2023-04-23 16:01:45
The iboga was handsome – on Djinns de Seynabou Sonko
How do you know that a book is impeccable, fluid, successful according to a tidy recipe? It is that one feels rising within oneself, on reading the work, the obscure force of the ancient “compound commentary” of the literary classes: seized with retrograde madness, one will be able to entomologize the lexicon like a collection of butterflies dead (“poukave”, “hess”, “since armored”, “witched”, etc.), to put the novel in a Hegelian cut according to the supposed “movement of the spirit” with which Gérard Genette plays in Figures II.
Where it is posed that any text can be summed up quite easily: it is the dialectic of a spirit which reveals itself to itself and of a poetics which assumes its task, as for example in “Attendre. Such a tender verb had never seemed so cruel to me. »
To us the unnoticed echoes rising from the abyss of interpretation and the proof that everything holds together, as when the narrator of Djinns finds in the depths of a forest a shrub that his grandmother planted there years ago – ah, roots, when you have us. The commentator will be able to use his elbow grease to track down isotopy, such as this description of a liberating laugh that appears three times, as beautiful as a skull mexican: “kakakaka, head backwards with all teeth out.” He will also be amazed by such a referential stall in the fictional universe, when the narrator begins to list, casually, the typology of cosmetic flies in the 18th century: “The discreet under the lip, the majestic under the forehead, the tender one on the earlobe, the playful one on the cheekbone, the cheeky one on the tip of the nose and the fucker one at the corner of the mouth. »
Let us not fail to note everything that relates to the poetic metatext and the language that slides on sight: “I had the impression of being bilingual within the very heart of French” (p. 14), “today everyone world says wesh, so you have to create new codes, dust off old words, invent new ones, because language alone has become a start-up. (pp. 63-64). We will flush out the metatext that does not speak directly to the text (trap) with Memento by Christopher Nolan (2000), a twice-quoted film dealing with amnesia and edited in reverse chronological order: a perfect image of the anamnesis experienced by the character of Jimmy in Djinns. Besides, isn’t the first name Jimmy an encrypted reference to another film, that of Arnaud Desplechin, Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian2013), whose hero provided Georges Devereux with the opportunity to invent ethnopsychiatry?
Indeed, from the fourth page, the apparent problem of Djinns posed, “Mami said, you know Penda, shrinks are for white people, let’s get Jimmy out of there.” Penda, the narrator, is a skateboarder and ex-supermarket cashier, her grandmother of Senegalese origin (but Gabonese at heart because of a certain Tonino) is called Mami Pirate (that’s her first name, without ” e”) and Jimmy is a young neighbor left behind by his mother, a white alcoholic: the father, Senegalese, remained in Dakar. Following a fight between dealers, Jimmy finds himself in HP labeled “schizophrenic”. But according to Mami Pirate, he is above all the victim of a djinn, of a spirit, “not happy, not happy at all”.
Let’s type in the internet “schizophrenic jinn”: we discover that their resemblance is a recurring question. “In psychiatric hospitals, we read on a Moroccan forum on August 14, 2006, ethnopsys who take into account the ethnic and cultural dimension in their patients are very rare. I have a Muslim friend who works in psychiatry, she obviously would never see herself saying to her colleagues “oh but we have all the signs of possession by a jinn…” but it seems that certain ethnopsys send to the a prayeror shekh, or the marregarding, or the healer some of their patients. »
Apparently, there is symptomatology that is jostling at the gate. “I believed in jinns because they were real, Penda said, but that didn’t mean they existed. This strict philosophy is not made to astonish, since in Europe, the magnetizers calm the anxieties and the burns of radiotherapy. To cure Jimmy, Mami Pirate recommends the ingestion of iboga, a hallucinogen likely to put your ideas back in place. She sowed some in the forest of Fontainebleau, it will be the object of the quest of Penda and her childhood sweetheart Chico, a silent boy not devoid of “almond eyes”.
Through its advertised cultural “bilingualism”, the novel goes beyond the traditional meaning of the Islamic jinn to make it a plastic concept, just as it goes beyond the schizophrenia of the colonized or the capitalist: in the case of Penda, his “jinn” is rather an ego ideal. Mami Pirate (she takes her surname from for pseudo-Breton preserves) spotted that her granddaughter’s djinn was “white, of the white kind from chez blanc”, to the point that her “white part […] can’t see colors” and “thinks he is the center of the world”. The analysis is perfect, says the white reader who has recently realized his own white privilege: he saw himself as anti-racist because he treated all his racialized friends as if they were not. Error, it’s just that he was blind.
