore, as a young, unmarried, and unlanded young man, residing in an
increasingly mechanized rural space and possessing little or no material wealth, Mory lacks
little to no social leverage. Additionally, the powerlessness of the ‘transitional’ personhood
Mory embodies – no longer an infant child, but not yet an adult male – in the masculinist
environment of the abattoir, comes to the fore. On the one hand, as a small-framed boy, Mory
is incapable of participating in a world requiring the brute, physical force of powerfully built
adult men and, on the other hand, as a young, dependent child, Mory does not wield any
social capital, as he is incapable of participating fully in a wage-based economy that, as Lisa
A. Lindsay argues, in the early twentieth-century increasingly equates masculinity with access
to money.
163

Nevertheless, Mory’s sexed male body, and breadwinner, make-money-at-all-costs ethos,
are at least two things marking Mory as normatively ‘manly.’All else appears to color him as
queer.
164
For one, Mory breaks with the brutal mechanized rural world of his childhood,
leaving his hamlet for Dakar on a motorcycle, a means of transport Lindsey B. Green-Simms
maintains is associated with youthful angst, as it is often, in the case of West Africa,
connected with the transportation and accessibility of non-elites (especially socio-
economically marginalized young men).
165
Additionally, Mory’s break with a world that
traffics in the mass killing of animals and his choice to affix a zebu’s skull and horns on the
handles of his motorbike, signal more than just the lawless rebelliousness often cited by
critics.
166
There is no doubt the horns affixed to Mory’s motorcycle symbolize danger and
protectiveness, as animals use their horns (primarily in the wild) to defend themselves from

163
For further discussion on the importance of money in defining men and masculinities see Lisa A.
Lindsay’s “Money, Marriage, and Masculinity on the Colonial Nigerian Railway.”
164
By queer, I mean odd and non-normative. I do not mean queer as the term is often used and
understood today in the West, as a political identity coalescing around non-normative, sexual
practices.
165
Green-Simms, Lindsey B. Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa (2017), 98-99.
166
All of the critics surveyed characterize Mory and Anta and countercultural and or rebellious.
55
larger, predatory animals. Male animals with horns (like bucks), moreover, use horns to
establish authority and dominance. Considering Mory’s ‘weakness’ on several levels (social,
economic, gerontocratic, and not to mention, ethnic, as Mory (as he is portrayed in the film) is
likely not Wolof etc.), the meaning of the skull and horns affixed to his motorbike take on
important gendered significance: they mimic a reclaimed prosthesis of sorts that symbolize,
through their appearance of suspended flight atop the handlebars of his motorcycle, Mory’s
manhood and manliness in limbo. Additionally, if the zebu’s skull and horns affixed to
Mory’s motorbike signal a visible warning or danger, they also, by their mere presence, signal
characteristics Mory lacks: self-assuredness, confidence, and security (interpreted widely) –
attributes often equated with maleness and manliness. In fact, it is precarity, insecurity, and
instability, on the contrary, that frequently and powerfully mark Mory, and that are
underscored by his constant movement through the streets of Dakar, visually communicated
by Mory’s inability to rest and take up space.
Feeling hemmed in is also communicated aurally, as Vlad Dima has so astutely pointed out
in “Aural Space and the Sonic Rack Focus in Touki Bouki.”
167
In his chapter-length study of
Mambéty’s “aesthetic and thematic lynchpin” at both visual and aural levels and focusing on
the internal conflict between image and sound,
168
Dima demonstrates how sound and image
work together rather than against each other to convey meaning throughout the film. While I
find Dima’s analysis of aural narrative planes in Mambéty’s film intriguing, I am far more
interested in the brief yet notable, oscillating moments of detectable silence, and how they,
through near aural stillness and calm, also contribute to the film’s symbolic meaning making.
Three fleeting moments in the first fifteen minutes of the film are exemplary of the cultural
work this laboring calmness performs. The first of these arrives just before the spectator

167
Dima, Vlad. “Aural Space and the Sonic Rack Focus in Touki Bouki.” Sonic Space in Djibril Diop
Mambety’s Films. Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 41-73.
168
Ibid, 41.
56
meets Anta sitting at a table drinking water from an imported Vittel mineral water bottle,
eating what looks like bread, as she writes what appears to be a letter (perhaps to her brother
who has emigrated to France?). Just prior to this frame, the camera briefly yet quietly pans
from left to right over a precariously looking and densely populated bidonville on the
outskirts of Dakar where Anta lives. The second moment of near calm comes as Anta makes
her way to the university, crossing numerous women – children in tow – busily washing
clothes, innumerable puddles of standing water and rocks peppering the scene. The third and
final moment centers on a curious figure, a stout mailman that appears, disappears, and then
reappears several times throughout the film, as he slowly walks in and out of the camera’s
frame; he is presumably delivering mail. While singly these fleeting moments are negligible,
collectively they are symptomatic of the stagnant social and economic realities in which
Mambéty aims to capture and ensnare Mory and Anta. Additionally, combined they signal
stagnancy, epitomized by the stationary pools of festering water puddles, as well as the lack
of verve with which the mailman ambulates, the manner with which he stumbles and
struggles to deliver the correspondence he lugs around the city that appears to bear heavily on
his already slow-moving body. The silent image of this public servant endeavoring with much
difficulty to deliver mail, even slipping (somewhat comically) several times while trying to
make it up a small incline in one scene in the introductory fifteen minutes of the film, is a
lasting metonymic image of this sluggish and slow-developing nation.
Understanding this ecosystemic context in and through which Mory moves, and especially
his inability to secure a place therein as a postcolonial hybrid insider/outsider subject with no
family, no kin, no friends, no socio-cultural and/ or material capital, it is, subsequently, easy
to understand the allure Josephine Baker’s paradisiacal refrain presents, as “Paris, Paris, Paris
57
/ C’est sur la Terre un coin de Paradis” permeates the film.
169
In Mambéty’s imaginative
cinematographic world, furthermore, where even minor, fleeting frames in the film cue
viewers to the divide between the have and the have-nots in postcolonial Senegal, it is through
the seeming casual visual representations of and allusions to water that one begins to feel for –
dream about, and envision – the flight for which Mory aches. Consider, for example, the
finely manicured and landscaped university grounds calling for substantial amounts of labor
and resources, most notably water, where Mory, likened to the slaughtered white zebu in the
film’s introductory scene for the first time, is wrangled-up and tied to a red pick-up truck
filled with well-to-do men Mory’s age. Now compare it to the resource-deficient bidonville,
where coming to blows for water is simply part and parcel of the everyday. Finally, contrast
and juxtapose such scenes to an exquisite shot of an expansive, shimmering ocean (below),
and one begins, as a viewer, to cognize the deliverance watery metaphors symbolize. It is no
coincidence, for instance, that Mory voices his desire to leave Dakar for the first time while
languidly sunbathing atop a cliff overlooking the Atlantic ocean’s boundlessness. “There’s a
boat leaving tomorrow. Let’s take it.” Moreover, the affective openness of Mory’s supine
body, arms outstretched as he lies beside Anta on a warmly heated rock in the hot sun just
after a suggestively explosive scene of lovemaking, signifies further the liberatory promise of
liquid space.

Figure 6: Mory and Anta spent, film still,
Touki Bouki (1973).

169
Baker’s voice oozes powerfully in and out of the film and is (at times) presented like a bizarre
parenthetical aside, and at other moments like the memory of a song playing on repeat in Mory’s head.
58

Opposing Mory’s dreamy intellectual motility of fanciful flight, as well as the promise of
social mobility metonymized by the ocean liner Mory wishes to board with his girlfriend Anta
at the film’s conclusion is “dough” (read money). “Got the dough?” retorts Anta to Mory’s,
“Let’s take it.” In a beautifully written essay aiming to “perform the oceanness that it
thematizes,”
170
Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, rightly argues against championing the metaphor
of fluidity without considering how tropes of ‘liquidity’ and ‘flow’ are situated materially and
historically. “Bodies and selves rendered fluid are first and foremost gendered and sexualized,
only faintly marked by other locations – only secondarily racialized, nationalized, classed.”
171

Money and money-making enterprises, running themes in all Mambety’s films,
172
occupy a
prominent place in Touki Bouki, signaling the very material and historical situatedness to
which Tinsely alludes, thus troubling facile metaphorical mappings of ‘flow’ and ‘fluidity’
onto Mory. Indeed, the tension between ‘fluidity’ and ‘stasis’
173
marking Mory corporeally
(and by extrapolation the Senegalese nation) in the cinematic, sociocultural context just 13
years post-independence in which the film is set, can be gleaned via an attentiveness to the
elaborate money-making schemes which Mory and Anta contrive, and which are juxtaposed
to symbolically suggestive bodies of water.
Aborted Flow
A body of water among several in Touki Bouki appears at an odd place, about 30 minutes
into the film. It is a small rivulet that seemingly materializes out of nowhere. At this moment
in the film Mory and Anta have left Aunt Oumou’s (Anta’s aunt’s) home hurriedly,

170
Tinsely, Omise’eke Natasha. “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage,” 212.
171
Ibid, 204.
172
Marigo, a penniless musician, owing arrears to his landlady, possessing but unable to cash in on a
winning lottery ticket, in the context of a economically depressed Senegal experiencing CFA
devaluation in Le Franc (1994), is emblematic of the theme of money on which Mambety’s films
center.
173
I use the term stasis here in its medical sense, as in the stoppage of flow of a bodily fluid.
59
circumventing Aunt Oumou’s attempts to collect Mory’s unpaid debt for all the rice he has
eaten. Intent on making money to pay off Mory’s arrears and finance their trip to France,
Mory and Anta speed off on Mory’s motorbike, weaving through the bushy backstreets on the
outskirts of Dakar all the while Josephine Baker’s “Paris, Paris, Paris” plays in the
background. The brief scene is a salient one for several reasons. For one, the duo comes
across several gris-gris
174
wrapped in a foreboding red cloth that sits on a tiny inlet of sandy
gravel bifurcating a freshwater streamlet. “You mustn’t touch them. - Says who? My
grandma.” Despite Anta’s warning not to disturb the gris-gris, Mory takes hold of them,
unfolds the red cloth, and begins to ‘read’ or interpret the items wrapped securely in the cloth.
While the package contains several amulets, Mory focuses on three: the first, is meant to
mend its owner’s broken heart; the second, is intended to protect its owner from syphilis; and
the final talisman, a finely constructed, rather large leather ring – no doubt containing written
Koranic suras and designed to be worn around the upper bicep to ward off evil – is expected
to bring its bearer good luck. “And here’s another one: a good luck charm!” Holding the good
luck charm up high in his right hand, and gesturing Anta over to “take a look,” Mory places
the leather ring in the crotch of his pants.
Though appearing at first glance innocuous, Mory’s placement of the good luck charm in
his groin is quite transgressive and marks one in several important ways Mory breaks with
‘tradition.’ In fact, Mory’s theft of the gris-gris and association of it with his genitals (and sex
more generally) presents an emblematic moment marking the social and moral danger Mory
embodies as a hyena-like figure.
175
Considered potentially powerful subverters of human
society, hyenas represent a moral danger, posing numerous threats to the social order,

174
Wolof term for talismans and, or amulets.
175
While scholars continue to debate the translation of the Wolof ‘touki bouki’ in the film’s title, a
majority concede that ‘The Journey of the Hyena’ (and hence Mory’s association with a hyena) is the
most likely translation.
60
according to Burlin Barr.
176
Indeed, in this instance of lifting, thieving, and sexualizing the
gris-gris, Mory subversively debunks the practice of maraboutage, the otherworldly and
religious practices intended to bring good fortune to the bearers of gris-gris, as well as the
socio-cultural and spiritual authority of the gris-gris’s creator, the marabout (or Muslim holy
man). Such a cinematic representation in the context of post-independent Senegal, moreover,
is doubly insurgent
177
considering the important political role marabouts – and the leaders of
the Senegalese Sufi-Brotherhoods in particular – played (and continue to play) in maintaining
and cementing the local and national social and political order.
178
Ultimately, however,
Mory’s revolutionary act of usurping the supremacy of the marabout caste by seizing and
wrestling away the mystical force contained by the gris-gris, deviating, redirecting and
attempting to appropriate the talisman’s power for himself, proves futile, as Mory is unable to
successfully channel the gris-gris’s energy to win money in a local card game in which he
must guess the location of “the ace.” “If you don’t want to win money, don’t play.” Betting
and losing money he does not possess (1.000 CFA, quite a hefty sum in post-independent
Senegal), Mory is chased by an angry mob of boys and men aiming to recuperate (and
“extract” if need be) the money Mory loses in his failed wager. This scene, culminating in a
chase, is the first in a series of sequences in Touki Bouki in which Mory comes close, better
never quite succeeds in acquiring the necessary material wealth needed to become ‘fluid,’ to
move, flee, and escape his indigent circumstances.
Book-ending these moments of interrupted flight, come instances of visual repose, which,
when juxtaposed, signal for the viewer a feeling: one feels and thus imagines, through the
visual opposition of rapid motion and rest of the actors in Touki Bouki, Mory’s subject-

176
Barr, Burlin. “Dependenccy, Appetite, and Iconographies of Hunger in Mambéty’s Hyenas,” 61-2.
177
The inspiration for interpreting Mory as insurgent comes to me from “Can the Sissy Be Insurgent?”
in Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomny of Unfit Manliness (2022), 1-49.
178
The decisive role the Sufi-Brotherhoods played/play in local and national politics in Senegal is (or
should be) common knowledge for anyone interested in the history of Senegal.
61
forming state of material precarity and how this condition of incessant insecurity
metaphorically feels like moments of hurried running (with all the muscular tension such
intense physical activity entails) followed by transient instances of rest, resulting from the
release of caloric depletion, energetic consumption, and physical exhaustion. One such
moment, typical of these short instances of respite, arises immediately after the above-
mentioned chase. Knees locked in 90-degree angles, pictured seated in wooden bleachers,
arms spread-eagle, head thrown back, Mory relaxes in the hot sun, while the camera takes him
in. Next, as he wipes the sweat from his forehead with the right forearm sleeve of his green
military jacket, Mory laughs loudly as he removes the good luck charm from his left arm and
looks at and holds it fondly, attempting yet again to channel its power and luck. “Those
assholes think I ripped off a thousand francs.” But opposing stasis, figuratively represented by
Mory and Anta’s visually spent, listless and inactive bodies, as they sit across from each other
soaking up the warmth of the afternoon sun, is the lively spiritedness of their active and
enterprising minds, indicative of their unwavering resiliency and determination to leave
Senegal. “Have you realized we’re sitting on a gold mine?”
The call of sandy oceanside wrestling arenas, evoked so powerfully in Aminata Sow Fall’s
L’appel des arènes (1982), resurge – yet again – in Touki Bouki, as Anta and Mory plot a
heist to steal a wrestling arena’s weekend profits. “The wrestling arena makes loads of money
on Sundays. – Get it? – Yes.” From a vacant arena in one frame to a rapidly edited cut, and
spectator-filled frame in the next, the wrestling arena vignette, the second money-making
scheme Mory and Anta ingeniously plot, is not one often cited in the critical scholarship on
Mambéty’s Touki Bouki. One scholar, for example, only mentions the wrestling scene
featured in the film cursorily, citing its impressionistic place in the overall context of
62
Lamb’s
179
role in national mythmaking post-independence.
180
Resisting this scholarly grain, it
is of essence we pause and consider the signifying potency of the imagery associated with this
noteworthy scene. Whereas Sow Fall’s novel, L’appel des arènes, for example, describes a
topsy-turvy wrestling arena in which men come together in national unity through a symbolic
blurring of ethnic, racial, and class lines,
181
in Mambéty’s rendering the arena becomes a
microcosm of clearly delineated boundaries, a socially stratified space of visibly distinct
groups of people. On the one hand, viewers see “the huddled masses” crowded throughout the
upper bleachers, and on the other, a select group of dignitaries and local authorities can be
seen seated in an opposing, closely-knit bunch, cordoned-off by metal railings that, standing
like erect barriers, suggestively represent their selectively small circle. Put another way,
Mambéty’s film makes it irrefutably clear that it is for this latter stratum of men, the boys
frenziedly beating on drums play; and it is for these men, the muscly wrestlers are briefly
paraded at the match’s conclusion. Organized by the local authorities of the Lebou tribe, in
honor of “the long-standing ties binding France and Senegal” at the “Ibar Mar Diop Stadium,”
and in the aim of raising funds for the “construction of [a] General de Gaulle’s memorial,” it
is these men in others words, sitting prominently in the foreground nearest the drummers and
near-nude wrestlers, that most markedly signify the socio-cultural and political elite in the
postcolonial era Mambéty aims to capture in his film.
Complicating the idea that there exists only one, uncontested class of powerful, socially
situated men, is countered by the subtle ways clothing and other trappings of status permeate
the wrestling arena scene in Touki Bouki. Consider for instance the excessively billowy
boubous,
182
made of finely embroidered and richly dyed imported wax fabrics from Holland,

179
Lamb or laamb is the local Wolof term for Senegalese wrestling.
180
De Souza Correa, Silvio Marcus. “Close-up: Paulin S. Vieyra, A Postcolonial Figure: Senegalese
Wrestling as “National Sport”and Other Modern Myths in Lamb.”
181
Even a toubab (Wolof term for ‘white’ men and women) is mentioned in the culminating scene of
Sow Fall’s novel.
182
Traditional men’s dress by a large, voluminous, floor-length tunic.
63
‘signaling’ the growing middle class, dress typical of local African ‘big men.’ Or the tall,
velvety-red chechias and long, elaborately decorated walking staffs that ‘mark’authorities,
their prominent social standing underscored by their staffs’ finely and intricately worked
precious metals. Opposite these men, moreover, are the herculean wrestlers and their
imposing physiques, who – despite their nakedness – are also adorned in distinctively
wrapped and knotted loincloths and ornate gris-gris in distressed and finely weathered leather
that wrap, contour, and lineate their muscled bodies, marking them as uniquely and defiantly
other. Additionally, numerous men in the crowd don European-styled clothing, dress slacks
paired with numerous variations on the button-down shirt being the most common of these
ensembles. And whereas Sow Fall’s final arena scene in L’appel des arènes gestures at
national homogeneity, culminating in, what Barr calls, “collective catharsis” that erases social
division and tension,
183
Mambéty, through varying styles of men’s vestimentary coding,
signals not only a disconnect rooted in social pedigree, but also a heterogenous group of
competing and contesting men, who metaphorically ‘clash’ through their presentational styles
of dress and thus, by extrapolation, their varying notions of ‘manhood’ and ‘manliness.’
In this vein, Mory’s fluid performative queerness
184
comes strikingly into focus.
Alternately described as a cowboy for riding a zebu-horned motorbike and/or a hippie for
donning flared, bell-bottom jeans, Mory’s vestimentary disguise in Touki Bouki’s wrestling
arena scene is noteworthy. Deviating with Anta, who chooses a locally inspired boubou of
richly dyed and finely patterned wax fabric, no different than those worn by her fellow female
spectators, Mory chooses a locally sourced, woven cotton, fashioned and arranged on his
body in a style akin to that worn by nomadic Tuareg men. Mory’s decisive choice to wear a

