Le marabout de Barbès (French Edition)

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However, his social life was not so limited. When we met, he was on medication. Samba shared a very modest flat to the north of Paris with a Senegalese friend. He had his carte vitale , or French social security card, that allowed him to have access to a doctor and free medication. After a couple of months during which we had met almost regularly, he stopped answering my calls.

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I lost track of him eventually, just as the Bellevue Centre did; anything might have occurred, from his having returned to Senegal, to having been repatriated or having lost his accommodation. At the beginning, Samba would not talk of his illness, apart from admitting that the car accident had dramatically changed his life.

It was when we started seeing each other more frequently that he elaborated on his suffering. It became clear that his affliction had to do with his dissatisfying way of life in Paris, the lack of family and the impossibility of feeling an attachment to the people in France as he had back home, from which ensued anxiety and disorientation. His regret at not having a wife was also related to the stigma that his status as a single man entails in his Muslim and conservative milieu, where sexual satisfaction is only sanctioned within marriage. At the Dakar Fann Hospital, Professor Babakar Diop used a Lacanian reading of the family dynamics in his clinical work, where different metaphors and symbols represented the cultural traits of the traditional Wolof society.

He said that this was very important, so that the new generation of Muslims in France would not lose contact with their Muslim and Mouride tradition. He gave accounts of his lessons with passion and serenity, which he did not show when speaking of other moments of his day, which all came across as a source of anxiety.

The Belly of the Atlantic - Fatou Diome

Not only did teaching the children take place at his place, thus in a familiar environment to him, but also, as a teacher, his skills were employed in one of the most heartfelt values within the Mouride community: In sum, both spiritual and material practices may enable the faithful to receive such a blessing. He thought of it as a condemnation: God had mysteriously decided that he should be ill, that this should be his fate. Samba made sense of his situation with social arguments not being married and not being able to go home , medical ones his reduced mental faculties and anxiety and symbolic ones his condition was part of a divine project , from which he drew a kind of strength, perseverance and patience.

Yet, he is also one of the very few migrant patients from West Africa attending the Centre, if not the only one loosely related to Foyer Barkat imbues objects, such as the salt given by the Sufi saint, with the power of procreation, life, fertility and so on. Some troublesome jinn are said to attack people and interfere with their lives, creating troubles of the mind and misfortune.

Jinebena , on the other hand, is described as affliction brought about by mystical agents. Ultimately, illness and health unfold in mediation, or through a process of negotiation with the spiritual realm, which requires the intervention of a marabout-healer and implies the essentially non-psychotic nature of the possessed. Indeed, some patients only recover after resorting to traditional healing. The difference between marabout and marabout-healer is one which separates the domain of baraka , the mystical power channelled by God , from that of lasrar, magical knowledge, which could also be used to harm people.

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Ousmane, a young resident of Foyer93, aged twenty-four, said to me:. All is connected to the same source, which is eventually spiritual. Affliction, supersedes illness and takes shape in many ways. It can be an attack of the jinn , as much as misfortune.

Wearing the amulet is important because it will be with you at all times and thus protect you. Healers normally belong to your circle, people you trust that have gone through similar problems as you have here in Paris, so you feel confident enough to open yourself and tell them your deepest problems. My respondents think that in the face of illness both medicine and traditional healing are valid as the Koran states that Muslims are compelled to heal themselves by any possible means.

They define themselves as the generation of change, between the country where they have chosen to live and that of origin, receptive to both worlds especially with regards to their wellbeing.

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They resort to western medicine as much as to their marabouts and healers, finding the former useful to treat physical ailments, while the latter better placed to deal with their concerns. For instance, both marabouts and healers deal, at different levels, with troubles of the mind , which are conceived to entail the realm of the spirits that has somehow been disrupted, and they are part and parcel of their world, first and foremost as Muslims and not least, as migrants.

