Francophone Afropean Literatures [1 ed.] 9781781385906, 9781781380345

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F R A NCOPHON E A F ROPE A N L I T ER AT U R E S

F R A NCOPHON E P O STCOL ON I A L ST U DI E S The annual publication of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies New Series, Vol. 5

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Francophone Postcolonial Studies New Series, Vol. 5, 2014 The annual publication of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies The Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies (SFPS) is an international association which exists in order to promote, facilitate and otherwise support the work of all scholars and researchers working on colonial/postcolonial studies in the French-speaking world. SFPS was created in 2002 with the aim of continuing and developing the pioneering work of its predecessor organization, the Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French (ASCALF). SFPS does not seek to impose a monolithic understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ and it consciously aims to appeal to as diverse a range of members as possible, in order to engage in wide-ranging debate on the nature and legacy of colonialism in and beyond the French-speaking world. SFPS encourages work of a transcultural, transhistorical, comparative and interdisciplinary nature. It implicitly seeks to decolonize the term Francophone, emphasizing that it should refer to all cultures where French is spoken (including, of course, France itself), and it encourages a critical reflection on the nature of the cognate disciplines of French Studies, on the one hand, and Anglophone Postcolonial Studies, on the other. Our vision for this new publication with Liverpool University Press is that each volume will constitute a sort of état present on a significant topic embracing various expressions of Francophone Postcolonial Cultures (e.g., literature, film, music, history), in relation to pertinent geographical areas (e.g., France/Belgium, the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Asia, Polynesia) and different periods (slavery, colonialism, the postcolonial era, etc.): above all, we are looking to publish research that will help to set new research agendas across our field. The editorial board of Francophone Postcolonial Studies invites proposals for edited volumes touching on any of the areas listed above: proposals should be sent to Dr Nicki Hitchcott: nicki. [email protected]. For further details, visit: www.sfps.ac.uk. General Editor: Nicki Hitchcott (University of Nottingham, UK) Editorial Board: Chris Bongie (Queen’s University, Canada) Dominique Combe (Wadham College, Oxford, UK/Paris III, France) Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool, UK) Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (University of Warwick, UK) Alec Hargreaves (Florida State University, USA) Jane Hiddleston (Exeter College, Oxford, UK) Lydie Moudileno (University of Pennsylvania, USA) David Murphy (University of Stirling, UK) Ieme van der Poel (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Andy Stafford (University of Leeds, UK) Dominic Thomas (UCLA, USA)

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F R A NCOPHON E A F ROPE A N L I T ER AT U R E S

Edited by Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas

Liverpool Universit y Press

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Francophone Afropean Literatures First published 2014 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2014 Liverpool University Press and the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies The right of Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas to be identified as the editors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78138-034-5 cased Web PDF eISBN 978-1-78138-590-6

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by BooksFactory.co.uk

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Contents Contents

Introduction: Francophone Afropeans Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas

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Essays Afropeanism and Francophone Sub-Saharan African Writing Dominic Thomas

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The Transatlantic Poetics of Fatou Diome Kathryn M. Lachman

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Corps sans titre: ‘Fleshiness’ and Afropean Identity in Bessora’s 53 cm 48 John Nimis Already Here: Sami Tchak’s Afropean Generation Allison Van Deventer

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Paris Polar: Afropean Noir in the City of Light Dawn Fulton

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Mapping Afropea: The Translation of Black Paris in the Fiction of Alain Mabanckou John Patrick Walsh

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Relighting Stars and Bazaars of Voices: Exchange and Dialogue in Léonora Miano’s Tels des astres éteints and Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar 110 Kathryn Kleppinger Sex and the Afropean City: Léonora Miano’s Blues pour Élise 124 Nicki Hitchcott

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Towards an Afropean Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Friendship and the African Immigrant Srilata Ravi

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Afropean Masculinities as bricolage 155 Ayo A. Coly Short Stories The Old Man and the Boat Fatou Diome

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The Rain-maker Affair Léonora Miano

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The Squirrels of Wannsee Abdourahman A. Waberi

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Francastérix 203 Wilfried N’Sondé At the Borders of My Skin Sami Tchak

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Confessions of a sapeur 217 Alain Mabanckou Notes on Contributors 223 Index 228

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Introduction: Francophone Afropeans Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas

Francophone Afropeans

Barely a decade had elapsed since the British Parliament established the Race Relations Act 1976 (itself an amendment of earlier parliamentary acts) and the Commission for Racial Equality, with the specific objective of targeting discrimination on the grounds of race, when Paul Gilroy drew attention in his landmark publication There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987) to the resilience in the public imaginary of the symbiotic link between Britishness and whiteness.1 More recently, in Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11, British novelist Caryl Phillips wrote: ‘For a large part of my life I grew up feeling that the real divisive factor in British, and by extension European, life was race; that it was race that was keeping us separate from each other, and that racism had made the greatest contribution to inequity of opportunity in modern Britain’ (Phillips, 2011: 7). Meanwhile, across the Channel in France, where the French Republic remains one and indivisible as enshrined in the first constitution of 1791 (a principle that underscores the commitment to protecting the rights of all citizens regardless of ethnicity, religion or other social associations), the persistent juxtaposition of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ remains a common feature in political discourse, such that, as Achille Mbembe has argued, ‘The perverse effect of this indifference to 1 The editors wish to thank Alec G. Hargreaves and Lydie Moudileno for reviewing the manuscript and for their helpful suggestions.

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difference is thus a relative indifference to discrimination’ (Mbembe, 2011: 93). Interestingly enough, the European Union itself has struggled to define its identity. Though conceptualized as ‘a family of democratic European countries, committed to working together for peace and prosperity’, current economic, social and political debates invariably leave observers pondering what Europe really is, to what degree family resemblances are to be found, and in turn how this community has undertaken the challenging process of imagining itself in the twenty-first century. The idea of Black Europe introduces a range of specific notions which this book will endeavour to elucidate. As Barnor Hesse has written, ‘The complexities of thinking through figurations of Black Europe arise from its being irreducible to the fixed terms of either Europe or non-Europe in the classical metropole and colony schema’ (Hesse, 2009: 301). There is thus growing evidence of the shared experience of discrimination shaping transnational ‘Afropean’ identities that ‘white’ Europeans are struggling to achieve, such that: Motivated by the shared experience of discrimination – either in recent history or extending as far back as slavery – such groups are less concerned with ethnic factionalism and the attribution of social roles according to national/non-national or European/non-European entities, than they are with the various ways in which inclusion and belonging could be fostered and in turn redefine the hegemonic tendencies of current political configurations. (Crumly Deventer and Thomas, 2011: 339) Indeed, as Fatima El-Tayeb has shown in her brilliant investigation into these issues in European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, this is all the more paradoxical given the efforts being made to promote a ‘European identity’, with the result that those very communities finding themselves the target of ‘negative’ and exclusionary discourse are in fact embracing cross-border connections, ‘new conceptualizations of minority identity’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: 50), and exploring a ‘postnational European identity’ (2011: xxxix), whereas those populations whose EU status and belonging remain ­unquestioned are exhibiting signs of national entrenchment: Europe appears as a promising terrain to explore and advance the possibilities of new conceptualizations of minority identity, inclusive of but not necessarily limited to black Europeans. Taken in its totality and national differences admitted, black European communities show important commonalities, rooted in a perception of Europe as a white continent living on in current debates on postnational identities. Consequently, the various black populations of Europe are increasingly subjected to the same

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conditions and confront an ever more homogeneous image of a continent that up to now has excluded its residents of color. (2011: 50) In public discourse (and in the collective imaginary), the EU is often mistakenly limited to mainland ‘Europe’ rather than including spaces such as the Canary Islands (in close proximity to the West African coastline), Ceuta and Melilla (located on the north coast of Africa at the border between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean), the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, or for that matter territories such as Reunion in the Indian Ocean, among others. What is more, the EU’s policy of targeting Africans as ‘non-Europeans’ has served to bolster a sense of European belonging and therefore of identity. As Éric Fassin has shown, ‘European identity is defined today, above all, in negative terms, and in opposition to “migratory pressures”’ (Fassin, 2012: 98). One is left pondering what Europe really is, to what degree family resemblances are to be found and, in turn, the extent to which the category ‘Afropean’ may prove helpful in improving our understanding of the complex ways in which minority communities conceive of identity in Europe today and address the range of issues impacting them. The term ‘Afropea’ was coined by the musician David Byrne as a way to describe the synthesis of African and European musical traditions and is often applied to the recordings of hip-hop and neo-soul musicians (most notably, Afro-Pop group Zap Mama, who released their album Adventures in Afropea 1 in 1993). As for the term ‘Afropean’, it first appeared in the 2008 short story collection Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles [Afropean Soul and Other Stories] by Léonora Miano. Since then, Miano has had recourse to the term in works of fiction – such as Blues pour Élise: Séquences afropéennes I [Blues for Elise: Afropean Sequences I] (2010) – while also theorizing its usage in texts such as Écrits pour la parole [Writings for Speaking] (2012) and Habiter la frontière [Living on the Frontier] (2012). In the title story of Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles, Miano’s young male protagonist is described as ‘un Afropéen, un Européen d’ascendance africaine’ [an Afropean, a European of African descent] (Miano, 2008: 53). What is initially presented as a seemingly straightforward definition of identity is immediately problematized a couple of lines later when Miano writes that ‘le jeune homme se demandait si l’identité des Afropéens était nationale. Il avait toujours cru les identités multiples. Même au sein d’une nation, elles ne pouvaient être figées’ [the young man wondered whether Afropean identity was a national identity. He had always believed identities to be multiple. Even within a nation, they couldn’t be fixed] (2008: 53). Miano’s suggestion that Afropeanness moves beyond national identity towards an unfixed, heterogeneous concept of identity is reflected in the term’s blending of the multinational spaces

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of Africa and Europe. However, as Crumly Deventer and Thomas have explained, an Afro-European space is not easy to delineate given that not only is ‘Europe’ itself increasingly difficult to define in geographical and political terms, but also that: Afro-European populations are themselves far from being homogeneous and have diverse roots and links with both Africa and Europe according to historical periodization, associated with slavery, colonialism, postcolonial migration, labor, mobility, etc., or influenced by migratory patterns (students, marriage, work, military, sport, entertainment). (Crumly Deventer and Thomas, 2011: 337) However, as Crumly Deventer and Thomas go on to suggest, what is common to all conceptions of Afropean identity is ‘an indissociability with the African continent, with blackness, and with notions of diaspora’ (2011: 339). It is this emphasis on Africa, blackness and diaspora within and between the nation-states of Europe (in this case, France) that informs all the stories and essays in this volume. Afropean identity is inseparable both from Africa and from Europe. The removal of the hyphen in the word ‘Afropean’ signifies what Sabrina Brancato, discussing Afro-European literatures, describes as the ‘reciprocal embeddedness’ of Africa and Europe (Brancato, 2008: 2). Afropeans do not identify themselves in terms of either/or in relation to the African country of their ancestry and the European nation of their birth, but rather in relation to the transnational, diasporic space that is black Europe. Stephen Small explains that ‘if we ask who is Black European, we must also ask, who is Black in Europe […] Blackness is not just, or even, about African ancestry. It’s about racialization and the ascription of blackness’ (Small, 2009: xxv–xxvi). The Kittian-born author Caryl Phillips has written on this question with the British context in mind, pointing out that ‘Britain, like most European nations, is not particularly open to hyphenation. We don’t talk easily of Jewish-Britons, or Afro-Britons, or Swedish-Britons, thus making it relatively easy to couple one’s cultural traditions to national identity. Being British remains a largely concrete identity, quite well gated, and not particularly flexible’ (Phillips, 2012). What, then, does ‘Afro-Europe’ signify? In terms of a physical presence, as Allison Blakely has revealed in his research on black populations in Europe, although ‘the percentage of Europeans of Black descent is still under 2 percent, the social construct of “blackness” has throughout modern times created a significance that cannot be measured simply in numbers’ (Blakely, 2009: 5). Furthermore, it is worth recalling that the ability to gather such data is complicated in countries such as France where information pertaining to ethno-racial criteria is not officially gathered. Yet estimates provided by

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the groundbreaking findings of the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires-Sofrès study Les Discriminations à l’encontre des populations noires de France [The Types of Discrimination Facing Black Populations in France] (2007; see Blanchard et al. 2012) indicate that somewhere in the range of 3–5.5 million people in France, that is 5–10 per cent of the French population (including the inhabitants of French overseas departments) self-designate as either ‘noir(e)’ [black] or ‘métis(se)’ [mixed race]. Francophone Afropean Literatures explores the question of Afropeanness by considering the manner in which francophone African writers articulate and interrogate their complex relationships with European society, culture and history. Through the different contributions in this volume, readers will discover the symbiotic ways in which Africa has transformed Europe and been transformed in/by Europe, and in turn how Africanness has (re)defined Europeanness. ‘What remains to be explored’, as Dominic Thomas suggests, ‘is the degree to which these spaces have themselves been reconfigured by African communities and networks, yielding alternative topographies that are increasingly finding a home in the notion of Afropeanism.’ To this end, the volume places scholarly essays addressing the relationship between the francophone and Afro-European context alongside short stories and essays by some of the most critically acclaimed and influential producers of Afropean writing: Fatou Diome, Alain Mabanckou, Léonora Miano, Wilfried N’Sondé, Sami Tchak and Abdourahman Waberi. Furthermore, works by these authors are discussed in and across the scholarly interventions in this volume. What emerges is a dialogue around the question of what it means to be ‘francophone’ and ‘Afropean’ in the twenty-first century, a dimension that is emphasized in Abdourahman Waberi’s short story, ‘The Squirrels of Wannsee’, set in Berlin. Although not all the authors discussed here are residents of France, the volume is limited to a discussion of Afropeanness in francophone literary texts. Of course, conclusions and findings are intended to stimulate further critical interventions in what effectively constitutes a relatively new way of conceptualizing African writing in/about Europe, while also being of obvious pertinence to analogous investigations of Afro-German, Afro-Hispanophone, Afro-Italophone, Afro-Lusophone or other relevant fields (see Brancato, 2008; Hine et al., 2009; Crumly Deventer and Thomas, 2011). As Sabrina Brancato reminds us, exploring Afro-European literature(s) comparatively therefore means tracing diachronic and synchronic connections that reveal new configurations across linguistic and national boundaries. The texts themselves are transnational and transcultural and foreground a comparatist perspective where Africa and Europe – and Africa in Europe – are continuously set

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Francophone Afropean Literatures against each other in an effort to problematize what the two continents mean to each other, how they interact and give place to new syncretic cultural formations. (Brancato, 2008: 11)

While some of the writers discussed (Léonora Miano, Wilfried N’Sondé) are part of the new generation of twenty-first-century African writers, others (Bessora, Fatou Diome, J.-R. Essomba, Alain Mabanckou, Sami Tchak, Abdourahman Waberi) are already well-established names on the francophone literary scene. However, what these writers demonstrate, as John Nimis notes, is that ‘while the term [Afropean] itself is relatively new, the broader experience it seeks to encompass has been a concern in literature for some time’. In fact, the various contributions to Francophone Afropean Literatures reveal how the term ‘Afropean’ follows in a long line of labels created by (and sometimes for) the black population of Europe. Since the early years of ‘Négritude’ writings and theorizations in the 1930s, a series of attempts have been made to describe the specificity of the experience of ethnic minorities in France and the French-speaking world. Concepts such as ‘Afro-Parisianism’, developed in 1998 by Bennetta Jules-Rosette in her book Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape, whereby ‘Parisianism refers to a literary interest in Paris as the social context for the author’s works, the subject matter of their writings, and the source of their focal audience’ (Jules-Rosette, 1998: 7) have helped us better understand how Black Paris is not an American-style ghetto. It consists of many communities sprinkled across the city, creating an exotic subculture that lurks behind the official monuments. As new immigrants pour into the city, Paris reluctantly makes room for them. This alternative environment has become the incubation cubicle for a new style of African writing. (Jules-Rosette, 1998: 147) Likewise, critical frameworks such as ‘Afrique-sur-Seine’ [Africa-on-Seine] (Cazenave, 2003) and later ‘migritude’, a neologism that ‘renvoie à la fois à la thématique de l’immigration, qui se trouve au cœur des récits africains contemporains, mais aussi au statut d’expatriés de la plupart de leurs producteurs’ [designates both the thematic of immigration that is at the heart of contemporary African works, but also the expatriate status of most of the writers] (Chevrier, 2004: 96; see also Beyala, 1995 and 2000), have been indicative of the multiple attempts made to define the identities of people who are sometimes described in French as ‘minorités visibles’ [visible minorities]. The very notion of a ‘visible minority’ often meets with considerable opposition given that census data on the basis of ‘ethnicity’ are not collected within metropolitan France. However, as Alec G. Hargreaves

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has shown, the law has always permitted others (e.g. social scientists, commercial polling organizations, etc.) to use anonymized data such that ‘racial’ categories feature in many public opinion surveys as well as in data collected by the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (Hargreaves, 2010). Moreover, the Constitutional Council issued a clarification in February 2008 in which it specifically stated that it is lawful to collect data on the basis of respondents’ self-stated ‘ressenti d’appartenance’ [self-identification] with no exclusion of racial or ethnic categories. Thus, the starting point of Pap Ndiaye’s study on ‘blacks’ in France, in which he writes that ‘les Noirs de France sont individuellement visibles, mais ils sont invisibles en tant que groupe social et qu’objet d’étude pour les universitaires’ [blacks in France are visible as individuals, but invisible as a social group and as an object of academic study] (Ndiaye, 2008: 21), does not stand up to empirical scrutiny. However, because of feelings of exclusion, many black people in France do look beyond the French nation as a space in which to identify themselves and create what Fatima El-Tayeb describes as ‘border-crossing translocal networks’ in Europe (El-Tayeb, 2011: 7). The notion of ‘Afropeanism’ is relatively new, and Francophone Afropean Literatures does not claim to offer an exhaustive analysis of the term’s usage and/or potential pertinence. Rather, as individual chapters reveal, the cultural, political and social circumstances of Europe today are reflected in discussions surrounding the term and, perhaps not surprisingly, in the diverse and diverging perspectives adopted by the scholars and in the ways in which individual writers furnish examples that contribute to the term’s complexity. Kathryn Lachman, for example, argues that ‘The notion of migritude writing offers considerably more flexibility than Afropeanism, as it is not limited to Europe and thus better accommodates the broader Atlantic aspirations of Diome’s project’, while also asking ‘how might we include African non-migrants in the discourse of Afropeanism or a global Atlantic?’ On the other hand, Nicki Hitchcott’s reading of Léonora Miano’s novel Blues pour Élise emphasizes the way in which Afropean identity is constructed through translocal and transnational connections based on shared experiences and common interests rather through than any sense of geographic belonging. In other words, although ‘Afro-Europe’ offers the possibility of what Allison Van Deventer describes as ‘a site in which to imagine more inclusive definitions of Frenchness, Europeanness and blackness’, it is also, as she goes on to show in her analysis of Sami Tchak’s Place des fêtes (2001), a space of ambivalence and contradictions. Sometimes, as N’Sondé’s short story ‘Francastérix’ reveals, it is only by moving out of France and into another European nation (in this case, Germany) that French blacks can actually be identified – and identify themselves – as French. For many majority ethnic French, black citizens of

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France will, Tchak explains, ‘never become invisible’; rather, they will always be identified as ‘immigrants’, ‘newcomers’, ‘others’ or, as ‘those who are French differently’. Such performances of exclusion are not, of course, unique to France and point to the difficulties of delineating a specifically ‘Afropean’ identity. This is especially true given what Dominic Thomas highlights as the difficulty of ‘establishing the coordinates of an Afropean identity as a constitutive historical formation when for some, being “European” means precisely not being black or African’. In ‘At the Borders of My Skin’, Tchak invokes former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s infamous use in 2005 of the term racaille [scum] when he was Minister of the Interior to describe unruly young French ethnic minorities living in France’s banlieues housing projects. Although, as Tchak points out, Sarkozy was not in fact applying this term wholesale to the entire minority population of the banlieues, the term has come to signify a defining moment in the evolution of the black community in Europe. The riots that began in Clichy-sous-bois following the death of two teenage boys who were electrocuted while running away and hiding from the police quickly spread across France and subsequently into cities in neighbouring European countries such as Belgium and Germany. For Fatima El-Tayeb, the coverage of the riots was symptomatic in its homogenizing of a heterogeneous group, externalizing representatives of a postindustrial European urbanity as a foreign, hostile Other. […] Containing superfluous populations, they became foreign territory, enclaves of the non-West, threateningly, finally invading Europe itself. (El-Tayeb, 2011: 15) To this end, debates such as the ‘National Identity Debate’ launched in France in 2009 by Éric Besson, then Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development, serve to highlight the ways in which ‘French identity’ was heavily reliant on exclusionary models of identity-building, while also further accentuating sentiments of non-belonging among ethnic or ‘visible’ minorities. The chapters in this book point to the growing identification among ethnic minority groups as a result of negative discourses, leading them in many cases to embrace cross-border connections, ‘new conceptualizations of minority identity’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: 50). Discussions on belonging are explored in Srilata Ravi’s contribution in which she considers the ways in which paradigms of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘hospitality’ may enrich or further complexify the resonance of ‘Afropeanism’ in a context in which the fluid identities and experiences of immigrants who are ‘economically, socially and ethnically marginalized from mainstream society’ are translated in ‘the redemptory poetry of hope and shared understandings’ in evidence in N’Sondé’s writings. The objective then, as John Walsh shows

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us, ‘is to contribute to the “mapping” of Afropean literature, not in the sense of demarcating boundaries, but of charting itineraries that transgress such limits by melding two geographic signifiers, each charged with historical, cultural, and racial meanings, into one that might produce something new’. Alain Mabanckou’s short story ‘Confessions of a sapeur’ provides a concrete example of the distinctiveness of Afropean topographic spaces discussed elsewhere in Francophone Afropean Literatures. To this end, the work of Léonora Miano is instructive given that, for her, ‘Afropea, c’est, en France, le terroir mental que se donnent ceux qui ne peuvent faire valoir la souche française. C’est la légitimité identitaire arrachée, et c’est le dépassement des vieilles rancœurs [Afropea is, in France, the mental locale that those who are unable to claim the privilege of French stock give themselves. It is the identitarian legitimacy uprooted, and it is the overcoming of longstanding bitterness] (Miano, 2012b: 86). One significant distinction identified by Kathryn Kleppinger in her analysis of Alain Mabanckou’s 2009 novel Black Bazar pertains to the relationship between Afropean protagonists and French society. Historically, francophone African literature has featured the range of challenges faced by African immigrants – assimilation and integration into mainstream society, cross-cultural encounters, racism and exclusion, police brutality, arrest and deportation etc. – yet, as Kleppinger shows, ‘the general absence of conflictual relationships between these Afropean characters and the white European people they must come into contact with on a daily basis serves yet another purpose in defining the place of these characters in European society. They never justify their presence in France, apparently because their presence is never in doubt.’ This is therefore an important component of the focus on Afropeanism since it serves to highlight the centrality of presence, while also underscoring the constitutive nature of this African presence with the formation of a broader European and Afropean identity in dialogue with both Europe and Africa. These new, transversal relationships provide indicators as to the coordinates, claims and expectations of newly configured Afropean identities. As Francophone Afropean Literatures reveals, these new identities manifest themselves in numerous ways. Ayo Coly uncovers ways in which ‘Afropean literary narratives exhibit a discursive preoccupation with masculinity that is not necessarily present or sustained in earlier literatures focusing on the African presence in France’, given that Afropean males are, for the most part, born and raised in France, and not therefore some kind of transient presence. In recent years, ethnic minority populations in France have made claims and demands based on this reality,

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Francophone Afropean Literatures in many cases articulating these in unprecedented ways when compared to earlier generations of African descendants in France.

This is, of course, relevant to the question of identity, precisely to the kinds of identities that can be formed in the Afropean discursive and physical space in question, whereby, as Coly notes, ‘the ideological model of Afropean masculinities that the writers develop is of particular interest for its unapologetic and uninhibited investment in disentangling, by way of bricolage, the Afropean male subject from narratives and projects of collective identity’. The contrasting positions adopted by the various contributors to Francophone Afropean Literatures are particularly striking on this issue. For example, Nicki Hitchcott points to the manner in which ‘through the various emotional intrigues it describes, Blues pour Élise paints a radically new picture of black women in twenty-first-century Paris. In this text, Miano’s women are not disenfranchised, marginalized “immigrants” but rather enfranchised urbanites who participate in and appropriate the city spaces they inhabit.’ These new communities, shaped by entangled individual and collective experiences, are reconfigured according to the demands of the cultural, political and social environments in France. As such, whether in film, literature or, as Dawn Fulton argues, noir fiction, the city of Paris itself provides a ‘framework of transnationalism other than that of sub-Saharan African immigration and Afropean interurbanism’, and the noir genre itself, ‘with its inherent attention to moral justice and discounted existences […] presents a particularly intriguing instance of Afropeanism, foregrounding the recalibration of ethical systems and social hierarchies that accompany the shifting conceptions of European and other, of insider and outsider’, representing a ‘key moment in the effort to redefine ethical parameters in the postcolonial era, as the city’s inhabitants – visible and invisible – undergo the shift towards yet other configurations of transnationalism’. This book is a collaborative project. Although individual contributors have, in their own way, endeavoured to explore the problematic of Afropeanism, each chapter stands on its own and, as will be evident, authors do not share the same approach to that problematic. In some instances, the pan-European dimension of the French-language corpus is privileged, whereas in others a predominantly binational optic or a more broadly transnational and/or global framework is adopted. Ultimately, we believe that Afropeanism can operate as a qualifier that can in turn offer new insights into French-language cultural productions by authors of African descent in Europe. While the apparently disparate approaches found in this book could potentially undermine the pertinence of Afropeanism as a discursive and analytic category, we prefer to think of Afropeanism in terms of its tentacular potential and latitude, building

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upon pre-existing categories – such as Francophone African Literatures or Transnational Literatures in French – while also extending them into new directions and territories that in turn capture and reflect the longer history of mobility and exchange between Africa and Europe. With that objective in mind, this introductory chapter has sought to map out the etymology and plasticity of the notion of Afropeanism, while also highlighting the multiple ways in which the overarching notion of Afropeanness is deployed both in and across subsequent chapters as a way to stimulate debate on a broad range of cultural, political and social issues that define the twenty-first-century world. As Dominic Thomas notes, for Léonora Miano the broad category Afropean constitutes an attempt to move beyond racial identification, as well as to emphasize the ‘obsolescence de la nation comme référent identitaire’ [obsolescence of the nation as an identitarian denomination] (Miano, 2012b: 139). Having said this, the rise in European discourses of cultural nationalism in the twenty-first century has been accompanied by increasing commentary pertaining to the apparent failure of multiculturalism. Paul Gilroy, for example, has called for new ways of ‘postcolonial culture building’ (Gilroy, 2004b: xviii): ‘We need to be able to see’, he writes, ‘how the presence of strangers, aliens, blacks and the distinctive dynamics of Europe’s imperial history have combined to shape its cultural and political habits and institutions’ (Gilroy, 2004b: xiv). Francophone Afropean literatures are a strong example of the kind of process Gilroy outlines, offering as they do a combination of hybrid cultural production and postcolonial counterhistory while simultaneously resisting incorporation into ‘the carnival of ­heteroculture’ (Gilroy, 2004a: 163).

Works Cited Beyala, Calixthe. 1995. Lettre d’une africaine a ses sœurs occidentales. Paris: Spengler. —. 2000. Lettre d’une Afro-française à ses compatriotes. Paris: Editions Mango. Blakely, Allison. 2009. ‘The Emergence of Afro-Europe: a Preliminary Sketch’. In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press: 3–28. Blanchard, Pascal, Sylvie Chalaye, Éric Deroo, Dominic Thomas and Mahamet Timéra. 2012. La France noire. Présences et migrations des Afriques, des Amériques et de l’océan Indien en France. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Brancato, Sabrina. 2008. ‘Afro-European Literature(s): a New Discursive Category?’ Research in African Literatures 39.3: 1–13.

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Cazenave, Odile. 2003. Afrique-sur-Seine. Une nouvelle génération de romanciers africains à Paris. Paris: L’Harmattan. Chevrier, Jacques. 2004. ‘Afrique(s)-sur-Seine: autour de la notion de “migritude”’. Notre Librairie 155–56: 96–100. Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires-Sofrès. Les discriminations à l’encontre des populations noires de France. http://www.le-cran.fr/ document-cran-associations-noires-de-france/1-la-premiere-enquetestatistique-sur-les-noirs-de-france---une--realisation-le-cran-tns-sofres.pdf (accessed 31 January 2007). Crumly Deventer, Allison, and Dominic Thomas. 2011. ‘Afro-European Studies: Emerging Fields and New Directions’. In Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (eds), A Companion to Comparative Literature. Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley Publishers: 335–56. El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fassin, Éric. 2012. Démocratie précaire. Chroniques de la déraison d’État. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Gilroy, Paul. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 2004a. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. Abingdon: Routledge. —. 2004b. ‘Foreward: Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe’. In Heike Raphael-Hernandez (ed.), Blackening Europe: The African American Perspective. New York: Routledge: xi–xxii. Hargreaves, Alec G. 2010. ‘Veiled Truths: Discourses of Ethnicity in Contemporary France’. In Roland Hsu (ed.), Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity and Conflict in a Globalized World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 83–103. Hesse, Barnor. 2009. ‘Afterword: Black Europe’s Undecidability’. In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press: 291–304. Hine, Darlene Clark, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds). 2009. Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 1998. Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mabanckou, Alain. 2009. Black Bazar. Paris: Gallimard. Mbembe, Achille. 2011. ‘Provincializing France?’ Trans. by Janet Roitman. Public Culture Winter 23.1: 85–119. Miano, Léonora. 2008. Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles. Paris: Éditions Flammarion. —. 2010. Blues pour Élise: Séquences afropéennes I. Paris: Plon.

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—. 2012a. Écrits pour la parole. Paris: L’Arche Éditeur. —. 2012b. Habiter la frontière. Paris: L’Arche Éditeur. Ndiaye, Pap. 2008. La Condition noire: essai sur une minorité française. Paris: Éditions Calmann-Lévy. Phillips, Caryl. 2011. Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11. New York: The New Press. —. 2012. ‘A Bend in the River’. http://www.artangel.org.uk/docs/CarylPhillips ABendintheRiver.mp3 Small, Stephen. 2009. ‘Introduction: The Empire Strikes Back’. In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press: xxiv–xxxiii. Tchak, Sami. 2001. Place des fêtes. Paris: Gallimard.

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ESSAYS

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Afropeanism and Francophone Sub-Saharan African Writing Dominic Thomas

Afropeanism and Francophone Sub-Saharan African Writing

How does one have a black face and be European? Caryl Phillips, Color Me English A collection of topographic maps may prove helpful in evaluating the infrastructure of a particular geographical region. However, attentive observers navigating their way through European cities will be confronted with various commemorative practices celebrating or glorifying French history. Indeed, as Achille Mbembe writes, ‘Love of the fatherland and pride in being French became embodied in public and ritual acts of civic piety: military parades; museums; memorials; commemorations; monuments to the dead; statues; names of boulevards, streets, avenues, bridges, and important places; and, ultimately, the Pantheon’ (Mbembe, 2011: 110). The FrancoDjiboutian novelist Abdourahman A. Waberi is one such observer, sharing with his readers his experience during an extended stay in the German capital, Berlin: I set out to find those traces of Africa, parsimoniously scattered throughout the federal capital and that remain to this day, for Africans, synonymous with the eponymous congress organised from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885 in response to Bismarck’s initiative, and with the objective of outlining the rules of the game for dividing up the African continent. (Waberi, 2009: 141) 17

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Such observations could, of course, be reproduced in a multiplicity of national contexts in which the vestiges of the colonial empire are ubiquitous (Aldrich, 2005). Paris is particularly rich in this regard, offering us such examples as the Place Félix Éboué (named after the colonial administrator) in the 12th arrondissement, the rue du Dahomey (the former French colony) in the 11th, or the rue du Commandant-Marchand and the rue de la Mission Marchand (named after the soldier and explorer), both in the 16th. Recently, demands have been made in Germany for the authorities to engage in Vergangenheitsbewältigung – in other words to reckon with this practice in order to come to terms with the past as a step towards ‘a “decolonization” of Berlin street names, many of which are shameless references to the country’s colonial past’ (Vancauwenberghe, 2012: 6). What remains to be explored is the degree to which these spaces have themselves been reconfigured by African communities and networks, yielding alternative topographies that are increasingly finding a home in the notion of Afropeanism. Contemporary debates and policy initiatives pertaining to ethnic minorities, immigrants, race relations and those aimed at fostering a sense of ‘European’ identity are connected to a much longer European colonial history. These discussions have invariably served to highlight the growing awareness of Europe’s heterogeneous qualities, while also yielding two opposing conceptualizations and models of identity according to which a range of inclusionary and exclusionary measures are deployed with the objective of achieving an ‘exaggeration of the threat posed by non-Europeans as a device for defining and consolidating the collective we’ (Thomas, 2013: 176) and bolstering age-old distinctions between insiders and outsiders. In fact, as Éric Fassin has shown, ‘De fait, l’identité européenne est définie aujourd’hui, avant tout, négativement – contre la “pression migratoire”’ [European identity is defined today, above all, in negative terms, and in opposition to ‘migratory pressures’] (Fassin, 2012: 98).1 What, then, are the implications of exploring constructs and definitions of gender, identity, race and religion alongside Europeanization? How are national spaces themselves being reconfigured by diasporic, immigrant and post-national communities? And finally, how may one begin the process of establishing the coordinates of an Afropean identity as a constitutive historical formation when, for some, being ‘European’ means precisely not being black or African? Travel by young Africans to France during the final stages of French colonialism was extensively documented and fictionalized in pioneering works by authors such as Ousmane Socé (Mirages de Paris, 1937), Bernard Dadié (Un 1 This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author of this chapter.

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nègre à Paris, 1959; An African in Paris, 1994), Ousmane Sembene (Le Docker noir, 1956; Black Docker, 1987), Ferdinand Oyono (Chemin d’Europe, 1960; Road to Europe, 1989), and Cheikh Hamidou Kane (L’Aventure ambiguë, 1961; Ambiguous Adventure, 1972). In these examples, travel to France afforded the protagonists the occasion to confront the teachings of the colonial school with the realities of life in the metropole. Subsequent generations of writers would turn their attention to the long-term implications of these experiences, considering instead the transnational nature of these population movements and the formation of diasporic networks in France and Europe. As Alain Mabanckou writes, ‘De l’Europe enfin est né le nouveau personnage du roman africain actuel: un être décousu, marginal, déphasé’ [The central protagonist in today’s African novel was born in Europe: a being at once disjointed, marginal, out of place] (Mabanckou, 2009: 44). To this end, the works of contemporary francophone sub-Saharan African writers such as Fatou Diome, Lauren Ekué, Kadhi Hane, Alain Mabanckou and Léonora Miano are especially helpful in further elucidating these questions. The inter-governmental and supranational governance structures adopted by the European Union have certainly reinforced economic, juridical and political collaboration. However, this institutional framework has done little to foster concrete pan-European identity consciousness. Furthermore, there is ample recent evidence of disquieting nationalist rhetoric (as exemplified by the government-sponsored ‘National Identity Debate’ launched in France in 2009), the direct consequence of which has been to exacerbate tensions between populations, most notably when it comes to Europe’s ethnic minorities. As Pap Ndiaye has argued, ‘la différence entre les Français noirs et les autres Français dont les parents sont venus d’ailleurs est que l’identité française se trouve constamment suspectée dans le cas des premiers’ [the difference between black French people and other French people whose parents came from elsewhere is that the French identity of the former is always treated with suspicion] (Ndiaye, 2008: 42). Growing disidentification with the nation-state and disillusionment with the concerted efforts to harmonize immigration policy and restrict entry to and circulation within the European Union has had, as a logical outcome of such exclusionary measures and policies, a significant unintended consequence, namely the growing supranational identification by minority populations of the shared nature of racial discrimination. This is, of course, all the more paradoxical given the efforts being made to promote a ‘European identity’, with the result that those very communities finding themselves the target of ‘negative’ and exclusionary discourse are in fact embracing cross-border connections, ‘new conceptualizations of minority identity’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: 50), and exploring a ‘postnational European identity’ (2011: xxxix), whereas those populations

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whose EU status and belonging remain unquestioned are exhibiting signs of national entrenchment. Naturally, ‘The new preoccupation with border security, while reviving discussions on the singularity of European identity and integration, has encouraged monolithic interpretations of history that fail to account for the fact that European populations are more intimately related to non-European ones than some European people wish to believe’ (Thomas, 2013: 69); and ‘it seems that instead of reconceptualizing Europe in order to include them, the unification process creates a narrative that not only continues to exclude racialized minorities but also defines them as the very essence of non-Europeanness in terms that link migration to supposedly invincible differences of race, culture, and religion’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: 2). As we shall see, these new configurations have the potential to disrupt and unsettle categories such as ‘Frenchness’ (Tshimanga et al., 2009: 10) while also creating a space in which ‘amorphous geographical boundaries locate its subjects in an explicitly transnational and transformative space of change and renewal’ (Murdoch, 2012: 4). What remains to be assessed is the degree to which Afropeanism might serve as an umbrella term with which to improve our understanding of the range of complex issues that have emerged, and how this term’s overarching possibilities are in evidence in the actual works of literature under consideration. First, as Barnor Hesse has argued, ‘Through the rites of European undecidability, we need to reimagine the meaning of the signified Europe in the signifiers “Europe”, “non-Europe” and “Black Europe”, where each implies the other and is encountered in each other’s racial configuration’ (2009: 297). Secondly, it remains crucial to underscore the plurality and heterogeneous nature of the populations potentially covered by Afropeanism. This means taking into consideration the range of social and political experiences, privileging the context of slavery, colonialism and migration, while also insisting, as Sabrina Brancato has done, that ‘rather than being seen as a subcategory of Europeanness – which would involve a perpetuation of a Eurocentric vision – Afro-Europe should be incorporated into the debate on European identity as a constitutive element of the cultural heritage of the continent’ (2008: 110).2 2 In fact, as Paul Gilroy has argued, ‘We need to conjure up a future in which black Europeans stop being seen as migrants. Migrancy becomes doubly unhelpful when it alone supplies an explanation for the conflicts and opportunities of this transnational moment in the life of Europe’s polities, economies, and cultural ensemble’ (Gilroy, 2004: xxi). This is all the more pertinent when one considers different national contexts and diasporic experiences, as Tina M.