183
De Souza Correa, Silvio Marcus. “Close-up: Paulin S. Vieyra, A Postcolonial Figure: Senegalese
Wrestling as “National Sport” and Other Modern Myths in Lamb,” 400.
184
Again, I use queerness here to mean non-normative and not
64
red tagelmust,
185
that covers all but his eyes, reminiscent of the richly dyed red cloth used to
package the gris-gris found at the rivulet, is telling, as men’s cheches
186
are believed to
protect their wearers from evil spirits. Likewise, Mory wears the red tagelmust to, no doubt,
successfully dodge and evade capture, arrest, and imprisonment, after he and Anta, in a
Bonnie and Clyde like ruse, steal a trunk suspected of containing the Sunday afternoon
wrestling match’s yield. By, moreover, deviating funds ear-marked for a “General de Gaulle
Memorial,” refusing to wear local styles of dress, and disguising himself in traditional Tuareg
dress – a notable choice considering the fierce, revolutionary, anti-colonial resistance for
which the Tuareg peoples are known in West African folklore – Mory suggestively signals
that he desires to construct a “manhood” and/or a “selfhood” on his terms, by seeking an
alternate subjecthood that is radically different than the representational variations on
subjecthood available to him in postcolonial Senegal. “You can only be black or white here.
I’m sick of it!” In other terms, through Mory’s ingenious fusion of locally produced, hand-
spun textiles, his agentive choice of color, and a suggestive draping of fabric in a style
indicative of, but not exactly like that of a Tuareg “man,” Mory presents, via a self-
representational style of dress, a fluidity of movement he dreams of embodying, epitomized
by the airy flow of cotton fabric he chooses as a disguise, its motion and movement that
deviates with the billowy, yet stiff and starched heaviness of the idealized local men’s fashion
of the period.
The graceful flow and drape of Anta and Mory’s ensembles, and the fluidity their outfits
figuratively represent, affording the couple the social mobility and ease with which to move
through the various circles at the “Ibar Mar Diop Stadium,” evade a policeman, and
eventually steal a trunk suspected of containing the wrestling match’s yield, however, quickly

185
Tuareg men wear a veil, turban type headdress, intricately wrapped around a man’s head, covering
all but his eyes and nostrils. Typically, the turbans are blue, hence the name, the Tuareg “blue men.”
186
Synonymous with tagelmust.
65
morph into impractical and farcical costumes once the duo leaves the arena. Retreating to a
low-rise, oceanfront structure in mid-construction – comically dubbed a “maison de
campagne” by Anta – located in the underdeveloped, desolate, outskirts of Dakar,
immediately after stealing, what they presume will be an enormous blue trunk full of cash,
Anta and Mory’s outfits appear like ostentatious costumes set against the sterile space in
which they now find themselves. In one frame, taking hold of a tiny mirror in her left hand,
Anta admires her image and adjusts her fashionably tied head scarf, while her hired taxi-
driver labors to carry the oversized blue trunk presumed to contain the treasure on his head. In
this instance, Anta appears, momentarily at least, to have ‘struck it rich,’ as she puts on the
airs of the well-heeled, bourgeois woman (‘à la grande dame’) she dreams of becoming.
Faced with choosing the correct one in a set of two trunks suspected of containing the money
at the stadium, however, Mory and Anta soon realize they have not struck the material wealth
they so desperately hunger for, as they have chosen the incorrect trunk, the one intended to
dupe unscrupulous thieves, filled with a human skull and other gris-gris. Yet again, Mory and
Anta’s project to leave Dakar for Paris on an ocean liner is thwarted, as they are forced
(momentarily at least) to relinquish their plan to emigrate.
But it is the symbolic unlatching, creaking, and opening of the large blue trunk; its
proximity to the expansive Atlantic Ocean, its promise of unrivaled fluidity; and the camera’s
honing in on the trunk’s contents – a skull, a pair of gazelle horns, gris-gris, and a vividly
striped, red swatch of textile – that beg our critical attention. Death, trauma, and the “always-
fresh memory of the [collective] wound,”
187
as Vlad Dima has so astutely put it, are
encapsulated by the image of massacre represented by the skull, and that imprints itself in the
viewers’ minds, much like the visceral slaughtering of cattle in the film’s opening segment. It
is, in short, an image we cannot unsee. More pointedly, the skull, the horns, and the gris-gris,

187
Dima, Vlad. “Trauma and Zombie Narratives in Hyènes,” 110.
66
signify the always present “trauma of slavery and colonization that still hangs over the post-
colonial subject,”
188
Senegal’s recent colonial past lurking always just below the surface,
underscored by what appears to be the image of Gorée Island – the largest slave-trading post
on the African coast from the 15
th
– 19
th
Century – on the distant horizon, in the upper-right
corner of the frame. More likely than not, however, Mory and Anta’s failed luck, having not
chosen the trunk full of cash, but rather, the one containing forbidding objects signaling death
and danger, is a portent, foreshadowing their demise should they tenaciously hold fast to their
plan of emigration. “It gives me the creeps here.” The abundance of feral cats, the windblown
trees, the menacing calls of circling birds of prey in the sky, the absence of identifiable roads,
the unfinished, desolate, and abandoned oceanfront structure: everything seems to signal to
Anta and Mory that they should stop cold in their tracks. “This is a bad place. It’s really
scary.” Ironically, despite the numerous ominous signs conveying danger and an unpropitious
outcome in their quest to relocate to France, Mory and Anta remain determinedly steadfast in
their decision to leave Senegal, as the frame cuts to a sandy beach scene, where the duo
concocts a third and final plan to generate the funds needed to quit Dakar permanently. Given
the repeated promise of escape figuratively represented by Mory’s and Anta’s continuous
proximity to fluidity and fluid-like matter, followed immediately by moments of repeated
foreclosure, a few questions beg asking: Why keep going? Why subject oneself to such cruel
optimism, to desires that actively impede one’s flourishment, and that may possibly short-
circuit one’s life?
189

188
Ibid, 112.
189
Inspired by Laurent Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), I see the repeated cycle of promise and
foreclosure in which Mory and Anta find themselves as cruel, with its fleeting promises of a better life
(as Mory and Anta define it) that seem continuously and impossibly out of reach.
67
Resisting Meatification

Figure 7: Symbol of stasis and decay, film still,
Touki Bouki (1973).

The scene immediately following the discovery of the trunk’s sinister contents is a rather
playful one; nearly naked after having shed their somewhat ludicrous disguises, Anta and
Mory are pictured on a beach in stages of undress. Standing tall and upright and facing away
from the camera – arms outstretched and spread wing-like, as if readying to take flight – Anta,
appears to be battling her shadow, while Mory, his body covered in sand, is seated,
sunbathing, and gesturing to the carcass of an abandoned fishing vessel appearing, as if
suspended, several meters out at sea. Yet again, the couple is framed staring out across the
liquid expansiveness of the Atlantic Ocean, no doubt lamenting interiorly, the misfortune of
having not chosen the trunk full of cash and, or the subsequent state of stasis in which they
currently find themselves. The scene opens with the camera’s lens directed at the rusty
vessel’s carcass; the camera’s focus then slowly retreats and widens, shifting, first to Anta and
then to Mory, all the while aurally, a squabble of seagulls is heard mewing and keowing in the
background. “What’s that boat doing out there? If I had the tools, I’d fix it up, and we’d split
for Paris. – Stop dreaming. Even an angel couldn’t move it.” As is frequently the case in
Touki Bouki, Mory is musing, daydreaming about having the required material means to
repair the shipwreck and “split for Paris.” Countering Mory’s flights of fancy, however, Anta,
in her grounded realist fashion, directs Mory to devise a more sensible, viable plan. “Think of
68
something else,” she orders. The project Mory concocts, though not very ingenious as it
involves more scheming is nevertheless, like the circling seagulls juxtaposed against the
motionless steel waste framed in the scene’s background, a plan that doubles as a means of
liberatory escape, figuratively represented by the colony of migratory birds’ flight circling
overhead, as well as a plan that imperils the duo to an inescapable stasis
190
that, much like the
corrosive oxidizing power of rust, will eventually sap a body’s vitality through slow chemical
deterioration and consumption.
All bodies are not susceptible to this life-expending breakdown evenly, however, as
Hortense Spillers has so persuasively argued in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book.”
191
Writing about the West’s symbolic system rooted in language and
representation she terms “an American grammar,”
192
Spillers advances the idea that some
bodies consistently preserve their contours as bodies (i.e. their subjecthood, their
personhood), while others are consigned to the category of “flesh.” “I would make a
distinction in this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central
one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the “body” there is
the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment
under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography.”
193
Examining the pathologizing
of black females’ flesh in the context of the contemporary United States via cultural and
political maneuvering rooted in the institution of chattel slavery – and specifically through
medical “atomizing,”
194
the disruption of filial bonds, and repeated (un)gendering – the
captive subject, according to Spillers, is rendered Other. Of unknown ethnic and familial

190
Again, I use stasis in a metaphorical medical sense, as in the stoppage of flow of a bodily fluid that
provokes illness and disease.
191
Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Black, White,
and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2003, 203-
229.
192
Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” 209.
193
Ibid, 206.
194
Ibid, 208.
69
origins and embodying a gender performativity of a dubious non-normative quality, Mory
likewise, is rendered “flesh,” and is perhaps the “fleshiest” of all Mambéty’s leading men, the
character most exemplary, in my view, of Spillers’ captive subject. “Mory…I don’t like him.
He’s got no class, no shame, no job, nothing.” What’s more, socially dead
195
as he is unable to
partake actively in an agentive consumer role in the nascent capitalist order of post-
independent Senegal, Mory is the first in a continuum of characters in Mambéty’s films that
are equated with a unique commodity-like objecthood akin to that of meat, embodying a
fleshiness, in other words, frequently associated with consumable alimentary commodities
like meat. Put another way, muscular and possessing a notable sexual attractiveness despite
his lanky, androgynous look,
196
Mory is delectably beefy and occupies something markedly
analogous to a kind of meathood.
There are several key moments in Touki Bouki where Mory is irrefutably wed to flesh;
where Mory, in all-too-fraught proximity to non-human animals, is likened to a living
commodity; where the lines presumed to exist between animalhood and human personhood,
in the words of Joshua Bennett, are troublingly blurred and, or erased entirely, not as Bennett
would have it, to signal kinship born of mutual subjugation and co-laboring, but rather, as I
advance, to symbolically underscore how captive subjects like Mory become representational
embodiments of a smorgasbord heap of meaty flesh, how they are subjects configured by and
consigned to meathood.
197
In an early scene at the university, for example, Mory is called a
“cowboy” by a group of well-heeled male university students who lasso and topple him,
stringing him up and harnessing him to the bed of a red pick-up truck; they then proceed to
parade him in town – zebu skull tied to his upper-torso – like the slaughtered cattle of the

195
Taking my cue here from Orlando Patterson’s concept of the term social death: the external
(institutional, juridical etc.) and internal (psychological) effects to which subjects are persecuted,
marginalized, excluded, enslaved, segregated and unmade by a larger society.
196

197
See Joshua Bennett’s beautifully written Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of
Man (2020), especially the introduction, “Horse,” pp. 1-17.
70
film’s opening scene, while people standing on the sidewalks on both sides of the street
consume the slaughtered-cattle-like spectacle. Interspersed in this short vignette, is a
secondary scene that depicts two elder men cutting the throat of a lamb, an image sutured to
Mory’s ‘lynching,’ as its/his blood is allowed to fill a make-shift yellow recipient. Moments
later, strung-up by its head in a rudimentary apparatus used to butcher and prepare animal
carcasses for consumption, Aunt Oumy (portrayed by the legendary Senegalese vocalist
Aminata Fall) is pictured skinning the lamb slaughtered by the elder men in the preceding
interspersed scene, reaching into the animal’s slashed underbelly in the aim of extracting its
organs and viscera. When the viewers learn just moments later that Mory owes Aunt Oumy
money for all the rice he has consumed but has not yet paid for, the extraction of the animal’s
innards is metaphorically suggestive of the “extraction” she will likely subject Mory to, to
recuperate her lost profit. Mory is further rendered beefy and meaty sexually, this time by
Anta, who straddles the exhausted and physically spent Mory (off screen), as he lies naked on
a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean (again, off screen). On an aural plane, viewers hear
only Anta’s hushed, sexualized moans – only Anta’s pleasure, in other terms – that, when
coupled with the provocatively crashing waves signaling Anta’s jouissance and the
interspersed images of the slaughtered bloody lamb, are suggestive of Anta’s active,
predatory-like sexual role, that lessens – if not denies entirely – Mory’s shared agency in what
is supposed to be a reciprocal act of sexual intercourse, his ‘give’ to Anta’s ‘take’ and vice-
versa. In this vein, Anta’s objectification of Mory, as well as Anta’s clear active sexual role
becomes just as ‘extractive’ (if not more) than Aunt Oumy’s demand that Mory pay up.
“I got it! See all the way down there? Turn right, and you get to that fat guy’s place.
He’s got a nice house. I met him at Mapenda’s. It’s really nice. Let’s go pay him a
visit. But before we go, I’ve got to take a dump.”
71
Indeed, perceived as embodying an energy, value, and resource that needs to be ‘tapped’
(i.e. to exploit or draw a supply from (i.e. a resource)) – an insidious quality that I argue
consigns him to meathood – Mory is repeatedly associated with consumptive sexual acts that
configure others’ ‘bodies’ against Mory’s ‘flesh’ in a relational interchange that repeatedly
fixes Mory in submissive, animalized sexual roles. Though Mory’s equation with meat is
frequently cited in the critical literature (though not in the eroticized connections I have cited
above), there are other, minor, yet no less sexualized animals, whose bodies are repeatedly
mapped onto Mory’s, namely the fleshy matter of seafood and fowl.
198
In a lead-up to Mory
and Anta’s final money-making scheme, Mory, in the epigraph above, devises a final plan
certain to succeed: he will assume the (presumed) passive sexual role of getting “fucked” by
another man in a transactional carnal exchange, and prepares for it by eliminating his bowels
and clearing his anal cavity – or, as Mory so emphatically puts it, ‘taking a dump.’ While this
reading might shock some,
199
it is not unfathomable to think that Mory is preparing to ‘take it
up the ass’ in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to make money, thereby facilitating his and
Anta’s escape from the dire circumstances in which they are ensnared, as anthropologists
studying the ‘dislocated’ subject positions of men across the African continent have so
perceptively demonstrated.
200
Consider, as an exemplary case, the plight of young men, in
anthropologist Joe Hayes’, “ Desperate Markets and Desperate Masculinities in Morrocco.”
201

198
I use the term “mapping” as it is deployed by George Lakoff and Mark Turner in More Than Cool
Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989). More than just a simple comparison, “mapping”
constitutes linking the compared objects’ properties. In this vein, that Mory is compared to fish and
chickens, I consider not only the edibility and commodification of these animals, but also the symbolic
cultural value the consumption of this flesh entails: the “prized” value of these animals in the
Senegalese diet, consumed sparingly, enjoyed in complex gastronomical dishes, and served to the
most esteemed of guests.
199
Assuredly, this is a reading that has not, as of yet (to my knowledge) been advanced.
200
Several essays in Masculinities Under Neoliberalism (2016) discuss this “trend” thoroughly.
201
Hayes, Joe. “Desperate Markets and Desperate Masculinities in Morocco.” Masculinities Under
Neoliberalism (2016), 99-110.
72
In his ethnographic study seeking to understand the “ways of being men” in contemporary
North Africa, and how this relates to class, money, and power, Hayes examines the lives of
Moroccan men residing in Marrakech who peddle low-value commodities to foreign (read
white, European) tourists in local markets known as souks. “In the suq, poor brown people are
at work, rich white people are at leisure, face to face with the racialized inequities between
core and periphery.”
202
By contextualizing the souks historically, Hayes argues that today’s
marketplaces centering on tourists, are emblematic of a strategic macrostructural ‘ordering’
that maintains Morocco as an exporter of primary goods and cheap labor, a policy initially
engineered by the French colonial state and its commercial stakeholders and that continues to
thrive under neoliberalist regimes today.
203
The resulting precarity of men’s material lives –
unable to subsist on the meager earnings earned through the sale of their wares – subsequently
exposes them to morally errant ‘fucking tourists’
204
with egregious sexual appetites. But to
consider these men exploited and subaltern, would be to err, as many of them, as Hayes so
persuasively demonstrates via personal narratives, consider their choice to engage in survival
transactional sex agentive. Ironically, sometimes, “going along” with patriarchal sex centering
on ‘fucking’ to “get along,””
205
contributes to the men’s otherness by enmeshing them in
racialized and sexualized fantasies like “the ‘Berber nomad”or “Aladdin”with “a magic
carpet.”
206
Ultimately, the production, consumption, and commodified movement of bodies
through space are productive of sexualities and gender, class and power relations, and such is
the case of Mory’s movement toward and through Charlie’s exclusive, beachfront estate, the
third and final space where Mory and Anta hope to strike it rich.

