In Dakar with Ousmane Sow: “My sculpture is intended for the public, I never forget that”

In 1999, “Télérama” traveled to Senegal to meet the great sculptor, who died on Thursday 1 December. Here is the very long account published at the time. “Sculpture is used to transmit a little humanity and a little hope”, he told us.

Unusually hot for the month of December suffocates Dakar. The breeze barely cools the still unfinished house, located by the ocean. The sky is dark blue. A few harriers hover above the large residences. On the beaten earth and sand road, a cart pulled by a donkey and driven by a ragged child passes a brand new all-terrain vehicle, raising in its wake a cloud of ocher dust in which shreds of plastic bags fly away royal blue in color.

Beads of sweat bead on my forehead, mix with the dust and burn my eyes. The slightest gesture tests my resistance. I am leaning on the balcony; I look at the courtyard of the house covered in sand with marbled shades; I observe Ousmane Sow sculpting, his face hidden by a gas mask, his left hand armed with an oxyhydrogen torch and the right, protected in a heavy leather glove, modeling melted plastic straw on the torso of a sketched statue.

I see him from behind, slightly three-quarters, sitting on a rudimentary wooden stool, his body leaning forward. He straightens up regularly and contemplates his work. A large brown halo looms over the back of his pale yellow T-shirt – and the image reminds me of childhood visions of men working the material in overheated workshops, their shoulders glistening with sweat. On the torso of the sculpted figure, the shape of the muscles appears, still coarse; in a small scrap bin, the plastic flames, giving off a nauseating gray cloud; and, within this silence where the cries of the gulls, the surf of the ocean and the laughter of the women in the neighboring gardens mingle, the blowtorch emits a haunting whistle.

A few years ago, we walk near the new football stadium built by the Chinese in the middle of the bush, near the highway linking Dakar to its airport. Ousmane leads me to the place where he collects the earth, a red clay necessary for the realization of his sculptures. The mound bears, like stigmata, the traces of the old samples. Although the land here is the same everywhere, Ousmane comes to this place far from his home, perhaps out of superstition, he says – perhaps out of habit, or out of loyalty. He points out the holes.

– There is in the ground the testimony of my sculptures as if it carried the memory. Here, you see, it's the Fulani, and here the Nuba...

Ousmane once lived in a more popular area of ​​Dakar, also near the ocean. He rented a small concrete house, surrounded by a sandy courtyard where he sculpted. You could hear the sound of the waves, the buzzing of flies, the cries of children in the alleys and the constantly on television sets in the neighborhood. On the surrounding wall remained a few hastily painted cabalistic formulas, almost erased by wind and salt, numbers, letters, multiplications, fractions: the secret composition of the Product.

You have to write Product with a capital P: the mystery surrounds its manufacture. Ousmane made it from chemical substances recovered from the trash cans of a Lebanese store. Once the mixture has been dosed, the liquid, thick and whitish, rests (like wine, he says) in plastic barrels for several years, regularly stirred and checked. Then he lets macerate shreds of hessian or incorporates red clay to obtain a thick paste; from the first (the pieces of soaked canvas) will be born the forms, from the second (the clay paste) the finishes and the expressions.

That day, Ousmane is sitting on a small wooden bench in one of the unfinished rooms of the house. A painter stands in front of him and executes his orders; Jacques, the caretaker, assists him; from the back of the room I observe the scene. The painter sifts cement, leaving a few lumps. Ousmane takes the sieve and shows him what to do. The painter adds yellow ocher pigment; then some Product (Ousmane yells at him for adding too much) and stir; then a pot of red acrylic paint that we just bought from a Lebanese hardware store and stir (Ousmane checks the color and pouts); then a pot of yolk and stirs (another pout); then a pot of white and stir (third pout); then yellow ocher pigment again and stir (Ousmane touches the mixture with his hand protected by a glove and seems reassured). The painter then steps aside and now Jacques, the confidant, adds the necessary Product, an operation, Ousmane tells me, extremely delicate. We leave the room, Ousmane leading the way and the painter closing it, loaded with the bucket, and preparing to test the mixture (red ochre) on a piece of the roof.

Ousmane's new house, a huge building rising on rocky ground, resembles a sphinx with geometric shapes. It is multicolored – which distinguishes it from the other residences in the district, all equally monumental but desperately white.

Ousmane got the idea one day to try the Product by mixing it with a lot of things (cement, paints, pigments, etc.) on the roof of the concrete garage, a modest prefiguration of the house. The coating not only resisted the sea wind, but it penetrated the concrete and waterproofed it. The older my sculptures get, he tells me, the more they solidify; so I'm going to cover my house with Product. He showed me the model, a closely guarded secret at that time, and sparking the most fanciful rumors in Dakar – one of them even claimed that it was a football. As I asked him the name of the architect, he replied that the construction of his own house was far too important a thing to be entrusted to an architect.

I didn't immediately understand. The structure of the house completed, Ousmane left the interior parts rough but devoted a lot of time to the exterior paintings, sculpted in the garden, but returned each evening to sleep in his old home, and developed, from the famous Product, large slabs (also multicolored) intended to cover the floor of the balconies – then, much later, to tile the rooms. This latest invention enlightened me. Leaning on the railing, I watched Ousmane in the yard: he was cutting strips of hessian from old sacks of rice and dipping them in the Product. My feet rested on the flagstones; I realized that they were treading on a part of the sculpture; the whole house was a sculpture.

We are sitting on the roof; we look at the ocean. Ousmane is silent. His body rocks back and forth. The minutes pass. The hours pass. Ousmane meditates, staring into space, without my being able to guess the thread of his thoughts. To meditate, he told me, is to let your mind go free. On the roof, caressed by the breeze, I try to let go of my mind, but the sun, the flight of a gull, the passage of a cart driven by a child disturb me. I try to find the thread of my dreams. I no longer meditate. The wind picks up and the ocean roars. Ousmane recovers.

