Saër Maty Ba probes the abyss July 7, 2026

Published in 2025, by Le Lys Bleu, “The Darkness of the Absurd” by Saër Maty Ba is part of an introspective vein where the quest for identity becomes novelistic material. Through the shattered destiny of Marie Madeleine, the author explores in his novel modern wandering, between uprooting, love and existential vertigo.

Reading “The Darkness of the Absurd” (180 pages) by Saër Maty Ba is to engage in an inner journey where the meaning is lost as much as it is reconstructed, like the literary experience offered by Inès Senghor in “The Honey of the Crab”.

In an age of plural identities, multiple passports and fragmented belongings, the question of origins has never been so burning. Saër Maty Ba does not remain a spectator. In this new novel, the author abandons only the mysteries of history to delve into a territory that he is particularly fond of: human psychology. He summons three conflicts: Indochina War, Vietnam War and Algerian War as matrices of the destinies of his characters. “Wars without which Mary Magdalene and Omar would not have existed,” he says.

These conflicts, the author continues, set in motion the choices of their progenitors, projecting them towards a path of no possible return. The intimate story is thus linked to the violence of the world: the characters inherit a displacement, an original rupture. To understand each other, Marie Madeleine and Omar must, he emphasizes, delve into the scraps of memory left by these wars, into this darkness of the absurd.

Through these trajectories, Saër Maty Ba highlights the persistence of colonial trauma. These wars, linked to the same imperial power, share a defeat whose effects are prolonged. France, he observes, continues to lose them, in Marie Madeleine, then in Omar.

Legacies at war, identities shattered
Thus, the author anchors this reflection in a more organic dimension. “The soil nourishes the process of identification,” he notes, evoking a need to dig into the darkness of origins. Identity, therefore, unfolds like a moving, deep, endless network.

Mr. Ba returns to the context of the novel: “Through teaching cinema and literature over the last 25 years, I have had the opportunity to build many modules. What I haven’t seen are stories told from the point of view of Vietnamese orphan children, adopted by the Catholic church, or even from that of the children of harkis.

So, through the main character of Marie Madeleine, symptom of an era, wounded and crossed by intimate fractures, the author orchestrates a real descent into oneself. Adopted in Asia, raised in Europe, in love with an African, become a diplomat, Marie Madelaine embodies the triumphant mobility of the 21st century. But beneath this smooth success lies a flaw. Because the more the geographical space expands, the more the interior space deepens.

Traumatized, inhabited by a painful memory which alters her perception of the world, she advances in the story as one walks on a ridge line: between collapse and resilience. His quest is not only for a past to understand, but for an identity to reconquer.

The novel thus questions “being itself” in its most dizzying dimension. Who am I when my bearings waver? What remains of me when the trauma has shattered my certainties?

Marie Madeleine becomes the sensitive laboratory for a reflection on selfhood, on this irreducible part of being that no event should be able to abolish, and which yet mishandles life.

But beyond introspection, another question runs through the work, even more serious: that of inheritance. What will she leave on this earth? What trace can a consciousness weakened by pain hope for? “How can we give life when we don’t know where we come from? », asks the heroine in the work.

Saër Maty Ba’s writing then becomes a meditation on transmission, not only material or social, but existential. It’s not so much about surviving as it is about meaning. The quest for origins here is not a matter of simple biographical curiosity. It is an existential necessity.

Faithful to an aesthetic line that he never denies, the author pursues, from work to work, an enterprise of cultural exploration of rare density. His writing, nourished by obvious erudition and a solidly structured general culture, allows for long factual developments, to the point that the reader could, at times, believe he is facing an essay rather than a fiction.

And yet, throughout the pages, the novelistic material emerges. The dialogues emerge gradually, discreet but meaningful, like breaths in the tight architecture of the text. Certainly, they are not legion; their parsimony could surprise fans of lively and continuous exchanges. But this economy is a choice fully assumed by the author.

Thus unfolds a work with a singular tone, marked by a constant stylistic requirement and an austere narrative discipline. Far from facilities, Saër Maty Ba favors density, precision and hold. His style, both scholarly and controlled, is aimed at an attentive readership, capable of appreciating the slow maturation of ideas and the nobility of prose that rejects superficiality.

A heroine facing her intimate fractures

The relationship with Omar introduces a decisive emotional dimension. Love, far from erasing fractures, highlights them. It acts as a magnifying mirror of Mary Magdalene’s uncertainties. Can we love without knowing ourselves? Can we build a future when the past remains an enigma? The text does not answer the question head-on, it lets doubt permeate the narration.

What is striking, finally, is the coherence between the character’s trajectory and contemporary issues. Behind intimate wandering, the major issues of today’s world emerge: migration, cultural hybridity, invisible heritage. Without ever giving in to theoretical discourse, the author places his story in a broader reflection on the diasporic condition.

“The Darkness of the Absurd” is a demanding, sometimes uncomfortable, but deeply human novel. It places the reader in a zone of questioning, where certainties waver. And it is precisely in this assumed obscurity that the book finds its strength.

Just the title of the book imposes silence. There is something suffocating in this alliance, like a night that does not promise dawn. Darkness is not just the absence of light; they are that moment when we no longer distinguish truth from falsehood, where certainties crack silently. And the absurd is not a learned concept placed on a philosophical shelf: it is a daily slap in the face, an inconsistency which seeps into the most ordinary gestures.

“When the absurd looks in the mirror, he is ready to revolt, and he knows how. But the rest of us, who look at the absurd staring at the mirror, we see its back, its reverse side, the rhizomes of shadows that have woven it, the black holes, if not the black boxes, mysterious, elusive, with the power of gravity,” asserts the author.

Equipped with a certain capacity for action, he adds, they bring it to life and never stop drawing the absurd towards their own depths: “So, this darkness can be the subject of investigation, of creative work, of writing and rewriting. »

Saër Maty Ba, teacher of cinema, cultural studies, advanced English and Anglo-Saxon literature, continues his work, placing his writing in a dynamic of continuity and renewal. He has published, in particular, “The Oath of the Ignorant Master” (2020), “Pulsions”, in 2023 and “Ia, blues and psychos on a stroll” (2024).

Adama NDIAYE