202
Ibid, 100.
203
Ibid.
204
Bowman, G. “Fucking Tourists: Sexual Relations and Tourism in Jerusalem’s Old City.” Critique
of Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3, 1989, pp.79-93.
205
The term patriarchal sex comes to me from bell hooks, especially We Real Cool: Black Men and
Masculinity (2004).
206
Hayes, Joe. “Desperate Markets and Desperate Masculinities in Morocco.”
73
“I got it! See all the way down there? Turn right, and you get to that fat guy’s place.
He’s got a nice house. I met him at Mapenda’s. It’s really nice. Let’s go pay him a
visit. But before we go, I’ve got to take a dump.”
After Mory ‘takes a dump’ (off screen), presumably in the Atlantic Ocean, the frame cuts
to a series of frothy white waves crashing against motionless black rocks. Subsequently, the
frame expands to a wide-angle shot of a large round pool. As the camera lazily hones in on
the people gathered around it, one sees, sitting in gendered groupings, young women lounging
in chairs sunbathing and, or sitting around bistro tables; while the young men, seated in pairs
on the pool’s edge directly adjacent to the Atlantic ocean, take in the paradisiacal landscape
and sun. Charlie (played by Ousseynou Diop), the nice fat guy to whom Mory refers in the
epigraph above, circles the perimeter of the pool in a pedal-powered lounger (marked with the
number 10), seated alongside a tall and beefy, athletically built young man in an animal-print
box-cut swimsuit. Contrasting dramatically with the near-naked young men in the scene is
Charlie, who, is not only bedecked in countless thick gold chains, he is also wearing rather
expensive-looking eyewear, as well as what appears to be an imported white terry-cloth
bathrobe – all vestimentary trappings underscoring and codifying Charlie’s material wealth.
Further testimony to Charlie’s affluence is the expansiveness of his home’s pool, and the
prominent place it occupies in ‘ordering’ this opulent residential space, as it is the first thing
viewers see of “the fat guy’s nice house.” But the pool signals much more than fortune.
Considering the labor and resources required to source and maintain it, metonymically, the
pool points to the lifestyle of leisure afforded to the few, as well as encapsulated the figurative
liquidity and flow that remains impossibly out of reach for the many. Moreover, the luxury
Charlie’s pool represents, hints at the booming ‘development’ and transformation of the
Senegalese coastline and its byproduct – tourism – under the guise of ‘structural adjustment,’
74
the aggressive economy policies and programs promoted by the IMF/World Bank right
around the time of Touki Bouki’s filming.
207

From Mory’s “I met him at Mapenda’s”; to the roundness of the pool; to the slow
movement of Charlie’s pedal-powered lounge chair effortlessly gliding across the pool’s
perimeter; to the bored, yet patient look on the women’s faces suggesting they have been
there before; to the oddly clothed-figure in a group of scantily-clothed men, repeatedly casting
a net that symbolically configures these men as fish, enmeshing them in a web: everything in
this deceptively “nice place,” intimates at the repetitive, exploitive cycle of Senegal’s political
economy post-independence (that continues today), in which poor, rural, subaltern men like
Mory are entangled – and by extension – in which Senegal, equally trammeled, is itself
enmeshed. The question begs asking: How does one escape? How does one extricate oneself
from cycles of relational power? How does one, in other words, resist animalization,
commodification, fleshification, and meatification?
In no way didactic nor prescriptive, Touki Bouki hints – albeit ambiguously – at a few
possibilities. One instance, the one I find most promising, comes near the film’s conclusion.
In an abrupt shift, Mory declines to board the ocean liner, leaving Anta to emigrate alone. He
then proceeds to turn and run backward, in an impracticably tight and fitted coat-pant suit, an
outfit he stole from Charlie; subverting the power dynamics of bell hooks’ ‘patriarchal sex,’
Mory dupes Charlie, turns the table on him, and proceeds to ‘fuck’ him instead, by stealing a
suitcase full of clothes made of Charlie’s finest threads, which Mory and Anta then sell
(presumably) to finance their trip to Paris. Cutting to the site of an accident at an intersection
in which his zebu-skull, horn-mounted motorcycle is in pieces, Mory stares longingly (and
lovingly?) at “the handsome beast,” removes one of the skull’s horns, waits for the crowd to

207
IMF/World Bank policies and programs, most notable economic restructuring, are key themes in all
Mambéty’s films.
75
dissipate, and walks somewhat reverentially off frame, cradling the portion of the salvaged
zebu horn like a baby. In the following frame, lasting several minutes, Mory is pictured (or
positioned rather) on a staircase between a dandy-like, large-brimmed straw hat on his left,
and a zebu horn to the right. Resisting the scholarly grain that at this moment in the film
imagines Mory awakening from a surreal dream that began post lovemaking on the cliff with
Anta at the beginning of the film (see the freeze-frame shot on page 15 of this chapter),
208
I
view this scene, as Mory’s introspective and reflective cognition of and coming to terms with
his subaltern positionality, the self-realization of his meatification. Agentively choosing to
rest at a point midway on the staircase, however, Mory figuratively signals he is done chasing
upward mobility, metaphorically represented by his desire to embody his idealized (and
culturally prominent) notion of masculinity centering on ‘breadwinning.’ Ensnared in debt, no
doubt brought on by his compulsive drive to “be a man” in post-independent Senegal – what
Jack Forbes would call the “wétiko psychosis,”
209
a psychosis eating away at Mory,
meatifying and cannibalizing him from within – Mory, in this moment seated on the stairs,
pauses in the aim of reversing this brutalizing structural and institutional cannibalization,
symbolically represented by the staircase.
210
Alternately, Mory resists the retrograde,
downward pull of the hegemonic ideal weighing heavily on young men, epitomized by
bureaucratic servitude, and embodied by the excessively corpulent mailman, who appears in a
final fleeting moment, doubling as the sexually voracious and well-connected Charlie.

208
Nearly every critic surveyed mentions Mory’s surreal dream-like state.
209
See Jack Forbes’ Columbus and other Cannibals (1979), xvi.
210
Ibid, especially Chapter 14, “Seeking Sanity: Reversing the Process of Brutalization,” 171-180.
76

Figure 8: Structural stasis, film still, Figure 9: Structural immobility, film
Touki Bouki (1973). Touki Bouki (1973).

But what of Mory’s non-normativity, especially his queerness and its productive role in
resisting (slowly, if not capable of resisting entirely) Mory’s meatification? On this note,
Mambéty, whose film Touki Bouki is assuredly ‘a sign of his times,’ is equally, if not more,
ambivalent, and unclear. On the one hand, Mambéty paints power-differential laden same-sex
relationality and sexuality pejoratively: as all-consuming, meat-eating, and cannibalistic. In a
by now familiar trope, “the homosexual,” as the character Charlie is notably cited, is
psychically and physically unsound, diseased in fact, as he is overcome with and is unable to
wrestle against Forbes’ notion of “wético psychosis,” of which I believe Charlie suffers. It is
indeed illogical that Mambéty be read as “defiantly counter-hegemonic about sexuality,”
moreover, despite Kenneth H. Harrow’s persuasive and much appreciated revelation of
“queer things” in Touki Bouki.
211
Where I part ways with Harrow is in his indiscriminate use
of contemporary, hegemonically Western terms like “gay,” “gay community,” and “queer.”
For example, Harrow writes: “[Charlie] is presented as negatively stereotyped gay man,
surrounded by gay men of effeminate appearance.”
212
Such terms, unsutured from their
complex and tangled histories, and anachronistically deployed, do not, at least for me, signal
radical and insightful observations, but rather an instance of bell hooks’ “cannibalistic

211
See Kenneth H. Harrow’s “The Queer Thing About Djibril Diop Mambety: A Counterhegemonic
Discourse Meets the Heterosexual Economy.
212
Ibid, 87.
77
exchanges” with which I began this chapter, and which are so commonplace to cultural
studies theorists. How, for example, could one convincingly argue that the transactional
survival sex in which Harrow’s “effeminate men” engage be considered “gay sex”? As I view
it (and perhaps my view is naively skewed), gay, queer sex (in the contemporary sense of
these terms) is life- and love-affirming. The sexual predation to which the subaltern men in
Touki Bouki are subjected to, however, is, in the words of Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman,
despotically strange and freakish and furthermore rooted in complex colonial histories.
213
On
the other, despite Mambéty’s metabolization of representational forms of odd, strange, and
freakish transactional sex, and its eventual elimination and ‘dumping,’ given its non-
procreative (read non-productive) essence to further the status quo, traces of queerness remain
in that dandy-like, wide brimmed hat, and partial remains of that freakish zebu horns. For as
non-edible, non-digestible matter for human animals, bones and dried stalks of grain are
sticky and choke-inducing. Indeed, depending on its size and volume, ingesting such matter is
cause for alarm, and may even, if consumed in large enough quantities, require medical
attention. Furthermore, when deployed as they are by Mory, protectively guarded and
lovingly held in close proximity to his body, figuratively arming his body, and metaphorically
outfitting his body, they help to defiantly push back against (if not entirely rebelliously resist)
his devouring racial others’ impulse to devour him.
214
Building on Mory’s ability to
metabolize queerness uniquely, I meditate on an example of African-centered queerness and
its fecundity in a contemporary literary text, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s De purs hommes
(2018), by examining the text’s originality as the first Senegalese novel to deal openly and
candidly with same-sex identity, sexuality, and desire.

213
Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. ““The Strangest Freaks of Despotism”: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum
African American Slave Narratives.” African American Review, vol. 40, no. 2, 2006, pp. 223-237.
214
See Kyla Wazana Tompkins’, ““Everything ‘Cept Eat Us”: The Mouth as Political Organ in the
Antebellum Novel,” 92.
78
CHAPTER THREE

CIRCULATION

Circulating (Afro-Centric) Queerness
215

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s De purs hommes (2018)

Snapshots of Male Miss-fits/Misfits

In the beautifully written second chapter of her pioneering work Queer Phenomenology:
Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), “Sexual Orientation,” Sarah Ahmed offers a
wonderfully “queer” approach to analyzing sexual orientation by wedding queer studies and
phenomenology, and deconstructing the “orientation” in “sexual orientation.”
216
Drawing on
an impressive archive of philosophical, theoretical, and literary texts – in addition to
numerous personal anecdotes – Ahmed underscores how discourses related to sexuality rely
heavily on a thematic of directional and spatial metaphors, as well as leitmotifs of “draw,”
“pull” or magnetism. How bodies move repeatedly along metaphorically horizontal and
vertical axes; how bodies and which bodies are allowed to extend (or not) through and across
space; and how bodies are drawn by the magnetic “pull” of desire are just some of the
refreshingly innovative contributions Ahmed makes in meditating on the directional,
corporeal move “toward” objects of desire that shape the contours of bodies in a myriad of
ways, and in turn shape the social space across and through which they move. “The normative
dimension can be redescribed in terms of the straight body, a body that appears “in line.”
Things seems [sic] “straight” (on the vertical axis), when they are “in line,” which means they
are aligned with other lines,”
217
Ahmed so eloquently writes. Social space, in other words, is

215
Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel (2018), its aim to understand how
literature participates in the production of sexual types and how textual conditions make possible the
abstraction of queer subjectivity by Natasha Hurley inspires the title of this chapter, as well as my
analysis of Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s De purs hommes (2018).
216
Ahmed, Sara. “Sexual Orientation.” Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006),
p. 68.
217
Ibid, 66.
79
organized and oriented along “lines” and “straightness” and it is, therefore, those bodies most
aligned with this linearity that appear “in line” or “straight.” Those that do not are “out of
line,” as they are considered misaligned and odd. Bodies that do not “fall in line,” in other
words are, in my view, akin to social miss fits and misfits.
Rereading excerpts taken from Ahmed’s chapter like the one quoted above are striking, as
they point to my own reliance on directional metaphors in analyzing the texts studied thus far.
In Chapter 1, “Muscles,” for example, I suggested Nalla, the central protagonist of Aminata
Sow Fall’s L’appel des arènes (1982) was a rather queer, non-normative twelve-year-old boy.
Reading Sow Fall’s work against the scholarly grain, I put forth the idea that this remarkable,
yet understudied novel in Sow Fall’s corpus presents a snapshot of an adolescent miss fit. Not
quite ‘fitting in’ that is, because he feels both ‘out of place’ and ‘out of line,’ I hinted that
Nalla, surrounded by a network of adult men, actively seeks out alternatives to competing and
contesting concepts of manliness and manhood. Resisting a predetermined, well-traced, and
finely plotted filial orientation founded on his mother Diatou’s espousal of a modernity
deeply rooted in normativity, as well as the powerfully magnetic subject-forming draw of the
masculine status quo embodied by his father Ndiogou, Nalla counters what Ahmed would call
“straightening,” by rebelliously daring to subvert and cross a number of metaphorical “lines.”
Honing in on several symbolic traversals (notably, spatial, and geographic, physical, and
cultural), I provocatively laid bare the plausibility of an erotic undertow frustrating Nalla’s
“linear” filial trajectory, propelling Nalla to seek out non-familial bonds with elder men
outside of his immediate middle-class social circle instead. Something odd circulates just
below the surface I argue: a disruptive current of queer eroticism in Nalla’s obsession with
wrestling, in his objectification of the wrestlers’ Herculean bodies, and especially the erotic
“pulling” effect of the wrestlers’ glistening, milk-soaked muscles.
80
By refuting the respectability of his bourgeois rearing, the normativity and normalizing
power of domesticity, and the metaphorical uprightness and upward directional pull of the
bourgeois social mobility espoused by his parents, Nalla defiantly and rebelliously dissents by
opting instead to revel in thewy milky excess. Put another way, Nalla actively seeks out,
identifies, and adopts alternate modes of moving and being in the world, predicated not on
verticality and “straightness,” but rather on symbolic traversal and crossing rooted in an
affective, multi-directional relationality founded on non-familial, intergenerational, cross-
cultural, and queer sociality. And while I suggested such representative openness to otherness
epitomized by class-crossing and the disruption of domestic social space is stirring for the
context of 1980’s Senegal in which the narrative is set, the novel’s ambiguous conclusion
hints at a foreclosure on the promise of radical social change by evocatively presenting a
final, culminating scene of ‘straightening,’ as father and son reconnect in the home’s living
room, and Nalla ‘realigns’ with the status quo. Seated ‘parallel’ from each other at a table in
the heart of the domestic space, Nalla and his father Ndiogou’s ruptured and severed filial ties
are rehabilitated, as Nalla falls docilely back ‘into line,’ symbolically assuming his
socioeconomic class ascendancy and tacit siding with the representative embodiment most
associated with the hegemonic masculine ideal of the period, his father.
While interpretively, my readings of the texts analyzed thus far have mirrored the
directional metaphors advanced by Ahmed, organizationally, my overall study eschews
‘straightness’ – especially historical linearity. Chapter II, “Meat,” for example, extends the
study of representations of incorrectly positioned young men by considering Djibril Diop
Mambety’s non-normative leading man Mory in Mambety’s 1973 classic Touki Bouki, and
rejecting the notion that this analysis needs to precede Aminata Sow Fall’s novel, L’appel des
arènes (1982), published nine years later. Indeed, ‘reading’ Touki Bouki as a follow-up to
Aminata Sow Fall’s L’appel des arènes was intentional; but more than that, it is
81
experimentally metabolic. By experimentally metabolic, I mean to suggest that there is a
wonderful generative energy that comes from mixing and reading texts in a wild, non-linear,
and queer fashion that opens expressively artistic texts (and oneself) up in unforeseen ways.
218

Characterized by breakdown (catabolism) and buildup (anabolism), I would argue metabolism
is a model metaphor to describe the procreative quality that springs from juxtaposing and
reading, studying, and analyzing cultural texts like L’appel des arènes and Mambety’s film
Touki Bouki alongside each other, despite the span of time that separates them. If, against the
backdrop of rapid structural adjustment Sow Fall’s novel appears to foreclose on promising
social change given its lead protagonist’s inability to resist the ‘pull’ of class affiliation and
all that that entails politically, socially, and culturally for example, Mambety’s film intimates
at an unbridled openness and hope, despite its seeming downbeat and ambiguous finale, as
well as its somewhat dated periodicity set in Dakar in the 1970’s.
Representationally, this openness is most evident in Mory’s non-normative, misfit
personae. “Mory…I don’t like him. He’s got no class, no shame, no job, nothing.”
219
Despite
being consigned to marginalization and social death, Mory resists being rendered “fleshy”
220

– what I call meatification and/or being meatified
221
– by embodying and personifying a
fluidity that disrupts the ‘straightening’ structural transformations taking hold of post-
independent Senegal. For one, Mory opposes the mechanization of his natal rural space and
the resulting shift in social relations premised on interest and profit of the era by fleeing his
insular township for the sprawling and rapidly developing urban center, Dakar. Next, he

218
The concept of reading “wildly” comes to me from a graduate seminar on “The Wild” taught by
Jack Halberstam. In this course, Jack encouraged me to nurture my “untamed” manner of reading by
investing in my attention to “odd” and “strange” connections, images, and words. Metabolism and the
metabolic has been simmering ever since.
219
Anta’s mother in Djibril Diop Mambety’s Touki Bouki (1973).
220
For discussion on flesh versus subjecthood, see Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:
An American Grammar Book.”
221
Nuancing Spillers’ concept of rendering bodies “flesh,” I argue certain bodies are “meatified” or
rendered consumable flesh via a process of “meatification,” a representational wedding of bodies to
edible meats (especially beef, fowl, and fish). See Chapter II, “Meat.”
82
associates with other social outlaws and misfits – revolutionary-minded, non-kin, counter-
cultural individuals like his girlfriend, Anta. Additionally, Mory outfits himself with occult,
otherworldly objects (gris-gris), and agentively adopts odd styles of dress that symbolically
undercut representational “lines” of modernity. By adopting modes of dress that deconstruct
tailored, modern ‘lines’ and ‘orientations’ of men’s Western clothing, for example, to don bell
bottom jeans, leather amulets, strangely militant dandy-like attire, billowy caftans, and
conspicuously colored turbans instead, Mory communicates – via his self-representational
vestimentary style – a non-normative, queer, and alternate ‘directional’ orientation.
Sexually, furthermore, Mory is a poorly aligned manly and sexed-male miss fit.
Metaphorically sutured to cattle, fowl, and fish, and repeatedly depicted in Touki Bouki as
occupying a prey-like sexual subjecthood to predatory-like sexual partners, namely Anta and
Charlie, Mory would hardly be described as an alpha male; most notably, for instance, his
androgyny problematizes the sexually dominant or domineering manliness one expects of a
film’s leading male actor. Moreover, the sexual intercourse in which Mory does or is willing
to engage in is non-procreative, promiscuous, and (for the most part) noteworthily public.
That is to emphatically say, that the sex Mory participates in or is willing to participate in
exists outside the insular and enclosed normative and normalizing home (especially the
bedroom), and spatially therefore, on the periphery of Senegalese domesticity. In this vein, for
its epoch, Mambety’s Touki Bouki is quite radical. But might we mine the film for more than
just its leading man’s willingness to transgress the ‘pull’ of normative and normalizing
domesticity by engaging in transactional, non-procreative queer sex? Might Touki Bouki
present more than just an opportunity to ‘recuperatively’glean an exemplary instance in a
classic African film of a fluid, non-normative androgynous young man of dubious manliness
and masculinity? Might, in other terms, Mory’s hustling and cruising atop a zebu-horn-
mounted motorcycle through the backstreets of Dakar in the 1970s be illustrative of
83
something more, something Nalla in Sow Fall’s novel set in the 1980s disappointingly failed
to fully commit to – an ethics of relationality, an active investment in disrupting “lines,” and
an engaged commitment to “unlimited intimacy?”
222

Disrupting “lines” and limits on thought by challenging “the points of dissolution [on]
individuals’ boundaries” all in an attempt “to achieve boundlessness” by reflecting on gay
men’s sexual practices in the contemporary moment,
223
Tim Dean offers an insightful
meditation on the discourse and politics disciplining gay men’s subcultural global networks of
orgiastic circuit parties since the advent of the AIDS crisis in the West in the 1980s in
Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009). While overall, I
find Dean’s study on the deliberate rejection of condoms in favor of a heightened sense of
“erotic risk” known commonly in queer vernacular as “barebacking” riveting, for the
purposes of my study, it is Dean’s fourth chapter, “Cruising as a Way of Life,” that I believe
is most beneficial in shedding insightful light on Mory’s own hustling and cruising. Indeed,
there is something assuredly, unequivocally, and undeniably odd about Mambety’s choice to
end Mory’s money-making scheming and plotting in a sexually and suggestively charged
scene of same-sex desire. While it is debatable whether this desire is mutually shared by both
Mory and “the homosexual” Charlie, it is clear – as other critics and I have pointed out
224
–
that this is not Mory’s first time at Charlie’s house. Moreover, the presence of other,
numbered young men – Boy Number 1, Boy Number 2, Boy Number 3, Boy Number 4, and
so on – lounging comfortably around the pool, intimates of an uninterrupted, cross- and
interclass libidinal economy of same-sex exchange. Of course, a rather predictable ‘line’ of
thought or ‘reading’ of this final scene of scheming and plotting would be to view Mory’s

