From Senegal to the Virgin Islands: The Weirdness of Having Fun While Writing About Historical Trauma

Unable to sleep, I go out on the veranda. I am swinging in the dark on a mountain in the Virgin Islands. It is my last day in the Caribbean and my novel still refuses to be done.

From the Baths—the clear-water caves in Virgin Gorda to the ruins of sugar plantations across Tortola, I have been immersed in the history that I expected to inspire my novel, but nearly a month has passed, and nothing fresh or coherent enough for the page has emerged.

Despite the revolutionary insurrections that erupted in these very hills, the sight of the peaks that night puts me in mind of a different scene: the wild car-chase through the mountains of the French Riviera in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 blockbuster To Catch A Thief. A departure from his traditional suspense films, Catch parades a playful remix of the whodunit plot with a no-holds-barred Hollywood romance.

To get to the good stuff, we must weather Cary Grant’s (characteristically stiff) portrayal of a notorious but retired jewel thief. As the wealthiest of vacationers come to town from around the world, theft abounds at the Riviera’s stunning seaside resorts, and the jewel thief sets out to prove his innocence.

The next day, from the airport, still thinking of the Virgin mountains and Grace Kelly’s convertible speeding away from the cops, I’m on my way to my next destination. I decide that maybe what came to mind might be what’s missing from my story: adventure. Bold, unabashed, joyful adventure.

*

Upon my arrival in Dakar, Senegal, a coastal country of West Africa and the setting of half of my novel, I binge-watch Hitchock from a seaside apartment: North by Northwest, To Catch A Thief, Rebecca, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo.

A path toward the book’s climax begins to pour out: nature, adventure, history. My protagonists are in Brazil. A concert on a former slave plantation. I’m writing. It’s working!

Then I’m deleting. It’s getting too… fun. Can historical fiction about Black global migration be… fun? Should it be? Is that responsible?

*

Days later, these are the questions in my head as I chat with one of the most prominent surgeons in West Africa. He’s flown in from Benin just for the event tonight and is trying to convince me that intracontinental travel has really gotten better these days. Historically, because of colonization, then globalization, it has been common to have to fly to Europe just to get from one African nation to another next door.

I’m here at the gala because I’m testing a well-worn method for difficult writing deadlines: a day or two of denial. Instead of writing, I’ve accepted a friend’s invitation to this event. We are across the street from the Musee des Civilizations Noires (the Museum of Black Civilizations) in the palatial (but smoldering) national theater.

The program is honoring Cheikh Anta Diop. A physicist, anthropologist and historian, Diop was one of the foremost researchers on human genealogy and world migration. His work interrogates what it means to exist within a diaspora.

And as colonization, slavery and the proliferation of cultures these forced migrations spawned began to complicate any notion of cultural connection among people of African descent—Diop’s work affirmed our connectedness and our power.

His family accepts his award to resounding applause and as the work of his legacy and the impact of colonization is discussed, a familiar picture of African diasporic history comes to mind: Leopold’s maiming of Congolese rubber workers in the Congo, tongues cut out of mouths on rice plantations in the American South.

By the time I am halfway home, I feel myself shying away, again, from the fun that’s emerging in my story. But then I remember the braids. The photographs in my father’s copies of Diop’s books. His research traces West African hairstyles to their Egyptian origins.

*

I arrive in Saint Louis, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a global citadel of colonial history in Senegal’s northern corridor. Perhaps too much history has been preserved: the force-feeding chambers where the rebellious enslaved were kept before they mounted the boats to journey to the Americas, the church that racially segregated the town, the homes and bars of the former French colonial officials—historical portraits of the stunning local women who served as their sex workers are memorialized on the murals on the walls.

My driver is a former talibe—child beggars/religious scholars—the subjects of a controversial but enduring cultural approach to quranic scholarship. As we drive through the crowded streets (the festival is an international affair) we discuss philosophy, religion, and happiness. He is one of the happiest people I have ever met and as we chat, he is frank about the reason: the power of humility—for him it is like a tonic, a solvent for anxiety, for fear, for depression.

He explains this almost mathematically and speaks of the other methods for happiness that he’s acquired through what others might call “suffering” from his childhood. I would say more, but he swore me to secrecy.

*

The Festival au tour des Cordes—the string music festival I’ve come to Saint Louis for is an African diasporic reunion like I’ve never experienced. At sundown, in courtyards, restaurants and school yards in the repurposed colonial structures across the town, musicians from across Africa’s north, west, east and south perform an array of contemporary and traditional music.

Some of the instruments are completely foreign to me as our crowd of concertgoers wanders from concert to concert, struck by all that we see and hear. From riti players to violinists, the music is telling me the story of the continent in a new way. It is bridging years, bridging cultures and countries.

The music is doing the work of telling history with delight. I’m taking note, I’m seeing where history, joy, and truth can meet in my own story.

*

During a break in the festival lineup, after interviewing its fascinating director Ablaye Cissoko, I take a walk along the river. I am still, of course, trying to write. Trying to find things in my mind, trying to accept that a hunger for adventure, for joy belongs in a book about Black history.

I encounter singing in the streets. First it’s one or two boys I notice–the talibes—incanting prayers from wooden scrolls in their hands but then I turn and there are thirty, fifty of them in the street—each reciting a separate surah. I stop in the street and close my eyes, finally my mind is racing, my mind is writing, I have only to listen.

______________________________

They Dream in Gold by Mai Sennaar is available via Zando.