Mabanckou breaks French chains one letter after another

The recent publication of Blue White Red (Indiana University Press, 2013), the English translation (by Alison Dundy) from the original French of the first novel of Alain Mabanckou, calls for a celebration of the vast work of this Congolese author, who has become one of the most influential African writers of the 21st century.

Poet, novelist and literary scholar, Mabanckou, 48, has received wide acclaim for his exuberant works, innovative use of African oral tradition and for being a champion of the integration of African literature into world literature.

Mabanckou studied letters and philosophy at a college in his native Pointe-Noire and then left Congo to pursue a law degree in Paris.

Upon graduation, he worked for a while in the field of corporate law. But all along, he had been writing.

His first publications were three volumes of poetry. However, these came out of small and independent publishers in France and remained largely unnoticed.

Blue White Red was taken up by the esteemed Présence Africaine and, upon its publication in 1998, won the Association of French-Language Writers’ Literary Grand Prize of Black Africa.

SHOCKING DISCOVERY

The novel, whose title makes an ironic allusion to the colours of the French flag, focused on the all-consuming desire of Congolese youth to migrate to France and live the glamorous life of Parisian dandies.

This illusory vision, itself a symptom of a pervasive post-colonial malaise, is shown to metamorphose into a nightmarish trap in which human lives are malformed forever.

Encouraged by his early publishing success, Mabanckou abandoned the legal profession and dedicated himself entirely to literature.

Within a decade, he produced seven more novels and a fictionalised memoirs. These have been translated into some 15 languages of the world. 

Since 2002 he has been writing and teaching in the US, currently at the University of California, Los Angeles, while regularly returning to Congo.

One “shocking” discovery Mabanckou made early on was that, of the six African languages he spoke before he learned French at age six, none had a written tradition.

To get to know anything about writing, he had to immerse himself in French literature, which was in any case the only one taught at school. Under these circumstances, the only way to express something “directly” to his people was to break the “chains of ‘pure’ French”.

He came to believe, as the protagonist of one of his novels puts it to his students, that “the French language isn’t a long quiet river, but rather a river to be diverted”.

His efforts towards this diversion have become a triumph, and his prose breathes with a rhythm that recreates “the Congolese way of speaking”.

Mabanckou’s prize-winning fiction deals with the shadowy existence of migrants in Paris, the manufactured crises in post-independence Africa, and the arrogance of Western civilisation.

A hallmark of his writing is the presence of laughter in the midst of desperation, and the use of a rich gamut of humour as a tool of criticism.

One point that clearly comes out of all his creations concerns the autonomy of the individual will, the inescapability of personal responsibility, the choice human beings must make to act for good or for evil.

GONE WEST

Broken Glass (2005), Mabanckou’s sixth novel, which firmly established his reputation as a first-rate writer, presents a view of Africa’s urban riffraff with gusto and irreverence. The narrator, Broken Glass, is a 64-year-old suspended teacher, who becomes a regular at the local bar Credit Gone West.

Having recognised his literary abilities, the bar’s owner, Stubborn Snail, soon gives Broken Glass a notebook and assigns him the task “to record, witness and pass on the history of the place”. Broken Glass gets it clear that:

… the boss of Credit Gone West doesn’t like ready-made phrases like ‘in Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns’, every time he hears that worn-out cliché he gets mad, he’ll say ‘depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down’…

As Broken Glass warms up to his project, he captures the history of not just Credit Gone West but that of its neighbourhood and the entire ghostly country since independence.

Broken Glass adopts a narrative technique that is unique and extravagant: the whole notebook is filled with one single meandering sentence, punctuated only by commas and empty spaces, with “twisted words, incoherent words, nonsensical words . . . in this shit-poor language of mine”.

Oral tradition runs like a deep current in the writing and is vital to both the shape and the meaning of the stories of these shattered souls who eagerly pour their bleeding hearts out to Broken Glass and who retain a glimmer of hope that “perhaps life’s waiting for me somewhere”.

Mabanckou’s great achievement lies in the fact that he has expanded the realm of the literary by opening entry into it of the sordid tales of those who are usually kept outside the mainstream national narratives.

The oral tradition, however, merges with other literary currents. Mabanckou makes reference to some 300 books in his novel, giving prominence to titles such as Petals of Blood, God’s Bits of Wood, The Famished Road, Satanic Verses, A Confederacy of Dunces, Death on Credit, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Catcher in the Rye.

Through the use of this device, Mabanckou not only charts his literary terrain, but also draws attention to the interconnectedness of all literatures. 

Memoirs of a Porcupine (2006) won Mabanckou the prestigious Renaudot Prize. Based on an African folktale, the novel is written from the perspective of a porcupine who was born as the animal double to a Congolese boy with a murderous predisposition.

After some 40 years of gory service, during which he dutifully kills any villager who crosses his vengeful master’s path, the rodent, who, contrary to tradition, outlives the man, withdraws to the hollow of a baobab tree to seek solace in confession.

WORLD LITERATURE

The memoirs he delivers, turns nasty, witty and perceptive, builds into a dark record of human insecurity, feebleness and moral cowardice.   

In 2007, following a literary season in which most of France’s major book awards were won by foreign-born authors, a multinational group of writers, one of whose spokespersons Mabanckou became, issued a Manifesto for a World Literature in French.

The 44 signatories to the document declared: “The centre, from which a franco-French literature supposedly radiated, is no longer the centre … the centre … is henceforth everywhere, at the four corners of the world”.

In the words of the manifesto, French had to be freed from “its exclusive pact” with France and French literature had to be turned into “world literature” written in French. “We will no longer come from a country or a continent, but rather from a language”, Mabanckou said in a separate statement.

This idea echoed what Goethe in 1827 famously called “world literature”: “I am more and more convinced”, Goethe remarked, “that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times … I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same.

National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach”.

Nearly two centuries later, Eurocentrism still stands on the way to the realisation of Goethe’s projection. Mabanckou, however, believes that its time has come.

Indeed, the movement for world literature in French is part of Mabanckou’s larger vision of one world literature.

He has urged for a vigorous programme of translation to speed up its arrival. Setting an example, in 2008, he translated Nigerian Uzodinma Iweala’s haunting novel Beasts of No Nation into French.

But to translate presupposes to know one another well. “We don’t know enough about our own continent”, he pointed out in a conversation with fellow writer Binyavanga Wainaina.

“I want to see a Kenyan writer writing a novel set in Congo-Brazzaville. We need to show our readers that we can deal with our continent, that our writing can pass through the boundaries of colonisation”.

In fact, Mabanckou’s Broken Glass has already shown the way.

His bitter life notwithstanding, Broken Glass has had one experience that has been entirely redemptive: I have travelled widely, without ever leaving my native soil, I’ve travelled, one might say, through literature, each time I’ve opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I’d just pick out a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters.

Alain Mabanckou’s work can be seen as an ode to that literature without “a single border”, of which African literature is an integral part.