If someone is a good healer, people in the community know, as the information is spontaneously passed on and circulated. People consult him when they think that somebody, or the jinn , either in Senegal or in France, is trying to harm them or when they wish to achieve or change something in their lives. The resulting number provides a formula that is then used for protection. One of these, called the formula of Souleymane , is deemed useful to heal all kinds of illnesses.

Translated from the Arabic, it reads: Other grids apply different letters, which therefore result in different numerical combinations and formulas:. According to him, not all practitioners have the power to deal with these spirits, since they only associate with men of the highest spirituality, virtue and knowledge of the Koran. The intervention of the guiding spirit may in fact fail to happen if the practitioner has misbehaved or failed to accomplish his prayers.

Le Marabout De Barbes (French, Paperback)

In this case, he should praise the spirits and gain their intervention by asking forgiveness. The Surat Al-Jinna — the seventy-second in the Koran and the twenty-eighth of the Revelation — is useful for this purpose. Reparation thus entails mediation in different realms, where what is at stake is not only the resolution of the problem, but also a wider equilibrium which needs rebalancing.

During divination, all the agents involved undergo a testing. Amulets and prayers have to be reproduced and performed on any new occasion, as life goes on, in order to keep troubles at bay or to escape them when these arise. For many, obtaining a residence permit or avoiding a police-check can be reason enough to visit one of them.

Such a possibility is already impeded by their feeling increasingly and more consciously that what France offers is not designed for them, they who are socially marginal and attached to their own values. They sense that French healthcare, premised on a secular and disenchanted standpoint, is ultimately detached from their most immediate needs and spirituality.

Salie, the narrator of The Belly of the Atlantic , is a woman from the island of Niodior, Senegal, who now lives in France exactly like the author.

Niodior is a sleepy backwater, self-sufficient in many ways -- a land of plenty, where the locals don't have to worry about getting enough fresh water or food -- but also forgotten and with few amenities. Illiteracy is still widespread, "the dispensary's almost bare; they rely on herbal infusions for curing malaria", and a TV is a big rarity.

Salie doesn't want to crush her brother's dreams, but she knows that coming to France isn't the solution -- and understands how hard it is to convince him, especially when she seems to be doing well there. But she hopes to talk him out of his plans -- first to make it as a football star, then to pay a fortune to be smuggled in illegally -- and instead wants to set him up with a shop in Niodior. The book recounts the fates of various locals who have tried to make it abroad. Then there's Moussa, the promising football player, who is scouted and brought over to France but can't adapt and isn't good enough , and whose dreams and life come crashing down.

Salie is torn between her two worlds. She escaped Niodior through education and then marriage to a white man whom she soon divorced , but her sort of ambition -- sneaking into school until the teacher accepted her there, studying relentlessly -- is rare. And she was already an outcast of sorts, with better reasons to escape than most of those who are more tightly knit into the community. The Belly of the Atlantic effectively portrays the tug of home and abroad. France sounds like a land of golden and almost inevitable opportunity, but the starker reality is that it comes at a high personal cost.

Niodior seems a place where almost nothing is possible, and yet there's great comfort in the sense of community and little true suffering. Even Salie is drawn back to it, even as she realises she does not really belong here either any longer. Diome is particularly good at the cultural differences and their consequences, from the locals' expectation that those who return from abroad bring gifts for all and share in their success which, of course, some take advantage of , to the costs of polygamy and the insistence on having so many children.

The book can seem overly didactic, its brief-lives stories covering the whole gamut of issues, but for the most part the stories and figures are compelling enough that it isn't that annoying. He, too, suffered a great personal tragedy -- again the result of local custom and expectations, where marriages are still arranged and love is rarely taken into account. Diome points out the flaws in both France and Senegal, but her main concern is with the people of her home-country, both their false expectations regarding France and Europe as lands of easy opportunity as well as their domestic failures, from holding marabouts in too high esteem to the failures of the government.

The critique is far-reaching, and at times the book does seem like an essay meant to list them all, but mostly Diome weaves it in well enough into her story, and even when she doesn't it's worth paying attention to, as when she notes:

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