Dismantling Thiaroye’s Dichotomies in Cheikh Faty Faye’s Play

Abstract

Although first published in a sequence of episodes in a Senegalese newspaper during the 1970s, Cheikh Faty Faye’s play Aube de sang was published in France as a complete work in 2005. It contributed to disseminating a work that had until then remained mostly unknown. Despite an early and discreet first publication, I argue that, like Bouchareb’s movie, Faye’s play belongs to a third phase of representing the mutiny and massacre. Indeed, the tone in which Faye depicts the mutiny has more in common with Bouchareb’s than it has with Doumbi-Fakoly’s, Diop’s, or Sembene’s.