Summary
Back at El Hadji's wedding, his fellow businessmen are hyping him up for his impending consummation of the marital bond. They even offer him an aphrodisiac which will allegedly be able to help him maintain a longer erection. He then absconds to the bedchamber, where N'Gone is sitting in wait, listening to the Badyen's advice on how to have sex (basically, she tells N'Gone to be docile and submit to El Hadji). El Hadji then enters the room and looks lecherously at N'Gone, who is described as "the offering" (23).
Later, the Badyen reappears outside the marital chamber with an elderly woman, dressed in ceremonial garb. Upon entering, this elderly woman draws out a cock and attempts to sacrifice it between N'Gone's thighs. However, this deflowering ritual cannot be completed, N'Gone insists, because El Hadji could not manage to have sex with N'Gone. Soon, Yay Bineta and the other woman she is with begin to cry that El Hadji has been cursed with xala (impotence), and that he has to see a marabout (a type of hermetic healer) in order to get it cured. Dejected, El Hadji then retires to his car, where he is unable to tell Modu where he wants to go. He believes that one of his other two wives is responsible for his xala, so he instead has Modu take him to his storefront, where Madame Diouf (his assistant) congratulates him on his wedding. Afterwards, El Hadji sits alone in his office and contemplates how failing to consummate the marriage with N'Gone will hurt his reputation and masculine image. He even contemplates divorcing her, but he considers how this would both materially damage him (i.e., since he already bought her so many gifts) and damage his public image. As El Hadji contemplates his next step, Modu sits outside and listens to the chanting song of a Beggar—a song that we are told irritates El Hadji to no end. Meanwhile, at the house of Oumi N'Doye, the family chauffeur (Alassane) arrives to pick up her children, while Oumi asks the driver if he has heard from El Hadji.
Back at El Hadji's office, a nervous Oumi N'Doye telephones to scold El Hadji, telling him that he should call after her and their children later that day. El Hadji quickly and frustratedly dispenses with her, and another knock at the door suddenly sounds. It is the President of the Chamber, who comes to commiserate with him about his new marital exploits. When El Hadji tells the President about his xala, however, the President is shocked and asks El Hadji if he took any precautions (i.e., ritualistic ones). El Hadji says he did not, and the two then discuss who may have cursed him. The President seems to suggest that it may be a jealous Oumi, but he quickly withdraws this accusation and says he does not know who it could have been. The two then depart in order to visit a marabout that the President knows.
Meanwhile, across town, Yay Bineta is preparing for something big. In order to understand why this is so, the narrator tells us that she was married twice before, but that each of her husbands passed away. Thinking that she is unlucky and destined to claim a third victim, men have thus stayed away from her. For this reason, she takes the marriage of N'Gone very seriously, taking it as her own marriage, in a way. For this reason, the xala of El Hadji deeply offends and threatens her, and she goes to tell N'Gone's parents all about it. Together, they resolve that Old Babacar (N'Gone's father) will go to talk to El Hadji, since women cannot talk to men about such things with propriety.
Babacar arrives at the office and is told to wait, and Oumi N'Doye is there waiting with him. Oumi asks if El Hadji has left anything for her, and when Madame Diouf tells her that he did not, Oumi is very upset. Thinking to herself that, before N'Gone, she was the most prized and attractive beauty in the family (who reads foreign magazines, dresses well, and watches foreign films with their ideas of glamor), she now despises N'Gone and blames Adja Awa Astou for not opposing the third marriage enough. She even thought about divorcing El Hadji as a result of the marriage, but as a woman, she was counseled that her economic fate and social status relied on her husband's fate. She then leaves, fuming, and Old Babacar follows shortly after when told that El Hadji is not in. On his way out, he drops a coin in the Beggar's sheepskin. Returning home, Oumi feels threatened and sends Mariem out to inquire after El Hadji. Mactar, her eldest son, complains to her about the fact that Rama and N'Gone (women) have cars, and he does not. Sympathetic, Oumi then resolves to talk to El Hadji about this "important" matter. She waits up all night for him, but he does not return to her, and she feels even more threatened.
