Dr Tijan M. Sallah: An intellectual who values his birthright

byCherno Omar Barry

        The euphoria of meeting a president or a king evaporates in time. However, the euphoric feeling stays either before, during or after meeting an intellectual. My Father used to tell me “There are three things to search for in life on earth: Wealth, Position and Knowledge. The first two are temporary and can be acquired by anybody. Knowledge, however, brings wisdom and respect. That is what everyone must crave to have for it makes the being out of the human.”  An intellectual is one who has not only acquired knowledge, but has the ability to use that knowledge to benefit mankind.

           Dr Tijan Momodou Sallah is an accomplished Economist and Poet/Writer. Most of all, he is an intellectual. The knowledge he has acquired has served the world in many aspects but it has particularly served the Gambia. Dr Sallah, despite his prominent role as an international economist and as an internationally recognized writer and poet, is very modest and open. He has been interviewed all over the world and numerous articles, in several languages (notably French, English, Arabic and Japanese), have been written about him. Students in several countries have chosen to write on the Life and Works of Dr Tijan M Sallah for their thesis.

        Though numerous articles have been written about him, Gambians should have their share of knowledge on who Dr Sallah is. Like several other Gambian writers/poets living abroad (Sally Singhateh, Essa Colly, Essa Sey), they may be known in the environment they live in but Gambians will still find their names strange. However, unlike those mentioned above, Dr Sallah made enormous contributions that need commendation from Gambians. Therefore, the article, which will be far from being exhaustive, will be divided in two parts: On Life and Works, and On Gambian Literature.

 
ON LIFE AND WORKS

“The person who belittles his birth right diminishes his dignity” Tijan Sallah, in an interview with Sandra M. Grayson, Netwook 2000: In the spirit of the Harlem renaissance

     Tijan was born at  Fana Street, Serrekunda, on March 6, 1958. His father, of Halpulaar origin (Tukulor), was a fervent Muslim who inculcated the strict pulaar upbringing on his children. Ali Malhani, a student of Sana’a University in Yemen, preparing his Master’s thesis on Tijan Sallah, quoted Tijan as saying his father was “a strict disciplinarian” and that “he believed in spare the rod and spoil the child”. One can therefore understand why the Sallah family is admired for the discipline they radiate. Tijan’s mother is of Serrer and Wolof origin.

       Fana Street, where Honorable Halifah Sallah lives today, was then full of fanafanas and a mixture of different ethnic groups. This explains the rich cultural personality Tijan became and how it reflected in his poetry and writings.

     Tijan has two sisters (Ndey Isatou known as Aisha is the eldest of the family but she passed away and left behind three children, and Sainabou known as Zeinab) and four brothers (Habib – lecturing, Halifa – politician and a National Assembly Member, Musa – presently working in Atlanta, USA and Mawdo Malik believed to be studying or working in the states.

      Tijan attended Serrekunda Primary School, then St Augustine’s High School before leaving for the United States. Some of the prominent Gambian teachers he still remembers are Mrs. Hariette Ndow fondly called Auntie Harrou or Mrs. Ndow, Mrs. Cobola Jones, Mr. and Mrs. Forbes, Mrs. Sarah Secka, Mr. Dawda Faal, Mr. Danso, Mr. L. K. Jabang and Serign Njai all during his primary school days. In high school he remembers other Gambian teachers particularly Ms Ralphina De Almeida (World History), Mr. Sait Touray (Latin, English & Science), Mr. Sola Joiner (Geography) and Mr. Marcel Thomasi (Literature). He was also taught by Irish teachers : Rev John Gough fondly called Father Gough later (English and Literature), Rev Father Murphy (Bible Knowledge), Rev Tammy (Mathematics), Rev Comma (Chemistry), and Rev Cleary who was then Principal of Saint Augustine’s High School. Tijan did not forget “the Scotland Belt” which Father Comma never spared on late comers and unruly behavior.

