Book review: Adventure in 18th-century Senegal in David Diop’s Beyond The Door Of No Return

Beyond The Door Of No Return

By David Diop, translated by Sam Taylor
Fiction/Pushkin Press/Hardcover/256 pages/$32.47/Amazon SG (

amzn.to/3U2tMqp

)
4 stars

On the island of Goree, off the coast of Senegal, is a door.

Through it, captured Africans would have emerged from dark dungeons into the sunlight of their native land one last time, before being packed onto ships and sold across the sea into slavery.

This is the titular Door Of No Return in David Diop’s third novel, in which swashbuckling adventure and doomed romance in 18th-century Senegal culminate in tragedy.

In 2021, Diop became the first French author and the first of African heritage – his father is Senegalese – to win the International Booker Prize with his visceral World War I novel, At Night All Blood Is Black.

That same year, he published Beyond The Door Of No Return in French. It has now been translated into English by Sam Taylor.

Diop, a university lecturer in 18th-century literature, subverts the tropes of that era’s travel writing to chart his own voyage into the dark heart of colonialism.

A young Frenchwoman, Aglae, sits at the deathbed of her father, Michel Adanson, a renowned botanist who neglected her in his pursuit of academic acclaim.

Before he dies, he speaks one last word: “Maram”. Aglae, determined to unravel her estranged father’s final mystery, discovers a notebook of his which records a research expedition to Senegal he undertook when he was 23.

There, a village head tells him the tale of the “revenant”, a woman called Maram Seck who has done the impossible: She was sold into slavery in America, but has returned alive.

Despite the scepticism of his guide, a cocky 15-year-old prince called Ndiak, Adanson decides to seek out the revenant.

Michel Adanson was a real-life naturalist who, in 1748, travelled to Senegal on an expedition funded by the Compagnie des Indes, or the French East India Company. He went on to publish his findings in Histoire Naturelle Du Senegal (Natural History Of Senegal).

Diop delves into the gaps of this expedition through the use of multiple frame narratives, all of which question how stories are recorded and which ones get to become history.

At first, the novel foregrounds the European Enlightenment narrative, with its focus on mastering the world through scientific knowledge and reason.

This gradually recedes to the edges of the frame, as the naturalist moves deeper into Senegal and encounters unknowable forces that he first exoticises, then embraces.

Into the centre moves the story of Maram, a redoubtable, resourceful woman who can draw on the power of her faru rab, a spirit protector that takes the form of a giant boa.

These multiple layers of diegesis slow down the novel to a degree that may frustrate readers, particularly the early sections from Aglae’s perspective. Even then, however, Diop is already planting seeds that will flower later on with devastating effect.

What seem like throwaway moments, such as a Senegalese toddler pulling Adanson’s hair or the refrain “Ripples, little waves, then stillness”, return with new and terrible significance.

Maram, Ndiak and Adanson’s stories are caught in the coils of colonialism and capitalism that will close inexorably around them.

But for a brief space, Diop opens a hidden door and lets light fall upon a part of history left too long in the dark.

If you like this, read: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail, 2018, $18.18,

amzn.to/3vGCOj2

), a Booker Prize-shortlisted adventure novel in which the eponymous hero goes from being enslaved on a Barbados sugar plantation to travelling the world as a scientist’s assistant.