God’s Bits of Wood

This chapter views the strike through the eyes of the elderly watchman, Sounkaré, a lifelong railway employee who has not joined the strike. Crippled and dying of starvation in the solitary hovel that he occupies, he is unsuccessful in an attempt to kill two rats in the railway machine shop, for food. He ruminates upon the irreparable deterioration of his own body as opposed to the aging machines in the shop that can be “repaired, recast, made new again” (129). Sounkaré prays to God for relief from hunger and reflects upon the death and carnage resulting from the prior railway strike in 1938, realizing that “the sons of those corpses were on strike again” (131). He reflects upon his own mortality; while the Koran teaches him of an afterlife, he is still afraid to die.

Sounkaré makes several futile efforts to obtain food. He visits the home of a local woman, Dieynaba, who has hosted him in the past but now advises him that she does not have enough food even for her own family. He experiences a similar outcome at the store of Aziz the Syrian, who physically expels him from the premises. His final abortive attempt occurs during a random meeting on the street with Bakary, a former friend who is pro-strike and does not offer him food.