4.2 Light and Sound: Boubacar Boris Diop with Sarah Quesada (AV)

Boubacar Boris Diop is the author of Murambi: The Book of Bones, an unforgettable novel of the Rwandan genocide that blends journalistic research with finely drawn characterizations of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. In this episode, Mr. Diop reads from Murambi, translated from French by Fiona McLaughlin, and speaks to Duke professor Sarah Quesada and host Aarthi Vadde about how his work on the novel spurred him to rethink his language of composition. Mr. Diop wrote his first five novels in French, but after Murambi, shifted to Wolof, the most widely spoken language in his home country of Senegal. Asked to describe the difference between writing in French and writing in Wolof, Mr. Diop sums it up memorably: “When I start writing in French, I shut the door; I shut the window…I don’t hear the words I’m writing. When I write in Wolof, I hear every word.”

Sarah and Mr. Diop discuss whether translation can be an ally to a Wolof worldview or whether the sounds that Mr. Diop hears through his window will inevitably be lost to readers who encounter his Wolof novels in English or French. Their dialogue suggests that, while Wolof represents a form of linguistic emancipation from the legacy of a French colonial education, there is also discovery and freedom in raising the literary profile of Wolof for an international audience. Mr. Diop’s Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooksis the first Wolof novel to be translated into English and an excerpt from his second Wolof novel Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma is available in translation here.

In response to our signature question of the season, Mr. Diop proposes that the Wolof word “keroog” is very difficult to translate but not impossible. And it spurs an impromptu comparison to the Spanish word “ahorita,” which like “keroog,” blurs the distinctions between present, past, and future. In an episode about personal and political memory, nothing could be more fitting!

Mentioned in this episode:

Aimé Césair e
Toni Morrison
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mario Vargas Llosa
Ernesto Sábato
Léopold Sédar Senghor
Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks
Les Petits de la guenon (French Translation of Doomi Golo)
Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma – literally translated as Kocc Barma’s Grave (Diop’s second Wolof novel)
Malaanum Lëndëm – Diop’s third Wolof novel
Alice Chaudemanche (French translator of Malaanum Lëndëm)
Pierre Nora – French historian
Marianne Hirsch
“Sites mémoriaux du génocide” – memorial sites of genocide (term used by UNESCO that qualify as heritage sites.)
Rwandan term – “ejo” (similar to keroog) from the language: Kinyarwanda

Listen and Read:

Audio: Light and Sound

Transcript: 4.2 Light and Sound

11.3 “Thank god for editors”: Imbolo Mbue and Sarah Dimick (RB) – Novel Dialogue

In this episode, novelist Imbolo Mbue and critic Sarah Dimick dive into the literary ecosystem from an author’s perspective. Imbolo recalls her formative experiences in public libraries when she first emigrated from Cameroon to the United States, and how her encounters with American literature, especially Oprah’s Book Club picks, shaped her sense of literary possibility. Imbolo’s first novel, Behold the Dreamers, was itself an Oprah’s Book Club selection. In a conversation that moves across Imbolo’s career, from Behold the Dreamers to How Beautiful We Were to the newly released Every Story Is a Love Story, Imbolo and Sarah probe multiple dimensions of the literary ecosystem. They take up networks of literary production: how Imbolo writes both with and against readers’ expectations and desires; how her reading shapes her writing, particularly the memoirs of forgiveness (or the lack thereof) that informed Every Story Is a Love Story; the editorial pressures against which she has been glad to stand her ground, and the ones that have shaped her work for (in her assessment) the better, including a critical intervention from Random House’s Andy Ward that moved Every Story is a Love Story away from punishment and toward the urgent if unsexy problem of forgiveness. They also address what Sarah suggests is another unity across Imbolo’s fiction, in addition to a formal and thematic interest in aftermath: namely, the energy infrastructures—oil, transit, cars—that allow characters to move forward through the world even as they enact extractive harm. Mentions:Oprah's Book ClubNgũgĩ wa Thiong'oChinua AchebeToni MorrisonJonathan FranzenJunot DíazSalman Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted MurderMichelle Obama's BecomingYiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely GrowRoxane Gay, "Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof"Random House's Andy WardVerdi’s AidaArundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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11.3 “Thank god for editors”: Imbolo Mbue and Sarah Dimick (RB) – Novel Dialogue

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