– It’s funny how it fills your life…

Although I know the answer, I ask:

- What?

Ousmane looks annoyed.

– Well, the sculpture!

The HLM market, located to the west of the city in a popular district, extends its unpacking of clothes and various objects over thousands of square meters. A noisy crowd gets their supplies there, discusses the prices, passes from seriousness to laughter, from anger to laughter, from laughter to laughter. In the center of the market is a hall made up of a maze of dark alleys lined with tiny shops, in which men work on old treadle sewing machines, cutting the fabric, sewing and ironing with large irons filled with glowing embers. Beyond the stalls selling shoes, the back of the hall is occupied by the Mali market, a souk where Bambara women sell indigo woven loincloths, ocher bogolans, multicolored plastic basins, jewelry and pottery. Ousmane advances through the alleys with long strides. He walks slowly. His massive body brushes against the frail bodies of shopkeepers who move aside and flatten themselves against their shops. He finally stops in front of an old woman sitting on the ground next to pottery and jewelry. He acquires, almost without discussing the price, a terracotta censer. It's for the meditation room, he told me. A little further, at the edge of the market, we will buy incense.

Since the construction of the house, most of our discussions have taken place on the roof, facing the ocean – or, if we refer to the sphinx, on its back. The right rear leg is a square room, about seven meters on a side, whose roof terrace is at the same height as the back of the sphinx. It is, like the penthouses of New York buildings, independent of the rest of the house. A balcony surrounds it, where smoking is forbidden (this is the rule, says Ousmane) and where the sculptor, in the afternoon, takes his siesta lying on a wooden bench covered with leather cushions. One must remove one's shoes (always the rule) before entering this dark green painted room, equipped with six windows, a door and a French window, and whose floor is covered with Product slabs drawing a green and yellow ocher checkerboard. Every morning, Jacques brings embers and pours them into the terracotta censer. Ousmane then places fresh incense on top: small balls of dark red, greasy paste that sizzle, releasing a bluish and fragrant smoke.

– I wanted to lend you the car but the engine is coughing.

Ousmane looks worried, hypothesizes dust in the carburetor and sighs. This is a recent Ford, the victim of a fairly commonplace problem in this country where petrol pumps awaiting refueling empty their tank bottoms. At his side waits the marvel: a CX – Palace or Prestige, I no longer know – the same as Chirac, says Ousmane, of an indefinable color where greens mingle: water, khaki, dried leaf, bronze, etc. It keeps breaking down but Ousmane loves it: so decorated, it looks like one of his sculptures.

Do I have the evil eye? Every time I come to Dakar, Ousmane's car – whatever the car! – has a whim. It becomes a subject of jokes between us. I went with him to the garage one day and listened happily to a conversation in Wolof punctuated with French technical words: carburettor, gearbox, air filter, etc. Here the parts are missing and the mechanics adapt: ​​the clutch of a Renault on a Citroën, for example. The lifespan of DIY becomes random: one hour or ten years.

Another day, Ousmane is desperately looking for an electric drill in a huge tool souk. The word passes between the shops and soon the touts approach Ousmane and drag him to their stalls where the traders all offer an impressive list of objects in which of course the famous electric drill does not appear. All the conversations end with the same sentence that Ousmane ends up translating for me.

– They say there is, but it's missing. You will always hear that in Africa: there are some but it is lacking.

I accompanied Ousmane several times around Dakar in search of rebar, tools, paint, cement or incense. There was always some, but sometimes it was missing. I understood that these wanderings, like car breakdowns, belonged to African life, to its poetry, to its uncertainties, for Westerners often unbearable and for Ousmane as the assurance of a possible humanity.

– In the morning, I sit there, on the balcony surrounding the meditation room, facing the sea, and I reflect. Or downstairs, on the balcony of the library, always facing the sea and I model accessories: a hand, a weapon. In the afternoon, after the siesta, from four o'clock I work in the yard.

– Have you ever had a workshop?

– If: my yard. Where do you want me to go? That I go to my workshop every morning as if I were going to the factory? I never considered sculpting anywhere other than in my house.

– I mean: a covered, closed workshop?

With a wave of his arm, he shows me the landscape, the blue sky where a few harriers are hovering, the wind which stirs the leaves of the palm trees, the nims, the tamarisks and the casuarinas, the bougainvilleas and the laurels in bloom, the foaming waves crashing on the huge black rocks.

– I don't see why I would lock myself in to sculpt!

The drain showing signs of fatigue (clogging due to dust? sand?), the shower tray (new like the house) fills with water and its evacuation takes some time. Downstairs, a taxi-brousse is waiting for me to take me to Saint-Louis. So I leave, letting the water flow slowly. On my return, three days later, Ousmane pointed out to me dryly that I had not cleaned the bin and that he had to take care of it. I try to justify myself but he does not listen to me. I have never seen him in such a state of anger for which I find only one origin: the sculptures, for the moment, are not coming out.

The sculptures have a life of their own: they come out or they don't come out, independently of Ousmane's will, of his gestures, of his hands kneading the material. An arm, a torso, the position of a leg can resist for days before submitting, overcome by the patience of the sculptor. The same test returns with the modeling of faces.

– I know more or less what I'm looking for, he told me one day, but each time I discover the expression on the face; if I am not moved, I destroy the sculpture.

We are in the old workshop – that is to say, in the courtyard of the little house, full of sunshine, cries of children and shouting matches between J.R. and Sue Ellen. We observe the first horses of the battle of Little Big Horn, still in draft form. One of them reminds me of the horse in Guernica, painted by Picasso: neck outstretched, mouth open as if letting out a final cry of anger and suffering.

