Numinous Thirdspace: Recrafting the City in Ken Bugul’s Rue Félix-Faure

Abstract

In Rue Félix-Faure (2004), novelist Ken Bugul, with her own inner fire and light, refashions the downtown Plateau arrondissement of Dakar, Senegal, radically re-imagining the capital’s real-life city center as a place where social contradictions can be laid bare and havens of interpersonal and moral harmony re-established through community (rather than police) investigation of the scene of a ritually executed leper, discovered at the beginning of the novel, in the usually festive Rue Félix-Faure. This excruciatingly estheticized scene links city structure, public health, sexual violence, and the spirit world, framing Ken Bugul’s violent rectification of gender inequality, her espousal of communities of mutual respect, and her redefinition of African religiosity. Story-telling, blues singing, writing, filmmaking, and arts of the spectacle thoroughly inform this reconfiguration of Dakar-Plateau. Via her artistic characters, the novelist crafts what Edward W. Soja in Thirdspace calls a “real-and-imagined” place, a contestatory “spatiality” where justice can be sought and an African city’s future can be replotted as the intersection of numinous hidden spiritual fields (as defined by Otto Rank and Sylvester Ogbechie) with true-life urban, medical, and esthetic geographies. Ken Bugul’s Rue Félix-Faure is an alternative space of self-governance and fantasy where an improvisational, creative, blues collective develops its version of civil society, thanks to the melding of spirit worlds and daily life. The street’s numinous zone requires those who walk it to recognize, respect, and fear the spirits that pervade its estheticized urbanism and ethics.