"Xala" by Sembenè Ousmane

       

    “Xala” opens with the announcement of a proud moment in the history of Senegal.  An African is now the head of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.  This is a period of transition from French colonial rule to African Independence.  Leading this country is a group of businessmen, at the peak of their career with a foot in the door of wholesale trade and the import-export field.  Having an African President to lead the Chamber of commerce and industry meant “access to the heart of the country’s economy, a foothold in the world of high finance, and of course, the right to walk with head held high.”(1) Among that elite group is El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye, a teacher turned entrepreneur.  After dabbling in various business schemes, he settles down as the “front” for overseas investors.  He establishes himself on the board of two or three local companies and acquires for himself a strong political and social influence.  This day is important to El Hadji in other ways as well.  He is acquiring a third wife.  “This third marriage raised him to the rank of the traditional notability; it represented a kind of promotion.”(4)  That actually reminds me of a Monkhouse limerick:

There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time,
When asked, “Why a third?”
He replied, “One's absurd!
And bigamy, sir, is a crime.” 

But I digress. 

On his wedding night, El Hadji is stricken with xala (A Wolof term for “impotence”) and is not able to consummate his marriage.  The novel is about the embarrassment it causes to his manhood and to his status in society which leads him to be a failure in business as well. In the few weeks that he has the xala, El Hadji suffers considerably.  “His bitterness had become an inferiority complex in the company of his peers.  He imagined himself the object of their looks and the subject of their conversation.  He could not endure the asides, the way they laughed whenever he went past, the way they stared at him.  His infirmity, temporary though it might be, made him incapable of communicating with his employees, his wives, his children and his business colleagues.  When he could allow himself a few moments of escape he imagined himself a carefree child again.”(38-9)

This reaction seems extreme. To El Hadji, however, who is on the threshold of “greatness” and for whom acquisition is a sign of progress, his impotence sounds his death knell.  He is the representative of the corrupt, and the hypocritical middle-class of Senegal.  He belongs to the world where only money talks.  Just as he is a fusion of two cultures, the book is a fusion of two apparently parallel plots—the story of El Hadji the man, and the story of the country he represents.  The author hints that the country is not yet ready to take responsibility for its own rule, because the very fabric of society reveals moral decadence.  The xala is not El Hadji’s alone.  The impotence had spread into all the nooks and crannies of Senegalese government and culture.

 

Change has to come from self-awareness.  Where does El Hadji really belong?  Sembenè calls him a “synthesis” of two cultures (French and Wolof)—“business had drawn him into the European middle class after a feudal African education.  Like his peers, he made skilful use of his dual background, for their fusion was not complete.” (4)  He has all the status symbols of a wealthy European businessman—the Mercedes Benz, three houses (referred to as ‘villas’) and of a rich Muslim—the three wives.  “I am a Muslim.  I have the right to four wives,” asserts Hadji.  Polygamy is one of Sembenè’s favorite themes. Herein lies the impotence of women. El Hadji’s first wife Adja Awa Astou, a Christian, had severed her ties with her own family to marry a Muslim and had accepted his religion.  Her sacrifice was for naught. She was forced to face the reality of an oppressive social structure when El Hadji married again.  “By an act of will she had overcome all her feelings of resentment toward the second wife.  Her ambition was to be a wife according the teachings of Islam by observing the five daily prayers and showing her husband complete obedience.”(20) She had no family support; as a result she was a lonely woman. Sembenè Ousmane seems to point out the importance of free will.  She chose to be alone and “as others isolate themselves with drugs she obtained her daily dose from her religion.”(22)  Although a victim by choice, she plays the role of the martyr. In fact, she warns Rama (her daughter) that it is not easy to change the world and that every woman was fated to share her man.  “You are young still.  Your day will come if it pleases Yalla.  Then you will understand.” (12)  Rama would not allow herself be put in that position.  Divorce may be a social stigma for her mother but not her. She is intelligent, feisty, and rebellious and has a mind of her own.  She is educated and questioning, the product of a new free generation that questions unfair traditional practices.  “A polygamist is never frank” (13) she tells her father and is slapped for her pains.  She has the courage of her convictions, and is the key to the change that is to take place in her country. She is conscious of the new political awakening in her country, and is determined to keep the African ethnicity alive by promoting Wolof language instead of the colonial French. 