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There are, of course, critical and theoretical precursors to Afropeanism. The term ‘Afro-Parisianism’ gained increasing currency following the publication of Bennetta Jules-Rosette’s book, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (1998), a reference to the literary productions of francophone sub-Saharan African authors residing in France, for whom ‘Parisianism refers to a literary interest in Paris as the social context for the author’s works, the subject matter of their writings, and the source of their focal audience’ (1998: 7). Jacques Chevrier (2004) also described this phenomenon using the term ‘migritude’, a reference that links late twentieth-century African migration to France with the cultural, philosophical and political conceptualizations of négritude over a half century earlier. Nevertheless, ‘exploring Afro-European literature(s) comparatively’, as Sabrina Brancato reminds us, therefore means tracing diachronic and synchronic connections that reveal new configurations across linguistic and national boundaries. The texts themselves are transnational and transcultural and foreground a comparatist perspective where Africa and Europe – and Africa in Europe – are continuously set against each other in an effort to problematize what the two continents mean to each other, how they interact and give place to new syncretic cultural formations. (2008: 11) Some of the answers – or at least clarifications of these questions – are to found in Léonora Miano’s 2012 book of essays, Habiter la frontière [Living the Border]. This work is all the more helpful because Miano demonstrates an awareness of the theoretical apparatus that has been developed as a way of confronting the complexity of contemporary globalization and migration, and even appropriates some of the terminology as an occasion to reflect on her own ‘hybridité culturelle’ [cultural hybridity] (Miano, 2012b: 7). Additionally, Habiter la frontière also partially demarcates the terrain Miano considers by privileging the experiential mode that in turns offers readers an insider’s perspectives on what she describes as ‘Les noires réalités de la France’ [The dark truths about France] (2012b: 59–88). These are mediated through ‘une littérature afrodiasporique’ [an afrodiasporic literature] (2012b: 73), whereby ‘Être noir en France et parler des Noirs, c’est constituer une menace, quel que soit le propos tenu, ce que j’ai pu éprouver moi-même à plusieurs reprises’ [Being black and speaking about black people in France Campt has recently shown: ‘Unlike for many black communities in the diaspora, for Afro-Germans, the Atlantic is neither the crucial geographic conduit of transit, nor is the slave trade the formative event of their arrival. Collective migration is the exception rather than the rule for this community’ (Campt, 2012: 24).

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is considered threatening, whatever it is that you have to say, and I’ve been made to feel this on several occasions] (2012b: 73). Léonora Miano’s work – as several chapters in this book attest – has focused comprehensively on Afropeanism. A cursory overview of recent publications confirms this: Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles [Afropean Soul and Other Stories] (2008), Blues pour Élise: Séquences afropéennes I [Blues for Elise: Afropean Sequences I] (2010), ‘Afropea’ (in Écrits pour la parole, [Writings for Speaking], 2012a: 28), and various chapters in Habiter la frontière. For Miano, the broad category Afropean constitutes an attempt to move beyond racial identification, as well as to emphasize the ‘obsolescence de la nation comme référent identitaire’ [obsolescence of the nation as an identitarian denomination] (2012b: 139). As such, ‘Afropea, c’est, en France […] la reconnaissance d’une appartenance à l’Europe, mais surtout à celle de demain, celle dont l’histoire s’écrit en ce moment […] C’est la nécessaire entrée de la composante européenne dans l’expérience diasporique des peuples d’ascendance subsaharienne’ (Miano, 2012b: 86).3 This is an important step, one that brings our attention to communities that may share a common background or heritage in slavery (often referred to interchangeably in Miano’s writing as Afrodescendants), colonialism or immigration, but that are, in the particular case of the context of the novel Blues pour Élise, of ‘nationalité française […] et ayant toujours vécu en France’ [French nationality […] having always lived in France] (Miano, 2012b: 138). As Allison Blakely has argued, One of the most tangible changes among the black population now taking shape in Europe from that present earlier is an expressed black consciousness and striving toward respectable identity, at times emphasizing group identity and at times on the individual level. One reason it makes sense to speak in terms of an ‘Afro-Europe’ is that increasing signs of some form of black community are appearing. (Blakely, 2009: 19) As mentioned in the introductory section to this chapter, a range of sub-Saharan African authors have treated the analogous subject matter of African diasporic communities in France but from very different class, national or other perspectives. These inflections or variations can be attributed to a range of factors, and only rarely can a uniform template be applied. Fatou Diome is originally from Senegal but both she and her protagonists navigate between the French city of Strasbourg and Senegal in the novel Le Ventre 3 ‘In France, Afropea is […] the recognition of a belonging to Europe, but above all to the Europe of tomorrow, that Europe whose history is being written right now […] It is the unavoidable entry of the European component in the diasporic experience of peoples of sub-Saharan African descent.’

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de l’Atlantique (2003; The Belly of the Atlantic, 2008) or between Africa and Europe in a broader sense in Celles qui attendent [The Women Left Waiting] (2010); Khadi Hane is also from Senegal, but in Des fourmis dans la bouche [Tingling Mouths] (2011)4 the central protagonist Khadîdja was born in Mali and now resides in Paris; Lauren Ekué is from Togo and also focuses on Paris in Icône urbaine [Urban Icon] (2005); and Alain Mabanckou’s novels Bleu Blanc Rouge (1998; Blue White Red, 2013), Black Bazar (2009; Black Bazaar, 2012), and Tais-toi et meurs [Keep Quiet and Die] (2012) move seamlessly between Paris and the Republic of Congo. One can only be struck by the irony of a couple in Miano’s Blues pour Élise, ‘Chacun ayant sa famille sur une rive de l’Atlantique, il faudrait, pour ne vexer personne, célébrer les épousailles sur le sol neutre de l’Hexagone, seul qui appartienne à la fois aux Caribéens et aux Subsahariens’ (Miano, 2010: 17).5 As Nicki Hitchcott’s chapter in this volume points out, it is precisely the very attachment to the Caribbean or the African continent that emerges as an obstacle to belonging in France and therefore Europe. Afropeanism therefore provides a new category that allows those whose hyphenated identities – Franco-African, Afro-German, Afro-Italian, and so forth – are considered either a threat to national identity or not permissible according to established ideals and values, a shared category of identification structured in a transnational framework that exists beyond the narrow parameters of a reductive national identity. The interwoven stories that provide the narrative structure of Blues pour Élise focus on relationships and the accompanying challenges to intimacy and sexuality within them, while also featuring animated discussions on race, fashion, identity and belonging in contemporary France. The reader follows the group of friends (the self-proclaimed ‘Bigger Than Life’ group) up the Boulevard de Strasbourg in the 10th arrondissement, and ‘Dès qu’elles sortent du métro Château-d’Eau ou Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, il y a toutes ces vitrines. Perruques à perte de vue. Pots, tubes, flacons, ampoules’ 4 Khadi Hane’s title represents a translation challenge. In French, the word fourmi (ant) is used in the expression ‘fourmis dans les pieds’ to connote the sensation commonly described in English as ‘pins and needles’. In Hane’s novel, the adapted phrase is used in an attempt to convey the mother’s concern with making ends meet in order to assuage the ‘tingling sensation’ in her children’s hungry mouths. 5 ‘With each one having a family living on a different Atlantic shore, one would need, so as to avoid offending anyone, to hold the wedding on the neutral soil of mainland France, the only soil to belong at once to Caribbeans and sub-Saharan Africans.’

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(Miano, 2010: 40).6 Later, they gather for dinner at the trendy Waly Faÿ, an African restaurant in the 11th, where the discussion on a number of likely topics might just shift to DiviNéa’s new line of jewellery: ‘Ses bijoux avaient leur préférence. Leur esthétique participait de ce souffle afropéen qu’elle sentaient autour d’elles’ [This was their favourite jewellery. The style related closely to the breath of Afropeanness they felt around them] (2010: 75). These encounters and responses perfectly encapsulate what the group comes to stand for and how they conceive of their place in French society: ‘les pieds solidement plantés dans les temps présents, le regard tourné vers un avenir qu’ils contribuaient déjà à façonner’ [their feet solidly anchored in the present times, their gaze turned to a future they were actively shaping] (2010: 76). Electing to define themselves, ascribing positive attributions to their collective memory and shared aspirations, ‘Les nouveaux Français étaient, comme tout ce qui existait dans le pays, une production de son histoire’ [France’s new citizens were, just like everything else in this country, a product of its history] (Miano 2010: 102), and as the character Estelle suggests, Afropeans must relinquish the desire to be ‘nommés et légitimés par la majorité. Ils devaient s’inventer’ [designated and legitimized by the majority. Instead, they needed to invent themselves] (2010: 106). The Bigger Than Life group thus exemplifies those ‘hybrid modernities’ (2012: 3) evoked by H. Adlai Murdoch, a level of self-awareness and a coming to terms with racial identity. Historically, of course, ‘black’ populations in France have focused on their relationship to society, whether as immigrants or citizens. However, works of literature have tended to privilege the concerns of a diasporic working-class population rather than the lives and circumstances of an upwardly mobile black middle class such as the one we find in Blues pour Élise. There are in fact only a handful of works that have adopted such an angle on these questions. Lauren Ekué, in Icône urbaine (2005), endeavoured, as she explained in an interview, to ‘proposer un livre d’expression française avec une héroïne noire, forte et loin du misérabilisme’ [offer a book in French with a black heroine, a strong woman and without any sordid realism] (in Cristèle D., 2006: 71). The originality of this standpoint will be even clearer from the brief consideration of other texts to which we will now turn our attention. These texts, in which the circumstances of post-migration and the living conditions of African immigrants and ethnic minorities belonging to a global underclass or underprivileged socio-economic group are measured, 6 ‘As soon as they exit from the metro at the Château-d’Eau or StrasbourgSaint-Denis stops, there are all the window displays. Wigs as far as the eye can see. Containers, tubes, small bottles, vials.’

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trace the outline of the individual living ‘en marge de la société’ [on the margins of society] (Mabanckou, 1998: 144). Fatou Diome’s novel Le Ventre de l’Atlantique addresses the impact of globalization on young sub-Saharan Africans and warns would-be migrants of the harsh realities of contemporary emigration to France. In Celles qui attendent, Diome focuses on a different dimension of the question, staging the perilous ocean crossings and challenges confronting emigrants pushed from the global south by the lack of economic opportunity and lingering dissymmetry and pulled to Europe’s markets by shortages of cheap labour and relative prosperity. Khadi Hane’s Des fourmis dans la bouche shares a similar concern with countering the fundamentals that inform beliefs about the prospect of reaching Europe and a refusal to overlook the challenges that are inextricably linked to the culmination of that undertaking. As Hane stresses, this new-found Afropean space is necessarily one of mediation and translation that compels individuals and communities to rethink cultural and social codes as a result of insertion into a new transnational environment. Invariably, this will lead to confrontation, both within African communities (whether these are defined by nationality or ethnic affiliation) and relationally because of the obvious engagement with French society. In France, the protagonist of the novel, Khadîdja, expresses her commitment to rearticulating her position in relation to Mali and to the Malian diaspora in Paris: ‘Si ma voisine et compatriote avait le pied ancré dans la tradition et refusait d’en sortir, moi, je n’avais pas fui le Mali pour en reproduire les schémas ailleurs’ [My neighbour and compatriot might very well have chosen to remain anchored in tradition and to refuse to step away from it, but I certainly had not fled Mali only to reproduce its mindset elsewhere] (Hane, 2011: 28). Hane devotes long passages to describing the neighbourhood around the Marché Dejean in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood of the 18th arrondissement, underlining how ‘Ici, nous étions encore en Afrique’ [Here, you were still in Africa] (2011: 34). To this extent, protagonists line up in the works that fill the library shelves of the corpus of francophone African literature and concur in their recognition of the gravitational pull of this area in Paris, ‘un point de repère déterminant dans mon existence: Château-Rouge, ce quartier situé près de Barbès, dans le dix-huitième arrondissement […] J’oubliais que j’étais en France […] Je me fondais dans cette masse hétérogène’ (Mabanckou, 1998: 140–41).7 These sequences reveal the importance that African immigrants 7 ‘A crucial landmark in my life: Château-Rouge, this neighbourhood located next to Barbès, in the 18th arrondissement […] I forgot I was in France […] I blended in with the heterogeneous mass.’

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and Afropeans accord to frequenting areas used by other members of the African community, and are drawn to the conviviality that is to be found there. If, as H. Adlai Murdoch has argued, ‘these groups implicitly differentiate themselves from the larger immigrant cultures of their respective metropoles, from the nationalist patterns of their host country, and from the established identitarian framework of their countries of origin’ (Murdoch, 2012: 4), the long-term goal is, of course, to participate in the broader society of which they form an integral component. Léonora Miano’s attention to Afropeanism – her novel Blues pour Élise is, one should not forget, only the first instalment of a trilogy of what the subtitle announces as Séquences afropéennes – leaves no ambiguity when it comes to the centrality of this dimension, and the argument in Habiter la frontière also makes this very clear: Aujourd’hui, les Européens noirs refusent d’avoir à choisir entre leur part subsaharienne ou caribéenne, et leur part européenne. Ils souhaitent abriter en eux les deux, les chérir, voguer de l’une à l’autre, les mélanger sans les hiérarchiser. C’est dans ces entre-deux qu’ils sont à l’aise, complets, épanouis. De ce qui était jadis un lieu de rupture, ils ont fait un espace d’accolement où les mondes qui les constituent se touchent sans s’affronter. (Miano, 2012b: 84)8 In fact, this ‘entre-deux’ [in-betweeness] was to some extent already contained in Calixthe Beyala’s two works of non-fiction, Lettre d’une africaine à ses sœurs occidentales [Letter from an African Woman to her Western Sisters] (1995) and Lettre d’une Afro-française à ses compatriotes [Letter from an Afro-French Woman to her Compatriots] (2000), although as mentioned previously, the primary focus was provided in these works by underprivileged disaporic subjects rather than middle-class protagonists. Having said that, and as I have previously noted, we are left wondering ‘At what point, then, does Beyala stop being a Cameroonian novelist and become an Afro-Parisian one?’ (Thomas, 2001: 167). I would suggest that the category Afropean is thus all the more helpful in delineating an inclusive space that can accommodate the multiple ways in which diasporic experiences translate into reality. 8 ‘Black Europeans today refuse to have to choose between the sub-Saharan or Caribbean part of their identity and the European part. Rather, they wish to provide a shelter for both, to cherish them, to meander from one to the other, mix them together without having to hierarchize them. It is in the in-betweeness that they find themselves most comfortable, complete and fulfilled. From what were once sites of rupture, they have created instead attachments in which the worlds they are made up of touch one another without having to collide.’

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When it comes to discussing the context of the African diaspora in France, Alain Mabanckou’s work has been the most widely read as well as the most influential. The novel Bleu-Blanc-Rouge (1998) featured the dynamic world of the Sape, the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes [Society for Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance], offering readers a transnational perspective on performance and identity through a focus on young Congolese (both from the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo) who are inspired to travel to France to acquire designer clothes and have as a result marked the Congolese diasporas there.9 The work also sought to demystify the migrant experience by uncovering the real difficulties associated with the post-migrant experience, indicating the resourcefulness and survivalist skills that are called upon, but also the crime and operations ‘on the margins of the law’ in which many engage as a means of acquiring economic and social capital.10 Mabanckou has returned to these questions in several works of fiction – Black Bazar and Tais-toi et meurs – as well as in two non-fiction books – Lettre à Jimmy [Letter to Jimmy] (2007), in which he entered into a dialogue with James Baldwin as the occasion to contemplate an array of topics such as identity and racialization, and Le Sanglot de l’homme noir [The Black Man’s Complaint] (2012), in which he adopted a critical position towards what he identified as a tendency among certain Africans to attribute near-exclusive blame for the current economic, political and social circumstances on the African continent (and within France itself) to Europe: ‘Un sanglot de plus en plus bruyant que je définirai comme la tendance qui pousse certains Africains à expliquer les malheurs du continent noir – tous ses malheurs – à travers le prisme de la rencontre avec l’Europe’ (2012a: 11).11 One is nowhere near reaching consensus on the subject of race and the status of ethnic minorities in France, but as the debate matures, one is finding a diversity of perspectives in the responses articulated by the very populations concerned. This must surely be seen as a step in the right direction. Mabanckou’s novels Black Bazar and Tais-toi et meurs both take place predominantly in Paris and in a series of readily identifiable locations that 9 For a sustained analysis of this subject, see Gondola (1999) and Thomas (2001). 10 See MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga (2000). 11 ‘An increasingly loud complaint that I would define in terms of the tendency that drives some Africans to explain the ills of the African continent – the sum total of these ills – solely through the prism of the encounter with Europe.’ I have elected to translate sanglot as ‘complaint’ rather than ‘sorrow’ since ‘complaint’ can mean both ‘sorrow’ (in the sense of perceived misfortune) and ‘casting blame’ (regarding those perceived to be responsible for that misfortune).

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systematically generate a cartography of Paris’s Afropean sites. In Tais-toi et meurs, the city has been subdivided up into ‘parcelle’ [sectors] (2012b: 41) by the Vieux, the elder in the diasporic community. The other characters, collectively gathered under the aegis of the ‘tribu du paradis’ [the paradise tribe] – named after the rue du Paradis on which they share an apartment – compete for the attention of the Vieux who decides which area they will be allocated and accordingly how lucrative the range of fraudulent activities they are assigned will be (cheque book fraud, identity fraud, etc.) In the meantime, the aspiring Sapeurs also frequent the Chez Maman D. (Pauline Nzongo) restaurant in Château Rouge or Restaurant Sapelogie (57 rue de Clignancourt in the 18th), line up at the local Western Union office to transfer funds to relatives and business associates in Africa, drop in on the Foyer de Bara in Montreuil, try on shoes at Osmose chaussures (246 rue de Paris in Montreuil), spend their evenings at Le Nelson nightclub (65 rue du Général Gallieni on the outskirts of the city), or attend a wedding at L’Espace Venice, a banquet and party hall in Sarcelles in the north of Paris in the French metropolitan department of Val d’Oise. The most coveted activity though is actually to be able to shop at the Sape’s fashion headquarters, namely the shop Connivences in the 18th arrondissement, whose motto is ‘L’art de faire chanter les couleurs’ [The art of making colours sing].12 From the portrait gallery of Afropeans we have explored, two things (at least) begin to emerge: on the one hand, the vibrancy, ingenuity, creativity and capacity of protagonists to imagine the contours of a diverse and inclusive France; and on the other, the ways in which the concerns and objectives of Afropeans are inseparable from the broader project of Europeanization, and of Europeans’ own reckoning with colonial history, its legacy and the multiple configurations of expanded twenty-first-century identities. The reality, as Fatima El-Tayeb has shown, is that In order to deconstruct the particular forms of racialization shaping contemporary Europe, in their continental commonalities and national differences, it is necessary to be aware of the historical formations leading up to the present point; a point at which, after the major steps of economic and political unification have been implemented, the need to define what makes a European, to create common symbols and a shared sense of 12 See www.connivencesparis.com/. The shop was featured in the video clip entitled ‘Black Bazar’, released along with the CD (2012d) produced by Alain Mabanckou and inspired by the novel Black Bazar: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=841i137-CYg.

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history in order to gain broad support for the new continental order, has increasingly moved to the centre of policy debates. (2011: xxxix) Redefining identity, achieving coexistence and delineating the coordinates of a constitutive history will surely be extremely trying. For this conversation to advance and remain civil, as Caryl Phillips has claimed, ‘Europe needs writers to explicate this transition, for literature is plurality in action; it embraces and celebrates a place of no truths, it relishes ambiguity, and it deeply respects the place where everybody has the right to be understood’ (2011: 17).

Works Cited Aldrich, Robert. 2005. Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France. Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Beyala, Calixthe. 1995. Lettre d’une africaine à ses sœurs occidentales. Paris: Spengler. —. 2000. Lettre d’une Afro-française à ses compatriotes. Paris: Editions Mango. Blakely, Allison. 2009. ‘The Emergence of Afro-Europe: A Preliminary Sketch’. In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press: 3–28. Brancato, Sabrina. 2008. ‘Afro-European Literature(s): A New Discursive Category?’ Research in African Literatures 39.3: 1–13. Campt, Tina M. 2012. Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chevrier, Jacques. 2004. ‘Afrique(s)-sur-Seine: autour de la notion de “migritude”’. Notre Librairie 155–56: 96–100. Crumly Deventer, Allison, and Dominic Thomas. 2011. ‘Afro-European Studies: Emerging Fields and New Directions’. In Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (eds), A Companion to Comparative Literature. Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley Publishers: 335–56. D., Cristèle. 2006. ‘Lauren Ekué et son livre “Icône urbaine”’. Amina 432: 71. Dadié, Bernard. 1959. Un nègre à Paris. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1994. An African in Paris. Trans. by Karen Hatch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Diome, Fatou. 2003. Le Ventre de l’Atlantique. Paris: Éditions Anne Carrère. —. 2008. The Belly of the Atlantic. Trans. by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman. London: Serpent’s Tail. —. 2010. Celles qui attendent, Paris: Flammarion. Ekué, Lauren. 2005. Icône urbain. Paris: Anibwe.

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El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fassin, Éric. 2012. Démocratie précaire. Chroniques de la déraison d’État. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Gilroy, Paul. 2004. ‘Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe’. In Heike Raphael-Hernandez (ed), Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. London and New York: Routledge: xi–xxii. Gondola, Didier. 1999. ‘Dream and Drama: The Search for Elegance among Congolese Youth’. African Studies Review 42.1: 23–48. Hane, Khadi. 2011. Des fourmis dans la bouche. Paris: Denoël. Hesse, Barnor. 2009. ‘Afterword: Black Europe’s Undecidability’. In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press: 291–304. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 1998. Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. 1961. L’Aventure ambiguë. Paris: Julliard. ____. Ambiguous Adventure. 1972. Trans. by Katherine Woods. London: Heinemann. Mabanckou, Alain. 1998. Bleu-Blanc-Rouge . Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 2007. Lettre à Jimmy. Paris: Fayard. —. 2009. Black Bazar. Paris: Seuil. —. 2012a. Le Sanglot de l’homme noir. Paris: Fayard. —. 2012b. Tais-toi et meurs. Paris: ELB/Éditions la Branche. —. 2012c. Black Bazaar. Trans. by Sarah Ardizzone. London: Serpent’s Tail. —. 2012d. Black Bazar. CD. Paris: Lusafrica. —. 2013. Red White Blue. Trans. by Alison Dundy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mabanckou, Alain, and Christophe Merlin. 2009. L’Europe depuis l’Afrique. Paris: Éditions Naïve. MacGaffey, Janet, and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga. 2000. Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2011. ‘Provincializing France?’ Trans. by Janet Roitman. Public Culture 23.1: 85–119. Miano, Léonora. 2008. Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles. Paris: Éditions Flammarion. —. 2010. Blues pour Élise: Séquences afropéennes I. Paris: Grasset. —. 2012a. Écrits pour la parole. Paris: L’Arche Éditeur. —. 2012b. Habiter la frontière. Paris: L’Arche Éditeur. Murdoch, H. Adlai. 2012. Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Ndiaye, Pap. 2008. La Condition noire: Essai sur une minorité ethnique française. Paris: Éditions Calmann-Lévy. Oyono, Ferdinand. 1960. Chemin d’Europe. Paris: Julliard. —. 1989. Road to Europe. Trans. by Richard Bjornson. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press. Phillips, Caryl. 2011. ‘Color Me English’. In Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11. New York: The New Press: 3–17. Sembene, Ousmane. 1956. Le Docker noir. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. Black Docker. 1987. Trans. by Ros Schwartz. London: Heinemann. Socé, Ousmane. 1937. Mirages de Paris. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines. Thomas, Dominic. 2001. ‘Daniel Biyaoula: Exile, Immigration, and Transnational Cultural Productions’. In Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx (eds), Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press: 165–76. —. 2007. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 2013. Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tshimanga, Charles, Didier Gondola and Peter J. Bloom (eds). 2009. Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vancauwenberghe, Nadia. 2012. ‘Africa in Berlin: Time for Some Vergangenheitsbewältigung?’ Exberliner 108: 6. Waberi, Abdourahman A.  2009. ‘Benjamin’s Cousins’. Trans. by Dominic Thomas. Forum for Modern Language Studies 45.2: 140–43.

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The Transatlantic Poetics of Fatou Diome Kathryn M. Lachman

The Transatlantic Poetics of Fatou Diome

Identity cards and Hemingway’s melanin levels, I couldn’t care less! Fatou Diome, ‘The Old Man and the Boat’ The concept of francophone Afropean literatures has emerged in recent years to account for authors shaped by Africa and Europe who publish in French, and who wrestle with what it means to be simultaneously African and European.1 Born in Niodior, Senegal in 1968 and a resident of Strasbourg since 1994, Fatou Diome would seem to fit well within this category. As her contribution to this volume suggests, however, Diome instead seeks to position herself as part of an even wider, more diverse literary community held together by the Atlantic. The narrator of ‘The Old Man and the Boat’ claims a transatlantic 1 The notion of Afropean identity echoes Paul Gilroy’s understanding that ‘[s] triving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness’, which leads to the production of ‘stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms’ (Gilroy, 1993: 1, 3). Léonora Miano deploys the term ‘Afropean’ in her collection of short stories, Afropean Soul (2008), to refer to second-generation Africans who have come of age in Europe and who lay claim to a hybrid identity. Miano uses the term Afropean interchangeably with Afrodescendant: ‘Il était un afropéen, un Europén d’ascendance africaine’ [He was an Afropean, a European of African descent] (Miano, 2008: 53). This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author of this chapter.

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literary inheritance that includes American writer Ernest Hemingway and Brazilian modernist João Guimarães Rosa. She recognizes in Hemingway’s portrayal of the Cuban fisherman Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea the dignity and generosity of spirit of her own grandfather, a fisherman on the Atlantic coast of Senegal, despite the vast linguistic and geographical distances between the two figures, and credits Guimarães Rosa’s powerful evocation of the forests of Minas Gerais with allowing her to travel to South America without ever having to present a passport – an implicit critique of the international border policies that limit the mobility of Africans.2 Diome’s impressive literary production includes a collection of short stories, La Préférence nationale [The National Preference] (2001), the autobiographical short novella ‘The Old Man and the Boat’, included in this volume, and four novels, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique [2003; The Belly of the Atlantic, 2008], Kétala (2006), Inassouvies, nos vies [Our Unfulfilled Lives] (2008), and Celles qui attendent [The Women Left Waiting] (2010). She wields a supple, lyrical French prose infused with remarkable humour and irony, as well as echoes of proverbs and oral storytelling. Her work examines the causes and pitfalls of contemporary African migration to Europe and, more broadly, offers an incisive perspective on contemporary social and economic questions in Europe and Africa. 3 In this chapter, I consider how Diome resists being contained within Afropean discourses by developing an Atlantic aesthetics. Her central preoccupations, namely Senegalese immigration to France, racism and the destruction of the local artisanal fishing industry, are fundamentally Atlantic questions, linked to the ongoing displacement and expropriation of Africans and African resources dating from the triangular slave trade and extending into the postcolonial present. The Atlantic inspires many of the metaphors Diome uses in her writing, figuring as a source of legends and transformative possibilities, but also of excess, waste and failure.4 Reflecting 2 Diome’s references to Hemingway and Guimarães Rosa are particularly interesting because they expand the notion of the Black Atlantic by de-essentializing the category of race and by highlighting the possibilities of south-south cultural trajectories. Race is a key issue in Guimarães Rosa’s novela Uncle Jaguar. Diome’s interest in Brazilian modernism also ties into what several scholars see as ‘the primacy of Brazil to diaspora studies’ (McLaren, 2013: 187). 3 Diome tackles such diverse subjects as attitudes to homosexuality (in Kétala) and the isolation of the ageing in the West (in Inassouvies, nos vies). 4 As mentioned, Diome is from Niodior, an island off the Senegalese coast, and her prose shares attributes that Antonio Benitez-Rojo finds in Caribbean writing in The Repeating Island, notably repetitions and circulating rhythms.

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her upbringing on an island off the Senegalese coast, Diome highlights the common struggles faced by island and coastal communities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and forges cultural and artistic connections with anglophone and lusophone writers. In this sense, Diome builds on Paul Gilroy’s seminal understanding of the Black Atlantic as a ‘stereophonic’ (Gilroy, 1993: 3), transnational flow of culture, music and ideas between North America and Britain, but attempts to move beyond the anglophone and francophone worlds and to transcend categories of race, language and gender. Interestingly, however, there is a conspicuous disconnect between the Atlantic aspirations of Diome’s project and the material realities of the subjects she writes about. Her fiction features individuals who are caught in the web of poverty, who do not share her mobility and whose dreams are thwarted by immigration policies and borders, which highlights the political work that needs to occur in order to make the transnational Atlantic space she claims more widely accessible to other Africans.

Writing on Migration Diome’s debut novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, articulates an impassioned critique of French immigration policy and racism, while advocating the reform of patriarchal institutions and educational and economic policy in Senegal.5 The author deploys a dialogic structure of narration – a series of transnational phone conversations – in order to juxtapose multiple conflicting perspectives on the issue of emigration. The protagonist is a vibrant young Senegalese woman by the name of Salie who, much like the author herself, is an aspiring writer in Strasbourg. Salie is bent on persuading her younger brother Madické not to emigrate, a difficult task as he sees Europe only through the glossy veneer of the television screen and through the sugar-coated stories of migrants on holiday. To this end, she exposes the harsh realities of illegal immigration and explodes the myths that returning migrants propagate to save face in their home communities. When that fails, she offers Madické her own meagre savings to help him start a local business instead. Ultimately, it takes the victory of the Senegalese football team against France in the World Cup to convince Madické to re-evaluate 5 Diome immigrated to Strasbourg through her marriage to a French citizen whom she met in Dakar. Although the marriage did not last – her fiction often hints at the challenges of transnational mixed marriage – she chose to remain in Strasbourg, where she completed a doctoral degree in literature and gradually established herself as an author through such French publishing houses as Présence Africaine and Flammarion.

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his plans. With a renewed sense of national pride, he decides to use Salie’s remittances to construct his future in the village. Madické’s story suggests that African youth need more than economic resources in order to consider alternatives to emigration; they also require mentors. Salie owes her own exceptional formation to two mentors, a politically engaged schoolteacher who took a personal interest in her intellectual development, and an involved, nurturing and wise grandmother. The novel thus opens a more transparent dialogue about African emigration to Europe, while arguing for economic and social investment in Africa. Interspersed in the exchange between Salie and her brother are numerous stories of migration. These stories function as case studies, interrogating the diverse forms of migration: economic migration (the case of l’homme de Barbès), the selective recruitment of talented athletes to play in European football teams (the case of Moussa), forced political exile (the case of the schoolteacher Ndétare), migration in order to escape patriarchal oppression and social stigmatization (the case of Sankèle) and transnational marriage (the case of the narrator). Here and in the later novel Celles qui attendent, Diome presents economic and selective migration as part of an ongoing history of exploitation of Africa by the West, from the slave trade, to the use of Senegalese infantrymen on the front lines of the Second World War, to the subsequent need for cheap African labour in French mines and factories. In this sense, she reinforces Achille Mbembe’s position that ‘la colonisation française en Afrique n’a jamais vraiment pris fin. Elle aurait simplement changé de visage, revêtant désormais mille autres masques’ (Mbembe, 2005 : 142).6 The narrator’s migration, however, is of a different order, as Strasbourg represents a desperately needed refuge from the patriarchal social structures, insularity and intolerance of her native village. Salie is stigmatized as an outsider in Niodior because her father was not from the region and she was born out of wedlock. Her grandmother saves her from the fate of most illegitimate children in the village, who are traditionally thrown into the Atlantic in an effort to drown out the shame they represent. ‘At home’ neither in Senegal nor in Europe, Salie uses writing as a means to piece together her own history of exclusion and non-identity, to create a hybrid ‘third space’ and develop an Atlantic aesthetics: ‘Je cherche mon territoire sur une page blanche; un carnet, ça tient dans un sac de voyage. Alors, partout où je pose mes valises, je suis chez moi. Aucun filet ne saura empêcher les algues de l’Atlantique de voguer et de tirer leur saveur des eaux qu’elles traversent. […] Partir, vivre libre et mourir, comme une algue 6 ‘French colonisation in Africa never really ended. It just changed faces, putting on a thousand other masks.’

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de l’Atlantique’ (Diome, 2003: 254).7 She claims her position in-between cultures as a source of vital critical insight. Writing is both a strategy of personal healing and a powerful way to access a political voice and to weigh in on the national and international policies that shape the lives of the communities she writes about. The political militancy and commitment of Diome’s prose are reflected in Salie’s declaration, ‘Si les mots sont capables de déclarer une guerre, il sont aussi assez puissants pour la gagner’ [If words are capable of declaring war, they are also powerful enough to win one] (2003: 79). Interestingly, this passage links Salie’s success – and mobility – to her mastery of language and, more specifically, to French. French is the vehicle through which she gains access to higher education, becomes an internationally recognized author and secures a presence in the media. Thus, even as she seeks to extricate herself from the need to belong to any fixed national space and to assert her freedom as a mobile Atlantic subject, her use of French nonetheless implies that the publication, distribution and audience of her work must first pass through and be sanctioned by France.8 Diome espouses strong feminist positions in her fiction, leading several critics to affiliate her with another major Senegalese woman writer, Mariama Bâ. Mohammed Amine Niang reads Le Ventre de l’Atlantique as a contemporary rewriting of Bâ’s epistolary novel, Une si longue lettre [So Long a Letter, 1981], in which transatlantic telephone calls supplant the letter (Niang,  2011).9 Diome supports this notion by including Bâ among Salie’s favourite authors, but here again she resists reinforcing either a Senegalese national literary tradition or a francophone tradition by deliberately placing Bâ in the company of Descartes, Montesquieu, Victor Hugo, Molière, Balzac, Marx, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar and Cheikh Amadou Kane (Diome, 2003: 65). A 7 ‘I seek my territory on a blank page; a notebook fits in my suitcase. Thus, wherever I put down my bags, I’m at home. No net can prevent the seaweed of the Atlantic from wandering and picking up the flavour of the waters through which it flows. [...] Leaving, living free and dying like seaweed in the Atlantic.’ 8 It is important to note that Diome inflects French with her own particular voice. The Serpent’s Tail Press published Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman’s English translation of Diome’s first novel, The Belly of the Atlantic, in 2006, just three years after its initial publication in French. 9 Bâ’s novel takes the form of a letter from a newly widowed Senegalese woman in Dakar to her close friend who emigrated to the United States. A teacher and the mother of twelve children, the narrator recounts the abandonment and humiliation she experienced when her former husband chose to marry her eldest daughter’s friend.

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similar desire to deconstruct origins, borders and categories characterizes ‘The Old Man and the Boat’, in which the narrator argues that good literature has no borders: ‘So when people talk to me about an author’s identity or origins, I reply: nonsense! To read through such a lens is pure literary heresy. Human fragility, existential issues and a vision of the world that good authors know how to convey make all borders porous.’ The story also calls into question gender norms, as the narrator’s grandfather initiates her into fishing although it is traditionally a man’s domain. He encourages her literary gifts by requesting one story after another during their time at sea, and calls her the petit fils [grandson] he always wished to have. Thanks to his tutelage, she affirms solidarity with all those whose livelihood depends on the sea and who evoke the sea in their writing, whether in Brazil, Cuba or Senegal, regardless of gender or race. The story exemplifies a key strategy in Diome’s fiction: she begins from an intimate local experience and expands outwards to articulate a broader Atlantic sensibility. As Brent Hayes Edwards has argued, however, theorizing Atlantic diasporic connections requires that we attend carefully to difference and décalage (Edwards, 2001: 64). The telephone calls between Salie and Madické momentarily link Niodior and Strasbourg, but ultimately expose the immense disconnect between the two places. Madické accuses Salie of hypocrisy for urging others to remain in Africa while she herself resides ‘comfortably’ in a Western city. Their exchange is heavy with irony, as Salie actually struggles in the West, where she has been abandoned by her husband, is forced to take on housekeeping jobs despite her higher university degrees because of racial discrimination, and is hard put even to pay her telephone bill (Diome, 2003: 44). Salie gradually comes to the conclusion that Madické, like many Africans, is so preoccupied by his own suffering and challenges that he cannot hear the woes of the West. Here, Diome identifies a problematic lack of reciprocity and understanding between the continents that is amplified in her later novel, Celles qui attendent.

