Breaking Boundaries in "God's Bits of Wood"

The following is my paper proposal for the annual Honors Colloquium held each spring semester at CSUN:

It is an inescapable reality that many people find themselves confined to certain boundaries within a society based on their gender, age, and/or race among other factors. The highly structured community of railroad workers in 1940s French occupied West Africa, as portrayed in Sembene Ousmane’s novel God’s Bits of Wood, lends itself to an exploration of the creation and destruction of these arbitrary spaces. In this paper I discuss the ways in which the fictional community along the Dakar-Niger railway is initially limited by socially sanctioned ideas of space and how a strike of the railroad workers leads to the breakdown of borders between men and women, old and young, and white and black.

Before the strike, the women were primarily confined to the home and to domestic duties, however; the sudden loss of income forces them to venture further and further from their traditional spheres of influence in order to feed and protect their families. In an ultimate act of breaking barriers, the women from the city of Thies spend several days marching to Dakar (a coastal city at the end of the rail line) to show their support for the men of the union. Similarly, this society has traditionally given precedence to the elderly, placing them in venerated space because of their assumed wisdom and experience. However, the strike brings forth new leaders from among the younger generations and they control the dialogue at union meetings, pushing the elderly to the side. The stark contrast between white and black space is frequently alluded to in the novel, with the primary focus on the juxtaposed appearances of buildings. Although the black community does not overtake and re-appropriate white space, they do force many of the French colonial elite to leave the region. In this paper I prove that although these changes are not immediate and universal, the strike is clearly the catalyst for radical changes to notions of space and boundaries within the fictional railroad community of West Africa.