El Hadji has returned to N'Gone's villa, where Yay Bineta is waiting for him and asks about his xala. El Hadji says that he has been to a marabout, but when in the marital chamber and faced with N'Gone, he is once again unable to consummate their marriage. Some days pass, and El Hadji's xala has become a topic of public interest. Accordingly, El Hadji has been around to several marabouts, each of whom tries various rituals and incantations in order to try and see who cursed him. Opinions vary, with some saying that it is one of his wives, and others telling El Hadji that one of his colleagues has cursed him. Regardless, El Hadji has become despondent, failing to carry out much of his business and failing to be present in much of his family life. Since 30 days have passed since his marriage to N'Gone, however, he has to return to his normal cycle of dividing his time among his wives. The President tells El Hadji that this is actually fortuitous, since he can perhaps learn which wife cursed him. When El Hadji spends his time with Adja, however, their nights pass without sex, and El Hadji notes that Adja is quiet and does not touch on his xala at all.
Our attention then shifts to Adja herself, who thinks about how much she misses her estranged father. They used to see each other in passing when visiting Adja's mother's grave, but over time, Papa John stopped making the crossing from Gorée Island, and as a result, Adja started to send Rama as an intermediary to facilitate communication with her father. Presently, Rama comes in and talks to Adja, telling her that people around town are talking about El Hadji's xala. Desperate, Adja asks Rama what she is supposed to do. This stirs a recollection in Rama, who went a few day earlier to go visit with her fiancé Pathé, a local doctor at the hospital. At the hospital, Pathé saw El Hadji and spoke with him about Rama, and when asking about why El Hadji was there, an attendant told Pathé about his xala. Later, when he met up with Rama, he attempted not to bring it up, but Rama mentioned it herself, saying that she was told of it directly by El Hadji himself. Pathé asks Rama about Adja's response, and Rama tells him that Adja is mostly passive. She wants Adja to divorce El Hadji and move in with her and Pathé after they are married formally.
Flashing back to the present, Rama tells her mother that she can do nothing about the gossip, and she asks her if it really was her who caused El Hadji's xala. Adja swears it is not her, and when Rama asks Adja why she did not tell El Hadji this during their time together, Adja accuses her of impropriety, asking her how she could possibly speak to her father about such matters.
Analysis
In this section of the novel, which covers the introduction to the novel's primary issue (i.e., El Hadji's xala) as well as some of the text's rising action, we get a first look at how some of the themes introduced earlier are being developed in service of Sembène's larger satire and social commentary. Particularly important themes developed in this section include ritualism, the dynamics of the modern family, the experience of womanhood in modern Senegal, masculinity (both its import and fragility), and the rumor mill of modern Senegalese society. These themes also intersect with one another significantly, lending complexity and increased power to Sembène's rendering of postcolonial Senegal.
In this early part of the novel, Sembène's examination of rituals and traditional practices comes through strongly. When El Hadji is told by Yay Bineta to perform a fertility/wedding ritual involving an axe handle, for example, he spurns her, instead opting to take an aphrodisiac pill to seal the deal on his wedding night. This is just one example of how he initially spurns and admonishes rituals, particularly regarding his marriage and fertility. On a less intentional and more subtle note, consider also how he thwarts the sacrifice of the cock by failing to consummate his marriage with N'Gone. However, though El Hadji dismisses the power of such rituals early on in the text as atavistic, as soon as his xala becomes a matter of public awareness, he returns to ritual desperately in order to save face. In particular, the first visits he makes to various healers are illuminating: readers are struck by his "anoint[ment] with safara" and his wearing of xatim "round his wait like fetishes" (37–38). This is a deep satiric jab at figures like El Hadji, who position themselves as a "modern" bourgeois class that has advanced beyond the need for tradition, all the while selling out their own culture and countrymen. As soon as the true power of their traditional culture is revealed, however, such people come back to it running. As we will see, however, one of the cruelest jabs of Sembène's satire lies in the fact that El Hadji is ultimately unable to return to and seek healing in the traditions he abandoned.
