Ken Bugul

Ken Bugul. the protagonist and pseudonym of Mariétou M'Baye, a Senegalese author born in 1947, chronicles her coming of age in the late 1960s and 1970s with flashbacks to her youth at a French school in Dakar and her early childhood in a small Senegalese village. Her somewhat fictionalized chronicle begins with her journey to Brussels, where she has won a scholarship to study: "The North of dreams, the North of illusions, the North of allusions. The frame of reference North, the Promised Land North."

But the book is framed within that childhood village and the family compound shaded by a baobab sprouted from a seed children left behind. A baobab, a compound, and a village eventually abandoned.

Indeed the overarching theme of the book is abandonment -- an abandoned child, an abandoned childhood, an abandoned culture and religion superseded by colonial values, even the abandoned idea of a new kind of life. Ken's sense of displacement is heightened by the drug use and sexual freedom of the era's counter-culture. While the book is revelatory and important, it is often agonizing to read. Not for the faint of heart.… (mere)

Senegal. Without at all intending to diminish the importance of post-colonialism as a destroyer of group and individual identity in this disconnected, often anguished memoir, there appears to be more going on than that. Whether her account is accurate or heightened for literary purposes, Bugul would seem to have a personality disorder as well as cultural disruption and dissonance. Certainly both forms of alienation and fragmented identity could co-occur and heighten each other. Her behavior and emotions are so extreme and self-harmful that, rather than being wrenched by the conflicts of post-colonial existence, the reader may simply see Bugul as dangerous to be close to.

Bugul uses symbolism and returns to pivotal events that are reductive and serve more as emblems than explanations. The style is poetic but the descriptions and assertions are often ultimately incoherent. As an artifact of drug abuse and emotional splintering, it's vivid. Ultimately, though, African writers such as [a:Alain Mabanckou|70642|Alain Mabanckou|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1283691655p2/70642.jpg], [a:Abdourahman A. Waberi|56973|Abdourahman A. Waberi|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg], and [a:Donato Ndongo|1124325|Donato Ndongo|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-M-50x66.jpg] express themselves more effectively in similar styles. Granted, Mabanckou and Waberi are also sardonic and poke fun at themselves, so there is an ironic distance. Bugul's anger and apparent disorientation may not provide sufficient separation from the subject for her to craft an effective narrative.… (mere)