Non-Migrant Heroines In Celles qui attendent, published seven years after Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, the author again takes up the issue of African migration, but shifts her focus to the situation of non-migrant African women. By highlighting the plight of women whose sons or husbands work illegally in Europe, Diome exposes a blind spot in contemporary discourses of hybridity and mobility: African men have much freer access to migration, while women are frequently left behind. The novel recounts the stories of two women who conspire to send their sons to Europe, hoping to improve their own financial and social status.

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They scrape together the means to finance the boys’ Atlantic crossing, and set about finding them wives in order to ensure their return to Africa and to lighten their own domestic responsibilities. In the process, they expose their sons to a hazardous journey and the precariousness of illegality and racism in France, and unwittingly thrust their new daughters-in-law into financial vulnerability and loneliness. The novel levels a critical gaze at French immigration policy, micro-lending and humanitarian aid, while also exposing the role that Senegalese institutions such as arranged marriage and polygamy play in fuelling emigration and poverty. Since the narrative never leaves the village, whatever fragmented news arrives from Europe does so via migrants on holiday, sporadic phone calls, secondhand reports of TV bulletins and gossip. The resulting depiction of Europe is comically distorted, turning on its head the amorphous way Africa is often seen in the European imaginary. In the eyes of the village women, Spain and France merge into an undistinguished mass presided over by ‘Sakoussy’ (Diome, 2010: 231). Other African writers have experimented with even more radical parodic reversals, perhaps none more overtly than Abdourahman Waberi in his satirical novel, Aux Etats Unis d’Afrique [2006; In the United States of Africa, 2009]. In Diome’s case the inversion grounds the text firmly within a rural African perspective. Celles qui attendent raises important critical questions with respect to Afropean and Atlantic fiction: how might we include African non-migrants in the discourse of Afropeanism or a global Atlantic? How do we resolve the inherent tension between the author’s wilful transgression of borders and the circumscribed, grounded subjects she addresses in this novel? Diome’s focus on non-migrant African women anticipates research by social scientists Jeffrey H. Cohen and Ibrahim Sirkeci, who suggest that non-migrants are ‘critically important as foci for action and interest to migrants and to the states and nations migrants leave’ (Cohen and Sirkeci, 2011: 87). Non-movers, as exemplified by the women in Diome’s text, help cover the expenses involved in migration and serve as anchors for migrants; their dependence on remittances puts pressure on migrants to succeed. Cohen and Sirkeci argue, moreover, that while migration is often ‘a rite of passage for young men’ on the way up the social and economic ladder, it ‘thrusts the women that remain behind into new roles’ (Cohen and Sirkeci, 2011: 87). Léonora Miano offers a disturbing portrayal of the impact of migration on African women in her dark novella L’Intérieur de la nuit [2005; Dark Heart of the Night, 2010]: la plupart des hommes vivant au loin, dans les villes du pays, dans les villes d’autres pays, et ne rentrant que de manière ponctuelle. Généralement, ils

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ne faisaient pas fortune, dans ces pays lointains. La vie qu’ils y menaient mangeait tout ce qu’ils étaient censés préserver dans le but de tenir les promesses faites à eux-mêmes et au clan. […] Et les femmes restaient là avec le monde sur les épaules. […] Leur vie passée à ruminer des rêves irréalisables s’écoulerait à grands flots d’amertume muette. (Miano, 2006: 14–15)10 Diome similarly calls attention to the false promise that migration holds in the imagination of young women in Niodior, who view marriage to a migrant as the only way to escape the poverty and polygamy that has stunted their mothers’ lives: Ne voyant aucun chemin susceptible de les mener vers un avenir rassurant, les garçons se jettent dans l’Atlantique, se ruent vers l’Europe, comme un chasseur perdu se jette dans les buissons, en quête d’une nouvelle piste. Les filles, quant à elles, s’accrochent à ces forcenés de l’exil qui les entraînent dans une dérive […] La scolarité éveille les filles et nourrit chez elles d’autres aspirations. Horripilées par la désastreuse condition de leur mère, sans pouvoir compter sur elles-mêmes, elles imaginent leur salut auprès de quelqu’un qui ose l’aventure, quelqu’un à qui elles offrent leur cœur en viatique. Parce que je t’aime, tu seras fort et parce que tu seras fort tu iras en Europe réussir pour nous. (2010: 218)11 As the money fails to arrive and the phone calls become less frequent, the women are forced to take on the financial burden of supporting their families without assistance. Whatever they gain in social status is matched by bitter disillusionment, stress, vulnerability and loneliness. 10 ‘Most of the men lived far away or in other countries, and they came home only now and then. In these distant places, they seldom made a fortune. The life they led there gobbled up everything they were supposed to save to keep the promises they had made to themselves and to the clan. […] And the women stayed, with the world on their shoulders. […] Lives spent fostering fruitless dreams rolled by in great waves of silent bitterness’ (Miano, 2010: 5). 11 ‘Seeing no other path likely to lead them towards a reassuring future, the boys throw themselves into the Atlantic and rush towards Europe, like a lost hunter throws himself into the bushes in search of a new trail. As for the girls, they cling to these mad exiles who lead them adrift […] Education awakens girls and nourishes in them other aspirations. Exasperated by the disastrous condition of their mother, without being able to count on themselves, they imagine their salvation alongside someone who dares the adventure, someone to whom they offer their heart as money for the journey: Because I love you, you will be strong, and because you will be strong, you will go to Europe and succeed for us.’

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On the surface, these non-migrant women may seem to have little in common with the discourse of Afropeanism, which stresses hybridity and worldliness as defining elements of contemporary African identity, and is primarily interested in Africans in Europe. The precarious situation of these women, however, reflects the punishing legacy of African and European factors: underdevelopment, overfishing, selective immigration policies and the ongoing pillage of African resources by foreign companies. Ayo Coly, one of Diome’s most perceptive critics, reads her work as a necessary counterpoint to the ‘celebratory theorizations of movement in contemporary criticism’ (Coly, 2010: 100). Coly cautions that ‘postcolonial African migration is not a project of hybridity, world citizenship or reverse colonization of the metropolis’ (Coly, 2010: 102), a point that Diome’s novel powerfully drives home by framing migration from the perspective of those on the other side of the Atlantic. In this sense, Diome’s work departs from what Odile Cazenave has identified as the prevailing trend in African writing in France since the 1980s. Cazenave argues that writers have come to assert ‘an individual rather than a collective political stance’: ‘Theirs is a gaze no longer necessarily turned towards Africa, but rather towards themselves and their own experience, their writing taking a more personal turn’ (Cazenave, 2003: 1). Diome instead places Africa squarely in the foreground of both Le Ventre de l’Atlantique and Celles qui attendent. While the narrator of Le Ventre de l’Atlantique is situated in Strasbourg, the novel offers little detail about her existence in Europe. Salie is nearly always featured within the confines of her studio and in front of the television, the computer or on the telephone, engaging with Africa. Moreover, Africa remains present in the few passages which depict Salie outside in the city; her hurried footsteps on the hard Strasbourg pavement carry the memory of the soft caress and more leisurely pace of her native village’s beaches, recalling Edward Said’s notion of the double consciousness and plurality of vision that exile affords (Said, 2000: 186): ‘Les pieds modelés, marqués par la terre africaine, je foule le sol européen. […] Pourtant je sais que ma marche occidentale n’a rien à voir avec celle qui me faisait découvrir les ruelles, les plages, les sentiers et les champs de ma terre natale’ (Diome, 2003: 14).12 Even more significantly, the narrative enmeshes Salie’s individual experience in the stories of others from her community. In Celles qui attendent, Diome eschews an individual protagonist altogether to focus instead on the experience of a 12 ‘With feet shaped, marked by African soil, I tread European ground. […] But I know that my Western walk is nothing like the one that made me discover the alleys, beaches, paths and fields of my native land.’

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group of women across two generations. The narrative frequently deploys the collective voice (‘on’) in order to reveal the common vulnerabilities and desires that people share across frontiers, particularly in relation to global capitalism: Dans ce siècle de la consommation et de la publicité planétaire, les frontières Nord/Sud n’endiguent pas les envies et le cœur du pauvre désire autant que celui du riche. Qu’on nous cache les yeux! Dans le Tiers-Monde, le marché de l’occasion sert de soupape aux frustrations. C’est là qu’on vient trouver, parfois des mois ou des années plus tard, la robe, le jean, le téléphone vus à la télé. On bave, on chine, on négocie à en perdre haleine et on rentre en caressant la pacotille tant convoitée. Qu’on nous cache les yeux.13 (Diome, 2010: 152) The recurring refrain ‘Qu’on nous cache les yeux’ [Someone shield our eyes] aligns the narrative on the side of Africans and the people of the Global South, assailed by advertisements for items they do not need that introduce desire, frustration and alienation. The passage demonstrates the particular expressivity of Diome’s style, in which repeated apostrophes and interjections interrupt and electrify the récit, giving it rhythm and coherence, while constructing a network of solidarity beyond Africa into the Atlantic.14

The Distorted Mirror In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1991, South African author Nadine Gordimer used the metaphor of the sea to characterize African writing as inherently political: ‘the writer’s themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea’ (1991). This depiction is particularly apt for Diome’s writing, where it takes on a more literal significance as the sea itself reflects the unequal relations between Africa and Europe. The 13 ‘In this century of consumerism and global advertising, the frontiers between North and South don’t curb desires and the poor man desires as much as someone rich. Someone shield our eyes! In the Third World, the secondhand market serves as an outlet for frustrations. It is there that we come to find, sometimes months or years later, the dress, the pair of jeans, the telephone, we saw on TV. We drool, we hunt for bargains, we haggle until out of breath and go home caressing the junk we so longed for. Someone shield our eyes.’ 14 Refrains such as ‘O, Memoria!’ ‘Métamorphose!’ (Diome, 2003: 141, 159) and ‘Chaque miette de vie doit server à conqueror la dignité!’ [Every crumb of life must serve to win dignity!] (Diome, 2003: 33) resurface throughout her works.

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competition between European (and of course Asian) commercial shipping vessels off the coast of Senegal and local fishermen has endangered the local ecosystem, depleted fish populations and destroyed an artisanal trade that had sustained communities for generations, creating food insecurity and unemployment and pushing young people to migrate.15 Senegalese youth embark on perilous Atlantic crossings aboard fragile fishing pirogues, risking everything to reach Europe as illegal migrants. Before 2005, the majority of immigrants entering France did so under the family reunification policy. In the wake of the banlieue and student riots of 2005 and 2006, however, the administration of Nicolas Sarkozy introduced a ‘skills and talents’ policy in order to limit the influx of unskilled migrants in favour of highly skilled and educated immigrants. Most economists who study the question of immigration contend that selective immigration will not reduce the number of unskilled migrants seeking entry into France; it simply ensures that these workers will do so illegally and under more precarious conditions (Murphy, 2012). Diome’s novel shows the impact of these particular policy changes on rural women in Senegal. In the absence of a family reunification policy, migrant workers must either return to their countries of origin to reunite with their families, or definitively construct a life in France without them. Celles qui attendent represents both scenarios: Lamine returns and assumes responsibility for his family in Niodior; Issa takes a European woman as his second wife, has children and only returns for a brief summer holiday, abandoning his wife Coumba in all but name. The narrative commands empathy for African migrants by consistently referring to them as youths and children, calling attention to the vulnerability, desperation and hope that motivate them: Quand on entend ‘immigration choisie’ on ne peut que se demander: qui choisit qui, comment, et pour quoi faire? […] Immigration choisie pour la guerre! Pauvres tirailleurs, choisis pour la mort. Immigration choisie pour l’industrialisation! Seules les mines et les usines se souviennent encore des étrangers venus porter l’Europe sur leurs échines, pour la sortir de l’après-guerre. Immigration choisie aujourd’hui, pour les besoins d’une main-d’œuvre compétente et peu coûteuse, d’où ce tri sélectif parmi les 15 A recent publication by the United Nations Environment Programme, ‘The Critical Role of Global Food Consumption in Achieving Sustainable Food Systems and Food for All’, provides an analysis of the consequences of foreign fishing agreements in Senegalese waters. The report notes that ‘in May 2012, the new government of Senegal announced a cancellation of all foreign fishing agreements. However, there remains the challenge of artisanal overcapacity and poor marine ecosystem monitoring and management.’

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nécessiteux, priés d’arriver avec la qualification requise ou de déguerpir. Le rejet est criant: une fois le gâteau constitué, les humbles, les pas rentables qui n’ont que leur faim à leur faire valoir sont sommés de quitter la table occidentale. Et les jeunes africains, poussés par leur détresse et l’inaptitude des gouvernants censés leur tracer un avenir, affluent, inconscients de ce qui les attend et résignés à leur nouveau statut de cheptel de l’Occident. On nous endort à coups d’aide humanitaire; se réveiller, c’est réaliser que l’Occident n’a pas intérêt à ce que l’Afrique se développe, car il perdrait alors son vivier de main-d’œuvre facile. (Diome, 2010: 240)16 According to the narrator, one of the impediments to reforming immigration policy and transforming the relationship between Europe and Africa is that neither is unable to fully see the other, because each continent is blinded by its own anxieties and needs. They are ‘comme deux enfants devant un miroir déformant’ [like two children standing in front of a distorting mirror] (Diome, 2010: 241). Unfortunately, Diome’s fiction often replicates this distorted mirror: it offers few images of progressive white European characters, instead reducing them to ridiculous, naive and racist caricatures. In Celles qui attendent, the portrayal of the ‘dame en porcelaine’ [porcelain lady] whom Issa brings back from France as his second wife reflects precisely this kind of negative caricature: she is singularly lazy, unshapely, impolite, ignorant of local customs and oblivious to the struggles of local women. Nameless in the novel, she requires multiple showers each day and parades around the village half-naked with her mixed-race children and a camera (Diome, 2010: 270). Instead of fulfilling the promise of an emerging Afropean identity, Issa’s mixed-race children cling to their mother, scared of chickens. However comical, the prevalence of such caricatured images in Diome’s 16 ‘When one hears of “selective immigration”, one has to ask: who selects whom, how, and for what? […] Selective immigration for war! Poor infantrymen chosen to die. Selective immigration for industrialization! Only the mines and factories still remember the foreigners who came to carry Europe on their backs to get her back on her feet after the war. Selective immigration today, to satisfy the need for a competent and cheap labour force, which explains how the needy are sorted, either arrive with the necessary qualifications or get out. The rejection is scandalous: once the cake is constituted, the humble and unprofitable whose only asset is their hunger are asked to leave the Western banquet. And young Africans, pushed by misery and the ineptitude of their leaders who are supposed to plot out a future for them, flock, unaware of what awaits them and resigned to their new status as livestock for the West. Humanitarian aid rocks us to sleep; to wake up is to realize that the West is not interested in Africa’s development as it would lose its source of cheap manpower.’

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fiction is problematic. If the goal is to provide an effective counter-discourse to the racial discrimination of French nationalist rhetoric and to imagine into being a dynamic Atlantic subjectivity, authors cannot simply replicate the same xenophobia.

Conclusion Diome takes on the contemporary African experience of migration from multiple angles: she constructs a transatlantic conversation on migration in Le Ventre de l’Atlantique and then addresses the impact of migration on non-migrants in Celles qui attendent. In place of the fashion-forward intellectuals and successful up-and-coming city dwellers that we see in much Afropolitan literature, Diome focuses on rural Africans: fishermen, women who scour the mangroves for firewood and shellfish to supplement their meagre household resources, grocers who are forced to sell on credit, knowing full well the debtors will not be able to repay them, youths desperate to try their luck in Europe.17 In Gilroy’s sense, Diome portrays the Atlantic as ‘continually crisscrossed by the movement of black people – not only as commodities – but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship’ (Gilroy, 1993: 63). While the migrants Diome writes about move primarily between Senegal and Europe, she nonetheless attempts to break out of the Afropean deadlock and open the Atlantic symbolically to other shores. In this sense, she gestures towards Paul Gilroy’s vision of ‘a shared, though heterogeneous culture that joins diverse communities in North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa’ (Barson and Gorschlüter, 2010: 2). It is nonetheless difficult, as I have sought to illustrate here, to reconcile the circumscribed stories we encounter in Diome’s fiction with her efforts to depict the Atlantic as a space of relation, movement and shared human struggle. Tellingly, the one instance in Celles qui attendent of movement that escapes the Afropean binary is a disaster of tragic proportions. A Senegalese pirogue bound for Europe goes astray and washes up on the coast of Brazil. No less than forty skulls are found aboard. When the news reaches Niodior, the entire village is panic stricken that the pirogue may have been carrying some of their own young people (Diome, 2010: 176). This tragedy suggests the history of loss, ‘transnational dislocation, global inequity and violence’ that remains inscribed within the Atlantic (Barson and Gorschlüter, 2010: 20), despite Diome’s efforts to reappropriate and transform the Atlantic into 17 Diome emphasizes that transatlantic migration is a natural phenomenon by frequently depicting African youth as pelicans and other kinds of birds.

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‘un pont vers l’avenir’ [a bridge to the future] (Diome, 2010: 185), a constant, faithful presence (Diome 2003: 52), a site of mobility, creative renewal and relation. Considering the stringent restrictions on African mobility and the history of failed economic and trade partnerships between African and other Atlantic nations,18 Diome’s interest in the Atlantic may be best understood as an aspiration for deeper connections across the Atlantic, rather than as a reflection of existing Atlantic relationships. In recent years, there have been encouraging moves towards realizing closer Atlantic collaboration, especially from a development and trade standpoint. Paul Zeleza sees, for instance, the launching of the African Union (AU) in 2002 as a tentative gesture ‘towards a global Pan-Africanism for the twenty-first century that could create a new compact between Africa and its Diasporas’ (Zeleza, 2009: 71). The AU convened meetings of intellectuals from Africa and the diaspora in 2004 and 2006 in Senegal and Brazil, respectively, suggesting that closer ties between these two nations in particular are already underway. The fact that Diome’s first novel was so quickly and so well translated also illustrates the capacity of her fiction to circulate outside African and European contexts, and to contribute to fostering a more vibrant Atlantic dialogue.19 Such movements, however, do not resolve the unsettling tension between the wide Atlantic dimensions of Diome’s project and the Afropean limits that circumscribe nearly all of her characters.

Works Cited Bâ, Mariama. 1981. Une si longue lettre. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. So Long a Letter. 1981 Trans. by Modupé Bodé-Thomas. London: Heinemann. Barson, Tanya, and Peter Gorschlüter (eds). 2010. Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic. Liverpool: Tate Liverpool. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. 1996. The Repeating Island: the Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 18 I am thinking here of the failed South Atlantic Treaty Organization that African activists sought to block as a neo-imperialist collaboration between Latin American racist dictatorships, the United States and the apartheid governments of southern Africa. 19 I would like to thank Bettina Lerner and Kerry Bystrom for their insightful comments on an early version of this chapter. I am also grateful to Kerry Bystrom and Joseph Slaughter for inviting me to present this research as part of the ACLA Global South Atlantic seminar in April 2013, which helped me to contextualize the Atlantic dimension of Diome’s work.

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Byrne, David. 1993. CD. Zap Mama: Adventures in Afropea. New York: Luaka Bop. Carillo, Susan (ed.). ‘Bridging the Atlantic: Brazil and Sub-Saharan Africa: South-South Partnering for Growth’. World Bank Report. http://siteresources. worldbank.org/AFRICAEXT/Resources/africa-brazil-bridging-final.pdf (accessed 23 May 2013). Cazenave, Odile. 2003. Afrique-sur-Seine: une nouvelle génération de romanciers africains. Paris: L’Harmattan. Cohen, Jeffrey, and Ibrahim Sirkeci. 2011. Cultures of Migration: The Global Nature of Contemporary Mobility. Austin: University of Texas Press. Coly, Ayo. 2010. The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Diome, Fatou. 2001. Préférence nationale et autres nouvelles. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 2003. Le Ventre de l’Atlantique. Paris: Anne Carrière. —. 2006. Kétala. Paris: Anne Carrière. —. 2008. Inassouvies, nos vies. Paris: Flammarion. —. 2008. The Belly of the Atlantic. Trans. by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman. London: Serpent’s Tail. —. 2010. Celles qui attendent. Paris: Flammarion. Diop, Boris Boubacar. 1999. Murambi, le livre des ossements. Paris: Stock. Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2001. ‘The Uses of Diaspora’. Social Text 66.19.1: 45–73. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gordimer, Nadine. 1991. ‘Writing and Being’. Nobel Lecture. 7 December. http:// www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1991/gordimer-lecture. html (accessed 20 October 2012). Mbembe, Achille. 2005. ‘La République et l’impensé de la “race”’. In Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire (eds), La Fracture coloniale: une crise française. Paris: La Découverte. 139–54. McLaren, Joseph. 2013. ‘Expanding the Channels of the African Diaspora’. Research in African Literatures 44.1: 180–87. Mda, Zakes. 2002. The Madonna of Excelsior. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Miano, Léonora. 2005. L’Intérieur de la nuit. Paris: Plon. —. 2008. Afropean Soul. Paris: Flammarion. —. 2010. Dark Heart of the Night. Trans. by Tasmin Black. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Miller, Christopher L. 2008. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Murphy, Kara. 2012. ‘France’s New Law: Control Immigration Flows, Court the Highly Skilled’. http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display. cfm?ID=486 (accessed 6 November 2012). Niang, Mouhamédoul Amine. 2011. ‘Croisées narratives ou nouvelle translation du vécu spatial de l’immigré. Le post-épistolaire et le mémoriel dans Le Ventre de l’Atlantique de Fatou Diome’. In Anna Rocca and Névine El Nossery (eds), Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin. Saarbrücken: Éditions Universitaires Européennes: 235–52. Ratcliff, Anthony. 2008. ‘Black Writers of the World, Unite! Negotiating Pan-African Politics of Cultural Struggle in Afro-Latin America’. The Black Scholar 37.4: 27–38. Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile: And other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Segatti, Désiré Kabwe Wa. 2009. ‘“Migritude”: Nouveaux visages de la littérature africaine au féminin’. In Bernard de Meyer and Neil ten Kortenaar (eds), The Changing Faces of African Literature. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi: 83–94. Thomas, Dominic. 2007. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. United Nations Environment Programme. 2012. ‘The Critical Role of Global Food Consumption in Achieving Sustainable Food Systems and Food for All’. http://fletcher.tufts.edu/CIERP/~/media/Fletcher/Microsites/CIERP/ Publications/2012/UNEP%20Global%20Food%20Consumption.pdf (accessed 10 November 2012). Waberi, Abdourahman. 2006. Aux Etats Unis d’Afrique. Paris: Lattès. —. 2009. In the United States of Africa. Trans. by David and Nicole Ball. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Zeleza, Paul. 2009. ‘Africa and its Diasporas: Remembering South America’. Research in African Literatures 40.4: 142–64.

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Corps sans titre: ‘Fleshiness’ and Afropean Identity in Bessora’s 53 cm John Nimis

‘Fleshiness’ and Afropean Identity in Bessora’s 53 cmCHANGE THIS

In the field of French literary studies, the rise of ‘francophone’ studies is one of the many signs of a shift in priorities and in world-views. Originally a term used to designate the study of the cultures of former French colonies, francophone has become more problematic as a term due, in part, to the perception that it perpetuates a colonial centre–periphery model. I have argued elsewhere that terms such as francophone are increasingly untenable because of more fundamental shifts, in particular the breakdown of the nation-state as a bounded socio-economic and linguistic community (Nimis, 2013). Companies and jobs, texts and languages, as well as human beings flow across national political borders with an ease and frequency that is unprecedented in the modern era. New identities arise which are not only irreconcilable with national categories, but because of new mobilities, hard to pin to geographical categories. In the realm of theory and criticism, the response to these changing realities has been to seek new paradigms for the study of culture, and to find new language for speaking about postnational human communities. It is in this context that the term Afropean has become useful given that it incorporates the term European – which designates a postnational economic community (the EU) – while also referring to ‘whites’ as a racial category. For the prefix ‘Euro’ is substituted ‘Afro’, which, like Euro, refers to both a continent (i.e. a larger than ‘national’ formation) and a racial category. Afropeanism is thus more grounded in this duality than more 48

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universalizing terms such as négritude or the more recent ‘Afropolitan’ (De Meyer, 2009). Some critics have used the term ‘Afro-European’ (Brancato, 2008; Crumly Deventer and Thomas, 2011), but Afropean points to a group with dual cultural and political identities without any basis or investment in the national, either as a source of legitimacy or a target of resistance. The absence of a hyphen in the term therefore registers the integrity of human subjects, thus designating a seamless mixture and crossing, across distance and across imagined categories of humans (black and white). While the term itself is relatively new, the broader experience it seeks to encompass has been a concern in literature for some time. This chapter thus focuses on the various ways in which Afropeanist principles operate in Bessora’s first novel, 53 cm (1999), a playful narrative told by Zara, a woman with ambiguous national and racial appartenances [belonging]. The central problematic of the novel is provided by her quest to legalize her status and that of her daughter Marie in France. Resorting to ironic satire, both the narrator and the cast of characters ridicule French laws on immigration, as well as discourses of national and racial belonging more generally. The novel points towards problems of Afropean identity in several ways: discrediting the ‘national’ as an identity paradigm, thematizing hybridity and métissage, but most importantly, representing the conflict in reconciling the experience of an individual with forces that work to separate and divide people into racial and legal categories. Zara’s identity is complicated by her attachments to other European nations besides France – she was born in Brussels and spent much of her childhood in Geneva, and remains connected to Africa through her Gabonese father. Because of the ways in which race is classified and coded in French society, she is presented as not ‘authentically’ belonging to either Africa or France, but rather as ‘emphasizing and maintaining her hybrid position’ (Westmoreland, 2007: 154). The novel thus consistently works to make explicit the paradoxes that grow out of either a nation-based ­identitarian modality or one based on physical characteristics such as skin colour. The novel’s main themes are reinforced through patterns of recurring symbols, mostly pertaining to food and digestion, but also through references to iconic symbols of (especially African) ‘other’-ness. Some symbols, such as Sarah Baartman, are explicitly named, while others, like the okapi, are only intimated. The suggestive ways in which Bessora plays with these symbols as well as with the French language yield a symbolic aesthetics of métissage and universal (non-)belonging rooted in physicality and the ‘fleshy’. Through this symbolic language and play, the ridiculing of certain rational modes of classification and the complicating of homogeneous categories (such as ‘white’ or ‘French’), the novel challenges existing categories of race and nationality.

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These main currents are prominent in the first four chapters of 53 cm, offering a critique of racial exclusion couched in biological terms. In these chapters, the target is specifically the language of physical fitness as it pertains to body shape and the absence of disease. The first chapter takes place in a gym and mocks the pursuit of bodily conformity, suggesting how this objective could be equated with ‘French’-ness. The first gesture in the narrative, however, demonstrates the trouble Zara has in fitting in to the category of ‘African’. For example, the book’s title is borrowed from the measurement of Zara’s hips, comically presented as too small for her to belong to the (racialized black) category of ‘stéatopyge’, or large-hipped persons. This category is presented on the first page of the novel by the character Keita, a student in anthropology and sort of maniac for ­classifications and measurements as a measure of black- or African-ness. Chapter 2 involves a doctor’s appointment, a required step in immigration procedures, to verify that Zara is free from disease. She tells the reader, with irony, that since ‘les virus ne s’attaquant qu’aux étrangers’ [viruses only attack foreigners], she will only be allowed to stay in France ‘s’il s’avère que ma personne n’est pas infestée’ [if it turns out that my person is not infested] (Bessora, 1999: 14).1 With her characteristic ironic tone, Zara explains the reasons for this checkup, not in the terms used by the government, but rather postulating an ideology based on the policy of mandatory health checkups for foreigners, and following the idea to its (il) logical conclusion. Throughout the book, the narrator points out this kind of déraison [irrationality] to the reader, especially when based on assumptions linked to racial and national categorizations. Bessora recycles the language of this encounter in the fourth chapter, in which Zara bites into a cherry (which she has bought at a market in Chapter 3) and finds it to be ‘unfit’. She proceeds to scold the cherry and asks it, ‘es-tu contagieuse, virus infâme?’ [are you contagious, nefarious virus?] (1999: 21). A bit further on, she weighs the cherry, just as the doctor had ‘[pesé] mes kilos, et mesur[é] mes millimètres’ [weighed my kilograms, and measured my millimeters] (1999: 14), continuing the theme from the first chapter of depicting the mania for measurement that accompanies classifications, and soon afterwards she demands a ‘ca’t de cériseté’ [cherry-ness card] (1999: 22). This is a joke on one of the most persistent tropes in 53 cm: the various identity cards that serve as proof of legal status, the most important being the ‘ca’t de séjou’’ (carte de séjour), or residency card, referred to in the novel in italics and with all r’s omitted. 1 This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author of this chapter.

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The cherry protests, and Zara and the cherry proceed to have a conversation that culminates in her throwing it into the rubbish alongside a can of flageolet beans. A binary opposition between cherries and flageolets is set up, drawing on racist terminology, and returns several times in the novel. This episode represents a turn to the fantastic or surreal, as Jennifer Westmoreland (2007) has called it, a basic pattern that continues throughout the novel. The narrator recounts episodes from her life, laden with irony and symbolism, which are interrupted by fantasies of analogous situations projected on to foods, animals or imagined characters. Beyond Zara’s conversation with the cherry, other examples include an imagined ethnographic expedition to France as a ‘gaulologue’ [gaulologist]; a stint as a ‘planétologue’ [planetologist] accompanied by Luke Skywalker; a transformation into a giant ant; and in the final chapters, a conversation with a small ant. Zara’s parodic ‘trial’, held at her sister’s home and acted out by both women, could also be considered a flight of fantasy, although it is told in dialogue rather than direct narration. While the tone is lighthearted throughout the novel, these fantasy sequences seem to chronologically follow particularly frustrating or stressful experiences: the doctor’s appointment, the visit to her home by a representative from the immigration services, a phone call informing her that her daughter’s legal status is problematic and, finally, the night she spends with Jean-Christophe, her imagined husband-to-be, who turns out to be her arresting officer. These episodes could also be read more seriously as the narrator’s post-traumatic escapism, especially considering the narrative’s sinister ending. The episode with the cherry also sets up a pattern of language games that are pursued and elaborated throughout the novel. The cherry is referred to using the very specific and somewhat exotic term ‘griotte’, the word for a morello cherry. This precise vocabulary participates in a larger theme of horticultural and zoological classification, which is used on food, animals and humans throughout the novel (as we have already seen with the term stéatopyge). Several situations bring back the word griotte to refer to someone who is excluded or insulted on the basis of their race, including the biblical character Ham (who is referred to disparagingly as a ‘griotte noire’), and so the word takes on a meaning that is ‘local’ to the novel. However, at one point, this pattern is jostled, as the word griotte is used as the feminine form of the well-known word for a class of West African storytellers, the griot. As her sister cooks for her one evening, she says, ‘je tiens mon rôle de griotte: le soir, à la veillée, je conte mon épopée’ [I hold my role as griotte: during the evening, as we gather, I recount my epic] (Bessora, 1999: 90). Bessora plays with double meanings and close spellings and pronunciations throughout her writing, undoing old divisions and remaking connections, which I will relate

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to the shift away from nation-centred (here, ‘old’) conceptions of identity towards Afropeanism. We will return to this dimension shortly, but it is notable that, like most of the symbols and themes, it is present in 53 cm from the opening sequence of the work.

Mixing Griottes and Flageolets: métissage and Food The theme from 53 cm that is most discussed, and for good reason, is that of métissage. The word refers in its first meaning to reproduction between two species or races that are considered distinct, but has come to be used more generally to refer to the blurring of boundaries, the blending of elements (physical, cultural or otherwise) generally considered to belong in different categories, and the ambiguous cultural and racial identities that accompany these processes. Caroline Beschea-Fache argues that 53 cm forms ‘corporeal representations’ of métissage, and that it ‘challenges the old paradigms and binary oppositions that continue to shape racial and national relations’ (2010: 99). I have chosen the word ‘fleshy’ instead of ‘corporeal’ because I see métissage thematized as much in terms of food and animals as in terms of humans and human bodies. The blurring of the categories of human, animal and food also presents some rich interpretive possibilities, and comments on the dehumanization made possible through rational and scientific discourses, as well as on long-standing tropes of human ‘other’-ness, such as cannibalism. The binary opposition between griottes and flageolets, two food items that are not usually associated or opposed, points to the arbitrariness of categories of physical difference and discrimination. The production of this kind of outlandish binary is one way in which Bessora ridicules systems of racial classification. Another aspect of this critique comes through her descriptions of human actors. When Zara describes the attendees at the gym in the first chapter of 53 cm, she uses vivid adjectives to describe their skin colour: people are not white or black, but rather ‘olivâtre’ [olive-greenish] or ‘chocolat’ [chocolate-brown] (Bessora, 1999: 10–11). Throughout the book, descriptions of people linger on the details of their skin tone, and are often compared to foods. One minor character is referred to as a ‘lait écremé’ [skimmed milk] in conversation with a ‘grain de vanille’ [vanilla seed] (1999: 110). Hermenondine is described as having a ‘bouche rose cerise, en forme de banane’ [cherry pink mouth, in the form of a banana] (1999: 26) and later is referred to with the epithet ‘biscuit nantais’ [Nantes biscuit] (1999: 155). At one point, a single food-related simile is used to describe the skin colour of both a white and a black person: one character is thus ‘blanc comme une biscotte grillée’ [white like a grilled biscotti] and the other ‘noir comme une

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biscotte grillée’ [black like a grilled biscotti] (1999: 35), again pointing to the arbitrariness of racial denotation. In particular, white French characters are associated with colours and terms such as ‘gris cendre’ [ash grey], ‘sable’ [sand], ‘neige’ [snow], ‘vanille’ [vanilla], ‘peau dorée’ [golden skin] or ‘roses et beiges’ [pink and beige]. Through these fine distinctions between skin colours, all of the characters become racially or ethnically ‘marked’. I read this as a strategy that responds to a resistance in (white) French culture to talking explicitly about race. Bessora seems to allude to this social phenomenon late in the book, when Zara defines the racial term ‘white’: ‘Blanc désigne toute personne de couleur allergique à la couleur, à commencer par la sienne’ [White designates any person of colour allergic to colour, beginning with his/her own] (1999: 177). This definition, like the detailed vocabulary for differences in colour, subverts the normal binary opposition between those who are ‘de couleur’ [of colour] and those who are ‘white’, thereby troubling the homogeneity of the category of white. This is just one of several instances in which Zara refuses to use a simplistic category to describe a person’s identity: she constantly refers to Keita’s mixed ancestry between Bambara and Mandingo (which the characters explain as being a peasant on one side and a noble on the other), and uses terms such as ‘azteco-hispano-colombien’ [Aztec-Hispanic-Colombian] (1999: 128) to point to the hybridity inherent in national identities anywhere. This hyper-attention to the complexities of narratives of belonging makes space for new modes of solidarity and identification, such as Afropeanism. Food symbolizes belonging in other ways throughout the novel. In one instance, Zara describes her childhood and the different places her family lived and how her mother appears to the other European expatriates in Gabon as a ‘jolie poupée vanille aux lèvres framboises’ [pretty vanilla doll with raspberry lips] (1999: 50). This description serves to describe her mother’s failure to integrate with the expatriate community in Gabon, which is also articulated in terms of the food she would prepare. The passage brings back the opposition between cherries and beans (‘griottes/flageolets’) from an earlier chapter: ‘Mais non… Maman est une collabo: elle accommode les griottes avec les flageolets, elle frit les bananes plantains, elle cuisine le chocolat, la sauce au pain d’odika, noyau de mangue sauvage. Blasphème’ [But no… Mum is a collabo: she makes room for both cherries and beans, she fries plantain, she cooks chocolate, sauce with odika bread, wild mango pit. Blasphemy] (1999: 59). Food is thus a symbol of the refusal on the part of Zara’s mother to assimilate with expatriates by joining them in excluding African foods (odika bread, mango, plantain), and her culinary métissage is described as blasphemous to the rigidly categorizing whites in Gabon.