As for the second wife, “as long as she was the favorite she accepted polygamy and the rivalry.”  However, Oumi N’Doye’s pride was hurt. At El Hadji’s third wedding she bravely lies to the aunt of the bride and the first wife: “I thank Yalla for putting me to the test so that in my turn I too can show that I am not jealous or selfish.”  But she is both of those things, and she does share the bitterness of polygamy with the first wife.  “As they watched someone else’s happiness the memory of their own weddings left a nasty taste.  Eaten up with a painful bitterness they shared a common sense of abandonment and loneliness.  Neither spoke.” (20)  Neither had anything to say because they were carried by this tide that they had no control over.

Women felt that they had no way to defend themselves against the ignominy of being relegated to the back burner with the advent of a new co-wife.  Oumi is unhappy; but her introspection can only bring out her shallow nature.  She recalls how she would rob Adja Awa Astou of whole days and nights of her husband’s company, and pretend to herself she was the only wife.  Not that she is remorseful of her part in hurting her co-wife.  She plans now to extract all the privileges she can from her husband.  Aware that divorcing him would leave her destitute and force her to prostitution to maintain herself, she decides to help herself to El Hadji’s wealth. Her immediate target is the acquisition of a car.  She waits till her “moomé” (her rightful time with her husband) to make her move; plies him with delicious food and then speaks her piece.  “You must treat us all fairly as the Koran says.  Each household has a car except this one.  Why?” (51) Not being educated or intelligent, she does not realize that nothing about polygamy is fair to women or the children.  The third wife N’gone, for instance, is a mere nineteen years old and is manipulated by Yay Bineta (her aunt) to marry a middle aged man who has been married twice before and has had a brood of children, the eldest of whom is her age.  Afraid that N’Gone would make rash decisions and fall for men who “don’t have a pocket handkerchief and wear clothes only fit for a scarecrow”, Yay Bineta fixes El Hadji as her quarry and embarks on a systematic campaign to trap him into marrying her niece. El Hadji, always attracted by a pretty face, falls neatly into the trap. In a tongue-in-cheek fashion, the author terms El Hadji’s life as “Urban Polygamy” or “Geographical Polygamy” as opposed to “Rural Polygamy” where wives have to share their home.  In the towns, as in the case of El Hadji, the men have different houses scattered all over so the wives do not meet each other and the children have limited contact with their father.  The fathers have no particular interest in the raising of the children. They are to the children what the colonial rule is to Senegal.

The xala is a lesson.  Everything that El Hadji built up, crumbles like a deck of cards.  Corrupt and greedy that he is, he discovers that his personal and business worlds were propped up on a weak foundation and could not endure the vicissitudes of life.  Also, Sembenè Ousmane condemns the imposition of an alien culture over the traditional one.  When El Hadji suffers from the xala, it is not modern medicine that cures him.  He is cured by the wisdom of centuries, by a marabout who lives in a village not accessible by car away from the sphere of influence of the western civilization.  It is the deep mysticism of the African culture, thrust rudely aside by the colonists and Christianity, which feeds the soul of its people.  Suddenly, the novel is not about El Hadji anymore but of the prevalence of a more insidious influence, of the oppression of a race, of human dignity.  It is up to El Hadji to rediscover the visionary gleam, the glory and the dream of the African people.   In a cri de coeur at the end of the novel, he criticizes the citizens of Senegal for their lack of integrity and for pandering to the colonists. Although the country was free, he pointed out that the important positions of the state were still occupied by the French. 

