KHADY SYLLA, TRAGIC ANGEL

Writer, filmmaker, Khady Sylla was an angel haunted by demons. She lived a hectic life, made of great expectations and marked by the tragedies of misfortune. In this article, Senegalese journalist and writer takes a look back on the trajectory of a free mind. 

Short hair, angel smile, sharp eyes, engaging charisma, pictural face! Despite her young age, Khady Sylla doesn't go unnoticed in the alleys of Vanvo (Van Vollenhoven high school), named after a former and brief AOF (Afrique Occidentale Française) governor . The adolescent impresses by her simplicity and natural grace, which highlight her early commitment to the life of the school. Vanvo is one of Dakar’s temples of knowledge which saw many national and sub-regional talents blossom. In the 60s, it was home to the young elite and was the sounding box of nascent activism in the country. A wind of change was sobering the national temper, Marxist ideas were sprouting and appealing. In these high schools, young people were at the forefront of new political struggles which provided the backdrop of the May 68 general strike and protestation.

Vanvo and Janson-de-Sailly, the roots of Khady Sylla's committment 

Khady Sylla is the prefect embodiment of this prosperous period. Nearly 10 years after May 68, she enrolled in Vanvo, got into high school associations, was always on the lookout for meetings. The young activist, was keen on philosophy and collected badges of honor. She was a good student. The terrifying and indescribable Madame Kodjo, an eccentric professor of philosophy and wife of the eminent Edem Kodjo, took her under her wing. Khady Sylla was an avid reader, had a pronounced taste for freedom and a wide culture. She payed attention to the burgeoning Senegalese cinema, theatres reopening and the representations of real life endeavours. The young woman foresaw a field of possibilities.

What dreams then populated the head of the teenager, who almost unanimously left a mark and seduced those she met?

In Fall 1981, Khady did hypokhâgne in Paris at Janson-de-Sailly, a prestigious college, less renowned than Henri IV or Louis-le-Grand. The Senegalese school elite has this privilege, sending brilliant young minds, with great hopes to the mythical College de France. With its splendors and miseries, its tragedies and mirages, its solitudes too, the institution was a manufacture of the national cream, from Léopold Senghor to Bachir Diagne. There, the college experience was the dawn of promises, glory was sketched as much as anonymity. In this raffle with several uncertainties, newcomers had the leisure to be carefree and to dream.

The Human Competition

Khady Sylla arrived in Paris young, candid, dynamic, with solid foundations and great skills. Within the establishment located rue de la Pompe, in the 16ème Arrondissement of Paris, she had to rub shoulders with brilliant minds from bourgeois background and went through the drastic regime of the elite producing manufacture. It was all the more complicated that the young woman had no ties, had changed environment and discovered a new country.

Khady was lucky, she very quickly met a pal from the South of France, who became her friend: Anne Villacèque. The two comrades lived in the high schoolgirls’ residence at rue du Docteur Blanche, residence of young paris women enrolled in preparatory classes. There were about 500 of them. Khady and Anne discovered the monochrome coloring of that environment. Anne Villacèque remembers this class with precision, the French cradle of her friend: "what was striking at first sight was not so much its intellectual elitism as its social composition: there were many students from wealthy, very wealthy families and who were living in the 16ème Arrondissement of Paris. Most of them were from a traditional bourgeois and Catholic background. “But Khady Sylla was resourceful enough to stand the comparison on what counted: studies.

Premises of solitude, silent suffering

The rapture, solitude, and the hectic college life din’t scare Khady Sylla. Her great culture shielded her: a fine knowledge of politics, of the forces en présence, her interest in cinema, her love for books. She impressed, engaged in class, took the floor. The general assemblies she attended in Vanvo and her natural curiosity gave her the poise, experience and confidence needed. She had solid ground in the muffled college competition. Anne Villacèque remembers: “I do believe Khady was more proficient than the majority of our peers. She had a robust knowledge in philosophy and literature. It looked like she had read everything! Nietzsche, Plato, Spinoza. She always knew what was up. She always spoke boldly at the beginning of the school year while her peers were struggling”.

The first two years, young Khady was full of promises, encouraged by Mr Renou, “an attentive and corteous post 68 professor with leftist ideas. A path of brilliant studies opened up, with her eyes on the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure. She got weary of the military discipline that the course required and the fierce competition for seats. She faced it steadily, enduring solitude and her family’s absence.

Khady was born in March 1963, to a teacher (her father) and to a mother working in the cinema industry. She grew up in a loving family, coveted in books and films. She very quickly emancipated herself from the conventions of the Senegalese society. Anchoring in her family was important to Khady, their absence weighed on her. It's a common given of exile, solitude on the fragile shoulders of these brilliant minds, on whom the country's unreasonable expectations are placed and who were tormented by the anguish of disappointing. Under the shell, Khady was very sensitive, the pain was slowly killing her. Anne Villacèque discovers later “the prolonged isolation from her family and her country was very difficult to bear. She was quite young and that was the first time that she had been far from home. She was missing her mother. She couldn’t bear the harsh individualism of the French society, the dry human interactions.