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In this fourth chapter, places are also described almost exclusively in terms of the food that is eaten there. Two short paragraphs are dedicated to Zara’s experience in Vienna while her father was a diplomat, the longer paragraph cast almost entirely in terms of food: ‘Pendant les vacances, on rejoint Papa à Vienne. Dans son palace, Himmel Strasse, je hume les exhalaisons qui s’échappent de la cuisine des domestiques indiens. Je bois du moût, croque dans un apfelstrudel sur l’air d’un disque de Police, Message in a bottle’ (1999: 62).2 This passage shows the kind of transnational métissage within Europe, including German-speaking Europe, Indian food and British music, that makes a binary postcolonial reading model (i.e. France-Africa or francophone writing) too narrow a paradigm for reading Bessora. The other paragraph describes Vienna in a single sentence, with Zara complaining that her hips did not grow as a result of being there. In the context of the racialized category of stéatopyge introduced at the beginning of the book, this suggests that Zara failed to become more African as a result of spending time in Austria. She remains in an increasingly complex ‘third space’ of globalized experience and identity, undoing European national specificity in order to point away from France in its imagined specificity and towards Europe as a component of her identitarian frame. One food product in particular is strangely and persistently present throughout the novel: the Carambar (a popular French sweet made of caramel). Zara first eats one in Chapter 4, using it to cleanse her palate after eating the bad cherry. Earlier in the narrative, she searches her bag for a Carambar while on the train with Marie. She also eats one with Hermenodine during their first meeting, an interview to verify her immigrant status, offers one to her sister Mya as they prepare a tarte tatin3 later in the narrative, and then to Hermenodine again in a later scene in the hammam. At times she ‘consoles herself’ with one, at others it ‘helps her think’. While these seem to be incidental details, in the later chapters of the book the Carambar becomes increasingly foregrounded, and is eventually cited as the primary cause for the genetic transformations Zara undergoes. While visiting the office of SOS-Racisme, trying to find support and a legal channel to continue to live in France with Marie, she transforms into a giant ant. At the same time, the various other clients and workers at the office also change into a variety of 2 ‘During vacation, we joined Papa in Vienna. In his palace on Himmel Strasse, I breathe in the exhalations that escape from the kitchen of the Indian servants. I drink wort, bite into an apple strudel to the tune of a Police record, Message in a Bottle.’ 3 A tarte tatin is a traditional upside-down French tart usually made with apples.

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insects: beetles, spiders, dragonflies, grasshoppers. It is this last insect, the grasshopper, who tells Zara that her genetic transformation into an ant was brought about by eating Carambars. Why might Bessora have used the Carambar specifically, rather than some other kind of confectionery? A Carambar is a long, thin and chewy sweet that is individually wrapped, and, according to the company’s online publicity materials, it was invented by the accidental mixing of cacao with caramel, or pre-processed chocolate with a modified white sugar product. In other words, the sweet is a cross-breed, like so many of the characters and symbols in 53 cm. The other cultural meaning of Carambar comes from the jokes that are written on its wrappers, and the phrase ‘blague de Carambar’ means something like ‘a bad joke’ or ‘a joke that isn’t funny’. Likewise, the novel itself, so lighthearted and humorous, nevertheless takes a sudden and sinister turn in the final pages. The implication is that Zara will be violently arrested and deported; this kind of ‘blague de Carambar’ invites the reader to laugh along, but the reality is that the precarious situation of illegal immigrants in France is no laughing matter. The connections between food and humans emphasize the physicality of human existence, or what I have called the ‘fleshy’. Perhaps another way to frame this emphasis on the physical would be in terms of the ‘animal’, biological presence of humankind.

Exotic Creatures: Animals and Humans If one reads 53 cm with attention to the references to animals, a strange consistency emerges. Two animals, the giraffe and the zebra, appear repeatedly in a wide variety of contexts. The first mention of a giraffe is brief, as one of Marie’s old toys. During one of Zara’s surrealist flights of fancy, in this case as the gaulologue-explorer adventuring in Europe, she addresses the ca’t de séjou’, telling it the different ways she will profit from it once she is able to acquire it (see Célérier, 2002). She will either use it to inspire a new art form (one of several nods she makes to European modernism throughout the book, this time suggestive of Marcel Duchamp or Picasso and their relationships to African art) and occupy the great art museums (of which she gives a list); or perhaps it will end up in the museum of natural history, ‘entre les restes d’une girafe et le cadavre sans sépulture d’une vénus hottentote’ [between the remains of a giraffe and the tomb-less corpse of a Hottentot Venus] (Bessora, 1999: 30; see Westmoreland, 2007). Here we see an oblique reference to the Hottentot Venus, one of the dominant symbols of the book, with the remains of a giraffe acting as a third symbolic term. This bizarre image of the giraffe and the Hottentot Venus lined up in a row at a museum with a French identity card between them is in a similar aesthetic

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register to a Dalí painting. However, the juxtaposition begs a comparison, as both the giraffe and the Hottentot are from Africa, and both are objects of European fascination because of their physical proportions: the giraffe, the tallest animal in the world, and the Hottentot Venus, ‘celebrated’ for her size. This image criticizes the animalization of black women, and also perhaps suggests a critique of the inflated value of French identity. It also mocks the perceived ‘natural’-ness of French citizenship by suggesting that, if it is not accepted in art museums, the identity card could belong in a museum of ‘natural’ history. The other animal that appears frequently in 53 cm is the zebra, a consummate symbol of métissage or non-integrated racial mixing, with its sharply defined black and white stripes. The symbol of the zebra appears only once not coupled with the giraffe, in a chapter in which Keita tells the story of Ham, the cursed son of Noah who is considered in certain discourses to be the ancestor of the black ‘race’. When Zara does not recognize the name Ham, she is accused of being like a zebra, suggesting that (once again) she is not ‘black’ enough. During the surrealistic ‘gaulological’ expedition, Zara encounters two different characters, described in very similar terms, the only difference being which animal and colours they are associated with. First, she sees a man urinating in the subway, whom she qualifies as ‘Mulâtre’ [Mulatto] but only after introducing him as ‘un Gaulois à peau de zèbre (le noir et le blanc ne se mélangent pas)’ [a Gaul with zebra skin (black and white don’t mix)] (Bessora, 1999: 51). On the next page, she encounters a ‘troglodyte, animateur souriant, à peau de girafe (le blanc et le jaune ne se mélangent pas)’ [troglodyte, smiling greeter, with giraffe skin (white and yellow don’t mix)] (1999: 52). In this alternative fantasy world, racial mixing produces spotted or striped skin, like exotic animals. The zebra and giraffe serve to inscribe the importance of skin in the judgements and presuppositions made by French people unconsciously, or at least without acknowledgement. This portrayal of an exaggerated version of a behaviour that is considered normal is the logic of the entire gaulological expedition, in which the various identity cards are treated as talismans and normalized social behaviour as ritual belief in magic. A few chapters later, Zara meets Bienvenu, whose racial belonging is baffling to Zara. When she asks him, ‘qu’es-tu donc?’ [so what are you, then?] (1999: 96), he responds with a precise account of his complex genealogy, followed by a list of other people’s misinterpretations of his physiognomy, articulated in terms of animals: Quand j’ai rencontré Keita, il m’a pris pour un cheval noir. Mais souvent, il me traite d’âne blanc. Hier, un Blanc à la peau marron clair m’a pris

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pour un âne noir. Une girafe m’a pris pour un zèbre, un homme beige m’a dit qu’il était jaune avant de me prendre pour un chameau, et un Noir marron-bleu m’a confondu avec son cheval blanc. (1999: 96)4 The character compares himself to several animals, among which the zebra and giraffe would not take on any special significance if they were not paired in so many other parts of the novel. In Chapter 14, Zara has decided on a strategy for obtaining her permanent resident status, or ca’t de séjou’, while avoiding Kafkaesque bureaucracies. She goes to a nightclub in search of a husband of French nationality, providing yet another context for the development of the novel’s symbolic vocabulary. When she recognizes the man she had met briefly at the market in the opening chapters of the novel, and pursues him, her way is blocked by ‘un couple, homosexuel mais hybride (un zèbre et une girafe femelles)’ [a couple, homosexual but hybrid (a zebra and a giraffe, both female)] (1999: 105). This quotation points to two interesting oppositions: the word ‘mais’ [but] sets up an opposition between homosexuality and hybridity, drawing attention to the naturalized hybrid nature of ‘normal’ heterosexual relations. In the same nominal clause, attention is also drawn to the naturalized male–female opposition in the French language, as the adjective ‘femelle’ must be applied, since the words for the two animals in question are of different grammatical gender (the zebra masculine, the giraffe feminine). Bessora’s attention to language and the meta-discourse about spelling and grammar throughout the novel make the reader attentive to these nuances. The persistent pairing of the zebra and giraffe evokes yet another symbol, which is never explicitly named in the book: the okapi. This animal, native to the eastern Congo, has the head of a giraffe (its closest biological relative), but is closer in size to a horse, and has zebra stripes on its haunches. It is a powerful symbol of hybridity and métissage, and, because of its rarity, has a powerful presence in the African imaginary as a magical creature. It is also a symbol of Western fascination with Africa’s otherness, and at the time of the publication of 53 cm, okapis were thought to be extinct in the wild and were only known to exist in zoos. Since that time, okapis have been seen in the wild (in 2006) and even photographed (in 2008). However, in 53 cm, they function as a kind of absent presence, suggested but never named, somewhat like the racially mysterious Zara with her liminal status 4 ‘When I met Keita, he took me for a black horse. But often, he treats me like a white ass. Yesterday, a white with light chestnut skin took me for a black ass. A giraffe took me for a zebra, a beige man told me that he was yellow before taking me for a camel, and a chestnut-blue black confused me with his white horse.’

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as an illegal immigrant, or perhaps more like her daughter Marie, whose physical presence defies ­categorization and prevents official recognition of her existence. In 1999, at the time Bessora published 53 cm, the okapi’s history was similar to that of Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, mentioned several times in the novel, including in the dedication. Baartman’s story, told in the text but well known in the history of Africa and its exploitation, is also like a ‘bad joke’ given that she is among the most famous and horrifying examples of the animalization of a human being. She was brought to Europe from southern Africa and put on display, both in scientific communities and more popular contexts, because of her unusually large sexual organs, buttocks and breasts. When she died, only those parts of her body were preserved to be kept on display. Thus, like the okapi, Baartman was an object of fascination, a strange, exotic beauty ‘discovered’ in Africa and brought to the West for ‘preservation’ and safe-keeping. Baartman plays a similar role to that of the okapi in the book, as the descriptions of Zara’s physical ‘inadequacy’ (she is not stéatopyge, or largehipped) refer to Baartman by implicit opposition. Zara has come to Europe seeking access, but is eventually deported, whereas Baartman was brought to Europe by the will of European others, and not allowed to return to Africa even when dead. Baartman’s body was conspicuously African and made into a spectacle, whereas Zara fights constantly against her and Marie’s invisibility within the French legal system. Finally, Zara’s name, which purportedly means ‘the small-hipped one’ in Fang, 5 differs only slightly from Baartman’s own name (Sarah), with the shift of the voiceless dental fricative ‘s’ to the voiced version ‘z’, an opposition made famous in Roland Barthes’s analysis of another figure of hybridity from another story of physical fascination and forced removal, namely la Zambinella from Balzac’s novella Sarrasine published in 1830 (Barthes, 1973).

Indigène indigeste: Words, Meanings and Human Experience The phonological proximity of the names Sarah and Zara is more convincing in the context of a broader practice of wordplay in 53 cm. As we saw earlier, the word griotte was introduced to describe a cherry with the most precise and classifying language possible, then recycled to refer, with racist overtones, to an ‘undesirable’. This subtle wordplay is ubiquitous in 53 cm. Words that are similar or have double meanings are more often in closer proximity, 5 While Caroline Beschea-Fache (2010: 106) seems to accept this etymology, which is presented in the novel, I suspect that it is a false one, made ironically.

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such as ‘je lui adresse un sourire et allonge mon poids plume à côté de son poids plomb’ [I give her a smile and stretch out my feather weight next to her lead weight] (Bessora, 1999: 119). At other times, the narrator comments on the quirks of sound and language, such as in this passage, ironically comparing the racial vocabulary for Jews and blacks: ‘Black, c’est mieux que Noir: ça sonne presque Blanc, à une lettre près. Mais pour Juif, on n’a rien qui sonnerait Blanc, ou Blond’ [Black is better than Noir [black]: it almost sounds like Blanc [white], just one letter away. But for Juif [Jew], we don’t have anything that would sound like Blanc or Blond [blonde] (1999: 130). Other examples are more intricately tied in with the main themes of the book. During one of Zara’s witty repartees with her sister and friend, they propose, again as a farce, the idea of a ‘chromosomatic identity card’. Zara sarcastically reassures her interlocutors not to be afraid, as ‘les biologistes sont rationnels, ils ne parlent plus de race. […] La rationalité est un bien qui s’oppose à la racionalité qui est un mal’ [biologists are rational, they no longer speak of race. […] Rationality is a good thing which is the opposite of racionality, which is an evil] (1999: 94). The neologism ‘racionalité’ is a homonym of the word for ‘rationality’, and the assertion that they are opposites in this ironic mode suggests that they are in fact just as close as they sound. There is a recurrent critique of the rational and scientific throughout the novel, its avatars being the racial science theorists of times past, Cuvier and Montandon, and the French bureaucracy. What these different elements all have in common is that they justify their systems in terms of an objective, scientific view of the world and humanity, but still systematically exclude or dehumanize certain people, especially along racial lines. Bessora’s attention to the details of language, like her rejection of the realist mode, constitutes an alternative discourse, or at least a critical discourse from within one of the literary and linguistic traditions that accompanied the rise of scientific reason. By operating on this more general and symbolic level, this critique applies itself less to the opposition between France and its former colonies than to the concept of European civilization and enlightenment and their relationship to the racialized people of the world. Another example is a dialogue between Zara and her sister Mya in an earlier chapter where, in response to Zara’s anxieties about her and Marie’s legal status, the two sisters perform a sarcastic mock trial on the subject while they cook. This chapter contains an interesting and rare moment of meta-literary discourse: when Mya advises Zara to charm the immigration officials with ‘métaphores pastorales’ [pastoral metaphors] (1999: 80) she gives a short narrative account of Zara’s student life and pregnancy in a literary style borrowed from the distant French past, including allusions to flowers and employing the literary tense par excellence, the passé simple. The

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inclusion of this parody of ‘high’ literary style, bracketed within the novel’s prose and immediately denigrated by Zara, draws attention by contrast to Bessora’s much more modern and less florid writing style. Later in the chapter, her sister plays the role of a harsh judge, refusing to admit to her physical existence. She first calls Zara an ‘indigène exogène’ [exogenous native], which is of course paradoxical given that ‘indigène’ [native] is precisely the opposite of ‘exogène’ [exogenous]. On the next page, the word ‘indigène’ returns as Mya recites three articles of a fictional law concerning the non-existence of babies born of foreign students. This is the case for Zara’s daughter Marie, and is a conflict that serves as a catalyst, pushing the plot forwards, as nobody can find a way to legally substantiate Marie’s existence in the French system. Mya’s fictional law is described as legislating for the possibilities of birth, and serves to mock the pretence of omnipotence professed by Western legal and logical systems, ridiculing the idea that a bureaucratic process could extend its control over the physical reality of the female body and its reproductive function. Mya recites the following article of the law: ‘un enfant peut naître d’un étranger, sans demande préalable d’un certificat d’hébergement pour l’enfant à naître nouvellement indigeste. Pardon, indigène’ [a child may be born of a foreigner, without a preliminary application for a certificate of lodging for the child to be born newly indigestible. Sorry, indigenous] (1999: 85). Mya uses irony once again, imagining a baby unable to be born without the correct certificate, and implicitly pointing out the impotence of the law over the body, or the rational over the ‘fleshy’. Another joke is produced through a play on words: ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ is transformed into ‘indigestible’. This slip of the tongue, which is probably intentional, constitutes a meeting point of several of the main themes of 53 cm. We have seen the thematization of food and the language of food used to describe humans, but here we see a human described in terms of digestibility, linked by a language game to the question of authentic belonging (‘indigeneity’). For a moment, France and French society appear as a living body that can ‘digest’ only certain kinds of people. Mya goes on to declare (still in the persona of a judge) that, ‘nous ne digérons que les enfants assimilables par l’Organisme; eux seuls nous rassasient sans embarrasser nos estomacs’ [we digest only children that are assimilable by the Organism; only they satisfy us without upsetting our stomachs] (1999: 86). This metaphor of assimilation as consumption is pertinent in the context of a narrative so preoccupied with the edible. Soon after this, Zara asks to be ‘cannibalized’ by the Republic, a word that appears at several points in the narrative. Cannibalism is another literary trope for savagery and has been commonly associated with Africa over the centuries. One of its earliest and best-known literary treatments

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came in the sixteenth century in Montaigne’s Essais, in which a cannibalistic culture from the newly discovered Americas prompts a reflection on the barbarisms of European civilization and the irony of European senses of moral superiority, at a very early moment of Western cultural relativism and liberal humanism. During her doctor’s visit toward the beginning of the novel, Zara mocks the patronizing tone of the discourse of multiculturalism of which Montaigne is an ancestor: ‘Le bon docteur me raconte ses voyages de routard: la Malaisie, le Kenya, la Turquie. Les immigrés de l’OMI lui rappellent de bons souvenirs. La diversité des races le fascine’ (1999: 14).6 This scientific, intellectualized and detached fascination with the question of race is one of the principal targets of Zara’s scorn in 53 cm. The most suggestive evocation of the idea of cannibalism is to be found in the final chapters, as Zara dines with Jean-Christophe, the French man she hopes will marry her and so immediately remedy her status as an illegal immigrant. Earlier in the book, when discussing her Carambar-inspired transformation with a grasshopper, she had speculated about the hierarchy of beings, citing a particularly racist passage attributed to Voltaire: ‘“Les Européens me paraissent supérieurs à ces nègres, comme ces nègres le sont aux singes, et comme les singes le sont aux huîtres”’ [The Europeans seem to me superior to these negroes, as these negroes are to monkeys, and as monkeys are to oysters] (1999: 177). Here, ‘European’ is evoked as a racial category in a comparison between animals and humans, which places black people on a continuum with monkeys and oysters. At the end of this chapter, Zara wonders if she might have originally been an oyster: perhaps because her mixed status excludes her from categories of both Europeans and blacks. While she eats with Jean-Christophe, he orders oysters, which Zara finds unsettling: ‘Jean-Christophe gobe une huître, me rappelant à ma possible huîtreté originelle; mon futur mari est cannibale: il mange une espèce à laquelle j’appartiens peut-être… Je chasse cette odieuse pensée de mon esprit’ (1999: 182).7 Ironically, it is revealed soon after this passage that Jean-Christophe is indeed a predator of Zara’s ‘type’: he is a policeman in a unit that expels illegal immigrants, and the book ends with his men entering the room where the two of them have just spent the night. By figuring Jean-Christophe, the white male French police officer, as the eater of Zara 6 ‘The good doctor recounts to me his wanderings: Malaysia, Kenya, Turkey. Immigrants from the OMI bring back good memories. The diversity of races fascinates him.’ 7 ‘Jean-Christophe swallows an oyster, reminding me of my possible original oysterness; my future husband is a cannibal: he eats a species to which I might belong… I drive this odious thought from my mind.’

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the oyster at the end of this ridiculous and surreal scene, we see the power differential that makes the novel, in the end, about the ‘bad joke’. Whether it is men exerting power over women (perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this ending is that the policeman actually sleeps with Zara before deporting her), states exerting power through their police and military forces, or the denial of the right of legal existence to a child or immigrant, these are the conditions under which farce becomes nightmare. 53 cm uses ‘fleshy’ imagery: the language for describing humans focuses on their skin and employs vocabulary from other registers, especially that of food; food is personified, racialized and métissé; we are shown several ways in which humans treat each other like animals: exoticizing, caging or controlling them. This physicality, coupled with the disparaging of rationalizations of human experience (through classification, legislation, etc.), reflects the material reality of discrimination and exclusion for humans, and reveals the ‘black comedy’ that is the legal system determining who can live where they choose and who can be forcibly removed. The language of the novel, by splintering otherwise homogeneous categories, especially national and racial categories such as ‘French’ or ‘white’, is a model, or perhaps an experiment, for rethinking the categories through which identities are organized. The appeal to the ‘fleshiness’ of human life stands as affirmation of the integrity of the human body and experience, mutilated in language by hyphenated or qualified (i.e. classifying) terms, a parallel to the geographical integrities of continental space (Africa and Europe) as opposed to national divisions. 53 cm creates a space in which to imagine new categories, even of ‘hybrid’ belonging, signalled by new terms such as Afropean. In the long run, as identity, national and racial categories are redefined by the complex dynamics of globalization and human exchange and interaction, we will find ourselves assessing whether or not the resulting configurations and newer terms for difference can be transcended.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. 1973. S/Z. Paris: Seuil. Beschea-Fache, Caroline. 2010. ‘The métis Body: Double Mirror’. In Cybelle H. McFadden Wilkens and Sandrine F. Teixidor (eds), Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility. New York: Peter Lang Publishing: 99–124. Bessora. 1999. 53 cm. Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes. Brancato, Sabrina. 2008. ‘Afro-European Literature(s): A New Discursive Category?’ Research in African Literatures 39.3: 1–13. Célérier, Patrice P. 2002. ‘Bessora: de la Gaulologie contre l’impéritie’. Présence francophone 58: 73–84.

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Crumly Deventer, Allison, and Dominic Thomas. 2011. ‘Afro-European Studies: Emerging Fields and New Directions’. In Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (eds), A Companion to Comparative Literature. Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley Publishers: 1–13. De Meyer, Bernard. 2009. ‘L’afropolitanisme en littérature: le cas de Bessora’. In Bernard De Meyer and Neil Ten Kortenaar (eds.), Nouveaux Visages de la littérature africaine. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 153–65. Nimis, John. 2013. ‘Frontières de francophonie: Francophone Africa and rethinking political and disciplinary boundaries’. In Adlai Murdoch and Zsuzsanna Fagyal (eds.), Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press: 215–229. Westmoreland, Jennifer T. 2007. ‘Poetics of Diaspora: “La Ca’t,” Surrealism, and Métissage in Bessora’s 53 cm’. Journal of African Literature and Culture 4: 151–68.

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Already Here: Sami Tchak’s Afropean Generation Allison Van Deventer

Sami Tchak’s Afropean Generation

The notion of Afropeanness, as developed by Léonora Miano in Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles [Afropean Soul and Other Stories] (2008), Tels des astres éteints [Like Extinguished Stars] (2008) and Blues pour Élise [Blues for Elise] (2010), suggests the possibility of a black French presence that has shed its association with foreignness to become a fully recognized part of the French nation, and indeed of Europe. In Miano’s work, the representation of Afropean characters invites understanding and acceptance; she writes that her texts ‘souhaitent présenter au monde des personnages noirs dans lesquels on trouverait toujours un peu de soi-même d’où qu’on vienne’ [wish to show the world black characters in which people could always find a bit of themselves, no matter where they come from] (2008: 86)1 and that her novel Tels des astres éteints aims to ‘poser la question de la couleur dans un contexte français, mais sans vouloir culpabiliser personne’ [pose the question of colour in a French context, but without wanting to blame anyone] (2008: 87). This view of Afropeanness as an invitation to greater inclusivity is reflected in the title story of Afropean Soul, in which the French political climate produces an increasingly narrow and rigid view of national identity, while the Afropean protagonist represents an essentially non-confrontational, rational and tolerant orientation to racial and ethnic differences. 1 This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author of this chapter.

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Questions about blackness and belonging – who belongs to France? on whose terms? – are posed in a significantly more ambivalent and defiant voice in Place des fêtes (2001) by the Togolese author Sami Tchak, a text that Alain Mabanckou calls ‘le roman le plus hardi, le plus iconoclaste de la littérature subsaharienne francophone contemporaine’ [the boldest, most iconoclastic novel of contemporary francophone sub-Saharan literature] (Mabanckou, 2011a) and that Boniface Mongo-Mboussa heralded as the forerunner of an emerging ‘littérature “black” ou “euroblack”’ whose authors are ‘à la fois d’ici et de là-bas’ [at once from here and from over there] (Mongo-Mboussa, 2005: 115). While Miano’s Afropean characters seem designed to encourage readers from a wide variety of backgrounds to sympathize or identify with them, Place des fêtes creates a much more perplexing reading experience, beginning with the fact that neither the Afropean narrator nor anyone else in the text is given a proper name. This narrator, who grows up in a housing project outside Paris, repeatedly mentions his difference from his parents, who were born ‘là-bas’ [over there], in an unspecified country in West Africa, while he was born ‘ici’ [here] in France (Tchak, 2001: 9). He underscores his allegiance to France by freely criticizing Africa, Africans and African immigrants, voicing a variety of stereotypes that provocatively echo anti-immigrant French discourse of the 1990s. Lacing his narration with slang, sexual references, elaborate metaphors and references to literary works from around the world, the narrator describes his scorn for his father, his admiration for his promiscuous mother and his own taboo-breaking sexual adventures, which include sleeping with his sister, raping a friend’s cousin, fantasizing about his mother and acting as a pimp for his cousin, whom he eventually marries. What does Place des fêtes contribute to our understanding of the parameters and possibilities of francophone Afropean literature? If Miano envisions Afropean literature as a site in which to imagine more inclusive definitions of Frenchness, Europeanness and blackness, what might be the value of Tchak’s narrator’s pervasive hostility (epitomized in the use of ‘Putain de…’ [Fucking…] to begin every chapter) and his frequent use of racist clichés and stereotypes? While others have focused on the transgressive sexuality in Tchak’s text (see Satra, 2010; Schüller, 2007), I propose to examine the provocative racial discourse in Place des fêtes against the backdrop of a growing body of scholarship in which critical perspectives on race, African diaspora and migration challenge a vision of European identity that implicitly equates whiteness with Europeanness (or with Frenchness, Italianness and so on) and that often treats non-white residents as migrants or permanent foreigners, regardless of their country of citizenship (see Wright, 2004; Goldberg, 2006; López, 2008; Hine et al., 2009; Brancato, 2009

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and 2011; Ribeiro Sanches et al., 2011; El-Tayeb, 2011). Such scholarship is, on the whole, less concerned with outlining a transnational European black identity than with exploring the critical and disruptive power of notions such as ‘Black Europe’, ‘Afro-Europe’ and ‘Afropean’ to unsettle national myths, show how Europe is being rethought by its migrant and minoritized ‘others’ and propose new critical paradigms for evaluating what Barnor Hesse calls ‘the cultural ambiguities and racial equivocations in our contemporary postcoloniality’ (2009: 291). In fact, evidence from a variety of national contexts suggests that young generations of Afropeans are asserting the right to speak as cultural insiders, provocatively challenging widespread norms that, across the continent, tend to mark a fundamental distinction between Europeans (usually imagined as white) and migrants (often defined by non-whiteness) and to treat the former more favourably than the latter, even when the so-called ‘migrants’ are in actuality the European-born children or grandchildren of immigrants. Though many Afropeans establish transnational allegiances that bypass the national identities from which they are often excluded (see El-Tayeb, 2011), some – like the narrator of Place des fêtes – focus on appealing to the nationstate for equal access to the rights and privileges of citizens while remaining critical of nativist formulations of national identity. To read Place des fêtes as an Afropean novel, then, is to view the protagonist as one among many people of African descent who seek to transform the various models of belonging authorized by European nation-states and their dominant cultural discourses. I begin by exploring how the idea of an ‘Afropean generation’ in Place des fêtes is imagined in contrast to the ‘diasporic generation’ of the narrator’s parents. While the narrator takes pride in his French citizenship and culture, he also expresses a persistent sense that he does not fully belong in France. What I argue, however, is that Place des fêtes is ultimately less concerned with allowing the narrator to forge a stable sense of belonging to a national or diasporic community than with dramatizing – and refusing to resolve – the contradictions that constitute him as an Afropean subject in France. The text’s vision of Afropeanness emphasizes its disruptive and transformative potential, particularly in its power to challenge myths of French identity and expose the fantasies and anxieties that coalesce around the idea of blackness in France. Tchak’s narrator enacts this critique with playfulness and creativity, emphasizing his refusal of a rhetoric of victimhood. The non-belonging of the narrator’s Afropean generation is ultimately portrayed as neither a tragic failure to integrate into French society nor a wilful rejection of French values; instead, it functions as the grounds for the narrator’s assertion of the right to generate his own interpretations of France’s landscape of alterity.

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Born Here, Not There In the first sentence of Place des fêtes, the narrator presents a central distinction: ‘Mais, est-ce que je vous ai dit que mes parents sont nés là-bas et que moi je suis né ici?’ [But have I told you that my parents were born over there and that I was born here?] (Tchak, 2001: 9). The geographical distance between the narrator’s birthplace and that of his parents symbolizes many other differences, especially between the narrator and his father. The bitterly disillusioned father blames French racism for a host of problems, while the son berates his father for perpetuating an irresponsible discourse of victimhood; the father is characterized by his son as emasculated, while the narrator demonstrates his sexual prowess by sleeping with his sister, several friends and a cousin. Most significantly, the narrator mocks his father for his dream of returning to Africa, a dream to which he clings long after everyone else realizes it will never be accomplished in his lifetime: ‘Lui, il s’accroche à son idée de retour comme une punaise à un chien errant. Rien à faire pour lui enlever de la tête cette idée de retour au pays natal comme dans un cahier martiniquais’ (2001: 12).2 In this continual renewal of a reactive sense of belonging to a distant native country, the father joins other African immigrant friends with whom he complains of the injustices suffered in France and reminisces about an idealized past. Together, the father and his friends represent the first-generation African diasporic community against which the narrator strives to define himself. Unlike his father, the narrator fiercely rejects diasporic nostalgia as a foundation for his own sense of identity. The narrator describes his parents’ fate as ‘triste’ [sad]: lonely, unnoticed and unvalued in France, they – and in particular the father – are ashamed to return to their country with no success to show for their French adventure. This ‘impasse’ and their resulting ‘agonie’ (as the narrator says, echoing the titles of two novels by Congolese writer Daniel Biyaoula) provoke their son’s pity, as well as his fierce criticism: he harshly objects to his father’s nostalgic evocations of the lost homeland and refuses to participate in any idealization of Africa. In this way, the narrator implies that he is a generation removed from the heartache and shame of what Lydie Moudileno calls ‘le retour “manqué”’ [the ‘failed’ return] (Moudileno, 2001: 183) chronicled in Mabanckou’s Bleu-Blanc-Rouge (1998; Blue White Red, 2013), one of a number of francophone African novels of the 1990s in which African characters, lured to France by the promise of wealth 2 ‘He clings to his dream of return like a bug to a stray dog. Impossible to get out of his head this idea of a return to the native country like in a Martinican notebook.’

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and opportunity, fail to achieve the success that would win them respect among their waiting friends and family at home. Tchak’s protagonist portrays himself, instead, as someone who can view his parents from a critical distance afforded by his Frenchness – a perspective epitomized by his use of titles from both Biyaoula and Michel Houellebecq to describe his parents’ fate (Tchak, 2001: 16). In addition, on the first page the narrator justifies his narration by saying that he speaks with ‘la liberté que me confère la nation’ [the liberty the nation confers on me] (2001: 9), suggesting that he is French in his values and attitudes as well as by birth. His belonging is demonstrated not only in terms of his social location as a citizen of France, but also in terms of his emotional attachment to an idea of France as a bastion of individual freedoms (see Yuval-Davis, 2006). France, in short, represents the narrator’s only home. If Place des fêtes distinguishes itself from an earlier body of francophone sub-Saharan African migrant literature by portraying Paris not as a point of arrival but rather as the protagonist’s native country (Adesanmi, 2006: 970), what is even more striking is the narrator’s gleeful and unapologetic recourse to a variety of stereotypes to characterize Africa, Africans and African immigrants in Paris. In what Pius Adesanmi calls an ‘unsympathetic, even hostile, handling of the roots motif’ (2004: 238) in francophone African literature, he not only ventriloquizes clichés about moribund African states, starving African children and eternally warring African people, but also discusses Africans’ purported obsession with sex, dwelling with particular fascination on the variety of sexual practices (orgies, paedophilia, sex between children, bestiality and so on) that he claims are characteristic of Africa as an undifferentiated whole. Moreover, he represents himself as a cultural insider in France – someone who has internalized certain French discourses that associate immigrants with criminality, filth and laziness – by defending the country against his father’s accusations of racism. He criticizes the immigrants living in ‘le plus ethnique coin du XVIIIe arrondissement de Paris’ [the most ethnic corner of the 18th arrondissement of Paris] (Tchak, 2001: 165) for their lack of cleanliness, their odours, their noise, their excessive sexual appetite, the men’s mistreatment of women, their intolerance, their numerous children’s invasion of local schools – in short, he repeats and embellishes numerous stereotypes about African immigrants that circulate in French public discourse (2001: 167–68). Indeed, the narrator echoes Jacques Chirac’s infamous comment about ‘le bruit et l’odeur’ [the noise and the smell] of immigrants when he defends the right of landlords to refuse to rent to black people: ‘Et puis, les Blancs de l’immeuble, est-ce qu’ils aimeraient avoir, eux, les bruits et les odeurs en voisinage de la République?’ [And then, the whites of the

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building, would they like to have noises and smells in the neighbourhood of the Republic?] (2001: 26). This unsparing use of stereotypes and clichés, in conjunction with the narrator’s penchant for sexual transgression, signals a resolute irreverence towards what Papa Samba Diop calls ‘the sacred cows of earlier generations’ of francophone African literary tradition – ‘mother, father, family, fatherland’ (Diop, 2011: 18). It also epitomizes the freedom with which, as Mabanckou argues, the narrator criticizes the relations between Africans in Europe, which in turn ‘implies a willingness to confront Africans with their own shortcomings and so risk contradicting the Negritude movement with its great hostility to self-criticism’ (Mabanckou, 2011b: 81). Read thus against the background of francophone sub-Saharan African literature (a literature that the text itself explicitly evokes with its references to Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Calixthe Beyala, Ahmadou Kourouma and Bessora, among other authors), Place des fêtes represents less a rejection of Africa than an iconoclastic engagement with a variety of tropes that mediate ideas of Africa. 3 However, what I wish to highlight by reading Place des fêtes as an Afropean text – and not only a francophone African or a Togolese text – is the narrator’s subversive performance of an innate belonging to France that is continually threatened by his enforced association with Africa. He admits that he will always be in some degree a member of the immigrant communities he vilifies because, as he says, ‘même si moi je crois que je suis comme tout môme de France, bien Français dans les manières, je crois que je ne l’ai pas encore dit, ma couleur fait trop tendance’ [even if I believe I am after all a child of France, really French in my manners, I don’t think I’ve said it yet, my colour is too trendy] (Tchak, 2001: 169). This ‘couleur tendance’ [trendy colour], the expression he uses to describe his skin colour, functions as the visible shorthand for his African origins. Throughout the text, even the narrator’s most explicit criticisms of immigrants and denials of French racism are accompanied by more subtle acknowledgements of the precariousness of his place in French society; for instance, even as he insists that his difficulty in finding work may be due to his choice of school specialization rather than his blackness, he says Bon, admettons: avec ma couleur, ce n’est pas facile, je ne peux pas nier 3 The argument that a post-1980 generation of sub-Saharan African immigrant writers in France collectively turned their gaze away from Africa is developed in Cazenave’s book Afrique-sur-Seine (2003). For an analysis of the various ways Africa and France are imagined and transformed in francophone sub-Saharan African literature, see Thomas (2007).

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Francophone Afropean Literatures cette évidence, je te le concède, papa! Parce que, comme j’aurai à vous le dire par la suite, j’ai déjà eu à essuyer ma couleur comme une insulte. J’ai déjà eu à voir les portes se fermer au nez de ma couleur. C’est aussi simple que ça’. (2001: 33)4

Elsewhere, when he explains that the French love black people, ‘surtout en Coupe du monde, ça ne se cache pas, ça, un tel amour’ [especially during the World Cup, you can’t hide it, a love like that] (2001: 176), he comments ironically on the celebration of multiculturalism that surrounded France’s 1998 World Cup victory – a celebration that, it has been argued, served more as an opportunity for self-congratulation than as a sign of genuine commitment to promoting an egalitarian society outside the rarefied arenas of sports and entertainment (see Beriss, 2004: 42–47).

Afropean Impossibility Adesanmi interprets this tension between belonging and non-belonging as the cause of a ‘psychic/identitarian impasse’ (Adesanmi, 2004: 237) that accounts for the narrator’s consistent hostility towards France and Africa alike. The narrator thus ‘succeeds in sustaining an aura of physical and psychological discomfort throughout the text, a condition which Place des fêtes […] metaphorizes as the inescapable foundation of diasporic subjecthood’ (Adesanmi, 2004: 238). This ‘aura of […] discomfort’, however, can perhaps be more fruitfully understood not as an affective state intrinsically linked to diaspora, but rather as part of a critique of a particular ideology of citizenship and subjecthood. According to the principles of republicanism, France officially maintains a race-neutral stance that recognizes all citizens as equal and undifferentiated, positioned in a direct relationship with the state without intervention from intermediate communities or collective identities. Although this model is intended to preserve equality, many of its critics argue that in practice non-white French citizens are, as Achille Mbembe asserts, ‘littéralement apparentés aux étrangers dans l’imaginaire public – et ce à une époque où la figure de l’étranger se confond dangereusement avec celle de l’ennemi’ [literally made to resemble foreigners in the public imaginary – and this in an era when the figure of the foreigner is dangerously confounded with the figure 4 ‘All right, let’s admit it: with my colour, it isn’t easy, I can’t deny this evidence, I grant you that, Dad! Because, as I will tell you later, I’ve already had to wipe off my colour like an insult. I’ve already had to see doors slam in the face of my colour. It’s as simple as that.’