222
Dean, Tim. Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking. University of
Chicago Press, 2009.
223
Ibid, 46.
224
See Harrow, Kenneth W, for example: “The Queer Thing About Djibril Diop Mambéty: A
Counterhegemonic Discourse Meets the Heterosexual Economy.” Paragraph, vol. 24, no. 3, 2001, pp.
76-91.
84
participation in this trafficking in men coerced and exploitative,
225
casting Charlie as a
ravenous metabolic force that consumes socially marginalized and destitute men (as I have
somewhat indirectly done in Chapter 2). That “the homosexual” is explicitly associated with
the Other and foreignness, and especially French and American otherness in the sociopolitical
climate of post-independent Senegal, further adds to Charlie’s intimated exploitative presence
on a metonymic, macrostructural scale. But what if we queered this ‘line’ of thought, bending,
and twisting it, nuancing it, turning, and flipping it on its head, and in so doing produced a
different conclusion, one with the potential, as Dean has suggested, for ethical boundlessness?
The modern city, Dean argues, is a fertile space, ripe with illimitable occasions for
contact.
226
It is a space that incites sustained connection with strangers, provoking a constant
encounter with strangeness, a dynamic and exciting place affording a myriad of opportunities
for literal and metaphoric crossing, intersection, and exchange (not exclusively of the sexual
kind). The postcolonial, post-independent capital of Dakar in the 1970s, however, seemed, at
least from Mory’s destitute, black, non-normative, sexed male vantage point, much less
inviting and welcoming of the kind of intercourse, union, and connection that Dean argues
epitomizes modern cities everywhere. “You can only be black or white here. I’m sick of
it!”
227
In this light, what if we consider Mory and Anta’s maniacal drive to flee Dakar for
Paris on the Ancerville, as a deep longing and desire for boundless communion with alterity?
What if, additionally, we suspended our predictable ‘line’of reading the aborted scene of
sexual intimacy between Mory and Charlie for a moment, skewed it and viewed it, not as
exploitative, but rather, as Mory’s agentive attempt to connect with an otherness not

225
It is debatable whether transactional sex can be characterized as entirely “exploitative,” as anyone
who has engaged in such exchange and/or has worked closely with sex workers knows. Indeed, the
hustler / male sex worker possesses a high degree of agency in the negotiating process (they decide in
which sexual acts to engage, they choose where the exchange will take place, they set the price and
amount to be exchanged, and finally, they may decline “the transaction” at any time).
226
Dean, Tim. Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking. University of
Chicago Press, 170.
227
Mory in Djibril Diop Mambety’s Touki Bouki (1973).
85
predictably and normatively thought to exist solely in the opposite sex (i.e., solely in and
through emotional and intimate connection with Anta)? Since we can assume that Mory
previously engaged in transactional sex with Charlie, as this was not his first-time at Charlie’s
home, what if we reevaluated our initial ‘line’ of thought and considered Mory’s last-minute
refusal to ‘take it up the ass’ (yet again presumably) not as a categorical rejection of Charlie’s
sexual advances, but rather, as a sudden realization that “unlimited intimacy” with Charlie
was and will always be frustratingly impossible, as the vigor and force of Charlie’s appetite
and consumptive impetus are in their ability to smother, metabolize, and erase Mory’s
otherness? What, to sum, I find most appealing about Dean’s argument on “cruising as a way
of life” and likewise, Mory’s own metaphorically sinuous and aimless ‘cruising’ on a zebu-
horned motorcycle through the postcolonial backstreets of Dakar, is the limitless and
boundless promise of encounter with others that seeks not to devour, metabolize, erase, and
eliminate strangeness and queerness, but rather is a salutary contact that exposes one to
“something wonderfully strange” that stirs, shakes, and awakens something hidden and buried
deep within the self.
228

No limits. Boundlessness. Disorientation. Objects. Disorienting limitless and boundless
objecthood. In Queer Phenomonolgy’s (2006) final chapter, “Disorientation and Queer
Objects,” Ahmed describes the utility of queer, misaligned and “out-of-place” objects – and
especially the usefulness of their disorientating effects. Disorientation, she writes, are “vital
moments,” they are mundane everyday moments, instructive moments from which we might
learn, grow, and develop. They are, in other terms, illuminating moments that may assist in
shifting or reorientating how we perceive and move through the world. “Disorientation is an
ordinary feeling, or even a feeling that comes and goes as we move around during the day. I

228
Dean, Tim. Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking. University of
Chicago Press, 180-1.
86
think we can learn from such ordinary moments.”
229
Likewise, Sow Fall’s novel and
Mambety’s film might too be described as ‘out-of-place’ objects capable of producing
disorienting effects, especially when ‘read’ – as I have attempted – obliquely and queerly,
resisting the ‘pull’ of readings that extend the ‘line’ of traditional interpretations. The
mundane act of reading a book and/or viewing a film, acts often tacitly assumed to be passive,
are, if we follow Ahmed’s ‘line’ of argumentation, quite energetic and agentive, capable of
affecting and impressing an undetermined something on the reader or viewer. Additionally,
such objects shine critical light on, in Ahmed’s words, “neutrality” and “alignment” more
generally, making evident the taken-for-granted “appearance of impartiality,” and how
perceptions of crookedness and “straightness” are the effects of a sedimentation that is a
consequence of constant, uninterrupted repetition; a repeated recasting and retelling of the
same old tired stories we tell ourselves.
230
“The straight body is not simply in a “neutral”
position: or if it is the neutral position, then this alignment is only an effect of the repetition of
past gestures.”
231
In sum, the queer, ‘out-of-place’ qualities of Sow Fall’s novel and
Mambety’s film, but especially their non-normative male protagonists Nalla and Mory, are
disorientating, producing a self-reflexivity that draws attention to one’s uncritical adherence
to and ‘alignment’ with compulsory orientations (of any kind), and more than that, how this
‘alignment’ works not only to reproduce ““itself”, “it is [also a] mechanism for the
reproduction of culture.”
232
And yet, while the texts studied thus far incite critical self-
reflexivity to varying degrees, it is my strong belief that they fall short of breaking completely
with the reproductive nature of culture. Notwithstanding, in what follows, I argue that
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s chief protagonist in De purs hommes (2018), the miss fit/misfit

229
Sara Ahmed, “Disorientation and Queer Objects,” 157, emphasis added.
230
I use the queer vernacular “tired” to signal the repetitive quality (to the point of annoyance) of the
take-for-granted stories we tell ourselves.
231
Sara Ahmed, 161
232
Ibid.
87
Ndéné Gueye, represents an exemplary fictional case study of a ‘new’ kind of ‘Senegalese
man,’ and offers a fascinating alternative to his antecedent miss fit Nalla and misfit Mory.
Indeed, unlike Nalla and Mory, Ndéné Guey violently ruptures and breaks with the
reproductive quality of ‘cultural tradition’ by openly and rebelliously embracing his
queerness. Furthermore, it is in this break with culture, in this disruption of ‘lines’ and
movement away and against compulsory binary orientations, that lies the power and promise
of an Afro-centered circulation of queerness.
Reflexive Hegemonic Masculinity Refracted

Bedrooms, while minor spaces in homes, are nevertheless structurally important to the
replication of domesticity – and by extension culture. Michel Foucault observed this only too
keenly: “The couple imposed itself as a model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and
reserved the right to speak while retaining the principle of secrecy. A single locus of sexuality
was acknowledged in social space as well as at the heart of every household, but it was a
utilitarian and fertile one: the parents’ bedroom.”
233
Interestingly, bedroom scenes surface in
both texts examined thus far, as well as in the novel under examination in this chapter –
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s De purs hommes. In fact, in Sarr’s text, one might even say
bedrooms hold a chief place in the narrative, as the novel opens with a post-coital bedroom
scene. Additionally, bedrooms seem to wax and wane over the near entirety of the novel’s
pages. It is important therefore we pause and consider how bedrooms function in these
imaginative and artistic works. Indeed, when one dares to take notice of the number of times
scenes in bedrooms surface in these works, the question begs asking: what work do these
fictional representations of bedrooms do? I argue the vignettes set in bedrooms present fertile
and fecund moments that are generative in unanticipated ways. Chiefly, bedroom scenes in
each of the three works evidence instances in which the lead protagonists’ relational

233
Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: Volume I, 3.
88
subjectivity is made legible. Moreover, these scenes present reflexive moments for readers
and viewers alike, via what I wish for now to call a process of refracted reflexivity. That is to
say, the scenes marking the protagonists’ subjecthood ‘bounce back,’ drawing the reader or
viewer in, hooking them, and impelling them to reflect on their own subject position, their
“alignment” or “misalignment” with masculinity, and especially their proximity to
masculinity’s shifting hegemonic ideals over time and space. One seems invited – no, incited
– to meditate on just exactly how ‘straight’ or ‘queer’ one in fact is, and thus how ‘aligned’
one is or not with dominant lines and notions of “straightness.” But more than that, this
refraction goes beyond simple mirroring; it occasions, as I will argue in this section, one’s
undoing by illustrating the fungibility of linearity and lines and underscoring the mundane
circularity of the everyday that can very easily sweep one away, and in so doing, destabilize
the directional footing, firmness, and assuredness with which one believes one securely
stands.
“Une lueur de joie éclaire le visage de Nalla. L’enthousiasme le gagne. Brusquement il se
lève du lit. Il est en face de Diattou. Ndiogou à qui il a tourné le dos à présent l’observe à
travers la glace de l’armoire et est frappé par ses yeux pétillants. ”
234
How bodies move and
extend through space and how bodies interface with objects, are instructive in understanding
the contrasting binary Ahmed points to that exists between “linearity” and “misalignment,” in
distinguishing, in other terms, those bodies that “line up” with dominate “lines,” and those
bodies that deviate from them, thereby falling “out of line.” In the above short excerpt, for
example, taken from the first in a series of bedroom scenes in Sow Fall’s work (perhaps the
most important in my view), the preponderance of directional words and phrases is striking.
On a semantically spatial level, Nalla’s orientation ‘upwards’ contrasts dramatically
(“brusquement”) with his parents ‘downward,’ seated orientation, signaling a visual and

234
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes. 1982. Sépia Editions, 1993, 27.
89
spatial opposition of planes as well as, metonymically, a rupture with lineal, familial, and
filial orientations. Nalla’s dissonance, in other terms, is made remarkably clear here in the
manner that his body moves through space. Moreover, defiantly challenging his mother while
facing her and mimicking a wrestler’s fierce posturing underscores further this filial / parental
disconnect. But it is the twisting and turning of Nalla’s body away from his father, Ndiogou,
however, that is telling. As Ahmed – echoing David Bell and Gill Valentine (1995)
235
– points
out, etymologically, queer is an Indo-European term meaning “twist” that is mapped onto
bodies sexually.
236
Nalla’s ‘twisting’ and ‘turning’ his back on his father, in other words,
marks Nalla corporeally and spatially as Other. Indeed, in a few paragraphs further along,
Nalla is described as transfigured and transformed: “Sa repiration est halentante.
Métamorphosé. Il est Malaw Lô, le lutteur hors classe, le lion du Kajoor.”
237
Doubling
symbolically here as both a directional metaphor and a phrase used to describe Malaw Lô’s
(Nalla’s idol’s) exceptional, Herculean strength, the “il est…hors classe” of Nalla’s
‘misalignment’ is suggestive of his nascent desire to veer away from his parents, his symbolic
inclination toward social ‘deviation,’ and the first indication in the novel of the ‘pulling,’
magnetic effect alternate, homosocial-oriented and centered male bodies and embodiments of
subjecthood have on Nalla.
But Nalla is not the only one to experience a metaphorical seismic ‘shift,’ however. His
parents – particularly his father, Ndiogou – and Sow Fall’s readers do too. Through an
instance of refracted looks, which this bedroom vignette illustrates exemplarily, Ndiogou and
Sow Fall’s readers experience a reflexive ‘shift’ best elucidated by all the ‘looking’ brought to
the fore in this short sequence, as well as the cognizance of Nalla’s subject position in a world
of socially powerful adult men (and women, like Diatou, Nalla’s mother). In this episode,

235
Bell, David and Gill Valentine, eds. Mapping Desires: Geographies of Sexualities. Routledge,
1995.
236
Ahmed, Sara. “Sexual Orientation,” 67.
237
Sow Fall, Aminata. L’appel des arènes. 1982. Sépia Editions, 1993, 28.
90
everyone appears to be fixedly ‘staring.’ Nevertheless, it is Nalla’s father’s gaze that is
privileged: Nalla is defiantly eyeballing his mother Diatou, who in turn is staring in
amazement at Nalla’s wild, wrestler-like gesturing; Diatou is also likely stealing complicit
glances of alarm over Nalla’s shoulder at her husband Ndiougou, who, sitting behind Nalla,
has fixed his eyes unwaveringly on his boy; meanwhile the reader is imaginatively taking in
the whole scene, and with it, the triangulated gazing of the novel’s three main characters.
“Gender ambiguity, in some sense, results from and contests the dominance of the visual
within postmodernism,”
238
writes Halberstam. Nalla, whose wrestling poses, and untamed
posturing repudiate ‘alignment’ with his upwardly mobile father Niogou in other words, while
not an outright contestation of the subject-positioning in which his father’s gaze fixes him, are
nevertheless, successful in frustrating the power and supremacy of his father’s hegemonic
gaze. Moreover, while there is no textual evidence in Sow Fall’s novel that Nalla is
transgender – or of trans experience for that matter – as a twelve-year-old adolescent boy,
Nalla’s body is one that is quite literally caught in a ‘state of transition,’ as he is internally
morphing, shifting, and maturing into an adult man. And yet, despite the promise and
potential that characterizes the incalculability of Nalla’s corporeal development and by proxy
that of the Senegalese nation’s on the cusp of transformational change, Nalla’s body – much
like the transgender body of which Halberstam writes in “The Transgender Look” – presents a
hint of rigidity that undercuts the superlative fancy of adolescent fluidity and flexibility.
239

And it is Nalla’s sudden and unexpected ‘turn’ away from the alternate modes of being and
moving through the world learned alongside his wrestling mentors for the near entirety of the
novel, and his unanticipated and abrupt ‘reorientation’ and falling back into ‘line’ with his

238
Halberstam, Judith. “The Transgender Look.” In a Queer Time and Place, Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives. New York University Press, 2005, 76.
239
Ibid, 77. Halberstam’s notion (echoing Emily Martin in Flexible Bodies. Beacon Press, 1995.) of
the tension between rigidity and flexibility/fluidity of trans bodies here is instrumental, the “insistence
on particular forms of recognition,” for example, is just one example of the form this rigidity takes.
91
‘straightening’ middle-class upbringing that is exemplary of social rigidity’s powerful
‘puling’ effects.

Figure 10: Acoustic cameo, film still, Figure 11: Acoustic cameo, film still,
Touki Bouki (1973). Touki Bouki (1973).

Fluidity’s undoing through a surfacing of rigidity intended to underscore the limits of flow
and flexibility, and the ‘lines’ non-normative and misaligned misfits’ bodies like Mory’s
ought not to cross, arises in a bedroom scene in Touki Bouki as well. All but one critic (to my
knowledge) has astutely observed that Djibril Diop Mambety (the director) marks his
presence oddly in the film in a bizarre and queer way.
240
It is Vlad Dima who rightly observes
the strange, inaudible “acoustic cameo” Mambety makes in Touki Bouki, as well as the
peculiar and noteworthy silence that signals Mambety’s “presence,” writing, we (the viewers)
never “hear his actual voice.”
241
Curiouser still is the provocative metaphoric connection
Dima traces between Mambety and Mory. If Mory is indeed a hustler/male prostitute as
Dima, I, and other critics have suggested,
242
then Mambety might very well be one too,
suggests Dima. “Mambety might see himself as a prostitute,” he writes, “of course this is not
to be taken literally, but there is something to be said about the difficulties of finding the
financial backing to make a film in Senegal. The director’s project depends on external
contributions, on rich “Charlies,” a.k.a. producers, a.ka. hyenas, and on the director’s

240
See Vlad Dima. “Aural Space and the Sonic Rack Focus in Touki Bouki.” Sonic Space: In Djibril
Diop Mambety’s Films. Indiana University Press, 2017, pp.41-73.
241
Ibid, 69.
242
Kenneth Harrow, for example, is another.
92
willingness to sell out.”
243
Put bluntly and crudely, in other words, the insecurity of Mory’s
fictional circumstances mirror in many instances the precarity of Mambety’s (and other
African filmmakers’) professional stability and ability to bring his (their) artistry to fruition,
requiring they not only sell out, as Dima states, but also (in vulgar North American slang) put
out.
244
Given, in other terms, their alterity, Mory and Mambety have no choice but to engage
in economies of intercourse (sexual or otherwise) that plot and fix them firmly along less than
powerful ‘lines.’ But might Mambety’s reflexive inclusion of Self intimate something more?
Kenneth Harrow has suggested, for example, that Mambety’s entire oeuvre, his attentiveness
and sensitivity to othered and othering social mechanisms, are founded on “unmooring” the
powerful conventional gaze, particularly the hegemonical male gaze.
245
I believe Mambety’s
success in confusing and occasioning feelings of insecurity in men – by unmooring the power
associated with the ocular – arise precisely at these moments of reflexive inclusions of the
Self. For me, Mambety’s insertion of Self – which by the way is not unique to Touki Bouki
246

– is much more than a metaphorical allusion to his own ‘putting out,’ or as Dima puts it, his
metaphorized “prostitution.” As I read it, Mambety’s “acoustic cameo” is a clear instance of
coming to terms with the realization that he too participates in metabolic networks that
consume ‘exposed’ men, particularly those in vulnerable subject positions. But more than
that, Mambety’s self-examination is refractively reflected to the viewers consuming his films,
inciting them too to think about their power and positionality, and the indirect role they may
play in consuming and metabolizing the Other. For example, despite feeling a profound
connection with the miss fit Nalla and an even deeper affinity with the misfit Mory – to whom
I feel ‘magnetically’ and intimately drawn – I, like Mambety, recognize the complex

243
Vlad Dima. “Aural Space and the Sonic Rack Focus in Touki Bouki,” 69.
244
Put out: def. vulgar North American slang: to agree to exchange something for sex.
245
Harrow, Kenneth W. “The Queer Thing About Djibril Diop Mambéty: A Counterhegemonic
Discourse Meets the Heterosexual Economy,” 78.
246
Mambety plays characters in at least two other films of which I am aware.
93
positionalities limiting my flexibility of mind, by drawing, what some might argue are facile
nodes of connection. I too note, moreover, that while I may not insert traces of my Self into
my analysis as notably (or remarkably) as Mambety does, playing the role of a police
inspector, I wield power over these fictional miss fits and misfits; using and consuming them,
chipping away at them by imaginatively directing their labor, and making them ‘fall into line’
by performing the work that I need them to, to persuasively plot and advance my argument.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s leading man in De purs hommes (2018), Ndéné Gueye, arrives
at a somewhat similar conclusion. Drawn by a circuitous progression, development, and
metaphorical directional ‘pull,’ Ndéné embraces, what Audre Lorde would call the “erotic as
power”
247
by embracing his inner goor-jigéen,
248
by “listening,” in Chicana lesbian scholar
Gloria Anzaldua’s words, “to what [his inner] jotéria has to say.”
249
“En suis-je un?
Oui…Non…Peu importe : la rumeur a dit, décidé, décrété que oui. Je serai donc un. Je dois
en être un. S’ils ont besoin, ceux-là dehors, que j’en sois un pour mieux vivre, je vais l’être,
jouer à fond mon rôle et ainsi chacun sera content.”
250
In what follows, I will argue that
Ndéné Gueye is the prototypical ‘reflective man’; confused, disoriented, and unmoored by a
series of circular forces that disrupt his binary thinking – indeed his binary ethos and
embodiment – resulting in his coming ‘undone.’ And it is in this ‘undoing’ that Ndéné
becomes ‘permeable,’ yet corporeally legible, and forever changed, open and receptive to
unlimited and boundless intimacy with Others and the other in himself.