“What are we?  Mere agents, less than petty traders!  We merely redistribute. Re-distribute the remains the big men deign to leave us.  Are we businessmen?  I say no!  Just clodhoppers!”(83)

The truth is out, and the other “businessmen,” in denial, are shocked.  El Hadji continues:

“We are a bunch of clodhoppers.  Who owns the banks? The insurance companies? The factories?  The wholesale trade? The cinemas?  The bookshops?  The hotels?  All these and more besides are out of our  control. We are nothing better than crabs in a basket.  We want the ex-occupier’s place?  We have it.  This Chamber is the proof.  Yet what change is there really in general or in particular?  The colonialist is stronger, more powerful than ever before, hidden inside us, here in this very place.  He promises us the left-overs of the feast if we behave ourselves.  Beware anyone who tries to upset his digestion, who wants a bigger profit.  What are we?  Clodhoppers! Agents! Petty traders! In our fatuity we call ourselves “businessmen”!  Businessmen without funds!” (83)

In a dramatic turn of events, reminiscent of the medieval Moral Interludes, El Hadji faces the consequences of this corrupt society.  He falls from grace, his homes are taken away, his wives leave him and he is subject to a ritual of spiritual cleansing that is at once atavistic and cathartic. He is stripped naked and spit on by beggars and lepers, who represent not the dregs of humanity but the people that were trampled upon without qualms by these corrupt businessmen and himself.  One of the lepers accuses him, “You are a disease that is infectious to everyone.  The virus of a collective leprosy.” (100) El Hadji surrenders to this treatment because he realizes the need for every man(personal level) and the country(collective level) to be purged of every evil on the soil.

Sembenè Ousmane’s skill as a film maker is obvious in the dramatic intensity of each ‘scene’ in the book, and there is really no other way to describe these chapters.  The humor of the bedroom scene on the wedding night with the woman and the cock, the mortar and the axe has the readers scoff at tradition, but the humor soon turns to seriousness at the dying mores and the collapse of an ancient civilization and the endemic ills such as polygamy. The book has representation from every strata of society, each searching for identity in the confusing world. The author is himself a griot, a wandering minstrel keeping alive the culture of the Senegalese.

Ousmane, Sembenè. Xala. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. 1976

Rating 4 out of 5.

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Meet the Lomans--Death Of A Salesman

“Why didn’t anyone come?” Linda Loman’s piteous, plaintive cry at Willy Loman’s funeral is perhaps the most touching moment in the play.  Even after at least thirty-five years of marriage to Willy, his wife is still clueless about her husband. She cannot understand what made him commit suicide.  “I search and search and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy”. (Requiem)

Meet the Lomans.

Willy is a salesman. He has a wife Linda and two sons Biff and Happy.  The play is about his dreams to make it big in his career, his dysfunctional family and his tenuous bond with his son Biff.  

Willy is constantly talking.  He talks to Linda, he talks to his sons, and he talks to himself. But Linda refuses to listen.  She has a fear of the unknown, so she does not probe into the relationship between her husband and her son Biff, never tries to figure out what exactly the conflict is, and actually prevents Willy from considering brother Ben’s offer to accompany him to Alaska and work with him. She is sucked into Willy’s delusional world. She tells Ben, “Why, old man Wagner told him just the other day that if he keeps it up he’ll be a member of the firm, didn’t he, Willy?”(p 85), when only a couple of minutes previously Willy had confided in Ben, “Ben, nothing’s working out.  I don’t know what to do.”(p. 84)

         Linda Loman is an enabler.  She lets her weak husband weave fantastic dreams that have no basis in reality.  She is fooled by Willy’s “wrong dreams”, just like the people in Hans Christian Anderson’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who were carried away by the grandness of the delusion of a non-existent fabric.  “He’s got a beautiful job here”, Linda assures Ben, “why must everybody conquer the world?” (p. 85) Taking the cue from her, Willy recovers from his brief spasm of insecurity and promises-“We’ll do it here, Ben! You hear me?  We’re gonna do it here!” (p. 87) 

