El Hadji's Wives (Symbol)
El Hadji's first two wives serve as a symbol of the two faces of modern Senegal. His first wife, Adja Awa Astou, speaks Wolof, understands the traditional institution of polygamy, and wears traditional African clothes. In doing so, and in how she acts modestly and often fails to confront her husband for her children's sake, she thus represents the more traditional and atavistic part of the country's population.
Oumi N'Doye, on the other hand, is a more "modern" woman who acts more licentious, dresses extravagantly in European clothes, speaks French, and reads foreign magazines to follow a more Western and cosmopolitan lifestyle. As such, she is a symbol of "modern" Senegal which, in being wedded to the same man as the traditionalist (i.e., El Hadji, or the bourgeois class) is forced to endure a strange, tense, and hypocritical life.
The Marriage Crown (Symbol)
The marriage crown is one of the oldest bridal decorations in human history. At the beginning of the novel, it thus appears as usual on the head of N'Gone, who wears it to symbolize her purity and status as the future wife of El Hadji. By the end of the novel, however, its symbolic meaning becomes inverted when a beggar places a bridal crown on El Hadji's head prior to spitting on him. Here, the bridal crown has two symbolic meanings: on the one hand, the crown is evocative of his perceived status as a ruler or governor of others; on the other hand, however, it crowns him as a sort of king of fools, subject to all the abuses and retributive gestures of the poor people he has abandoned to a cruel fate.
El Hadji's Cars (Symbols)
The Mercedes that El Hadji uses to get around town serves as a symbol of the influence of foreign powers in everyday Senegalese life, despite the fact that Senegal is allegedly an independent nation free of such control. Additionally, when El Hadji is visiting Sereen Mada, he feels uncomfortable leaving the protection of the car and making his way to the healer by horse-drawn cart, indicating that he is more comfortable with foreign, colonial structures than the more humble institutions and practices supported by local peoples and traditions. Finally, the fact that El Hadji buying cars for his various families becomes a matter of contestation between them is symbolic of the fact that the car is the symbol par excellence of wealth in modern Senegal. Together, then, these disparate influences paint a powerful picture of cars in the text as a symbol of the wealth and power structures put in place by neocolonialism and its comprador supporters.
Xala/Impotence (Motif)
El Hadji's xala (impotence) becomes motific in the text as a reminder of El Hadji's various failures—be they a failure to actually produce and connect with a successful family (since his actual family only uses him for his money), his business failures (which are insecurities that stem from his impotence), or his failures as a man (i.e., his literal sexual impotence). At the same time, however, El Hadji's xala is also an important symbol of the modern bourgeoisie's failure or "impotence" in improving the material conditions of Senegal's working poor. Just as El Hadji is powerless to change his own family or personal life, so too is he powerless to help other people and, in fact, he has only actively harmed people who are worse off than him. Additionally, El Hadji is only a symptom of a broader societal malaise—one in which the entire bourgeoisie class is powerless to help its own countrymen, since its members are merely doing the bidding of ostensibly banished foreign masters.
Bottled Water (Symbol)
Bottled water—and, specifically, imported mineral water—is also a symbol in the text of El Hadji's clinging to foreign elements. When offered water in the text that is not imported mineral water, El Hadji uniformly refuses in discomfort, and even when he is offered pure, locally sourced water at the house of Sereen Mada, he does not trust the locals. Such distance that El Hadji places between himself and other Senegalese people reinforces the idea that El Hadji is an isolated figure, a kind of stranger in his own country.
