We have risen, we’re on the rise, we are here:

Interview with Mame Bougouma Diene

23.07.2023  

 Marta Mboka Tveit taks to speculative writer and 2023 Caine-prize co-winner Mame Bougouma Diene.

MBD: Pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. This was really not expected.

Thus sounded the reaction of Franco-American-Senegalese Mame Bougouma Diene on being co-nominated for the Caine Prize for African Literature, which he later co-won, together with his partner Woppa Diallo. It was the story ‘A Soul of Small Places’, published by Tordotcom in 2022 and in the Africa Risen Anthology (edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight). The couple won a cash prize of £10,000, and had their work featured in the 2023 Caine prize anthology.

 I interviewed Mame via zoom from Pretoria, having just missed him and left SA myself. There he was, newly posted, un-unpacked, perched in a fold-out chair on a white-washed patio, a small child trying to climb onto his lap:

MBD: Oh, hey, honey, Hi! Hey, look at the screen! Say hi to Marta! I’m just going to… sorry can you hear me? I can hear you? Bandwidth is low, but we’ll just keep going and see if it works for a while.

We settle in for the interview, and after the usual technical difficulties, daily exercise for the muscle of patience that we all become so used to during Covid-19 shut-downs, he elaborates on the unexpected nomination:

MBD: I wrote the story a couple of years ago, just maybe a week after meeting my wife. Woppa founded an NGO when she was 15, and she started talking about gender-based violence in the parts of Senegal where she’s from, and the pervasiveness of it all when we visited this girls’ shelter outside Dakar. It inspired me to write A Soul of Small Places. I started that very night actually. Some of the descriptions in there are directly from what she was saying about her home, like how geography affects oppression and such. I told her look, I’m writing this thing and she was like oh let me tell you more about this statue, the statue is a real landmark in her village and when she told me about it, I changed it up a little, but that’s when everything clicked and it became a running thing through the narraive. It is something that is so prevalent in Senegalese society. It’s such a taboo. It’s not a traditional co-authoring, since Woppa didn’t write the story or contribute to the plot or choices etc, but it wouldn’t have been written this way if she hadn’t been so inspirational. That single-minded focus, grounded in a real place with real problems.

Diene is an established writer of African speculative fiction. A humanitarian worker specializing in policy analysis (by day) he is the US/Francophone spokesperson of the African Speculative Fiction society by night. Having worked in many countries, including Niger, Israel, Bangladesh, Mexico, France and the USA, he belongs to a network of African-rooted speculative creators that is highly mobile, cosmopolitan and multicultural. His travels and his work must feed into his work?

MBD: It’s always about the human angle. And there’s a lot of humanity. There’s a lot of humanity and a lot of emotion and a lot of conflict and contradiction when you work with people in humanitarian situations. A lot of my work has some level of, there’s a social element to it. It’s the job that I do, but it’s also been what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years. And maybe it’s a way of processing as well, the things that you come into contact with […] 

You know, I’m lucky. I’m born in New York. I grew up in Paris, this and this and that. But we’re always going back to Senegal to visit the family. And it was always pretty clear to me that, there was very little difference between me and my cousins. You know, it could have been either one of us whose father would have done one thing, you know, as opposed to the next. So, you know, my interest since I was a kid has always been to try to figure out a way to lend a helping hand.  And it’s not the same when you have someone from Senegal talking about these issues in Europe, [as] when you have someone who grew up in Europe and who can be that bridge, you know. 

 I tell people, and this is how I met my wife, actually, was the first conversation we had: look, if you want to be a good humanitarian, you’ve got to be 50% mother Teresa, 50% Vladimir Putin. […] If you want to be efficient in a humanitarian setting, the colder and more practical and just pragmatic you are about things.  You meet people who are in desperate situations, if you want to feel for them, and then you realize they’ve been lying to you the whole time you’ve met them, because they’re also playing the hand that they’re dealt.