 
‘“The person who is afraid of the sun is afraid of what benefits him” meaning enlightenment can be shunned only towards one’s own detriment.’ Tijan Sallah, in an interview with Sandra M. Grayson, Netwook 2000: In the spirit of the Harlem renaissance

        Tijan proved to be an excellent student. Desperate not to break his education at High school yet faced with financial difficulties, Tijan will resort to working. Working as an audit clerk first at the Custom Department then the General Post office will barely the fare he needs to go to the United States. As he could not pay for his tuition, he will finally go to Rabun Gap high school where he is required to work for his tuition and study at the same time. His outstanding performance there earns him a scholarship to proceed to Berea College, Kentucky where he bagged his B Sc in Business Management and his B A in Economics. He was no doubt an outstanding student so it was no surprise when he was awarded the “Berea Senior Award for Economics and honored as the Berea College Student Nominee for Carnegie Endowment for Peace Internship, both in 1982.” (Ali). Tijan proceeds to Virginia Polytechnic Institute where he obtained his M A in Economics and subsequently his Ph D in Economics in 1987. He also gave lectures on Micro and Macroeconomics as he was preparing for his doctorate. After completing his Ph D, he started his professional career as a lecturer at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. It was in 1989 that Tijan Sallah joined the World Bank. He has since supervised and managed many development projects in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. He is currently responsible for the projects on Natural Resources, Water and the Environment in Egypt, Jordan and Yemen. He will soon be moved to oversee projects covering the southern part Africa.

 

“I believe in poetry as talking words, as possessed words, as words that most find an object to move, as words purged of the impurity of excess.” Tijan Sallah, in an interview with Sandra M. Grayson, Netwook 2000: In the spirit of the Harlem renaissance

 

        The first poem Tijan published is entitled The African Redeemer. It was printed on SUNU KIBARO, the Saint Augustine’s High School magazine, in 1973. Commenting on how he first started spurred by Father Gough who encouraged him to try poetry, he says:  “I thought it was purely and simply rhyming, so I tried my hand first time on a rhyme – ‘The African Redeemer’ – a poem written as a tribute to the continentally admired, Pan-African nationalist leader and first head of state of Ghana, Dr Osagyfo Kwame Nkrumah The poem turned out excellent and brought a new recognition for him. He continued writing poems. His inspirations were the Negritude Movement – Leopold Sedar Senghor, David Diop, Aimé Cesaire etc. Another inspiration was Lenrie Peters who already published two collections of poetry (Satellites and Katchically) and a novel (The Second Round). Tijan frequently consulted Dr Peters, who was at the time a surgeon at the West Field junction, and seek for his advice. One thing Tijan remembers well is being told to scrape out all the old Shakespearean English and stick to simple language. He will continue writing poetry but his motivation will increase when he arrives at Rabun Gap Nacoochee High school in the United States. Among his teachers was Harry Lloyd Van Brunt known as H. L. Van Brunt. With a summer program meant to harness creative writing among young students and aspiring poets, Tijan succeeded in easily gaining recognition. Tijan confesses having leant “real poetry” from Van Brunt. That was when Tijan leant that “poetry is trying to express ideas through the use of images”. Tijan, however, was active in writing as he started an active role as editor for the student newspaper – Silent Runner. He publishes his second poem in his life, but the first in the United States, “Worm Eaters”, in the Atlanta Gazette of February 17, 1978. It was a public satire on people who portray in public quite an opposite image of what they really are.

       Though he is an Economics and Business Management student when Tijan arrives at Berea College in 1978, he continued developing his skills in writing. Two years later he succeeds in publishing his first collection or poetry entitled When Africa Was A Young Woman.

“The publication of a book is like the christening of one’s newborn. Only it’s more gratifying because the child may phases away your name as the generations multiply yet the book stays loyal in rendering immortal.
   

When Africa was A Young Woman was published at the Writers Workshop of Calcutta, India, in 1980. It is a collection of 36 poems. The work is divided into two parts: The first part, On Africa, is made up of 9 poems and the second part, On People, Places and Things, has 27 poems. Then Tijan was only 22. He best explains the poems published in this book in an interview with Sandra Grayson. He says “My earlier poetry was simpler, message oriented – the use of poetry as ‘talking and fighting words’. There is for example, my poem “When Africa was A Young Woman”, which compares Africa’s anguished history with the image of a beautiful woman who is raped of her treasures, and another poem “Tarzan Never Lived in My Africa”, which is a defense against the negative stereotyping Africa, the so call ‘Tarzan myth,’ the jungle Africa of social Darwinian struggles, where you have continuous war, famine and death, where life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ – to borrow from Hobbesian categories.

