Summary
El Hadji continues to be tormented by his xala, and his confidence suffers in such a way that his professional life suffers. In desperation, and hemorrhaging money the whole while (i.e., with his continued expenditures on his three wives and three villas), he decides to go to a seet-katt (ritual seer) with Old Babacar. This seer is located in a poor area of town, and he has an awkward air about him. Nonetheless, he is effective, being able to discern that El Hadji suffers from xala without being told. Though the seer knows of El Hadji's condition, he also admits that it is strange, and the only identification he can provide of the curser is that they are "someone close to" El Hadji (49). El Hadji offers to pay through the nose for a name or more identifying information, but the seer is unable to give one. Nonetheless, El Hadji pays him double his fee.
Back at Oumi N'Doye's house for his allotted time with her, El Hadji is turning over the seer's words in his mind and acting relatively aloof. Oumi, meanwhile, is trying desperately to win her husband's favor back with expensive French food and table settings, and when they have a moment together, she asks him for a car for her children. El Hadji only thinks to himself that he appreciate's Adja's reticence, and that she does not constantly press him for such things. Oumi takes all of this as playing hard to get on El Hadji's part, so she tries to get him to bed, all to no avail. He tells her that he has to leave the following day to meet with some businessmen, and Oumi extracts a promise from him to take her to the movies.
Later, Modu sits outside El Hadji's office, and Yay Bineta pays the businessman a visit. She urges him to go to Babacar's seer, but when El Hadji tells her that he has already been, Yay Bineta only says threateningly that she is looking forward to N'Gone's next allotted period of time with El Hadji. This discomforts El Hadji even more than before, and the narrator reminds us that El Hadji's business (if it can even be called that, since his import-export trade is essentially acting as a middleman for foreign interests) is suffering as a result of El Hadji's mounting alienation. El Hadji then goes to a restaurant and hotel that he knows, and he has Modu take him to a high-up lighthouse in the village of N'Gor. Modu worries about El Hadji, and he even watches him carefully to make sure that he does not commit suicide. Afterwards, El Hadji asks to be taken to N'Gone.
Upon arriving at N'Gone's, El Hadji begins to engage N'Gone in idle chatter, which makes El Hadji realize that he really did not have a strong foundation for marriage built up with N'Gone. At Yay Bineta's urging, N'Gone then tells El Hadji that she cannot drive, and that he will have to hire a chauffeur to teach her how to drive. Meanwhile, El Hadji thinks to himself that N'Gone's youth and beauty, which once represented to him a departure from the responsibilities of his other wives, have vanished since he married her. N'Gone eventually tries to get El Hadji into bed, but he is once again unable to manage it, and he leaves her for his movie date with Oumi. They go to the cinema and then out dancing, and Oumi tries to have sex with El Hadji too. When he fails at this, too, Oumi warns him that she can go elsewhere if he does not satisfy her. The next morning, Oumi and her children make several demands of El Hadji (like the car), and this overwhelms El Hadji. At this moment, we get a parenthetical insert from the narrator about the way that urban polygamy corrupts and decentralizes the modern family, with poor outcomes being the norm for the children of such families. El Hadji tells Oumi that he has xala, and he begs her to release him if she is the cause. He then leaves, and Modu, once restrained by propriety in the employer-employee relationship, decides to recommend a healer to El Hadji.
Three days later, Modu takes El Hadji to the marabout he knows in a remote village among the baobabs. They have to leave El Hadji's Mercedes behind and travel via carriage to the middle of a remote plain to reach the healer's quarters, and as they pass through a variety of provincial and poor communities to get there, El Hadji feels like a wealthy outsider on account of his dress and the customary greetings that he receives. Once at the quarters, they are offered pure water from a local well, and El Hadji does not drink it. Kept waiting for a while, Modu and El Hadji then fall asleep and wake late in the night. The attendants offer Modu and El Hadji food, which El Hadji again does not partake in, and eventually the pair are taken to Sereen Mada, the healer. Sereen Mada performs a ritual to cleanse El Hadji of his xala, which involves El Hadji being stripped naked, and El Hadji eventually feels his hot blood and erection returning. Overjoyed, El Hadji writes Sereen Mada a check, and Sereen Mada warns El Hadji that he will restore his xala if the check bounces. He and Modu then leave and return to Dakar.
Modu asks El Hadji which villa he would like to be taken to, and El Hadji contemplates the fact that he does not have a real home among his three houses, and that he feels merely like a transient in each one. Nonetheless, he decides to be taken to N'Gone, but just as El Hadji is about to enter N'Gone's bedchamber, Yay Bineta stops him and says that N'Gone is on her period, so they cannot have sex. This infuriates El Hadji, who feels that Yay Bineta has been taking advantage of him since before their marriage. Incensed, he leaves Yay Bineta desperately calling after him and goes to Oumi's, where he satisfies her sexually all throughout the night.
