I have readIn Koli Jean Bofane, Congo Inc. Le testament de Bismarck (2014)
Emmanuel Dongala, Johnny chien méchant (2002) Tchicaya U Tam' si, Ces fruits si doux de l'arbre à pain (1987) |
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I have written... nothing ...
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sandrumers of globalisation
The novel promises to be so tasty. It starts as a colonial one that you might have happened to read in your childhood; even me, in Poland, have happened to read Sienkiewicz's W pustyni i w puszczy. So as it opens, Congo Inc. brings about the very same taste with its description of the jungle. As if a fabulous colonial adventure were to begin. Especially if the hero, Isookanga, happens to be a Pygmy. According to good old 17th-century novelistic recipes, he is a lowly man, we may admire his shrewdness from our naturally superior position. At the same time, his love of computer games brings him so close to our world, makes the Pygmy our smaller brother, even if we are both, he and the reader, the same mental age of a single 26-year old male. The novel is funny, promises to be funny, even if we know that, in Congo, wars and genocides are never far away. Actually they are just some tens of pages away, you just happen to wake up one morning to verify, with only a mild surprise, that, oops, your mother and father had been killed in an ethnic cleansing. As you naturally happen to belong to the same ethnic group as your parents, you just catch a couple of your younger brothers and run away, as far away as you manage. After a couple of days, naturally, the kids get sick. You just make a quick mental calculus to reach the conclusion that it is better that at least one of them survives; so you abandon the weaker of them and continue running away. Yet when you wake up the next morning, oops, you discover that you bid on the wrong child, and the one you decided to save had silently expired while you were sleeping. So what you do, you get back to where you left the first child, hoping that he might be still alive, and ufff, he happens to be. This is the game of Shasha, a girl of sixteen. Well, apparently, she is not playing, it is presented as just the reality, as the things are in Congo. But when I read it, I got the impression the kind of imagination, this particular abstractly logical absurdity, was taken directly from the RPG world.
Be that as it may, the Pygmy boy, in spite of his stature, is an enthusiast globaliser, exploiter of resources, still in a very much colonial way that strands on the postcolonial shore of local history. Together with his Chinese partner, an ex-bulldozer operator abandoned by his boss, Isookanga resolves to commercialize the most precious of all resources, water. Giving it a terroir, a special taste, obtained with a drop of condensed bowayo (electric eel) decoction.
Oh, the sublime pleasure of colonial literature. Did you ever venture to imagine how an electric eel might taste like? The beast of the Congo river, as thick as your thigh and striking with up to 800 volts? And if I say that no woman can taste its meat? The colonial world is where the western masculinity always used to seek its refuge. This is even better than competing for Gondvanaland resources against Blood & Oil, Mass Graves Petrolium, and Hiroshima-Naga using sandrumers, which is a promissory neologism created on the basis of Congolese term "sandruma" that stands for looting. On the other hand, the mention of Hiroshima is to make us remember that it is to Congo that we owe the uranium used to build the first atomic bomb.
And on, and on, everything goes explosive in this novel: war, sexual slavery, even the church. Exhilarating, festive, orgasmic. It's continuously ecstatic, even without any illicit substances, just sober as they are when they dismember a victim, and start chanting and dancing, and rape women, in the same elation as they experience later on, in the Church of the Divine Multiplication. Because the country is just this, miraculous, with pyramids of gold, while in Egypt, Moses and the Israelites only saw pyramids of stone.
Finally, the great Game Over brings the inebriating taste of revenge, a substitute of justice, at least for Adeïto, the sexual slave of the ex-rebel warrior Kiro Bizimungu, vel Commandant Kobra Zulu. Incinerated alive among some old tires, he dies the painful death he used to give to others. The Salonga forest that covers the mineral deposits, already mapped by the Chinese, survives, at least for the time being. The Pygmy returns with the map, hoping to become the tribal leader after the death of his uncle. Is it for a bright, or for a gloomy future? Who knows.
In Koli Jean Bofane, Congo Inc. Le testament de Bismarck, Paris, Actes Sud, 2014.
Neuville-sur-Oise, 29.03.2021.