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of the enemy] (2010: 116). Specifically, Place des fêtes evokes the frustrations engendered by a contradiction that gained particular attention following the autumn 2005 youth uprisings in numerous French banlieues: while the descendants of immigrants are called to abandon the particularistic markers of ethnic, cultural and religious identity in compliance with republican norms of citizenship, the privileges of a fully acknowledged Frenchness are continually placed beyond their reach (see Tshimanga et al., 2009; Fassin and Fassin, 2006). As exemplified in political discourse at the time of the 2005 riots, expressions of discontent in banlieue neighborhoods are frequently explained with reference to the failures of particular immigrant communities to internalize French cultural norms – a response that frames the discontented residents as foreign rather than, for example, interpreting their actions as part of a long French tradition of social protest against perceived injustice (Thomas, 2012: 112). No matter how thorough the assimilation of the immigrant and his or her descendants, Florence Bernault states, ‘French society […] constantly reinscribes cultural and racial markers on the immigrant’s mind and body, forbidding h/er, in practice, to enjoy full civil rights’ (Bernault, 2009, 133; see also Hargreaves, 1995: 149–76). These factors together put ‘second-generation’ immigrants like Tchak’s narrator in the contradictory position of being both marked as foreign and continually asked, in the name of republican integration, to refrain from publicly claiming any kind of immigrant or ethnic community affiliation. As Fatima El-Tayeb argues in European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postcolonial Europe, however, the very contradictions of such a position can produce new identities, forms of resistance and transnational alliances among racialized minority subjects. In this comparative study of minority art and activism across western Europe, El-Tayeb argues that many European-born descendants of non-white migrants live in a tension produced by occupying two identities widely believed to be incompatible: they are Europeans because they were born in Europe and grew up there, but they are consistently perceived as immigrants (2011: xxi, 167–70). As native ethnic minorities, they are ‘impossible subjects’ in that their very existence disrupts the unacknowledged racializing logic normatively used to distinguish ‘Europeans’ from ‘foreigners’.5 Rather than accept the logic that constructs them as outsiders, many of the young Europeans of colour in El-Tayeb’s study exploit the tension of their impossible position to mount creative critiques of the 5 The notion of the ‘impossible subject’ is also used by Catherine Raissiguier (2010) to analyse the invisibility and impasses faced by undocumented women immigrants in France; like El-Tayeb, Raissiguier suggests that a position of impossibility can give rise to creatively disruptive interventions.

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racializing processes that create it – elaborating, for example, a form of black European identity that ‘[reacts] to the process of racialization itself rather than aiming at producing a legitimate racial or national identity, challenging the very idea of normative, exclusive identity formations and thus opening up a space for postethnic identifications among communities of color in Europe (and beyond)’ (2011: xliii). Following El-Tayeb, we can trace an expression of defiant Afropean impossibility in the complications that Tchak’s narrator introduces into the basic distinction between ‘né ici’ [born here] and ‘nés là-bas’ [born there] that he offers at the beginning of the text. For the narrator to describe his blackness as an impediment to his Frenchness is an aggressive affront to France’s race-blind republican ideology. Even in the age of globalization, according to Françoise Lionnet, ‘republican ideals remain for the most part the bedrock of political legitimacy, the ground for solidarité among France’s diverse regions and citizens, and the only putative and theoretical guarantee of equality for all’ (2008: 1504). And yet, even as the narrator insists on his Frenchness, he describes in unambiguously racial terms the surplus of identity that calls into question the terms of his belonging to France: Mais, je suis né français, papa. Je suis français, même si je ne suis pas vraiment français, parce que ma peau ne colle pas avec mes papiers. Mais je sais que je ne suis pas de là-bas non plus, parce que je j’ai rien à voir vraiment avec là-bas. […] Je veux dire que la France, c’est mon pays natal, mais ce n’est pas ma patrie. Je veux dire que je n’ai pas vraiment de patrie. Les gens croient qu’il suffit de naître quelque part pour avoir une patrie. Mais non! Une patrie, c’est autre chose que la nationalité, une patrie c’est dans le sang. Sinon, une touriste japonaise qui met bas sous la tour Eiffel de Gustave, est-ce que son morpion devient patriote français? (Tchak, 2001: 22)6 This passage encapsulates the narrator’s simultaneous insistence on his Frenchness and his recognition that he is widely assumed not to belong because of the racial identity ascribed to him. Despite his repeated insistence 6 ‘But I was born French, Dad. I’m French, even though I’m not really French, because my skin doesn’t fit with my papers. But I know I’m not really from over there either, because I don’t really have anything to do with over there. […] I mean that France, it’s my native country, but it’s not my homeland. I mean I don’t really have a homeland. People believe it’s enough to be born somewhere to have a homeland. Not at all! A homeland, it’s not the same as nationality, a homeland is in the blood. Otherwise, a Japanese tourist who gives birth under Gustave’s Eiffel Tower, is her brat going to be a French patriot?’

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that his birth in France is a defining fact of his life, here he mocks the idea that ‘il suffit de naître quelque part pour avoir une patrie’, suggesting that it is self-evidently true that national belonging is fundamentally defined by ties of blood, as proven by the supposed absurdity of the idea that a baby born in France to a Japanese tourist could become a ‘patriote français’. The ironic subtext of his assertion that ‘une patrie c’est dans le sang’ is that the affective borders of the French nation are policed by a biologized definition of belonging that excludes not just immigrants, but also their descendants (Peabody and Stovall, 2003; Camiscioli, 2009). What the narrator suggests here and throughout the text is that Frenchness is an embodied identity, and that despite Article 1 of the 1958 constitution, which assures the equality of citizens without regard for origin, race or religion, French citizens in practice are afforded unequal opportunities on the basis of the ‘origine’ attributed to them because of their ‘peau’ [skin]. In the complicated contours of this relationship between blackness, immigration and Frenchness, the narrator embeds a sharp criticism of French republican ideals.

Laughing Back In Place des fêtes, the meaning of being ‘born here’ is contradictory and ironic, defined less by a stable sense of national or racial belonging than by a continued transgression of all kinds of social norms. It is important, however, to heed David Chariandy’s warning to resist the ‘temptation […] to automatically pathologize second-generation visible-minority expressions of alienation or un-belonging’ (2007: 827), that is, the temptation to approach such expressions with the assumption that they signify individual failure and loss, or alternatively threats to the security and integrity of the nation, without sufficient regard for the creativity and critique that may be articulated precisely in the failure to achieve what El-Tayeb describes as ‘the kind of stable identity, both national and ethnic, naturalized by dominant society as well as the first generation of migrants’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: xxxi). In Tchak’s text, the impossibility of fully belonging to either a national or diasporic community does not represent an exclusively pathological or tragic condition; instead, it generates a series of ludic reappropriations of the stereotypes that cluster around the notions of blackness and Africanness in France. Throughout the text, the narrator practises what Mireille Rosello describes as a ‘theft’ of the stereotype (1998: 64), a gesture that involves adapting an ethnic stereotype to a new and subversive purpose rather than attempting to challenge it directly. Irreverently invoking the trope of the excessively large, uncontrolled sub-Saharan African immigrant family, for example,

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he mocks his father for dreaming of Africa as a place where he could have married two or three wives (Tchak, 2001: 58).7 The narrator laughs at the idea of his father as the head of a polygamous family because, as he has already explained to the reader, his father has become impotent and his wife openly complains of his inability to satisfy her sexual desires. He asks, ‘Papa, tu te prenais pour qui, toi qui ne pouvais même pas apaiser la faim d’un seul derrière? Papa, tu te croyais vraiment où pour te laisser flatter par tes idées ethniques?’ (2001: 61–62).8 The narrator recasts his father’s ‘idées ethniques’ – his values and attitudes that depart from French notions of appropriate family structures – not as a threat to France, but rather as a delusion that his father seizes to rebuild his shattered sense of masculinity, as well as a source of mirth. The narrator imagines the petty quarrels that would take place between his father’s wives, concluding, ‘J’aurais voulu vivre ça, ça aurait été marrant, je crois’ [I’d have liked to see that, it would have been hilarious, I think] (2001: 61). The practice often held up as an example of an alien culture that threatens France’s republican values is here shaped by the narrator into a site of laughter and play, but also pathos: the father has so little power, even within his own family, that the idea that polygamy represents any sort of a threat to France is rendered doubly absurd. In another scene, one of only a few that mention school, the narrator is insulted by his white maths teacher, who calls him a ‘fils de pute’ [son of a whore] (2001: 87). The narrator is initially filled with ‘la haine, comme dans un film de banlieue’ [hate, like in a banlieue film] (2001: 88), but after his mother describes her previous work as a prostitute in Nigeria, he decides to apologize for hating his teacher unjustly. ‘Fils de pute’, as it turns out, is a perfectly accurate description. He approaches the teacher after school and, after effortlessly solving an algebraic equation, explains his contrition. This episode subverts the narrative, familiar in Beur literature (see Hargreaves, 1991), of the school as the site of the first- or second-generation immigrant’s difficult struggle with the French language and French mores, revealing instead the narrator’s easy mastery not just of algebra, but also of a calm, reasonable demeanour that is the opposite of the violent impetuosity often attributed to young men from the banlieues. The scene’s resolution, in fact, suggests that its real significance lies in exposing the teacher’s enormous 7 After the 2005 riots, France’s employment minister, Gérard Larcher, cited polygamous families as a possible cause of anti-social behaviour among youth from immigrant families (Arnold, 2005). 8 ‘Dad, who did you think you were, you who couldn’t even satisfy the hunger of one behind? Dad, who did you really think you were to let yourself be flattered by your ethnic ideas?’

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appetite for exotic sexual experiences. Intrigued by the narrator’s story, the teacher asks him to arrange a home visit and soon begins sleeping with the narrator’s mother and both of his sisters. The narrator explains the teacher’s behaviour as a product of his attraction to stereotypes of African female sexuality: Il avait pensé à maman et l’avait revue dans leur savane là-bas, son corps en sang parce qu’on venait de l’exciser. Il avait écrit des poèmes en pensant à Assèze l’Africaine, la Négresse rousse, qu’il tourna et retourna dans tous les sens dans ses rêves. […] Grisé par cette chair exotique, il quitta la France pour Abidjan où, il faut dire, il en bouffera à sa guise. (Tchak, 2001: 90)9 Although the text as a whole allows the narrator to inhabit Western stereotypes that associate black African men with a powerful physicality and an avid, frequently threatening sexuality,10 he here demonstrates his ability to shift the narrative’s focus away from the personal attributes that place him outside the French mainstream and instead to expose, through a parodic exaggeration, an exoticizing gaze. At other times, Tchak’s narrator reappropriates ethnic stereotypes not to transmute them into hyperbolic celebrations of sexual and textual creativity, but to resist being cast in the role of a victim. In another scene, the narrator encounters ‘une petite Française bien blanche’ [a little white French girl] (2001: 171) who insists on discussing what she believes to be the narrator’s suffering because of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Her unsolicited sympathy serves only to position him as a victim. Indeed, when the narrator dares to disagree, she responds angrily by accusing him of betraying what she sees as his own cause: ‘Toi un Noir?’ [You, a Black?] (2001: 172). Although he does not answer the girl, he reminds the reader that he and others like him are fully capable of articulating their experiences on their own terms: ‘Avec des lèvres aussi grosses, eh bien, nous avons une grande gueule pour parler aussi, de temps à autre, de nous, par et pour nous’ [With such big lips, well, we have a big mouth for talking as well, from time to time, about ourselves, by and for ourselves] (2001: 174). With the reference to broad lips, the narrator 9 ‘He had thought of Mom and had seen her in the savannah over there, her body bleeding because she had just been excised. He had written poetry thinking about Assèze the African Woman, the red-headed Negress, whom he turned over and over in all directions in his dreams. […] Intoxicated by this exotic flesh, he left France for Abidjan where, it must be said, he’ll get as much as he wants.’ 10 This association between black masculinity and the threat of rape is dramatized, for instance, in Sembene Ousmane’s novel Le docker noir [Black Docker] (1956).

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seizes another element of racial caricature to insist on his right to deploy images of blackness for his own ends. Specifically, he demonstrates his ability to playfully appropriate stereotypes that threaten to perpetuate the image of the black French person as a victim and invest them with meanings that emphasize what he elsewhere calls his ‘liberté tricolore’ [tricolour liberty] (2001: 169), his French-given freedom to speak for himself. The narrator of Place des fêtes thus cleverly employs stereotypes to reveal himself as a knowing, savvy manipulator of French discourse from within – as a cultural insider who is, nevertheless, externalized by the failures of France’s republican principles. For Ahmed Boubeker, French universalism does not prevent a negative identity from being ‘assigned’ to France’s black and Beur youth in a way that denies their ‘right to an ambiguous identity – the right to be from here and from somewhere else, with no obligation to choose among different allegiances’ (2009: 85). Tchak’s narrator, however, stakes his claim to an ambiguous and multiple identity that is not the negation of Frenchness, but rather a forcing open of a quintessentially French identity to allow for other concurrent belongings. In fact, the narrator ultimately portrays himself as possessing a freedom that is derived from his rights as a French citizen and that nevertheless is very specifically not premised upon a radical disentanglement from his family and the African immigrant community they represent. Even his differences from his father, while a defining feature of his adolescent self-image, are far from central in his relationship with his family as he grows up. Pondering his family heritage at the end of the text, the narrator again refuses to resolve the tension of being both French and an outsider. He once considered moving to his parents’ country, he tells the reader, but soon realized that his French upbringing would render him a permanent outsider there as well. Instead he will remain in France because, as he writes, ‘Si je devais vivre dans la solitude, autant le faire dans un pays où je sais au moins que je suis venu au monde avec une couleur tordue. Là, au moins, je sais pourquoi je ne peux pas être un national d’abord. Je suis né ici, j’assume’ (Tchak, 2001: 290).11 Although France will never be his ‘patrie’, he will live as though it were, inventing his own form of belonging in this country where his ‘couleur tordue’ provides a visible reminder of its broken promises. In the years since Place des fêtes was published in 2001, and especially since the 2005 riots, a public conversation has arisen around the notions of racism, black identity and black communities in France (see Thomas, 11 ‘If I had to live in solitude, better to do it in a country where at least I know that I was born with a twisted colour. There, at least, I know why I can’t be a national from the outset. I was born here, I accept it.’

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2007; Yade-Zimet, 2007; Lozès, 2007; Ndiaye, 2008; Blanchard et al., 2011; Keaton et al., 2012). Nevertheless, the idea of native French racial or ethnic minorities continues to generate controversy, often eliciting the criticism that such a concept represents the imposition of an Anglo-Saxon model that fails to account for the historical specificities of the French case. What Place des fêtes emphasizes is that the narrator belongs to an Afropean generation whose members are French from the beginning, although French in diverse, complicated and potentially transformative ways. Tchak thus performs the important function of calling attention to the presence of a native-born black population in France, participating in the redefinition of the French nation that Mabanckou proposes when he asserts that ‘[l]es “Noirfrançais” sont des citoyens à part entière et, dans une certaine mesure, c’est même la définition de l’expression “Français moyen” qu’il faudrait désormais réviser car ces hommes et ces femmes écrivent ou réécrivent les pages de l’histoire de cette nation avec des crayons de couleur’ (Mabanckou, 2011c: 6).12 However, the originality of Tchak’s contribution to redefining Frenchness in the twentyfirst century lies not in the elaboration of a unified Afropean identity for the generation of those ‘nés ici’, but rather in the subversive and generative power with which he invests his vision of Afropeanness – subversive in that it unsettles received notions about belonging and identity in France, and generative in its ability to foreground new narratives, identifications and critiques from the perspective of France’s Afropean subjects, whose voices join a chorus rising from spaces throughout Europe. The notion of Afropeanness that emerges from Tchak’s text is one that allows for, and indeed embraces, ambivalence, divisions and contradictions. Caught between the seemingly incompatible identities of French insider and African migrant, the narrator resolves simply to remain in France, serving as an astute witness to the racialized fantasies and antipathies that he criticizes, manipulates and shares.

Works Cited Adesanmi, Pius. 2004. ‘Of Postcolonial Entanglement and Durée: Reflections on the Francophone African Novel’. Comparative Literature 56.3: 227–42. —. 2006. ‘Redefining Paris: Trans-Modernity and Francophone African Migritude Fiction’. Modern Fiction Studies 51.4: 958–75. 12 ‘the “black French” are full citizens and, to a certain extent, it is the definition of the expression “the average French person” that we must now revise because these men and women are writing or rewriting this nation’s history pages with coloured pencils’.

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Arnold, Martin. 2005. ‘French Minister Says Polygamy to Blame for Riots’. Financial Times. 15 November. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d6f1fe0a– 5615–11da-b04f–00000e25118c.html (accessed 13 November 2012). Beriss, David. 2004. Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France. Boulder, CO: Westview. Bernault, Florence. 2009. ‘Colonial Syndrome: French Modern and the Deceptions of History’. In Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola and Peter J. Bloom (eds), Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 120–45. Blanchard, Pascal, Sylvie Chalaye, Éric Deroo, Dominic Thomas and Mahamet Timera. 2011. La France noire: trois siècles de présences. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Boubeker, Ahmed. 2009. ‘Outsiders in the French Melting Pot: The Public Construction of Invisibility for Visible Minorities’. Trans. by Jane Marie Todd. In Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola and Peter J. Bloom (eds), Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 70–88. Brancato, Sabrina. 2009. Afro-Europe: Texts and Contexts. Berlin: Trafo. — (ed). 2011. Afroeurope@n Configurations: Readings and Projects. Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Camiscioli, Elisa. 2009. Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cazenave, Odile M. 2003. Afrique-sur-Seine: Une nouvelle génération de romanciers africains à Paris. Paris: L’Harmattan. Chariandy, David John. 2007. ‘“The Fiction of Belonging”: On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada’. Callaloo 30.3: 818–29. Diop, Papa Samba. 2011. ‘The Francophone Sub-Saharan African Novel: What World Are We In?’ Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Yale French Studies 120: 10–22. Special issue ‘Francophone Sub-Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts’, ed. by Alain Mabanckou and Dominic Thomas. El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fassin, Didier, and Éric Fassin (eds). 2006. De la question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Goldberg, David Theo. 2006. ‘Racial Europeanization’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 29.2: 331. Hargreaves, Alec G. 1991. Voices from the North African Immigrant Community in France: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction. New York: Berg. —. 1995. Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France. London: Routledge.

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Hesse, Barnor. 2009. ‘Afterword: Black Europe’s Undecidability’. In Darlene Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 291–304. Hine, Darlene, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds). 2009. Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Keaton, Trica Danielle, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Stovall (eds). 2012. Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lionnet, Françoise. 2008. ‘Continents and Archipelagoes: From E Pluribus Unum to Creolized Solidarities’. PMLA 123.5: 1503–15. López, Marta Sofia (ed). 2008. Afroeurope@ns: Cultures and Identities. Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Lozès, Patrick. 2007. Nous, les noirs de France. Paris: Danger Public. Mabanckou, Alain. 2011a. ‘Sami Tchak, libre portrait d’un iconoclaste des lettres africaines’. Cultures Sud. http://culturessud.com/contenu.php?id=411 (accessed 17 March 2011). —. 2011b. ‘Immigration, Littérature-Monde, and Universality: The Strange Fate of the African Writer’. Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Yale French Studies 120: 75–87. Special issue ‘Francophone Sub-Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts’, ed. by Alain Mabanckou and Dominic Thomas. —. 2011c. ‘Préface’. In Pascal Blanchard, Sylvie Chalaye, Éric Deroo, Dominic Thomas and Mahamet Timera (eds), La France noire: trois siècles de présences. Paris: Éditions La Découverte: 6–7. Mbembe, Achille. 2010. Sortir de la grande nuit: essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Miano, Léonora. 2008. ‘Toni Morrison, l’écriture de la couleur’. Le Magazine Littéraire 474: 86–87. Mongo-Mboussa, Boniface. 2005. L’Indocilité: supplément au désir d’Afrique. Paris: Gallimard. Moudileno, Lydie. 2001. ‘La Fiction de la migration: manipulation des corps et des récits dans Bleu-Blanc-Rouge d’Alain Mabanckou’. Présence Africaine 163: 182–89. Ndiaye, Pap. 2008. La Condition noire: essai sur une minorité française. Paris: Éditions Calmann-Lévy. Peabody, Sue, and Tyler Stovall (eds). 2003. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Raissiguier, Catherine. 2010. Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship in France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ribeiro Sanches, Manuela, Fernando Clara, João Ferreira Duarte and Leonor Pires Martins (eds). 2011. Europe in Black and White: Immigration, Race and Identity in the ‘Old Continent’. Chicago: Intellect.

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Rosello, Mireille. 1998. Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Satra, Baguissoga. 2010. Les Audaces érotiques dans l’écriture de Sami Tchak. Paris: L’Harmattan. Schüller, Thorsten. 2007. ‘“Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex?” La Fonction de l’obscénité dans la littérature contemporaine de l’Afrique noire francophone’. In Gisela Febel, Karen Struve and Natascha Ueckmann (eds), Écritures Transculturelles: Kulturelle Differenz Und Geschlechterdifferenz Im Französischsprachigen Gegenwartsroman. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag: 221–32. Tchak, Sami. 2001. Place des fêtes. Paris: Gallimard. Thomas, Dominic. 2007. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 2012. ‘Immigration and National Identity in France’. In Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Stovall (eds), Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 110–22. Tshimanga, Charles, Didier Gondola and Peter J. Bloom (eds). 2009. Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wright, Michelle M. 2004. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yade-Zimet, Rama. 2007. Noirs de France. Paris: Éditions Calmann-Lévy. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’. Patterns of Prejudice 40.3: 197–214.

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Paris Polar: Afropean Noir in the City of Light Dawn Fulton

Afropean Noir in the City of Light

Among the myriad forms of artistic production emerging from the post-independence encounters between African and European cultures is a unique iteration of noir fiction. With its inherent attention to moral justice and discounted existences, noir presents a particularly intriguing instance of Afropeanism, foregrounding the recalibration of ethical systems and social hierarchies that accompany the shifting conceptions of European and other, of insider and outsider. Jean-Roger Essomba’s 2010 novel Alerte à la bonté [Kindness Threat] is a semi-fantastical noir narrative that reflects these important intersections between the genre and ongoing renegotiations of local, national and global affiliations. But the work also sketches out new ground in francophone African crime fiction in that it teases out the potential points of friction between the genre and Afropean experience. In particular, as I will discuss here, Essomba exploits the longstanding affiliation of noir with urban space in order to suggest a critique of the ways in which colonial geographies persistently manifest themselves in the Parisian cityscape. Read in dialogue with the author’s earlier narratives of Afropean migration, Alerte à la bonté ultimately posits the representative limits of noir as a means of examining twenty-first-century configurations of urbanism and ­transnationalism in the city of light. Like most genres, noir eludes easy definition, but criticism on the genre tends to focus on its symptomatic and critical function as a commentary on contemporary political and social context (see Conard, 2006: 1–2, 7–22; 81

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Naremore, 1998). Noir figures as a sign of its times, offering a wide spectrum of positions on its contemporaneous moment, from the conservative impulse towards order and conformity in works of detective fiction to the subversive possibilities of exploring and celebrating the nonconformity of the noir world.1 In the Anglo-American context that is considered its birthplace, for example, crime fiction has been studied as a key to the British imperial project and as an expression of US anxieties concerning capitalism, the atomic age, race relations and gender.2 In France, interest in the genre intensified in the years following the Second World War, reflecting, as Claire Gorrara (2009) notes, shifting conceptions of criminality and violence on both individual and collective scales. Benvenuti et al. dub the noir novel ‘une écriture de la désillusion’ [a writing of disillusion]3 (1982: 8), evoking an artistic form whose shadowy portraits probe the worst of society’s destructive impact, its disavowed underbelly, its most bitter disappointments. As such, the genre is particularly apt as social and political critique, offering a means of targeting a nation’s ‘pressure points’, as Gorrara puts it (2009: 122), or shedding light on social injustice (see Naudillon, 2003: 103ff). The francophone African polar builds upon the nexus of these French, Anglo-American and African-American literary traditions. Here the history of French colonialism, the unjust treatment of immigrants in contemporary France and international African politics are on stage, the genre providing a means of reappropriating an inherited tool of colonialism in order to cast a critical eye on those very legacies. As Pim Higginson notes in his important study of the francophone African crime novel, the popular aspect of crime fiction has proven particularly compelling for some African writers, who have found creative and financial freedom in a genre that both reached a wider audience and offered a new path away from the connotative weight of an elitist literary formation (see Higginson, 2011: 168–98).4 1 Andrew Pepper examines this aspect of the crime novel’s ‘elasticity’ in The Contemporary American Crime Novel (2000: 14). 2 On the British empire, see in particular Reitz (2004), McLaughlin (2000) and Mukherjee (2003); on capitalism and the US, see Conard (2006) and Naremore (1998); on race relations and inner-city violence see Davis (1990), Giroux (1995), Kennedy (1999) and Diawara (1993); on gender and modernism, see Munt (1994) and Rabinowitz (2002). 3 This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author of this chapter. 4 For a historical overview of the francophone African polar, see also Moudileno (2003: 71–74), Cazenave and Célérier (2011: 128–31), Naudillon (2003) and Kom (1999).

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Noir’s most immediate and nearly universal association is the urban landscape. The nineteenth-century rise of industrialization conferred a density and anonymity to the city that provided the ideal labyrinthine settings for the era’s detective fiction, while twentieth-century noir emphasizes the harsh unpredictability, the camouflaged violence and the grittiness of dark city streets. The term ‘urban jungle’ connotes the mix of the familiar and the exotic in which noir flourished.5 As Françoise Naudillon puts it, ‘la ville tue’ [the city kills] (2003: 110), attributing noir’s violence to the city itself and pointing to the personification of the urban landscape as a signature aspect of the genre. In this sense, urban and noir can be seen as mutually constitutive, each guaranteeing the other’s force as a portal to the extreme instances of human behaviour. As a close corollary to its connotative urbanism, noir has inherent intersections with the trope of migrancy, especially in the postcolonial context: the legacy of violence and the vestiges of yet unresolved moral injustices, the hierarchical social structures reproduced within the borders of former colonial powers and the trafficking and corruption embedded in the underground world of clandestine immigration offer settings and an ethos that lend themselves fluently to noir narrative. Transnational studies and postcolonial studies have thus shown an intensified interest in the ways in which detective fiction sorts through questions of criminality and human rights in settings where multiple readings of self, statehood and geographical power are at stake. As Nels Pearson and Marc Singer write, a key dilemma that brings together crime writing and transnational studies is that ‘laws, human rights, and the assessment of criminal guilt – both as protective and punitive codes – have rarely matched the flexibility of culture, or kept pace with economic developments, across transnational space, or within postcolonial countries where state authorities, agendas, and jurisdictions frequently shift’ (2009: 9).6 This décalage offers a fruitful space for the postcolonial writer to probe notions of criminality in contexts where the crossing of borders multiplies 5 McLaughlin examines what he terms Conrad’s construction of the modernist metropolis as ‘an urban heart of darkness’ (2000: 23). See also Naudillon (2003: 104). 6 On crime fiction in postcolonialism and transnationalism, see also Matzke and Mühleisen (2006), Christian (2001), Cazenave and Célérier (2011: 128–31) and Carter (1991). Moudileno describes the parallels between the postcolonial and the polar: ‘le règne de la violence, de l’arbitraire, de la corruption généralisée, et la prolifération de réseaux de pouvoir’ [the reign of violence, of the arbitrary, of widespread corruption, and the proliferation of networks of power] (2002: 93).

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the terms of ethical judgement. In the case of Essomba’s work, as I hope to show here, competing moralities pit the postcolonial immigrant against the collective disavowal of colonial history, effecting an impasse that manifests itself spatially through the confinement or invisibility of the unwelcome outsider. As the allocation of criminality to a transnational conspiracy in Alerte à la bonté suggests yet another vision of a dichotomized city, Essomba’s use of genre portrays a Paris intent on preserving imperial geographies in both internally and externally oriented self-definitions. As a sign of its times, then, Afropean noir offers in this instance the possibility of critiquing not only global hierarchies in the wake of decolonization but also the uncertain relationship between Paris and contemporary urbanism.

Framing the Noir Reader in Alerte à la bonté Jean-Roger Essomba is the author of seven novels, all but one published by Présence Africaine. His work reflects an enduring concern with the intercultural encounter and repeatedly interrogates the possibility of harmonious relationships between racial groups, particularly in such novels as Le Dernier Gardien de l’arbre [The Last Tree Guardian] (1998) and Une Blanche dans le noir [A White Woman in the Dark] (2001).7 One of Essomba’s signature traits is the recurrent geographical shift from his native Cameroon to France and back, with particular attention to the cities of Douala and Paris as the focal points in this exchange. Essomba thus figures as one of a number of key writers from sub-Saharan Africa – such as those discussed by Dominic Thomas in this volume – whose diasporic viewpoints permeate their work and demand more nuanced literary categories. As I will discuss further, Essomba’s transnationalism emphasizes a comparative urban framework, or what might be called an Afropean inter-urbanism. Alerte à la bonté is not the first of Essomba’s works to explore the intersections between noir and Afropean cultures. An element of the polar runs through a number of his previous works, most notably Le Paradis du nord [Northern Paradise] (1996), with its peripatetic forays through the realms of murder, prostitution and the drug trade. In the case of Alerte à la bonté, the generic designation applies more consistently, but the overlap with other genres such as the fable, the thriller, science fiction and fantasy nonetheless sets this novel apart from a classic noir tradition. The publisher’s blurb on the book’s cover describes Alerte à la bonté as a generic hybrid, a novel ‘à mi-chemin du polar et du roman d’aventures’ [halfway between a detective novel and an adventure novel], then redefines it as ‘une fable qui a pour prétexte le racisme’ [a fable On this topic see Klüppelholz (2001) and Ugochukwu (2008).

7

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whose pretext is racism], to finally place it in a contemporary tradition: ‘Ce roman se situe dans la veine actuelle du roman policier africain contemporain’ [This novel falls in the current vein of contemporary African crime fiction]. While this hesitation captures the extent of Essomba’s stylistic dexterity in the novel, the multiple generic placements evoked in this cover blurb also speak to the important role of noir in the marketing of postcolonial fiction. Indeed, Alerte à la bonté offers numerous indications of an extended reflection on the place of noir in the contemporary publishing world. Pim Higginson’s work on African crime fiction has illuminated this vexed question through the lens of the genre’s historical links to Chester Himes and the ascent of the African-American crime novel in post-war Paris. Higginson examines the appeal of the genre for African writers who felt constricted by the aesthetic hierarchies inherent in their postcolonial context: ‘These authors’ refusal to adhere to the accepted ordering of literary value represents a (re)appropriation of the terms of literary performance and the relationship of the author to the marketplace […] and demonstrates a deepening comprehension of how Western epistemes situate race and writing in relation to each other’ (2011: 4). In focusing in particular on the work of Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti, Higginson points to the ways in which crime fiction can mean a way out of the double bind of francophone African writers by offering an otherwise elusive marriage between popularity and sociopolitical critique (2011: 168–98). Essomba’s use of noir in his work leaves little doubt that he is similarly alert to these dilemmas. In fact, his inscription of noir in Alerte à la bonté is of particular interest in this respect in that it goes further to engage those dilemmas allegorically: the novel not only makes use of the conventions of the genre but also contains numerous references to those conventions that suggest an embedded questioning of the very relationship between text and reader that is at stake in the rise of this literary genre. Here the framing device employed by Essomba is critical: Alerte à la bonté presents a group of characters who have been recruited in a paid experiment which entails watching a film while their reactions are recorded via MRI. Meanwhile the novel’s principal narrative follows the plot of the film they are watching, a semi-fantastical tale involving efforts to contain the consequences of a Nazi-era pharmaceutical experiment gone awry. References to noir are immediate, as Essomba incorporates various signature tropes of the genre into the opening passages of his novel. The scene’s setting in a cinema, for example, signals the association between noir and the visual medium while also playing on the connotative import of the word ‘noir’: ‘La salle était plongée dans une nuit aussi noire que celle qui habille la mort’ [The theatre was plunged in a darkness as black as the darkness of death] (Essomba, 2010: 9). The semantic clustering of noir/black, the dark (or, in a literal translation, the night), death

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and film establishes the novel as a mise-en-scène of the consumption of noir, while the defamiliarizing effect of noir is heightened by the electronic sensors attached to the heads of the spectators and the strange circumstances of their presence in the theatre. Indeed, the novel also plays on the links between noir and black humour (l’humour noir) as the audience, upon seeing the naked body of the immediately recognizable right-wing politician Bruno Vallet as rendered in the film, bursts into a ‘torrent’ of uncontrollable laughter (2010: 9).8 The structure of a film being watched and responded to by an audience (an audience that is in turn being observed and analysed from behind the screen by nameless scientists) allows for a recurrent trope of artistic evaluation and consumerism. Given the references to noir established at the novel’s outset, it is difficult not to read this trope in the light of the singular status of crime fiction in the francophone African publishing world. The parodic aspect of Essomba’s text, moreover, enables a profoundly sceptical take on that status: the embedded reader response in Alerte à la bonté is rendered as an exaggerated exercise in self-deprecation, as the novel’s principal narrative is repeatedly subject to the baffled and occasionally derisive reactions of the various audience members. One viewer, for example, having been recruited through mysterious methods like the other participants in the experiment, grows increasingly uncomprehending as the film continues: ‘Toute cette mise en scène, tout cet attirail, pour leur montrer un film d’espionnage de série B? Où voulaient-ils en venir, au fait?’ [This whole elaborate set-up, just to show them a spy B-movie? Where were they going with this exactly?] (2010: 63). For another, the film’s quality degrades into incompetence: ‘le scénario qu’elle jugeait jusque-là acceptable devint carrément mauvais. On tombait dans l’ineptie totale’ [the screenplay that up until that point she had considered passable was becoming downright terrible. It was descending into total inanity] (2010: 80). Essomba thus subjects his own framed narrative to a relatively devastating critical response, evoking judgements that hinge on questions of literary quality and genre. While this allegorical structure marks an attention to the ever treacherous question of marketing for the postcolonial writer of any genre, these passages highlight the specific concerns that emerge from the intersection of noir and the literary publishing world: the apparent ‘literariness’ of a narrative and its popular success. If Alerte à la bonté does situate itself ‘in the current vein of the contemporary African crime novel’, as its cover suggests, it also marks a turn towards a more doubtful assessment of the conventions that underwrite the genre, in particular the ‘transaction between text and reader’ (Higginson, 2011: 2). In 8 Jonathan Eburne writes of the links between black humour and cinematic disruption in his study of surrealism and the Série noire in Paris (2005: 810–11).

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Essomba’s mise-en-scène of reading noir, the framework of the psychological experiment underlines the artificiality of this transaction, rendered here as a staged one with ‘readers’ who were paid or otherwise remunerated for their presence. The reliability of the text–reader contract is further undermined by the fact that the experiment’s conclusion impugns the audience members on moral grounds by implying that they are universally self-interested and fundamentally averse to compassion. In his move towards meta-noir, then, Essomba presents a narrative that looks back at three decades of literary production to ask what assumptions are being made about that corpus’s readership, and in particular to question the enduring dependence on a ‘successful’ transaction with the public.

The Location of Noir Given the allegorical reflection on noir reading staged in Alerte à la bonté, the ways in which the novel inscribes noir into the twenty-first-century Parisian cityscape are of particular interest. As we have seen, the Afropeanism of Essomba’s work is underwritten in many respects by the relationship between African and European cities. His second novel, Le Paradis du nord, is a key reference in this respect, and one that lends particular insight to the representation of urban space in Alerte à la bonté. Indeed, Le Paradis du nord bears a number of parallels with such contemporary francophone crime novels as Achille Ngoye’s Ballet noir à Château-Rouge and Bolya Baenga’s La Polyandre, where noir inhabits the intersection between African immigration and the Paris underground. In Le Paradis du nord, this portrayal of Afro-Parisian space as a marginalized underworld is all the more pointed because of its focus on the fate of undocumented immigrants. The sans-papiers’ introduction to the city is predetermined as one that must erase its trace as it goes, and thus occurs only in unofficial spaces and via unseen conduits. The space of noir – the illicit world of murder, counterfeit identities, drugs and prostitution – is the space he is doomed to inhabit because of his undocumented status. While this account echoes the bifurcated vision of Paris that characterizes a long line of Afro-Parisian immigrant narratives of disillusionment, from Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris to Alain Mabanckou’s Bleu-Blanc-Rouge , the particularity of its generic categorization as noir affords a uniquely focused attention to the segregation of the city as a key element of this disillusionment. Le Paradis du nord’s protagonist is an idealistic bartender from Douala who suffers betrayal from both the white French and established African immigrant population in his attempt to penetrate the city of his dreams. As a result of the inter-urbanism of Essomba’s work, this vision of Paris appears in

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a comparative light, as Jojo, hiding out in an abandoned building, evokes the stark disparity between homelessness in Douala and homelessness in Paris: Il avait passé sept années de son enfance dans la rue pourtant il n’avait jamais rencontré pareille misère. Dans leurs carcasses de voitures, ils pouvaient rire et chanter. Lorsque leurs jambes étaient engourdies, ils pouvaient sortir et courir. Mais dans sa nouvelle demeure, il pouvait à peine tousser. (Essomba, 1996: 114)9 The severe constriction on the protagonist’s sounds and movements speaks to the precariousness of his situation as an undocumented immigrant, but the reflection also underlines how different the texture of the urban landscape he encounters in Paris is from that of his native city. In contrast to the indeterminate spaces of the Doualan landscape where movement is facilitated by fluid boundaries between official and unofficial space, Jojo evokes Paris as a closed, tomblike city where detection will mean his expulsion. The attempt to survive these harshly dichotomized spaces thus forces him deeper into the city’s crevices. This attempt is ultimately a failed one, as the city’s spatial contingencies create an impossible existence for Jojo, who ends up in the classically sublimated space of the prison. But in his (albeit ineffective) statement to the court, Jojo’s defence lawyer makes a telling turn to history. Responding directly to the prosecution’s efforts to incite racist and anti-immigrant paranoia on the part of the jury by evoking ‘ces hordes qui débarquent chez nous’ [these hordes descending upon our country] (1996: 164), the lawyer points to the colonial roots of Jojo’s presence in France. The defendant’s desire to live in France and the very language he speaks are a contemporary legacy, he claims, of the fact that France was imposed – often violently – on Jojo’s native land. Calling up a collective national guilt, Maître Maillot inscribes this historical framework into the context of commemoration: ‘En cette période riche en commémorations, il ne me paraît pas déplacé de vous rappeler que l’histoire de ce jeune homme n’est que la fin tragique de votre histoire d’hier’ [In this period rich in commemorations, it does not 9 ‘He had spent seven years of his childhood in the streets but he had never known such hardship. In their abandoned car shells, they could laugh and sing. When their legs got stiff, they could go outside and run. But here in his new residence he could hardly even cough.’ Françoise Ugochukwu argues that the inaccessibility of Paris in Le Paradis du nord is such that the protagonist’s encounter with France never in fact takes place (2008: 115). See also Forsdick et al., who examine Essomba’s ‘implicit critique of both French and Cameroonian societies’ in the novel (2006: 113).

