Interpretation
of New York poem
The child of Joal has arrived
in New York. This city is normally baffling for people
from other capitals or big cities in the United States
and the rest of the world. But in New York,
this feeling is redoubled for Senghor, who now sees
himself and considers himself not as someone who has
lived in Paris but simply as a black who was born
in Joal, a village of Africa. There, in the
villages, man lived in harmony with trees, rivers,
animals, gods and the dead members of the family.
Many a time in the poems of Senghor, people, young
and old, sit below the baobab or beneath the kaicedrat
and chat, and chat and chat, or simply doze, and doze
and doze. People sit down in the villages.
The old tell stories about age and fairies, the young
learn facts about the stars and life. New York
should not be expected to be like Joal, but for the
poet, it is just too different, too inhumanly different
to be acceptable or palatable. The external
beauty of New York also masks the immensity of its
emptiness. Man is dehumanized. Nature is denaturized.
Things are even 'reified', leaving nothing but pure
matter in place of life itself. A man of flesh
and blood disappears in this arid desert overpopulated
by creatures filled with anxieties and worries. It
is desert because it lacks the blood that keeps society
alive and together - love. It is nothing but a mass
of steel, stones, cement, ivory, aluminium and corrugated
iron sheets. In retrospect, the poet considered
Paris more human, more humane to beings. He
must have been thinking of the Paris he would celebrate
during his speech to the Municipal Assembly in 1961,
where the smile of May and the splendour of September
... chant the sweetness of life
