Djinns is the first novel by Franco-Senegalese Seynabou Sonko. Singer, interpreter, this primo-novelist not quite thirty years old entered literature through music and song. There is a lot of poetry in his novel, but also an inventiveness, a freshness and above all the promise of beautiful things to come.
“Once out on the street, the streetlights in the square came on, and it reminded me of how much of a quitter the sun can be in autumn. It must have been five o’clock in the afternoon, it was dark and I drove. I drove without any destination. […] I rode out of the need to move, rode so as not to wait, rode so as not to cry, and cried all the same at an orange light which provoked in me a horrible indecision. There were no cars around but I pulled over, letting the rain mix with my tears, unable to determine if they bothered me or not. I turned my head from side to side and realized how far I had come. I was too far from home now, I was too wet from the rain, I was just mega lost. »
So speaks Penda, Senegalese born in Paris. Penda is the protagonist of Jinnsthe spellbinding first novel by the Franco-Senegalese Seynabou Sonko. Double of the author in the novel, Penda, you have to imagine her, wearing her dreadlocks, slaloming on her skateboard launched at breakneck speed through the streets of Paris. ” Mega lost in his head, Penda slaloms to find himself, perhaps also to free himself from the diktats of the jinn who inhabits him.
THE jinn reminds Thousand and one Night. Penda is a modern Scheherazade. And the jinn, a kind of inner voice, which guides the teenager, sometimes distancing her from her instincts of revolt against the society which wants to lock her into her identity as a black woman, an immigrant, potentially ” wild child “. It is also a narrative process, as Seynabou Sonko explains. ” I don’t really know what a jinn is. It’s a motif that I use to develop several narrative arcs. So, there are several characters who are possessed by jinns. The first is therefore the narrator Penda who is inhabited by a white jinn. Around her gravitate other characters who, themselves, are inhabited by jinns, rather evil. It was also a way for me to make the characters more complex, to give them the density. »
souls in distress
It is haloed by the density of the din of their lives that the characters of Seynabou Sonko enter the scene. The novel opens with the internment at the Paris psychiatric hospital of Jimmy, eaten away by his addictions to cannabis and other narcotics. On hearing the news, Penda rushes to his bedside, because he is a childhood friend, whose dramas and decline she has closely followed. He is also his neighbor in the building at 10e district where she lives with her grandmother, Mami Pirate.
Be careful, Mami is not a grandmother like the others. Under her mask of an inoffensive old lady, this grandmother is a traditional healer, very famous, whom even the whites of the neighborhood come to consult to benefit from her gifts of clairvoyance. She is mostly a therapist and heals souls in distress, such as Jimmy. The latter, according to her, would not really suffer from psychiatric problems, as the doctors at the hospital where he is being treated for schizophrenia suggest, but he would rather be the victim of a particularly evil jinn. To unbewitch this neighbor whom she has taken a liking to, the healer needs theiboga, an African medicinal root with miraculous virtues, but banned in France. Mami then sends Penda to fetch the plant in the forest of Fontainebleau where she remembers having once secretly sown the seeds…
We must save Private Jimmy. This is the issue of Jinns. But as preposterous as the protagonist’s frantic race through the streets of Paris in search of the forbidden root may seem, from the pen of first-time novelist Seynabou Sonko, this quest becomes the basis for a dazzling fable about fortunes and woes of multiculturalism. The author brilliantly mixes here family stories, social stories, past and present, Senegal and France, to tell through the metaphor of the jinn the contradictions and the tensions of her characters. The novel takes place, summarizes Sonko, in ” an in-between. It tells of an impossibility to situate oneself on one side or the other, that is to say in France or in Senegal, which is the country of my parents. Me, I was born in France and I grew up in Paris. And the novel also tells that. I can’t belong to one country or another. So who are you? That’s kind of the question the novel asks. Who am I ? Where am I going ? The idea is to reconcile multiple identities and to deal with and accept because, in any case, through the eyes of the other, we will never be quite something. The idea is to make it a strength more than a tension. »
Between rage and despair
We will understand, Jinns is an initiatory story, evolving between rage and despair towards greater maturity and self-acceptance. ” I was always convinced that I was going to become a writer, without knowing when it would happen obviously, proclaims Sonko. Even though my first dream was to become a singer, but I couldn’t put together songs that corresponded to me 100%. In the novel, I allowed myself all that, there are constructions, arrangements, there is a story, there are characters, there are sounds. The novel seemed to me the most total way to fulfill my desire to create. » A « total » novel which is part of a vast corpus of postcolonial novels, depicting the malaise and the quest for self by a youth of immigrant origin. Exploring in turn the abysses and aporias of becoming in his adopted country, Seynabou Sonko renews the content and the form of the genre through an inventive narration and an eminently poetic writing.
Jinns impresses with his sense of rhythm, the musicality of his phrasing with hammered words like in a piece of rap. Coming to literature through music, its author continues to sing under the pseudonym of Naboo and to compose music, even if it is through writing that she found, as she likes to recall, her true identity. . Just like her narrator Penda on her skateboard, she slaloms over the blank page, driven by the sole ambition of ” go towards oneself ” And ” stay pirate “, the words of the end of the very beautiful novel by Seynabou Sonko.
► Jinns, by Seynabou Sonko. Grasset, 2023, 180 pages, 18.50 euros