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seem out of place to remind you that the story of this young man is nothing but the tragic result of your history] (1996: 164). While the speech does nothing to alter the defendant’s fate, it reads Jojo’s contact with the Parisian landscape through the lens of France’s colonial past, thus positing the noir narrative of African immigration as a key means of tracing the link between a ­dichotomized urban landscape and suppressed history. Alerte à la bonté announces an initial thematic affinity with Le Paradis du nord through the introduction of an illegal immigrant in Paris, Abou Koné, who, like the idealistic Jojo, is determined to remain in his adopted city at any price. But the narrative stays with this character only briefly before fanning out into a panoramic view of the city and its inhabitants. The author’s use of the framing device further multiplies the settings and cast of characters, as the framed narrative is periodically interrupted with brief passages describing individual audience members and their reactions to the film. Similarly, the novel’s geographical outlook includes the binational exchanges for which Essomba’s work is known, but inscribes this relationship in a transnationalism that goes beyond the borders of France and Cameroon to include the United States, Sudan and Argentina, ultimately implicating an international conspiracy with roots in Nazi Germany and South Africa. While flirting throughout with the absurd, especially in its portrait of right-wing politician Bruno Vallet, the somewhat hapless victim of a pharmaceutical accident resulting from this conspiracy, Essomba’s narrative exploits its panoramic perspective on the French capital to delve into the lives of Paris’s least visible inhabitants. Along with Abou Koné, we meet a couple from Cape Verde working as servants in a luxurious residence in the 16th arrondissement, an Arab fruit seller in the banlieue and a morgue watchman from Martinique who calls himself wryly a ‘pauvre négropolitain’ [poor negropolitan] (Essomba, 2010: 154). But the most archetypal manifestation of the city’s discounted working class in the novel is the balayeur [street sweeper] working at the airport who addresses the right-wing politician’s wife Martine Vallet in the car park. As Martine, late to pick up her husband, exclaims to herself that there are days where ‘tout est noir, noir’ [everything is black, black], the balayeur, ‘un jeune Africain surdiplômé que le déclassement rendait amer’ [an overqualified young African man embittered by his demotion], responds to her outburst without looking up: ‘Le noir, Madame, est le support idéal pour tout blanc, même dégénéré, qui se veut éclatant! C’est la raison pour laquelle le tableau est noir et la craie blanche’ (2010: 27).10 The figure of the unseen African street cleaner – iconic now in its symbolic indictment of the deeply ingrained colonial 10 ‘Black, Madame, is the ideal prop for any white person, even a degenerate, who wishes to stand out! That is why blackboards are black and chalk is white.’

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hierarchies that play out on the Parisian landscape – thus appears here as a kind of tongue-in-cheek Greek chorus, unveiling the self-serving utility of Martine’s racist language while warning her portentously of the error of her ways.11 Instead of situating the central enigma driving the narrative in this community of invisibles, however, Essomba posits the principal secrets and crimes of Alerte à la bonté in the realm of transnational conspiracy: with its doubled structure, the novel’s suspense unfolds on the one hand in the embedded narrative of Bruno Vallet and his encounter with the compassioninducing drug bontanine (the word bonté – goodness or kindness – is embedded in the name of the drug) and on the other hand in the framing narrative in which another international experiment on human ethics is being conducted. What makes the novel a noir text, in other words, is not an urban underground involving the city’s marginalized inhabitants as we see in Le Paradis du nord, Ballet noir à Château-Rouge and La Polyandre, but an inter-urban conspiracy implicating the world’s elite classes. Similarly, Essomba’s vision of Paris as a noir city foregrounds not its illegal immigration and trafficking but its place in a covert global network of institutionalized racism. Essomba thus uses noir to situate Paris in a framework of transnationalism other than that of sub-Saharan African immigration and Afropean interurbanism. Indeed, with the futuristic vision presented in its framed and framing narratives, Alerte à la bonté stages alliances that cross borders not in order to transcend cultural divisions but rather in order to solidify demarcations of global power. Essomba pointedly evokes the G8 as the site of deliberations concerning the fate of the mutated ‘bontanine’ drug, the product of covert research begun under Hitler and taken up in apartheidera South Africa. The leaders of the world’s eight wealthiest countries are confronted with the unexpected effects of this chemical weapon: originally intended to reduce its victims to a state of complete docility, the drug holds the added power of inducing an ‘irrépressible inclination pour la compassion’ [irrepressible inclination towards compassion] (2010: 147). As the affliction also proves to be highly contagious, the experiment presents a clear threat to the preservation of global power structures. The panic of self-interested speculation on the part of the G8 leaders in this scene points parodically to the incompatibility between compassion and commerce in visions of transnationalism, serving as a trenchant reminder of such 11 We see this figure of the African balayeur for example in Chéri Samba’s painting ‘Paris est propre’ (1989; see also Thomas, 2007: xii) and as a recurring character in Maryse Condé’s novel En attendant le bonheur (Heremakhonon) (1988: 34, 48, 244).

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challenges to Europeanization as the gap between common currency and common interests and the congruence of economic insecurity and internal discord. As in his earlier work, then, Essomba conveys the concrete hurdles at stake in the conceptualiziation of an Afropean identity, but shifts his focus to the framework of supranational power hierarchies, raising the question of Europe’s place in the contemporary global economy and its historical role in instances of extended racial violence within and outside its borders. If the expansion beyond national borders towards a notion of European identity has gone hand in hand with what Philomena Essed calls the ‘persistence of “Othering”’ (2009: ix), Essomba points here to transnational economic organizations configured specifically on the basis of GDP as being similarly linked to particular national and local instances of racial intolerance. Indeed, the instinct towards self-preservation in the context of shifts of power on the global stage is a recurring theme in Alerte à la bonté, from the low-wage minority worker to the right-wing politician to the audience members in the framing narrative who themselves recoil at the notion of being ‘infected’ by a drug-induced compassion. Given Essomba’s topographical concerns, the city of Paris is no exception in this respect. A commentary on the marketing challenges faced by the media offers a symbolic look at the ways in which local preoccupations become oriented in the face of heightened global awareness: in the absence of any political scandals or crimes of passion to report, journalists are forced to detail the high levels of pollution afflicting the city. News from abroad fails to divert the public: ‘Il y avait bien quelques beaux charniers en Afrique, mais le sujet ne faisait pas recette. Toute la presse faisait donc ses choux gras de l’indéracinable nuage d’hydrocarbures imbrûlés qui asphyxiait la ville lumière’ (Essomba, 2010: 53).12 Essomba depicts in effect a city polluted by its own narcissism. If a decades-long international project of chemical warfare and genocide continues unnoticed by the public, this scene implies, it is in part because Parisians have turned increasingly inward towards local concerns, confirming the paradoxical collusion between expanded borders and insularity. The most caustic of these appraisals in Alerte à la bonté is its reflection on contemporary French xenophobia. As in his earlier works, Essomba sprinkles the novel with references to recent events in France. He obliquely channels former president Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, through the character of Martine Vallet, the anti-immigrant granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants who refers to the Africans she sees arriving at the airport as 12 ‘There were some nice mass graves in Africa, but that story wouldn’t sell. So all the papers were making the most they could of the ineradicable cloud of unburned hydrocarbons asphyxiating the city of lights.’

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‘toute cette racaille’ [the scum] who should be cleaned out ‘au Kärcher’ [with a high-pressure hose] (2010: 28).13 Yet despite its parodic tone, this portrait of racist Paris also attempts to track this collective hostility along historical and geographical lines. The novel’s account of a young racist enlisted as a hitman in the effort to cover up the pharmaceutical breach, for example, offers particular insight into the psychology of xenophobia. Antoine Dupinard is the son of a wealthy colonial family who, although they maintained their financial stability upon relocating to France, saw a precious world crumble in the wake of decolonization. This loss is the source of his father’s hatred: ‘La xénophobie devint alors le remède à son mal de ne plus posséder cet ailleurs lointain et exotique’ [Thus xenophobia became the balm for the pain of having lost that distant exotic elsewhere] (2010: 101). Much as the criminalization of Le Paradis du nord’s Jojo reflects a national unwillingness to confront colonial history, the Dupinard family’s right-wing politics stem from a refusal to acknowledge a shifting French geography. Mapped on to the collective scale, Dupinard’s anti-immigrant rhetoric can be read here not only as a projection of a false ethnic purity but also as an anachronistic recuperation of the national: having lost the association between a global outlook and colonial power, France turned inwards to re-establish power within its borders. Nostalgia for colonial-era mappings of transnationalism is ultimately to blame for the polluted, narcissistic city evoked in Essomba’s novel, and for the political strength of the anti-immigrant platform. The critical gaze offered by noir in Essomba’s work thus falls in turn on French xenophobia, parochialism and the plight of illegal immigrants. Thanks to the collusion between noir and urbanism, this critique maps with particular insight on to the Parisian landscape, exposing the ways in which the topography of the French capital continues to be constricted by race and national identity. This vision of Afropeanism in Paris ultimately presents a city polarized by transnationalism: whereas in Le Paradis du nord Paris proves spatially incommensurable with the African immigrant underground, Alerte à la bonté’s Paris has shut its eyes to supra-urban conspiracy networks in its nostalgia-induced attempt to preserve its national borders. In both narratives, noir is necessarily located in these disavowed spaces, underscoring in that very spatial confinement the city’s persistent segregation at the turn of the twenty-first century. Contemporary Afropean noir thus represents a key moment in the effort to redefine ethical parameters in the postcolonial era, as the city’s inhabitants – visible and invisible – undergo the shift towards yet other configurations of transnationalism. 13 Sarkozy became notorious for using inflammatory phrases such as these regarding immigrants in the banlieues.

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Works Cited Baenga, Bolya. 1998. La Polyandre. Paris: Serpent à Plumes. Benvenuti, Stefano, Gianni Rizzoni and Michel Lebrun. 1982. Le Roman criminel: histoire, auteurs, personnages. Trans. by Cécile Supiot. Nantes: L’Atalante. [First published as Il romanzo giallo: storia, autori e personaggi, 1979.] Carter, Steven R. 1991. ‘Decolonization and Detective Fiction: Ngùgì wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood’. In Eugene Schleh (ed.), Mysteries of Africa. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press: 72–91. Cazenave, Odile, and Patricia Célérier. 2011. Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Christian, Ed (ed.). 2001. The Post-Colonial Detective. New York: Palgrave. Conard, Mark T. (ed). 2006. The Philosophy of Film Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Condé, Maryse. 1988. En Attendant le bonheur (Heremakhonon). Paris: Seghers. Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso. Diawara, Manthia. 1993. ‘Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema’. In Joan Copjec (ed), Shades of Noir: A Reader. London and New York: Verso: 261–78. Eburne, Jonathan P. 2005. ‘The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris: Chester Himes, Surrealism, and the Série noire’. PMLA 120.3: 806–21. Essed, Philomena. 2009. ‘Foreword’. In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds). Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press: ix–xv. Essomba, Jean-Roger. 1996. Le Paradis du nord. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1998. Le Dernier Gardien de l’arbre. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 2001. Une Blanche dans le noir. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 2010. Alerte à la bonté. Paris: Présence Africaine. Forsdick, Charles, Feroza Basu and Siobhán Shilton. 2006. New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French. New York: Peter Lang. Giroux, Henry A. 1995. ‘Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyper-Real Violence: Pulp Fiction and Other Visual Tragedies’. Social Identites: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 1.2: 333–55. Gorrara, Claire. 2009. ‘Dramatic and Traumatic: French Crime Fiction and the Reconstruction of France’. In Louise Hardwick (ed.), New Approaches to Crime in French Literature, Culture and Film. Oxford: Peter Lang: 123–36. Higginson, Pim. 2011. The Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kennedy, Liam. 1999. ‘Black Noir: Race and Urban Space in Walter Mosley’s

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Detective Fiction’. In Kathleen Gregory Klein (ed.), Diversity and Detective Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press: 224–39. Klüppelholz, Heinz. 2001. ‘L’Image du transfuge religieux dans Le dernier gardien de l’arbre de Jean-Roger Essomba’. Présence africaine 163–64: 168–81. Kom, Ambroise. 1999. ‘Littérature africaine, l’avènement du polar’. Notre Librairie: Revue des littératures du Sud 136: 14–25. Mabanckou, Alain. 1998. Bleu-Blanc-Rouge. Paris: Présence Africaine. Matzke, Christine, and Susanne Mühleisen (eds). 2006. Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi. McLaughlin, Joseph. 2000. Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Moudileno, Lydie. 2002. ‘Le Droit d’exister: Trafic et nausée postcoloniale’. Cahiers d’études africaines 165: 83–98. —. 2003. Littératures africaines francophones des années 1980 et 1990. Dakar: CODESRIA. Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. 2003. Crime and Empire: The Colony in NineteenthCentury Fictions of Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munt, Sally R. 1994. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. London and New York: Routledge. Naremore, James. 1998. More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Naudillon, Françoise. 2003. ‘Black Polar’. Présence francophone 60: 98–112. Ngoye, Achille. 2001. Ballet noir à Château-Rouge. Paris: Gallimard. Pearson, Nels, and Marc Singer (eds). 2009. Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World. Burlington, VT, and Aldershot: Ashgate. Pepper, Andrew. 2000. The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Rabinowitz, Paula. 2002. Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press. Reitz, Caroline. 2004. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Socé, Ousmane. 1937. Mirages de Paris. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines. Thomas, Dominic. 2007. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ugochukwu, Françoise. 2008. ‘Quand un roman en éclaire un autre – l’interculturel chez Jean-Roger Essomba’. In Ladislas Nzessé and M. Dassi (eds), Le Cameroun au prisme de la littérature africaine à l’ère du pluralisme sociopolitique (1990–2006). Paris: L’Harmattan: 113–30.

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Mapping Afropea: The Translation of Black Paris in the Fiction of Alain Mabanckou John Patrick Walsh

The Translation of Black Paris in the Fiction of Alain Mabanckou

Translations of Francophone material in the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ give evidence of black modernity and perhaps most important show the ways that ‘race’ actually transcends the nation-state […]. But at the same time, translations open ‘race’ to the influence of an exterior, pulling and tugging at that same signified in an interminable practice of difference, through an unclosed field of signifiers (Negro, noir, black, nègre, Afro-American, Aframerican, Africo-American, Afro-Latin, etc.) whose shifts inescapably reshape the possibilities of what black modern culture might be. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora In Alain Mabanckou’s first novel, Bleu-Blanc-Rouge (1998; Red White Blue, 2013), the hero-in-training, Massala-Massala, learns a tough lesson from his mentor, Charles Moki. ‘On ne devient pas parisien du jour au lendemain ou parce qu’on habite à Paris. C’est une affaire de longue haleine’ [One does not become Parisian from one day to the next or because one lives in Paris. It’s a long-term project] (1998: 75).1 On the surface, one could read in Moki’s observation the idea that the identity so prized by these two Congolese immigrants owes more to a state of mind than it does to residence. However, 1 This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author of this chapter.

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the becoming parisien is less a becoming French than it is the acquisition of a particular (and masculine) Congolese style that makes visible a state of being in Paris. Moki refers to the time it takes to obtain the material trappings – the vestimentary style of the SAPE, or the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes – that articulate a flashy sense of belonging for the immigrant who must then return to the Congo to close the circle of identification that is the parisien (Thomas, 2003).2 As several of Mabanckou’s characters have joked, the clothes do make the parisien, and this attempt to dress up the French capital with a pair of Weston shoes and a Versace suit comes as no surprise to the reader, nor do the lengths Massala-Massala will go to achieve such status. The first line of the novel, ‘j’arriverai à m’en sortir’ [I’ll manage to pull through] (Mabanckou, 1998: 9), uttered by Massala-Massala in a French detention centre not long before his deportation back to the Congo, is an ambiguous statement that actually foreshadows a failure of arrival. Both verbs shift between the idiomatic (‘arriver à’ [to manage] and ‘s’en sortir’ [to pull through]) and the literal, ‘to arrive’ and ‘to get out’. The slippage in meanings suggests that the illegal immigrant ‘arrives’ in Paris, his physical destination, but never ‘manages to pull through’: the dream of inhabiting the mental territory of parisien – a long-term project – turns out to be a hopeless illusion. Alone in his cell, Massala-Massala can only contemplate the unsurpassable distance between an imagined geography and an incarcerating reality. The story of migration and return at the heart of Bleu-Blanc-Rouge is about the conflict between the idea of Paris as imagined by the Congolese protagonist and the experiences that do not live up to the dream. The scenes of Massala-Massala’s failed journey, depicted as the struggle to inhabit a space that defines a sense of self, serve as a point of departure for this chapter. The anticipated transformation into a new identity marked by a strong geographical consciousness runs up against boundaries of race and culture, marks of difference that deny entry to the immigrant. The frustrated desire of the Congolese immigrant to be of France is a theme that runs through Mabanckou’s fiction, just as the use of playful language to evoke the painful quest to ‘arrive’ and to ‘pull through’ is the ludic signature of his writing. The structure of Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, which begins at In Verre cassé, the Printer says of the SAPE: ‘et quand je dis “Sapeurs”, mon cher Verre Cassé, il faut pas les confondre avec les gars qui éteignent les incendies, non, les Sapeurs c’est des gars du milieu black à Paris qui font partie de la SAPE’ [and when I say ‘Sappers,’ my dear Broken Glass, I do not mean the guys who put out fires, no, Sappers are boys from the black milieu in Paris who belong to the SAPE (2010: 43)] (2005: 62).

2

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the suspended conclusion of the story, reinforces the paradoxical situation in which Massala-Massala finds himself. Moreover, the sense of entrapment is expressed in the foreignness of his own language, caught between the literal and the figurative. The future tense, ‘j’arriverai’, leads to the space of an ‘ambiguous adventure’;3 if it is unclear just where he will arrive or how he will manage, it is certain that he will get out of his cell only to be kicked out of the country on the way to a failed return to his native land. This chapter examines the liminal space between imaginary and physical geographies that begins with Bleu-Blanc-Rouge and is developed further in Verre cassé (2005; Broken Glass, 2010) and Black Bazar (2009; Black Bazaar, 2012). The aim here is to contribute to the ‘mapping’ of Afropean literature, not in the sense of demarcating boundaries, but of charting itineraries that transgress such limits by melding two geographical signifiers, each charged with historical, cultural and racial meanings, into one that might produce something new. The definition offered by the Franco-Cameroonian novelist Léonora Miano is instructive: ‘Afropea, c’est, en France, le terroir mental que se donnent ceux qui ne peuvent faire valoir la souche française. C’est la légitimité identitaire arrachée, et c’est le dépassement des vieilles rancœurs’ (2012: 86).4 In her recent fiction, set largely in Paris, Miano depicts a range of ‘Afropean’ characters whose sense of self is walled in by boundaries of race, gender and sexuality. If her protagonists retreat into spaces of self-doubt, they also challenge the privilege granted by these normative discourses. The representation of competing mentalités, one that claims legitimacy at the expense of the other and one that seeks to go beyond such proscriptive antagonism, is a hallmark of Miano’s Afropean fiction. The interaction between claiming and rejecting privilege is also at work in the journeys of various fictional immigrants imagined by Mabanckou – Massala-Massala (the central protagonist in Bleu-Blanc-Rouge) and ‘Fessologue’ (the Buttologist of Black Bazar) – each at different points between the Republic of Congo and France. What do their stories reveal about the possibilities for, and obstacles to, the transformation of identity assumed by the Afropean? In terms of theoretical implications, as Sabrina Brancato has remarked, how do the depictions of these characters inform ‘present anxieties about terminology concerning minorities and their way of articulating identity’ (2008: 7)? An 3 The eponymous narrator of Verre cassé notes that the Printer describes his journey in this way (Mabanckou, 2005: 73; 2010: 53). The expression is a reference to L’Aventure ambiguë (1961), the seminal novel of Cheikh Hamidou Kane. 4 ‘Afropea is, in France, the mental locale that those who are unable to claim the privilege of French stock give to themselves. It is the identitarian legitimacy uprooted, and it is the overcoming of longstanding bitterness.’

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attempt is made here to answer these questions by way of close textual analyses of Mabanckou’s fiction as well as consideration of recent theoretical and historical inquiry into the term ‘diaspora’ and its use in making sense of the boundaries of lived experiences between Africa and Europe.

Diaspora as Impossible Return Before turning our attention to Verre cassé and Black Bazar, it is worth spending a little more time with Massala-Massala to reflect on his imminent return. As he waits in his detention cell, he worries about his reception back home. Having left the Congo, Massala-Massala can only return as a hero (parisien) or a failure (‘parisien raté’). The stark contrast is foreshadowed in the first part of the novel, ‘Le Pays’, in the much-anticipated return of Moki, whose arrival as parisien in the Congo is met with great fanfare. Along with his cohorts, Moki is tracked in Paris as a clandestine, yet his material success and ability to elude the police distinguish him from his less fortunate apprentice. Although the story ends before Massala-Massala’s deportation is complete, the binary structure of the novel, in which the celebration of Moki occurs in the ‘Ouverture’ [opening] and is followed by the arrest of his erstwhile protégé in the ‘Fermeture’ [closing], leaves no doubt as to the fact that Massala-Massala cannot return simply as a congolais. The journey that unfolds from the opening to the closing of the novel could be read as a postcolonial variation on the impossibility of ‘return’ that Édouard Glissant theorized in Le Discours antillais. ‘Retour’ for Glissant is the ‘première pulsion d’une population transplantée, qui n’est pas sûre de maintenir au lieu de son transbord l’ancien ordre de ses valeurs’ [Return is the first desire of a transplanted population that is not sure of maintaining in the site of its transfer its former order of values] (1997: 44; Thomas, 2003). ‘Retour,’ he continues, ‘c’est l’obsession de l’Un’ [Return is the obsession of the One] (1997: 44), which is a kind of wholeness of being, or a relationship to an origin of a people who have been changed into something else. Because ‘wholeness’ is no longer possible, this population is forced to take another route, a ‘détour’ [detour or diversion], which is a turning away from origin towards an indirect path to an ‘elsewhere’ from which to counter dominating forces. Although Glissant grounds his conceptions of retour and détour in the legacies of slavery and the slave trade around the Atlantic Triangle, he opens to other histories of dispersed peoples such that, more generally, the impossibility of return is a defining condition of diaspora. The point of embarcation of Massala-Massala and his peers into a Congolese diaspora is situated on the continuum of the détour, or the route to an ‘elsewhere’; in their case, it is the result of a postcolonial situation in

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which the mode of domination is so concealed – or, to lean once more on Glissant, ‘camouflaged’ – as to be alluring. Instead of being obsessed with origins, Massala-Massala is drawn to the former metropole. To take this detour is to aspire to the transformation of the congolais into the parisien; when Massala-Massala is deported back to the Congo, he is turned away from this dream and forced back on the detour. This is why to return to the Congo is not to go back to a source: his return, as well that of Moki, demonstrates that native land can be transformed by, and into, diasporic space. In other words, because both young men bring part of France back into the Congo, the novel compels its readers to reflect on the presence of the Congo within France as well as the parisien within the Congo. In the end, Massala-Massala becomes a philosopher of sorts, who departs with a lonely meditation on the complicated relationship between self and space. Aboard the plane, flying above and across geographical boundaries, he remarks, ‘le rêve et la réalité ici n’ont plus de frontières’ [dream and reality here no longer have borders] (Mabanckou, 1998: 222). This erasure of borders stands in direct contrast to the chain of African capitals (Bamako, Dakar, Kinshasa and Brazzaville) that the text links as his connecting flights back to the Congo. Though weighted with a colonial history that cannot be ignored – and which is inscribed into the text by the presence on the plane of a ‘vétéran de l’AEF’ [a veteran of French Equatorial Africa] (1998: 220) – these cities and the (inter)national boundaries they compose have lost their meaning for Massala-Massala. His marginalization and arrest reveal to him that Paris is as much a racial and social construction as it is a physical presence. Yet the novel does not place the entire burden of failure on MassalaMassala; his somewhat predictable run-in with French law is set inside the larger drama of exclusion that the immigrant experiences upon arrival. The craftiness and guile of the immigrant are depicted as responses to the general inhospitability of a host nation that insists on monitoring its immigrants rather than welcoming them. By restricting Massala-Massala’s movement, the French government fails to open its national space to a more abstract version of what Brent Hayes Edwards has termed ‘the practice of diaspora’, or an ‘intervention’ that is a ‘call to translate’ (2003: 115–18). To be fair, this is an oversimplification of Edwards’s analysis, but it allows for a way to read Massala-Massala’s deportation as the result of a mutually failed ‘translation’.

Translating the Archive of Diaspora Edwards’s understanding of diaspora is the result of his attempt to ‘excavate a historicized and politicized sense’ of the term for the study of black internationalist movements in the meeting ground of Paris between the two world

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wars (2001: 45; 2003: 25) As such, some explanation of the ‘use’ of these earlier cultural and political configurations that date back to the inter-war years for the study of contemporary Afropean literature is necessary here, while also making it possible to argue that the process of ‘exchange and translation’ was an early ‘practice of diaspora’. Multiple groups of African descent debated, read, wrote about and translated each other’s texts; this transnational meeting ground brought together various groups but also called on them to translate their racial and geopolitical identities to each other and to themselves (some of these are included in the epigraph to this chapter). Inevitably, translations also leave a gap in time and space, or a décalage, a word that is itself difficult to pin down. This décalage, Edwards argues, is a constitutive ‘unevenness’ in the weave of language, race and culture that makes up (joining and separating) diasporic groups. Thus, the return to the archives is a critical way to avoid dilution of the term; equally important for this chapter, the unearthing of texts that circulated among black internationalist movements is instructive for the link it provides between past and present and the study of this prior articulation is also a contemplation of continuity and discontinuity in contemporary practices of diasporic translation.5 Therefore, the ‘use’ of translation with regard to the lived experiences of the characters of Mabanckou’s fiction is not, in the end, so abstract. On the one hand, the predicament of Massala-Massala can be understood as a failed translation in that he is unable to bring himself across to France without risking deportation. The ‘excavation’ of the archive is illuminating for an understanding of the (relatively new) designation, ‘Afropean’. The activation of this critical genealogy allows for a reading of the future in the past. In this light, it is possible to heed Brancato’s caution – that one be ‘aware of the principles on which the use of the term is based’ – and, perhaps, use ‘Afropean’ in a less ‘arbitrary’ manner (2008: 3). The use of the term, however, is not meant to be conceptually synonymous with African diasporic groups of the past, such as those identified by Edwards. Just as archival work requires sifting through layers of texts in order to bring out the diversity of translations of diaspora, the study of Afropean texts, too, must follow their development over time. Beyond this temporal dimension, as Brancato points out in her reflection on the possibilities of a comparative approach to Afro-European Studies, it is 5 For the concept of ‘archive’ Edwards borrows from Foucault’s L’Archéologie du savoir (1969), specifically the idea of continuities and discontinuities inherent to the ‘bordure’ of the archive. Edwards writes, ‘this book attempts to hear the border of another future of black internationalism in the archive of its past’ (2003: 10).

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The Translation of Black Paris in the Fiction of Alain Mabanckou 101 imperative to consider the particular linguistic and geographical attributes of the literature in question. That Mabanckou is now a well-established writer of francophone novels whose settings move between the Congo and France places him on a different Afropean trajectory than, say, ‘Afrosporic’ writers in Spain (see Brancato, 2008: 10). The specificity of Mabanckou’s novels – for example, the satire of his bar room stories – surely sets him apart; however, the mapping and remapping of the Congolese diaspora across his fiction is comprehensive enough to have left a wider impression of its Afropean dimension. Because the three novels considered in this chapter locate their protagonists on different stages of the migrant journey, reflecting on where their stories ‘pull and tug’ at each other is revealing of the circuitous routes that link the Congo and France.

Itinerant Narratives Concluding as it does with Massala-Massala flying over discrete yet blurred borders, Bleu-Blanc-Rouge anticipates the next leg of the journey in the story of the Printer in Verre cassé. Set in a dive in Brazzaville, the novel depicts Broken Glass, an embittered alcoholic, who records anecdotal stories of the denizens of the bar in a notebook. One of the central ‘characters’ is the Printer, a loquacious regular whose nickname derives from a former job at a printing press on the outskirts of Paris. Upon learning of the notebook, the Printer approaches Broken Glass and demands to be inscribed in its pages. When Broken Glass asks why he is more important than the others, the Printer responds: ‘je suis le plus important de ces gars parce que j’ai fait la France, et c’est pas donné à tout le monde, crois-moi’ [I’m more important than the rest because I’ve been to France, and not everyone can say that, believe me (2010: 37)] (2005: 54). Unable to contradict the Printer’s conviction that France is the ‘unité de mesure, le sommet de la reconnaissance’ [yardstick, the height of achievement (2010: 37)] (2005: 54), Broken Glass proceeds to take down his story. In the interests of space, it will be sufficient to sketch the outlines here in order to consider its place in Mabanckou’s Afropea. The Printer’s presence in the bar and subsequent place in Broken Glass’s notebook mean that he had reached the heights of the parisien experience only to have fallen from grace. A ‘good man’ with a respectable job, a family (he was married to Céline, a white woman with whom he had a daughter), a home, even savings and a pension, the Printer is nevertheless aware that this ‘blue sky’ of domestic tranquility could darken over at any moment (Mabanckou, 2005: 64; 2010: 45). Sure enough, the past comes back to haunt him and, eventually, leads to his downfall. A son from a relationship with an Antillean woman around the time of his immigration to France comes to

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live in the house and soon disturbs the peace. The son takes to hanging out on the corner of the street with the ‘jeunes voyous du quartier’ [local riffraff (2010: 45)] (2005: 65) and confronts his father with a series of accusations that are translated by the Printer in the language of a colonial past: as such, he is criticized as a ‘vendu’ [[someone who has] been bought], ‘assimilé’ [gone over to the other side], ‘Nègre Banania’ [a Banania black], ‘complexé’ [all fucked-up], ‘esclave de la chair blanche’ [a slave to white meat (2010: 46)] (2005: 65); in short, the prototype of the alienated Fanonian individual. In the playful recourse to the discourse of anti-colonialism, Mabanckou nevertheless appears to cast doubt on the ‘success’ of the immigrant life led by the Printer in Paris. Even before the arrival of his son, the Printer had seen his forward momentum stall, if only briefly, upon meeting Céline’s father, who offers an ambiguous apology for French colonialism that is undermined by a nostalgic reminder of ‘notre belle et prestigieuse colonie’ [our beautiful, illustrious former colony (2010: 42)] (2005: 61). Despite his desire to look to the future, the Printer stands as a reminder of a colonial past. Perhaps burdened by this past, he becomes obsessed with the ‘Africans’ on the corner, fearing that they will seduce Céline. Having internalized this colonial stereotype, the Printer is instead treated to an Œdipal drama: he catches Céline in bed with his son, gets into a fight, is arrested and locked up in a mental institution. Before long, Céline obtains a divorce, gets custody of their daughter and manages to have the Printer, now declared insane, deported back to the Congo. The colonial fantasy-become-reality apparently sends the Printer over the edge. In the end, however, as Broken Glass notes, it is the subsequent telling of the story that undoes the Printer: ‘chaque jour je surprends maintenant L’Imprimeur en train de narrer à quelqu’un d’autre ce qu’il appelle son aventure ambiguë […] je crois surtout que cette histoire l’a rendu dingue’ [I come across the Printer every day now, spilling out his story to someone or other, what he calls his ambiguous adventure […] but I really think this story’s scrambled his head (2010: 53)] (2005: 74). In a move typical of the ironic edge to Mabanckou’s satire, the Printer realizes that his alienation was less the result of some colonial narrative that he had internalized, in a fit of transference through his son, than the belated recognition that he is less at home in the Congo than he was in France. The Printer is a pivotal figure in the cartographic repositioning of the immigrant that develops across the three novels. To recall the idea of Afropea evoked by Miano, it is possible to read the bitterness of the Printer not simply as an expression of personal failure but as kind of shared anguish in the face of an unjust uprooting. His tale charts a possible epilogue to the tribulations of Massala-Massala and, in many ways, points to the story of Fessologue in Black Bazar. In this sense, the movement of the Printer between the Congo

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The Translation of Black Paris in the Fiction of Alain Mabanckou 103 and France mediates the itinerant narratives of the other two characters. Although his status as parisien is outside the frame of Massala-Massala’s failed bid, it allows the reader, in part, to imagine the latter’s depressing return, perhaps in the same bar where he listened to Moki regale his audience with stories of life in Paris. For his part, the Printer confirms the allure of becoming a parisien, yet his validation of the French spaces of this identity comes at the expense of his ability to reconnect to the Congo. As soon as the plane has landed and he has seen the shame and sadness on his parents’ faces, he states: ‘j’ai refusé de vivre avec mes parents, j’ai refusé cette humiliation’ [I refused to live with my parents, that humiliation I did refuse (2010: 52)] (2005: 73). From his vantage point in the bar, he rails against the poverty and corruption of his native land. Indeed, if the telling of his story has made him crazy, it is due in no small part to the growing divide between the surreal image of his time in France and the sad reality of his life in the Congo. When he is not in the bar, he tells Broken Glass, ‘je longe la mer, je discute avec les ombres qui me pourchassent’ [I roam the shore, I talk with the ghosts that haunt me (2010: 52)] (2005: 73).

Mapping the ‘Black Bazaar’ It is from the liminal space of the shoreline that, perhaps, the Printer looks out to contemplate what could have become of his former life in Paris. It is where his alter ego, Fessologue, also a sapeur and printer, as well as the narrator of Black Bazar, engages with another, livelier group of regulars of Jip’s, an Afro-Cuban bar in the 1st arrondissement. Black Bazar represents Mabanckou’s most sustained effort to reflect on the ‘bazaar’ that is Paris. The novel gathers a wide range of immigrants from the francophone African and Caribbean diaspora, including Roger Le Franco-Ivoirien [Roger the FrenchIvorian], Yves L’Ivoirien ‘tout court’ [Yves the just-Ivorian], Paul du Grand Congo [Paul from the Big Congo], Bosco Le Tchadien [Bosco the Embassy Poet], Vladimir Le Camerounais [Vladimir the Cameroonian], Patrick ‘Le Scandinave’ [Patrick ‘the Scandinavian’] (a Congolese married to a Finnish woman), and Pierrot Le Blanc du Petit Congo (Pierrot the White from the small Congo). In addition to this African ‘confrérie’ [brotherhood], there is Fessologue’s neighbour, Monsieur Hippocrate, a Martinican seemingly in denial of his skin colour; Djamal, the ‘Arabe du Coin’ [the manager of the local convenience store], who runs a small market; L’Hybride, a musician and fellow Congolese who runs off with ‘Couleur d’origine’ [Original Colour], a woman born in France to Congolese parents and Fessologue’s former companion and the mother of his daughter, Henriette. These toponymic layers are superimposed over geographical, racial and linguistic markers

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to animate a map of Paris in which former colonies and metropole unite discordant Afropean voices. From the start, Mabanckou appears bent on rethinking not only the traditional, hexagonal boundaries of France but also the terms of race and culture that have largely shaped postcolonial discourse. As with Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, the novel opens an ambiguous relationship between reality and an imaginary alternative. Fessologue tells the reader, ‘Quatre mois se sont écoulés depuis que ma compagne s’est enfuie avec notre fille et L’Hybride, un type qui joue du tam-tam dans un groupe que personne ne connaît en France, y compris à Monaco et en Corse’ (Mabanckou, 2009: 9).6 As Pascale de Souza has pointed out, in this new ‘literary geography’ the political borders of Mabanckou’s cartography are oddly drawn, especially since Monaco is not part of France and Corsica has always had a ‘thriving independence movement’ (2011: 106). Fessologue seems to have no use for geographical and political boundaries; at the very least, one wonders why Monaco and Corsica would have a hold on his imagination. In any event, Mabanckou marks Fessologue and his fellow characters with nominal designations as part of a satirical world-view that plays with national and racial identification. Perhaps the most glaring example of the skewering of assumptions about race occurs when Fessologue explains the nickname, ‘Couleur d’origine’: Je l’avais surnommée Couleur d’origine à cause de sa peau très noire. Au pays on croit encore que les nègres qui naissent en France sont en principe moins noirs que nous. Eh bien, non, manque de pot, jusqu’à notre rencontre je n’avais jamais encore croisé une personne aussi noire que mon ex. Il y a des gens lorsque tu les vois ils sont tout noirs comme le manganèse ou le goudron, tu te dis c’est parce qu’ils ont forcément cramé au soleil des tropiques, et ils t’apprennent sans transition qu’ils sont nés en France. Quand c’est comme ça moi j’exige séance tenante qu’ils me montrent leur carte d’identité. (Mabanckou, 2009: 65)7 6 ‘Four months have come and gone since my partner ran off with our daughter and the Hybrid, this African drummer in a group nobody’s ever heard of in France, and that’s including in Corsica and Monaco’ (2012: 3). 7 ‘I had nicknamed her Original Colour on account of her very black skin. Back in the home country, we still believe that negroes born in France are less black than us. But no, as bad luck would have it, before we met I’s never clapped eyes on anyone as black as my ex. There are some people, when you see them, they’re black as manganese or tar, so you figure they must have roasted under the tropical sun, but then out of the blue they tell you they were born in France. When it’s like that I insist they show me their identity card on the spot’ (2012: 60).

