Bienvenue!

My name is Cheikh Mbacke Ndiaye.

I was born in Tene-Toubab, a small Serere village in the Midwest of Senegal. Tene-Toubab in Wolof means the White Person's Well. The name was given in memory of the French people who dug the well while they were constructing a colonial route between the ancient capital of the Serere kingdom of Sine and the kingdom of Saloum.

I hold an M.A. from the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (Senegal).

I recorded many stories from famous Griots telling about the historical and mythical figure of San Moon Biram Fay. San Moon Fay was a king in the 19^th century whose legend is still wedded with his courage and his tyranny and more importantly with his mysterious complicity with the Pangools, the spirits of the Ancestors.

The epic story considers also the socio-political organizations in the Serere Community before the French colonial hegemony and provides a broad sample of West-African oral traditions. It analyzes the Serere's local modes of thoughts and beliefs, and more importantly its forms of cultural expression mainly derived from oral genres including tales and epics.

My Ph.D dissertation in French Studies from the University of Connecticut: “Reawakening the Repressed: Post-colonial Narrative Strategies in Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga, Rachid Momouni’s La Malédiction, and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco,” - considers specific defensible narrative strategies in postcolonial literatures, with a focus on these three representative writers from the Francophone world.

Calixthe Beyala is a woman writer from Cameroon, Rachid Mimouni and Patrick Chamoiseau are both male writers from Algeria and Martinique respectively. My work treats these authors’ efforts to emerge from the colonial legacy and the “disillusionment of independence” to forge a new “postcolonial identity.”

By reading Tu t’appelleras Tanga, La Malédiction, and Texaco, I have sought to emphasize these writers’ shared uses of the French language. I argue that their style destabilizes the readers, especially those outside these specific cultural spaces, by confronting them with hitherto unfamiliar images, figures, and symbols directly derived from local meanings and repressed desires. I also address the ways these writers surpass certain colonial quarrels by mobilizing their critical vision in regard to the gender, religious, and political conflicts they individually witness or experience.

My research interest is on Francophone studies with a focus on West African oral traditions and on post-colonial literature from West Africa, North Africa, and the Caribbean. With the completion of my Master’s thesis and my doctoral dissertation , I now feel comfortable writing about a variety of demanding topics that relate to the culture and literature of those French speaking regions

My Master’s thesis, “L’épopée orale sérère: La geste de San Moon Fay,” which I defended in July 1993 at the University of Dakar in Senegal is a result of field work conducted in 1992. It consisted of a collection and recording of an oral epic from different “Griots” (troubadours in a European context) in Senegal. It included a transcription into the local dialect (Serere), a translation into French, and a literary analysis. The study examines the epic story of San Moon Fay, a historical and legendary king in the late nineteenth century whose figure in the ancient Serere kingdom in Senegal provides a strong model of thoughts and beliefs in pre-colonial West African societies. By considering the mythical representations and socio-political organizations of this ancient kingdom, the story shows how local forms of cultural expression are derived from oral genres- tales and epics- and how these shape written literatures, both colonial and postcolonial, through their oral literary devices.
The revision and the publication of my Master’s thesis are a top priority. One of the chapters has been published by Les Editions Karthala in Paris in 1997 in Les Epopees Africaines, a book written by L. Kesteloot and B. Dieng, two distinguished scholars in African oral literature. I have also written paper conferences relating to the thesis and I am committed to turn them into academic articles for publication. Thanks to a research grant recently awarded by the Humanities Faculty Development Board at Union College for the summer 2002, l was able to conduct further research related to the thesis, so that ultimately, it may be published in book form.

My doctoral dissertation, whose revision and publication are another top priority, considers the narrative strategies in post-colonial literatures, with a focus on three representative writers from the Francophone world; Calixthe Beyala is a woman writer from Cameroon, Rachid Mimouni and Patrick Chamoiseau are male writers from Algeria and Martinique respectively. My work treats these authors’ efforts to emerge from the colonial legacy and the “disillusionment of independence” to forge a new post-colonial identity. By reading Beyala’s Tu t’appellerasTanga, Mimouni’s La Malédiction, and Chamoiseau’s Texaco, I have sought to emphasize these writers’ shared uses of the French language. I argue that their style destabilizes the readers, especially those outside these specific cultural spaces, by confronting them with hitherto unfamiliar images, figures, and symbols directly derived from local meanings and repressed desires. I also address the ways these writers surpass certain colonial quarrels by mobilizing their critical vision in regard to the gender, religious, and political conflicts they individually witness or experience in their societies. I am currently revising the third chapter entitled "Postcolonial Poetics" of my dissertation for publication. The chapter focuses on the three novels' political meaning and on how the latter is stated, in other words, how Beyala, Mimouni, and Chamoiseau use a particular style, in some degree innovative and revolutionary, to alter French classical conventions, both literary and cultural, accepted and considered as universal. Overall, this chapter poses the question of modern identity in French territories and former colonies in reaction to the weight of the French colonial legacy, local traditions, and modernism. In line with my strong interest in the French speaking Caribbean region, I have an article published in 1998 in Francographie, a special volume, on Haitian magical realism as viewed by Rene Depestre in his book Hadriana dans tous mes rêves. Although I have not reached a stage in which I feel comfortable writing on very demanding topics about North Africa, I have a strong commitment to exploring this field further. To this end, in May 1997, I attended the first month long Séminaire Interculturel d’Etudes Francophones (S.I.E.F) in Morocco organized by the Centre d’Etudes des Littératures Comparées et de Didactique (CELCD), Faculté de lettres et des Sciences Humaines Ben Msik-Casablanca and the Centre d’Etudes des Littératures Comparées, Université du Connecticut, USA. On top of Rachid Mimouni, an Algerian writer whose work I am still exploring, I have presented a paper in April 2002 at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference on “Women Writers in/on Colonialist France.” The paper is about the ways the theme of death is represented as a sign of self-revelation in Mariama Ba’ s Une si longue lettre and Malika Mokedem’s L’Interdite. Ba is a woman writer from Senegal and Mokkedem an Algerian woman writer.

In my research interest, I am concerned with the relationship between pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial literatures. My interest in these types of literature consists of exploring particularly oral genres, and more specifically the function of their infusion into colonial and post-colonial literatures. I argue that North and West African, and Caribbean post-colonial literatures very much imbued with local literary devices, mainly oral, and this challenges Eurocentric notions of “universal” and “purity” in language and writing. I view this as going beyond the aesthetic to reflect as well a narrative and political strategy in the construction of a new national identity.

Along with my research interest, I am very committed to teaching that I perceive as a mission. As for language teaching, I believe in interaction as a pedagogical method to achieve a proficiency in oral skills. When teaching culture to my students, I always use literary masterpieces to expose them to the main patterns of my target culture, show them how the patterns function in this culture, so they can understand the meaning of such or such cultural trait without being biased in their judgments.