Episode 025: Fatoumata Seck
Dr. Fatoumata Seck of Stanford University is a literary scholar who studies African literature, including Senegalese graphic comics. As a multilinguist, she offers insights into the importance of cultural translation at a time of increasing xenophobia, and the power of satire in the face of hegemonic economic policies.
Transcript
Cameron: My guest today is Dr. Fatoumata Seck, Assistant Professor at Stanford University. She studies African literature, including literature of the African diaspora in the Caribbean. Her scholarly critique of a Senegalese comic strip caught my eye and led to this interview. I'm looking forward to talking with her about the connection between literature, social critique, and graphic comics. I spoke to Dr. Seck remotely from Toronto, and she was at her home in California. I hope you enjoy our conversation…. Fatoumata, welcome to the podcast.
Fatoumata: Thanks for having me.
Cameron: There are so many pieces that I'm trying to understand about your work here, because there are so many layers going on. One of the questions that I'm going to come to is about the place of graphic novels and graphic comics within literature as a broader topic. But first, I'd just like you to tell me a little bit about your academic background. You did an MA in Leon, in France. You did another MA in Athens, Georgia. And then you did a PhD on fiction and economics in postcolonial Senegal. That was at Stanford, and you graduated in 2016. Tell me a little bit about how your interest developed over this time?
Fatoumata: So I was born and I grew up in Dakar. Then I went to college in France, where I completed my bachelor's degree and my first master's degree, which focused mainly on foreign languages and management. I decided to pursue another master's degree, this time in romance language and literature at the University of Georgia. In Georgia, I studied literature in the French and Spanish Caribbean, and I chose to focus on oral traditional and oral texts because I was interested in strategies deployed by enslaved people to preserve their cultures. Caribbean oral literature is not an exact copy of African oral texts because the latter have been transformed. And actually, one of the animal characters I studied is what one might call the African ancestor of Br'er Rabbit, in the American folktale. During my PhD training, I focused on African literature. And the underlining question remained the same, which is the relationship between text and context, be it oral or written.
Cameron: I guess it's pretty much fundamental to the work that you're doing that you're dealing with literature that has been transplanted by force, right, through slavery?
Fatoumata: Yes. In the case of the oral texts, at least for my master's, what I was really looking at is what happens once the text is on the other side of the Atlantic. How does it differ from the "original" version? And what does it tell me about the process of adaptation? Why did it change? Why are these characters racialized once they're in the New World? Why does race matter in this context in a way that allows me to read subversion but also domination?
Cameron: Can you explain to me and to the listeners, the importance of this word racialized?
Fatoumata: So I would just say that it focuses on the face that it's a construct, right? It's not something that people were necessarily born with, it's something that is ascribed to them.
Cameron: Right.
Fatoumata: And the proof is that depending on where you stand, your race is different. One thing that the characters allowed me to do was look at how race was given to them as part of their features. Whereas when I read the African tales, there were trickster animal characters, people could identify with them but not under a racialized term. But once, at least in the Haitian folklore, they were clearly referring to racial categories and the racial hierarchy that was being built in the New World at that time as a consequence of slavery. So yes, racialized, because it's a construct, and it is actively produced, and described, and imagined. And it has very real, serious consequences.
Cameron: Right. Can you just describe to me, you know, your understanding the role of the academic in the field that you're working in within literature? Why don't we just let people write books and read books? What do academics add to the conversation?
Fatoumata: It depends if we're talking about reading works of literature to pass time or actively engaging with the texts. Not only because critical thinking is a major skill that can be honed through literature, it is also very important in today's world, because we're flooded with information and images from social media and in this context it is crucial to learn how to filter through these images and words, and make sense of everything that we read and see on a daily basis. So, personally I don't believe that literature is a solution to all problems but I cannot conceive of a world without literature. Not only do people reflect on their lives through literature, it also allows them to dream about possible and impossible futures. It is in the realm of the imaginary that we contribute to the making of our societies, right? And here I'm referring to philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, who argues that societies institute themselves, and they create their own signification. And literature, I believe, allows us to see the present or the future in the light of the past, and it allows us to learn from others by being exposed to different world views. The experience of reading literature also enables us to make unexpected connections, although there is no guarantee that it will result in change or moral progress. And in my reading of Francophone African fiction, I focus on what it does to us as readers, the very experience of it.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. There's two aspects of the text that you are studying that strike me, one of them being that you're studying works that are in French, and yet your publishing largely in English. And then you're also studying these kind of non traditional texts, the oral texts, the graphic comic, the graphic novel, sort of subsets of literature. So this seems to me that there's all these kind of moments of translation that are going on from one thing to another. If you're taking an approach that tries to understand the role of literature in that kind of culturally embedded sense, right? -- you're not just abstracting it, you're actually looking at how it is produced and relayed in the oral tradition, you know, how people represent themselves, and see themselves in these texts -- it's a very socially embedded approach to literature. And you're dealing with these kinds of literature that almost demand translation to a new context, from French to English, from ... Well, in the case of our conversation today, from a graphic to a verbal form. I'm just wondering how you begin to kind of keep track of all those vectors?