Diene’s work has appeared in for instance  the Omenana magazine, AfroSF anthologies v2 and v3, Brittlepaper and on Tordotcom. Diene has also published an African horror collection called Dark moon rising on a starless night (2018). He developed an interest for science fiction at a young age, and early on in his career, he was ‘embraced’ by the (digitally-based) African speculative fiction community:

MBD: it’s been really wonderful. When I started writing, I had no idea there even was an African speculative fiction writing community. I remember telling an ex, watch, in the next few years I’m going to be the most famous African writer in speculative fiction. And then I found AfroSF1, and Tade Thompson’s stories, and all the others, and I’m just like, yeah, yeah, this might just take a minute.

[….] I found a very, very nurturing environment the moment I started submitting, and I was really not expecting that. So I didn’t feel isolated. I’m just interacting with everybody, you know, and getting a sense of how diverse the visions are for African speculative fiction. Omenana Magazine (Mazi Nwonwu and Diana IquoAbasi) and Ivor Hartmanm with Afro SFv2 gave me my first breaks, and a lot of other authors were very supportive and still are. Some less, it’s just how it is.

I was naively thinking I would be the first to do something when actually people had been struggling for years. It was the embrace. It was the embrace. So the fact that now the speculative fiction scene is blowing up, which is great.

Diene’s texts tend to have elements of horror, and he has a knack for making ‘the familiar strange’. My personal favourite is Hell Freezes Over, published in 2015 in AfroSFv2 edited by Ivor Hartmann. Diene wrote this story, he tells me, after his posting in Tel Aviv:  

MBD: A lot of people believe that Hell Freezes Over is set in Africa. It is not. It is set in Iran. It is set on the plateau by the Damavand. [The characters] all have Jewish first names and Iranian surnames. I thought: hey, what is the most unlikely thing that could happen if circumstances force them to?  But no one picked up on that because I have an African name.

The story contains some of his most fleshed-out world-building; a society with its own social rules, religion, mythology, and histories. He paints a dystopian climate-changed “drowned world” scenario, where most of our current civilization lies under the ocean, with an eerie and otherworldly ambiance. On climate futures:

MBD: I’m a sceptic, not the fact of climate change, but in the fact that we’re actually really seriously going to do anything about this.

If you have to put food on your table to feed your family, the world is going to freeze over in some, you know, incalculable future is probably not going to take precedence over what you need to do. There’s one billion more people now than there were 10 years ago. In less than 10 years ago, there’s going to be another billion more. We’re going to consume a lot more stuff. I see people wanting more McDonald’s and more and more SUVs, not less. […] The world is going to be fine. We’re just not going to be here to see it.

This planet has been here before. It’ll be here after. What we’re trying to save is ourselves. And I do think that the problem is with the narrative, because as long as we talk about saving the planet, we’re expressing the exact same hubris that allow us to believe that we could control the planet and remodel it into our image. Because now we think that we can save it. There’s nothing for us to save except for ourselves.

MT:  Yeah, I like that you said hubris there. In [the story] Hell Freezes Over they also have this idea that we’ve done too much, gone too far, and are being punished by something divine Do you have any thoughts?

MBD: Yeah. I mean, with hell or high water, I was trying clumsily to define a society that would have split itself into castes out of necessity. I mean, it’s what we do as humans as well, right? We divide ourselves. But, you know, like caste systems that are that oppressive, they’re really, you know, it’s a forced adaptation. […] I was still in a pseudo-religious kind of place, right? I’m not religious personally myself, but I’m pretty sure that, you know, that’s one thing aspect of humanity that we’re never going to outgrow. It’s always going to be, there’s always going to be some elements of the mystical that make its way through.

In the story, a group of survivors, known as ‘The Colony,’ has sought refuge in what was once a mountain range and established new lives there. The Colony is structured into distinct Castes, each with its own roles, societal functions, status, and traditions, all associated with specific animals: the Bees (involved in agriculture), Beasts (laborers), Moles (miners), Ants (engineers), and Fish (maritime scavengers).

The story strikes me as highly relevant in light of what is currently unfolding on the Gaza-strip. In the story, a long history of atrocities defines the relationship between Moles and the Fish, and it is this infighting between the castes that leads to the colony’s downfall. In the first part of the story we follow a teenage-boy, Ari, caught up in the hateful politicking and scheming. The result of the never-ending bloody and revenge-driven feud, is that innocents like Ari are born into a life of suffering ending in early death.  Diene skilfully portrays the fallouts of a histories of violence.

