In the arenas of Nalla September 15, 2026
Published in 1982, “The Call of the Arenas” by Aminata Sow Fall delves into the world of Senegalese arenas. Through Nalla, a teenager fascinated by wrestling, the novel explores the passion for fighting, traditions, the quest for oneself and the conflict between generations.
Nalla is still young enough for adults to think they can decide for him what he will become, young enough for his father and mother to be able to look at his school results, his associates and his distractions as so many clues allowing them to correct his trajectory before it escapes them, but already old enough to experience, without yet knowing how to formulate it, this particular anxiety of adolescence which pushes us to look outside for what the house is no longer able to provide.
At home, however, everything is organized around his future. His parents want to see him succeed, continue his studies, acquire the knowledge that will allow him to take his place in a society where diplomas, professional success and signs of social distinction take on increasing importance. They supervise his education with the will of parents who feel that they have understood the demands of their time and who wish to avoid for their child paths that they consider useless or dangerous. Nalla looks towards the arena.
This movement is at the heart of Aminata Sow Fall’s novel, “The Call of the Arena”, published in 1982, which tells of an adolescent’s attraction to the Senegalese struggle while making this passion the starting point for a reflection on education, family and the place of memory in a transforming society. But begins with a child who feels a fascination for a universe that the adults around him do not view with the same gaze. This fascination must be taken seriously.
Satisfy the imagination
What attracts him is broader and is gradually revealed as he explores this universe. In the arenas, he encounters a society which has its own codes, its own figures, its stories and its ways of transmitting. He discovers men who are not only fighters but characters inscribed in a story, surrounded by admirers, disciples, elders and storytellers. Behind the fights, he also discovers speech.
This progression is important because it allows Aminata Sow Fall to give wrestling a function that goes far beyond the sporting spectacle. The arena is a place where generations meet and where culture circulates differently than in educational institutions. Research devoted to the novel has notably noted the importance of orality, music and the epic universe of Kajoor in Nalla’s journey. The young boy enters a system of references which until then had remained partly foreign to him. The presence of Mame Fari deepens this discovery. With it, memory takes on a face. The old woman belongs to a world where history is preserved in words and in the relationship between generations.
For Nalla, this relationship opens up a space that her family upbringing had left on the margins. It is here that the novel opens up to a learning story. Nalla grows up by changing her outlook on what surrounds her. He learns to distinguish, behind what might appear to him as simple popular entertainment, a set of values and representations. The fight shows him strength, but also discipline; it features the body, but it is based on rules; it brings together a crowd, but this crowd is not anonymous, since it recognizes names, lineages, reputations and stories. Mr. Niang understands this better than others. His role is particularly interesting because he does not surreptitiously seek to tear Nalla away from his passion and bring him back to school requirements. He understands that we must start from what interests the child to lead him to what he needs to learn. The approach is more subtle than a choice between two value systems: it assumes that education can use the child’s passions instead of immediately considering them as obstacles. The conflict with Nalla’s parents then takes on another dimension. They are not caricatured adversaries of their son. They want him to succeed and think they are acting for his good. Their error comes rather from the way in which they define this good. They tend to consider certain cultural universes as incompatible with the future they want for it.
Aminata Sow Fall here tackles a much broader social attitude. In African societies undergoing transformation, the adoption of new educational, professional and social models can produce an ambiguous relationship with the past. We do not necessarily reject our origins out of conscious contempt. We can simply end up considering certain practices as embarrassing, popular or outdated, to the point of no longer seeing that they contain a part of collective history. Diattou, in particular, allows us to understand this tension. His desire to protect Nalla from certain influences is not devoid of logic.
She belongs to a generation that wants its children to benefit from the transformations in society, to be educated and to achieve a different existence. But this aspiration can become problematic when it is accompanied by a systematic distancing from everything that relates to popular culture and ancient memory. Nalla thus finds himself in the middle of a conflict that is beyond him. This is what gives the novel its lasting interest: Nalla is rather the product of a society where these two dimensions coexist without always managing to dialogue. His discomfort comes precisely from this separation that adults have installed around him. School and arenas do not convey the same thing, but they are not necessarily incompatible.
Answer the call?
The school provides tools to understand the contemporary world. The arenas provide access to a memory and forms of sociability that the educational institution is not enough to transmit. But, the problem appears precisely when one claims to erase the other. This question runs through the novel without taking the form of a theoretical discourse. It passes through the behavior of the characters, through the concerns of the parents, through Nalla’s curiosity and through the encounters which gradually modify her outlook. This is also what allows Aminata Sow Fall to maintain a certain narrative lightness even as it addresses profound questions. Orality plays an essential role in this construction. The songs, stories and words give the world of struggle a depth that a simple description of the fights could not produce. Culture appears as something that is said and shared. It exists in the voices of others, in the stories we tell and in the figures we continue to name. What matters in the arena are also relationships, speech, respect for the rules and reputation. It is this depth that is lacking in the eyes of those who only see the struggle as a spectacle. And this is precisely what Nalla discovers. He evolves through the contradictions of his family, the teachings of those he meets and the growing fascination that the arenas exert on him. The title of the novel then takes on a particular resonance. The great success of Aminata Sow Fall is ultimately not to make tradition a perfect refuge nor modernity an absolute danger. Rather, she observes beings at the moment when these two universes meet, with their misunderstandings, their fears and their hopes. Through Nalla, therefore, the author questions a society which wants to change without always knowing how to preserve what belongs to it, a society where parents wish to offer their children a future different from theirs but risk, in this desire for rupture, above all transmitting to them an uncertainty about their own origins.
By Amadou KEBE