– A man, even a failure, remains a man, he told me. But a horse can neither be failed nor realistic: it becomes insipid. Picasso understood this well. Look at David's paintings, for example, his horses, unlike those of Delacroix, offer no interest: they are too faithful to reality.

The conversation resumes a few hours later, on the roof of the house, at sunset, facing the gray sea that gleams like an immense metal plate.

– Do you remember the seated Nouba? If you pick it up, it's a monster: arched legs, too long and placed on the side like a skirt. It takes exaggeration to get the expression. Rodin keeps doing it. His Thinker has a forearm much too short compared to the upper arm; it is an anatomical aberration, like his Balzac and all his sculptures! Camille Claudel never understood that: she sculpts with unimaginable perfection and obtains much less expression; it's smooth. This is why my injured horse has twisted, tucked-in legs and a round back impossible in a real horse: to express its approaching death.

Night is falling. The sun disappears behind the hotel once designed by a pupil of Le Corbusier, a concave curve facing the ocean. Only the bare bulbs of the Mauritanians' stalls illuminate the sandy paths. The music broadcast by their radio sets reaches us muffled; they mingle with the surf of the ocean, the barking of dogs, the roar of a plane taking off from the nearby airport whose flight we follow for a moment in the sky overseas.

– At the same time, I don't tell myself: I'm going to distort, as if I were applying a concept. The distortion, the exaggeration come naturally; they obey a desire that I have.

Returning to the example of the nouba wrestlers, I talk to him about their upset imbalance, their tangled legs, the feeling of both strength and fragility they inspire.

– It is through balance – or apparent imbalance – that we can give movement to a sculpture. And it is through deformation that we can give expression. The viewer should be able to feel sadness or joy, defeat or victory, or even fatigue, in the shape of the sculpture itself.

I have wondered for a long time why Ousmane sculpts teeth on faces whose finished mouths will be closed. The question, when I ask it, seems to annoy him. Shut your mouth, he tells me (I obey). Put your tongue on the front of the palate (I obey). What do you feel? Teeth.

The three-hour delay of my plane upsets Ousmane: we risk missing the boat for the island of Gorée, located off Dakar, where we have to have dinner. Luckily the car works – but in my memory, it is a rental vehicle. We drive in the warm night to the port to see, on our arrival, the lights of the boat nodding in the harbour; the next leaves in two hours. Hating setbacks, Ousmane takes me to a corner of the port and begins a long palaver with a guard. In the seriousness of the conversation I understand that he is negotiating (Ousmane always discusses the prices – of a taxi, of food, etc. – by looking exasperated, then miming his anger, never smiling, even when he wins the game). The deal concluded, he informs me that we are going to go to Gorée by canoe and we follow the guard in the dark to a pontoon where the large fishing boats are moored.

I'm sitting near the diesel jerry can – a plain yellow plastic container, connected to the engine by a hose fitted with a small rubber bulb operated by a kid. The pungent smell of gasoline sickens me. Ousmane, installed at the front of the canoe, monitors the maneuver, sometimes dropping in a severe voice a few laconic sentences that I do not understand. The fisherman pulls sharply on the string: the old outboard motor coughs, trembles on its base and is silent; after two unsuccessful attempts, it finally backfires, throwing a nauseating cloud of smoke onto the black water haloed with iridescent sheets. The boy casts off the moorings and jumps onto the quay; Ousmane, armed with a pole, pushes back the other canoes, clearing a passage for us to the harbour; and, soon, the boat, swept by a warm breeze, sinks into the night, between an ebony sea and a starry sky, towards the beacons of Gorée whose colored lights flash in the distance.

- It's beautiful, isn't it? Ousmane said smiling to me.

The customs officer at Dakar airport opens my bag and looks at the large package it contains. He puts his inquisitive finger on the package and worries about its nature. I explain to him that it is a gift for my friend, the sculptor Ousmane Sow. Then his eyes light up, a broad smile appears on his face and, theatrically spreading his arm, he proclaims: Sir, it is a pleasure to welcome you, come on!

The ritual goes like this: when I arrive in Dakar, Ousmane is waiting for me in the airport hall where I give him the gift I brought him (usually an art book, which gives him makes it known that I am constituting his library for him); when I leave, he accompanies me and, still in the airport hall, slips a package into my arms, advising me to open it only once in Paris. After two or three trips – and two or three exotic gifts – he probably thought I was sufficiently imbued with Africa to offer me a magnificent embroidered boubou that I have kept as a relic ever since.

For the first time, because of new immigration laws – the Pasqua laws – Ousmane is having difficulty obtaining a visa to enter France, which is now essential. Formerly married to a Frenchwoman, father of two French children, he could easily acquire dual nationality but he stubbornly refuses to apply. There is no shame in being Senegalese, he says – and his pride reminds me of the policeman at the airport checking my passport and asking me: do you find it normal to enter my country without a visa when your government requires one for my compatriots? Ousmane studied physiotherapy in Paris in the early 1950s, without ever suffering from racism, which was not widespread at the time. When I didn't know where to sleep, he said, I even went to the police station where the policemen lent me a cell and offered me food. The idea of ​​a welcoming, open and republican France therefore also pushes him to keep his Senegalese nationality – and that is why I am accompanying him today to the French consulate where he hopes that his visa application will finally be accepted. . I'm sitting in an air-conditioned hallway, watching the merry-go-round of officials, when I see him come out of the office laughing.

– They still wanted to make me wait, but I warned them that a French journalist was waiting for me behind the door and here is the result.

He shows me the buffer and adds:

- It's really good that you came.