Fatoumata: Oh, wow. That's a difficult question. So just to go back to your question about translating all these worlds, it has to do with perhaps my upbringing. I grew up in a multi cultural and very multi lingual environment. And to me, it was the norm and not special. Right? Growing up bilingual, I would say in French and Wolof. Wolof is the most widely spoken language of Senegal. So I had to navigate different and sometimes conflicting world views. And to me, it was an incredible source of wealth. Hence my interest in foreign languages. I learned Spanish and Portuguese in high school, and English, of course. And I grew up watching African, European, American movies, Mexican telenovelas, Brazilian telenovelas. I remember listening to music in different languages, and seeing my parents' generation really enjoying Afro-Cuban salsa, and Senegalese salsa, as well. Jazz and Blues music. So, all this to say that living in a country praised for its religious tolerance and just seeing beauty in heterogeneity, really characterized the way I am in the world, and the way I see things. And I'm aware the differences is what scares many people. And that this fear is at the origin of many acts of violence. Which makes me wary of any attempt to achieve homogeneity in cultural expression. And my role here is to translate difference. And perhaps seeing the beauty in difference turned me into a translator of culture or someone who likes to create bridges for others to experience diversity and make the most of it. So that's what I would say about the translation portion of your question, is that I really see different ways of seeing and being in the world, and perhaps making sense of it, not just for me, but for others to experience together, really makes difference not so scary.
Cameron: There's a sense in which my own upbringing is revealed in the way that I framed that question, you know, coming from an English speaking background in Canada, struggling for many years in school to learn French from the distance of Alberta or wherever in Canada. And yet, when I go to Montreal now and sit at a restaurant -- in the times when you were allowed to sit a restaurant, we're recording this in the midst of a pandemic -- but in Montreal restaurants, you would hear people engaging in a conversation that would flow seamlessly from French to English and back and forth, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, right? And there's no real tension there. It's a richness.
Fatoumata: Yes.
Cameron: So perhaps I'm asking you a question that reflects my own struggle with languages and your background is one in which this fluidity from one language to another really enables you to see the richness in these kind of cultural artifacts that you're looking at, the oral texts, the graphic comics.
Fatoumata: Yes. Yes, it does. Another thing, though, is that it allows me to be critical of linguistic hegemony, right? I very much understand the implications of it, and part of my work focuses on explaining how it works, and how it has been instituted throughout history, mainly through Imperialism. So, living in the world where ... I mean, coming from a country where we speak French and Wolof, among other languages -- there are many other languages in Senegal, but the education being mainly given in French -- and understanding how that happened historically is also very important. Since English is not my first language, I realize that it is a great opportunity to have access to a wider audience, right? And I also am able to draw from different intellectual traditions which enable me to further enrich my work. But it also shows me that within the framework of globalization, thinking of language and the disappearance for the languages that are not necessarily as widespread as English and French, I would say, their disappearance is also a sign of things that we should be careful not to let disappear, I guess. Because then we will miss out on an entirely different universe, on cultural productions, of ways of being and seeing, and of things that we could learn from others. It is not just a language, it is also everything that is attached to that language. So I don't know if I answered your question, but I think yes, it is positive, it is great, to be able to speak all these languages, but it also means that linguistic hegemony's real and that there are languages that are not so valued or appreciated or accessible, and that's a problem.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. It's interesting to me that, you know, you're looking at these graphic comics in the particular article that I first read of your work, and there's this sense of people of Senegal being able to see themselves in that comic strip. And I wonder about the role of literature and of works of art in kind of doing two things at the same time. One is representing the world to us in a new way, and helping us to see the world in different ways. But also in some way reflecting ourselves to us, to ourselves, right, so that we can see ourselves in this work of art. We can learn something new about ourselves. So that's something I think that comes across very strongly in your article about this particular comic strip. So maybe we should turn to that, and give the listeners an idea of what this comic strip is about. The name of the comic strip is Goorgoorlou.