For a somewhat old white anti-racist, the whole world is white, his African or Asian friends are white, he sees no difference; he sincerely believes, in repainting them with his love, that they share his privilege. It takes time to get rid of this blunder-beam-in-the-eye. He understands that it can also happen to people of color. Didn’t Albert Memmi write of Frantz Fanon that he saw himself as “French and white” in his early days? Likewise the jinn of Penda is “in denial”. And that of his older sister, Shango, seems just as embarrassed: “I can’t stand Shango’s djinn, he has a head for being called Guillaume, for wearing clothes that are too big for him and for taking care to leave the title of the book he is reading sticking out of his pocket. »
If you missed the beginning: the tugs of the ideal of the Ego and the ideal Ego constitute the essence of what there is to remember from Djinns.
The slightly doddering white anti-racist is a little more annoyed when he comes to this description of the character of Léa, a French teacher and “nice left-wing white woman who writes articles in magazines where she is a spokesperson for the black cause, her, yet completely disconnected from her writings. It’s him, he recognizes himself. A becoming Clementine Celarie is he waiting? Fortunately, the embittered reader noticed that the narrator was not perfect either because, if Djinns intersects a lesbian couple mixed (but tainted by the bourgeoisie of one), a “transgender djinn who regularly injects testosterone” and the idea that Penda might be “queer”, weary, this one wallows in a shameless validism by treating the patients of the psychiatric hospital of “vegetables”.
If you missed the beginning: the tugs of the ideal of the Ego and the ideal Ego constitute the essence of what there is to remember from Djinns. There is certainly the racism of the whites of the supermarket and the chief cashier, who makes fun of the accent of an employee. But also the inadequacy of Penda and her white djinn when she arrives in Senegal: “we were spotted straight away. At the same time, with the quickdraw I had, I should have expected it. “Had she spoken Wolof, she notes, that would not have been enough to “belong”: “we wanted to know if I was more Black from the valleys, Black from the islands, Black from the desert or Black from the coasts. So much so that she comes to this desperately ironic conclusion: “Among the things I didn’t choose, being a woman was sometimes a second-order problem. »
In this order, it is not great either, because from relations with men, the young woman deduces that fetishism reigns: “the Rebeus are negrophobic, the Renois colorists, and negrophile whites”. Beyond colorism, Jimmy’s father “like many Senegalese” had even had the “most ardent desire […] to take a white woman as a wife. In short, all these human beings are very tiring, just as it is tiring to “have to justify one’s existence, whether on one side or the other of the Mediterranean.” My ambition was elsewhere, in a place where things would have more importance than beings, where the invisible would be used to imagine a new world, worthy of being made visible. The real rather than existence?
As this novel is very well constructed, it will be the last movement of Djinns than bringing to reality what does not exist and vice versa, in three chapters lost in the woods and near a “fairy pond”. It is this “tale” side that charms from the outset: “The phone rang in the living room. I answered, because my grandmother, Mami Pirate, said that if I wanted to be a good healer, I had to start by answering the phone to make appointments”. A mixture of the marvelous and the trivial, typical of childhood and narrated in a deceptively innocent syntax – one can think of When I was five I killed myself (1981) the Howard Buten ou Big hug (1974) by Emile Ajar, two stories of affective failure as the characters of Djinns : “A red woman, a black man, they might have done more subtle than giving birth to a schizo kid, frankly. And for fathers, you have to invent a special color, that of absence. Boris Vian would also work.
One of the best sequences in the book is the one where Mami Pirate shows the narrator a photo of the mysterious iboga: “You might see Tonino all smiles, in the middle of the Gabonese forest, behind a flowering shrub no taller than a 5-year-old kid . The photographer himself must certainly have been a kid from the village given the height of the frame. It may have been his very first photo. Click. Faithful to his old method of bringing the texts back to themselves, the critic will find that this childlike height is a fairly operative metaphor for the poetics at work here, and since this first novel ends with the sentence ” you have to go towards yourself, remain a pirate”, he added that you frequent this island of treasures with delight.
Seynabou Sonko, DjinnsGrasset, January 2023.
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