For a long time, Ousmane sculpted quietly, in the evenings and on weekends. His wife then considered him a kind of eccentric. He was a physiotherapist, he lived in the suburbs of Paris, he had a completely ordinary life – except sculpture, of course. Then he felt the need to return to Senegal, homesick in a way, but his wife could not stand African life and they left each other. In Dakar, he opened a practice. A few years earlier, he had headed the physiotherapy service at Le Dantec hospital, the largest in the country. Ousmane speaks little of these years, but rumor has it that he was a dedicated practitioner, deeply human, in a word: admirable; and, although he once gave up this activity to devote himself entirely to sculpture, those who knew him then still call him, with respect and emotion, the Patron.

The smell of grilled meat intoxicates the mosquitoes that the ocean breeze will soon drive away. Ousmane cooks ground beefsteaks on an electric grill. It's night. We eat on the roof of the house (the back of the sphinx), enjoying the relative freshness of the air. I evoke the latest Western artistic debates which, seen from a continent where the primary concern of most of its inhabitants is to eat their fill, suddenly seem derisory to me. Ousmane serves me the meat on a slice of bread; in the glow of the small luminous plot installed at the foot of the roof terrace (the right hind leg of the sphinx), his face reflects astonishment.

– Talking about the death of art seems curious to me; and a bit perverse: as if they wanted it to happen. They also speak of the death of philosophy, when there are still so many things to think about. Me, when people make aesthetic remarks to me about my work, I listen to them and I try to analyze them; I confront them with my convictions and, if they bring me nothing, I reject them. I can't doubt the essential, otherwise it's all over. I find that all theories sometimes do not correspond to the reactions of a large audience. We can say that this large audience is a set of idiots, but we can also reflect on the function of art and wonder if it is exclusively reserved for a small circle of intellectuals... Aesthetics as a field of thinking seems to me…how can I put it?…like a delicate discipline, because emotion and the affective are mixed together. So I don't think we should draw definitive conclusions. In fact, I do not understand that we are talking about the death of sculpture since I am a sculptor; nor of the death of figuration since I am a figurative sculptor. This amounts to denying the obvious.

The mist thickens and the hitherto veiled sun disappears behind the clouds. A feeling of autumn sets in, reinforced by the cool wind blowing from the sea. From the balcony, I observe the fish gleaners bent between the rocks where, at low tide, there remain small ponds in which the captive carpenter is dying. In the courtyard, Ousmane opens a cylindrical black plastic container and checks the quality of the Product, its color, its consistency, its fluidity. Using a stick, he stirs the mixture. He seems satisfied. He raises his head, sees me and, pointing to the can, says to me: do you remember our last conversation on contemporary art? As I tell him that yes, I remember it perfectly, all the better since I noted it down in my notebook, he adds: well, I invented my material, and I believe that it is something something very contemporary. We can no longer cast bronzes or carve marble as in the past, it's stupid. But on the other hand, we can invent lots of different materials, and that…

– When I lived in France, I often saw an African sweeper cleaning the street while dancing. He turned, he twirled, his broom in his hand and, believe me, his movements expressed a rare elegance and his gesture seemed light, airy. When he was absent, his replacement, on the contrary, struggled and left behind piles of dead leaves. One day, I approached the sweeper and asked him the reason for this dance. Here the wind swirls, he replied, so you have to turn with it. You see, art is everywhere, in words and gestures, but you still have to feel the wind to dance with it.

An incredible pile of bodies in the making invades the courtyard, some still reduced to their scrap metal structure, others put into volume and in places almost finished – here the expression of a face, there the movement of a arm or the mouth of a horse. As I am surprised by the coexistence of these different states, sometimes on the same sculpture, Ousmane explains to me that the completion of a detail or a face reassures him and allows him to continue.

Here, then, scattered in the red ocher sand, is the battle of Little Big Horn, a project that the sculptor has had in him for many years – the symbolic battle of humiliation and revolt, he says. The horses, the intertwined bodies, remind me of another battle, Guernica, and another artist, Picasso; but with this difference that Little Big Horn represents one of the rare historical victories of the oppressed - a real victory, says Ousmane, since there were about as many men on both sides, but that the Indians of America do not celebrate, preferring to mourn the defeat at Wouden Knee as we lament the monstrosity of slavery and the violence of colonization, rather than rejoicing in Lat Dior's historic victory over French troops.

One day, Ousmane found a book of photographs showing scenes of struggles among the Noubas, an ethnic group from Sudan. These images inspired him to create a series of magnificent sculptures, where we see warriors entwined, engaged in symbolic confrontations, fighting for their freedom and dignity. But Ousmane was unaware of the sulphurous past of the author of the book, Leni Riefensthal, former filmmaker of the Third Reich and friend of Hitler. Taking advantage of this rapprochement, and forgetting to look at the works, their deformations, the subtle and extremely contemporary game of their geometric constructions, certain European aesthetes then engaged in a heavy misinterpretation and qualified the sculptures, in their eyes guilty of being figurative , of totalitarians. At the time, they were of course unaware of the attempt to exterminate the Nouba ethnic group by the Sudanese Islamists – which Ousmane the African knew.

We have lunch in Ousmane's old house – he, boiled eggs sprinkled with Maggi aroma (the essential magic potion that flavors everything he eats), and I, a tiebou-diene (a rice with fish) prepared in my honor. We talk about politics (one of Senegalese's favorite pastimes), the economic crisis and advances in technology leading to unemployment. Suddenly, Ousmane takes on a really sorry look and says to me: you know, sometimes Westerners make me think of this plane that the English invented in the past; it had an engine that was supposed to propel it to a speed never before achieved, but when they turned it on, the engine turned out to be so powerful that it wasn't the propeller that spun, it was the plane .