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The Translation of Black Paris in the Fiction of Alain Mabanckou 105 Surprised by what appears to him a rare exception to a theory of black racial origins, Fessologue seeks a geopolitical explanation in the form of an identity card. In his way of thinking, which, he asserts, is also the norm in the Congo, black skin colour should be lighter in France. The phrase ‘d’origine’ is a mark of authenticity (as on wine bottle labels, ‘appellation d’origine contrôlée’), and when this ‘control’ fails, Fessologue wonders, ‘mais dans quel monde on est si les gens ils sont sans cesse en train de battre en brèche les petites choses qui pérennisent nos préjugés, hein? Est-ce que je suis un imbécile qui goberait des histoires pareilles?’ (2009: 65).8 Fessologue is certainly an imbecile for his faith in tropical determinism, yet his question ‘what world are we living in?’ is worthy of reflection because it speaks to communal expectations of, and reliance on, prejudice. If there are racial stereotypes such as the origins of skin colour, it is because, unconsciously or not, people have more or less accepted them. This is the assumption on which Fessologue’s reasoning is based; it is also one that allows him to move effortlessly from ‘nègres’ [negroes] to ‘noirs’ [blacks] without having to explain the accumulation of different historical and social meanings that charge these terms (see Edwards, 2003: 25–38). In the end, if Fessologue pronounces these questions ‘unthinkable’ it is precisely because Mabanckou asks his readers to explore how questioning such ‘little things’ can unsettle expectations. The laughter provoked by the scene is the first step to thinking ‘in what world are we?’ It is a world that exists under the surface of the satire; to arrive there is to get beyond the laughter and to open a critical space in which to make sense of this ‘black bazaar’. At this point, Fessologue cannot imagine such a world. The turn to writing, however, more than being just a way to cope with the loss of his family, might be seen as an attempt to expand the horizon of his imaginary. Unlike the Printer, who flies into a fit of rage when his family comes apart, Fessologue finds an outlet in the written word. Following the advice of his friend and writer, Louis-Philippe – who urges, ‘Écris, écris ce que tu ressens’ [‘Write, write what you are feeling’ (2012: 141)] (Mabanckou, 2009: 144) – Fessologue documents his failed relationship and, at the same time, begins to observe his surroundings more carefully. Like Broken Glass, he feigns indifference in order to listen carefully to his garrulous interlocutors, especially his neighbour, Monsieur Hippocrate, who delivers a long apology for colonialism – including a hilarious rebuttal of Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme [Discourse on Colonialism] (1955), ‘N’importe quoi!’ [‘Stuff and nonsense!’ (2012: 227)] (2009: 229). The reference to Louis-Philippe Dalembert, the 8 ‘what world are we living in if people are busy demolishing the little things that keep our prejudices alive, eh? Am I the kind of fool who swallows stories hook, line and sinker?’ (2012: 60).

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Haitian writer, and to his fictional mentoring of Fessologue – and, indeed, to the latter’s becoming a writer – is surely another satire at work. Indeed, it would seem quite appropriate to ask ‘what world are we living in’ where a character who goes by the sobriquet ‘the buttologist’ can aspire to become a writer. One might be as sceptical as Paul du grand Congo, who, the first time he spies Fessologue with a ‘journal d’un cocu’ [cuckold’s journal], remarks, ‘C’est pas toi qui viendras changer les choses’ [‘So don’t go thinking you can change things’ (2012: 14)] (2009: 20). Yet, as in Verre cassé, the coming to writing is accompanied by a seemingly endless number of literary and pop cultural references. Through these references, the novel builds an intertextual community whose many voices pull and tug in a number of spatio-temporal directions.9 In keeping with Mabanckou’s signature in 2007 of the manifesto, Pour une littérature-monde en français [Towards a World Literature in French], such a community represents another literary geography, ‘une littérature-monde en langue française consciemment affirmée, ouverte sur le monde, transnationale’ (Le Monde, 2007: 2) [transnational world-literature in the French language, open to the world (Simon, 2009: 56)] that mirrors the text’s mapping of a cast of characters uprooted from their national referents. How does the role of writer relate to the nickname given to him by his bar room colleague, Pierrot Le Blanc? And what connection might be made to the claims of the above-mentioned manifesto? As a studied expert on the female ‘derrière’ [butt] (also referred to in his language as the ‘face B’ [B-side]), Fessologue appears to be nothing but a caricature; nevertheless, he has developed a rather sophisticated language to perfect this particular science. His decision to start writing occurs right after the departure of Couleur d’origine, who had the ‘derrière’ [‘butt’ (2012: 263)] of his dreams (Mabanckou, 2009: 72). In order to fill the void of this object of study, he pursues his fieldwork elsewhere. Initially, as a bird watcher, he simply records, taking cues from Louis-Philippe, who tells him that ‘les écrivains notaient tout et faisaient par la suite l’inventaire de leurs notes pour ne garder que l’essentiel’ [‘writers noted everything down and then went through their notes so they only kept the stuff that really mattered’ (2012: 165–66)] (Mabanckou, 2009: 167–68); later on, however, walking through the market at Château-Rouge, he has honed his craft considerably, such that the comedic voice gives way to the more serious air of a documentary on immigrant life in Paris. In the range of subjects covered by Fessologue, de Souza appreciates the humour but focuses on the root of the nickname to argue that 9 The sheer number of references risks becoming a game between Mabanckou and the reader, who is tempted to uncover them all. In so doing, the art of criticism is reduced to a kind of literary detective work.

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The Translation of Black Paris in the Fiction of Alain Mabanckou 107 ‘Mabanckou also deconstructs the “logos” of Western discourse, the marker of order and knowledge’ (2011: 106). It is tempting to read this character as a kind of anthropologist, who observes and records the din of voices that mock the long history between Europe and Africa. Similar to Miano’s insistence on the uprooting of identitarian legitimacy – the idea of a privileged stock – the logic of Mabanckou’s Afropean discourse is very much about undoing the objectified image of Africans within France. However, Mabanckou’s satire also takes aim at the chequered past of African countries since the era of independence. In many respects, the withering critique of the order of things on the African continent is a central (and overlooked) piece of the Afropean dimension of his writing. Mabanckou portrays Fessologue as part of an emerging transnational culture but also as a budding anthropologist, who maintains a critical distance from this very community. As Edwards has shown, the notion of the anthropologist as a ‘translator’ of cultural difference, or, for that matter, the trope of the ‘objective’ anthropologist as a mediating figure, is not new.10 As one who ‘crouches behind behinds’, Fessologue exerts a measure of authority over a playful social science. Yet the expanding scope of his gaze suggests that he acquires the skills to translate an array of encounters in Paris for his future readers. His typographical notes are an attempt to make comprehensible this ‘black bazaar’, a place that resists neat translation. Two foreign signifiers, English and Persian, come together: race meets a place where things change hands, a market where goods are bought and sold; where the buyer and seller haggle, each leaving, perhaps, content in the knowledge that the other has been duped. From prologue to epilogue, Fessologue is at work on a text that documents the everyday marketplace of Paris; in the familiar conceit of the ‘book within the book’ Mabanckou fictionalizes the writer of a littérature-monde. The idea of the bazaar as a site of translation is a helpful way to understand the uneven exchanges that constitute the blurred boundaries of the Afropean map. ‘Cultural translation’ may be a common trope; nevertheless, there is something peculiar to the anthropological practices of Mabanckou’s characters. Beyond their more abstract roles as translators of cultural difference, the protagonists examined here are connected in some way to printing and writing (even Massala-Massala sends letters home that 10 Edwards cites Talal Asad on the difference between anthropological and linguistic translation. Asad argues that the anthropologist ‘must construct the discourse as a cultural text in terms of meanings implicit in a range of practices. The construction of cultural discourse and its translation thus seem to be facets of a single act’ (1986: 160; Edwards, 2003: 85–86).

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offer a scripted lie about his life in Paris). In all three novels, Mabanckou creates characters that are also graphic actants: they are figures of a kind of translation in which the immigrant inscribes his role, refracted through acts of writing and/or printing, on to the new mapping of Paris. These characters move across borders and into the discursive system of the nation to challenge from within not just the idea of physical boundaries but also the ‘order of things’ that have defined the French Republic since its inception. If maps are used to delimit boundaries, then the itineraries of Mabanckou’s characters confound and exceed these cartographic limits; narrow discriminating boundaries are redrawn in an imaginative process that would bring two continents into new ways of being. Several questions remain, however, concerning the centripetal force of Paris on Mabanckou’s Afropean map. Do the multiple ‘translations’ at work across his fiction reify the notion of Paris as the graphic centre of a ‘worldliterature in French’ (see Woolward, 2010)? Or is there something about these translations that radically disrupts the republican cohesion of the (former) metropole? Recalling Léonora Miano, is ‘Afropea’ still a ‘mental territory’ that is necessary for a future belonging to a ‘post-occidentalité’ [post-Westernism] (2012: 5)? These questions are open to debate, and much critical ink has now been spent on the manifesto (Hargreaves et al., 2010). Yet there is little doubt that Mabanckou’s novels open a field of vision that exceeds ‘a certain idea of France’. Perhaps the best way to appreciate this hopeful future is to return to Black Bazar. The novel ends as Fessologue nears the conclusion of his own book, ‘Black Bazar’. By this point, the writing, which has come at a feverish pace, has changed his life. A big part of this transformation is his new companion, Sarah, a Franco-Belgian painter who is also his first reader. After picking up a few pages, she asks, ‘Est-ce que ma couleur est aussi une couleur d’origine?’ [Is my colour also an original colour?’ (2012: 263)] (Mabanckou, 2009: 265). This playful repartee allows Fessologue to ponder the imbecility of his earlier beliefs concerning racial origin and thus to revisit the possibility of another world. This new world, emerging from the novel’s last line – the white Franco-Belgian asks the black Franco-Congolese to live with her – is inhabited by an Afropean union in which the physical and the imaginary begin to commingle.

Works Cited Asad, Talal. 1986. ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’. In James Clifford and George Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press: 141–64.

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The Translation of Black Paris in the Fiction of Alain Mabanckou 109 Brancato, Sabrina. 2008. ‘Afro-European Literatures: A New Discursive Strategy?’ Research in African Literatures 39.3: 1–13. Césaire, Aimé. 1955. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine. De Souza, Pascale. 2011. ‘Trickster Strategies in Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar’. Research in African Literatures 42.1: 102–19. Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2001. ‘The Uses of Diaspora’. Social Text 66: 45–73. —. 2003. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1969. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard. Hargreaves, Alec G., Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (eds). 2010. Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. 1961. L’Aventure ambiguë. Paris: Julliard. Mabanckou, Alain. 1998. Bleu-Blanc-Rouge. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 2005. Verre cassé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. —. 2009. Black Bazar. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. —. 2010. Broken Glass. Trans. by Helen Stevenson. New York: Soft Skull Press. —. 2012. Black Bazaar. Trans. by Sarah Ardizzone. London: Serpent’s Tail. —. 2013. Red White Blue. Trans. by Alison Dundy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miano, Léonora. 2010. Blues pour Élise. Paris: Plon. —. 2011. Ces âmes chagrines. Paris: Plon. —. 2012. Habiter la frontière. Paris: L’Arche Éditeur. Le Monde. 2007. ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’. 16 March: 1–3. Stovall, Tyler. 1996. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Thomas, Dominic. 2003. ‘Fashion Matters: La Sape and Vestimentary Codes in Transnational Contexts and Urban Diasporas’. Modern Languages Notes 118: 947–73. Simon, Daniel (trans.). 2009. ‘Toward a World Literature in French’. World Literature Today: 54–56. Woolward, Keithley. 2010. ‘World Literature in French: A Caribbean Design?’ Small Axe 33: 89–98.

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Relighting Stars and Bazaars of Voices: Exchange and Dialogue in Léonora Miano’s Tels des astres éteints and Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar Kathryn Kleppinger

Exchange and Dialogue in Miano and Mabanckou

Léonora Miano’s Tels des astres éteints [Like Extinguished Stars] (2008) and Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar (2009) are complex works to consider in terms of theoretical frameworks, as these novels actively challenge attempts to situate them in any one place. The two books feature young, cosmopolitan characters of African heritage leading their lives in Paris and openly arguing with each other about where and how they want to live and what their lives mean to them. Miano’s characters explore their varying relationships to Africa, while Mabanckou’s first-person narrator recounts the many conversations and adventures he has had with his friends in a local bar. By making these exchanges central to the progression of the works, the authors do not promote any single vision of the lives led by Africans who have settled in France. They instead emphasize the existence of a range of valid and logical possibilities as they explore the richness of what this study aims to identify as the Afropean community. I identify a refusal to pin down one overarching ideology or message not as a critique but rather as a means to shift attention towards the processes undertaken by the characters in their quest to find their places in their new homes. Indeed, Miano’s and Mabanckou’s novels begin with the premise that the characters feel somehow stuck: they have reached an impasse in their lives, as they are now in their early or mid-thirties and have realized that their current situations no longer satisfy them. They feel ill at ease for various reasons and must decide what they are going to do to improve their 110

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respective situations. The books thus chronicle what happens to characters as they seek answers to the questions they are asking themselves. Even though they disagree on the nature of the challenges they face and the solutions they hope to find, they all recognize that something must change if they want to lead settled, fulfilled lives. Using this deciding moment in the characters’ lives as a foundation, this chapter will argue that Miano’s and Mabanckou’s contributions to the concept of Afropean identities and literatures stem precisely from their exploration of the range of topics their characters debate over the course of the novels. Through this focus, it becomes clear that Miano and Mabanckou have placed dialogue and exchange with others at the heart of their respective novels. Their characters frequently discuss the topics and questions that concern them and, in so doing, they tackle some of the most pressing contemporary identity considerations for Africans living in Europe. They argue over the importance of remembering past traumas (in particular the memory of the slave trade), what it means to be black in Europe today, and what they hope to see change in the future. Additionally, Miano and Mabanckou reinforce the importance of their approaches through the trajectories of their characters, as the only ones who find answers that satisfy them are those who are willing to open themselves up to conflicting ideas and opinions. These characters do not necessarily change their plans, but they do listen to alternative ideas and adapt their thinking to reflect the wider perspectives they have gained. With these varied evolutions, Tels des astres éteints and Black Bazar refuse dogmatism of all kinds and posit communication and openness as fundamental elements of a peaceful, settled existence as members of an Afropean community. Afropeanism thus becomes a distinctly open yet engaged concept, as characters are actively involved in analysing the world around them and seek to define their lives on their own terms.

The Characters’ Initial Philosophies and Frustrations Tels des astres éteints features three main characters, Amok, Amandla and Shrapnel. Amok and Shrapnel are childhood friends from an unnamed country in Africa; Amok had come to Europe to study and never returned to his childhood home, while Shrapnel came to Europe illegally to work. Amandla is originally from Guiana and aims to settle in Africa but has stopped in Europe first to study and then to work and to plan her next move. Amok and Shrapnel meet Amandla at an African pride meeting, and while Amok is highly sceptical of the rally’s message, he finds himself mysteriously attracted to one of its leaders (who turns out to be Amandla). They quickly

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become a couple, and the rest of the novel chronicles their exchanges as they get to know each other and try to understand their respective (and often conflicting) opinions. Amok, the narrator tells readers, has fled his country to escape the violence his father routinely inflicts on his mother, who continually refuses assistance. This cyclical violence traumatized him as a child, so he took the first opportunity he could find to escape, as a university student. When the novel begins he has been out of school for many years but has refused to use the family networks to find a promising job. Instead, he works in a call centre and has cut off all ties to his family. Unfortunately, as he has come to discover, his strategy has not succeeded; he has not escaped from his family: ‘Il lui semblait qu’il n’y avait échappé en rien. Il s’en était seulement écarté pour mieux le porter au fond de lui. Jamais il n’avait dépassé l’histoire des siens’ (Miano, 2008: 28–29).1 The end result is that ‘Il s’avouait dans son for intérieur que la vie au Nord ne lui plaisait pas. Elle n’avait pour unique avantage que l’anonymat qu’elle lui garantissait. Ici, il n’avait pas de généalogie. Il n’était qu’un point sombre rasant les murs’ (2008: 40).2 Amok’s challenge is that he has fled to Europe without addressing the trauma of his background, and as he has come to discover, fleeing the source of his pain is not enough to make it disappear. Amandla, we later learn, is equally frustrated with her present circumstances. Raised by a Rastafarian mother, she wants to travel to Africa (or Kemet, as she calls it, in keeping with the Rastafarian vocabulary) and find a way to convince Africans to invest in their own continent, rather than continuing to travel abroad. She believes that this change must happen first through mentalities, as she feels that ‘L’âme kémite était désormais un logiciel infesté de virus: division, méconnaissance de soi, acceptation de l’injure comme vérité’ [The Kemite soul was now software infected with viruses: division, lack of self-knowledge, acceptance of insults as truths] (2008: 91). Amandla hopes to destroy this ‘virus’, but she has not yet figured out how to do so, nor where to begin. She wants to build a school in Africa that will have a specialized curriculum that only focuses on African history and culture, but she has never been to Africa and has no contacts on the continent. With such lofty goals, she finds herself stuck at the starting point with no clear 1 ‘It seemed to him that he had not escaped in any way. He had only moved away, now to carry everything deep inside himself. He has never got over his family’s history.’ 2 ‘He acknowledged in the deepest part of himself that he did not like life in the North. The only advantage was the anonymity it guaranteed him. Here he did not have a genealogy. He was just a dark dot, clinging to the walls.’

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plan. Her frustration recurrently manifests itself as a binge-eating disorder; she buys large packages of chocolate-covered caramels and eats them all at once to drown her feelings of loneliness. As indicated by the title of the novel, when Amok meets Amandla, they are ‘astres éteints’ or ‘extinguished stars’ (Kimmelman, 2008). They are frustrated in different ways, but they share a sense of needing to change their circumstances. The questions that remain for them to address, then, include what is preventing their stars from shining, and how they can reignite the spark. A similar feeling of frustration plagues the narrator of Black Bazar, whom readers know only by the name ‘Fessologue’ [Buttologist]. This nickname was given to him by his friends in honour of his dedication to predicting women’s psychology based on the shape and movement of their ‘Face B’ [B-Side], as he calls it. Fessologue has recently found himself alone, as his partner has left him and taken their one-year-old daughter with her. He has also learned that their daughter, Henriette, might not be his. Fessologue cannot believe that he has been cuckolded by a fellow Congolese man, and a supposedly ugly one at that. He tries to reassure himself by writing about his frustrations, but wallowing in his anger does not make him feel better. After a tirade in one journal entry, he writes, ‘Je dois me calmer, sinon je risque de donner un coup de poing sur ma machine à écrire’ [I need to calm down, or I might punch my typewriter] (Mabanckou, 2009: 125). In order to analyse how these characters deal with the frustrations that plague them, it is useful to break their concerns into subsets. At the heart of each novel are debates surrounding what to do with the past, how this past influences the present and how to change the future. As these characters come to realize, the ways in which they understand the historical relationship between their country of origin and their country of residence weigh heavily on their impressions of contemporary life in these places and shape their ambitions for change in the future. These considerations thus put systems of identification, particularly between Africa and Europe, at the heart of their existence, as questions that need to be addressed before they move beyond the concerns that are leaving them feeling stuck (Vitiello, 2010). In Tels des astres éteints, the reflections of Amok and Amandla reveal that each character espouses a different perspective regarding the traumatic events of colonial history and the slave trade. For Amandla, these events are central to her identification. Regarding her use of Rastafarian vocabulary, the narrator explains that ‘dès son plus jeune âge, Amandla avait appris qu’être kémite n’était comparable à rien d’autre… [les Kémites] étaient un peuple unique, les seuls dont on ait dit un jour, qu’ils n’étaient pas des humains… Ils étaient les seuls qu’on ait réduits en esclavage, sur la base unique de leur carnation’

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(Miano, 2008: 89).3 Amandla places the slave trade at the heart of her identity, as a foundational event that determines everything about her. As we also learn, she even refuses to work in what she considers the ‘capitalist’ environment, as she blames this system for spurring on the slave trade (2008: 81). Amok, on the other hand, represents the opposite extreme. For him, slavery and colonialism are remnants of the past that do not determine his present state. As he reflects on his childhood with his sister, he realizes, ‘On ne les avait pas élevés dans le souvenir des trépassés de la traite’ [They had not been raised with the memory of the ghosts of the slave trade] (2008: 264). Despite his lack of personal historical memory of the slave trade, Amok is nevertheless traumatized by a different kind of history: that of collaboration with the colonial power. When he was a young boy, Amok’s father had shown him his grandfather’s weapons from the Second World War, in which his grandfather had participated on the French side. This participation in the war effort propelled his grandfather to high-ranking positions within the colonial government and set the family on a track of wealth and recognition in society. Amok realizes that this decision, which he knows could be seen as a form of treason in cooperating with the colonial power, continues to benefit the family in the postcolonial era. Amok believes this difficult situation has led to the domestic violence he grew up with since, in the symbolic realm, the product of colonial cooperators (his father) abuses the one who does not have such connections (his mother). As the offspring of both parents, Amok worries that he possesses the evil inside him as well and has vowed to run as far away as possible. With these two characters, the novel presents both ends of a spectrum regarding the colonial past but also demonstrates the difficulties that come with adopting extreme positions. Neither Amandla’s fierce identification with slavery nor Amok’s categorical denial of the past will make their stars shine again. Shrapnel, on the other hand, finds ways to mediate the two extremes of his friends. While he understands Amandla’s militant stance and also hopes to change contemporary society through activism, he also takes into account Amok’s fears of perpetuating continual conflict. While Amandla insists that the only way forward is in Africa, working to create an African alternative to European society, Shrapnel focuses on more global, humanitarian concerns. He sees his primary mission as reaching out to the distressed populations of Africans living abroad who no longer know where they come from. He wants 3 ‘Even at a very young age, Amandla had learned that being Kemite was not comparable to anything else… [Kemites] were a unique people, the only ones about whom it had been said one day that they were not human… they were the only ones who were reduced to slavery on the sole basis of their skin colour.’

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to give them a new sense of a history, but a positive one: ‘Ils avaient besoin de savoir de quelles traditions ils venaient. Il leur était nécessaire de connaître l’apport des leurs à la beauté des choses. Ils ne devaient plus douter de leur légitimité à vivre, même sur ce territoire’ (2008: 57).4 Shrapnel’s conception of history is both personal, like Amok’s, but also aware of broader historical trends, like Amandla’s. Similar debates and discussions about Europe’s colonial past occur in Black Bazar, although Mabanckou uses a different tonality in discussing such matters. His narrator, Fessologue, has a strong sense of humour and interacts with his friends in a joking manner (de Souza, 2011). But the subjects they joke about are very real, and their observations are no less thoughtful for being presented in a humorous fashion. Fessologue frequently speaks with a friend he calls Yves l’Ivoirien, who repeatedly tells him that his choice of dating a French woman of Congolese heritage does not force the French to pay back their ‘dette coloniale’ [colonial debt]. When Fessologue has a baby with this girlfriend, Yves l’Ivoirien tells him: C’est un métis qu’il fallait avoir! Tu n’as rien compris à ce pays alors que je me crève à répéter urbi et orbi que le problème le plus urgent pour nous autres de la négrerie c’est d’arracher ici et maintenant l’indemnisation pour ce qu’on nous a fait subir pendant la colonisation […] Puisqu’on ne veut pas savoir qu’on existe dans ce pays, puisqu’on fait semblant de ne pas nous voir, puisqu’on nous emploie pour vider les poubelles, eh bien ne cherchons pas midi à quatorze heures, l’équation est simple, mon gars: plus nous sortons avec les Françaises, plus nous contribuons à laisser nos traces dans ce pays afin de dire à nos anciens colons que nous sommes toujours là… (Mabanckou, 2009: 102)5 Yves l’Ivoirien represents one side of the debate about how the colonial past 4 ‘They needed to know the traditions from which they came. It was necessary for them to understand their contribution to the beauty of things. They should no longer doubt their legitimacy to live, even in these lands.’ 5 ‘You should have had a mixed child! You understood nothing about this country even though I’m dying here repeating urbi et orbi that the most urgent problem for those of us who are black is to seize payback here and now for what they made us suffer during colonization […] Since they don’t want to know we exist in this country, since they pretend not to see us, since they hire us to empty their trash, well, don’t look for the answer in the wrong place, the equation is simple, my friend: the more we go out with French women, the more we contribute to leaving our traces in this country in order to tell our former colonizers that we are still here.’

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could inform the lives of Africans in today’s Paris. He wants recognition of that past and acknowledgement that Africans have paid a heavy price for colonial policies. He uses humour to tell his friend that they deserve more recognition for their hard work and continued contributions to French society. At the opposite extreme, Fessologue also converses with his Martinican neighbour, whom he calls Mister Hippocrate (in honour of the man’s repeated attempts to force doctors to visit him at home, which he considers part of their responsibilities under the Hippocratic oath). Readers are not initially told that he is from Martinique, only that he is a racist Frenchman. The joke becomes apparent when readers discover that he is black as well, but that he refuses to identify as such. In a long tirade, he tells Fessologue: Pourquoi vous ne parlez jamais de ces Noirs qui ont été complices des Blancs, hein? […] On n’a plus le droit de dire aux Noirs ce qu’on pense d’eux alors que les Noirs ils ne se privent pas de critiquer les Blancs au lieu de se mettre au travail pour développer leur continent. Est-ce que c’est ainsi que vous allez entrer dans l’Histoire, hein? […] Moi, je parle de cette histoire de la colonisation, celle qu’on explique mal aux gens alors que sans la colonisation vous ne seriez pas ce que vous êtes devenus. Donc je ne veux plus être taxé de noir, moi. (Mabanckou, 2009: 226)6 Although Mister Hippocrate’s opinions are harsh and unilateral, he nevertheless presents to Fessologue an alternative conception of contemporary identity politics. Whereas Yves l’Ivoirien calls for an overt campaign for recognition based on past injustices, Mister Hippocrate argues that Africans should take what they can from their colonial past and focus on moving forward.

Evolutions in Thinking Using the background information about each character presented above, we can now focus on what happens when these characters come into contact with each other. When Amok and Amandla go on their first date, 6 ‘Why do you never talk about the black people who worked with the whites, you know? […] We can’t tell blacks what we think of them any more, even though they don’t hold back in criticizing whites instead of getting to work to develop their continent. Is that how you’re going to enter into history? […] I’m talking about the history of colonization, the one that is poorly explained to people even though without colonization you would not be what you became. So as for me, I don’t want to be labelled a black.’

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they engage in a passionate discussion about Africa and the African pride movements. Amok harshly criticizes the leaders of the movement whose meeting he had just attended, calling them separatists who are just as racist as the French people they attack in their speeches. He argues that they do not understand Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican thinker and political leader generally credited with inspiring pan-African movements. By reducing Garvey’s arguments to their most militant and divisive elements, Amok tells Amandla, they neglect the suffering of the individual at the heart of the philosophy. The narrator presents Amandla’s reaction by commenting that ‘Amandla avait souri. Si d’autres lèvres avaient prononcé ce discours, elle l’aurait pris différemment. Elle s’était seulement dit qu’il n’était pas stupide, qu’il connaissait ses classiques kémites, que c’était une excellente entrée en matière’ (Miano, 2008: 228).7 Even though Amandla finds Amok’s arguments shocking to her own sensibilities, she recognizes his intellectual capacity and also respects his awareness of important texts in African cultural history. Believing she can work with his arguments and redirect their focus, she hopes to use this foundation as a starting point in converting him to her cause. Amok, on the other hand, takes a very different approach when he disagrees with Amandla. After she tells him about her childhood and her lifelong dream of building her new school in Africa, Amok tells her directly that the Africans he knows are not interested in her inward-looking approach. The narrator paraphrases his response to her by noting, ‘Ils n’étaient pas nombreux, à habiter leur terre comme elle le faisait, par toutes les fibres de son être. Il sourit malicieusement, pour préciser qu’à ce jour, il appartenait à la majorité de ceux que d’autres questions préoccupaient. Il lui dirait pourquoi une autre fois’ (2008: 248).8 With this response to Amandla, Amok acknowledges his disagreement with her approach but refuses to enter into a real exchange with her. She wants to know more about him, but he will not tell her the truth about what is bothering him. This lack of communication creates problems for their intimate relationship as well, as Amok cannot perform sexually because he is too afraid of accidentally impregnating Amandla and thus having to face his fears of perpetuating his family drama. 7 ‘Amandla had smiled. If other lips had pronounced this speech, she would have taken it differently. But now she just told herself that he was not stupid, that he knew his Kemite classics, that this was an excellent entry-point to the subject.’ 8 ‘There weren’t many of them, living on their land like she did, with every fibre of her being. He smiled maliciously, to clarify that at this time, he was a part of the majority of those preoccupied by other questions. He would tell her why another time.’

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Amandla wants to hear him out and help him, but he remains closed off, unable to tell her the full story. Like Amok, Mabanckou’s Fessologue also struggles with deeper levels of communication. After Yves L’Ivoirien’s commentary regarding France’s supposed ‘colonial debt’, Fessologue changes the subject and focuses on a different character, called Roger Le Franco-Ivoirien on account of his mixed French and Ivoirian heritage. In this scene, it is Roger Le Franco-Ivoirien who engages with Yves l’Ivoirien by telling him, ‘Va attendre chez toi que la France t’indemnise pour ta colonisation comme si tes propres parents n’avaient pas coopéré et bénéficié du système!’ [Go home and wait for France to pay you back for colonization, as if your own parents hadn’t cooperated and benefited from the system!] (Mabanckou, 2009: 104). In this case, Fessologue presents alternative interpretations of the relationship between France and its colonies but does not become directly engaged in the debate. He adopts a similar strategy in dealing with Mister Hippocrate’s tirades, except that instead of having another character jump in, he becomes distracted. After a certain length of time, ‘Monsieur Hippocrate avait compris que depuis quelques secondes j’avais baissé mon attention, je regardais plutôt une fille qui s’installait sur la terrasse’ [Mister Hippocrate understood that for the past few seconds my attention had wavered, I was instead watching a girl who was getting settled on the terrace] (2009: 230). Fessologue has again distanced himself from the very real subjects of concern that Mister Hippocrate has raised; in a sense he is only skimming the surface of the various issues that are being discussed around him. As the novels continue and the characters engage with each other, Tels des astres éteints and Black Bazar also provide indications as to how the characters change (or do not change) as a result of their interactions with their friends. By the end of the novels, the characters’ conversations have exposed them to alternative interpretations and ways of living, but the choice is theirs as to whether or not they will open themselves up to the possibility of changing their own opinions. This is where we see the novels making a strong statement regarding openness to a wide range of options as a fundamental key to a settled Afropean existence. In these novels, only the characters who accept the possibilities of expanding horizons through their interactions with others are able to move past the frustrations that plague them at the beginning of the respective stories. In Tels des astres éteints, Shrapnel’s sudden death provides the spark that eventually allows Amandla to find her way, while Amok remains stuck in the same mental state in which readers found him at the start of the novel. When Shrapnel collapses and dies on a subway train, Amok and Amandla decide to accompany his body back to Africa. This trip is Amok’s first

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time visiting his family since he left as a teenager, and it is Amandla’s first visit to Africa. After their short stay with Amok’s family, Amandla decides that her time has come, that she will move to Africa and launch a school programme for African youth. She now realizes that she must start with a modest plan, perhaps building an after-school programme that children can attend to learn some stories from African mythology. She also knows that her French background will most likely work in her favour in attracting students, and that she can accept and benefit from this situation. Rather than fighting against any admiration of ‘Babylon’, as she calls France, she will use all the tools available to her to attract new students. Eventually a full-time school might develop from this programme, but her priority is now to focus on the smaller ways she can make a difference. Amandla has altered her ambitions to reflect more accurately the situation in Africa, which Amok had repeatedly told her was nothing like the idealized image she had nurtured her entire life. Amok, on the other hand, continues to reject his family and returns to Europe with no intention of going back to Africa. Amok and Amandla break off their relationship, as they have different plans for the future and different mindsets about their present circumstances. When the novel ends, readers are left with Amandla living out her dream, albeit in a modified form, as she has become more realistic about what one individual can hope to accomplish. She has also understood the arguments that Amok had presented to her regarding the current situation in Africa. She used these experiences productively, finding a purpose in her life and enacting her goals. Amok, on the other hand, has not loosened his grip on his traumatic past and has not opened himself up to alternative ways of thinking. The question that remains, however, is what Shrapnel’s death signifies for the overall argument of the novel. By removing the one character who operated as a form of liaison between Amok’s and Amandla’s respective positions, Miano is perhaps forcing her two remaining characters to face their fears and concerns. Shrapnel’s death serves as the catalyst that brings Amok and Amandla to Africa, thus putting them at the centre of the continent that has informed so much of their conversations. In a symbolic register, the destinies of each of these characters are inscribed in their names. Amok and Shrapnel are each war references, named for forces of destruction. Amok comes from the Malay language, in which the word signifies a ‘killing spree’, which effectively sums up Amok’s approach to dealing with his past and current suffering. He wants nothing more than to kill it. Shrapnel refers to the destructive debris released by bombs, the pieces of metal that fly about after an explosion. Shrapnel the character also exhibits this type of frenetic but destructive energy, as he wants to do everything at once but

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spreads himself too thinly and leaves nothing behind. Amandla, on the other hand, is a Zulu word meaning ‘power’, and it was used as a rallying cry by the African National Congress during the fight against apartheid. Amandla’s initial philosophy directly contradicts much of the anti-apartheid movement’s ideals, but as she comes to moderate her opinions she is able to assert her power and find her happiness (Etoké, 2009). In Black Bazar, Fessologue’s ability to engage with the various debates and considerations he witnesses in his life develops through his budding relationships with two new people. The first is Louis-Philippe, a Haitian author he meets one day at a book signing and who inspires him to try his hand at writing. Fessologue’s early attempts frustrate him, however, as he tries to observe birds on branches and chronicle every detail of the scene. Louis-Philippe had told him to observe everything around him and record it all. After repeated experiences of frustration while following this advice, Fessologue realizes that the true subject of his writing had to be his own life. As he writes, ‘je me suis rendu compte que je ne pouvais écrire que sur ce que je vivais, sur ce qu’il y avait autour de moi, avec le même désordre…’ [I realized that I could only write about what I was living, on what there was around me, with the same disorder…] (Mabanckou, 2009: 168). The novel thus chronicles this shift in perspective, as he begins by writing about his anger at his ex-girlfriend and then branches out and imposes some order on his thoughts in order to communicate effectively with his readers. This discovery is a crucial turning point in Fessologue’s life, as he begins to engage more directly with the richness of his own world, rather than that of the birds, and pay attention to the nuances of his friends’ lives and conversations. The second person who helps Fessologue broaden his horizons is his new girlfriend, Sarah. Sarah encourages him to be himself, rather than imitating his impressions of what he thinks others expect him to be. His transformation is most noticeable in his clothing choices, as in the early parts of the novel he brags about his designer suits and shoes. He had been an avid practitioner of ‘la Sape’, a tradition commonly attributed to the Congolese population both in Africa and in France that promotes the wearing of elegant clothes to earn the admiration of others (Thomas, 2003). Sarah insists that Fessologue adopt his own style and thus his own identity and learn to be himself, and he writes that she tells him, ‘je dois me distinguer, créer mon propre style même à contre-courant’ [I need to distinguish myself, create my own style, even against the current trend] (Mabanckou, 2009: 243). She also challenges his linguistic choices, as he refers to his ex-girlfriend as ‘Couleur d’origine’ [Original Colour] because she is very dark despite having been born in France. Sarah asks Fessologue if her own skin colour is a ‘couleur d’origine’ as well, since she is white and was born in Europe (2009: 265). Sarah thus

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challenges all of Fessologue’s assumptions about how he fits in with French society and how he conceptualizes skin colour. She convinces him that he does not have to follow anyone else’s model, that he can assume the various elements of his life and create something unique out of it. Sarah turns out to be the perfect synthesis for Fessologue as well as for his friends. In addition to teaching Fessologue to be himself, she satisfies Yves l’Ivoirien with her Franco-Belgian background. As Fessologue notes, ‘Comme elle est franco-belge, c’est à la fois la France et la Belgique qui vont passer à la caisse. On va avoir une double indemnisation. C’est ce qu’on appelle faire d’une pierre deux coups…’ (2009: 248–49).9 Sarah encourages his interest in writing but tells him he needs to branch out and consider authors of different backgrounds and styles. She promotes Belgian authors in particular, and he develops a taste for Maurice Maeterlinck, Béatrix Beck and Amélie Nothomb, among others. Even more symbolic, Sarah is also the first person to see his ‘Black Bazar’ manuscript, which Louis-Philippe had not even seen, and she seems to enjoy it. The epilogue concludes with her finishing the manuscript and inviting Fessologue to move in with her. Built on the solid foundations of the exchanges and conversations portrayed in Fessologue’s novel (which readers are led to believe is the text they have in their hands), the two characters are ready to commit to building their future together. Through his portrayals of the various exchanges he has had with his friends regarding life as Africans in Paris, Fessologue has transformed these chaotic debates into a solid foundation for his future in France.

