Under African Skies Read Online Free PDF

been ill for many years—much of the time during his exile in Senegal, where he had resided for thirteen years as Senghor’s guest. Laye was regarded as his continent’s preeminent Francophone novelist.
    Most of Laye’s career as a writer was a continuous struggle against hardship, poverty, and government censorship. Laye had become a writer somewhat by accident. Born in Kouroussa, Guinea, in 1928, he distinguished himself as a student and in time received a government scholarship to a technical school in France. At the end of the year overseas, when Laye decided that he wanted to continue his studies and pursue a baccalaureate, his government abruptly cut off his funds.
    Impoverished, Laye took whatever work he could to support himself. Out of loneliness, frustration, and a fear that he would forget his African heritage, he began writing down memories of his childhood in Guinea. Although he never intended his writing to be published, he was persuaded by a Parisian woman who had befriended him to show the material to a publisher. The work appeared in 1954, as L ’ enfant noir ( The Dark Child, or The African Child, as it is translated in the two English-language versions), still perhaps the most
beautiful account of traditional African life ever published—in large part because of the haunting portrait of Laye’s mother.
    Laye’s first novel, Le regard du roi ( The Radiance of the King), was published two years later, in 1956, by which time he had decided that he wanted to be a full-time writer. This novel—a lengthy narrative about a white man who undergoes a spiritual transformation and becomes an African—has repeatedly been cited, along with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart , as one of the masterpieces of African fiction. Laye—a firm believer in the positive aspects of cultural syncretism, in ethnic reciprocity—was an optimist, in spite of the unsettling difficulties that were about to unfold in his own life.
    Back home in Guinea, Laye was given an innocuous position in the civil service, which permitted him time to write. But when Sékou Touré, the president of Guinea, read the author’s work-in-progress, Laye was given two options: not publish the book or go into exile. Laye chose the latter, and Dramouss (a sequel to L ’ enfant noir ) was published in Paris in 1966, after being postponed for several years.
    In exile in Senegal, Laye was a haunted man. Sékou Touré ordered Laye’s wife imprisoned, apparently in retaliation for the books her husband had published. Laye agonized about his wife and children in Guinea while suffering recurrent physical and psychological illnesses. Like other African writers of his generation, he discovered that his fame as a writer did not bring commensurate economic rewards or intellectual freedom.
    Laye’s writing suffered, though more in quantity than in quality. His final work, Le Maître de la Parole (1979), was published in Paris the year before his death. Though the volume chronicles the life and death of Sundiata, the first Emperor of the ancient Malian empire, The Guardian of the Word (the English-language title) is equally a celebration of the traditional African storyteller, the griot. In the narrative itself, Laye warns the reader not to confuse the true griot with contemporary storytellers, “those music merchants, those choristers or guitarists who wander through the big cities looking for recording studios.”
    Rather, Laye tells us, the true griot , “one of the important members of that ancient, clearly defined hierarchical society, is … preceding his status as a historian … above all an artist, and, it follows, his chants, his epics, and his legends are works of art.”
    Camara Laye was such a custodian of the word.

THE EYES OF THE STATUE
    Translated from the French by Una Maclean
    Â 
    She stopped walking for a moment—ever since she set out she had been