The Francophone Mirror

I was raised in two spellings of the same hunger.

In Dakar, my schoolteacher, Madame Sow, corrected my Wolof-inflected French with a ruler that never quite hit. "Parlez correctement," she said, lovingly. At home, my father, who sold fabrics at Sandaga, spoke a French so creatively Senegalese that no Parisian would claim it — and we did not want them to.

In Toronto at nineteen, I introduced myself in English and felt my tongue get tired halfway through the sentence. English wanted my jokes to be shorter.

This essay collection interrogates:

• The Francophone Prize Circuit: why "African writing" still means "translated" to some juries.
• Writing Between: drafts that begin in French and end in English when the emotion gets too precise for either.
• Mame Diarra’s Proverbs: what is lost when "Ndank ndank mooy japp golo ci ñaay" becomes "Slowly the trap catches the monkey."
• The Mirror Test: reading my own French back in English and not recognising my laugh.

"Bilingualism is not double," I write in Chapter 4. "It is a single, larger house with two kitchens. You still only have one hunger."

With practical notes for emerging writers: exercises for code-meshing without exoticising, and a reading list from Mariama Bâ to Ken Bugul to Scholastique Mukasonga.