Fatoumata: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: And it is ... Well, I should let you describe it. Why don't you start by telling me about the first time that you saw this comic strip. Can you remember?
Fatoumata: Well, I can't tell you the exact day, but it must have been sometime in the 90s, in the late 90s. The newspaper that my father would bring home and leave on the table, I must have seen the comic strip there. But my mother, actually, always restricted screen time to force to read books, so as a result, my siblings and I became avid readers. So I must have read the Goorgoorlou in the satirical newspaper, but then, I remember the lasting impression ... The TV show, actually is what made the lasting impression. Since people gathered around the television at night to laugh and have a good time, and it was in Wolof, which makes a big difference.
Cameron: This comic strip, just to clarify for the listeners, this comic strip did get made into a TV show at one point?
Fatoumata: Yes.
Cameron: Right, okay.
Fatoumata: Yes. So it had different lives. So it first appeared in a satirical newspaper beginning in the late 80s, throughout the 90s and early 2000s. Then it was compiled into volumes, nine volumes, exactly. And turned into a television show, on a national television FDS, and it was in Wolof.
Cameron: And the strip has ceased production? There's no more new comics being created?
Fatoumata: No, there's no new comic being created, unfortunately. However, the character is often used in NGO campaigns, oddly enough.
Cameron: That's interesting.
Fatoumata: Yes. And the character was actually a very ... This is ironic, because the character was used to advertise the lottery, I think. It was also used to advertise Coca Cola, and other drinks in Senegal.
Cameron: So these global corporations?
Fatoumata: Yes. So in times of massive privatization, the character actually critiques the neoliberal reforms, but is also used as the face of advertisement for many, many, many brands. And I think it was because it was so popular.
Cameron: Tell me a little bit about the background, the socioeconomic background. So this is 1987 and you're getting the World Bank and the IMF coming into Senegal with what's called structural adjustment programs?
Fatoumata: Yes.
Cameron: So what's going on there?
Fatoumata: You want to know about the economic context, more or less?
Cameron: Yeah, just because this strip is written at least partly as a reaction to what's going on in politics and in economics in Senegal.
Fatoumata: Correct. Yes. So, I think we should think about what happens right after independence. We're independent in 1960, and the Senegalese economy revolved mainly around the export of groundnuts. And groundnuts was the colonial cash crop, which is the crop which is cultivated in order to be sold for profit. So this not only made the country vulnerable to the variability of the world market prices, but also to natural hazards such as drought. And that is exactly what happened. In the 1970s there was seven years of drought, combined with other external factors such as the oil crisis in '73, which also impacted the country system which was already quite weak, because it relies heavily on imported goods. The economic activities were not that diversified. So the agricultural crisis led to rural exodus, and in turn, it increased the population living in the outskirts of Dakar, such as Mendy's neighborhood, which was built in the 1950s. And the structural adjustment loans arrived in the 80s. They were loans with strict conditions set by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Which mainly consisted in economic reforms that were in theory designed to address the series of crises that had been impacting African and Latin American economies. And it was also supposed to prepare them to compete in the market economy.
Cameron: So the word "structural" in the structural adjustment programs involves a transformation of the structures of the economy, right? The creation of markets. The liberalization of banking and finance, and so forth. Currency revaluations, all that kind of stuff. So these are immense transformations that are being imposed on Senegal by the World Bank and the IMF at that time. Now, you mentioned Mendy. So Alphonse Mendy is the author and artist behind Goorgoorlou. Do we need to know anything about Mendy, or is it important who he is?