Linda Loman is the picture of serene domesticity—always appearing with a basket of laundry, mending stockings in the manner of a thrifty housewife and performing those hundred little services that are expected of a dutiful wife. To Linda, Willy is the handsomest man in the whole world and deserves to be smothered in love.  She fusses over Willy’s glasses, his saccharine and his handkerchief as he goes out of the house, she takes his shoes off when he gets home; she is forever offering platitudes:  “But you didn’t rest your mind.  Your mind is overactive, and the mind is what counts, dear.” (p. 13) She lives her life with the ideology that “father knows best”.  She is blind to Willy’s faults.   Although Willy is not “easy to get along with”  (“nobody knows that better than me”, she qualifies), although he’s not a great man, nor the finest character that ever lived, she insists, “attention must be finally paid to such a person”(p. 56) She finds excuses for him and in a way buries her head in sand because it is too much trouble to confront life.  It is easy to fall under her spell and pity Willy’s state, as she perceives it.  “For five weeks he’s been on straight commission, like a beginner, an unknown.” (p. 57) Willy as seen through her eyes is the victim of a changing world, an unappreciative employer and ungrateful children.  He is tired, exhausted and wants to end it all because he has worked too hard and too long without being appreciated.  In a way, she instinctively feels compelled to restore dignity to a man who has willfully lost it. She however, shows keener perception of the character of her sons.  Of Biff she says, “I think he’s still lost,” and Happy she calls a philandering bum; both judgments are appropriate in Willy’s case as well.  She protects Willy from Biff and Happy, and uses all tactics in her power to elicit compassion in them for him.  She confides in them about Willy’s attempts at suicide and while it truly shocks them, the audience is left wondering why she does not confront Willy herself and help him face his demons. 

Willy Loman rode on “a smile and a shoeshine”.  However, he did not even do that very well.  He boasts that he “knocked ‘em cold in Providence, slaughtered ‘em in Boston” and sold thousands and thousands of whatever and could have gone on doing it but he had to get home.  He later modifies that to “five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston” and within seconds stammers, “I—I did—about a hundred and eighty gross in Providence.  Well, no---it came to –roughly two hundred gross on the whole trip.”(p. 35) We never know what he is selling, but are left with the impression that he is trying to sell himself.  But Willy is a mediocre man, with mediocre abilities and mediocre morals.  He is only slightly aware of his shortcomings.  He confides his insecurities to his brother,  “Ben, nothing’s working out, I don’t know what to do.” (p.84) 

Willy is always tempted to link his lot with brother Ben.  Ben epitomizes all that is brave and successful.  He takes on the untamed, and the unexplored and nature seems to drop her cornucopia in his lap.  “Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked in to the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out.  And by God, I was rich! (p. 48) Willy is fascinated with this account and parrots it incessantly—it all seems so simple to him.  Nowhere in his brother’s account is the story of blood, sweat, toil and tears.  Willy has a skewed view of success or what makes a person tick.  He himself follows no rules.  He makes his sons steal wood from neighboring construction sites to make additions to his home, and is quite brazen about it.  “You shoulda seen the lumber, they brought home last week.  At least a dozen six by tens worth all kinds of money.”(p. 51) He encourages Biff to bring home footballs from the school but vehemently denies it is stealing.  He is merely “borrowing” them to practice with; ends, to him, justify the means. Somewhere in his conscience he does have this niggling doubt, “…sometimes I’m afraid that I’m not teaching them the right kind of---Ben, how should I teach them?” (p.52) He does not let that worry him for long.  He cheats on his wife and offers loneliness as his excuse.  He is angry that Biff is disproportionately shocked, “You musn’t—you mustn’t overemphasize a thing like this”, he tells him little realizing that he has now lost Biff forever. 

