‘Grandfather, I know now what it is that washes the water. It is the spirit. The water is clear and pure, but the spirit is purer still.’ Essentially a story of triumph of the spirit over the brain or brawn, Sembene Ousmane’s ’’God’s bits of wood’’, translated from French to English by Francis Price is about the 1947-48 railway worker’s strike in the region of French West Africa (includes Senegal, Mauretania, Sudan, Niger, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Dahomey). It was the time after world war II when the colonized were finally exposed to more of the world and were understanding the western concepts of equality and freedom, evolving a system that was a hybrid of their own culture crossed with the colonial culture. They were breaking up the structure of oppression from the within. This is a story about fighting an enemy that is larger than life, unchallenged for generations and has built an empire with the instrument of fear. The writing itself is unique in its construction. Every chapter reads like a story in-itself and could have been released as a short story book but all of them have the common theme of the strike and the leaders of the union.
The writing itself in the fashion of script written for a film or a play, Ousmane describes the settings, the light, the costumes in perfect detail before he starts every chapter: “Hovels. A few rickety shacks, some upturned tombs, walls of bamboo or millet stalks, iron barbs, and rotting fences. Thies: a cast, uncertain plain where all the rot of the city had gathered – stakes and crossties, locomotive wheels, rusty shafts, knocked-in jerricans, old mattress springs, bruised and lacerated sheets of steel. And then a little farther on the goat path that leads to the Bambara Quarter…Thies: a place where everyone- man, woman and child – had a face the color of the earth.” - Thies ‘The City’ He sets the whole scene so that we can enjoy it visually with details such as the position of every object, the atmosphere in the air, which in turn gives us a feel of the scene thats coming up. He also goes into a short summary of what happened in the preceding chapter so that we can quickly recall it (similar to a sequel movie): “The battle between the women and the policemen in the courtyard of N’Diayene was of short duration. Overcome by sheer weight of numbers, the police beat a hasty retreat, and after they had gone the crowd that had gathered in the compound also began to disperse” - Dakar ‘Mame Sofi’ and then moves on to detail descriptions of the appearance of a character that is to be a principal player in that particular chapter: “ Niakoro was very old indeed. On either side of her little, high arched nose the drooping lids half covered her eyes. Her lips were tattooed – a souvenir of youthful vanity. The line of her mouth was drawn back in perpetual sucking motion, and her cheeks moved in and out to the rhythm of her breathing, so that she seemed always to be swallowing. Her head appeared linked to her body only by theads of flesh, and by the flabby dewlaps that drooped beneath her chin.” - Bamako ‘Ad’jibidi’ which sometimes involve a flashback that tells us more about the past of the character and then back to the original setting where the action is happening in present tense. Its no wonder the writer has taken to film making now. It seems like he was already writing film scripts when he wrote this book. Once we know the setting, the atmosphere, the characters and the preceding action leading up to the present the story proceeds. This kind of writing in a very visually appealing manner highlights the priority of the writer in terms of making the book not just a historical account of the 1948-49 strike but a look into the culture, the traditions and the people. A look at their customs as a result of a certain thinking of a certain history that is perhaps overlooked by many of the western writers when looking into a new culture. The why’s and how’s and no just the ‘whats’ of west African culture. In contrast to all this the characters of the colonialists seemed a bit shallow. Ousmane does go into the detail of their characters in a similar fashion but his description seems only on a surface level giving the ‘white men’ an maybe intentional one- dimensional caricature.
The constant reference to the “black man” as ‘children’ also has varied interpretations but is spoken in a more negative fashion. Finally the story sketches out the role of women, union workers and Africans in general in the struggle to stand up for their rights and then eventually obtaining them while not belittling the suffering that the path brings about. Bakayoko, the spirit of the strike (and the book) who eventually is victorious in the mission, is constantly aware of the sacrifices and suffering and the question of ultimate justification for the path faces us constantly. The final turn however is Fa Keita’s speech and Maimouna’s song which reminds us of Gandhi’s method of non-violence that brought freedom from colonizers in more than half of the colonized world. It is an indication of the independence that West Africa will eventually have using the path of non-violence. “ From one sun to another The combat lasted, And fighting together, blood covered, They transfixed their enemies. But happy is the man who does battle without hatred.”