Cendres et braises.

Meyer, E. Nicole

The sun-soaked, movement-filled images of her native Senegal return in Ken Bugul's second autobiography, Cendres et braises. Once again the author attempts to understand and communicate her often painful past. "Je n'osais pas avouer un certain vecu," she writes, "pourtant ce vecu avait ete." While this story is very much a personal one, it provides a social commentary on woman's role, on differing perceptions of polygamy, on the importance of the mother-daughter bond, and on the postcolonial difficulties of finding one's identity.

Colonial disruption of a peaceful, natural society is personified in the author's life by her married white French lover Y., with whom she conducts a disastrous and passionate five-year relationship in France. The reader shares her loss of self as Y. beats her mercilessly. She leaves him occasionally, only to return to "la valse infernale." How can she dance the white man's waltz when the natural rhythms of Africa (sun, heat, light) still pulse through her veins? How can she return to feeling after the numbing denial caused by her relationship with Y.? Their liaison suppresses her self, her voice, and her roots.

The conventional chapter structure is somewhat deceptive. Chronological and geographic back-and-forth movements characterize Bugul's text, which appears at first to be the recounting of her story to a female friend. The identity of her listener becomes questionable as the reader sees the sympathetic Muslim holy man (le Marabout) take form through the text. It is he who is the "auditeur invisible" suggested early in the book and who helps her redirect her past peregrinations onto an interior path of self-understanding and acceptance. More important, he helps her appreciate the flavors of her feelings and her life: "Je decouvris les delices des mets simples et l'instant merveilleux avant la pluie. Je sentais en moi une nouvelle fraicheur des sens et des sensations." But while this result (coupled with her coming to a Supreme Peace) bodes well for her future, the last two sentences of the novel may disappoint some readers: "Ma Mere vient d'apprendre par la Mauresque et sa voisine que le Marabout m'avait epousee. Mille Gloires Au Createur des Harmonies Eternelles." No one can begrudge the author this happiness, but as it is recounted through passive constructions and involves her becoming one of the Marabout's several wives, it suggests a contradiction of her feminist outlook.

My hope is that Ken Bugul will continue to take pleasure and power in the creation of verbs, images, and textual movement. I, for one, look forward to the next book that flows from her pen.

E. Nicole Meyer University of Wisconsin, Madison