Seated on a stool in the sandy courtyard amid unfinished sculptures, Ousmane conscientiously cuts squares of burlap using a pair of scissors and removes the annoying burrs. He tells me that he feels tired, that he goes to bed early at the moment, that he wakes up around two o'clock in the morning, reads until four o'clock, and goes back to sleep until the maid comes. . I observe, as he talks to me, his powerful hands manipulate the canvas, and I realize that Ousmane works alone, without assistance, even when it comes to performing the most humble, thankless tasks, as if no foreign hand should land on one of the elements that will make up the sculpture.

Ousmane does not compromise on politeness, respect and dignity. Of an impressive size, he does not hesitate, if the situation calls for it, to intervene, to defend the weak, to make the punch. His last great feat – reported in detail by the national press – fueled conversations for a long time: he dared to enter the garden of the National Assembly with a crane, in order to recover a sculpture (a Maasai holding a buffalo by the horns) that the respectable institution had bought him and was slow to pay. He came out without the work – but with the check presented by the President of the Assembly in person – and has since enjoyed, among the population eager for epics, an almost legendary glory.

We are in Gorée, in an old renovated colonial house bordering the sea. In the distance, in the whitish sky, the buildings of Dakar, the warehouses of its port and a part of the corniche can be seen. Ousmane, with sparkling eyes, talks to me about boxing, for which he has a real passion. He gets up at night to watch the matches on television; he loves stylists; he prefers heavyweights; Tyson's colossal strength and brutality impress him, but he retains an undiminished admiration for Muhammad Ali – the admiration that only great artists can command.

– I don't put feathers or headdresses on them, it's ridiculous...

Ousmane turns nervously around his unfinished Indians, straightens some of them, straddles the bodies in the making, caresses their material, removes a few annoying twigs in passing.

– …just war paint on my face and, believe me, it will be accurate, and historians won’t bother me…

(I would never know what Ousmane feared since the finished faces of the Indians ultimately bear no war paint. I retain his concern for historical accuracy. We know the faces of the chiefs, he told me , since they were all photographed, with the exception of Sitting Bull, who was murdered before. So I'm going to invent a face for him. And Sitting Bull's face, like Crazy Horse's, like all the other faces, will express a magnificent dignity, strength and interiority.)

– … I sculpt them naked – except for one who will be wearing pants – with a square of fabric as a cache-sex. I was thinking of carving twenty-two of them, but I realized that an Indian woman participated in the battle of Little Big Horn to avenge the death of her husband. There will therefore be twenty-three characters and eight horses.

Ousmane's face softened. He points to the bodies lying in the sand, covered with shreds of hessian, looking like skinned people, their heads still emaciated, skeletal, with protruding eyes or empty sockets, with lipless mouths showing carnivorous teeth, with disturbing faces mutants or extraterrestrials.

- I'm quite happy as the postures so far are coming out well. Everything is consistent. This is the first phase of the work: making the characters and the relationships between them appear. Then I will move on to modeling.

Ousmane contemplates his work and smiles.

– At the same time, it's good like that, isn't it? We would like to leave them like this, unfinished... but that's not possible.

When Ousmane is not working, we often walk around in the middle of this currently chaotic battle. He explains to me the way in which the sculptures will be composed: such a man over there (the barely modeled body, without hands, the concrete iron still visible in places) will ride such a mount (for the moment a simple pile of plastic straw ), or this one (a vague silhouette) will be lying in front of that one (with a face already defined) who will strip him. He points to a skeleton.

– Here you see Custer wounded; you understand, he is going to die. The Indian there (he points to another skeleton in a corner of the yard), faster than him, kills him with his own revolver. It is a historical reality: we have the testimony of this Indian.

The position of Custer's murderer – right leg bent under him, left leg stretched forward, right hand resting on the ground – obeys a skilful balance. Once installed by Ousmane facing Custer, the impression is reinforced: the American presents himself as an elongated trapeze (designed by the leg, the trunk, the arm, and the ground) and the geometry of the two forms (still reduced to two rebar structures sheathed in plastic straw) an extraordinary movement is born.

Further on, he shows me a horse, its hind legs wide apart, its belly low, its mouth outstretched, and tells me that it will be ridden by an Indian chief and that it will jump over a group of dead men and horses. The carcasses of these horses, huge, monstrous, are scattered in the yard. They represent, in reality, only the pieces of the sculpture that Ousmane will bring together once they are completed. By observing them, a question comes to me: their forms being decided from the development of the concrete iron structures, how can Ousmane, without the help of a drawing, conceive the final composition and ensure that the arrangement of all these volumes works down to the millimeter?

One day in Paris I discovered a photograph of a draft notebook belonging, I am told, to Ousmane Sow, showing four drawings of horses, hasty sketches that testify to extraordinary virtuosity and recall those of Delacroix. On the phone, Ousmane confirms to me that he is indeed the author and, in front of my astonishment (I thought that for him the drawing was limited to his concrete iron structures), he tells me that the drawing does not interest him , which he had never drawn since childhood but which, in order to meet the demand of a Japanese museum, he had spontaneously made a few sketches. And as I marvel at the quality of his drawing, he simply replies that it's like riding a bicycle: you can't forget it.

We are once again sitting on the roof, at night, in the cool of the wind. We look at the dim clarity of the ocean; we listen to the surf. I can barely distinguish the whitish moss from the scum on the asphalt-black rocks. Below, in the courtyard, the sculptures are nothing more than shadows, or vague silhouettes drawn by the light of a lantern. Ousmane is meditating, perhaps? He is silent. His gaze seems to be lost. Why is it at this moment that I understand that the images, by I don't know what miraculous gift, are imprinted on his mind in three dimensions, that he spatially conceives his work, and that the drawing, consequently, does not is of no use?