        As Samuel Baity Garren will note in his review of Tijan’s poetry in Wasafiri entitled Exile and Return: The Poetry and Fiction of Tijan Sallah, this first publication is the beginning of a journey that Tijan has taken and in this one the poet draws the person to a sense of what Africa was in its unspoiled wholeness. Tijan tries to defend Africa’s cultural heritage in many ways. He shows what that beautiful Africa is about and extends an innocent image of the cultural richness of its children.

        Tijan reviews three literary books: The Tragedy of Platitudinous Piety by Bill Best (1981), Summer of Pure Ice by William White (1985) and Gem Within by Rosemary Wilkonson (1986). He receives an honorary doctorate in literature from World Academy of Arts and Culture from Tapei, Taiwan in 1984.

        His second book is a collection of short stories entitled Before the New Earth: African Short Stories published in 1988.

         Before the New Earth, which was also published in Calcutta, India, is a collection of 16 short stories (including a Letter from Wole Soyinka to the author) and consists of 93 pages. The author is raising his voice against the North-South inequalities and its consequences on Africa. He is dreaming of a New Earth with New Human Values. “Sallah attempts to create a panorama of mistreatment and resistance. The first word in the title is important. The tales seek to show the urgency of the need for rebirth, the many reasons why this society must change.” Samual Baity Gordon.

         Dr Tijan Sallah’s second book, Before the New Earth, was reviewed by Ezenwa Ohaeto on page 8 of The African Guardian of May 22, 1986. In this review, some of the stories are explained in depth. Ezenwa reveals that there are not only stories in the book but two poems are included. “...perhaps to justify the fact that poetic prose enhances the art of a writer if he is conscious of  then limitations of dense poetic language.” According to Ezenwa, what immerges in the stories is an optimistic view of society. To conclude his review, he wrote “Before the New Earth utilises interesting literary devices to explore the human condition in Africa. However the tendency to sermonise and the seeming thinness of plots make the stories read like essays.”

 
Strange as it may seem, Sallah notes, exile, involontary or self-imposed, heightens one’s sensibility to one’s homeland, to the familiar, to things that one takes for granted; a minor encounter about one’s homeland echoes deep reverberations and sends one into a chain of endless self-questionings.

 
        Kora Land, Tijan’s third publication, was published by Three Continents Press in Collorado, USA, in 1989.  It is a collection of 25 poems with 48 pages.. “I consider myself to be a griot flying over the Gambian land, but seeing it in its interrelation with other lands”. Tijan expresses a strong attachment to his motherland and seems to reflect on its cultural diversity and complexity.

 Distant my land, but
Pure the fixation
My heart-and-vien land
My diastole and systole

 
      David Dorsey of Clark Atlanta University, in his review of Kora Land in World Literature Today, wrote “It (the book) notes in personal relationships such as spouse, grandparent, host, and guest the enerving trivia and difficulties which dilute the preponderant enduring purposes of reward. It celeberates the grandeurs and intricacies of both nature and society in specified locations (mainly Banjul). Often iy marks the meanness of spirit inherent in so many of Africa’s capitulations to westernisation.”

 
‘My recent poetry is more deliberate perhaps more complex in its use of symbolisim and imagery, more preoccupied with enduring themes: “roots”, “memory”, “family”, “relationship with elders and ancestors”, - perhaps a movement more towards personal.’ Tijan Sallah

 

         In 1993, four years after the publication of Kora Land, Tijan published another collection of poetry entitled Dreams of Dusty Roads. This was also published by Three Continents Press in Collorado, USA. It is a collection of 34 poems divided into three parts: Roots (Africa and particularly the Gambia), Branches (America), Dream-Clouds (in the Mind). Beyond material things, believes Tijan, Man craves for spiritual things, longing for the Dream Kingdom where he can experience something that transcends him and will bring about spiritual fulfilment. One can safely say that in this book his mastery of style and theme is proven without doubt. He has matured into a master magician of words. Tanure Ojaide, one of his best friends and a professor at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte made a review of this book in World Literature Yoday published in 1994. He made an excellent review giving a brief but explicit interpretation of each part of the three parts of the collection. In conclusion, he wrote:

 
“In Dreams of Dusty Roads Tijan Sallah has matured into a master word magician. His lines are strong, varied and interesting. The voice is confident in its movement, with appropriate and recurring images, repetitions, and other techniques employed to talk about his homeland, his sojourn abroad, and his faith that a spiritual/mystical preoccupation would make life meaningful in the contemporary oppressive materialism.

