chad

told by starlight in chad

by joseph brahim seid

Excited to have broken in the double figures with this slim book of short stories by Joseph Bahim Seid, who was born in N’Djamena, Chad. He received his education in French colonial schools in N’Djemena and Brazzaville, Congo, and went to secondary school in Cairo, Egypt. Seid’s distinguished claim to fame was being the first ever university graduate from Chad, when he graduated with a BA in Law from Lyons, France.

Chad was one of the countries that challenged my goal to pick books by contemporary female writers. So few were available, and even fewer in translation. TOLD BY STARLIGHT IN CHAD was translated from the French by a Dutch translator, Karen Haire Hoenig, (there’s a lovely story about this translation below*) and has at it’s heart an intention that did resonate with one of my objectives in taking on this challenge: to represent Africa in a positive light, and disrupt the tales of war, famine, and destruction that inform so much of the Western world’s perception of the African continent.

The stories in this book are allegorical. Each has a moral imperative and wants to make a point about life, the choices we make, and the consequence of those choices. When I first started reading, I thought often of the oral tradition of storytelling, and I suppose the clue is in the title. TOLD BY STARLIGHT IN CHAD evokes wide-open spaces, the smell of wood smoke and cooling earth after a hot day, the distant call of an owl, the secure company of family beneath the full sweep of the milky way. It was as if I had found the folded notes of a scribe who’d sat around the campfire listening to an elder pass his ancient tales onto the next generation.

Chad is named after Lake Chad, the freshwater lake located in the Sahelian zone of west-central Africa. Chad occupies this middle ground between southern sub-saharan Africa and the northern, more Arabic territories. The stories in Seid’s book present the country as having roots that are strong and ancient, and push deep into Africa’s past and the historical kingdoms and caliphates that emerged and diminished and emerged again in the Chad basin through millennia.

Seid was born in 1927 and the stories do feel a bit dated. Men are always the hero while women are either wise old griots (West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, or musician,) or pretty inoffensive young things. In one story we read about, “a woman as devout as she was beautiful,” in another, “a virtuous and trusted little girl, a good friend to all… especially beautiful,” in a third, a sultan has a daughter, “of incomparable beauty. As gentle and delicate as a flower in the season of the rains, she was the talk of the entire country.”

But it is a quick read that, although not especially well written, did make me feel like I was tapping into something beautiful and ancient. The kind of stories that emerge when we are quiet beneath the stars, and listening.

*Karen Haire Hoenig’s translation story: “I dedicate this translation to my father, John Norman Haire, who laid the foundation early with his infectious love for language and fascination with words. He became acquainted with the creative works of Joseph Brahim Seid during a stint of lecturing at the University of N’Djamena in 1979, and in fact had almost finished translating Au Tchad sous les étoiles. After his passing in 1995 we were unable to find the manuscript of his translation, but we do remember his appropriate title, Told by Starlight in Chad.”