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����������� From a Great Clamor: A Review of Ambiguous Adventure
20 November 2000
The novel Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane is aptly named. The character experiences a life that is fraught with ambiguity once he leaves the confines of his traditional African family. After enrolling in the "new school," the school started by the colonists, and continuing his education in France, the protagonist, Samba Diallo, finds that he does not fit into modern European culture nor in his African home. Diallo is not alone in his sentiments; his journey to find just where he fits into the world is one that is experienced by many Africans, and, to a degree, Africa itself. By 1963, when this novel was first published, Africa had found itself with a new culture, alien to its oral-based history and close-knit way of governance, thrust upon it. With the sudden imposition of independence, each country, each community, and each person had to mold a new identity. The ensuing confusion in his search for his identity perpetuates itself in three crucial points of Diallo's life: religion, family,
and his own self-perception. However, all of these are related to the religion that Diallo must struggle to find. In the end, his only recourse during death is to come full circle back to the spirituality he knew as a child.
The first lines of the book reveal its preoccupation with religion: "That day, Thierno had beaten him again. And
yet Samba Diallo knew his sacred verse" (1). If there is any identity group that Diallo can attach himself to at the beginning of the novel, it is the Muslims. The country of the Diallob� was Islamic, without exception, so far as the reader knows. This faith, demanding and exacting as it is, dominated the lives of the Diallob� people. It certainly dominated the life of Samba Diallo from the time he was seven, when he was sent to the religious school to memorize the Koran and learn how to be a good Muslim. While there, Diallo learned his verses through strict punishment and was forced to beg in the streets for his meals. Despite these hardships, Diallo excelled and lived a richly spiritual life, one that would stay with him temporarily after leaving the school. On one of the first days at the "new school," Diallo found himself praying fervently during a beautiful sunset; during that prayer,
"in this twilight that was so beautiful, he had felt himself swept by a sudden exaltation while he was praying, an exaltation such as he had formerly felt when he was near the teacher" (58). This sentence is telling for two reasons: it brings up how closely the Diallob� religion was tied to nature, and it presents the important role of the teacher in the Diallob� community.
For the Diallob�, the bountiful earth and beautiful sky were some of the very few things left to them after they chose to fight the invading Europeans. Samba Diallo, especially in his younger years, felt a great kinship with the land around him; he admired the trees, he listened to the river, he even sneaked into the cemetery one night to sleep next to the bones of his ancestors. When he left the school to return to his parents, it was tradition that on his first night home he would recite the entire Koran through the night. "On that first night, it would seem that Nature had wished to associate itself with a delicate thought of the boy's, for the luminous twilight had sprung forth in the sky," (65). Upon leaving the country of the Diallob�, Samba Diallo lost this connection with nature. Based in Paris, he could not seek refuge in the land; the busy streets did little to content his heart. His first agitation spiritually begins while he is in France. One night, "he got up, undressed himself, and prepared for bed. Late in the night he realized that he had forgotten to make his evening prayer, and he had to disturb his rest to get up again and pray" (117). This is the first indication that Diallo has begun to lose his firm hold on his religion. Later in the book, after returning to the country of the Diallob�, Samba Diallo finds himself at a river, this time completely without the comfort of Islam. He still hears the river, but it is more of a memory of what the river used to say to him in the past. By then, Diallo had quit praying altogether. When the Fool, a mystical man given to thinking that Samba Diallo is the religious teacher who died, urges Diallo to pray, Diallo refuses. The Fool, caught up in a fervor, attacks Diallo with his weapon. In the final chapter, Diallo, presumably dying, finds himself in the presence of God. Throughout this chapter, the word "river" appears, underlining the importance of nature throughout the novel: "There is only that turgescence which rises up in me, as the new water does in the river in flood. The river is rising. I am its overflow. The moment is the bed of the river of my thought" (164-5). In the final words of the novel, this metaphor becomes apparent: "The sea! Here is the sea! Hail to you, rediscovered wisdom, my victory!" (165). With death, Diallo is able to get back to nature, back to his lost wisdom and religion. It is only in recapturing that which he lost by leaving his home country that he could obtain "victory." For all his studying in France, it did him little good since it served only to keep him away from God.
