This article examines the textual inscriptions of local in Senegalese literature, taking as a pretext the exceptional international recognition of this literature in 2021. From Boubacar Boris Diop (Neustadt Prize) to David Diop (Booker Prize) and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Prix Goncourt), the aim is to examine the fertile paradox of contemporary Senegalese texts, which attribute a global celebration to a deeply local narrative imaginary. Focusing more closely on David Diop's novel Frère d'âme, the aim here is to demonstrate how the relationship of and to the country of origin reveals the fabulist accents of a “tirailleur French” that imposes an enunciation of the colonized soldier and a lexical semantics that are both signs and meanings of a local formulation and presence in the world.