Be that as it may, the Pygmy boy, in spite of his stature, is an enthusiast globaliser, exploiter of resources, still in a very much colonial way that strands on the postcolonial shore of local history. Together with his Chinese partner, an ex-bulldozer operator abandoned by his boss, Isookanga resolves to commercialize the most precious of all resources, water. Giving it a terroir, a special taste, obtained with a drop of condensed bowayo (electric eel) decoction.
Oh, the sublime pleasure of colonial literature. Did you ever venture to imagine how an electric eel might taste like? The beast of the Congo river, as thick as your thigh and striking with up to 800 volts? And if I say that no woman can taste its meat? The colonial world is where the western masculinity always used to seek its refuge. This is even better than competing for Gondvanaland resources against Blood & Oil, Mass Graves Petrolium, and Hiroshima-Naga using sandrumers, which is a promissory neologism created on the basis of Congolese term "sandruma" that stands for looting. On the other hand, the mention of Hiroshima is to make us remember that it is to Congo that we owe the uranium used to build the first atomic bomb.
And on, and on, everything goes explosive in this novel: war, sexual slavery, even the church. Exhilarating, festive, orgasmic. It's continuously ecstatic, even without any illicit substances, just sober as they are when they dismember a victim, and start chanting and dancing, and rape women, in the same elation as they experience later on, in the Church of the Divine Multiplication. Because the country is just this, miraculous, with pyramids of gold, while in Egypt, Moses and the Israelites only saw pyramids of stone.
Finally, the great Game Over brings the inebriating taste of revenge, a substitute of justice, at least for Adeïto, the sexual slave of the ex-rebel warrior Kiro Bizimungu, vel Commandant Kobra Zulu. Incinerated alive among some old tires, he dies the painful death he used to give to others. The Salonga forest that covers the mineral deposits, already mapped by the Chinese, survives, at least for the time being. The Pygmy returns with the map, hoping to become the tribal leader after the death of his uncle. Is it for a bright, or for a gloomy future? Who knows.
In Koli Jean Bofane, Congo Inc. Le testament de Bismarck, Paris, Actes Sud, 2014.
Neuville-sur-Oise, 29.03.2021.
the fruits of justice
(his blood, her blood)
The first impression about this book written and published in the 1980s is of some sort of antiquity, even if it is in fact the last book of a decolonial writer, often compared with Senghor as one of the greatest voices of the francophone Africa (Tchicaya U Tam' si died in 1988). It's not the Congo we expect, it is an early postcolonial Congo, a relatively happy one, the main picture is almost idyllic. Firstly, this is Congo Brazzaville, not the D.R. Congo on the opposite side of the river, and the times are before the great war derived from the 1994 massacre in Rwanda (you didn't know these two wars were connected? That Tutsis and Hutus went on fighting and killing each other abroad? Neither did I, only a couple of weeks ago... Be that as it may, it is curious to know that the great Congo wars 1 and 2 were the bloodies conflicts on Earth since the end of the ww2, but it happened many years after this book was given to print). Eventually, there is just a premonition of things that might come one day, as they actually came, and it's in the relatively more pacific reality on the other shore of the river that the question of justice is still debatable and a roman de mœurs may be written to portray the ambitious upper middle class, greedy of prestige and social stance. At least at the beginning, in the first part of the novel. The book shows the family of a judge, Raymond Poaty, who reflects on the concept of justice that progressively drifts away from what he once had learned at his Parisian university (well, it also implies the question of justice or injustice of his own promotion he awaits with considerable impatience, while so many incompetent people occupy high ranks of the new state), even if those modern European categories hardly cover the crimes committed in Congo. What to do with the cases of witchcraft, that are behind the disappearances of many a girl in her early adolescence? Le silence du juge Raymond Poaty laisse supputer qu'il croit que là où ces choses se jugent, eh bien, elles ont déjà été jugées; les condemnations, déjà été prononcées aussi ! Le coupable purgera sa peine quand le temps d'expier sera venu. Il établissait ainsi qu'il y avait deux justices. Celle du Code et l'autre (p. 57).
