Ndokale Maam Bubakar Bóris Jóbb
Maam [grandfather in Wolof, the language of wider communication in Senegal] is how I sometimes jokingly call Boubacar Boris Diop. This powerful mind from Senegal has consistently worked in the shadow for decades, just like the title of one of his novels, The Knight and His Shadow [from the French original Le Cavalier et son Ombre, translated into English by Alan Furness]. This timeless novel asks the basic but central question: whom do ‘African’ authors address in their works, in what languages? Boubacar Boris Diop shifted from French to Wolof after his participation in the Project Rwanda: Écrire par Devoir de Mémoire [Writing for it Never to Happen Again!] because he understood in Rwanda that French had danced in a ditch of blood. While he was a writer in residence and my guest at the University of Bayreuth in 2016, I organised a workshop focusing on his writing in Wolof and carried out an interview with him at the Holocaust Museum in Nuremberg. The outcome is ‘Qui a Peur de la Littérature Wolof’, Études Littéraires Africaines 46/2018, available at Qui a peur de la littérature wolof ?. Études littéraires africaines – Érudit (erudit.org)
Boubacar Boris Diop wears several hats: as a journalist, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, university professor etc., he has always raised his voice against all kinds of neocolonial enterprises such as the recent Montpellier Masquerade with thousand voices of a continent speaking to the French head of state, and human humiliation. Murambi, The Book of Bones [translated from the French original Murambi, le livre des Ossements by Fiona Mc Laughlin] is his ultimate cry against The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, a metaphor of any human humiliation. This novel of eternity is the representative novel for The Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2022 for which the writer and translator Jennifer Croft recommended Boubacar Boris Diop. Maam is taking the prize home, after Assia Djebar (Algeria, 1996), Nurrudin Farah (Somalia, 1998) and Mia Couto (Mozambique, 2014):
[Congratulations] Ndokale Maam Bubakar Bóris Jóbb
Rémi Armand Tchokothe