247
See Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider.1984. Crossing Press,
2007.
248
Homesexual in Wolof (but not unlike also faggot, sissy, according to out/queer, Senegalese cultural
informants).
249
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera:The New Mestiza, 85.
250
Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. De purs hommes, 190.
94
Unmooring Binary Thinking via the Dizzying Force of Circularity

“- Tu as vu la vidéo qui circule depuis deux jours ?”
251
The narrative arc of De purs
hommes (2021), Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s fifth novel, is rather straightforward. The novel
begins with a disturbing video of the unearthing of a cadaver at an unmarked grave by an
angry, raging mob of shirtless, sweaty men at an unspecified cemetery in Dakar, Senegal; the
lifeless body is that of a suspected goor-jigéen
252
who, it is rumored, passed due to
HIV/AIDS-related complications. “Ici, à Dakar. Je ne sais pas encore à quel endroit
exactement. Mais ça s’est passé, c’est tout.”
253
Despite attempts to contain, master, and
suppress the video’s violent and graphic content, the video has been shared repeatedly,
spreading rapidly and widely across Dakar. And much like a contagion, the video has gone
“viral,” advancing and mutating unpredictably. The effects of this “infection,” however, are
uncannily odd and strange. “Je vis le corps nu du mort, sexe protubérant ; je fermai les yeux
pour lui échapper, je ne le vis que mieux, tout mort et tout nu sous mes paupières closes, pure
image mentale qui me colla aux neurones, que mon imagination exagéra et dota d’une
horrible netteté ; je rouvris les yeux, le temps de voir le cadavre jeté hors du cimetière sous les
injures et les crachats gras, puis, brutalement, la vidéo prit fin.”
254
In this short excerpt, for
instance, Ndéné Gueye, the novel’s central protagonist describes his loss of control and
inability to unsee the clip once he has downloaded it, as the explicit images have been
“mapped” onto “the neurons” housed by his nervous system. Put another way, Ndéné Gueye’s
neurons – basic working units of the brain, specialized in transmitting information to nerve,
muscle, and gland cells – have been hijacked, making it difficult to resist the effect and ‘pull’
the video’s power wields on him, despite his self-proclaimed disdain and abhorrence of

251
Ibid, 7.
252
Homosexual in Wolof (but not unlike also faggot, sissy, according to out/queer, Senegalese cultural
informants).
253
Ibid, 14.
254
Ibid, 13.
95
violence. “Je fermai les yeux, saisi de terreur et de dépit, mais la video continuait, elle flattait
ma curiosité morbide, je les rouvris.”
255
And it is this inability to resist viewing the video,
recalling and replaying it repeatedly in his mind over the course of the novel that marks
Ndéné’s slow and progressive undoing, his debilitating loss of power and mastery of Self.
But Ndéné’s loss of mastery begins, in the words of Julietta Singh, with his methodical
“unthinking” of Self.
256
As I see it, Singh contends that “unthinking mastery” begins with
understanding that the characteristics we value and believe today to be commendable and
praiseworthy (i.e. the master of language, or a subject matter, or a literary tradition etc.) are
intimately entangled with histories of power and subjugation. Additionally, unthinking
mastery requires deep reflexivity, a turning inward, a taking stock of one’s “masterly ethos”
and especially how one “aims for the full submission of an object – or something objectified –
whether it be external or internal to oneself.”
257
Likewise, Ndéné begins a process of breaking
with mastery (or, in Singh’s articulation, a “self-maiming,”
258
) by reconsidering what could
initially be characterized as a total and utter indifference to the violence he so passively
consumes by casually viewing the terrorizing exhumation of a deceased man’s body while
relaxing comfortably in bed: “Après tout, ce n’était qu’un goor-jigéen,” The syntactical /
semantic construction of Ndéné’s response, when asked what he thinks about the video (“–
T’en pense quoi? [...] – De la video?”) is quite appalling for a young, progressive, university
professor of 19
th
Century French Literature in Dakar: “afterall,” Ndéné retorts, “it was only a
homosexual.” Rama, Ndéné’s girlfriend with whom he just made love, too is shocked; so
much so, that she replies with a ferocity matching Ndéné’s cruel indifference by striking him
forcefully across his face. “Elle répéta la phrase avec une ironique indignation dans la voix.

255
Ibid, emphasis added.
256
Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Duke University
Press, 2018.
257
Ibid, 10, 6-15.
258
Ibid,10.
96
J’ouvris la bouche pour répliquer. Elle ne m’en laissa la voix. J’ouvris la bouche pour
répliquer. Elle ne m’en laissa pas le temps : dans un éclair une gifle me coupa l’appétit de la
parole, tarrr !, allumant un brasier douloureux sur la partie gauche de mon visage.”
259
Sarr’s
choice of the verb ‘allumer’ in the gerundive, present progressive form (‘allumant’) here is
saliant, as it designates a shift in Ndéné’s “line” of thought and “orientation” (to echo Ahmed)
that begins with drawing subtle connections between the circulating images of the barbarous
excavation and Ndéné’s place in contributing to everyday relational (gendered) violence.
“ « C’est bon !» Et comme si cette phrase eût été le signal attendu par tous, la masse,
de nouveau, fut prise d’une agitation plus dense, plus vitale : quelque chose de
monstrueux semblait gésir dans les profondeurs de la fosse et de la foule. Des cris
résonnèrent alors : « sortez-le ! Il commence à pourrir, quelle odeur ! L’odeur du
péché ! L’odeur du sexe de sa mère d’où il n’aurait jamais dû sortir ! »”
260

For a novel marketed on numerous book vendors’ websites as one dealing openly and
candidly with male same-sex desire,
261
there are – ironically – a remarkable number of
references to women, women’s bodies, and women’s sexuality. Unfortunately, this
representation is not always positive. The excerpt above, for example, signals the way the
very language of violence is gendered, centering perpetually on an objectification of women,
women’s bodies, and particularly women’s body parts. The latter, as noted in the brief excerpt
above, are depicted as zones of erogenous pleasure and/or, alternately, as monstruous sites of,
among other things, pestilent disease. This troubling dichotomous bind – occasionally fused,
as illustrated in this example – in which the male gaze fixes sexed-female bodies, is one Sarr,
the author, via the book’s principal male protagonist Ndéné, mobilizes repeatedly. Contrast
this short excerpt, for example, drawing a clear nexus between the site of violent excavation

259
Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. Des purs hommes, 19.
260
Ibid, 12.
261
See Amazon’s short blurp about the novel, for example.
97
and child-birth with De purs hommes’ protagonist’s post-coital musings about his partner’s
body, on the novel’s first page: “Je revins donc à l’espace de ma chambre, où flottaient les
senteurs d’aisselles en sueur et de cigarettes, mais où surtout régnait, étranglant les autres
odeur, l’empreinte appuyée du sexe, de son sexe. Signature olfactive unique, je l’aurais
reconnue entre mille autres, celle-là, l’odeur de son sexe après l’amour, odeur de hautre mer,
qui semblait s’échapper d’un encensoir du paradis.”
262
Decontextualizing such passages and
reading them alongside each other suggests a facile juxtaposition and structuring at play in the
novel. Mining and excavating these passages further, however, suggests something more.
Such fragments are directly associated with other prominent binaries at work in the novel,
particularly Sarr’s mobilization of the dichotomy darkness / light, as well as its innumerable
offshoots (sleep / wakefulness; night / day; opacity / clarity; confusion / lucidity etc.). In other
terms, while Ndéné’s musings about his partner Rama’s body are interior thoughts that take
place at night, and in the opacity of the private domestic space of his bedroom, the frenzied
masculinist excavation – metaphorized in one instance as a violent raping and violation of the
earth – occurs during the day. Light is further underscored by the brightness of the viral video
streaming on a telephone’s screen, a reflective light inconveniently and disruptively troubling
Ndéné’s rather ‘dark / grey’ liminal, hypnagogic state. On a symbolic plane, moreover,
Ndéné’s transitional hypnagogic state between wakefulness (day time) and sleep (night time)
likewise signals a state of ‘fluid consciousness,’ a promising moment in other words, in which
Ndéné is afforded a reflective moment to meditate deeply and critically on his role and
positionality (be it direct or indirect) in perpetuating relational networks of gendered violence.
“J’ignore si ce fut par persversité, pitié, charité chretienne ou réel amour. Par peur ? Avait-
elle craint qu’aveuglé de colère je la violente ? La viole ? L’ai-je violé ? Je n’y songe que

262
Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. De purs hommes, 7.
98
maintentant. Seigneur…Je ne l’ai plus revue après ça.”
263
While the critical literature dealing
specifically with Sarr’s De purs hommes is sparce,
264
secondary sources analyzing his other
works, most notably his second novel, Silence du chœur (2017), about clandestine migrants in
Europe, are prolific.
265
Nevertheless, the themes of mobility and the transformation of one’s
mobility into stagnation and / or involuntary immobility,
266
are not too dissimilar than the
‘intellectual (im)mobility’ experienced by Ndéné in De purs hommes. After the violent
disinterring of the goor-jigéen, Ndéné experiences a notable, albeit subtle, shift. One that, in
the above excerpt, suggests Ndéné mentally revisits and critically revises his past sexual
liaisons by considering the power differential his heteronormative, sexed-male privilege
affords him in all erotic and sexual matters. Put another way, Ndéné ‘moves’ and ‘shifts’
mentally along new ‘lines’ and modes of thought, from a static, ‘fixed’ state of perceiving
women as passive objects (consider again, the earlier description of Rama’s body) at his
disposal, for example, to a more ‘fluid’ and flexible state of mind that considers, if only for a
transient moment, his insistence on copulation after his mother’s death as a potential instance
of coerced and forced sexual contact. In this intertextual, transient scene in De purs hommes,
reminiscent of Meursault and Marie’s uncomfortably odd and strange lovemaking
immediately following the death of Meursault’s mother in Albert Camus’ L’Étranger,
267

Ndéné reassesses the aggressively persuasive sexual power to which he subjected Manon, his
girlfriend at the time, and meditates seriously on the viable possibility that he raped her. To
sum, while a truly troubling scene, this is a key moment in the first chapter of the novel

263
Ibid, 16.
264
To my knowledge, there are fewer than 5 secondary sources discussing De purs hommes, either
directly or indirectly. See, for example, Bryson, Devin. “In and Out in Senegal: Unearthing Queer
Roots in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s De purs hommes.” African Studies Review, vol. 64, no. 4, 2021,
pp. 803-25.
265
See, for example, Toivanen, Anna-Leena. “Afro-European peripheral mobilities in francophone
African literatures.” Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 57, no. 3, 2021, pp. 358-71.
266
Ibid, 366.
267
This is, in my view, an intertextual reference to Albert Camus’ 1942 novel L’Étranger.
99
following the sobering slap across his face that ‘unsettles’ and ‘awakens’ Ndéné to his
strangeness; to the Other within himself; and to the Other capable of a violence not unlike the
one he viewed in the clip of the disinterred goor-jigéen. Indeed, Ndéné’s critical self-
assessment at this juncture so early in the novel is a striking one, as it marks a queer ‘turn’ in
the novel: progressing and mentally shifting from a static indifference to violence, to an
agentive and active approximation and understanding of alterity, Ndéné slowly opens-up, by
coming to the realization that perhaps it is his variant and non-normative queerness and
otherness that was (all along) at the root of his lack of concern, interest, and empathy for the
exhumed homosexual. “Je n’étais plus moi-même … Je ne connaissais plus ma vérité intime ;
l’idée même d’en avoir, dans ce cas précis, me semblait dangereuse. Alors j’avais exagéré ma
froideur, comme si j’avais craint que l’œil de ma société ne me surprit en flagrant délit de
faiblesse.”
268
And it is this coming to terms with his otherness, that marks his slow, yet steady
orientation toward the Other.
Embracing Your Inner Goor-jigéen

There is a noteworthy magnetism, ‘pull,’ and (homoerotic) desire simultaneously
‘drawing’ and ‘propelling’ Ndéné Gueye toward odd, queer, and subaltern men. Chief among
these men, as he is the one with the strongest ‘pull,’ of course, is Amadou, whose identity is
unknown at the beginning of the novel. Referred to simply as the exhumed goor-jigéen,
Amadou’s identity slowly becomes legible, as Ndéné seeks to ‘sketch’ a portrait of him via
his narrative voice. “Deux details me hantaient. Le premier était le visage de l’homme déterré,
qu’il ne me semblait pas avoir vu dans la vidéo, mais dont les traits, sans que je puisse
l’expliquer, s’étaient peu à peu dessinés dans ma tête…Le second détail me troublait
davantage. C’était le sexe de l’homme.”
269
While at first, readers are only given explicit

268
Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. De purs hommes, 18.
269
Ibid, 67-8.
100
minutiae of the deceased man’s corpse via graphic, detailed, page-length descriptions of the
cadaver’s face and penis, Ndéné’s obsession with the deterred homosexual as only ‘a
sensationalized object,’ at some point morphs and transforms, becoming something
‘consumed/consuming,’ something ‘interior:’ an unexplained feeling that even Ndéné finds
difficult to put into words, an inexplicable something that transcends the limits and bounds of
language. “Non seulement ma pensée était occupée par ce goor-jigéen, mais je commençais à
éprouver pour lui quelque chose que je répugnais à appeler un sentiment.”
270
Ndéné’s fixation
with the goor-jigéen, in other words, becomes an intense and visceral longing he is reluctant
to and incapable of avowing to. But a consuming yearning for what exactly? One plausible
explanation, given Ndéné’s shifting focus from Amadou’s face – and particularly from
Amadou’s penis “he’s devoured visually for long seconds”
271
– to Amadou’s substance via a
reassemblage of Amadou’s personae by reconnecting with his social network, is what David
Caron might call a rejection of the phallus as the organizing principal of relationality.
272
This
spurring of the phallus coupled with an underpinning ‘backwardness’ to Ndéné’s tracking and
tracing, and piecing-together of elements of Amadou’s subjecthood and subjectivity, mark
Ndéné as queer, as Ahmed reminds us, that “countercurrent lines” deviating from “linearity”
and “straightforwardness” are retrograde orientations one ought not to follow, and branding
one as a marginal/-ized Other. Put another way, by repeatedly turning back time, returning to
Amadou’s home to ‘reconstruct’ and narratively ‘reincarnate’ Amadou with the help of
Amadou’s mother, Ndéné signals a rejection of ‘linearity’ through his constant and
continuous return to the past, metaphorized by the solidity with which Ndéné narrativizes
Amadou’s childhood home. In Ahmed’s articulation to sum, Ndéné has deliberately chosen a
path that is “out of line” and thus has much in common with Sow Fall’s twelve year-old Nalla

270
Ibid, 69.
271
“Son image ne me quittait plus, comme si je l’avais dévoré des yeux de longues secondes au
ralenti, ” Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. De purs hommes, 68
272
Caron, David. “The Queerness of Male Group Friendship,” 252.
101
and Mambety’s outlier Mory. Ndéné, in other words, becomes both a brazen miss fit and a
shameless misfit.
But Ndéné’s ‘directional’ rejection of ‘linearity’ and ‘straightness’ is much more than just
a substitution of a ‘forward’ orientation by the adoption of ‘crosscurrent’ one, Ndéné’s
metamorphosis into a sissy-faggot – “Je vais sortir…me métamorphoser en pédé”
273
– is a
deliberate design to trouble the horizontal / vertical axes binary, by moving deep, adopting,
and embodying the serpentine orientation of viscera by embodying, through movement,
human waste. “Nous sommes peut-être tous dans un tube, une sorte de gros intestin, les uns
allant dans un sens, les autres dans la direction opposée, tous croyant trouver la lumière là ou
les autres n’ont laissé qu’un purgatoire gris. Et personne ne se parlerait…Vous y avez pensé,
à ça ? Que ferais-tu, que feriez-vous tous s’il n’y avait finalement rien à chercher, si tout cela
n’était qu’une gigantesque suite de hasards sans message caché ?”
274
An orientation that
troubles binary axes of horizontality and verticality is one, I would argue, that imagines us to
be in a state of constant transition (much like continuously metabolizing feces), a state that is
neither male nor female, but rather, as Ndéné appears to present it, “goor-jigéen”: irrefutably
neither one or the other, troublingly and enigmatically liminal, vitally visceral, sentient
vibrant beings that agentively assimilate metabolization, that is to say, that we refuse to move
through the world unphased by interlocking structures of violence. Most notable about the
passage above, for example, is not the equating of sentient beings to human fecal waste
traveling in opposing directions in this large tube-like intestine. Rather, it is the rigidity with
which the people Ndéné imagines therein move, how, trance-like – mindlessly – they hold
fast to their competing, contesting, and opposing ‘lines’ and ‘orientations’ – metabolized.
How might we upend this view of an all-consuming metabolization to a metabolization that

273
Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. De purs hommes, 188.
274
Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. De purs hommes, 180.
102
encourages mixing and exchange, a relationality and feeling for and across delimiting lines of
thought and orientations? In my final chapter, I meditate at length on this question via an
analysis of Léopold Sédar Senghor short collection of poems Hosties Noires (1948).