Nonetheless, the family still conserve their mildly progressive, postcolonial normalcy; the wife is the director of a school, dedicating herself to the cause of female education; the oldest son is studying in Paris just like his father did in his time. But how fragile this normalcy is. And how strangely interwoven with things that are not Parisian at all, such as those totemic fruits, the tchilolo, and more, those enigmatic, perturbing rituals, those irruptions of Mouissou, whose troubling, vaguely symbolic tales generated in a state of trance are supposed to introduce the hidden truth. Those postcolonial Congolese, apparently, are not full aware of what they mean and what purpose they actually serve.
Overall, those ingredients could make the kind of vaguely obscure literature to which the European reader of the time is used. Images, sections, not quite linear narration, the deconstruction of causality. The usual thing. Also the irruption of political violence is an expected thing, it could not be different, we are in Africa. No wonder that the judge, who intended to resign in the consequence of a bribe attempt coming from a high authority, suddenly disappears. So suddenly that his wife refuses to recognise that he must be dead. But the case of incest between his children? The death of the sister, the ideal Tchilolo daughter, in the consequence of an abortion? Not quite confessed guilt of Gaston Poaty? Certainly, there is a conflict with the young woman's fiancé, le camarade Paulin Pobard. Gaston Poaty will be taken from his home as suddenly as his father, but to purge what crime? That of asking uncomfortable questions during the meeting of the party, inviting the Congolese à se remettre en cause, à interroger attentivement the revolution of colonialism, la question de savoir si le colonialisme, dont nous faisons la source de tous nos maux, n'était pas, en fait, la première grande révolution des temps modernes de l'Afrique, d'hier, d'aujourd'hui et de demain (p. 199-200). The members of the party do not try to answer such questions. Tous les membres de bureau se retirèrent, dans un même mouvement, laissant derriére eux un lourd silence plein d'émanations fétides et dangereuses (p. 202).
Certainly, the Parisian goût du paradoxe of Gaston Poaty is not appreciated in Congo. But as we know, it is not the true reason of the hostility between him and Paulin. There is a corpse of a woman bleeding to death after an abortion. The Christian symbolism of those faithful of the Pentecostal church is close at hand. Le vendredi des Rameaux brings about a foreboding of an impending catastrophe, suspended between the political and something else. There is the question of Angola, the intrusion of foreign agents, instability. As Gaston cite the prophet Zachary, Mathilde, his wife, has a quiet intuition of his death: Il avait l'air de s'être coupé les veines et de s'être résigné à se vider de son sang , jusqu'à la dernière goutte. L'effondrement de son regard était pitoyable. Il osait, il se résignait au suicide sacrificiel. La bête se laisse coucher sur l'autel des sacrifices et son cri est à la fois plainte et prière. A la fois révolte et soumission. (...) Elle saignait avec orgueil. Elle saignait avec générosité (p. 236). Yet the final section of the novel, introducing the troubled experience of the prisoner, his suffering, his memories of the maternal womb, his dying, opens with both a quotation of from the Apocalypse of Saint John, and a mocking title: Le fou et la mort (p. 253). What is of that pure sacrificial lamb? Why does Mouissou bring the final tale of Mavoungou and Ngondi, brother and sister, who sleep in the same bed because le sol est humide (p. 323) and ashamed, kill the child they conceived? The final words of the novel speak of a monde à l'envers (p. 327). Why is it so? Because of the coloniser, because the Congolese refused de se remettre en cause, because of the Angolans, because of the president? Because of the incest? Because of witchcraft, because of those sacrifices of girls at the beginning, conferring unlimited power to the person who committed the crime that Raymond Poaty left for "the other justice"? Where is the crime and where is the punishment?
The fruits of justice, in Congo, seem to grow from the drops of le Sperme de l'incube, of which the priestess Mouissou speaks at the very beginning (p. 54). The Pentecostal lamb has no such sacrificial power as to wash, with his blood, the sins of the nation. Perhaps because the lamb was in fact an ewe, and the female sacrifice, her bleeding to death, covered with guilt and shame, serving someone else's thirst of power, was left in the shadow.
Tchicaya U Tam' si, Ces fruits si doux de l'arbre à pain, Paris, Seghers, 1987.
Neuville-sur-Oise, 9.04.2021 - 6.06.2021.