Not to be lost in the story of his death is the importance of the teacher. This teacher was truly a unifying force for the Diallob� people, one of the last vestiges left of pre-colonial times. At one point in the novel, the people of the Diallob� must decide whether they should send their children to the new school, where they will learn how to build houses but be spiritually bereft. The teacher urges against this; having taught generations of the Diallob� what it meant to be Muslim, he felt that this would uproot the one thing holding the Diallob� together. For a while, the teacher "felt that [he] was the only obstacle to this country's happiness" (115). He did indeed play an important role. Upon his death and the ascension of a fellow pupil of Samba Diallo, a man by the name of Demba, everything began to go amiss. The chief of the Diallob� writes to Samba Diallo: "Today everything fled and crumbled around my immobility," (114). With the decision of the community to send their children to the new school, spiritual confusion results. This is especially apparent with Samba Diallo himself, the first to go the new school and the first to admit to "a more personal and more profound disquietude" (152). For this reason, he is called home, where he finds things amiss: the most loyal apostle to the teacher is the Fool, and the Fool thinks that Samba Diallo is the new teacher rather than Demba. Diallo is far from being a harbinger of God's Word; indeed, he thinks to himself, "I do not believe - I do not believe very much any more" (161). These things which are amiss, coupled with Diallo's own loss of faith, eventually leads to his murder.
By the time Diallo is murdered, he has become an ambiguous part of society. Had he not gone to the new school, he probably would have been the one chosen to succeed the teacher instead of Demba. As it is, he has estranged himself from his family by his renunciation of God and from his land by forgetting its beauty: "I am like a broken balafong, like a musical instrument that has gone dead," he says at one point. "I have the impression that nothing touches me anymore" (139). But it was not always that way. Prior to leaving the country of the Diallob�, Samba Diallo had found himself content to be his teacher's pupil, his father's son. He shared many things in common with his father, not the least of which was a hungry knowledge for the Word. To Samba Diallo, his father was a stalwart champion of Islam: "'Even while he thinks, he has the air of one praying,'" Samba Diallo said to himself. 'Perhaps he is really praying? God has indeed entered into his entire being'" (89). Diallo cannot help but see his father through the prism of the Muslim faith. In this scene, it is the essence of what ties them together. When Diallo recites the Koran for his family, he was repeating for his father what the knight himself had repeated for his own father, what from generation to generation through centuries the sons of the Diallobe had repeated for their fathers, from knowing that he had not failed in this respect and that he was about to prove to all who were listening that the Diallobe would not die in him." (66)
Unfortunately, by the end of the book, part of the spirit of the Diallob� has died in him. This was not unforeseen; when the Most Royal Lady, Samba Diallo's cousin, had decided that he should attend the new school and thus speed up the process of modernization, she announced to the community that "the school in which I would place our children will kill in them what today we love and rightly reserve with care" (42). She made this decision only after many debates with the Chief of the village and the teacher. "We must ask them: we must go to learn from them the art of conquering without being in the right," she argued (33). Diallo remembers his goal, but by the end of his studies can only attest that "their victory over us is - an accident" (142).
Along the way, Diallo loses his connections to the home of his youth. It began early on, when he first goes to France to study. After reading a letter from the Chief describing his hardships in dealing with modernization, Diallo thought, "What have their problems to do with me? I have the right to do as this old man has done: to withdraw from the arena of their confused desires, their weaknesses, their flesh, to retire within myself. After all, I am only myself. I have only me" (117). By that time, he had repudiated his people and was blinded to all but their negative attributes, their "confused desires" and their "weaknesses." He saw neither the benefits of his youth nor the integrity of his people. More importantly, he does not identity himself with this group: "I have only me." As his studies wear on, he realizes that this is not the case: "I am not a distinct country of the Diallob� facing a distinct Occident, and appreciating with a cool head what I must take from it and what I must leave with it by way of counterbalance. I have become the two" (140). The Most Royal Lady's experiment did not work, and the teacher for all he had done to instill God in his pupil had failed. Two of the most influential members of the Diallob� could not keep Samba Diallo from transforming into this hybrid of cultures. Their greatest hope for the future, the son of the Chiefs, no longer fit into their culture. The people then were also left in ambiguity as their fate was tangled up in Samba Diallo's. He was supposed to be their leader; instead, he died an unbeliever in their faith and an outsider to their way of thinking. The only understanding that presents itself to Diallo comes at the moment of his death, when he succumbs to God and the infinite. It seems as though Kane would have the reader believe that a victorious resolution for the Diallob� people will also only come with death.
In Ambigious Adventure, two stories are told. One is of a member of an African's chief's family who is sent to school abroad and loses his faith and his ties to his culture. The other is of the people of the African continent who are inundated by those from abroad and who, in the insuing confusion, lose their myriad of faiths and their ties to their varying cultures. Diallo's fate reflects the fate of the masses. "The country of the Diallob� was not the only one which had been awakened by a great clamor early one day. The entire black continent had had its moment of clamor" (44). And from that first clamor came Samba Diallo and his tortured journey to find in himself only an indistinct sense of what it meant to be his father's son, his teacher's pupil. From that first clamor, an entire continent of people have had to find and are still finding what it means to be an African, a Nigerian, an Igbo, or just - themselves.
Works Cited
Kane, Cheik Hamidou. Ambiguous Adventure. New York: Collier Books, 1963.
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