Tobias Warner became professor of French and Comparative Literature at UC Davis in 2012 after completing his PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley under the mentorship of Professor Karl Britto. At Davis he regularly teaches and advises students about African literatures as the faculty member responsible for francophone literatures and cultures from outside of France. His research focuses on modern African literature, with a special interest in Senegal, and the globalization of literary cultures. He is the author of The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal, published by Fordham University Press in 2019.
Warner’s passion for Senegal began during an exchange program in Dakar, where he began learning Wolof to navigate the urban space. At UC Berkeley he benefited from the Center for African Studies and its support for the teaching of African languages at Berkeley, which allowed him to advance his studies in Wolof as a graduate student. Unfortunately, funding for Wolof disappeared when the center temporarily lost its federal grant, but Warner describes his time at Berkeley as a “golden age” for studying Senegal due to the various lecturers able to teach African languages—particularly the late Paap Sow who taught Wolof. Additionally, several other graduate students were also interested in studying Senegal alongside Warner at the time. Many of these graduate students have gone on to become esteemed scholars as well, such as Rosalind Fredericks (PhD, Geography), Jonathon Repinecz (PhD, French), Cullen Goldblatt (PhD, Comparative Literature), Sarah Zimmerman (PhD, History), Duana Fullwiley (PhD, Medical Anthropology), and Ivy Mills (PhD, African Diaspora Studies). Professor Fatoumata Seck (PhD, French), coming from Stanford, also joined as a graduate student in the study of Senegal with this cohort.
“I was really lucky to have a number of other students who were also interested in Senegal and also learning Wolof, as well as a wonderful teacher in Paap Sow,” says Warner. “It really didn’t hit me actually until I had graduated from the program just how lucky I was that that infrastructure had existed, because it really doesn’t [exist] at a lot of universities, particularly around African languages.”
With financial support from the Comparative Literature department and the Center for African Studies in the form of a FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) fellowship and two Rocca fellowships, Warner managed to travel consistently to Dakar during most summers for language study and research. As a professor at UC Davis, Warner was able to support the continuation of Wolof instruction for a period of time through a Mellon grant he received.
At UC Davis, Warner regularly supports students interested in working on Senegal, the Caribbean, and North Africa. “Studying African literature is inherently comparatist,” he notes. With his own research, Warner has published articles and book chapters on authors ranging from Léopold Sédar Senghor to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. One figure who frequently appears in his scholarly work is the acclaimed Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ (1929-1981). In an essay published in 2016, “How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature,” Warner examines the role of translation and its effect on the global reception of Bâ’s prize-winning novel Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), which has been translated into more than twenty languages and is widely considered a feminist classic of African literature. The novel, which relates the devastating experience of a Muslim woman mourning her late husband alongside his second wife, is often interpreted as a denunciation of polygamy in Senegal, with authorship serving as a self-fashioning mechanism by which to resist tradition. Warner provides an alternative, decolonizing reading of the novel that emphasizes instead the novel’s “critique of a modern effort to reform the legal framework of marriage in Senegal.”[1] And, rather than align Bâ’s feminism with the imperialist mission of “rescuing” African women from tradition, superstition, and custom, Warner shows how Bâ’s feminism in the novel may be viewed as an open-ended search for alternative forms of social value: “What could be an adequate, alternative source of value with which to transform society in the context of rapid urbanization, the extension of the market into countless new areas of social life, the persistence of caste privilege, patriarchy, and colonial structures of social inequality?”[2]
Warner describes the challenge of interpreting Bâ's literary work as twofold. “The most challenging thing about writing about Mariama Bâ is, on the one hand, that she has been written about so much already,” says Warner.
“The other thing that is tricky with Bâ is that in some ways the novels and the criticism stand in for her because she died so tragically soon after her first novel, just before her second novel Un chant écarlate (Scarlet Song) was published. It was quick relative to her becoming a novelist. She wrote a couple of speeches and did a few interviews, but wrestling with what to do with that [is challenging], because of how Une si longue lettre became absolutely foundational for African literatures, Global South feminisms, francophone literatures, all kinds of fields. It has been translated so much but it was also a text that was almost treated as if it exists in a capsule because she wasn’t publishing much else, we thought, so there was a sense that it was just this novel.”
No longer is Bâ’s literary contribution restricted to just this novel, or her other novel and juvenilia. More recently, Warner has rediscovered a poem that had been lost to history: “Festac…Souvenirs de Lagos” (“Festac…Memories of Lagos”). The poem was originally published in a Senegalese periodical in February 1977, two years before the publication of So Long a Letter.
Warner rediscovered the poem after the journal Small Axe invited him to respond to Annette Joseph-Gabriel’s book Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire, which examines overlooked texts in an effort to push beyond the limits of the archive. Adopting the same methodology, Warner set to work on rereading the understudied text Mariama Bâ; ou, Les allées d’un destin (Mariama Bâ; or, The Alleys of Destiny), a biography of Bâ written by her daughter Mame Coumba Ndiaye. Reading this text again, Warner was struck by a reference made to a trip to Lagos, Nigeria; Bâ was said to have attended the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977 to represent the magazine L’Ouest Africain (The West African), which was published by her husband Obèye Diop. Curious about whether Bâ had written something about this important Pan-African event that drew over sixteen thousand performers and attendees, Warner asked the Bibliothèque nationale de France for anything written by Bâ in 1977 about FESTAC. The national library returned his request with nothing, except for a piece written by a “Mariama Diop.” On receiving a photocopy of the piece six weeks later, Warner was astonished to find a photo of Bâ running alongside the published poem and confirming her authorship. “The poem does all this work in terms of connecting across the siloing of African literature by language. She’s having this really transformative experience at this Pan-African festival in Lagos and it seems like it’s that experience that is generating some of this temporary optimism that she brings to the first novel,” Warner remarks.
The poem also invites one to think about the relationship between the genres of poetry and prose within an author’s oeuvre when that author works with both forms. Warner had much to say on this topic and revealed more details about the text of the poem:
“I do think that there is something about this poem [where] you can see her working on some of the things that will later animate her prose, even in kind of a poetic form. To be clear, I’m calling it a poem, but the line above it when it ran in the newspaper is ‘témoignage’ (testimony, witnessing), but it’s kind of a list poem and she has this preference for apostrophe—for speaking to a public that is both there and not there yet, which is really striking and which is the thing that drew me to Une si longue lettre. I think you see her trying that out in the poem in a way that is really extraordinary. She goes through the descriptions and then she begins speaking to an audience—it’s the classic apostrophe, and the novel is full of that. The novel is written to her friend, but there are all these moments where the address switches and she’s speaking to some larger, indeterminate public, and really playing with distinctions of a semi-private form of the letter and almost speechifying in these moments. Weirdly, I think it helps to see the poetic or rhetorical core of the later prose works. It helps me to understand something about So Long a Letter that always struck me but that I never really thought about as a poetic moment.”
Those interested in reading the poem along with Warner’s introduction may find it published in the Documents series of the journal PMLA. PMLA also published earlier this year a special Theories and Methodologies section on Bâ’s “Memories of Lagos” with essays by Tsitsi Jaji, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Stéphane Robolin, Grace A. Musila, Merve Fejzula, Ainehi Edoro-Glines, and Akua Banful. The cluster also includes Warner’s introduction; an interview with Mame Coumba Ndiaye (Mariama Bâ’s daughter and biographer, also available in French); and an essay Warner wrote on the broader and still unknown archive of writings that Bâ published before So Long a Letter.