Nonetheless, the family still conserve their mildly progressive, postcolonial normalcy; the wife is the director of a school, dedicating herself to the cause of female education; the oldest son is studying in Paris just like his father did in his time. But how fragile this normalcy is. And how strangely interwoven with things that are not Parisian at all, such as those totemic fruits, the tchilolo, and more, those enigmatic, perturbing rituals, those irruptions of Mouissou, whose troubling, vaguely symbolic tales generated in a state of trance are supposed to introduce the hidden truth. Those postcolonial Congolese, apparently, are not full aware of what they mean and what purpose they actually serve.
Overall, those ingredients could make the kind of vaguely obscure literature to which the European reader of the time is used. Images, sections, not quite linear narration, the deconstruction of causality. The usual thing. Also the irruption of political violence is an expected thing, it could not be different, we are in Africa. No wonder that the judge, who intended to resign in the consequence of a bribe attempt coming from a high authority, suddenly disappears. So suddenly that his wife refuses to recognise that he must be dead. But the case of incest between his children? The death of the sister, the ideal Tchilolo daughter, in the consequence of an abortion? Not quite confessed guilt of Gaston Poaty? Certainly, there is a conflict with the young woman's fiancé, le camarade Paulin Pobard. Gaston Poaty will be taken from his home as suddenly as his father, but to purge what crime? That of asking uncomfortable questions during the meeting of the party, inviting the Congolese à se remettre en cause, à interroger attentivement the revolution of colonialism, la question de savoir si le colonialisme, dont nous faisons la source de tous nos maux, n'était pas, en fait, la première grande révolution des temps modernes de l'Afrique, d'hier, d'aujourd'hui et de demain (p. 199-200). The members of the party do not try to answer such questions. Tous les membres de bureau se retirèrent, dans un même mouvement, laissant derriére eux un lourd silence plein d'émanations fétides et dangereuses (p. 202).
Certainly, the Parisian goût du paradoxe of Gaston Poaty is not appreciated in Congo. But as we know, it is not the true reason of the hostility between him and Paulin. There is a corpse of a woman bleeding to death after an abortion. The Christian symbolism of those faithful of the Pentecostal church is close at hand. Le vendredi des Rameaux brings about a foreboding of an impending catastrophe, suspended between the political and something else. There is the question of Angola, the intrusion of foreign agents, instability. As Gaston cite the prophet Zachary, Mathilde, his wife, has a quiet intuition of his death: Il avait l'air de s'être coupé les veines et de s'être résigné à se vider de son sang , jusqu'à la dernière goutte. L'effondrement de son regard était pitoyable. Il osait, il se résignait au suicide sacrificiel. La bête se laisse coucher sur l'autel des sacrifices et son cri est à la fois plainte et prière. A la fois révolte et soumission. (...) Elle saignait avec orgueil. Elle saignait avec générosité (p. 236). Yet the final section of the novel, introducing the troubled experience of the prisoner, his suffering, his memories of the maternal womb, his dying, opens with both a quotation of from the Apocalypse of Saint John, and a mocking title: Le fou et la mort (p. 253). What is of that pure sacrificial lamb? Why does Mouissou bring the final tale of Mavoungou and Ngondi, brother and sister, who sleep in the same bed because le sol est humide (p. 323) and ashamed, kill the child they conceived? The final words of the novel speak of a monde à l'envers (p. 327). Why is it so? Because of the coloniser, because the Congolese refused de se remettre en cause, because of the Angolans, because of the president? Because of the incest? Because of witchcraft, because of those sacrifices of girls at the beginning, conferring unlimited power to the person who committed the crime that Raymond Poaty left for "the other justice"? Where is the crime and where is the punishment?
The fruits of justice, in Congo, seem to grow from the drops of le Sperme de l'incube, of which the priestess Mouissou speaks at the very beginning (p. 54). The Pentecostal lamb has no such sacrificial power as to wash, with his blood, the sins of the nation. Perhaps because the lamb was in fact an ewe, and the female sacrifice, her bleeding to death, covered with guilt and shame, serving someone else's thirst of power, was left in the shadow.
Tchicaya U Tam' si, Ces fruits si doux de l'arbre à pain, Paris, Seghers, 1987.
Neuville-sur-Oise, 9.04.2021 - 6.06.2021.
