You also mentioned comic books?
When I was a kid, we couldn’t really afford to buy comic books, but you could borrow comic books from these kiosks, like a library, you would give them a deposit, and get it back when you returned the comic book. Back then there were two major types: DC comics type, all of the superheroes, Ironman was an all time favorite, Spider Man, etc. And the other one was all of the European stuff, mostly French. So I grew up with Pif, Tintin, a little bit later on I discovered Manara, one of my uncles, a cardiologist, turned me onto Manara. That’s when my art career started. When you’re a kid, you always want to draw your comic book heroes. That’s how I started.
Then later on, in my late teen years, I discovered other stuff, like Hugo Pratt, erotic novels. Every family has its crazy uncle, there was one in my family, he was the one who spoke fluent English, who traveled all the time, he went to med school. He’s the one who brought us the first Thriller tape. He really helped me nurture my artistic side. We would also watch Japanese anime on TV, Goldorak and all of it. That’s a lot of influences now that I think about it, damn!
It seems you had your eyes open to the entire world?
As a kid, I was one of those who had an escapist mentality, I was really attracted to anything that was not part of my every day. Art, music, comic books, all of those things were a way for me to get out and explore the world. I was consciously looking for those things, but then the local stuff just happened to be there, so that’s how I got exposed to it, readily available without me making an effort. The other stuff I was really going out of my way to have access to. I’d spend all of my allowance on comic books, tapes. I remember when I was 19, I heard Wagner on the radio one time, and I was blown away. I remember looking for it everywhere in town, and I found one place that had it, for a fortune. So I spent my budget, my entire month, on a Ring of the Nibelung tape!
Music, comics, I remember you telling me you also love to read?
I was an avid reader, the more foreign and far away the author, the more attracted I was to it. Of course in school we had to read all of the local authors. The curriculum was French books and African authors. But I was interested in far away authors. So I had my run with American authors, I used to love Jack London as a kid, John Fante, and of course discovering Jack Kerouac just threw my whole artistic world inside out, it blew my mind. I read The Subterraneans first, and it kind of destroyed everything really! (Laughs), that was some intense shit, wow! I read a lot of John Dos. I got the books from Alliance Française, Centre Culturel Français. I was always there, if that place hadn’t existed I would be a different person, my influences would have been very, very different. We can say a lot of bad things about the influence of France in Senegalese culture, but as a kid, all I saw was easy access to books from America, Europe, Japan, Russia. It really helped me round up my literary education.
After this American stage, I went through this Russian phase, I started reading Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, all of that stuff. Then a Japanese phase too: the further the author, the more interested I was. Some of those books were turning points for me as an artist and as a human being. Jack Kerouac was one, another one was Philippe Djian, a French radical, Latin American writers, Borges totally blew my mind, it was the first time I experienced a writer who only wrote about writing. It was an interesting concept for me at the time. Gabriel García Marquez, Carlos Fuentes. But Borges and García Marquez were my biggest influences from that part of the world.
