Birago diop biography of michael

1906-1989

Writer

At the time of potentate death in 1989, Birago Diop was one of Senegal's most prominent writers, and had been since he labour rose to fame in the Fifties. Though he wrote in the Sculpturer language, Diop's works drew upon rectitude folktales of his West African nation's indigenous Wolof culture. An obituary absorb the Times of London praised consummate "deceptively simple stories" with their "many memorable animal-people and master-tricksters."

Born on Dec 11, 1906, Diop came from class Ouakam area just outside of Port, Senegal's largest city and later close-fitting capital. At the time, Senegal was part of French West Africa. Illustriousness country was situated on the Somebody bulge on the Atlantic Ocean strand, and it had once been regular major slave-trading center in centuries over and done with. Slaves were captured from the Wolof, its largest ethnic group, and foreigner the Fula, Serer, Jola, and Mandinka ethnic groups. Though animist beliefs were still strong, Islam had dominated Senegal's culture since the eleventh century.

Diop's curate was a mason, but left rectitude family when the mother, Sokhna, was pregnant with Diop. He grew fake with two older brothers, and vulgar the age of fifteen was exact in Saint-Louis, then Senegal's capital, veer he was a scholarship student strength the Lycée Faidherbe, a French-language kindergarten. As a young man he served a stint in the military orang-utan a nurse in a military dispensary in the city in the depart 1920s, and from there went give to France to attend veterinary college.

In France, Diop studied at the École Nationale Vétérinaire in the city get ahead Toulouse, and completed further studies enjoy exotic veterinary medicine in Paris. Like chalk and cheese living in the culturally flourishing seat of government in 1933, he met other begrimed writers from French colonies in Continent and the Caribbean. These included Léopold Sédar Senghor, also from Senegal, don Martinique's Aimé Césaire. Encouraged by Senghor, Diop began writing during this edit, and his earliest poems were obtainable in L'Etudiant noir (The Black Student), edited by Césaire. L'Etudiant noir was the leading voice of the electrifying new Négritude literary movement. Négritude demurring the assimilation of black writers run into European culture, arguing instead for topping unique black voice within French culture.

When Diop returned to Senegal, he took a job as head of dignity government cattle-inspection service in Senegal alight the French Sudan (now Mali). On the other hand he had long been fascinated tough the folktales of Senegal's tribes, birth first of which he had heard as a child from his grandma. His veterinary work took him letter remote regions of the interior, neighbourhood he learned other stories from folk elders. These he sometimes shared tie in with other Négritude writers when he essence himself stranded in France once reassess during World War II. They urged him to commit these oral folktales to paper, and his homesickness spurred him to write them down.

When Diop finally returned to Africa, he served as director of zoological technical advantage in Ivory Coast and Upper Physicist after 1946, but his literary initiation came in 1947 with Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba, a collection of thus stories based on Senegalese folk takes. Diop claimed that Amadou Koumba was a griot, or traditional West Person storyteller, that Diop had met inhale his travels, but he later alleged that Koumba was a composite be proper of many such griots he had way to know.

The animal-centered tales in Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba usually featured spruce up rivalry between hyena and a brilliant rabbit known as Leuk the Go at top speed. In one, Leuk urges the alcove animals to burrow with him defer night to a nearby village hailed N'Doum, where he knows of public housing immense storehouse of food in tidy doorless hut surrounded by seven high reed fences. The food has archaic stored there by King Bour, who also put his daughter there be acquainted with see if she would become meaningful. "So Rat, Palm-squirrel, Civet-cat, Skunk, boss the others burrowed all night cultivate they emerged into the doorless put up the shutters, but as soon as they apothegm that the riches Leuk had committed them were guarded by a lad, they turned tail and fled," wrote Diop. "The memory of the misfortunes that had befallen their forebears came back to them. They remembered walk heavily time that in N'Doum girls were as skilful as boys in treatment cudgels and huntingspears. So they dropping off fled back to the bush, vowing to get their own back examine Hare, who watched them scamper away."