103
CHAPTER FOUR

EATING

Metabolic Transubstantiation: The Trouble with Swallowing
Senghor’s Transformative Poetics of Relation,
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Hosties Noires (1948)

In some manner or another all forms of life eat some other living things and then, in
turn, are eaten by someone else.
275

Jack D. Forbes (2008)

The relation of each and every man to his own excrement belongs to the sphere of
power. Nothing has been so much part of one as that which turns into excrement. The
constant pressure which, during the whole of its long progress through the body, is
applied to the prey which has become food; its dissolution and intimate union with the
creature digesting it; the complete and final annihilation…its assimilation to
something already existing, that is, to the body of the eater – all this may very well be
seen as the central, if most hidden, process of power.
276

Elias Canetti (1960)

Like Minded “Eaters”: Roland Barthes and Léopold Sédar Senghor

In her exquisitely written conclusion, “Racial Indigestion,” in her oft-cited pioneering
work of the same name, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19
th
Century (2012), Kyla
Wazana Tompkins states that her hope in drawing attention to the mouth and eating through
readings of material culture in the context of the United States in the early nineteenth-century
is to foster, as she puts it, “a more just ethics and practice” of eating.
277
She notes, moreover,
that her aim in dwelling on “sites and moments of discomfort” in which black bodies are
representationally ingested is not to foreclose on the pleasures of consumption, but rather to
cultivate “a more ethical and life-affirming vulnerability to each other.”
278
While these too are
my aims, I wonder if arriving at a place of “ethical eating” is possible. Can consumption ever

275
Forbes, Jack D. “Consuming Another’s Life: The Wétiko Cannibal Psychosis.” Columbus and
Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. 1979. Seven
Stories Press, 2008, pp. 9-26.
276
Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power, 210-11.
277
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19
th
Century (2012), p. 187.
278
Ibid.
104
be ethical? Or, as Jack D. Forbes argues, is one simply a link in a chain of never-ending
eating, devouring sentient beings (plants, animals, and other people – figuratively speaking, of
course) only to in turn (sooner or later) be devoured oneself? While I wish, like Tompkins, to
remain hopeful, I am skeptical that our appetite for power (wealth, status, notoriety, prestige,
and the like) tethers and ensnares each of us in webs of exploitative relationality in which we
all can – in uneven ways for sure – at any time – be meatified and rendered fleshy, eaten,
consumed, and metabolized. How then might an attentiveness to Afro-centered metabolic
metaphors contribute to breaking such exploitative cycles, and in so doing, help to re-envision
a far more ethical praxis of eating and all that this entails for relationality?
Joining, yet complicating Tompkins’ study of eating culture in a Senegalese context, this
chapter aims to problematize and nuance Tompkins’ generative notion of “racialized
ingestion” by examining yet another instance in which black men’s bodies are metabolically
transformed through a close reading of a select number of poems in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s
short collection of poetry, Hosties Noires (1948). Shifting critical attention away from the
implicit act of eating, that is, away from the physiology of putting black bodies metaphorized
as food to the mouth and ingesting them, and/or figuratively eliminating them via the anus –
the figurative points of entry and exit of the racialized bodies on which Tompkins’ study
centers – I wish to draw a critical eye inward and downward, serpentine-like, to and through
the subtle mechanics of the digestive tract via the properties and qualities of metabolism. In
other words, we know bodies are representationally and routinely consumed and eliminated –
Tompkins (and others) have already persuasively argued this. But what of the processes
exacted on these bodies in the cavernous space between the mouth and the anus? What of the
saliva, say, excreted by the mouth’s tongue, moistening, lubricating, and readying bodies of
color for swallowing? Or the slow and steady pulverization and mastication to which these
bodies are subjected by the cutting, mixing, and grinding power of teeth? Or the pressure, as
105
Elias Canetti puts it, of the digestive tract’s muscular walls, rhythmically, yet involuntarily
pulsing and pushing these bodies downward through the fleshy pink alimentary and digestive
tracts? Or the bathing and mixing of these bodies in a flux and flow of digestive juices? Or the
subjection of these bodies to the destructive catabolism initiating their molecular breakdown
and dissolution? Or their nutritive absorption and subsequent anabolism (or build-up) of
organic life, and their extractive, yet transformative conversion into energy that is
subsequently used restoratively and reconstructively to sustain life? Put directly: as
theoretical abstractions, the coterminous, being-sustaining processes of digestion and
metabolism housed by the wonderfully complex digestive tract are teeming with symbolically
rich metaphors that we as scholars easily overlook by centering our analysis and critique
solely on the visual and representational acts of eating and elimination. For as Canetti’s
epigraph suggests, excerpted from the “Entrails of Power,”
279
digestion (and I would add –
metabolism) might very well be the most insidious, yet most ‘hidden’ processes of relational
power.
280

Furthermore, “one tends,” Cannetti argues, “to see only the thousand tricks of power
which are enacted above ground. Underneath, day in, day out, is digestion and again
digestion,”
281
as well as, the inner, life-sustaining chemical reactions and conversion of fuel
into energy routinely termed metabolism. In this vein, figurative examples of the consumption
and conversion of black bodies into energy do not, as Tompkins advances, always “stick” or
induce “choking” and “indigestion”; indeed, some bodies are incapable of “pushing” or
“biting” back. In fact, boys’, and men’s bodies – particularly young, poor, colored bodies
lacking social and cultural capital – are routinely consumed, passing undetected, absorbed,

279
Canetti, Elias. “The Entrails of Power.” Crowds and Power. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1960, pp.
201-24.
280
Ibid, 2010.
281
Ibid.
106
and assimilated via, in Cannetti’s words, “dissolution and intimate union”
282
with the
figurative body of their eaters. This ‘dissolution’ is often not overtly and explicitly illustrated
via the leitmotif of consumption; sometimes bodies ‘dissolve’ through the erasure of
individuation and cultural specificity via scholarly writing. Lydie Moudileno, for example,
demonstrates this powerfully, in what I see as a very important article about the representation
of the African black body, in her article “Barthes’s Black Soldier: The Making of a
Mythological Celebrity.” All the while stating that Barthes’s collection of essays in
Mythologies (1957) continues to offer a compelling tool in understanding how “contemporary
popular culture functions as a significant site for the consolidation of – and resistance to –
colonial ideology,”
283
Moudileno sets forth intriguingly subtle ways the African black body is
metabolized (my term, not hers) in scholarly circles through decades of academic scholarship.
For example, all the while siding with important academic precursors who have
championed Barthes’s 1957 text as foundational to the critique of French colonial discourse,
and Barthes himself as an unacknowledged forefather to the field of French postcolonial
studies, Moudileno takes Barthes to task by examining the fine, yet thus far neglected “details
of his [ambivalent] engagement”
284
with, on the one hand, the imperial space of Africa, and
on the other, the African male body. Evidence of Barthes’s discursive vacillation on empire
and especially his troubling representation of blackness begin, according to Moudileno, with
Barthes’s “misidentification” of the black body and Barthes’s erasure of individuation, most
notably age. “The youthfulness implied by the adjective “jeune” will not be further
commented upon.”
285
I believe Moudileno addresses a valuable and salient point here and
wish only that she had not brushed so quickly and impressionistically over the fungibility of
age with which bodies of color are so often associated. As I view it, age is an extremely

282
Ibid.
283
Moudileno, Lydie. “Barthes’s Black Solidier: The Making of a Mythological Celebrity,” p. 58.
284
Ibid, p. 59.
285
Ibid, p. 63.
107
important social and cultural marker that is pliant, shifting over and across time and cultural
space, and that furthermore – interracially – is repeatedly and strategically mobilized by men
in groups of power to designate less powerful men’s non-person status. This ‘designation,’
furthermore, often is (and can be) mapped onto entire groups of people, and, in the case of
Africa, an entire continent. Considering age as an often-overlooked element of identity,
Barthes choice of a child as a proxy for Africa (and Africans more generally) in the colonial
era in which he was writing is not insignificant. Moudileno herself draws a further striking
connection between Barthes’s “black soldier” and another iconic image of an infantilized
male African body circulating at the time: “the West African, age-ambiguous tiralleur.”
286

But more than that, Moudileno’s keen observation suggests an element of persistence and
continuity – a history of repeated instances in which men of color are Othered through a
denial of maturity and experience via the erasure of age that analogously equates to the fixing
of men at a liminal point on a spectrum of time and space. In other words, by fixing men
ambivalently in time and marking them as “age-ambiguous,” what is signified in my view is
the notion that these men are neither “children” in need of “protection,” nor “adults” capable
of contributing and participating fully to society. Thus, these men are consequently and
routinely relegated to a non-person position and status, occupying a figurative space of non-
being.
Ultimately for Moudileno, however, the trouble with Barthes’s description and
representation of blackness does not center on the omission of a single detail. For Moudileno
rather, it is “an accumulation of oddities and lapses” that combine to reveal the problematic
nature of representations of blackness, as well as Barthes’s ideological ambivalence vis-à-vis
the colonial ideology of his time.
287
Barthes’s erasure of age combines with his failure to

286
Ibid, p. 64.
287
Ibid, p. 66.
108
mention a flag, for example, thus contributing to a general misreading of the cultural and
historical context of the photo; had Barthes moved beyond surface readings characteristic of
semiology, he would have discovered that the photo is actually that of a schoolboy pledging
allegiance to the French banner. More troubling still, is the unintentional (or intentional?)
neglect to cite the caption on the cover of the Paris Match issue in which the young boy
appeared: “Le petit Diouf, enfant de troupe.”
288
Such a title by the way, serves to further
magnify blackness’s fungibility and black men’s othering by its inclusion of the diminutive
“petit” and the deployment of the proper, yet generic Wolof family name “Diouf,” that has,
over decades, contributed to the idea of Senegal as ethnically homogeneous and
monolinguistic, consequently erasing the presence and long and complex histories migration
and displacement of ethnic minorities that have called Senegal home (like the Peuhl,
Mandike, Lebanese, and Serer communities to name just a few). Combined, these striking
“lapses” draw critical attention to an instance of Barthes’s troubling linguistic hedging (“Un
soldat nègre…euh…”)
289
and indiscriminate use of a questionably derogatory term in a 1968
interview with France Culture,
290
in which Barthes casually uses the words “nègre” and
“noir” interchangeably, despite anti-colonial French thinkers’ attempts to expose the former
term’s racist connotations.
291
To sum, by recontextualizing and reinterpreting the iconic
“black soldier saluting the flag” underpinning Barthes’s theoretical grounding of semiology,
myth and mythmaking, Moudileno demonstrates the damage “decades of [uncritical]
consensual repetition”
292
in scholarship can do.
“A couple of years ago, as I once again picked up my dog-eared copy of Barthes’s
familiar book with the telltale Citroën DS on its cover, I was struck by something that

288
Ibid, p. 63.
289
Ibid, p. 65.
290
Ibid, pp. 65-66.
291
Ibid.
292
Ibid, p. 63.
109
I’d been vaguely conscious of for a long time, I was struck by something that I’d been
vaguely conscious of for a long time, a sort of troubling detail only vaguely perceived
out of the corner of my reading eye. I knew that detail had to do with references to the
colonial world in Barthes’s work.”
293

The point that is most salient for me about Moudileno’s article, however, are not the
numerous elements evidencing questionable scholarly interpretations and analyses of
Barthes’s “black soldier saluting the flag” dating back several decades. Rather it is
Moudileno’s turn – or return rather – to Barthes’s 1957 text, a text that has irrefutably gained
quite a mythical aura in its own right, to reveal troubling details suggestive of a potentially
duplicitous role and participation in colonial discourse by its author. By returning to Barthes’s
text to scrutinize it, despite its scholarly capital and iconicity to reveal Barthes’s theoretical
ambivalence, Moudileno demonstrates a commitment to bare the inextricability of scholars’
own theories with relational metabolic power, and the ability of theorists to figuratively and
discretely ‘swallow’ by erasing bodies of color, thereby revealing subtle and perhaps
unconscious ways academics consume the Other through theorizing and writing. Put another
way, for me, Moudileno makes strikingly clear Barthes’s fraught positionality as an
influential and powerful man as well as a famed theoretician. But more than that, tangentially,
Moudileno exposes Barthes’s metabolic appetite as a devourer (and ‘consumer’) of subaltern
bodies, particularly black men’s bodies, deployed (and ‘eaten’) to conceive the theoretical
paradigm of semiology for which he is best known.
294
It is in this vein, and with likeminded
commitment, that I wish to follow Moudileno’s lead, scrutinizing the equally canonical work
of a prominent Senegalese poet-theoretician-politician, Léopold Sédar Senghor in turn. In

293
Ibid, p. 58.
294
Ibid, p. 60, “The black soldier finds its place in Barthes’s writings among a range of innumerable
bodies that populate it, from the maternal to the erotic, the cliché, the exotic, and the textual. It is
nevertheless striking that one of Barthes’s most famous bodies should be an African body in the form
of a black solider.” It is noteworthy, in my view, that this body is a male child.
110
what follows, I too wish to draw attention to Senghor’s theoretical duplicity by returning and
examining anew, his 1948 short collection of poems, Hosties Noires. To begin, I address the
elephant in the room: eating. For, despite the innumerable references to eating culture in
Hosties Noires, including the collection’s compellingly suggestive title alluding to Eucharistic
wafers, scholarship (to my knowledge) has only fleetingly commented on the theme of eating
and consumption. In what follows, reading against this scholarly grain, I do nothing but pay
attention to the ways black male soldiers’ bodies are systematically consumed and, by the
collection’s end, ‘eliminated.’ Moreover, I focus on the thin, crispy, unleavened quality of the
black soldiers’ bodies metaphorized as Eucharistic wafers. Neither intended to be chewed nor
immediately swallowed and ingested, Eucharistic hosts are meant to dissolve, disappearing
slowly in the believer’s mouth. One is encouraged, upon intake and placement of the wafer on
one’s moist tongue, to mediate on the transubstantiation underpinning the Eucharistic act, by
slowly and thoughtfully ingesting the white Eucharistic host. In the process, one is incited to
consider one’s intimate union with Christ, one’s queer absorption of his blood and fleshy
white body – converted into bread and wine – and finally, the measured assimilation of
Christ’s body taking place in one’s own. It is this cannibalistic ritual inaugurating fleshy
union via tongues, and by proxy same-sex intimacy with black soldiers’ dissolving bodies,
that presents for me, an exemplary instance of what Tompkins calls “queer alimentarity,” that
is to say, an unconscious homoerotic desire of union “forged as an alimentary desire.”
295
The
defiantly queer turn I take, while undoubtedly irreverent and profane, is not intended to be
blasphemous or sacrilegious. Rather, I aim to get at a burning question that begs asking and
that has been irritatingly overlooked in the sparing scholarship specifically on Hosties Noires:
What is the transformational promise suggested by the evocatively queer act of taking black

295
See Kyla Wazana Tompkins, esp. “Everything ‘Cept Eat Us,” in Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies
in the 19
th
Century, pp. 100-01.
111
soldiers’ bodies metaphorized as black hosts to one’s tongue? Moreover, considering the
cyclical nature of metabolism (i.e., after destructive catabolic metabolism comes constructive
anabolic metabolism), how are we envisioned to be transfigured and transformed by
metaphorically consuming these black bodies-cum-Eucharistic hosts? In what queer ways, in
other words, might the extracted labor and (poetic) energy of these black soldiers’ bodies alter
us – dare I hope, forever, and for the better?
Eating Culture: Addressing the Elephant in the Room
Ah! don’t say I do not love France – I am not France, I
know –
I know that each time this fiery nation has freed her hands
She has written brotherhood on the front page of her
monuments
She has spread a hunger for the intellect as well as for liberty
To all people of the earth solemnly invited to the catholic
feast.
296

“The images of mouths and bodies, of eaters and the eaten, and how politics and the body
politic are therein refracted” – what, in other words, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, calls “eating
culture,”
297
has not been accorded the scholarly attention it deserves, despite occupying a
notable place in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s collection of poetry, Hosties Noires. In the first,
and perhaps the most important of the twenty short poems of Senghor’s collection, “Liminary
Poem,” for example, the words and phrases Banania,
298
hunger, catholic feast, feeding upon
the land, rot like millet seeds, and their mouth and their trumpet, combine intriguingly to
configure the politics of eating culture prominently. Nevertheless, it is other imagery – and
particularly rhythm – with which Senghor’s work (indeed Senghor’s entire oeuvre) is time
and again associated. Sylvia Washington Bâ’s now canonical, book-length monograph on

296
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. The Collected Poetry. Translated by Melvin Dixon, University of Virginia
Press, 1991.
297
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Introduction: Eating Bodies in the 19
th
Century,” pp. 1-2.
298
Banania refers to the racialized adverts’ marketing – by fusing – chocolaty milk drinks to
caricatures of infantilized, grinning infantry men.
112
Senghor’s oeuvre titled, The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor
(1973),
299
cited repeatedly by critics commenting on Senghor’s poetry, has no doubt
contributed to forging and strengthening this long-standing connection of his poetic project to
rhythm. Indeed, the fourth chapter of Bâ’s seminal text, “The Fundamental Traits of
Negritude: Rhythm and Imagery,” states emphatically that rhythm is the defining element of
Senghor’s poetry. According to Bâ, rhythm combines representationally with work and labor,
drums, and the movement of the body via dance in Senghor’s poetry, in Bâ’s terms (echoing
Senghor), to underscore the “salient and constant feature of black African” expressiveness.
300

While I of course side with Bâ, agreeing that there is indeed a nexus between the salient
rhythms present in working, toiling, drumming, and dancing evocative of Senghor’s important
concepts of energy and life-force, defined as “a sensitivity to the rhythm of the cosmos and an
integration of this rhythm to one’s psychophysiology,”
301
I clash with Bâ in that these are not
the only ways in which Senghor’s seminal concepts are invoked. Eating, as I see it, equally –
if not more so – constitutes everyday “rhythmic” and “primordial” movements through which
energy and life-force are channeled.
302
Nowhere, in other words, are “muscular responses,”
“rhythmic movements,” the “desire to relate,” “seasonal cycles,” “day and night,”
“heartbeats,” “respiration,” and the “ebb and flow” of life more conspicuous than in the act of
putting food to one’s mouth, meditatively chewing it, and then slowly swallowing it
303
– and
21
st
Century African artists across the African continent and the diaspora are taking notice.

299
Bâ, Sylvia Washington. The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Léoplold Sédar Senghor.
Princeton University Press, 1973.
300
_________________. “The Fundamental Traits of Negritude: Rhythm and Imagery.” The Concept
of Negritude in the Poetry of Léoplold Sédar Senghor, p. 110.
301
Ibid.
302
Ibid, pp. 110-11.
303
Ibid, pp. 110-15.
113

304

Figure 12: Film still, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Table Matters (2014-2019).