Out of college, the beginning of uncertainty

At the end of college, Khady finally enrolled into a philosophy class. She had prosperous and hard times. Lamine Badian Kouyaté, her partner at the time, remembers their struggles between Strasbourg and Paris. Son of celebrated Malian writer Seydou Badian Kouyaté, he met Khady Sylla on the benches of Vanvo. They eked out a living, like bohemes in the artistic circles of Paris, moneyless yet with big dreams. Khady got pregnant. That was the beginning of a tunnel of fragility and incertitude. Maternity and its constraints became the trajectory of this young woman who watched her big promises darken. Her love for her son counterbalanced this perspective, Khady then faced the longest ambiguity of her life. The perpetual duality between assured resources, aptitudes beyond the average and the reality of life’s riddles and hardships created a chronic and numbing insatisfaction which seriously impacts her mental health. Lamine Badian Kouyaté remembers “she was like a free spirit in a straightjacket”. Thanks to her ambition, her thirst for discovering and conquering she faces the hostile providence. The fragility of her condition undermined her dreams.

To the young lady with a vast and ecclectic culture, literature is a refuge and her mentors arecompasses. She navigated from one register to another, worshipped Borges, the Argentinian , loved the budding work of Congolese Sony Labou Tansi. Writing erupts as a natural path, a calling, continuously fuelling her dreams. Khady then made a decisive acquaintance which was a turn in her personal and professional life. Anne Villacèque remembers “for a few years, the last ones she spends in Paris Khady lived with a French press photographer, Stéphane Weber who perceived her genuine literary talent. The photographer with his keen knowledge of Africa and Senegal encouraged her to write without the permanent concern of finding money. That’s how she was able to finish her book Le Jeu de la Mer”.

Le Jeu de la Mer, the entry to literature

Khady Sylla published her first book in 1992, part of the collection Encres Noires of the publisher Harmattan. She drew from her passions, journalism, feminism and displayed her full range, her literary mastery, a rich style, wit, a sense of details. She made use of generous, acute and beautiful descriptions, escape, the symbolism of the sea. She evoked the foundational myth, the mirror, a source of unsolved equations. Le Jeu de la Mer is a saga, an investigation weaved around Assane, the central protagonist, in charge of elucidating a mystery. She writes on page 154,

“He simply stood there, facing the sea. The breeze had seized all the waves. The golden scales of twilight flowed on the surface of the waters. This abyssal void, adorned with its most beautiful evening skin, echoed his thoughts. The entanglement of doubt was undone, unravelling the straight and brief line of truth. What he had just discovered took him back to the past. The blazing sea and sky began to resemble this interior territory, illuminated by a new and violent emotion. He turned his back on the two eternal deserts, walked back on the path surrounded by flowers.» 

Le Jeu de la Mer was shyly received and didn’t allow her to overcome the curse of unfortune. However, the novel seduced professionals of the literary world by its strength, images and potential. The text was liable to be awarded and was at the heart of a quarrel. Khady’s lack of experience aroused mockery and jealousy of among others the giant Ousmane Sembène who wasn’t stingy with harsh words. This episode broke her heart. Shortly after, in 1994, Khady returned home, living between Senegal and France, still wandering.

Le jeu de la Mer drew the attention of Jean Rouch, great filmaker and attentive reader. They had the project to turn it into a film. She mades other acquaintances, more or less in the cinema world. Anne Villacèque remembers very well this period. Time hadn't tamed their complicity and close bond « I have the memory of her meeting with Alain Cuny, a nearly legendary actor in France who was then very old. He had a sort of reverence for Khady”. Writing, her first dream didn’t take her to frank recognition and her situation remained precarious, so the interest and interactions stirred her appetite for cinematography. She started her career as a film director and produced respectively Colobane Express in 1999 and Une Fenêtre Ouverte in 2005.

The brief salvation of cinema before the plunge

The first film is noticed, hailed. Khady made use of the same wit and skills she showed in her literary work, a certain vision of the world, a sense of detail, a certain aesthetic. Journalist and great admirer of her work, Ousmane Ndiaye talks about her outstanding cinematographic work: "Khady Sylla's cinema moved me in 2005 with "Une Fenêtre Ouverte". It is a powerful and touching parole, deep, acute, stripped of artifice. No posturing of the director! I feel like every shot, every sequence displays not the lives of her protagonists, but her own reality, her own life.  She uncovers herself first, courageously and plainly. Yet, it is not self-centered, this dis-covery is a pretext to talk about others, about her society.

In her documentaries, Khady happily freed herself: first from the taboos of society, second from aesthetic and artistic formatting. Nothing is corseted or formatted in her cinematographic gesture. I hope the public will get to view or review her work”. Rama Thiaw, a filmmaker, well acquainted with Khady has the same admiration, “Khady Sylla had a way of filming that was her own, singular and poetic, unclassifiable and iconoclastic. Khady's craft in "Colobane Express" is unmatched, she vividly captures a city always in motion, with the incessant parade of “cars rapides”.

Khady’s writing is witty and full of humor. She liked to laugh, not at the expense of others, always with them, with tenderness. She also had some in store for the outcasts and those left behind, those Djibril, one of her mentors, lovingly called “les petites gens”.

In her many quests, Khady Sylla made great friends, Aminata Sophie Dieye and Ken Bugul, both writers with a strong sense of freedom. Evidence of the spirit of pals coalesced against the shackles of a frozen society.

In the midst of tumults, of the lures of recognition, of solitude, enemies stronger than her, Khady Sylla traced her route as best as she could. By the time she died, her psychological troubles had weakened and overwhelmed her. She had more projects in store, instead she had to fight mental illness.  She surrendered in 2013. A bittersweet end, like her life was, made of light and darkness, and hesitation. Her work and her journey are an echo of disappearing voices, the taste of unfinished business and the persistent feeling of injustice. Traces of the sufferings of this brilliant mind, impeded by circumstances. The many shadows cast over the course of her life muffled her voice without ever silencing it.

Elgas

This article was originally published in French in Seneplus