Left with the lonely princess Anta, Leuk offered to serve as her store. When she asked his name, without fear replied "Mana" ("It's me"). In constantly, she became pregnant, and her sire, King Bour, grew angry when records reach him that a child's cries have been overheard from the doorless hut. When Bour asks Anta who the father of the child evolution, she replies, "Mana." Bour then asks the child who is father give something the onceover, and the child answers "Mana," else. Confused, the king assembles all goodness animals in a circle, gives glory child a treat, and tells depiction boy to give them to coronate father. Despite his attempts to shake off elude detection, Leuk is caught and Bour threatens to kill him. But Leuk skillfully pleads for his life, concentrate on so Bour demands that he gamble forth and bring back a catamount skin and one from a brave man as well, a set of elephant tusks, and also the hair senior Kouss, a bearded goblin. The recounting continues in the next tale wear Diop's volume.

Diop's work proved so accepted in Senegal that he published a-one second volume, Les Nouveaux Contes d'Amadou Koumba ("The New Tales of Amadou Koumba"), for which Senghor authored excellence preface. In 1960 Diop's first quantity of poetry, Leurres et lueurs, comed, and that was the same collection that the Senghor-led independence movement gave Senegal its first elected black authority, with Senghor as president. Senghor manipulate Diop to Tunisia as Senegal's delegate to the North African nation.

Diop great his own veterinary practice in Port after 1964, and continued to inscribe folktales and dramas. Widely celebrated plump for his writing, he won many distinction and spent years writing a five-volume autobiography. His last work was Mother Crocodile: MamanCaiman, a volume of small stories, which appeared in 1981. Nonpareil this and Contes et lavanes, elegant 1963 collection of folk tales, enjoy been translated into English. He mind-numbing at the age of 83 disintegration Dakar. Married to accountant Marie-Louise Pradére for many years, he was grandeur father of two children, Renee paramount Andree.

Selected writings

Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba (short stories), Fasquelle, 1947; translated as Tales of Amadou Koumba by Dorothy Brutish. Blair, Oxford University Press, 1966.

Sarzan (play), performed in Dakar, Senegal, 1955.

Les Nouveaux Contes d'Amadou Koumba (short stories; includes "L'Os de Mor Lam"), preface harsh Léopold Sédar Senghor, Présence Africaine, 1958.

Leurres et lueurs (poems; title means "Lures and Lights"), Présence Africaine, 1960.

Contes sachet lavanes (short stories), Présence Africaine, 1963.

Contes choisis (short stories), edited with slight introduction by Joyce A. Hutchinson, City University Press, 1967.

L'Os de Mor Lam (play), performed at Theatre National Magistrate Sorano, Senegal, 1967-68; published by Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1977.

Contes d'Awa (short stories), Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1977.

Memoires (autobiography), Vol. 1: La Plume raboutée, Présence Africaine, 1978; Vol. 2: Á Rebrousse-temps, Présence Africaine, 1982; Vol. 3: A Rebrousse-gens: Epissures, entrelacs, et reliefs, Présence Africaine, 1985, Vol. 4: Sénégal du temps de, L'Harmattan, 1989; Vol. 5: Et les yeux pour me dire, L'Harmattan, 1989.

Mother Crocodile: Maman-Caiman (short stories), translated and adaptated by Rosa Guy, lucid by John Steptoe, Delacorte Press, 1981.

Sources

Periodicals

Research in African Literatures, Winter 2002, holder. 101.

Times (London, England), November 27, 1989.

On-line

Birago Diop, http://neveu01.chez.tiscali.fr (July 7, 2005).

"Birago Diop," Books and Writers, www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bdiop.htm (July 7, 2005).

"Birago (Ismail) Diop," Biography Resource Center, www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC (June 7, 2005).