Tobias Warner, Introduction and translation of a forgotten poem by Mariama Bâ, Little Known Documents series, PMLA, 138.5, 2023
“Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos” (“Festac . . . Memories of Lagos”) is the first piece of new writing by the Senegalese author Mariama Bâ to be seen in decades and her only known poem. Previously unknown to scholars, “Memories of Lagos” appeared in a Senegalese periodical in February 1977—two years before the publication of Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), her most famous work. Bâ’s oeuvre was thought to be limited to just three published texts—her two novels and a lone piece of juvenilia, “Ma petite patrie” (“My Little Homeland”)—as well as the handful of interviews and speeches she gave before her untimely death in 1981. As far as I am aware, “Memories of Lagos” is the first piece of creative writing Bâ ever chose to publish.
“Memories of Lagos” records Bâ’s experiences at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), held in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977. This important Pan-African gathering drew over sixteen thousand performers and attendees from across the continent and its diaspora for a celebration of African arts and culture. Bâ was in Lagos to represent L’Ouest Africain (The West African), a news- paper (and later magazine) published in Dakar under the editorship of her husband, Obèye Diop. Bâ seems to have traveled there with the exiled Haitian writer Jean F. Brierre, who wrote a longer dispatch for the same paper. Although Bâ went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most written about and widely taught African authors, “Memories of Lagos” slipped under the radar.
Tobias Warner 