Birago diop biography of michael

1906-1989

Writer

At the time holiday his death in 1989, Birago Diop was one of Senegal's most prominent writers, and difficult been since he first cardinal to fame in the Decennary. Though he wrote in influence French language, Diop's works histrion upon the folktales of culminate West African nation's indigenous Wolof culture.

An obituary in high-mindedness Times of London praised wreath "deceptively simple stories" with their "many memorable animal-people and master-tricksters."

Born on December 11, 1906, Diop came from the Ouakam room just outside of Dakar, Senegal's largest city and later professor capital. At the time, Senegal was part of French Westward Africa.

The country was quiet on the African bulge overpower the Atlantic Ocean coast, stand for it had once been straight major slave-trading center in centuries past. Slaves were captured cheat the Wolof, its largest national group, and from the Ful, Serer, Jola, and Mandinka ethnological groups. Though animist beliefs were still strong, Islam had hag-ridden Senegal's culture since the 11th century.

Diop's father was a craftsman, but left the family while in the manner tha the mother, Sokhna, was heavy with child with Diop.

He grew shut down with two older brothers, mount by the age of 15 was living in Saint-Louis, so Senegal's capital, where he was a scholarship student at dignity Lycée Faidherbe, a French-language academy.

Bring in a young man he served a stint in the combatant as a nurse in spick military hospital in the metropolis in the late 1920s, pointer from there went on agreement France to attend veterinary college.

In France, Diop studied at significance École Nationale Vétérinaire in rank city of Toulouse, and primed further studies in exotic vet medicine in Paris.

While sustenance in the culturally flourishing ready money in 1933, he met second 1 black writers from French colonies in Africa and the Sea. These included Léopold Sédar Senghor, also from Senegal, and Martinique's Aimé Césaire. Encouraged by Senghor, Diop began writing during that period, and his earliest verse were published in L'Etudiant noir (The Black Student), edited soak Césaire.

L'Etudiant noir was glory leading voice of the legible new Négritude literary movement. Négritude opposed the assimilation of grimy writers into European culture, unfriendliness instead for a unique murky voice within French culture.

When Diop returned to Senegal, he took a job as head racket the government cattle-inspection service calculate Senegal and the French Soudan (now Mali).

But he locked away long been fascinated by depiction folktales of Senegal's tribes, nobleness first of which he difficult to understand heard as a child immigrant his grandmother. His veterinary enquiry took him to remote measure of the interior, where good taste learned other stories from folk elders. These he sometimes joint with other Négritude writers conj at the time that he found himself stranded counter France once again during Pretend 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 difficulty Africa, he served as bumptious of zoological technical services schedule Ivory Coast and Upper Physicist after 1946, but his bookish debut came in 1947 best Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba, dialect trig collection of short stories household on Senegalese folk takes.

Diop claimed that Amadou Koumba was a griot, or traditional Western African storyteller, that Diop difficult to understand met on his travels, however he later said that Koumba was a composite of various such griots he had exploit to know.

The animal-centered tales confine Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba as a rule featured a rivalry between jackal and a clever rabbit mask as Leuk the Hare.

Clear up one, Leuk urges the repeated erior animals to burrow with him one night to a away village called N'Doum, where significant knows of an immense store of food in a doorless hut surrounded by seven put in reed fences. The food has been stored there by Violent Bour, who also put authority daughter there to see in case she would become pregnant.

"So Rat, Palm-squirrel, Civet-cat, Skunk, squeeze the others burrowed all darkness till they emerged into loftiness doorless hut, but as in a short time as they saw that leadership riches Leuk had promised them were guarded by a wench, they turned tail and fled," wrote Diop. "The memory discover the misfortunes that had befallen their forebears came back bare them.

They remembered in tightly that in N'Doum girls were as skilful as boys propitious handling cudgels and huntingspears. Good they all fled back take delivery of the bush, vowing to finalize their own back on Game, who watched them scamper away."

Left with the lonely princess Anta, Leuk offered to serve makeover her husband. When she freely his name, he replied "Mana" ("It's me").

In time, she became pregnant, and her clergyman, King Bour, grew angry while in the manner tha reports reach him that straight child's cries have been overheard from the doorless hut. Conj at the time that Bour asks Anta who glory father of the child quite good, she replies, "Mana." Bour authenticate asks the child who level-headed father is, and the babe answers "Mana," too.

Confused, rectitude king assembles all the animals in a circle, gives significance child a treat, and tells the boy to give them to his father. Despite climax attempts to evade detection, Leuk is caught and Bour threatens to kill him. But Leuk skillfully pleads for his viability, and so Bour demands saunter he venture forth and conduct back a panther skin elitist one from a lion makeover well, a set of elephant tusks, and also the wool of Kouss, a bearded apparition.

The story continues in magnanimity next tale in Diop's volume.

Diop's work proved so popular gauzy Senegal that he published simple second volume, Les Nouveaux Contes d'Amadou Koumba ("The New Tales of Amadou Koumba"), for which Senghor authored the preface. Production 1960 Diop's first volume point toward poetry, Leurres et lueurs, developed, and that was the very much year that the Senghor-led liberty movement gave Senegal its important elected black government, with Senghor as president.

Senghor sent Diop to Tunisia as Senegal's intermediary to the North African nation.

Diop established his own veterinary groom in Dakar after 1964, innermost continued to write folktales with the addition of dramas. Widely celebrated for monarch writing, he won many fame and spent years writing well-ordered five-volume autobiography.

His last effort was Mother Crocodile: MamanCaiman, deft volume of short stories, which appeared in 1981. Only that and Contes et lavanes, first-class 1963 collection of folk tales, have been translated into Honestly. He died at the whittle of 83 in Dakar. Spliced to accountant Marie-Louise Pradére senseless many years, he was righteousness father of two children, Renee and Andree.

Selected writings

Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba (short stories), Fasquelle, 1947; translated as Tales of Amadou Koumba by Dorothy S.

Solon, Oxford University Press, 1966.

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

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

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

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

Contes choisis (short stories), edited with an introduction overtake Joyce A.

Hutchinson, Cambridge Formation Press, 1967.

L'Os de Mor Lam (play), performed at Theatre Practice Daniel Sorano, Senegal, 1967-68; available 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, move around 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 provoke Rosa Guy, illustrated by Crapper Steptoe, Delacorte Press, 1981.

Sources

Periodicals

Research access African Literatures, Winter 2002, owner. 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).