MBD: You know, when horrible things have happened, people have found a way to adjust, and then the major catastrophe is actually going to happen. So what was interesting to me was, you know, what kind of societal changes could you expect? What  two people would get together just because necessity now drives a new relation.

Diene has a whole series of stories set in a future state called the Caliphate, seemingly in North-West-Africa. The Caliphate is part of a Chinese economic Empire, yet it is caught between warring Chinas, China Corp and Han Industries. In one story The Satellite Charmer The Caliphate is torn to shreds after having allowed ChinaCorp to practice Satellite Beam mining. The local population struggle in the ruins of extractivism, while elites and external powers benefit. As becomes evident, only a few tweeks lie between some African present-day realities and Diene’s dystopic future caliphate. How does Diene himself classify the kind of work he is doing?

MT: Lastly, what are your thoughts on these labels that are going around? Because there is Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Afropantheology, African speculative fiction. What’s your relationship and thoughts on labels?

MBD: I appreciate the academic effort to try to find out like a common thread between various expressions of resistance and expressions in art. But, you know, I find this rush to needing a label a little off-putting. I think the problem with those terms is that they try to focus on a person’s identity as opposed to the quality of the person’s work.

We don’t have to go back into the whole historicity behind the term Afrofuturism, how it’s trying to repackage under a label things that are completely disparate and happened 50 years before the guy [Mark Dery] even decided to look into them. The irony is one of my column at Strange Horizons is the myriad drumbeats of Afrofuturism.  I was thinking, oh, what about, you know, Afro-Brazilian speculative fiction? Because every time we talk about Afrofuturism, we’re talking about English speaking people. I was meeting a Guinean author, Hamidou Ba, who writes supernatural crime thrillers and also acts, in Dakar and he was just like, “oh, that’s a word? Really? Never heard of it before.” Because francophone, not at all on the scene. And so my interest initially was asking Brazilian authors, what do you think about the term? And how is it useful to you? And just get a sense of how racial dynamics work in Brazil, which are very different from the way they work in the United States, which are very different from the way they work in the Caribbean, closer to the way they work in the Caribbean. And so that was just meant to be ironic. You know: “the myriad drumbeats of Afrofuturism”. I don’t really think the term is worth much, but let me see what other people want. And now it’s become a column. So it’s become an irony within an irony.

I would also want to have a term that isn’t just about being black. Because that’s what it is.  They are not really trying to embrace a continent. They’re just trying to narrow this down to, you know, a like, western racialized version of things, and we’re trying so hard to move past that. It’s a little regressive in mind.

Africanfuturism, obviously, speaks more to the continents than Africa, than Afro Futurism. And for a good reason, those are two completely different, you know, fulcrums. But there too, as it is defined for sub-sharans, it’s also reductive and stuck in time. Africa is also a modern continent, and it has to face it’s contradictions, so reducing it to ethnicity is a little silly. I remember a friend saying: no one is black in Africa, it’s an external imposition the racialization. Ethnicities sure, but, it feels like we’re headless chickens a little. I would just rather people would just write horror [or the likes], you’re writing horror, you know, just because there’s a baobab, does it make it some kind of miraculous thing? And I just wonder why, if there’s already one label, why do you need to create another one? I mean, what’s going to happen next? What is the next” Afro-”, “Blacko-“ thing that is going to get thrown in our face? And we are going to have to go along with it because it is, I mean, it perpetuates so many things, you know what I mean? External people categorizing African Blacks, particularly into the bubble of slavery athlete, this guy, you know, and it’s just a continuation of that.

And, yeah, maybe it’s a good leg up for some people. It definitely provides a space to identify authors that you might have skipped otherwise, because there is that bubble. But, you know, at some point or another, I do feel like there’s some blowing up that needs to be done. Don’t try to keep labelling yourself and just restricting your own creativity. You know, feel free to write anything you want about whoever you want. The writing comes first you know what I mean?

It’s just outside of the African continent, and even on the African continents in many ways, no one is trying to promote an artistic approach to our lives, right? Our lives are still very much seen through the humanitarian prism and it’s very, very convenient. What’s really, really good is that at least now the stories originate from the continent. It’s really good that now we have risen, we’re on the rise, we are here. So you know, shake the shackles, that kind of thing.