Beyond the Door of No Return (2023) by David Diop

 

Book Review

Beyond the Door of No Return (2023)

by David Diop

  I really enjoyed French novelist David Diop's first book, At Night All Blood is Black.  It won the Students Prix Goncourt in France, the 2020 LA Times Fiction Book Prize and the 2021 International Booker Prize.  Also, I genuinely enjoyed it- a novel about the experience of an African volunteer in the French army during World War I.   His new book, about the experience of a French naturalist in early 19th century Senegal- then a quasi-French territory but a weak one with many local rulers- was nominated for the National Book Award for Translated Literature (they need to work shop the name of that award!) and I'm sure it will be nominated for the International Booker next year. 

  Diop's 19th century Franco-phone Africa is a nuanced portrayal- we are a century past Conrad and his Heart of Darkness, and Diop's Senegal reflects the more nuanced view of the colonial experience that has percolated through academia in recent decades.  This early in the 19th century, the slave trade was still going full tilt- the first French ban on slavery (within France) didn't come till 1818, and slavery was abolished in French territories in 1845.

  I sensed that the narrator- the French naturalist, isn't really the focus of the book, which consists of a kind of post-mortem revelation of his past to his daughter, years after the experiences described; rather it is Senegal and the rich historical tapestry of the early 19th century at the center of Beyond the Door of No Return.  Presumably, the title of the book refers to the actual Door of No Return in Benin, which is a monument to the experience of the enslaved as they leave Africa for the last time.

  I tore through the book- I just so enjoyed turning each page (figuratively speaking because I read the eBook copy from the Los Angeles Public Library), that I didn't want it to end. I wish it was 500 pages long!