Douceurs du bercail

A young woman sent on a mission to Europe is arrested at the border, humiliated, and arbitrarily detained for several days while awaiting deportation along with a large number of other Africans deemed undesirable. A victim of the new apartheid movement that is plaguing Europe today and reverberating in the form of a thousand injustices and a thousand despairs, Asta loses her composure, but quickly recovers, realizing that the future does not lie in a robotic and dehumanized elsewhere. It lies in dignity rediscovered and shared, on the threshold of her home. From then on, she says:

"Let us love our land; we will water it with our sweat and dig it with all our might, with courage. The light of our hope will guide us, we will harvest and build. Only then will we be able to travel the roads of sky, earth, and water without being driven out like pariahs." (P.IV of the cover)

The Sweetnesses of the Bercail is a novel imbued with naked testimony that explores the margins and seeks to extract a generation from its ghetto and reveal the truth. The ostracism to which these "African immigrants" are subjected is an incentive for Africans to create, on their continent, their own space with humanizing living conditions. Ultimately, Aminata Sow Fall reacts against the relegation of Africa to a space of meaninglessness. Her book invites us to abandon approximations and allow ourselves to be carried away towards practical action because "man is an absolutely free and self-conscious being, capable of conjuring up from nothing a whole world that is the only 'true and thinkable' creation." Once created from nothing, this world must allow itself to ask serious questions: how should a world be constituted to correspond to free and moral beings?

Biography of Aminata Sow Fall

Aminata Sow Fall was born on April 27, 1941, in Saint-Louis, Senegal. After graduate studies at the Sorbonne, she taught modern literature. She was a member of the French Reform Commission in Senegal and Director of Arts and Intellectual Property from 1979 to 1988. In the meantime, she founded the African Center for Cultural Activities and Exchanges (CAEC) in 1987. Author of several titles currently on the curriculum of high schools and universities in Africa and the United States, Aminata Sow Fall is considered by critics to be one of the best contemporary French-language novelists. Her works have been translated into several languages. Aminata Sow Fall holds honorary doctorates from numerous foreign universities.