“And She Fell into the Sea”: (De)Formations of Land, Liquid and Sexuality in “Les Mamelles” by Birago Diop

• In Event: African Sexualities and Textual Practice

Description for Program

In Birago Diop’s telling of the Wolof tale “Les Mamelles,” Khary-Khougué throws herself into the sea after being cursed with not one, but two hunches on her back. While most of Khary’s body disappears below the surface of the water, the sea refuses to swallow up her bumps, leading to the creation of Les Mamelles, the two mountains which now grace the relatively flat surface Dakar, Senegal (Diop 40-41). In their many metamorphoses, Khary-Kougué’s bumps resist categorization —they are both human and inhuman, described as “breasts” as well as “babies,” and imagined to be full of, at different moments, milk, children, and useless flesh. Bumps are both hated and desired, trivialized and valued, too big and too small. In her decolonial feminist psychiatric work, Dr. Ismahan Soukeyna Diop reads feminine deformity in this tale as a social prescription for African women’s “patience” : where Koumba, Khary’s co-wife, is rewarded for her good humor with the removal of her bump, Khary’s envious, taciturn nature is punished with the transfer of Koumba’s bump onto her already hunched back (49). This paper builds on Dr. Diop’s insights from a literary studies perspective, considering Khary’s (de)formations as creative acts of rebellion wherein women seem to fertilize one another, and a man’s reclaiming of “feminine” mounds might reject the very terms of colonial emasculation. This paper considers the significance of overdetermined symbols of lands and liquids in the creative projects of Khary —whose “deformity” literally forms mountains— and Birago, whose rediscovery of this Wolof tale enables, I will argue, a decolonial resistance through the de-forming and queering of colonial constructions of gender, sexuality, race and (dis)ability.

Author

• Elara Sherman, Emory University