         Tanure, who has also edited with Tijan a selection of poetry, finds Tijan’s work quite useful in understanding Africa and the African people. Tijan’s percieves Africa as an immerging and tall woman who looks helplessly as her children go astray. He confesses being a believer of tradition only if leads to affirming the humanity of every person. He remember’s Hampate Ba’s saying “a dying old man is a burning library”.

 “To me, poetry can tap deep into the resources of history – it can reactivate dormant images, and give the past a life in the present, and allow us to go back to the school of the death and revisit their restless skeletons and learn from their muted voices”

 In 1995, he publishes his first anthology of African poetry entitled New Poets of West Africa. It is an Anthology of 156 pages. There are 7 female poets among 48 poets. One discovers poets from 15 West African countries: Nigeria, Benin, Cameroun, Liberia, Equitorial Guinea, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. They all belong to the third generation of African poets of the seventies and eighties.

       Soon after, with Tanure Ojaide, Tijan publishes another anthologie entitled New African Poetry published four years later, in 1999. It consists of 350 pages. It is another Anthology covering this time the whole continent. The euphoria of independence is gradually giving the way to an era of disenchantment. 66 poets among them 17 women are featured in this book.

 

ON GAMBIAN LITERATURE

 
“…the impact of English culture on Gambian society, and the fact that the system of economic remuneration favored those with English education, helped to marginalize this literature” Word or Rice? The state of Literature in the Gambia by Tijan M. Sallah

 These literary pioneers, however, suffered one major syndrome: cultural marginality.

 Literature can do much for a society. It can create a vision where one does not exist. It can make people self-critical, to find out what is retarding their progress and what they can do to change their condition. Literature is a mirror – through it a society can see its blemishes and beauties.

 Sallah, Tijan M. (b. 1958)

            Tijan Sallah—poet, essayist, biographer, anthologist, professor, and economist—represents a “third generation” of post-colonial African poets (Ojaide and Sallah 1-7) who “ tap … their people’s oral traditions and techniques” to generate poetic innovations. He belongs, also, to a generation of expatriate poets born on the African continent, educated in Africa and the U.S.A., and successfully employed in careers outside of the academy.  Sallah is a senior economist with the World Bank in Washington, D.C., who lives and writes in Potomac, Maryland. His business expertise is in the field of rural development of water and other environmental resources for the Middle East and North African region. His dedication to literature, however, has been of much longer standing than his vocation as an economist. He began composing poetry while he was in secondary school in The Gambia, and he has since published in a broad spectrum of literary and associated genres: poetry, short stories, cultural monographs, as well as biographical and critical essays. While working at the World Bank, he used his spare time in the service of literature to collaborate with Tanure Ojaide to produce The New African Poetry: An Anthology (1999) and with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to write a full-length study of Chinua Achebe’s life and development into one of our era’s great moral leaders: Chinua Achebe, Teacher of Light: A Biography (2003). Sallah’s own poetry is especially noteworthy for its neo-millennial combination of attributes: its chic cosmopolitan tone, its wide range of topics and responses to contemporary life, and its deep cultural and aesthetic roots in The Gambia.

            Tijan Sallah was born in 1958 in Serekunda, the largest city in The Gambia, to a Wolof /Muslim family. As a child he received instruction in the Quran and attended Western elementary schools.  When the time came for him to prepare for university, his parents enrolled him in St. Augustine’s High School (situated in Banjul, Gambia’s capital city), an all-male Catholic missionary school run by Irish priests of the Holy Ghost Order. There, the curriculum was British, and students read the plays of Shakespeare, key works by canonic poets (e.g., the Romantics and William Butler Yeats), classic novels (e.g., by Robert Louis Stevenson and George Orwell), and the writings of James Joyce. It was just as compulsory to memorize literary texts as to memorize the facts of biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, but the young Sallah was undaunted: he distinguished himself as a brilliant student. When one of his favorite English teachers, the Reverend John Gough, praised his writing and encouraged him to “try [his] hand at poetry,” the boy composed his first poem, “The African Redeemer,” a tribute to Kwame Nkrumah, the universally admired Pan-African leader from Ghana.