Fatoumata: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. It is actually very important because he's the father of Goorgoorlou, right? And he was living in the context that we were describing. What I can tell you about Mendy is that he was first an economics major, and then he became a caricaturist after he won a contest from the newspaper Le Politicien. And the contest allowed him to have an internship at Le Canard enchaîné, which is a newspaper that very much resembles the newspaper Le Cafard libéré that he and his friends started a bit later. When I sat down with him a few years ago, he told me that creating the character required him to constantly engage with city dwellers. He was, I would say, taking the pulse of those who were experiencing the reforms by sitting in public transportation, walking in the street, observing and listening carefully to ordinary women and men who went about their activities despite the crisis. It was very important for his creativity to hear and see people react to the surge in prices, to food shortages, which would directly impact the price of today's meal and therefore determine who would be able to afford it. And yes, one thing I didn't say about the structural adjustments is that there are two different stories here. There is the story that what the government was supposed to do together with the prescription of the IMF and the World Bank, but what it really meant for the people, right, the social costs. And that's what the comic is about. It is not concerned with what it was supposed to be in theory, it was more concerned with the direct impact. And when we talk about deregulation, privatization, cuts in government spending and health education, among other expenditures, cut in government subsidies of basic food stuff, trade liberalization, and currency devaluation, what it means for someone like Goorgoorlou is to wake up tomorrow and rice doesn't cost the same as it did before yesterday. And what it means is, "Oh, can we afford rice today?" Right? "Oh, we ran out of sugar." The price of sugar just increased. And this is how much you have for expenditure today, can you afford sugar? If you don't have sugar, what are you going to do? So you see a story in which he goes and fights angry bees in order to get honey so that his wife could sweeten the meal. So these are ways in which Mendy completely de centered the narrative from official documents, and turned into a very practical and very concrete ways of seeing the economy affect people's lives.
Cameron: Yeah, so like peeling back the layers and getting to see what's going on underneath in that lived reality. So, maybe you could describe to me the central characters of this, and the name of the central character actually resonates with exactly what you're describing. So Goorgoorlou, what does the word Goorgoorlou come from, linguistically?
Fatoumata: Yeah, so it's a borrowing from Wolof. It's the Wolof word for to act like a man. It means to act like a man, but then in the comic, it means more to make due, right? To be a resourceful person, and to make ends meet. And I think ...
Cameron: Getting by?
Fatoumata: Yes, definitely getting by. And it reminds me of the French word se débrouiller, la débrouillardise, so that's really what it embodies. And he's the main character, and his wife Diek is, I believe, the real Goorgoorlou since she always finds a way to feed the family when her husband's plans fall through. Which we know is often, because his expeditions into the streets of Dakar are not always successful. Then you have their children, Modou, the son, and the daughter, Aida, and the baby. Then we see Tapha, who's Goorgoorlou's best friend and also a civil servant. He's the one who always talks about politics and economic reforms. So he's the bearer of good and bad news. And he always shows up to Goor's house with something to say about the current situation. Then we have Abdallah, who's a shopkeeper who always allows Goor and Diek to borrow groceries from his shop. And we also have the neighbor, I believe her name is Coumba, who also lends money and rice to Diek. And so, we see many stories begin or end with both the shopkeeper and the neighbor asking for their money back. And Goor is hiding somewhere in the house, and Diek comes up with an excuse or asks for more time to pay them back. So that's one of the recurring themes of the stories, yeah.
Cameron: Which represents the entire country and their relationship with the World Bank and the IMF, with these loans?
Fatoumata: Yes. Yes, exactly. It's a wider social commentary here.
Cameron: Yeah. Tell me about gendered roles here, because you write in your paper that although Goor represents homo senegalensis, you know, the Senegalese man, he is not particular representative of women's struggles. So Diek you said is in some ways the true Goor, the one that makes do and figures things out, and comes to a practical resolution of things. Is this a product of the time, these gendered roles or is there an implicit social critique going on by Mendy?
Fatoumata: Yeah, it's definitely social critique because gendered role really differ per household, depending on the social class. Not everyone was affected the same way by the crisis. And since he was focusing on the most vulnerable and focusing on a household where the wife is a homemaker, so it's very different. So, many women were working, and he definitely didn't represent every single household. But in the case of Goor's and Diek's household, we know ... I mean, Mendy refers to women's providing for the family as la Goorgoorlou des femmes, or women's Goorgoorlou. But I don't think that he really allows for a real, in-depth analysis of women's role. He does critique society's way of thinking of women as those who were spending money or asking for money to go spend it in ceremonies. But in reality, what he shows, and he does it often through ellipsis, is that there is a lot of work that women do that we don't see. And the results is what we see, basically, a delicious and rich meal, like the one she presented to the president of the World Bank. We still don't know how she did get the fish for the delicious meal, but we just know that she will make it happen. And that's this belief in women's ability to make the impossible happen. That is something that he recognizes but I wish he had explored it further.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. You use this word ellipsis.
