{"id":57232,"date":"2024-01-03T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-03T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/?p=57232"},"modified":"2024-01-05T10:09:40","modified_gmt":"2024-01-05T10:09:40","slug":"mariama-bas-memories-of-lagos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2024\/01\/03\/mariama-bas-memories-of-lagos\/","title":{"rendered":"Mariama B\u00e2\u2019s “Memories of Lagos”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The appearance of a new text by the Senegalese writer Mariama B\u00e2 is cause for celebration. And appropriately enough, \u201cFestac . . . Memories of Lagos<\/a>\u201d is a text that conjures celebration. The short poem evokes B\u00e2\u2019s transformative experiences at the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC)\u00a0held in Lagos, Nigeria\u2014an important Pan-African gathering that drew over sixteen thousand performers and attendees from across the continent and its diaspora. This poem is an exciting addition to the small corpus of B\u00e2\u2019s writings. Tragically, B\u00e2 died not long after the success of her first novel, Une si longue lettre <\/em>(1979; So Long a Letter<\/em>), just before the publication of her second, Un chant \u00e9carlate<\/em> (1981; Scarlet Song<\/em>). In addition to these two published texts, B\u00e2 was previously thought to have left behind just a small handful of interviews and speeches. Yet she is one of the most widely taught African novelists of the twentieth century. The appearance of this little-known poem will be a welcome revelation to the many readers and teachers of her works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I stumbled upon \u201cMemories of Lagos\u201d without setting out to find it. It began with an invitation from the journal Small Axe<\/em> to respond to Annette Joseph-Gabriel\u2019s Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire<\/em>, which takes a creative approach to the limits of the archive. To trace a different kind of history and politics, Joseph-Gabriel went in search of not necessarily unpublished sources but rather a variety of overlooked texts by Black women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attempting to harmonize with Joseph-Gabriel\u2019s method seemed the appropriate scholarly response. The understudied text I turned to was Mariama B\u00e2; ou, Les all\u00e9es d\u2019un destin <\/em>(Mariama B\u00e2; or, The Alleys of a Destiny<\/em>), a biography of B\u00e2 written by her daughter, Mame Coumba Ndiaye, which I had read while writing about B\u00e2 and world literature for PMLA<\/em> in 2016<\/a>. Ndiaye\u2019s study of her mother is a striking blend of biography, filial ventriloquism, and citations from unpublished correspondence. Like many of the texts Joseph-Gabriel studies, it is not completely unknown yet it deserves a much wider reading than it has received.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought I knew Ndiaye\u2019s Mariama B\u00e2<\/em> well\u2014my copy fairly bristles with tiny paper Post-its\u2014but while rereading it I came across a reference to a trip to Lagos that was unfamiliar to me. B\u00e2 was said to have gone to FESTAC to represent L\u2019Ouest Africain<\/em> (The West African<\/em>), the magazine published by her husband, Ob\u00e8ye Diop. On a hunch that B\u00e2 might have written something about her trip, I requested from the Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France anything from 1977 written on FESTAC in Lagos by Mariama B\u00e2. The librarians found nothing under that name but to my surprise and immense gratitude, they told me that a \u201cMariama Diop\u201d had written something about Lagos that same year. Guessing that B\u00e2 might have used her married name, I requested a reproduction. A photocopy of the text arrived in the mail six weeks later, and when I opened the envelope, I was stunned: not only by the short yet highly evocative poem but also by the photograph of B\u00e2 that ran alongside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading through the BnF\u2019s holdings of L\u2019Ouest Africain<\/em>, I found that, in the years leading up to So Long a Letter<\/em>, B\u00e2 also contributed several other articles, and a few of them are significantly intertextual with entire scenes from her first novel. That is, it now appears that B\u00e2 did not burst into print all of a sudden in 1979. For several years, she had been drafting in public whole sections of what would become her first novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To recast a comment Eileen Julien<\/a> once made about Chinua Achebe, \u201cMemories of Lagos\u201d is an invitation to ask how, where, and why one might read B\u00e2 today. I invite you to attend the virtual roundtable<\/a> on \u201cMemories of Lagos\u201d at the 2024 MLA Annual Convention, on Friday, 5 January.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The resurfacing of B\u00e2\u2019s poem serves as a reminder that the archive of twentieth-century print is still vast and very unevenly digitized, especially for African literatures. It seems certain that the years to come will yield further surprises (see, e.g., Edwards<\/a>). Alongside the inevitable excitement when something unpublished comes to light, one hopes that scholars will continue to reconsider understudied works that still have much to teach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Links to the PMLA<\/em> archive:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

B\u00e2, Mariama. \u201cFestac . . . Memories of Lagos<\/a>.\u201d PMLA<\/em>, vol. 138, no. 5, Oct. 2023, pp. 1172\u201376.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. \u201cClipping in and out of the Trenches<\/a>.\u201d PMLA<\/em>, vol. 137, no. 2, Mar. 2022, pp. 201\u201314.
Julien, Eileen. \u201cHow We Read Things Fall Apart<\/em> Then<\/a>.\u201d PMLA<\/em>, vol. 129, no. 2, Mar. 2014, pp. 248\u201350.
Warner, Tobias. \u201cHow Mariama B\u00e2 Became World Literature<\/a>: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique.\u201d PMLA<\/em>, vol. 131, no. 5, Oct. 2016, pp. 1239\u201355.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The appearance of a new text by the Senegalese writer Mariama B\u00e2 is cause for celebration. And appropriately enough, \u201cFestac . . . Memories of Lagos\u201d is a text that conjures celebration. The short poem evokes B\u00e2\u2019s transformative experiences at the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC)\u00a0held in Lagos, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":823,"featured_media":57238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4187],"tags":[235,6816,6817,6815],"coauthors":[11020],"class_list":["post-57232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humanities","category-literature","tag-literature","tag-mla","tag-modern-language-association","tag-pmla"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/823"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57232"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57263,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57232\/revisions\/57263"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57232"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=57232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}