The Dark Child by Camara Laye

First published:L’Enfant noir, 1953 (English translation, 1954)

Type of work: Autobiographical Bildungsroman

Time of work: The mid-1930’s to the mid-1940’s

Locale: Kouroussa, a village in French Guinea, and Conakry, the capital of Guinea

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a youth of the Malinke people, growing up in Upper Guinea
• His Father, a skilled village goldsmith
• His Mother, a woman endowed with magical gifts

The Novel

The Dark Child tells the story of the author’s youth. Yet, the style, structure, and purpose of the book cause it to be classified as a novel as well as an autobiography; Camara Laye has molded his materials in such a way that it is not he, himself, who emerges from the book but rather a representative man. In this way, The Dark Child is similar to other “shaped” autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), and even D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913).

Laye’s account is structured through a dozen chapters, each evoking a particularly meaningful and poignant memory. The first chapters show Laye as a small child, playing about his father’s hut, where he observes his father caressing and talking to a small snake. His mother tells him that this snake is the guiding spirit of his father’s people; it gives his father knowledge and the special skills which make him a highly praised, prosperous goldsmith. His father tries to share this same knowledge with the child, but both father and son sense that the transference will never occur, that the son’s destiny lies elsewhere.

Another part of Laye’s heritage is related in the next two chapters, as the child visits his maternal relatives in the village of Tindican. Here, he participates in the rice harvest. The narrator captures the many rituals associated with the harvest as thoroughly as he detailed the ritualistic aspects of his father’s trade. Above all, he recalls the joy of the participants in these rituals. Laye’s artistry works to create a sense of foreshadowing here, as, amid joy there are notes of sorrow or potential sorrow. Laye’s village, Kouroussa, is much larger than Tindican. Thus, in Tindican, he is regarded as a “town boy.” He is dressed differently and is not permitted to perform labor. Though everyone is kind and loving, he is different, set apart. This difference and his slight uneasiness about it foreshadow the greater alienation he is preparing to undergo as the book ends.

As the boy grows older, he attends schools, Muslim and then French. Although he values his religious and intellectual education, he details more fully the particularly African education he receives through undergoing rites of manhood, including circumcision. Through this ritual, he and his friends become reborn as men. Laye describes the many rituals surrounding this event and makes clear the powerful bonding that results. He views the experience not simply as a chance to show courage or gain the prerogatives of adulthood; rather, the experience is valued because it makes him truly at one with his people. For the expatriate, this aspect of the memory is most powerful.

To further his education, Laye now travels to Guinea’s capital, the coastal city of Conakry, four hundred miles from home. Equipped with magic elixirs and talismans, he makes the journey successfully, settles in with relatives, and eventually falls into a childlike love affair with a girl named Marie. After a few false starts at school, he is graduated at the top of his class and is given an opportunity to study in France. He accepts, then faces the painful task of telling his parents. His father and finally his mother agree to his going, and the novel ends as he sits on the airplane with a map of Paris in his hand, grieving but looking forward.

The Characters

The central character is Laye, himself. He portrays himself as a happy child, fitting perfectly into a coherent and benevolent culture in which each individual has an identity and a role. As he grows into young manhood, though, he finds himself pained by his need to leave the village and travel farther away in order to fulfill himself intellectually. He seems to know early that this separation is his fate, so he experiences nostalgia for his home long before leaving it.

Other than this feeling of loss (or perhaps because of it), Laye portrays himself as happy and content. When he has problems with school, his father solves them. When he loses a friend to death, he is comforted by thoughts of religion. It is important to the central idea of the story that this character should be happy; he is the product of a culture which is being idealized.

Laye’s father and mother represent two aspects of the African culture which Laye idealizes. The book begins with a poem of dedication to his mother, a prayer that she will know how much he loves and values her. It is she with whom he has an emotional relationship: She represents a more passionate, mystical side of life, and it is significant that her family are farmers, closely attuned to life through their rituals. Also, his mother is a healer with magical gifts. Laye, in his Westernized narrator’s voice, seeks to explain the miracles she performs but cannot.

The family’s respect for the mother is nearly absolute. Laye notes that people often believe mistakenly that the African woman’s role is subordinate; such stereotypes, he says, are far from the truth. His mother runs the house and, partly through custom and partly through their great mutual affection, controls much of her son’s life—chasing off friends she deems unsavory and checking his room to see that he is not sneaking in girls. Because of her strident nature, some critics have viewed her as a negative character. The narrator makes it clear, however, that her role is appropriate. It is she who links him to the part of the past for which he yearns, unconditional acceptance and love.

His mother has both magical power and the power of love over her son, yet she is doomed to fail when the issue that matters most emerges; despite her pleas, her son leaves for school in France. In recognition and love, his initial poem calls out to her and to that part of Africa which she represents:

Black woman, woman of Africa, O my mother, let methank you; thank you for all that you have done forme, your son, who, though so far away, is still closeto you!

Laye’s father represents a different side of experience. He seems to know early that his son will not follow his trade. He teaches and protects his son, guiding him closely in the ritualistic attainments of manhood. The attitudes learned in these rituals—courage, self-control, and respect for community—become the valued traits of the soon-to-be expatriate.

Critical Context

The popularity of The Dark Child established Camara Laye, among Westerners at least, as a notable African voice. His fellow African writers, however, were not always united in praise of the book. The Dark Child portrays a childhood lived under a colonial government. To many critics, his idealistic portrait of a childhood under colonialism was comparable to an American black writing, in 1865, of the joys of his childhood in slavery. Negritude, African consciousness, was the key theme of the day, and Laye did not conform to its attitudes. Laye has commented that there were few whites where he lived; he simply did not feel the oppressions of colonialism as others did. Therefore, conflict in The Dark Child is not between the French and the Guinean, but between two sides of the self. The side of Laye which was destined to leave Africa always seems to dominate. Nostalgia and loss then, not anger, inform his style (though anger was more fashionable).

When Guinea gained its independence in 1958, Laye returned to fill political roles. After seven years, however, he left Guinea for the political reasons detailed in his second autobiographical novel, Dramouss (1966; A Dream of Africa, 1968). His bitterness and lack of distance made this novel a failure as a work of art. His last work, Le Maitre de la parole (1978; The Guardian of the Word, 1984), is more successful. In it, Laye again addresses African history—specifically, where the present Africans might find the seeds of redemption. It appears that Laye’s great strength was his powerful recounting of the virtues of the past. With The Dark Child, he has left a wealth of knowledge and wisdom as well as a moving work of art.

Bibliography

King, Adele. The Writings of Camara Laye, 1981.

Lee, Sonia. Camara Laye, 1984.

Moore, Gerald. “Camara Laye: Nostalgia and Idealism,” in Seven African Writers, 1962.

Olney, James. “Ces pays lointains,” in Tell Me Africa: An Approach to African Literature, 1973.

Palmer, Eustace. “Camara Laye,” in An Introduction to the African Novel, 1972.