Fatoumata: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: And I think what you're referring to is the fact that in the comic strip there might be kind of a missing scene that you might expect to be there, but it's just skipped over and you're left to your imagination as a reader to understand something must have happened there. And so, what you're saying is frequently in that ellipsis, it's actually some work by Diek, who has resolved the situation somehow?
Fatoumata: Yes. And it's actually one of Mendy's favorite devices. If we analyze what comic artists call, and critics as well call it, the gutter. It's basically the inter-frame or the inter-iconic blank space. In French it's interstice. It's the space between two panels. There is a lot happening, and it functions often as a spatial and temporal jump in which the reader is expected to use clues from the previous and following panel to make sense of what happened in action that was not depicted. And in the article I talk about the imaginary visit of the president of the World Bank in which GoorGoor invites him to share a meal, and asks his wife to find a way to make a rich and delicious meal despite their lack of means. And one of the aspects I want to highlight is that Mendy's ability to communicate through images also depends on him not telling us everything. And his omission of how Goorgoorlou's wife manages to cook the delicious meal references a common scenario. But I also believe that it's a mechanism to imply rather than explain complex economic and sociocultural processes. Mendy shows that fiction is not interested in truth claims, rather in triggering the reader's interpretive potential. The story lets us engage with the critique in relation to two important aspect of, I would say, African and Francophone studies, which is what scholars have called the burden of representation the tendency towards cultural explanation in African fiction. This stems from the fact that many writers have devised strategies to counteract the stereotypical depictions that are common in colonial texts, which in turn has prompted criticism that they're writing adopts an explanatory rather than introspective approach. Mendy's use of ellipsis is also a way for us to engage with another aspect of Francophone and African studies which is the common critique regarding the primacy of foreign audiences over local ones. So I argue that Mendy does not primarily write his story for foreign audiences. Instead he makes it somehow ... Sometimes, you know, he makes it cryptic in a way that matters. His strategies of representation often resists reducible interpretations and certain approaches that seek to conflate the diversity of it. And how complex it may be. There is not one single answer to how the reforms affected them.
Cameron: I'm trying to think of a parallel here in Toronto, where I live. Toronto is frequently part of the background, the film set, for TV shows and movies that are set in American cities. And so, there's this sense that a lot of our cultural production in Canada, in Toronto particularly, is actually for somebody else: it's for the American audience. And what you're saying here is, I think, that Mendy is actually committing a rather radical act of not writing for a foreign audience. He's writing for the Senegalese themselves.
Fatoumata: Yeah. I think sometimes it also has to do with the fact that he was a journalist caricaturist. His profile is not similar to the traditional Francophone African writer who's part of a circuit of texts that are published through Paris. I think Mendy's profile is different in the sense that he was publishing our newspaper in a national setting. I don't think she started the stories thinking that it would become what it became. So he was primarily reacting to a situation. Whereas in novels that we see published by Francophone authors, people tend to think of it as texts that would like to explain African culture to foreign audiences.
Cameron: Right. Yeah.
Fatoumata: And I believe that given the circumstances, Mendy's not doing that at all. And I know that the text is always a collective work. The editorial process sometimes has a lot to do with the way the text is presented to the readers. What happens in the footnotes, for instance? Why do we explain certain words? Why do we take the time to provide cultural contextualization for the foreign reader to understand things? Not that it is a bad thing, but it was a tendency to over-explain certain things in those texts. That's why critics felt it was too explanatory and not introspective enough.
Cameron: Yeah, but you have the same thing going on in terms of the representation of women in culture.
Fatoumata: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: There's the hegemonic gaze, right? The presumption that the audience is, in Mendy's case, in Paris, sitting looking at Senegalese culture and needing it to be explained. And in a lot of cultural production today, there's the assumption that the audience is somehow this neutral abstract person. Which when you unpack it is actually typically a white male. The implicit assumption there is that the audience is white male. And so, when you get works that bypass that assumption, that in itself is radical. It has potential to transform.
