Florence Ladd evokes three turbulent decades in Africa

By Bunmi Fatoye-Matory

Special to the Gazette

Florence Ladd, director of Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute, is also the author of a new novel, Sarah's Psalm. Under the guide of a patient and gentle muse, she wrote the novel in a little French village in Burgundy, where she said she enjoyed the necessary solitude and the "respect the French extend to intellectual life." The result is a masterpiece of elegant prose, a story tenderly crafted, to be read and re-read, just for the sheer pleasure.

Self-Discovery

"I will cast mine eyes upon the ocean from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from Senegal, which is heaven and earth" goes the lifelong psalm of Sarah, an African-American graduate student of comparative literature at Harvard University. It is a dream and a prayer and it would become the destiny of this brilliant young woman who forsakes a secure professional and family life to pursue the risky, the unknown. Born into an affluent Washington, D.C., family, Sarah grows up a very independent girl, with a passion to visit Senegal. As a child, her imagination is fired by a sailor uncle who talks about her twin image in the West African country. Later, as a graduate student, she sees a film of Ibrahim Mangane, a Senegalese writer and filmmaker, and decides to write her dissertation on his work.

She marries Lincoln Thompson, another Washingtonian from a similar bourgeois background, and a graduate student at M.I.T. When their passions and intellectual commitments flow in different directions, the marriage becomes fractured. She will follow the call to go to Senegal and he will be at the forefront of the civil rights struggle in America. To the dismay of her parents and husband, Sarah leaves for Senegal to study her subject, Ibrahim Mangane. It becomes a journey that will reshape the rest of her life. Her intellectual interest in Mangane soon evolves into an emotional entanglement. After the seemingly insurmountable problems of their both being married, of living oceans apart, and of coming from two very different cultures, their love metamorphoses into a marriage that would be a symbol of the hope, unity, and achievement of African peoples. It would also be a symbol of the problems and conflicts that assail them, gender, cultural, political, and racial.

Romance

Florence Ladd's first novel is a riveting romantic tale about the brightest and best of black societies across the seas. Cosmopolitan characters inhabit the pages with pride and vulnerability, not the kind of characters featured in the popular media or Hollywood movies. Their concern for the progress and dignity of black people is expressed through political action, artistic endeavors, and scholarly contribution.

The description of their food and clothing, homes and art collections, travels, celebrations, relationships, and family networks give the story a profound universal appeal. It is about how people live when racism does not impinge on everyday life, the organization of life as a series of conscious choices made from a whole array of possibilities, life as it is really lived in black Africa. In vivid prose, Ladd presents a wonderful feast of sights and sounds, whether describing women's colorful fruit arrangements in a Senegalese market, their boubous billowing through the streets of Dakar, or the sonorous voice of a singer at a wedding ceremony.

For example, she writes of the wedding, "They came bearing gifts of grain, calabashes, and cloth. . . The night before the ceremonies, the compound had been surrounded by celebrants who danced to the music of bafalons, tambourines, rattles and drums. Now the fatty smoke of roasting mutton swirled in the morning air, and expectations of the festive day were mounting... The eldest griot, a countertenor, sang a lengthy meditative memoir about Ibrahim's genealogy... A griotte -- a venerable holy woman -- began chanting and dancing. Nearly all the women encircled her and danced to the edge of exhaustion."

Personal and Political Changes

Sarah's Psalm takes place amid momentous and historic political changes. It is a valuable chronicle of the sociopolitical history of African peoples in the past three decades. The themes of religious and cultural conflicts, women's work and place in the society, and the sacrifices women make to support men they love, at the expense of their own work, are all explored. The sometimes tense relationship between Africans and African-Americans, the color-struck attitude of certain black people, and the celebration and unity of peoples of African descent are portrayed poignantly and humorously. It is a new kind of tale, that of leaders of black societies, their lives, and their visions.

Fact to Fiction

In an interview recently in her office at the Bunting Institute, Ladd talked about the novel and the creative process. She spoke about her French muse in Burgundy. Writing in France, she says, has its advantages, one of which is living in two languages with a subsequent enhancement of one's verbal potential.

A psychologist by training, Ladd had intended initially to write psychological characterizations of women -- "what is known through research, media images, and psychology of African-American women." She started a factual profile of a woman; but soon decided that fiction might be more accessible to more women, and as fiction, the writing took on new energy, "a certain force I couldn't control entirely." It was the kind of fiction that has roots in both literature and reality. Her beautiful heroine Sarah is a composite of many women, but her literacy ancestor is Jadine in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby.

On the matter of polygyny explored in the novel, Ladd clearly understands its economic and cultural uses. However, as she explained, she was persuaded of its deleterious effects on women by Mariama Ba's biographical novel, So Long A Letter.

The Pan-Africanist message of the novel had its origin in former Senegalese President Leopold Senghor's "Negritude" political philosophy of the 1960s. As Ladd puts it, "A place in me is very concerned about the dignity of Africans and African-Americans, about the cultural wealth of the peoples of both continents, how they are enriched and enlarged when two individuals come together."

Ladd drew on her own travel experiences for the vivid descriptions of foreign places. She has traveled and lived in Europe and many African countries. Among her future projects is a travelogue.