We often have lunch in the courtyard of a restaurant on the Pointe des Almadies, protected from the sun by the cool shade of a giant rubber tree. Ousmane always sits at the same table, the closest to the entrance, and always in the same place, facing the sea. When a car parks in front of the restaurant and obstructs his view, he gets up and asks the owner to move his vehicle. For some time now, he told me, the mentality of some whites coming to Senegal reminds him of the colonial era: they are arrogant and contemptuous. The last time, he even almost corrected an Italian who refused "to obey a Negro" and to move his car, but who, faced with the build of the sculptor, finally complied reluctantly. Ousmane bursts out laughing. I order, as usual, a fish cooked in a shell of coarse salt; he orders, as usual, meat and fries drizzled with Maggi aroma.

When Ousmane recounts his life, he always manages so that the anecdotes have a symbolic significance (the story of the sweeper, for example), or that they end in bursts of laughter (his own, mixed with tears, taking on the task of dragging the others). One of the funniest concerns a field he bought one day near Rufisque, because at that time, he says, it was fashionable for the people of Dakar to invest a little money in market gardening. He hired a watchman and planted onions; but the onion crop, oddly, turned out to be meager. He replaced the onion with cassava. With the caretaker conscientiously tending the fields, the cassava thrived. When harvest time came, he and Ousmane decided on the date – a Friday, I believe. That day, the sculptor got up early and went near Rufisque to discover his plowed field: all the cassava had just been stolen. Furious, he rushed into the cabin of the guardian who was still sleeping, woke him up, and demanded explanations that the old man could not give him, claiming to have heard nothing, despite the deep imprints of the wheels of a tractor in the ground. The guard was lying, of course, but he never confessed. Later, Ousmane learned that he lived in a nearby village, and that a kind of local custom wanted the villagers, with the complicity of the guards, to appropriate the harvests of the Dakar residents during the night. Annoyed, he immediately sold his field, abandoned his agricultural ambitions, tried to forget his lost savings, and promised himself, like the crow in the fable, that no one would catch him again.

This story, Ousmane told it to me the day I told him that some friends were offering me an association in the setting up of a small Senegalese company. He made me swear not to pursue the project. His gaze expressed sincere concern, quickly swept away by the tears of joy that accompanied the end of the anecdote.

Since I am leaving the next day for Paris, we have agreed, Ousmane and I, to spend the last evening together. I have just been staying in Rufisque, and when I arrive at his new house at nightfall, his caretaker, Jacques, informs me that he has just gone to bed in the other house where he still lives. Somewhat disappointed (not to say unhappy), I return to Rufisque at night, driven by Pape Diop (he pushes the engine of the little Fiat to the limit, slaloms between the fast cars, brushes the carts, narrowly avoids the children who in the dark, swerving in the sand when a crazy truck appeared in the middle of the road), Pape Diop, therefore, whom his friends affectionately nicknamed Vatanen. I return the next day by the crowded train, seated between veiled women (I wondered the reason for this veil until the dust, despite the closed windows, invaded the compartment and tried to suffocate me). I find Ousmane relaxed and smiling. The day before, he told me, he worked all day on a figure (the one who is lying, dead, scalped) without managing to get the sculpture out.

– There was nothing to do, it didn't come, especially the head. When the character was on his back, it was fine, but when I put him as he should be, on his stomach, it no longer made any sense.

– And today?

– Today, yes, it came out. I finished it.

A few hours later, he will accompany me to the airport and offer me my departure present in the lobby.

A long time ago, Ousmane organized an exhibition of his sculptures in a gas station in Dakar (just as he organized an exhibition of the Indians on the corniche, facing the ocean, before the great Parisian retrospective; like Youssou N' Dour, when he is in Dakar, plays every evening with his orchestra in his own nightclub; as one could meet in a bar, before his death, the immense director Djibril Diop Mambéty (Hyènes, among others), and talk with him of cinema; like... here, the word popular immediately comes to mind, but in its most noble sense: no demagogy, no opportunism inhabit these artists who never cease to demonstrate, through their modesty, their commitment and their generosity and their immense respect for the public). In the gas station, therefore, an old woman came in, looked at the sculptures for a long time and wept. She confessed to the sculptor that she could neither read nor write and knew nothing about art, but that, she said pointing to the works, is really magnificent. Then in her sobs she added: formerly men were like this, they were men.

Ousmane tells me this anecdote in a moved voice, his eyes slightly misty. Sitting in a rattan armchair very close to the ground, his back arched, his elbows resting on his knees, he kneads his hands, rubs them, grinds them, expressing not nervousness, but rather an embarrassment, a modesty.

– You understand, the emotion felt by people who look at my sculptures imposes a lot of obligations on me, a lot of demands. I sculpt because I take pleasure in sculpting and because I give it. My sculpture is intended for the public, I never forget that.

We dined in Gorée, in the courtyard of the old colonial house, in the company of Mustapha Dimé, a sculptor living and working in a small turret clinging to the rocks, at the tip of the island, whose Ousmane appreciates both human qualities and hard work. Mustapha, younger, multiplies the marks of respect and listens to Ousmane who, that evening, feeling in a playful mood (the sculptures must be coming out well at the moment), tells anecdote after anecdote and amuses the assembly. During the stories, Mustapha plays with small Dogon iron sculptures, puts them together, and I note how obsessed he is with balance. At the end of the meal, they come to talk about time – the time of art and sculpture. Responding to the concerns of some about the apparent delay of his work (the Indians of the Battle of the Little Big Horn), Ousmane then asserts that a sculpture - and hence any work - contains its own time of realization that it takes, for the artist, knowing how to respect. With a smile, Mustapha silently nods.

