Summary

The penultimate section of Diop's novel begins with Alfa and Doctor Francois starting a friendship. He has Alfa and other soldiers draw pictures to calm their nerves and "wash our minds clean of the filth of war" (94). Alfa's first drawing is of his mother, a Fula whose father gave her away to thank Alfa's father for his hospitality. Her name was Penndo Ba, and she was the fourth wife of Alfa's father, and much younger than him, too. "My father, the old man, idolized Penndo because she was what he was not: movement, joyous, instability, novelty" (99).

But Alfa's mother soon grew restless with her new husband and longed to return to her Fula father, who lived a nomadic life as a shepherd with his other five sons. When Alfa was nine, Alfa's father told Penndo Ba to look for her father since she...