Willy is out of sync with the world.  He is slowing down while the rest of the country seems to be spinning faster.  Even his neighborhood changes–the streets are lined up with cars, the houses have given way to apartment buildings, there are no huge backyards anymore and certainly no trees.  People eat whipped cheese and discard anything that is of no advantage to them.  Nothing grows in Willy’s world anymore.  Not his commission, not his relationship with his sons, not even his mind.  He gets fired and has to depend on Charley for handouts. Linda’s hair becomes grey, Happy stagnates at his job and Biff becomes a drifter utterly lost, not believing in his father but not being self-aware either.  What makes Willy’s life pathetic is that he did not have the capacity to appreciate what he had or owned.  He did not make the connection between effort and result or even effort and ability. He was lost just like Biff.  He could not risk leaving his world behind and going to Alaska with his brother, but he did not have the special talent in sales like Dave Singleman, the ultimate salesman.  What is significant is that even though he was not so remarkable and had suicidal tendencies, he was not doing too badly.  The Lomans did eventually manage to pay off their mortgage and the installments on the refrigerator.  Willy Loman was a restless spirit and “he had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong.”(p 138) He mistakenly believed that a “man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked”, because “it’s not what you do. Ben.  It’s who you know and the smile on your face! It’s contacts, Ben, contacts”.  (p.86) He never quite grasps what success is, so he oversimplifies it.  Of Ben he says, “What’s the mystery?  The man knew what he wanted and went out and got it!  Walked into a jungle, and comes out the age of twenty-one, and he’s rich!” (p.41) He believes that superficial charm and popularity without the foundation of integrity, effort and honesty is enduring. 

And this is what Biff had learned from his father.  He is his father’s twin soul, misguided for most of his life, but unlike his father, Biff introspects.  “I’ve always made a point of not wasting my life, and everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.” (p.23) He admits to being “mixed up very bad”(p.23) to Happy, reminiscent of Willy’s confidences to Ben.  He is lost as Linda put it but the years have matured him.  He senses now the need to settle down and stop being a drifter. Act One of “Death of a Salesman” is a time for Biff to do some soul-searching.  He is not sure about his future, but he knows he would like to spend it outdoors, stripped to his waist working in a ranch.  However, he is willing to settle down in the city to please his mother. Biff’s indecision stems from certain unresolved issues and the first half of the play leads up to his self-awareness.  “I just can’t take hold, mom.  I can’t take hold of some kind of life.” (p.54) In any case, he makes up his mind to speak to his ex-employer Bill Oliver about a loan to start a sporting good store fully aware that he had once quit Bill’s employment because he had stolen a carton of basketballs from him.

Biff’s moment of epiphany occurs as he subconsciously steals a pen at Bill Oliver’s office.  “I took those balls years ago, now I walk in with his fountain pen?  That clinches it, don’t you see?” (p.112) This coincides with the climax of the play, with the audience transported to Boston to witness Biff’s horror as he discovers his father’s infidelity. In one chaotic instant, the audience, Biff and Willy reach the same level of awareness.   Willy and Biff both come to terms with their past.  Although Biff is not consciously thinking of the adultery, he realizes that he had spent his entire life believing his father’s “simonizing”.  He understands now that his father’s dreams are phony, and that his father never really understood the needs of his family.  “The man don’t know who we are! The man is gonna know!  We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!” (p.130) The one thing Biff finally learns is that a person is “well-liked” and popular, not for being handsome and charming, but for his honesty and hard work—qualities that were non-existent in his upbringing.  In spite of perfect role models in Charles and Bernard next door,  the Lomans more or less drifted rudderless.  Bernard was termed anemic, not well-liked and Charley was dismissed as not having a great personality.  Trusting in his father, Biff ignores all warning signs; he fails in math, loses his place in the football team and never quite recovers the glory of his carefree years.  Lost and confused since Boston, he stumbles through life, rebelling against all enduring values, a petty thief and a drifter, in and out of prisons.  He finally has the sense to stop.

“Willy! I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand today.  And suddenly I stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building, do your hear this?  I stopped in the middle of the building and I saw –the sky.  I saw the things that I love in this world.  The work and the food and time to sit and smoke.  And I looked at the pen and I said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for?  Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be?  What am I doing in an office, among a contemptuous begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!  Why can’t I say that, Willy?”  (p.132)

The separation from his alter ego is complete.  As the past explodes into the present, and Willy is forced to accept his part in Biff’s plummet into life’s deep end, Biff and Willy’s paths diverge. Willy is not “Pop” to him for a brief while.  He is one of the multitude, “a dime a dozen”. Willy senses this momentous change in Biff more than understands it.  While the change makes Biff come alive, it signals the death of the salesman.

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