The next day, Mustapha will tell me all the admiration he feels for Ousmane, for his work, for his righteousness and his honesty in life. He considers him as a model, as a master, even if their two lifestyles are opposed on many points: if Mustapha also meditates for long hours facing the sea, he has adopted for some years an ascetic and deeply religious life. , no doubt influenced by her membership in the Mouride congregation, the most mystical and radical Senegalese Muslim sect. Fifteen years younger than Ousmane, Mustapha nevertheless believes in the power of magic and thinks, for example, that the pains he feels in his stomach come from a spell cast on him by a jealous comrade. He treats himself by drinking herbal teas, seeing a marabout and wearing grigris – which has the gift of annoying Ousmane, much more pragmatic (his past as a physiotherapist?), who, fearing an ulcer, keeps advising him to go to the hospital.

Right now, he tells me, I release six sculptures a month. I watch him work in the yard: he models a figure on his knees, legs apart, body leaning back, arms falling behind his back, powerful torso, bulging and knotty muscles, but which the wind makes oscillate.

– What is the sculpture for?, I asked him.

His face suddenly became serious.

– To transmit a little humanity and a little hope. When I sculpt the Nouba warriors, this ethnic group from Sudan that the Islamists massacre, I sculpt the pain of man, of all men – my own pain. So I have to believe in man, while knowing that he can sometimes do the worst, that there is good and bad in him, everything that I feel in myself. I know you can't wake up a sleeping conscience, yet that doesn't prevent you from trying to show the suffering and the greatness of beings? And then, if I succeed with one person, I will have won, right?

On Sunday morning, Dakar seems asleep, immersed in an unusual silence (one would also have to describe the din of the city during the week, the cries, the horns, the music, the laughter and the crackling of the mixed engines). The ocher sand tracks of Yoff, where the blackish peaks of the rocks point here and there that the cars take care to circumvent, the tracks are therefore deserted, sometimes crossed by some starving dog in search of a dump, watched from above by a flight of scavengers. In the silent courtyard, I watch the sculptor's objects from the balcony: a pair of gray skin gloves placed on a sky-blue plastic bucket, spatulas cluttered with Product, a blowtorch on an ugly wooden stool, a large knife with a handle stained, a yellow gas mask on a small bench, pots, of all shapes, sizes, colors, recovered and recycled.

It's hot, very hot, a heavy heat announcing the next rainy season (the rainy season, in summer). We walk in the streets of the plateau, in Dakar. Ousmane offers me to go eat an ice cream – his favorite delicacy with the Maggi flavor. He drives me to the best pastry shop in town and orders a vanilla ice cream that he covers with a mountain of powdered sugar.

I'm sitting on a bench and staring at the ocean. The sun draws an imperfect silver triangle on the water, like a fir tree whose tip is turned towards my gaze. In the distance the horizon by the light mist that surrounds it is a blurred line. A few seagulls fly in the sky; raptors accompany them. A trawler passes; the sound of its engine harmonizes with the surf. The sun slowly veers towards the west; the surface of the tree decreases; its peak lengthens; its thorns sparkle. Carried by the warm breeze to the shore, the powerful voice of a muezzin, broadcast by a loudspeaker, chants a verse from the Koran. And I hear, like an echo from the depths of my memory, the voice of Ousmane telling me: Dakar is the only place in the world where I want to live.

When I watched the unfinished Fulani in the courtyard of the little house, the old one, the one invaded by clouds of flies, the cries of children and the howling programs of the neighboring televisions, Ousmane was already talking to me about the Indians, of the battle of Little Big Horn, of work on the duty of memory and of the difficulty he had in gathering historical documentation. Now, I contemplate Indians sketched out, the incredible shambles of the courtyard where all the stages of sculpture mingle, from concrete iron to the modeled face, and Ousmane dreams of his new project.

– After the Indians, I will sculpt the Egyptians. I already have a group of characters: an embalming session. It happens to me the same way every time: a character imposes itself and, when I hold it, the whole scene comes. Thus on the Indians I had the idea of ​​a warrior stripping a dead soldier; then everything else came from that character.

I really like Egypt. I tell him about an old trip to Cairo, the hospitality of its inhabitants, their gentleness, and the beauty of the desert, beyond Saqqara, crossed by the shadow of a small cloud spinning in the sky. crystal clear. Ousman smiled.

– that's good, I wanted to suggest that you go together...

Or: we will therefore go together to Egypt to dawdle between the pyramids and tease the sides of the sphinx, a mythological animal occupying a special place in the imaginary bestiary of Ousmane, a mythological animal that he would like to sculpt, he told me , a huge sphinx in which visitors could enter and which would be a tribute to Cheik-Anta-Diop – forgetting for a moment that his house represents him geometrically, that it is not really a house and that it is already, in its incompleteness, a sculpture.

We're not talking. Ousmane shakes his head, spreads his arms, opens his mouth and gives up. We do not talk. We are sitting in the shade of the tamarisk trees, in front of the house. I just came back from Saint-Louis. It must have been a party, the tour of Senegal in Moussa's taxi-brousse, the Sine Saloum, Kaolack, Tambacounda, the Niokolokoba (the dry bed of the Gambia River covered with red stones, bordered by ocher cliffs populated by bawling baboons, flown over by the great eagles drawing elegant arabesques in the sky, where there are deep pools in which the hippos bathe, while on their sandy shores, near the fresh tracks of the lions, the crocodiles sleep with their yellow mouths open), Kédougou ( the wooded mountains at the top of which still live animist tribes, the Bédiks), Bakel (former colonial stage crushed by heat on the border of Mali and Mauritania), Podor and finally Saint-Louis where I was to meet Mustapha Dimé… It was to to be a party that ended in the hospital, in the room of a dying man, skeletal, prostrate like a foetus, skin yellowed, discolored: the stomach pains were not from an ulcer but from cancer – unpronounceable word here. On the phone, Ousmane, who had come to Saint-Louis three days earlier, confirmed the diagnosis to me: cancer patients, he had massaged many of them at Le Dantec hospital, to relieve their pain, to bring them a little human warmth. . Every day, I went to Mustapha's room, until the last evening: he hardly spoke any more, barely a whisper, but kept, stuck in his hair, the porcupine quill that I had given him and that the Bé diks consider as a lucky charm – ultimate and vain grigri… It must have been a party. Ousmane goes back to the x-ray that Mustapha, two years ago, should have had... and maybe it wasn't too late then, and... What's the point of railing now against superstitions? You can't understand, Mustapha told me, you're a Westerner. It was supposed to be a party. All that remains is an immense sadness that we share, Ousmane and I, in the shade of the tamarisk trees, and the feeling of profound injustice.

