Novel
The Wound
La Plaie
Malick Fall · 1967
Synopsis
Magamou Seck leaves his village in the Walo to make good in Saint-Louis, but a road accident leaves him with a wound on his ankle that will not close. Having become "the man with the wound", he roams the market, feared and despised, surrounded by stray cats and dogs; accused of madness, he is confined, escapes, and meets a colonial doctor and his interpreter. The novel makes the wound of the body the sign of a social wound, with a biting irony towards colonisation.
Context
The novel appeared in 1967 from Albin Michel, then in 1968 from Éditions Rencontre; it is the author's only novel, after the collection of poems Reliefs in 1964. Clive Wake translated it into English as The Wound, in the African Writers Series. Having become almost unobtainable, it was reissued in 2014 in Senegal by Éditions Jimsaan, with a preface by Alioune Badara Diané. Its refined, often comic language carries Wolof expressions into French.
Who it is for
To discover a forgotten classic of the Senegalese novel, in which a wound becomes the mirror of a whole society.
Prizes and reception
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr counts it among his finest readings, a "marvellous text" too little read.