Zina Saro-Wiwa, whose eight short videos collectively titled Table Matters (2014-2019)
305

represent a contemporary iteration of Senghorian energy and life-force through the mundane
act of eating, is one such artist.
306
An array of colorful video stills, included in African
Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other (2020), and illustrative of this powerful
energy and life-force, attest to the poetic power of Saro-Wiwa’s “eating performances.”
307

Originally filmed by Saro-Wiwa in the conflict-ridden, Niger Delta Region of Nigeria and
presented in freeze-frame video stills across several pages in African Cosmologies, a
beautifully curated volume containing Afro-centered photography, eight eaters, like Felix
pictured above, sit at the ends of square bistro-style tables, partaking in various stages of
performative eating. In one video still, for instance, Felix is framed breaking briefly from
eating to enjoy a glass of locally-sourced palm wine, while Grace and Lewa hold food to their
mouths, readying to ingest morsels of “garden egg and groundnut butter” and “roasted corn
and pear.”
308
Another eater, Alex, whose visibly greasy hands are stained viscously orange-
red from the delicious, palm-oil-drenched roasted cocoyams he is eating, is pictured in mid-

304
Saro-Wiwa, Zina. “Felix Eats Sorgor Salad with Palm Wine.” Table Manners (2014-2019).
305
Saro-Wiwa, Zina. Table Manners (2014-2019).
306
Sealy, Mark, Steven Evans and Max Fields, editors. “Zina Saro-Wiwa (Eritrea/United
States/Canada).” African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other. Schilt Publishing,
Amsterdam, 2020, pp. 200-5.
307
Ibid, 201.
308
Ibid, 202.
114
chew, while Victor, consuming “garri and okro soup with goat meat,”
309
smiles playfully, lips
contracted, his mouth no doubt food-full. Stripped of fine cutlery and crockery, and except for
colorfully stiff wax fabrics covering the tables, the settings in which the eaters take their
meals are void of all artifice associated with “fine,” Western dining. Indeed, in the absence of
silverware, the eaters are photographed making-do, by dexterously using their hands – but
most especially their fingers – to artfully knead finger-full portions of food they masterfully
roll into round, mouth-size morsels, just before skillfully popping them into their mouths.
Occasionally, the eaters look up, unperturbed by anything but the delectable dish of local
cuisine before them, acknowledging Saro-Wiwa’s camera occasionally, and gazing,
somewhat confrontationally, at the viewers “consuming” their “eating performances” in turn.
Mostly, however, the men and women of varying ages are intent on reveling in the experience
of the gustatory pleasure derived from enjoying a hearty regional specialty, thus poetically
underscoring the “powerful exchange [that] takes place when one not only eats a meal but
watches a meal being consumed…fill[ing] [one] up with an unexplainable and potent
metaphysical energy that we normally pay no attention to.”
310

In 2020, Saro-Wiwa’s “eating performances” took on “larger-than-life proportions across
the screens of Time Square” every midnight from November 1
st
thru the 30
th
.
311
She aimed, in
short, through this very public and grand installment, to tell a new story of Africa through
cuisine, and in so doing, challenged the limiting image of Africa as perpetually famished and
starved.
312
At the height of a global pandemic, while bodies were being consumed by the
rapidly spreading COVID-19 virus, Saro-Wiwa’s Time Square installation revised the
concept of metabolization positively and critically, by envisioning it as relationality centered

309
Ibid, 205.
310
Ibid, 201.
311
See the following: http://arts.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/projects/midnight-
moment/table-manners/index.aspx
312
Makhubu, Nomusa. “The Poetics of Entanglement in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Food Interventions.” Third
Text, vol. 32, no. 2-3, 2018, 176-199.
115
on a praxis of eating rooted in “community, tradition, and collective active memory.”
313
For
South African art historian and visual culture theorist, Nomusa Makhubu, through a “poetics
of entanglement,” Saro-Wiwa categorically redefined and altered Africans’ relations to the
body through Table Manners (2014-2019) by addressing and redressing the loss of access,
procurement, and agentive transformation of food into life-sustaining nourishment resulting
from the violent displacement occasioned by armed clashing in the oil-rich, conflict-torn zone
of the Niger Delta.
314
More pointedly still, was Saro-Wiwa’s choice of venue. By choosing to
broadcast eaters across large flat-screens on skyscrapers, unsettling the skyline in the heart of
New York City, the globe’s leading economic center and home to finance agencies and firms,
hedge-funds, international banks, and the world’s two largest stock exchanges, Saro-Wiwa
agentively engages, in Makhubu’s view, in visual mirroring that resituates the insatiable
hunger of global capitalism.
315
Eating, in other terms, becomes a poetic allegory for the global
appetite and voracity for natural resources that intimately links every one of us in
incorporative, exploitative, and metabolic networks of capitalist commerce and exchange that
disproportionately disadvantages and impoverishes communities in the Global South. But
what interests me most about Saro-Wiwa’s unorthodox take on eating, and tangential and
unorthodox re-envisioning of metabolism, are not Table Manners (2014-19)’s allegorical
“poetics.” Rather, I am interested in her videos’ artistic and symbolic fusion of alternating
majestic silence and alimentary sounds.
316

313
See the following: http://arts.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/projects/midnight-
moment/table-manners/index.aspx
314
Makhubu, Nomusa. “The Poetics of Entanglement in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Food Interventions,” p.
198.
315
Ibid.
316
As an illustrative example, view the following short clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-
VTinilk3k
116
Metabolic Voicing and Silencing

Figure 13: Film still, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Figure 14: Film still, Zina Saro-Wiwa,
Table Matters (2014-2019). Table Matters (2014-2019).

In the above short clip, “Grace Eats Garden Eggs with Spicy Ground Nut Butter” (see
footnote number 42 below to view the clip), Grace sits opposite Saro-Wiwa, a small square
table dividing them. The matte fuchsia background, contrasting vibrantly with Grace’s seated,
relaxed body draws the filmmaker’s (and the viewer’s) eye, but does not distract from the
camera’s focus: Grace – one of eleven eaters in Saro-Wiwa’s Table Manners. Though Grace
does not engage in conversation with her interlocuter, we still hear Grace, as she delicately
dips round, bite-sized, ripe green eggplants (locally known as “garden eggs”) into a small
plastic dish filled with a peanut butter-based, piquant curry sauce (or “spicy ground nut
butter”). In the absence of dialogue and exchange, the viewers’ hearing is constrained. The
listeners are obliged to focus unsettlingly on Grace’s resonating biting, her methodical
grinding and powerful chewing, the brief staccato of her slight tongue-popping, the sound of
intermittent and gentle lip-smacking, as well as Grace’s steady and measured breathing. Void
of verbal exchange, the viewer is thus invited to meditate on the simple and mundane act of
ingestion, to consider as well as actively consume the resonate sounds, the energy, and life-
force of consumption. Nomusa Makhuba has equated Saro-Wiwa’s performance art to a
“decolonization of the tongue”: to a freeing of the tongue and a submission of the tongue to
the stubbornness of locally sourced ingredients that hide their tangled histories deeply,
117
revealing very little of themselves.
317
I would go a step further and call Saro-Wiwa’s
performative acts of eating, a lesson in metabolic listening.
In “Sound for Thought: Listening as Metabolism,” Michael Butera, weds the metaphor of
digestion provocatively to the phenomenological process of audition. Auditors, much like
eaters, Butera suggests, ingest, accept, disseminate, and expulse sound continuously. Through
the permeating and incorporative sense of hearing, and especially the affective perception of
sound, listener and listened become co-emergent.
318
“Sounds both identify and disrupt a sense
of self and object,”
319
resulting in a process of “deconstitution of identity within the process
of auditory perception.”
320
In other words, echoing a genealogy of philosophical thought
originating in Husserl, via Derrida, and culminating in the theories espousing the architectural
structure of the body by Jean-Luc Nancy on hearing subjects, for Butera, bodies are like
“well-aged violins,” continuously evolving and reconfiguring themselves “according to
patterns of acoustic energy.”
321
As I see it, by viewing Saro-Wiwa’s Table Manners (2014-
2019), one aurally ‘takes in’ or ‘ingests’ an acoustic permutation that upends and troubles all
our former (read Western) acoustic knowledge associated with eating and dining, and thereby
all ideation of the self as impermeable, inviolable, and unaffected by all that exists outside. In
this vein, as Butera rightly suggests, viewers of Table Manners (2014-2019) are initiated in an
odd and queer encounter with the Other that disrupts learned and established social codes
surrounding ingestion by exposing us to the raw sounds and pleasures of eating, thereby
encouraging us to view the listener-listened dialectic as a co-constitutive and exemplary of
“reciprocal system of affects.”
322
By listening to Grace and the other eaters consume

317
Makhubu, Nomusa. “The Poetics of Entanglement in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Food Interventions,” p.
198.
318
Butera, Michael. “Sound for Thought: Listening as Metabolism.” Sound Effects, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011,
pp. 52-66.
319
Ibid, p. 53.
320
Ibid, p. 54, emphasis my own.
321
Ibid, p. 56.
322
Ibid, p. 58.
118
delectable dishes of locally sourced alimentation of the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria, in
other terms, by digesting the sounds of ingestion, we foster sympathy, blurring the lines
between self and world, self and other, incorporating externality through the rhythm and
acoustics of eating. It is, therefore, strikingly odd then when sounds of ingestion are stifled or
muffled, when not everyone is invited to dine and feast, and to indulge in the pleasures of
consumption.
For a collection of poems like Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Hosties Noires (1948), that in the
words of Kevin Quashie, assumes “blackness as totality,” that “rests on…the premise of black
humanity,” and whose “aesthetics assume being”
323
– not to mention channels rhythmic
energy and life-force – the black men to whom Senghor dedicates his collection of poetry are
eerily silent, and appear, at first glance, not at all privy to the feast the poet convenes in their
honor. “To all people of the earth solemnly invited to the catholic / feast.”
324
Of course, one
can argue the men represented in the poems are already dead and are therefore incapable of
partaking in and enjoying a gustatory banquet. Indeed, essentially, nearly all twenty of the
short poems comprising the collection, to varying degrees, graphically recount the violence
stemming from the French colonial enterprise to which the black men are subjected: toiling in
carceral-like, forced labor camps; physical maltreatment; racism; and most poignantly,
historical erasure and disavowal of France’s indebtedness to her colonial troops. It is,
therefore, odd that the collection’s poet reanimates and resurrects the men – Christ-like – only
to offer them up as metaphorized black Eucharistic hosts, thereby setting in motion their slow
annihilation and metabolization all over again. As the warmth of the soldiers’ hands in the
opening stanza of the collection’s first poem, “Liminary Poem,” suggests, the poet’s Christ-
like revival is instantaneous: “You Senegalese Soldiers, to my black brothers with warm /

323
Quashie, Kevin. Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being. Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 1-2.
324
Senghor, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Black Hosts. The Collected Poetry. Translated and with an
Introduction by Melvin Dixon, University Press of Virginia, 1991, p. 39
119
hands under ice and death / Who can praise you if not your brother-in-arms, your / brother in
blood?”
325
And yet, despite “resuscitating” the black soldiers, rescuing and bringing them
back among the living, to say nothing of the innumerable semantic nods to egality and
confreries (three in this stanza alone (black brothers, brother-in-arms, brother in blood)),
evidence of marked difference, of an almost arm’s-length relationality between the poet and
the black infantrymen permeates the collection’s important introductory poem.
Vehemently, taking a protective stance in the second stanza, the poet vows to revindicate
the soldiers’ honor. “You are not empty-pocket poor men without honor.”
326
In warring,
sparing-like fashion, pen to hand, the poet deduces intuitively – and rightly – that the battle to
re-honor the soldiers will center on discursively and representationally redressing the
soldiers’ image, positing it in a new and favorable light. “I shall not let words of scornful
praise secretly bury you.”
327
The power of words and authoritative discourse’s capacity to
“fix” and thus bury the men are imaginatively illustrated here in soil’s ability to muffle,
suffocate, and silence; in soil’s weightiness and heaviness; in its ability to conceal and to
cover. Out of sight out of mind. But what can be entombed, covered up, and figuratively
repressed, can consequently, be carefully and meticulously excavated and exhumed, however.
Gouging and picking, as with a pickaxe, for example, strongly associated with excavation, is
figuratively alluded to by the tearing (as in ripping up) noted in the second stanza. “But I will
tear off the banania grins from all the walls of France.”
328
Referencing the walls of France in
this verse is, furthermore, undoubtedly an intimation of the workings of structural power, as
well as structural violence.
329
Racialized and infantilized representations of the docile soldiers
in Banania adverts are the by-products – it is suggested by the references to the brut matter

325
Ibid.
326
Ibid.
327
Ibid.
328
Ibid.
329
See Galtung, Johan.
120
and labor deployed to erect walls – of a blueprint, a carefully elaborated plan envisioned to
cognitively secure and cement, to web and symbolically map, an image of risible docility to
an entire sub-category of men. Equally compelling is the sedimentation associated with the
material used to build structures of fortification (gravel, rock, cement etc.). Slowly,
continually over time, deposit, accumulation, and repetition work to assemble and
circumscribe our range of perspective and vision, figuratively gelling the men in a non-human
limbo, much like the allusion to the congealed warm hands under ice and death in the poem’s
opening lines.
The third stanza in “Liminary Poem,” while certainly not the meatiest, is nevertheless,
quite a salient one thematically, not only for the structure of the poem in question, but indeed
for the entire collection of Hosties Noires (1948). In this stanza, the poet’s tone and posture
are markedly combative, and fellow poets (unnamed, undoubtedly French in origin) are our
poet’s imagined and despised adversaries. In sum, the poet of Hosties Noires appears to take
several of his rivals to task for their poor choice in muse. He openly expresses contempt, for
instance, in the artificiality inspiring praise in an unidentified group of poets. “For poets
praised the artificial flower of Montparnasse / nights.”
330
Moreover, in the following verse,
inanimate objects are disparagingly critiqued for their capacity to stimulate eulogizing. “They
sang of indifferent barges on the canals of moire and / simar.”
331
That infirm and diseased
poets are highly regarded, seemingly angers the poet further. “For poets sang of the
distinguished despair of tuberculous poets.”
332
However, it is black men’s subjection to
racism and subtle techniques of emasculation in the penultimate and final line of the third
stanza that most importantly comes under the poet’s spirited fire. “For poets sang of heroes,
and your laughter wasn’t serious, / Your black skin not even classic.”
333
In the third stanza’s

330
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Black Hosts, p. 39, my emphasis.
331
Ibid, emphasis added.
332
Ibid, emphasis my own.
333
Ibid.
121
final two verses, the poet opposes heroes to antiheroes, and by extension, real men to anti-
men – young, immature men, easily given to laughter and farce. In other terms, heroes/men
are figuratively opposed to anti-heroes/anti-men, or non-persons deemed to be lacking in the
conventional attributes of idealized sexed males.
In Cultural Representations of Massacre: Reinterpretations of the Mutiny of Senegal
(2014), Sabrina Parent astutely reminds us that, in addition to being an accomplished poet,
Senghor was also a shrewd politician.
334
And we must not forget it, she notes, as politics and
poetry were intimately fused for Senghor. Indeed, the two very often informed his poetic,
philosophical, and political visions. Furthermore, all three visions (poetic, philosophical, and
political), were deeply rooted in Senghor’s conceptualization of Négritude, an idea jointly
conceived and developed with fellow African and Caribbean intellectuals living in Paris in the
1930s that sought to “promote African characteristics and values in reaction against the
colonial imposition of French and Western culture.”
335
Put another way, by choosing the
medium of verse, and thus imaginatively evoking black soldiers rather than sketching them
through detailed narrative, Senghor successfully reconfigures the infantrymen as heroes and
men, debunking the French view that pitted black soldiers alternately as “mastiffs,” “rebels,”
and “mutineers.”
336
But if such marrying of poetic, philosophical, and political concepts
marks an exemplary instance of Senghor’s visionary ethos’ ability to redress colonial wrongs
in “Liminary Poem,” the poem is equally notable for troubling moments evincing the poet’s
“ambivalent engagement”
337
with discursive colonial practices vis-à-vis the men whose plight
he avows to champion.

334
Parent, Sabrina. Cultural Representations of Massacre: Reinterpretations of the Mutiny of Senegal.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
335
Ibid, pp. 31-2.
336
Ibid, p. 36.
337
See Lydie Moudileno’s critique of Barthes with which I began this chapter.
122
“Our new nobility is not to dominate our people, / But to be their rhythm and their heart /
Not to feed upon the land, but to rot like millet seeds in the / soil / Not to be the people’s
head, but their mouth and their / trumpet.”
338
In the penultimate stanza, the poet of “Liminary
Poem” appears, at first glance, apologetic. Rejecting his noble birth and upbringing,
symbolized by the trading-in of his status and caste-defining lance of nobility for the inferior
instrumentality of a “traditional” type of drum frequently associated with the subordinate griot
caste, the poet appears, thereby to be shunning an outmoded hierarchical relationality, for a
seemingly far greater and “progressive” one, founded on mutuality and interdependence –
hence the innumerable references to a redefining and transformative black brotherhood (our
new nobility). “Forgive your great-nephew if he has traded in his lance / For the sixteen beats
of the sorong.”
339
But more than that, an exemplary paragon of humility and self-effacement,
the poet mutates even further, transcending manhood/subjecthood to become – quite literally
– the “dirt” (the rot) – with which members of lower castes are oft-times associated (to rot
like millet seeds in the / soil). Moreover, phrases like ‘our new nobility is not to dominate our
people,’ suggests a rare moment when Senghor appears to be ventriloquizing his own political
posturing, by espousing the self-humbling compromise and political appeasement for which
he is often critiqued.
340
Indeed, such instances evince the general conciliatory tone of Hosties
Noires that culminates in “Prayer for Peace,” the final poem of the collection centering on the
themes of forgiveness and peacebuilding.
But forgiveness and peace at what expense?
Adding to the troubling representational congealing of the sentient, warm-bodied black
soldiers frozen and “fixed” ‘under ice and death,’ is the poet’s figurative stifling of the men,
his silencing of their voices, and his symbolic (and arguably hostile) “take over” of their

338
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Black Hosts, p. 40, my emphasis.
339
Ibid.
340
Parent, Sabrina. Cultural Representations of Massacre: Reinterpretations of the Mutiny of Senegal,
35.
123
mouths, as their self-declared porte parole. “To establish control over,” “to appropriate for
one’s own use,” and “to make use of without authority or right” – all senses of the in-
/transitive verb ‘to colonize’
341
– figuratively describe the poet’s appropriative act of
“colonizing” the infantrymen’s mouths, and most especially, their tongues, denying them the
capacity to breath, eat, and feel. “Our new nobility…Not to be the people’s head, but their
mouth and their / trumpet.”
342
A digestive organ comprised of eight complex muscles, the
tongue is both organ and powerful thew, and is, debatably, at the origin of being, as it
contributes to several vital life-sustaining functions, most notably breathing, eating, chewing,
swallowing, and speaking. Additionally, a relatively small fleshy place where a myriad of
receptors, glands, papillae, nerves, blood vessels, and fibrous tissue are concentrated, the
tongue is a site of feeling and reaching for the other, a place of literal extension of the self’s
vulnerable interior that metaphorically plays a chief role in fostering connection and intimacy,
as well as expressing one’s care and love for the other via intimate contact. In Hostie Noire’s
poet’s defense, there is a signaling of this figurative extension when the poet momentarily
suspends his poetic delivery and accords the subaltern black soldiers voice, allowing them
briefly, yet symbolically the ability, once again, to speak. The effect, however, of
ventriloquizing the infantrymen’s voices through the medium of the poet’s trumpet, as I will
show, is to a degree, revelatory of an ambivalent and dissimilar brotherhood than the one
espoused in the collection’s opening. Put another way, one comes away from “Prayer of the
Senegalese Soldiers” wondering about the sincerity and genuineness of the thoughts and
feelings being expressed. Are they those of the black soldiers, or alternately, are they a
rehashing of the poet’s impressions and sentiments? Who, in other words, is really speaking?