The warriors of the Maasai series wear leather and iron charms around their necks and wrists which one day disappeared in a warehouse in Dakar, just before the sculptures were shipped to France. When he noticed it, Ousmane immediately called the guards together and (he's the one who tells me this while laughing), putting on a devastated face, said to them: I'm very worried about this theft because the charms have an evil power on those who steal them. The next morning, all the trinkets had miraculously found their place.

The day of the Indians on the Corniche exhibition is approaching. In the courtyard-workshop, many sculptures are not yet finished (faces not modeled, hands missing, hessian still too apparent on the bodies, etc.). Dressed in white, Ousmane works, assisted by Jacques and another man who make the manes of the horses and the hair of the fighters. Despite the apparent delay, he seems serene, tired but serene. Armed with an electric grinder, he passes from one sculpture to another, digs a deep cut in a wrist in order to rectify a position, erases an asperity on a shoulder, modifies a face, straightens the leg of a horse. He takes me to the porch of his house and shows me his black CX station wagon he usually uses to transport materials, in which we have installed a foam mattress covered with a loincloth.

– You see, I work at night. When I'm too tired, I lie down here and ask Jacques to wake me up an hour later. And believe me, this car is truly extraordinary: just long enough for me to lie down, just wide enough for me to turn around, and just narrow enough to keep my heat.

The day before the exhibition, before the works are removed and installed on the cornice, I gaze one last time at the Indians in the courtyard and I begin to doubt myself. They seem to me too polished, too clean, too colored with earthy pigments. The next afternoon, during the inauguration, I no longer recognize them: during the night, and at the very moment of their installation in the early morning, Ousmane soiled them, abused them, remodeled them, endowing them with a power of extraordinary expression. That evening, I tell him how I doubted him, and how my doubts were swept away when I saw the sculptures in their entirety, the scenes finally reconstructed and the bodies reworked for the last time. He lets out a deep sigh and says to me: if you only knew how much I doubted myself!

A small party closes the inauguration. Ousmane responds to requests and receives marks of admiration with obvious pleasure. The officials (ministers, ambassadors, sponsors of the exhibition…) surround him, congratulate him. He laughs; his face marked by worry and sleepless nights, he finally relaxes. Darkness envelops Dakar and the nearby ocean is just a rumour. Something languorous floats in the fresh air, a kind of abandonment, this sweet vacancy accompanying completion. Conversations slip by, muffled, inhabited by weariness and propriety, when Bigué, one of Ousmane's friends, who runs a small souvenir shop on the island of Gorée, magnificently dressed in a large bright orange boubou, stands in front of him and, like cherries, in a beautiful head voice sings his praises. The guests surprised by this improvised spectacle smile, but in the eyes of Ousmane appears a glimmer of emotion – the flicker of tears.

Two statues belonging to the Fulani series have just returned. Purchased by the presidency (at least I believe), exhibited in the gardens, regularly watered, they suffered from a few minor injuries (their feet, especially) that Ousmane healed before sending them to France for the Parisian retrospective. Their clothes are in tatters and the patina of their bodies, under the effect of the water and the sea air, offers new and magnificent nuances. Ousmane is dazzled by the aging of these old sculptures (three times he will ask me if I have looked at them, three times he will confide to me his impression of discovering them) and dreams aloud of seeing the Indians grow old in this way, for two days installed on the cornice, offered to the crowd of Dakar residents coming to admire them.

Moussa Ka, my friend, borom-driver, big taxi-brousse, Peul among the Peuls and high-flying prankster, knows nothing about art and, to put it plainly, doesn't care at all – which does not prevent him from dropping a few sentences of remarkable lucidity and spontaneously baptizing the museum of Dakar: the mosque of the Toubabs (the Whites, in Wolof). But when he enters the courtyard of the sphinx for the first time and discovers the sculptures, he emits a whistle of admiration, takes me by the arm, leads me into a corner and says to me, pointing to Ousmane: it is the big one who did this? He's strong, you know?

- That you came from so far to see me, I can't believe it: it's a great honor.

Ousmane smiles, modestly trying to hide his pride but fails (I will see that same smile both embarrassed and delighted when the passengers of a fast bus recognize him). We met for the first time in Paris a few months earlier. I have just arrived in Dakar, at the beginning of the summer, shortly before the rainy season; the hot air takes on moisture and the mist dims the light and clouds the horizon. I bring with me a bottle of Bordeaux and Yves Bonnefoy's book on Giacometti, Ousmane's favorite sculptor. I discover the courtyard of the small house invaded by sketched sculptures, twisted concrete irons whose curves already evoke human silhouettes, small bundles of tied straws (before discovering the virtues of the oxyhydrogen torch, Ousmane sewed these little bundles together to give the sculpture its volume) and buckets filled with a strange, thick, fluid and blackish mixture. The next day, Bouna Medoune Seye, a Senegalese photographer, accompanies me. Of an exuberant nature, he displays an unusual timidity when entering the courtyard. He walks slowly behind me, his body hunched over, and when he finds himself face to face with Ousmane, he takes the sculptor's hand, raises it to his forehead and says with deference: Master Sow.