Title: Beyond the door of no return
Author: David Diop
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374606770
David Diop came into the anglophone literary limelight as the first francophone to win the International Booker Prize. This was in 2021 for his gruesome book of a Senegalese soldier hurtling into madness, At night all blood is black. I didn’t get on too well with that book. Beyond the door of no return is a finely balanced book that doubles up as ethnographic literature. It is, methinks, written to draw the ghastly lasting legacy of colonial mischief. Mercifully, it has a nuanced comprehension of the African worldview that’s often absent in books by African immigrant writers who have lived too long in the West, making them solely dependent on Occidental archives for historical research.
The first line is a tag line for the story. We meet a French botanist, Michel Adanson who is watching “himself die under his daughter’s gaze”. In the following chapter, the angle switches to the point of view of Aglaé, his daughter. She gets to speak her truth a little, but is almost quiet throughout the rest of the story. From there, we learn that among the things he has left her, including some plant species, there’s a journal written as a last love letter to her as a daughter. Adanson feels he neglected her due to preoccupation with his career and other things. Her ability to find the journal is the first proof of her love for her father. By this, she demonstrates that she has been listening to his ramblings through the years, and therefore will carry out his strange last instructions and wishes, regardless of his failures.
Michel Adanson (1727-1806) | WikiMedia, public domain
The novel is set around the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the era of Diop’s historical expertise. Then, the western world was full of noble and ignoble intentions for going to and being in Africa. Of course, it was also the age of the parasitic vagaries in the scramble for Africa for colonial plunder under the mercantile tutelage and gaudy promises of imperial Western governments. Adanson – and other white people of paradiastole liberal persuasion – willingly bought into the hypocritical tropes of the era, like the messianic syndrome and delusions of grandeur, the poeticised white man’s burden of Rudyard Kipling and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romantic myth of the noble savage. As such, Adanson fell head over heels in love with “a dark beauty” from one of the tribes he lived in. His journal is mostly about his preoccupation with this exiled Senegalese woman, Maram, whose life was harangued into slavery for a mere rifle to a visiting white man by her uncle. Maram, whose characteristics are constructed from the Dahomey Amazon she-warrior feature stereotypes, becomes his everlasting haunt. Adanson goes on a quest to find her on the pretext of collecting new botanic species. Thenceforth, he acts like someone who is bewitched, to the neglect of even his scientific duties. He gets mixed up in anxiogenic superstitions and tribal politics, spying for one group while collecting his scientific samples. Things soon sour for him. He discovers that his muse has the sulks and is given to fits of revengeful hatred – and that most African leaders have feet of clay. Eventually, fearful of bucking their powerful authorities, he returns to France with his tail between his legs. To ward off that shame, he immerses himself in the task of writing an encyclopaedia of plants, a desideratum for an ambitious, successful career. Unfortunately, though, this comes at the expense of his wife and daughter. He shamefully fails to achieve his goal anyway. As a last resort, during his sunset years, he writes the journal to his daughter to be read posthumously. It is then that he gets a chance to vent the hapless bewilderment that turned him into a lethargic, despairing cynic for life.
The book takes us into meanderings of geographic, historical and cultural clashes. Crossing deserts and rivers, Adanson and his entourage encounter different challenges, skirmishes and diseases to be delivered to his muse, who, as a medicinal woman, cures him from the verge of death. George Orwell was of the opinion that, “In order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it … it is not possible to be a part of such a system without recognising it as an unjustifiable tyranny.” Adanson had similar qualms, but chose to publish articles against his conscience so as to secure funding from the powers of the time for his encyclopaedia project. Again, we recognise similar attitudes of racism and misogyny from several men of science in that era, who we think should have known better from the evidence of their studies.
The narrative content of the book, rightly, doesn’t flinch in tackling the culpability of black people in selling others into slavery, or other big topics like incest, lust and, chiefly, greed. It also showcases the wise, old skill of the African ability to observe and adapt to the environment without disturbing it too much. And we learn of the use of animals – snakes in particular – for clairvoyant powers, together with other African lore. If you picked up earlier that Aglaé is Aphrodite’s messenger in Greek mythology, and have an inkling about the myth of impossible love between Orpheus and Eurydice, who was killed by a snakebite, then you kind of have an idea of how the story of Adanson ends – that his daughter will also be tasked to deliver his final message of love. Still, you are happy to listen to his aria (the story is also metaphorically referenced to the opera of Orpheus) because not only does Diop use these received mythologies pertinently. It is also written with a pleasing quiet wisdom of showing, in telling the adventures of Adanson. They don’t feel too contrived, even when they slip into phantasmagoria. In content, the book reminded me of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. Diop, as an experienced writer, has better narrative control, and his navigational skills with historical content are superb, not to mention his accomplished craftsmanship. Unlike in At night all blood is black, this time we’re spared – by the author’s intentional reticence the gore of what happened on the slave island, like the Gorêe, while everything is implied. The plot also comes together in a rather surprising and aesthetically satisfying way in the final chapters.
If you’ve loved the sparse ironic tone of Amor Towles’s A gentleman in Moscow, you’ll love Beyond the door of no return. It’s not a book that dazzles with writing theatrics, but it delights with depth in an old, traditional storytelling way. And it leans on myths (African ones also) for metaphors and proverbial elucidation. You don’t need to know the myths in depth, because they’re gently explained in unobtrusive ways as the story proceeds. The book blurb says that the story is “tragic and tender, alive with feeling”. I concur. If you like the theme of African folklore in adventure stories, this book of vaudevillian tragedy will probably please you. In the end, it reminds us of the ancient wisdom that every human generation (including the stoics, despite their pretensions) learns by experience, only too late that: the love of bodies brings us grief!
The post Beyond the door of no return by David Diop: a review first appeared on LitNet.
The post <i>Beyond the door of no return</i> by David Diop: a review appeared first on LitNet.