            In 1977, still a teenager, Sallah traveled to Georgia (U.S.A.) to attend Rabun Gap Nacoochee High School for a year before enrolling at Berea College in Kentucky. Both the high school and the college are well known for their strong emphases on agriculture and environmental policy. While an undergraduate at Berea, Sallah published his first collection of poems, When Africa Was a Young Woman (1980), an internationally acclaimed book, praised by many reviewers including the BBC.

            After graduating with two bachelor’s degrees from Berea, Sallah enrolled at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, from which he earned his M.A. and doctoral degrees in economics (Ph.D. 1987). In 1989, he joined the World Bank through its Young Professionals Program.  All this while, he was fully engaged in writing stories and poems, soon publishing a series of books in quick succession: his first collection of short stories, Before the New Earth, came out in 1988; a second volume of verse, Kora Land, appeared in 1989; a third collection, Dreams of Dusty Roads: New Poems, was published in 1993.

            In his review of Kora Land for World Literature Today, David Dorsey aptly noted the poet’s “unaffected grace of feeling and expression” and the “quiet and clear [poetic] force” of his treatments of a broad spectrum of topics and images, including traditional customs, domestic and community roles, the Senegambian landscape, ancient African history, contemporary urban types—and even “rakes, brooms, refrigerators, head ties, World Bank statistics, Texaco gas stations, mango boughs, and sweaty armpits” (Winter 1990).

            In his article “My Approach and Relation to Language,” which appeared in The Washington Review (August/September 1993), Sallah defends his production and publication of poetry in English, saying, “I, of course, would have liked to write in my own mother-tongue.  Who would not? But the fact is that Wolof is not a written language”; nevertheless, “poetry is alive and well among the Wolof” bards and minstrels, who have inspired “the aesthetic and thought-patterns of such great African poets as Birago Diop and Léopold Senghor of Senegal.” He adds that it is not necessarily a betrayal of one’s mother-tongue to write in “an alien language—a colonial language”; any language “can be domesticated to serve one’s own culture-specific” uses, or as he put it metaphorically: “English becomes my horse-of-speech. I ride it to my African destination.”

            In Dreams of Dusty Roads, for instance, a stunning collection of contemporary poetry, his incantatory “Prayer for Roots” incorporates Gambian rhythms and parabolic wisdom steeped in African imagery, and his poem titled “Woman (for F. Haidara)” pays tribute to “a tall beauty of giraffe-grace” who is “Timbuktu” and whose head is anchored “on the rock of tradition.” In these poems with crystalline language and sophisticated themes, Sallah does not hesitate to employ Wolof diction (e.g., terranga for Senegambian hospitality; Kora jalos for Mandinka griots). He does not hesitate to use humble imagery, as in “Death of Roaches,” to satirize greedy chiefs and those who steal and profit by association with them; nor does he refrain from the fun of mocking “Americans / And their self-congratulatory” behaviors, doing so by wittily imitating the rhythms and refrains of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” (“Meditation on America”).    Sallah’s idea of a good poem is one that harnesses the “magical … sacred power” of words so intimately that they “speak to you as if the words run close to your heart” (Grayson 4).  The four poets he considers “must reads” for young poets—regardless of who they are or where they live—are T. S. Eliot, Wole Soyinka, William Shakespeare, and Christopher Okigbo. Like them, Tijan Sallah is a poet attuned to the grip and subtleties of human interactions and to the rolling consequences of misapplied powers.

Bibliography

Grayson, Sandra M. “An Interview with Tijan M. Sallah, Poet.” Network 2000: In the Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance 4, 4 (Fall 1997): 1-4. Published by the Eyele Research Center (Waltham, Mass.).

Ojaide, Tanure, and Tijan M. Sallah. The New African Poetry: An Anthology. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999.

Parekh, Pushpa Naidu, and Siga Fatima Jagne, editors. Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Sallah, Tijan. Before the New Earth. (Stories.) Calcutta, India: Writers Workshop, 1988.

---.  Dreams of Dusty Roads: New Poems. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993.

---.  Kora Land. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1989.

---, editor.   New Poets of West Africa. Lagos, Nigeria: Malthouse Press, 1995.

---.  When Africa Was a Young Woman. Calcutta, India: Writers Workshop, 1980.

---.  Wolof: The Heritage Library of African Peoples. N.Y.: Rosen Publishing Group, 1996.

Sallah, Tijan, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Chinua Achebe, Teacher of Light: A Biography.  Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003.