Fatoumata: Yes, definitely. And I'm not trying to say that his text does not include translations of certain terms and explanations. They're just not as prominent, I would say. And the way he chooses to depict a story are sometimes inside jokes that only locals could understand. And in a way, I think it attests to him thinking of a local audience primarily. While albeit thinking about a foreign audience as secondary. I think writers should always include the widest audience possible, but not necessarily gear the text towards a foreign audience first.
Cameron: Right. Now you mentioned the kind of satirical representations of images that are deeply colonial. You know, the representation of the Senegalese -- or African, to use a much more general term -- the representation of the African in Western culture is highly filtered through this colonial lens. And so, Mendy is deliberately drawing on those images and using them in a satirical way. Can you give an example perhaps from, I don't know, the character's clothing or something? What might you point to as an example of that?
Goorgoorlou wearing his red hat
Fatoumata: I think that is the most telling. The red hat ...
Cameron: The fez?
Fatoumata: Yes, the red fez or chechia, depending on where it's from, is very similar to the tirailleur, the Senegalese infantrymen and their hats during World War I and World War II. And I think what he's doing here, and I'm not trying to say that he actually plucked that hat from there, but it's a hat that people actually still wear in Senegal. Not the tirailleur's hat but a red hat that resembles the chechia, that is the Tunisian chechia that resembles the hat of the tirailleur. I think what Mendy does is that he creates a palimpsestic image. He blends images ...
Cameron: What does that mean, palimpsestic?
Fatoumata: A palimpsest is like a manuscript in which you erase a previous version and write on top of it.
Cameron: I've always what that word meant. I mean, I've heard it, but I had no idea what it meant.
Fatoumata: Yes. And I think if we look at that image as a palimpsest then we can see that hat morphing into a different version, like the postcolonial or more contemporary modern version of it.
Cameron: Right.
Fatoumata: Because in the colonial version, you have a tassel and it's a hat that soldiers would wear, and it gives them a certain status. But in the postcolonial depictions we see it as a hat that heads of household would wear, right?
Cameron: Mm-hmm.
Fatoumata: And now you see Goorgoorlou as a head of household wear it, but he's not able to live up to his role because of the economic crisis. And in that way I think that hat is very telling of ways in which the crisis attacks masculinity. And how Mendy somehow prompts us to think about the male body in colonial and postcolonial depictions as being a product ... And I would quote Frantz Fanon here who says, when he was critiquing the image of the infantryman, that he's "a product among other colonial products, an object among other objects." He was referring to colonial products such as banana and cocoa. Again, referring to the advertisement, the Banania advertisement that I mention in the article. So, the hat allows us to go back in time and travel through while thinking about masculinity in a way that prompts us to relate it to the economy and what it did to the male body.
Cameron: That's fascinating. The hat that you're talking about, you're saying, originates as the hat of the infantrymen in World War I?
Fatoumata: Yes.
Cameron: So the Senegalese males who were, I presume, conscripted to go to fight for France in World War I?
Fatoumata: Yes. Yes.
Cameron: And so, the infantrymen is someone who is subject to authority and follows orders without question.
Fatoumata: Yes.
Cameron: And yet it becomes the symbol of the leader of the house in contemporary Senegal.
Fatoumata: Yes. I think it was not the fact that heads of household wear it. I'm not sure it's necessarily because it was worn during the war. Because that hat also came in through Tunisia, and Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country. But I can't help but notice that its color, and the fact that we can find it on the heads of so many men in heads of households, definitely triggered my interpretation of it as a sign of masculinity throughout the postcolonial period.
Cameron: This is an example of the many layers in this comic strip, then. You've got the traditional colonial relationship between France and Senegal. You've got the kind of neo-colonial relationship between the IMF and World Bank in Senegal. You have the relationship between the solider and the superior officers. You have the notion of masculinity and its relationship to power. There's just layer after layer after layer after layer built into this comic.
Fatoumata: Yes. And that's why I like it so much, because it allows us to interrogate history using different entry points, I would say. Right? I could talk about masculinity. Think about colonial and postcolonial depictions of Senegalese men. But also think about gender and the way it's treated in the comic strip. But I can also think about what the Goorgoorlou outfit means in contemporary times. When I see in the cover of the albums in 1993, The Goorgoorlou Year, in which his friend Tapha wears it, and it's a synonym of someone whose salary was reduced and who has to resort to odd jobs now to make ends meet as well. So becoming a Goorgoorlou, right? So it's completely ...