Analysis
In this section of the novel, many of the dynamics that we have seen in the earlier parts of the text are amplified and exaggerated. These include El Hadji's growing sense of isolation, the growing hostilities among members of El Hadji's family, and the idea that El Hadji's business is suffering as a result of his suffering. As such, this section of the text might be considered to be the rising action of the novel, culminating in the resolution of El Hadji's healing by Sereen Mada—a resolution that we will ultimately see is more of a false ending than anything else. In order to understand how the actions of this section progress, however, it is first important to look more closely at the underlying phenomena that are driving the text's thematic and narrative development.
Chief among the phenomena driving the narrative arc of this selection are the competing financial and familial demands that weigh on El Hadji, despite the fact that he feels powerless to meet these demands on account of his xala. Regarding the financial, we have things like marabout fees and business failure that cost El Hadji a great deal of money as a result of his xala. In the realm of the familial, there are things like El Hadji being unable to spend time being present with Oumi or N'Gone (e.g., taking Oumi to the movies). Especially on the latter point, consider that it is only once El Hadji has been able to put some introspective distance between himself and N'Gone that he realizes that his marriage with her was built on sand (and that Yay Bineta took advantage of him). There is also the pressing physical demand from people like Oumi and N'Gone to have sex with El Hadji, which stresses him out and which he is unable to do. Finally, at the intersection of the familial and the financial, we have things like Oumi demanding cars for her children and N'Gone demanding a chauffeur, as well as taking in her siblings to raise them and support them. Together, then, what we see in El Hadji here is the truth of the narrator's parenthetical insert regarding urban polygamy—that having so many "home bases" around town leads to one being pulled in infinitely many directions at once, something that would be stressful for a normal family man, let alone one afflicted with the xala and weak will of El Hadji.
Growing in tandem with these competing demands on El Hadji's mind and body is El Hadji's growing feeling of isolation in this part of the text. We have already seen the way in which social pressure around his xala has isolated El Hadji from his work colleagues, but here we see more of the ways in which El Hadji feels unmoored from a secure sense of self on account of his xala. In the village outside Sereen Mada's home, for example, El Hadji feels alienated on account of his Western dress and his luxurious automobile, a feeling that only intensifies when he rebuffs the village people's kindness and hospitality. Central here is also the general lack of trust that El Hadji feels for the local people, as evidenced by his refusal to drink Sereen Mada's water and eat his food. Note also his distrust of various marabouts and healers, who he feels are only after his money, just as he distrusts his wives for fear that they have afflicted him with his xala. This directly relates to his feeling that he has no true home and is only passing through as a kind of transient in each of his wives' homes. In short, El Hadji is kept isolated greatly by his distrust of others, as well as by his self-imposed expectations of how he will be differently treated on account of his wealth.
Another important thing to note here is the fact that perhaps El Hadji is not wrong to be so circumspect regarding others' interest in him and his business. As we hear from the narrator in this section, El Hadji's "business" is really more of a type of middleman work for the same foreign powers that once colonized Senegal. In a way, he is betraying his local customs and serving foreign masters not only in an ideological sense (e.g., how he dresses, the car he drives, the water he drinks), but also in a material sense. This is important to recognize because it directly connects to El Hadji's mistrust of less material sources of good and evil (i.e., local culture and rituals). He is so disturbed by his xala perhaps because it is from the world he has sold out to gain wealth and status, and he is perhaps so distrustful of ritual healers and seers because he can only understand their motives in terms of the money he so values.
It is thus only appropriate to discuss ritualism in this section of the novel. Again, we already know that El Hadji's xala has made him so desperate that he is willing to return to local traditions and rituals, which he has spent a great of time spurning and repudiating. Or, as phrased exceptionally well by Sembène here, "Just as nature re-imposes its life on ruins with small tufts of grass, the ancestral atavism of fetishism was being re-awakened in El Hadji" (50). El Hadji returns to what he came from almost as part of a natural process attendant to his own breaking or ruination. Even so, something particularly striking about El Hadji's relationship with ritual in this section pertains to his financial conceptualization of such practices. When rituals offer him no benefits and he is only able to think of them in terms of what they are costing him, he has no problem thinking about and announcing his dislike for such rituals. However, as soon as Sereen Mada is able to offer El Hadji assistance, he immediately lets finances fall to the wayside of his concerns (the check bouncing is almost an afterthought, but as we see later, this is a mistake on El Hadji's part). This hypocrisy is one of the central objects of Sembène's satirical critique in Xala. Finally, one important thing to note is the fact that El Hadji must strip naked to be healed of his xala, a detail that will become especially important when we look at the conclusion of the novel.
