Quote by Aminata Sow Fall: “Art does not speak of the past. It speaks of the present.”

No matter when a work of art was created, when you experience it the encounter happens now. A five-hundred-year-old painting does not live in the fifteenth century — it lives in the room with you, making meaning in your current moment. Art's power is that it is always happening in the present tense.

Sow Fall made this observation in the early 2000s, during a period of renewed international interest in African literature following a wave of major translations and prizes. Questions about the temporality of literary and artistic meaning — whether African literature was 'universal' or 'local,' 'historical' or 'contemporary' — were live debates in global literary circles.

Senegalese novelist whose 1979 novel La Grève des Bàttu (The Beggar's Strike) is a landmark of Senegalese and Francophone African literature. She was the first woman from sub-Saharan Africa to be nominated for the Prix Médicis and has received numerous international literary awards. Her work examines social inequality, tradition, and modernity in Senegalese society.