Tobias Warner, PMLA, October 2024
The rediscovery of Mariama Bâ’s “Memories of Lagos” began with a clue in a biography of Bâ written by her daughter, Mame Coumba Ndiaye. Mariama Bâ ou les allées d’un destin [Mariama Bâ or the Alleys of a Destiny] is the kind of book that sparks such unexpected connections.An unclassifiable hybrid of biography, memoir, and filial ventriloquism, it is the only book-length study of Bâ’s life. In its pages, Ndiaye offers a meditation on decolonization and gender, and traces an intellectual portrait of her mother. Drawing on many of Bâ’s private writings and unpublished speeches as well as on a host of questionnaires that circulated among Bâ’s friends and family, the book is itself an archive. Throughout, Ndiaye hovers movingly between speaking as a biographer and as a daughter. “I am not outside this narration,” as she puts it in this interview, which was conducted, translated, and edited by Tobias Warner. For the first time in English, Ndiaye reflects on her extensive research into her mother’s life, their mother-daughter epistolary relationship, the role of print culture in their family, and the relevance of Mariama Bâ’s work today.
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Tobias Warner 