Summary
True to his word, Sereen Mada has returned El Hadji's xala, and correspondingly, El Hadji's world continues to fall apart at an accelerated pace. Though El Hadji is paralyzed by fear and shame, his creditors are taking his children's cars, Madame Diouf has taken him to a labor tribunal, and the Grain Board is taking action against him. Only Modu remains loyal to El Hadji. Meanwhile, the lives of El Hadji's wives begin to crumble: Yay Bineta and N'Gone move out of their villa, threatened by creditors, and Oumi N'Doye moves with her children into a poorer area of town with her parents (for her part, Oumi tries to get employment, but when this fails, she pursues an easier life of going out with men who have money in the evenings). Eventually, El Hadji is invited to a meeting with Yay Bineta at the home of Old Babacar and Mam Fatou.
At the meeting with Yay Bineta, she and some officials indicate that they would like to reclaim N'Gone's freedom from El Hadji. They feel that he has taken advantage of her and failed to provide for her, only shackling her with debt, and they say that under Islamic law, she has the power to divorce him. Yay Bineta gets in a spirited argument with Modu over the terms of their separation, but when Yay Bineta asks El Hadji what he would like to do to proceed with the liberation of N'Gone, he only leaves, dejected and powerless to do anything.
He and Modu then return to his office, which has since been locked up with a notice of bankruptcy posted. Modu tells El Hadji that the Beggar can cure his xala, and the two then drive off as the Beggar intones his sharp chant.
Two days later, something astonishing happens. In the quiet suburb where the Villa Adja Awa Astou is situated, a riotous hoard of sick, downtrodden, and disabled beggars takes to the streets. Among their ranks are lepers, people missing limbs, and impoverished men and women. They ring El Hadji's bell, and when the maid answers the door, they storm the place, tearing through his fridge and bedrooms and stuffing their clothes with his possessions.
When El Hadji and his family are summoned before the crowd of beggars, the Beggar from outside of El Hadji's office makes himself known. He explains that this is the price he is collecting for the removal of El Hadji's xala. Further, he reveals that it was he who afflicted El Hadji with his xala this entire time. The Beggar explains that he and El Hadji know each other, and that El Hadji falsified documents to have the Beggar's land stolen from him and his clan. Moreover, when the Beggar protested in the past, El Hadji had him thrown in jail. The various beggars take turns explaining to El Hadji that he is a virus in society, affecting countless others with his greed and casting them into the depths of poverty. In order to reclaim their dignity, the beggars tell El Hadji that he must strip naked and allow them all to take a turn to spit on him. Only then will their leader take away El Hadji's xala.
El Hadji's family pushes back against the crowd, but some members of the crowd force Rama and Adja to submit by beating them. They too must take turns spitting on El Hadji. When threatened by the police, who have since assembled outside El Hadji's home, the beggars tell El Hadji and his family that being in jail is nothing to them, since in jail they can at least be housed and fed. Realizing that the beggars have nothing to lose, El Hadji then begins to strip and allows the various people assembled to spit on him.
The final image of this riot that we are provided with is then given, with El Hadji being crowned by the beggars in a wedding crown. Meanwhile, outside, the police raise their weapons in anticipation.
Analysis
Here, in the climactic conclusion to Sembène's novel, the exaggerated heights of the author's satire are reached. Here, not only does El Hadji's life fall apart to an unprecedented degree, but readers also will note the ironic and satirical inversion of virtually every thematic dynamic established prior in the novel. Many important symbolisms that were established earlier in the text are also reversed here in the conclusion. Chief among the things being subverted here are the established dynamics of the family unit, the novel's prior treatment of rituals, and the novel's understanding of political power.
In talking about the family unit's subversion, one must look at what happens here to each of El Hadji's wives. Adja Awa Astou and her children are forced to spit on El Hadji in abject horror, though they try to defend him, in spite of all of his faults. Oumi, perhaps the most financially and physically demanding of El Hadji's wives, is here forced to retreat from her life of luxury from creditors. Even her children, who once relied on money to hold their notions of family together, abandon their hopes and only complain about trivial things like having to take public transport. N'Gone, for her part, tries to separate from El Hadji after trying to bond herself to him for the entire novel. In each case, the subversions of their respective family dynamics reveals each of the family's tragic flaws: Adja and Rama love El Hadji too much (refusing to square their love for him with his greed and selfishness); Oumi and her family got too greedy with El Hadji, failing to put any love in him beyond these material demands; and N'Gone did not really want a husband, but rather someone to save her from her unstable and uncertain life as an uneducated woman.
Another key dimension in which the family unit is subverted here is through the novel's major ironic revelation—that is, that the Beggar and El Hadji are from the same clan, and that they likely had some kinship between them before El Hadji sold his people out for money and influence. El Hadji was, after all, told throughout the novel that the person who cursed him was someone close him, but he never anticipated that it could be the Beggar whose chant secretly was cursing him every day. While we have known El Hadji to be a relatively greedy and unsympathetic figure throughout the text, this revelation completely demolishes our understanding of him, forcing us to reckon with the depths of the evil that he has perpetrated on some of the people closest to him. Additionally, the fact that El Hadji only suspected his wives throughout the text—rather than reckoning with his own past and understanding that he has real enemies who would seek to extract material and physical compensation from him—reveals and solidifies the misogyny and alienation that we have been given hints of throughout the novel.
The family unit is not the only thing that sees subversion in the novel's conclusion, however. The treatment of ritual is also very important in these concluding pages of the text, and—in particular—one does well to note some key symbols that are recycled from earlier in the text. In Yay Bineta's meeting with El Hadji and the clerics, we see a sort of inversion of the earlier sealing ritual performed at the mosque to unite N'Gone and El Hadji. Just as El Hadji was absent from the former ceremony, he is mentally not present at this ceremony, with Yay Bineta being the driving force. Moreover, one could say that, just as the earlier ritual was feckless in actually uniting El Hadji and N'Gone, this ritual is also relatively useless. After all, the financial damage has already been done to N'Gone and her family, and their divorce proceedings are, at best, an attempt to save face. A different ritual inversion that is important in the novel's conclusion is the stripping ritual that El Hadji is made to do by the Beggars. In it, we see a clear reversal of Sereen Mada's earlier ritual, performed also when El Hadji was stripped naked. Though both are allegedly being performed in order to cure El Hadji of his xala, this one clearly leaves him more vulnerable and exposed, destroying the same image of masculinity that Sereen Mada's ritual was supposed to build up.
Another key place in which ritual is subverted is in the coronation of El Hadji with a wedding crown, a gesture which also clearly touches on the political. In the coronation, we see a clear gender inversion of the traditional bridal crown: whereas the woman's crown is meant to symbolize her purity, here the crown is more of a symbol of El Hadji's impurity. Moreover, though the crown generally represents the external manifestation of power, here it represents El Hadji's denigration to a level even below that of the ordinary criminal. This is not the only political inversion in the conclusion, however. When Rama presses the beggars about the police's presence, they reply only that they will not be intimidated by the same political tools that they have been kept down by—their riot is really a revolution, a type of attack on the political order that enshrines El Hadji. At the same time, one must remember that the novel ends not with the image of the riot, but rather with the image of the police raising their weapons outside. The revolution of the poor is ultimately destined to fail—yet another ironic twist on Sembène's part.
At the end of the novel, then, where are readers left? Does El Hadji ultimately pay for all the evil he has brought into the world? And does the revolution of the poor hit us more strongly because of how subtly the political and class themes of the novel have been developed?