Much is also revealed in these pages about the dynamics inherent in the "modern" Senegalese family. In particular, we are struck by how transactional and commodified familial interaction is within El Hadji's family, with Oumi's family raising deep concern over the fact that they do not have a car, even though El Hadji pays for Alassane's chauffeur service. In addition, it is also remarkable here that each of the families seems to be absorbed in a senseless rivalry with the other extended units of the larger family: this, of course, includes Adja and Oumi, but it also extends to their children, who voluntarily choose to segregate themselves on Alassane's bus. In short, though El Hadji's family members are united by marriage and ostensibly have little to worry about in the way of money or material possessions, they seem primarily driven by a greed-centered survival instinct. In other words, they feel perpetually threatened by the mere fact of each other's existences, as if one unit is constantly mooching off of and seriously depriving the other. In Yay Bineta's family, too, we see that the family is convoluted in unexpected ways in a "modern" society that nonetheless has strong traditional values. In particular, through the figure of Yay Bineta, we see the importance of superficial distinctions like gender and marital status in the family. After all, if Yay Bineta were not widowed twice, and if she were not a woman, she would not have to use Babacar as a conduit to communicate with El Hadji about his xala (which she feels threatens N'Gone's financial and social prospects). Thus, by looking into these three families, Sembène gives readers a strong sense of the ways in which a conventional family dynamic is complicated and made survivalist in a "modern" society.
Closely related to this idea of complexified family relations is the theme of womanhood in Senegal. Adja Awa Astou, for example, is trapped as a woman both within her religion and her marriage. As a devout worshipper, she believes that it is her responsibility to build her home and serve her husband, and these values are also reinforced by the fact that she depends socially on El Hadji for money and status. As a result, though she feels real jealousy and shame on account of El Hadji's marriage and xala, she is unable to divorce him and feels helpless. N'Gone, too, is a rather helpless and passive character (though she lacks Adja's depth and resilience), even being compared to a sacrificial "offering" on her wedding night (23). Even those women who are more independent in the text face limitations as a result of their gender. The bold and outspoken Oumi is ignored by her husband and is unable to divorce him because, like Adja, she depends on El Hadji's money and status to enjoy the lifestyle she prefers. Yay Bineta is limited by the social superstitions regarding her late husbands. Even Rama, the symbol of revolutionary and bold youth in the text, is kept down on account of her gender: when she and Pathé are stopped by a police officer on their way to discuss El Hadji, Pathé is told by the officer that he hopes her "husband will correct her" behavior (43).
One should not believe that women are the only people in the text put in a precarious position on account of their gender, however. El Hadji's desperation over his xala, which comes to affect his business, communication with family members, and social standing, reveals that he is also largely put down by a false expectation of what a "man" should be like. This fragile relationship between El Hadji and his masculinity is on his mind even as soon as the moment in which he fails to consummate his union with N'Gone. He thinks of divorcing her, but he realizes soon that, more than even the financial loss of his gifts to her would cost him, the social consequences of such an action would threaten his masculine image. The speed with which rumors of his xala spread around Dakar is also a testament to the delicate posturing one must undertake in "modern" Senegal in order to appear manly—the failure of even one piece of the masculine routine (in this case, sex) is so shocking as to constitute a kind of local curiosity, or perhaps even national news.
Finally, discussion of some of these other themes brings readers to a heightened awareness of rumor and gossip in Senegalese society. Throughout the text, we get a sense of the fact that people are always talking and keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. For example, consider the guests talking about wealth at El Hadji's wedding, the doctors and nurses gossiping with Pathé at the hospital, and El Hadji's friends discussing aphrodisiacs at his reception. This omnipresence of idle talk is what reinforces many characters' fears, even when the gossipers in question are unseen. El Hadji, for example, is tormented by the idea that others are talking about him, even if he does not know who they are. This then has real, material consequences for the subjects of the gossip and their families: Adja, for example, feels scared to talk to El Hadji and ashamed in public, and Yay Bineta feels that gossip about El Hadji's xala will have material consequences for her family's wealth and marital prospects. Thus, throughout the text, gossip is often a convenient scapegoat for self-imposed pressure, but it is also a very real force that takes a toll on people both ordinary and privileged.
