The realization of Senghor’s vision of cultural citizenship entailed the creation of a mandarin literary class, similar to France’s. By definition, such a group would dominate the imagining of modernity in Senegal and, as a result, would benefit the most from it. While this position was intellectually coherent and politically viable, it had ramifications that some Senegalese found disturbing. Their reservations revolved around the elitist assumptions of Senghor’s position. In addition, Senghor’s variety of negritude, despite its efforts to strike a balance between universalism and cultural nationalism, still seemed to favor cosmopolitanism over cultural authenticity, thus potentially limiting the scope and significance of intellectual decolonization. Some Senegalese felt it was too accommodating of French intellectual hegemony. Moreover, Senghor’s model left little room for serious consideration of the role of popular culture in creating Senegalese modernity. That meant a dismissal of the cultural importance of Afro-Cuban music (and even of African music) and, with it, an implicit repudiation of an embodied modernity.
Two literary texts dealing with this era—Senghor’s famous poem “Comme Je Passais” and a much less known novel by Socé Diop, Mirages de Paris, articulate these differing early visions of negritude. Afro-Cuban music plays a crucial role in both texts. However, in Senghor’s poem, references to Afro-Cuban music are so oblique that many distinguished literary scholars have completely overlooked them. By contrast, Socé Diop’s novel gives pride of place to Afro-Cuban musical expression and shows how it served as one of the foundations of an African modernity. Senghor’s poem hints at his future distancing from Latin music, while Socé Diop’s novel suggests why this music would have such a powerful attraction for postwar Senegalese youth. Not surprisingly, Senghor was critical of the novel when it was published in Paris in 1937.28 His disapproval, however, could not prevent the ideas expressed in the novel from having a long life in Senegalese discussions of what sort of modernity would best suit the Senegalese.
It is possible to generate many readings of the extraordinary “Comme Je Passais,” but the analysis here focuses exclusively on how the poem illuminates Senegalese debates about music, cultural identity, and modernity.29 The poetic voice recounts the thoughts and sensory sensations he experiences as he walks past La Cabane Cubaine on the Rue Fontaine in Paris:
Comme je passais rue Fontaine,
Un plaintif air de jazz
Est sorti en titubant,
Ébloui par le jour,
Et m’a chuchoté sa confidence
Discrètement
Comme je passais tout devant
La Cabane cubaine.
Un parfum pénétrant de Négresse
L’accompagnait.
Voilà des nuits,
Voilà bien des jours au sommeil absent.
Réveillés en moi les horizons que je croyais défunts.
Et je saute de mon lit tout à coup, comme un buffle
Mufle haut levé, jambes écartées,
Comme un buffle humant, dans le vent
Et la douceur modulée de la flûte polie,
La bonne odeur de l’eau sous les dakhars
Et celle, plus riche de promesses, des moissons mûres
Par les rizières.
As I was walking by Fontaine Street,
I heard a jazz song stagger about,
Dazzled by the day,
And it whispered its secrets to me
Discreetly.
And just as I walked in front of
The Cuban Cabana
The penetrating scent of a black woman
Became its accompaniment.
Here come the nights,
Here come the days without sleep.
Horizons I thought had gone
Have reawakened in me.
And suddenly I bound from my bed
Like a buffalo with its muzzle raised high,
Legs spread, like a buffalo
Sniffing the wind
And the modulated sweetness of the polished flute,
The good smell of water under the dakar trees
And the aroma, richer in promise,
Of ripe harvests from the rice fields.30
In a number of respects, this poem constitutes a daring sequence of appropriations by Senghor. Most saliently, Senghor creates a new African subject. In the poem he veers away from representing Africans as the exoticized objects of the European gaze, positioning Paris as the object of desire and fantasy. The poet’s tool for fashioning this new subject is French, the language of the imperial dominator. He uses this language to assert his cultural “citizenship” in the “lettered” imperial city. Senghor’s adroit use of French literary style, infused with his knowledge of French literary history, further supports his case for cultural citizenship.31 His poem pays homage to Baudelaire through oblique references to such poems as “À une passante.”32 A key element in the poem is the textualization of urban space. Though a colonial subject, the speaker moves comfortably around the capital of the country that has conquered his nation, proclaiming his freedom of movement. The speaker in this poem is an African flaneur marveling at but not being intimidated by the semiotic spectacle of Paris. This poem demonstrates that the speaker is at home abroad, cosmopolitan without being French.
Senghor explicitly links the poem to negritude through his emphasis on sensory perception. The poem engages the body and many of the senses: seeing, smelling, and hearing. Senghor’s flaneur uses his head (eyes, nose, and ears) to know the world. The poem also references negritude through its identification with black music and rhythm. Here Senghor introduces music stripped of its specificity. There is only a vague association in calling it “jazz.” When the speaker passes by La Cabane Cubaine, he detects “Un parfum pénétrant de Négresse” (the penetrating perfume of a black woman). Similarly, later in the poem, when he encounters “la douceur modulée de la flûte polie” (the soft and refined modulations of a flute), it awakens his sense of smell: “La bonne odeur de l’eau” (the beautiful smell of water). The music as a symbol of blackness induces nostalgia. He keeps on walking and resists responding to the music physically. However, it continues to resonate for him. Later that night he is finally affected by it, perhaps involuntarily and subconsciously, in the privacy of his room.
The poem reveals more of Senghor’s complicated feelings about Afro-Cuban music than he perhaps intended. His African flaneur is not sauntering down the Champs Élysées or wandering through the arcades. He is strolling around Pigalle, a district famed in the first part of the twentieth century for its bohemianism and artistic modernity. The sonic environment of this area, so associated with advanced artistic production, was saturated with Afro-Cuban music during this period. Senghor thus, consciously or not, links Afro-Cuban music with African modernity by locating the poem in this quartier. This link, however, is fraught with ambivalence.