Cameron: This is Tapha, the public servant ...
Fatoumata: Yes, Tapha the public servant.
Cameron: ... who would have previously had a stable job and is now in the same circumstances as Goorgoorlou.
Fatoumata: Yes. Exactly. And you see Goorgoorlou and his wife laughing at him, as in, "Oh, now you join the ranks. Welcome to the club!" And that's basically the album cover. And how do we know he became a goorgoorlou? It's the outfit, right? So Mendy, he's basically crystallizing this outfit into becoming a symbol of somebody who needs the informal economy now to get by. Thereby inviting us to think about the informal economy as a temporary fix, but not so temporary anymore since it has grown so much since then. So, again, so many layers, pushing us to constantly think about what it means, how it could be interpreted within the contexts but also outside of its context.
Cameron: Yeah. The question of power comes through very clearly in one of the specific strips that you talk about in the article and this is the Invité de Presse Club, where Goorgoorlou is invited to be on TV. Is that what's happening?
Fatoumata: Yes. Yes.
Cameron: Tell me about that strip.
Fatoumata: So he's invited and he goes, and there's a law enforcement officer who's basically preventing him from accessing the building.
Cameron: He's trying to get into the TV studio for his interview.
Fatoumata: Yes. Yes.
Cameron: Right, okay.
Fatoumata: And there's somebody there blocking his way and telling him, "We're not going to let you air our dirty laundry on TV," or I think it was on the radio. And he responds, "Well, I'm a product of these reforms, I didn't create them. I'm just a product of the problems they created." There are also stories in which he walks by and overhears people talking about the situation of the country, and that young people are needing help, and he complains about how people focus on women and young people now and forget about his own situation, that there's so many goorgoorlous who are no longer goor -- as in men, because the stem of the word is goor, and goor is the Wolof word for man -- who are no longer men because their role as breadwinner is threatened, and it is destabilizing the society. So you have all these ideas and all these things that he wants to tease out and force people to think about and properly discuss in the comfort of their homes., and wonder how it changes social fabric.
Cameron: Yeah. So again, the parallel between the crisis of masculinity and the crisis of the country in the face of power.
Fatoumata: Yes.
Cameron: Where do you go with this in terms of what's happening right now in California where you live, and elsewhere in the United States, and in many other areas of the world as well, but particularly in the States? Clearly this comic strip resonates, but how do you begin as an educator to help people make the connection and to learn from this other representation of a similar struggle?
Fatoumata: I think, perhaps reiterating the importance of cultural productions and the necessity, I would say, to listen to people's voices. The voices that have been silenced, and are still being silenced. Thinking about how peoples whose version of the story we dismiss, may actually be the version that you need to hear in order to have a better world. Also thinking that it is not just a problem for the marginalized, but is a problem for society as a whole. Not thinking of it as a them vs. us, but thinking about it as our issue as a civilization. Where are we today if certain acts of violence are still being perpetrated and condoned by our society? So I would say that as an educator, I would invite people to read more and to be ready to feel uncomfortable.
Cameron: So it's not just that this comic strip provides a story that is excluded from the hegemonic discourse, but that engaging with it as a reader helps us to develop that ability to empathize, would you say?
Fatoumata: Yeah, I think it triggers emotions, depending on who's reading, really. It doesn't do the same to everyone. It does not trigger the same kind of emotions. But I think ...
Cameron: What's your emotional reaction to it, when you see this strip today?
Fatoumata: I wonder what I felt when I was reading it back then. Because, to me, it doesn't have the same meaning as it does today.
Cameron: Right. When you were kid, you mean?
Fatoumata: Yes. I didn't really realize what it meant. And I think that's the power of fiction: you read it and you enter the text from different perspectives. So today I see it as a symptom of a bigger issue, right? Global inequalities.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. Well, thank you, Fatoumata for talking to me about this really, really interesting comic strip. But also this fascinating field of study. It seems so germane to what's going on in the world today.
Fatoumata: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Links
Faculty web page for Fatoumata Seck
Publisher’s website for Goorgoorlou
Goorgoorlou on Twitter
Dr. Seck’s article on Caribbean literature
Credits
Host: Cameron Graham
Producers: Cameron Graham, Bert Imai
Photos: Stanford University
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Audacity
Recorded: July 1, 2020
Locations: Toronto and Stanford