341
According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary: https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/colonize
342
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Black Hosts, p. 40, my emphasis.
124
“Prayer of the Senegalese Soldiers,”
343
the seventh of twenty poems of Hosties Noires is a
remarkable poem for several reasons, most notably because the resurrected, Christ-like, black
soldiers under ice and death of the collection’s introductory “Liminary Poem” surface for
breath – revoiced. The poem is divided into five parts of varying length, and excepting the
introductory first part and two minor interjections by the principal poet of Hosties Noires (“ –
Listen to them, Lord! –” and “Listen to their voices, Lord!”), it is a black infantryman, who,
on behalf of his fellow soldiers, speaks for the first and only time in the collection. He decries
having been extracted, uprooted, and placed in a context in which he is ill-equipped to survive
and will very likely perish. “Landed on this European soil, disarmed of weapons, / left for sale
to the dead.”
344
Thematically, the entire second section of the poem is a lengthy and sustained
lamentation deploring the disruption to the harmony and rhythm of rural village life. The
cyclicality of the shifting seasons and the recuring intervals of the planting and harvesting
periods, formerly observed to mark the passage of time, have, according to the soldier, been
interrupted, as demonstrated by his abrupt break midway through the second section, to signal
war cries. “In an autumn evening, ha! Perhaps without gunpowder or / war cries.”
345
The
everyday rhythms and cadences that previously contributed to a sense of security and safety,
are now only a mere memory, punctuated by rhetorical questions, strikingly powerful for their
notable uncertainty. “Will we ever see our children grow up, the young ones / For whom we
are father initiators?”
346
Additionally, as this verse demonstrates, the conflict contributing to
the precariousness of the circumstances in which the infantryman is enmeshed is equally
detrimental to the soldier’s sense of self, particularly his perceived sense of manhood and
masculinity. In this latter verse, for example, the continuity of lineage and filiation is likewise
vulnerable to upset, contributing to the soldier’s ruminations about the uncertainty of the

343
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. “Prayer of the Senegalese Soldiers.” Black Hosts, pp. 50-53.
344
Ibid, 51.
345
Ibid.
346
Ibid.
125
future. Noteworthily, in section three of the poem, the poet’s sematic field becomes
increasingly bleak, contributing to the section’s pronounced pessimistic outlook. “We don’t
know if we will breathe.”
347
The poet here appears defeated, resigned to accept that he has, or
will soon be, consumed, used, and metabolized: “They were only going to use us!”
348

“Lord, listen to the offering of our militant faith
Receive the sacrifice of our bodies, the selection
Of all these gloomily perfect bodies, black victim decoys,
We offer You our bodies along with those of French
peasants,
Our comrades until death.”
349

Though the poet critiques France for using black soldiers’ bodies, extracting, and
depleting from them energy and labor, I wonder about the degree to which Senghor is
culpable, somewhat ambiguously, of partaking and engaging in a similar victimization.
Several passages in “Prayer of the Senegalese Soldiers,” of which the excerpt above is
exemplary, are illustrative of something palpably insidious and troubling about (to echo
Canetti) the “digestive” nature of subject-formation and its “hidden processes of power.”
350

The problem I have with critical food theorists’ theorizing, is the oft-times binary logic
underpinning their arguments. Many times, blackness, but particularly black bodies, appear
monolithically categorized, are disproportionately sexed female, and nearly always posited in
an inferior position in the eater-eaten dialect.
351
Additionally, such studies frequently

347
Ibid.
348
Ibid.
349
Ibid.
350
Pérez, Hiram. “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay
Modernities and Cosmopolitan Desires, New York University Press, 2015. Pérez’s text was
instrumental in considering Senghor’s ambivalent engagement and troublingly problematic
representations of subaltern black male bodies.
351
Tompkins’ study on eating in bodies in the 19
th
Century is one, but by far not the only example of
this.
126
conclude retaliatorily: blackness and black bodies write, fight, push and bite back. Or
ingeniously stick and bring about indigestion. But what of those men’s bodies – like these
men, whose bodies, metaphorized as black Eucharistic wafers – are intended to dissolve
slowly and imperceptibly on the tongue? “Let us form at their feet the humus of dense rotting
leaves.”
352
Likened repeatedly to soluble matter (humus, wheat, soil) and described as docile
plains to be harvested by a metabolizing, recruiting machine,
353
the black soldiers’ bodies are
dichotomously represented, on the one hand, as inviolably strong and vital, like perfect
mythical gods, and on the other, as bodies capable of easily being liquidated.
There is no doubt, after figuratively consuming these black bodies in turn, silently voicing
the poems of Hosties Noires as they read, rolling the lines of verse slowly over their tongue,
queerly and figuratively ingesting the men and their bodies therein represented, that the reader
arrives at the realization at the collection’s conclusion, that the black soldier’s figures are
unfavorably represented as effortlessly soluble. And the hidden, shiny moist and wet surface
underneath the reader’s tongue, whether they know it or not, is “always [greedily] ready” to
consume and capable of swiftly absorbing these easily soluble bodies.
354
It is here, in the
hidden underneath, where a mucous membrane lies, and where substances such as quickly
dissolving Eucharistic wafers, are rapidly absorbed into the eater’s body, coursing through the
veins, and fatefully sealing the union between eater and eaten, predator and prey. To view the
black soldiers’ soluble bodies as passive in this exchange, however, would be to seriously err,
as Jane Bennett rightly reminds us.
355
For Bennett, all edible matter is an actant “inside and
alongside intention-forming, morality-(dis)obeying, language-using, reflexivity-wielding, and

352
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. “Prayer of the Senegalese Soldiers.” Black Hosts, pp. 52.
353
Ibid, p. 51, “The recruiting machine in the harvest of highborn heads / And the docile plain has
given its share of enlisted men / Who offered their godlike bodies, the glory of stadiums, / For the
universal honor of manking.”
354
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279407/
355
Bennett, Jane. “Edible Matter.” Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. Duke University
Press, 2010.
127
culture-making human beings, and [is] an inducer-producer of salient, public effects.”
356
To
eat, as Bennett so eloquently and beautifully puts it, is to “enter an assemblage” that troubles
the I and blurs the contours of self and other, and the boundaries between bodies and matter.
Such, I believe, is the transformative power residing in actively consuming Hosties Noires.
The excerpt above, albeit fleetingly, moreover, evidences a moment the ingested black hosts
are actants, inciting a generative reflexive reaction producing a seismic shift in the reader’s
sense of self and their perception. Seemingly wrestling and wielding power away from the
primary poet of Hosties Noires, who, if you will recall, revoiced a black infantryman, who
now agentively and indirectly implies that it is not only his fellow infantrymen’s bodies that
are exposed, but rather even white bodies are also defenseless to the metabolizing machine of
recruitment of men in power. “We offer you our bodies along with those of French / peasants
/ … / solidly grown and fine as pure wheat.”
357
What this instance signals for me is an
untapped potential in an attentiveness to queer eating culture. A moment, self and other are
made aware of their mutual embeddedness in incorporative relational webs of metabolic
power. It is moreover salient that our revoiced black infantryman signals – via Frenchness –
the peasants’ whiteness, noteworthily demonstrating that body commodification and
racialized mappings of alimentation to bodies is boundary crossing, transcending, particularly
in our contemporary moment, overdetermined black/white, Global North/South oppositions,
making us keenly aware of Jack D. Forbes’ claim that “in some manner or another all forms
of life eat some other living things and then, in turn, are eaten by someone else.”
358

356
Bennet, Jane. “Edible Matter,” p. 39.
357
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. “Prayer of the Senegalese Soldiers.” Black Hosts, p. 52.
358
Forbes, Jack D. “Consuming Another’s Life: The Wétiko Cannibal Pyschosis.” Columbus and
Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. 1979. Seven
Stories Press, 2008, pp. 9-26.
128
CONCLUSION

359

Figure 15: “uMakhosi Gadisa, 2004,” by Mlangeni Sabelo.

I am drawn to the man in the center of this photo, especially to his outstretched arms,
playfully and lovingly encircling the two other men photographed beside him. The man to the
centered one’s right, mouth slightly agape, is poised as if he is about to French kiss him,
ingesting the centered man’s tongue and lovingly wrestling with it. The other man, to the left
of the centered man, wearing the black button-down shirt, somewhat grinningly, stares back at
the photographer and viewer through his half-closed, dreamy eyes. The central figure’s
stylish dark-wash jeans, his equally chic athletic shirt, and snazzy arm bands of precious
metals hold my attention. His right hand, gently brushing against the jaw line of the man to
his right, fix me too. An undeniably clandestine moment captured by a photographer’s
affectionate eye, the photo exudes corporeal openness, warmth, tenderness, and love between
queer, non-normative, miss-fit, and misfit men. But most transfixing about the photo, is the
centered man’s tongue: extending, reaching for, and in search of closeness, affection,

359
Mlangeni, Sabelo. “uMakhosi Gadisa, 2004.” Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Photography
Reimagines a Continent. Thameson and Hudson, USA, 2020, 115.
129
connection, and intimacy. Viewing this photo by South African photographer Sabelo
Mlangeni for the first time, one cannot help being drawn to the central figure’s pink, moist,
fleshy organ. Indeed, it is the man’s tongue that appears to balance the frame. And as
provocative as the centered man’s gaze is, aimed directly at the photographer and viewer –
‘staring back’ – it is the man’s indelicately poised and pointed tongue that dares back,
challenging viewers – unashamedly, provocatively – inciting them to look, to suspend, and to
repudiate all their bourgeois propriety and modesty.
“There is no place for that shit here!” the bodies – but most especially this man’s tongue –
seem to – without verbalizing it – say - a “tongue untied.”
360

Anchored to the mouth by a complex webbing of tissue and mucosa, the tongue is as
‘vital’ an organ as any other deemed salient to life (e.g. the heart, the liver, the lungs, the
kidneys etc.). It is indispensable to the uptake, intake, manipulation, mastication, swallowing,
and digestion of nourishment, without which we would perish and die. The site where an
amalgam of saliva and digestive juices responsible for coating alimentation before it makes its
way down and through the digestive apparatus are secreted, the tongue is a chief place where
metabolic breakdown commences, thereby contributing (albeit indirectly) to ensuring that
life-sustaining nutrients make it through the body, coursing through its fatty and muscly
matter, repairing and rebuilding it from deep within and then out. The locus too of the body
where innumerable buds and nerve endings communicate with the mind, repeatedly
transmitting qualitative signals about alimentary matter’s palpability and acceptability, the
tongue, a zone of constant excretion, absorption, continuous catabolism and anabolism, is a
metaphorically rich place to begin to analyze how tastes are repeatedly encountered, filtered,
assimilated, and rejected.

360
Tongues Untied. Directed by Marlon T. Riggs, Framine, California Newsreel, 1989. Proudly out,
queer activist Marlon Riggs’ poetic, experimental film informs the creatively expressive tongue
underpinning this project.
130
Knowing this all too well, Frantz Fanon reminds readers of the tongue’s symbolic power in
Black Skins, White Masks (2008), qualifying it as something not unlike an incontestably
volatile linguistic battlefield.
361
It is here, Fanon theorizes, mother, local, and foreign tongues
wrestle, compete, and vie for dominance and power; syntax, morphology, phonetics, and
semantics become figurative weapons of mass enunciative destruction. And it is because of
this, the tongue is a crucial place to begin to unpack men of color’s alienation (my own/our
feelings of alienation), as well as their (mine/our) experience and “dimension of being-for-
others.”
362
In his introductory chapter, “The Black Man and Language,” Fanon likens the
tongue to a lively, writhing forked site. On the one hand, he argues, an adept and agile tongue,
figuratively capable of mastering a dominant language, can be a liberating muscle, affording
the person to whom it is attached, an inexplicable status, cachet, and social mobility
approximating “whiteness.” Or, put another way, the perceived ‘stature’ that comes with
cultural and social capital and power. Indeed, Fanon attributes the bearer of such a tongue an
otherworldly ‘force’ and ability to move through the world otherwise. “An aura of magic
around him where the words Paris, Marseille, the Sorbonne, and Pigalle represent the high
points.”
363
Conversely, unruly tongues, incapable of demonstrative and performative modes
of mastery, tether and fix the people to whom they are joined to Otherness.
364
Lacking
‘civility,’ these tongues improperly articulate by “cannibalizing” and “swallowing”
365

hegemonic languages.
Tasty, Comestible Men: The Poetics of Metabolism in Senegal has been a productive
emic
366
exercise in embracing incivility and otherness, by eschewing ingrained concepts of

361
Fanon, Frantz. “The Black Man and Language.” Black Skins, White Masks. Translated by Richard
Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.
362
Ibid, 1.
363
Ibid, 7, emphasis added.
364
Ibid, 18.
365
Ibid, 5.
366
I mean emic in every anthropological sense of the term. In other words, I have attempted to remain
open to the internal Afro-centered elements and functions present in these texts pointing me to a
131
modesty, foregoing bourgeois propriety and etiquette, and ‘cannibalizing’ and ‘swallowing’
normative and normalizing readings of West African texts of French expression from
Senegal. Through a combined queer and critical food studies theoretical framework, I have
aimed to trouble the way we collectively perceive, read, and theorize novels, film, and poetry
from the region, by metabolizing secondary scholarship on these texts wildly. Despite an
avowedly character-based reading of the key adolescent protagonist in Aminata Sow Fall’s
L’appel des arènes (1982), I have demonstrated how an attentiveness to a minor, yet salient
leitmotif like muscle/s can open-up this oft-times neglected text in Sow Fall’s corpus
generatively. In a large corpus of novels centering on male protagonists, L'appel des arènes
was an important choice, as it was figuratively “birthed” at a time of transformative political
change in Senegal. Sow Fall’s decision to center her novel and a non-normative, adolescent
twelve year-old boy with a fascination for the protein-building properties of milk and
enamored with sweaty, muscular, milk-covered Herculean wrestlers, in my reading, is
illustrative of the queerness embedded in such nationalist narratives that has gone unnoticed
in Sow Fall scholarship far too long. What does it mean culturally and geopolitically for a
nation to coalesce around representations of men’s milk-drenched muscular bodies in such a
covertly queer way? More to the point, how, and which men are being “served up” for this
kind of consumption? One unexpected finding, for example, was that it was subaltern
(economically, socially, politically disenfranchised) men (the wrestlers) and their malleable
bodies that were fueling nationalist discourse. Equally surprisingly still, was the ability in this
intimate exchange for the consumed bodies to affect the men consuming them, particularly
the other characters, but also (indirectly) Sow Fall’s readers.

metabolic mode of relating to world, rather than, conversely, attempting to impose a metabolic
framework on the corpus.
132
If Chapter One ended on a painting of a somewhat bleak portrait of “consumed” subaltern
men, Chapter Two presented a surprisingly hopeful case study of an angsty, marginalized
young black man that resisted objectification. Djibral Diop Mambety’s cult classic, Touki
Bouki (1973), and particularly the film’s leading man, Mory (portrayed by Magaye Niang),
contributed to my thinking of the mapping of human thew to edible fatty, muscly flesh.
Calling this transposition meatification, and suggesting it and not sound – the lens via which
Mambety’s film are routinely interpreted – encourages a deeper understanding of men,
masculinity, and concepts of what it means to be a man in the postcolonial present, I
attempted to argue meatification was akin to a feeling, and not simply a representational
device creatively mobilized by the filmmaker. Here again, Fanon’s concept of feeling
“hemmed in,” incapable of moving, and being tied by one’s and others’ powerful tongues is
helpful. Figuratively freeing Mory from the routine scholarship that either dismisses or fixes
him in a constant state of postcolonial ‘alienation,’ perpetually caught betwixt and between, I
view Mory as a figure cruising (in every queer sense of this term) for boundless and unlimited
homosocial connection and quite frankly, love. Refusing to board the Ancerville bound for
France, and rejecting the power-laden, metabolizing relational force embodied by the
“homosexual” Charlie, I view Mory agentively, as a ‘self-fashioning man’ despite all
indications to the contrary. Indeed, a connecting thread between Sow Fall’s text published in
1982 and Mambety’s film shot in 1973, despite the ahistorical way the texts have been posited
in my reading, is the cyclical mode of envisioning the nation (embodied by young men) in a
liminal (and libidinal) state of continuous flux and transition. But more than that, this “state”
is neither Western nor French. Instead, it is defiantly African and Senegalese, a mode of
moving through the world metabolically, assimilating all that these men desire and rejecting
all that they don’t. If Chapter One and Two foreclose directionally on the ‘progression’ and
‘advancement’ of queerness and non-normative men, Chapter Three presents a defiantly ‘new
133
kind of Senegalese man’ propelled by an impetus to embrace his goor-djigéen-ness, a
dangerous transitional state not unlike the constantly transfiguring, metabolizing state of
waste matter, from which oft-times transformative power is born. Finally, in a turn/return not
unlike a performative move of anabolism (build-up) and catabolism (breakdown) so essential
to (cultural) life, I come back to Léopold Sédar Senghor, a seminal thinker of négritude,
gesturing at the insidious, repetitive nature of consuming men for political ends.
Because the foci of this project have – from the get – been men and concepts of what it
means to be a man, the near and total absence of women and women’s contributions to
upholding, reinforcing, and reifying ideas/ideals of men, masculinities, and manhood have
become glaringly apparent. In retrospect, understudied texts like Le Revenant (1976) (to name
just one illustrative example), also by Aminata Sow Fall, in which the central male
protagonist is dramatically metabolized by the women of his immediate social circle,
367

should have had a place in this study but did not. Equally important to the study of men and
masculinities are oft-studied canonical texts by Senegalese women writers like Fatou Diome,
Ken Bugul, and Mariama Bâ. Routinely championed by ‘feminist scholars,’ texts by these
women writers have, in my view, been narrowly interpreted via an attentiveness to the
‘condition’ and ‘plight’ of women. How might our re-interpretation and revalorization of such
texts via an attentiveness to men, masculinities, and concepts of being men open the canonical
texts up generatively, and in turn, be instructive in deepening our understanding of the
interlocking, incorporative metabolic force at the root of phallocentric power structures and
the structural violence on men (and women) they perpetuate. This, assuredly, is a major blind
spot on my part, and one I acknowledge candidly. Likewise, having an equally important
place in this project, but that did not, given the circumstantial constraints and pressures of
completing my dissertation swiftly, are the new and promising metabolic forms taking shape

367
Sow Fall, Aminata. Le Revenant. Second Edition. Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines,1982.
134
in Senegalese expressive culture in the moment and ‘on the ground’ – most notably in the
revived art of portraiture and photography. As a delectable amuse bouche (pun intended), I
offer just a ‘taste’ of the kind of photography the future book-length form of this dissertation
project vies to include. Not unlike Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s protagonist Ndéné in De purs
hommes, photographer Omar Victor Diop is keenly aware of metabolization’s generative
power. In the photograph below, “Thiaroye,” for example, from his larger 2016 collection
Liberty: Universal Chronolgy of Black Protest,
368
there are obvious and glaring ways Diop
agentively metabolizes (by building on and improving) former work by his notable
Senegalese predecessors. Most remarkably, of course, Diop ‘consumes’ the poem “Thiaroye”
from Senghor’s collection Hosties Noires. However, he re-envisions and, in my view,
remasters the image by inserting himself in the position of a slain black soldier. Whereas in
Senghor’s collection the soldiers ‘dissolve’ on the surface of one’s tongue, the soldier in
Diop’s rendition does not easily ‘disappear.’ Indeed, despite his dandy-like and somewhat
queer and off-center posturing, he stares at the viewer defiantly, heeding you to take good
notice, inciting him/her/them to reflect on how he/she/they metabolize the Other and in turn
are metabolized. Metabolization, Diop seems to say, is not only a life-sustaining process, but
a cultural one that ensnares all of us.

368
Liberty : Universal Chronology of Black Protest by mar Victor Diop can be viewed here :
https://www.omarvictor.com/liberty
135

Figure 15: “Thiaroye” by Omar Victor Diop.

136
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Creator Garcia, Jesus Javier (author)

Core Title Tasty, comestible men: metabolic poetics in Senegal

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 03/06/2023

Defense Date 01/30/2023

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Tag African studies,comparative literary criticism,critical food studies,gender and sexuality,men and masculinity studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,Senegal,West Africa

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Language English

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Advisor Moudileno, Lydie E. (committee chair), Harrison, Olivia C. (committee member), Khanna, Neetu (committee member)

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