Toward an Afropean Community With the wide range of characters presented in Tels des astres éteints and Black Bazar, Léonora Miano and Alain Mabanckou have further widened the scope of what it means to live in Europe today. Rather than focusing on any one difficulty, they show how characters can work through various types of concerns by talking about them and listening to each other. In these novels, the characters who succeed in overcoming the identity concerns that trouble them do so by synthesizing and accepting the contributions of various people and opinions. Contemporary Afropean identity in these novels is thus not ‘about’ any one single perspective, but rather is an attitude or lifestyle. It requires a proactive engagement with thinking through the difficulties that migrants face when they settle abroad, but it does not prescribe any 9 ‘Since she is French-Belgian, both France and Belgium are going to have to pay. We’ll have a double repayment. It’s what we call killing two birds with one stone.’

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specific set of ideas that must be adopted. Instead, the cure is to be found in openness and engagement, and in actively pursuing solutions that work for each individual based on his or her personal background and current circumstances. One further factor that merits attention is a noteworthy absence from both of these novels: neither text presents any scenes of racism, discrimination or troubles faced by these characters as a result of European bigotry. The difficulties these characters face arise from their own thoughts and perspectives, not from those of others. The general absence of conflictual relationships between these Afropean characters and the white European people they must come into contact with on a daily basis serves yet another purpose in defining the place of these characters in European society. They never justify their presence in France, apparently because their presence is never in doubt. That educated, ambitious young people from Africa or the Caribbean have chosen to live in France is taken as a given in these novels. The important question, then, is how to live comfortably as fully fledged members of European society, not how to justify their presence. This focus coincides with the arguments promoted by Paul Gilroy in Postcolonial Melancholia (2005). In this text, rather than calling for a recognition of the influence Africans and other supposed outsiders have on creating and defining European society, Gilroy argues that these populations must be recognized as a fundamental part of that society: ‘These historical processes have to be understood as internal to the operations of European political culture. They do not represent the constitutive outside of Europe’s modern and modernist life. They can be shown to be alive in the interior spaces and mechanisms through which Europe has come to know and interpret itself’ (Gilroy, 2005: 142–43). In Tels des astres éteints and Black Bazar, Miano and Mabanckou naturalize the presence of their characters, which reinforces the ‘European’ part of the ‘Afropean’ identity, as the characters are shown to be fundamentally a part of the European society in which they live (in Amandla’s case, whether she likes it or not). By extension, these novels also stake a powerful claim for Afropean literature as a form of writing that is not limited to Africa or Europe and does not need to justify its focus on border-crossing individuals. These characters and the authors who created them are here to stay, the novels tell us, and they will continue to ask tough questions and seek out creative solutions to the concerns they face as members of African, European and Afropean societies.

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Works Cited Etoké, Nathalie. 2009. ‘L’Onomastique comme poétique de la (dé)construction identitaire dans Tels des astres éteints de Léonora Miano’. International Journal of Francophone Studies 12.4: 613–38. García Márquez, Gabriel. 1985. El Amor en los tiempos des cólera. México: Diana. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Kimmelman, Michael. 2008. ‘French Blacks Rediscover “négritude”’. International Herald Tribune 19 June: 9. Mabanckou, Alain. 2009. Black Bazar. Paris: Gallimard. Miano, Léonora. 2008. Tels des astres éteints. Paris: Plon. De Souza, Pascale. 2011. ‘Trickster Strategies in Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar’. Research in African Literatures 42.1: 102–19. Thomas, Dominic. 2003. ‘Fashion Matters: La Sape and Vestimentary Codes in Transnational Contexts and Urban Diasporas’. Modern Languages Notes 118: 947–73. Vitiello, Joëlle. 2010. ‘Séismes nord/sud: comment repenser la Françafrique à travers les œuvres de Léonora Miano et Aminata Traoré’. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14.5: 495–504.

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Sex and the Afropean City: Léonora Miano’s Blues pour Élise Nicki Hitchcott

Sex and the Afropean City

In his exploration of Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city, geographer Mark Purcell reminds us that Under the right to the city, membership in the community of enfranchised people is not an accident of nationality or ethnicity or birth; rather it is earned by living out the routines of everyday life in the space of the city. (2003: 102) Of course, enfranchisement means benefiting from civil privileges that are not accessible to a large proportion of the black female population in Paris. Despite living out the routines of their everyday lives in the spaces of the French capital, many women of African origin are prevented from enjoying the right to the city because of their low and sometimes precarious economic and legal status. The same cannot be said of the protagonists of Léonora Miano’s 2010 novel, Blues pour Élise [Blues for Elise]. Set in 2008, the text describes the everyday lives of a group of black women friends living in Paris. Like the four women in the well-known American sitcom alluded to in my title, Miano’s four main protagonists are intelligent, financially independent and beautiful. As in Sex and the City, it is the relationships between the different characters that generate the narrative: intimate stories about sex and sexuality, family feuds and family secrets along with descriptions of other common features of everyday life such as trips to the hairdressers and house-warming parties, all combine to create a kind of black French 124

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literary sitcom. And yet, through the various emotional intrigues it describes, Blues pour Élise paints a radically new picture of black women in twentyfirst-century Paris. In this text, Miano’s women are not disenfranchised, marginalized ‘immigrants’ but rather enfranchised urbanites who participate in and appropriate the city spaces they inhabit. This chapter will discuss the ways in which Miano celebrates and advocates the right to the city for contemporary black women in Paris and, in so doing, promotes her vision of an Afropean community. In Chapter 2 of Blues pour Élise, we travel to an area of Paris with a relatively high Afro-Caribbean population: the 10th arrondissement, more specifically the boulevard de Strasbourg. Here, the reader learns that ‘le plus petit coin de la rue révèle la longue peine des femmes noires, leur obsession intime: se trouver belles en portant des cheveux crépus’ [Even the smallest street corner reveals black women’s long suffering, their intimate obsession: how to feel beautiful with frizzy hair] (Miano, 2010: 39).1 Tongue in cheek, this sentence in many ways epitomizes the way Miano writes about contemporary Afropean femininity: the ‘long suffering’ does not, as we might initially expect, refer to the well-documented difficulties of social exclusion experienced by African women migrants in the French capital, but rather to their shared experience of being excluded from universal canons of beauty. As the narrator informs us, ‘Les femmes d’ascendance subsaharienne sont les seules à avoir être radiées de la douceur’ [Women of sub-Saharan ancestry are the only ones to have been refused silky hair] (2010: 39). The text describes how, on exiting the metro at Château-d’Eau or Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, women are confronted with window after window of wigs, hairpieces and products for relaxing and straightening Afro hair: ‘Les innombrables produits que l’industrie crée pour leur adoucir l’existence’ [The innumerable products created by the industry to soften their existence] (2010: 40). We then enter the hairdressing salon of Coco Prestige where discussions of hairstyles slide quickly into black female identity politics: Akasha, who chooses to wear her hair in dreadlocks, condemns the practice of hair straightening as alienation while Elise, a first-generation migrant, rejects Akasha’s politicization of black beauty as ‘afro-terrorism’ and requests a Naomi Campbell weave.2 Of course, Afro hair has long been a focus for black consciousness-raising, particularly in the US but also in Europe. In Paris in 1 This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author of this chapter. 2 Naomi Campbell is a black British supermodel who wears her hair very long and very straight.

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2002 the black rights group Conscience Noire organized a day conference on black hairdressing with the slogan ‘Être belle, sans défrisage, c’est possible’ [You can be beautiful without straightening your hair] (Blakely, 2009: 19–20). In Blues pour Élise, Miano uses the discussion of hairdressing to articulate and critique the often polarized nature of identity formation for women of African descent. As the narrator writes in the conclusion to the hairdressing episode: ‘Les femmes noires du troisième millénaire cherchent leur place dans un espace aux limites mal définies, entre aliénation et quête de la pureté identitaire’ [Third millennium black women are looking for their place in a space with ill-defined limits, somewhere between alienation and the quest for purity of identity] (Miano, 2010: 49). Before she goes to Coco Prestige’s hair salon, Akasha is presented to the reader alone in her apartment, deciding to transform her life and resolving to shake off all the popular stereotypes of black women: Aujourd’hui, c’était le premier jour de sa nouvelle vie. Fini de passer pour une amazone, une icône. Elle ne serait plus la jumelle bronzée de Xéna la guerrière, le double féminin d’Alas s’interdisant de gémir sous le poids de la terre. Aujourd’hui, elle congédiait la femme poteau mitan3 […] Fini de marcher sur les traces de ses aïeules, pour n’être, sur une rive ou l’autre de l’océan, que madone ou bête de somme. (2010: 13–14)4 This is the opening scene of Blues pour Élise and so immediately prepares us for a novel about four women who very much counter stereotypical representations of women of African descent. These are not the ‘immigrant’ African women familiar to readers of Calixthe Beyala or Fatou Diome. All four have French nationality and are independent, financially successful members of the ‘transnational middle class’, a group that sociologist Phil Cohen describes as: 3 ‘Femme poteau mitan’ is explained in a footnote in the text as ‘Créolisme. Le poto mitan, en créole, c’est le pilier central sur lequel repose la case. S’il s’écroule, toute la maison s’écroule, toute la maison s’écrase. Cette image est associée à la femme antillaise’ [Creolism. The poto mitan, in Creole, is the central pillar on which the shack is built. If it collapses, the whole house collapses, the whole house falls down. This image is associated with the Antillean woman] (Miano, 2010: 13). 4 ‘Today was the first day of her new life. No more pretending to be an Amazon, an icon. She would no longer be the suntanned sister of Xena, Warrior Princess, the female double of Atlas refusing to allow herself to grumble under the weight of the earth. Today she was getting rid of poteau mitan woman […] No more walking in the footprints of her women ancestors only to become either a Madonna or a workhorse on either side of the ocean.’

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no longer dominated, either demographically or ideologically, by more or less dead white men. Women, and members of ethnic and sexual minorities have been in the vanguard. And like any emergent social force they have constructed a view of the world in their own image, a world in which there is no reality outside its representation, where hybridity is celebrated and pleasures of consumption are put at the cutting edge of change. (2000: 322) For Akasha, Amahoro, Shale and Malaïka, collectively known as ‘Les Bigger than Life’, Paris is not a space of ambivalence; it is home. The city is constructed by the women ‘in their own image’ as neither a ‘French’ nor an ‘immigrant’ space but rather as an Afropean metropolis. Moving freely around the city, the women hold regular get-togethers where they discuss relationships, sex, diets and so on: monthly dinners are organized at an Afro-Antillean restaurant, Waly Faÿ in the 11th arrondissement; Akasha buys bottles of high-quality rum from Christian de Montaguère, a chic concept store in the 6th that imports luxury products from the Caribbean; and Malaïka meets her anglophone future husband, Kwame, in her favourite local grocery store, one that stocks a particularly good selection of African foodstuffs. Blues pour Élise presents the reader with a version of black Paris that very much resists fixing the black community in an immigrant ghetto and presents us instead with a remapping of Paris as experienced by women who are black and French and middle class. Challenging the very same stereotypes that Akasha resolves to shake off at the beginning of the novel, these women are also very much Parisians: Shale, for example, lives a bourgeois bohemian or ‘bobo’ lifestyle, eating quinoa bread and sprouting grains at home in the Marais, and riding around Paris on Vélib bikes. What I am suggesting in this chapter is that, through the very intimate stories of these four women friends, Blues pour Élise redraws Paris as an Afropean city. Miano’s Paris is no longer a site of conflict or alienation for women of African descent, but rather what Fatima El-Tayeb calls a ‘translocal’ space in which women ‘circumvent the complicated question of national belonging by producing a localized, multicentred, horizontal community, in which a strong identification with cities or neighbourhoods, perceived as spaces both created by and transcending national and ethnic limits, combines with a larger diasporic perspective’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: xxvii).5 Indeed, the space of the postcolonial city is central to Afropeanness since Afropeans identify 5 El-Tayeb defines diaspora as ‘a population that does not share a common origin – however imaginary that may be – but a contemporary condition’ (2011: xxxv) and this is how I am using the term here.

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with, across and beyond the cities of Europe, making connections through shared experiences. Through its emphasis on connections, Afropeanism encourages thinking about black people in Europe in terms of a transnational community, a community that is defined by a shared contemporary condition and which has evolved from the translocal spaces of European cities. This growing sense of a black community in Europe, an ‘Afro-Europe’, has led diaspora theorists such as Allison Blakely to draw our attention to parallels with the black population in the US. Blakely writes that, While even the participants themselves are only beginning to sense a degree of group identity – largely forced upon them by the shared experience of discrimination and racism expressed in unmistakable common patterns – the Black community in Europe has achieved a size and visibility that invites comparison with the involuntary definition of community that shaped the concept of African American among the descendants of enslaved Africans in North America. (2009: 3) Of course, the concept of a black community is very much in opposition to the Republican values of France, as Miano herself acknowledges in the performance piece ‘Communauté’ [Community], published in her 2012 collection Écrits pour la parole [Writings for Speaking]. In this piece, which opens with a quotation from the black US president Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, Miano contemplates the paradoxical nature of a black community in France, a community which, as she says, everyone talks about because it does not – it cannot – exist (2012: 36). Despite France’s refusal to recognize its black population in terms of a community, black leaders in France – and indeed elsewhere in Europe – are increasingly promoting group identity in terms of black consciousness, often adopting organizational models taken from the US. The formation of the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires (CRAN) [the Representative Council for Black Associations] after the 2005 riots demonstrates what Blakely identifies as ‘a transition from organized efforts that are primarily antiracist into those that are assertively pro-Black’ (2009: 21).6 Indeed, the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen such an increase in the public visibility of French blacks that, according to Pap Ndiaye, it is now acceptable to talk about a ‘question noire’ [black issues] in France (2008: 23). Afropeanness, however, attempts to move beyond the apparent impossibility of a black French community by promoting translocal and transnational identifications within and beyond the nation-space of France. This combined emphasis on translocality and transnationalism is echoed The CRAN represents around sixty African and Caribbean groups in France.

6

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in the structure of Miano’s novel which she herself has described as a ‘roman à structure explosée’ [a novel with an exploded structure], composed as it is of eight chapters that can be read as individual, discrete stories but which are all interconnected through the relationships between the different characters they describe.7 In fact, Miano presents Blues pour Élise like a music CD in which each chapter can be read as both a separate track and as part of a whole album, with the final chapter labelled as a ‘bonus’ or secret track and presented in a different font. At the close of each chapter, Miano also provides a soundtrack to the written narrative, which ranges from Martinican biguine to hip hop to neo-soul and includes such artists as Valéry Boston, who performs a mix of Martinican soul, ska and reggae; Black American soul singers, Womack and Womack; and Algerian jazz fusion artist Keyko Nimsay. A selection of the songs can be listened to on the author’s website where they are associated by Miano with different characters in the novel.8 What the soundtracks demonstrate is not only the diversity of music that can be traced back to the African continent but also the process of entanglement that epitomizes Afropeanness. Miano also includes two sections of text labelled ‘interludes’, each of which consists of a monologue by a minor woman character, Bijou, in a telephone box. Bijou is speaking in the Cameroonian blended street language, Camfranglais. These interludes offer an interesting counter to the way in which, in many former colonial cities outside Europe, the rapid expansion of call centres and factory outsourcing has led to a form of linguistic recolonization, with staff required to attend language workshops and ‘accentneutralization programmes’ to perfect their competency in the language of the former colonizer (Varma, 2011: 16).9 In Blues pour Élise, Miano provides a Camfranglais glossary for speakers of metropolitan French, demonstrating how, just as European languages colonized the languages of the African continent, now African languages are in turn creolizing European languages as well as European urban spaces such as Paris (Varma, 2011: 31). It is worth noting that what Miano presents as creolization is not the slightly slippery postmodern notion of transcultural ‘bricolage’, but rather a form of postcolonial entanglement that is strongly rooted in historical specificity and the dynamics of power. Like Afropeanism, Miano’s writing simultaneously 7 See Miano’s presentation of the novel on her official website: www. leonoramiano.com. 8 www.leonoramiano.com. 9 While this is still predominantly an English-language based activity, a number of French companies are now outsourcing in Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry) in India.

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acknowledges and resists postcolonial power dynamics. The young male Parisian protagonist in Miano’s short story Afropean Soul does not mind being told that his ancestors were the Gauls because, ‘Ce n’était vrai que pour très peu de gens, dans ce pays. Il s’agissait seulement d’une formule symbolique et les symboles ne le gênaient en rien’ [That was only true of a very few people in this country. It was simply a symbolic expression and symbols didn’t bother him at all] (Miano, 2008: 54). Here, Miano’s character’s tacit acceptance of one of the most damaging symbols of French colonial history reveals the extent to which racism has become ingrained in the psyche of many blacks in France. Postcolonial Paris is not then presented by Miano as some kind of Afropean rainbow city where racism is a thing of the past and black characters blend seamlessly into the urban landscape. On the contrary, Blues pour Élise is full of references to the historical processes of slavery and colonization that created the African diaspora and indeed foregrounds what diaspora theorists describe as the ‘colour-blindness’ or ‘political racelessness’ of postcolonial Europe. Both of these represent, as El-Tayeb reminds us, forms of ‘invisible’ racialization according to which non-white is constructed as non-European while at the same time Europeans claim not to see racialized difference (El-Tayeb, 2011: xxiv). Of course, this concept of theoretical ‘colour-blindness’ is particularly relevant in a country such as France, where ethnicity is not recognized as a category of identity and hence members of ethnic minorities are forever classified as outsiders, immigrants or ‘newcomers’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: xxv). The view of Afropeans as newcomers is ironically highlighted in Miano’s chapter, ‘Figures de l’altérité’ [Figures of otherness], which centres on a private view of an exhibition of photographs on the theme of ‘Les nouveaux Français’ [The new French people] (Miano, 2010: 97). One elderly woman at the private view claims that she cannot understand the concept of ‘Les nouveaux Français’, which she sees as a threat to French national identity (2010: 101). For Afropeans, ‘Les nouveaux Français’ is an equally meaningless term, albeit for very different reasons, and indeed the characters in this novel bear no resemblance to any of the photographs on display. The scene ends with one of the secondary characters, Estelle, and her future lover, Ernest, having a drink together and listening to the Zap Mama song ‘Bandy Bandy’, a song which leads the couple to reflect on the fact that Afropean music is more successful in the US than in Europe. As Ernest remarks, ‘Même dans le domaine artistique, l’Europe n’aim[e] pas ses Noirs, leur préférant les Américains’ [Even in the artistic sphere, Europe doesn’t like its own blacks, preferring Americans] (2010: 105). Estelle does not agree. She feels that Afropeans have brought their marginalization upon themselves. In her view, they should follow the

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example of black Americans and demand their right to be European. What both Estelle and Ernest seem to agree on, however, is the suggestion that black people in France are positioned in a triangular relationship: with Africa, with Europe and with America. This triangular relationship is reflected in the way in which music, in Blues pour Élise, represents a useful tool for building a transnational community for blacks in Europe. Drawing together a diversity of musical styles and cultural influences, the soundtracks point to an alternative way of thinking about being black in France, emphasizing the multidirectional, relational nature of Afropeanness. Of course, the title of the novel points to both a European musical heritage, with the reference to Beethoven’s Für Elise, and the black American tradition of the Blues. The soundtracks further emphasize this multidirectionality, including as they do tracks by Afropean artists such as Septembre and Perdre et Gagner as well as songs by black musicians from the United States. What Miano’s choices in the soundtracks demonstrate is not only the diversity of music that can be traced back to the African continent but also the process of entanglement that epitomizes Afropeanness. The inclusion of references to the music of Afropean artists such as the Belgian-Congolese rap group Septembre and the Franco-Senegalese hip hop group Perdre et gagner also points to the importance of vernacular culture in constructing subjectivity in black Europe. Born out of a sense of exclusion from majority ethnic culture, the hip hop and rap communities in Europe are important manifestations of the translocal exchanges that characterize Afro-Europe and that also reach transnationally across the Atlantic to black America. The relatively privileged status of black Americans in France, particularly in Paris, harks back as far as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when black American artists, musicians and soldiers began to be welcomed on to French shores, and continues to this day. France’s refusal to acknowledge its black population as anything other than French means that Black Studies in French universities tends to focus only on Africa and black America (Blakely, 2009: 21). Indeed, as Pap Ndiaye reminds us in La Condition noire, there are many more books published in French on Afro-Americans than there are on the black community in France (2008: 22). What both Blakeley and Ndiaye, along with other critics (Gondola, 2004; Sharpley-Whiting, 2002; Stovall, 1996), show is the way in which narratives of inclusion, in relation to black visitors from the US, have often served to obscure the social realities of being black in contemporary France, which largely amount to narratives of exclusion. Compared with the experiences of other members of the African diaspora, including minority French nationals, black Americans in Paris represent what Trica Danielle Keaton calls an ‘exceptional imagined

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community’ (2009: 103). This mystification of France (and particularly Paris) as an inclusive space for black people is also illustrated in a significant number of texts by American and non-American blacks. These include works by such influential black American authors as Richard Wright and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as by France’s first black député, Senegalese representative Blaise Diagne (Keaton, 2009: 100–02). While the mythical inclusion of black Americans in Paris has been convincingly critiqued and challenged, what Tyler Stovall refers to as the ‘rosy portrait of African American Life in Paris’ (2009: 185) still continues and is reinforced by the late twentieth-century phenomenon of package tours of black Paris for American tourists. Former TV news anchor turned tour operator Ricki Stevenson describes her Black Paris Tours as designed ‘For Any and Everyone Interested in the Real History of France and the US!’10 The tour includes visits to the place where Thomas Jefferson allegedly began his affair with his slave mistress, Sally Hemings (presumably the memorial plaque at the now demolished Hôtel de Langeac), and the Théâtre des Champs Elysées where Josephine Baker first performed, and ends with mint tea and pastries in La Goutte d’or district known by Americans as ‘Little Africa’.11 Guests can even request dinner at the restaurant where President Obama and his family dined on the occasion of the 2009 D-Day commemoration in France. Herself a black American woman with a degree in African and African American history, Stevenson has created a touristic simulation of black Paris that privileges the experience of black Americans in France while at the same time acknowledging the presence of the local black community only through a skewed, exoticist lens as ‘Little Africa’. In Blues pour Élise, the transnational connections between black Paris and black America are acknowledged through the soundtracks to each chapter, which include established black soul singers such as Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye as well as negro spirituals, hip hop and jazz. A textual nod is also made to the Harlem Renaissance when the ‘Bigger than Life’ don 1920s fancy dress in preparation for Malaïka’s hen night (Miano, 2010: 94). However, the novel also implies that the relationship between black Americans and Afropeans is not necessarily straightforward, a suggestion that is crystallized in the novel in the ambivalent figure of Barack Obama, whose presidential victory in November 2008 features in the ‘bonus track’ chapter entitled, ‘Newbian luv: Let’s Barack our Lives!’ This chapter begins with one of the ‘Bigger than Life’, Amahoro, and her partner, Michel, getting www.http://blackparistour.com. It is interesting that ‘Little Africa’ here appears to connote the Maghreb rather than sub-Saharan Africa. 10 11

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ready for a housewarming party at their new apartment in Paris. Prompted by his reading of slam artist Insa Sané’s 2009 crime novel, Gueule de bois, in which President Obama dies, Michel reflects on the way in which Amahoro has changed since the appearance of Barack and Michelle Obama on the global stage.12 Amahoro now promotes what she describes as ‘Newbian luv’, defined as ‘L’égalité parfaite au sein des couples noirs’ [perfect equality at the heart of the black couple] (2010: 189), a model of heterosexual relationships that she claims is based on the Obamas. She has also incorporated the Obama presidential campaign slogan, ‘Change we can believe in’, into her personal philosophy of life, repeating that ‘le moment était venu d’acter le changement, pas seulement d’y croire’ [the moment had come not only to believe in change but to make it happen] (2010: 191), and she has developed her own personal maxim which punctuates the novel: ‘Let’s Barack our lives!’ Michel, on the other hand, is far less enthusiastic about the new black leader of the free world, seeing him as a threat to black masculinity and an agent of US imperialism. Indeed, he almost chokes when his friend Gaétan arrives at their party wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt. For the ironically named Michel, Barack Obama is a double agent (2010: 197). For Amahoro, on the other hand, Barack is the ideal black male partner but is not to be confused with his alter ego: Obama, the ‘Yankee President’.13 What clearly emerges as the rather mixed response of Miano’s characters to the first black president of the US reflects the wider, complex reception of black Americans in France. The reflections on Obama in the final chapter are particularly important in terms of the structure of the novel as this chapter is presented as the ‘bonus’ or hidden track, suggesting that it holds the key to the rest of the text. Mulling over Obama’s victory, Michel recalls how the election result generated an important moment of solidarity between young blacks in Paris: Le lendemain de la victoire, dans la rue, les Noirs de Paris qui évitaient en temps normal de se montrer ensemble ou même de se regarder – de peur 12 Born in Dakar, Senegal, Insa Sané grew up in Sarcelles and performs as Insa Sané & Le Soul Slam Band. 13 The opposing responses to the black president articulated by Miano’s Parisian couple are reflected more widely in the black French community, most visibly in the debate between Martinican intellectuals, Raphaël Confiant on the one hand and Patrick Chamoiseau and Édouard Glissant on the other. For Confiant, Obama is little more than a symbol of American imperialism, ‘un Yankee noir’ [a black Yankee], whereas for Chamoiseau and Glissant, Obama becomes what Valérie Loichot describes a ‘one of the main constructive agents’ of Martinican diasporic identity (2012: 88).

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qu’on ne les prenne pour une bande ethnique – se souriaient bêtement, se lançant des clins d’oeil, comme s’ils avaient changé de statut. (2010: 196)14 In describing this moment of ethnic minority optimism, Michel’s observation confirms the widely reported view that, as journalist Michael Kimmelman wrote in the New York Times in June 2008, ‘For Blacks in France, Obama’s Rise [was] Reason to Rejoice, and to Hope’. While, at that point, Barack Obama was still only the presumed Democratic nominee for president, political commentators were already crediting Obama’s increasing popularity with the birth of a new black consciousness in France. In Blues pour Élise, this moment of solidarity also demonstrates the translocal and transnational nature of Miano’s conception of Afropean identity. Winking and smiling at one other suggests an act of mutual recognition that facilitates a translocal connection. The transnational dimension of Afropean identity is acknowledged through the figure of Barack Obama who becomes a symbol of possibility for the black community in Paris. In suggesting that because of the Obama victory the status of black Parisians seems to have changed, the text shows how translocal and transnational connections have the potential to grow a sense of group or community identity and so to offer alternative models for the construction of individual identities. Black America is an important element in Miano’s Afropean vision but one that, the novel suggests, needs to be viewed with a certain amount of critical distance. While Barack Obama is presented in the novel as a possible catalyst for positive change, as demonstrated in the repeated refrain of ‘Let’s Barack our Lives!’, the cynicism of Michel in the closing pages also suggests the limitations of an African American model for black people in Europe. As he listens to his friends toasting the US election results, and contemplates the translocal connections being made in France as a result of Obama’s victory, Michel concludes that ‘Ils [les Noirs de Paris] s’en apercevraient vite, seraient nombreux à se dire, comme lui, que Barack n’avait pas intérêt à croiser leur chemin’ [The blacks of Paris would soon realize and, like him, many of them would tell themselves that Barack would have no interest in crossing their path] (Miano, 2010: 196). Through the ambiguity of his reception, the figure of Barack Obama plays an important role in Miano’s fictional portrait of Paris and her vision of Afropeanness. In highlighting the advantages and limitations of a black American model of black French identity, Miano 14 ‘In the streets, the day after the victory, the blacks of Paris who would normally avoid being seen together or even looking at one another – for fear of being taken for an ethnic group – were smiling foolishly at one another, winking at one another, as if their status had changed.’

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encourages us to think through the possibilities of a transnational black community in which Paris is no longer presented as an exceptional imagined community for black visitors from the US but rather as a starting point for constructing black identities in Europe. For the women of Blues pour Élise, Afropean Paris offer models of alternative gender relations between black women and black men as suggested by Amahoro’s promotion of Obama-style ‘Newbian luv’. As Michel wistfully observes, ‘Maintenant, les frangines exigeraient d’être traitées ainsi [comme Michelle Obama] […] Elles ne se cacheraient pas derrière les hommes, comme leurs aînées l’avaient fait pendant des générations. C’était du passé’ (2010: 191–92).15 However, the novel suggests that a transformation of gender roles had begun long before the appearance of the new black First Lady, and this is reflected in Miano’s representations of the different generations of women in her text: the four young women known as the ‘Bigger than Life’ were all either born in Paris or moved there as infants and relate very differently to both the city and to men than first-generation migrants such as Shale’s mother, Elise, and her sister, Fanny, who migrated to Paris from Cameroon. Elise’s story, which takes the same title as the novel, is a very different one from those of her daughter and her friends. Despite having spent thirty years in Paris consciously avoiding places such as the Protestant church where other Africans gather, Elise nevertheless remains influenced by gender norms in Africa, referred to in the novel as ‘le Continent’ [the Continent]. Fanny, Elise’s sister, identifies only with a nostalgic image of what the text suggests is ‘le pays disparu’ [the lost or missing country] (2010: 122), fixed in dusty, yellow postcards on the walls of her apartment. Neither Fanny nor Elise is portrayed as totally at home in the Afropean city since both are still identifying with or against their African roots. Their children, on the other hand, experience Paris unequivocally as home where they have the freedom to identify themselves and choose their sexual partners on their own terms. When Malaïka gets engaged to Kwame, the friends are concerned that he is a bit too ordinary, does not speak French well enough and works as a chef in someone else’s restaurant rather than owning one of his own. As producers and consumers of Afropean culture, the ‘Bigger than Life’ remap Paris in their own image, eating at Afropean restaurants in the city and shopping at Afropean concept stores, buying clothes from Afropean fashion designers such as Nigerian Londoner, Duro Olowu’s collection and Malian Parisian, Lamine Badian Kouaté’s label, Xuly Bët. What emerges 15 ‘Now the sisters would insist on being treated like Michelle Obama. They wouldn’t hide behind their men as their elders had done for generations. That was all in the past.’

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from the novel is an affirmation and a celebration of twenty-first-century Paris as a creolized city, reflecting the entangled, creolized identities of the Afropean community. This celebration of entanglement can also be read as a call for Afropean women (and men) to move beyond the polarization of identity in terms of either ‘alienated’ or ‘pure’ that informs the discussion in the hairdressing salon that opened this chapter towards a more inclusive, multidirectional way of thinking about identity. Miano refers to this in the novel as a ‘souffle afropéen’ [a breath of Afropeanness], symbolized by the DiviNéa necklace given to Malaïka by her fiancé, Kwame: Ces bijoux assemblaient les mondes qui les [les Bigger than Life] avaient engendrées, matérialisaient la complétude qui était une de leurs plus profondes aspirations. Mêlant bronzes baoulés, graines, perles de verre, nacre, ils avaient de la mémoire, les pieds solidement plantés dans les temps présents, le regard tourné vers un avenir qu’ils contribuaient déjà à façonner. (2010: 75–76)16 As this quotation and the image of a ‘souffle afropéen’ suggest, Blues pour Élise is a forward-looking novel that ends by capturing the worldwide moment of diasporic optimism when Barack Obama won the race for the White House in November 2008. That the celebration takes place at a housewarming party reminds us of another often unacknowledged parallel between black France and black America, that is, the rise of the black middle class. Miano’s characters are middle-class black French women who have the economic and cultural capital to make the city their own. By emphasizing the importance of translocal and transnational connections for the African diaspora, Miano shows how contemporary Paris has been, and continues to be, reshaped by the contributions of its ethnic minorities who in turn are beginning to construct their own identities as well as that of their city in their own image and on their own terms.

Works Cited Blakely, Allison. 2009. ‘The Emergence of Afro-Europe: A Preliminary Sketch’. In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 3–28. 16 ‘These jewels brought together the different worlds that had created them, materialized the completeness that was one of their greatest aspirations. Mixing Baoulé bronzes, seeds, glass beads, mother-of-pearl, the jewels had memory, their feet firmly planted in the present, their eyes turned towards a future they were already helping to build.’

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Cohen, Phil. 2000. ‘Dual Cities, Third Spaces, and the Urban Uncanny in Contemporary Discourses of “Race”: and Class’. In Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds), A Companion to the City. Oxford: Blackwell: 316–30. El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postcolonial Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gondola, Didier. 2004. ‘“But I Ain’t African, I’m American!”: Black American Exiles and the Construction of Racial Identities in Twentieth-Century France’. In Heike Raphael-Hernandez (ed.), Blackening Europe: the African American Perspective. New York: Routledge: 201–15. Keaton, Trica Danielle. 2009. ‘“Black (American) Paris” and the French Outer Cities’. In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 95–118. Kimmelman, Michael. 2008. ‘For Blacks in France, Obama’s Rise is Reason to Rejoice, and to Hope’. The New York Times. 17 June. Loichot, Valérie. 2012. ‘Creolizing Barack Obama’. In Martin Munro and Celia Britton (eds), American Creoles. The Francophone Caribbean and the American South. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press: 77–94. Miano, Léonora. 2008. Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles. Paris: Flammarion. —. 2010. Blues pour Élise. Paris: Plon. —. 2012. Écrits pour la parole. Paris: L’Arche Éditeur. Nidaye, Pap. 2008. La Condition noire: Essai sur une minorité française. Paris: Éditions Calmann-Lévy. Purcell, Mark. 2003. ‘Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant’. Geojournal 58: 99–108. Sané, Insa. 2009. Gueule de bois. Paris: Sarbacane. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. 2002. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stovall, Tyler. 1996. Paris Noir. African Americans in the City of Light. New York: Houghton Mifflin. —. 2009. ‘No Green Pastures: The African Americanization of France’. In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 180–97. Varma, Rashni. 2011. The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Towards an Afropean Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Friendship and the African Immigrant Srilata Ravi

Towards an Afropean Cosmopolitanism

This chapter explores the intersections between cosmopolitanism, hospitality and the African immigrant in Wilfried N’Sondé’s novel Le Silence des esprits [The Silence of the Spirits] (2010). Born in Brazzaville, Congo, and currently residing in Berlin, the writer and musician made his literary debut with Le Cœur des enfants léopards [The Heart of the Leopard Children] in 2007, for which he won the prestigious Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie. He followed it up with Le Silence des esprits in 2010 and Fleur de béton [Flower in Concrete] in 2012. In all three texts the impoverished Parisian banlieues serve as the principal backdrop to the stories of second-generation immigrants, the anonymous first-person narrator in Le Coeur des enfants léopards, Clovis Nzila in Le Silence des esprits and Rosa Maria in Fleur de béton. While these narratives offer a realistic depiction of the lives of immigrants (of all ethnic and religious affiliations) who are economically, socially and ethnically marginalized from mainstream society, they also contain in their unfolding the redemptory poetry of hope and shared understandings. I am suggesting here that Wilfried N’Sondé’s writing translates an ‘Afropean cosmopolitanism’ – a poetic blend of cosmopolitanism as hospitality (Baker, 2011) and guest friendship (Gandhi, 2006) that engages in a resisting discourse against the hegemonic violence of global interactions (de Sousa Santos, 2002) through the affective practice of cosmopolitanism as conversation (Appiah, 2006). 138

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Cosmopolitanism as Conversation In his introduction to Cosmopolitanism – Ethics in a World of Strangers, Kwame Anthony Appiah asks ‘What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared community?’ (2006: xxi). He frames his response in the notion of cosmopolitanism, a term to which he attributes two strands: One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even more formal ties of shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking on the interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. (2006: xv) What is of interest to us is that Appiah perceives in his idea of ‘cosmopolitanism as obligation to the other’ not a solution but a challenge (2006: xv), not a principle but a practice, a desire not to seek agreement but to engage in conversation – distinctions that I will retain in my definition of ‘Afropean cosmopolitanism’. Crucial to Appiah’s discussions is his view on ‘facts’ and ‘values’. Positivists, he argues, separate facts and values (based on desires) and believe that every true belief must correspond to a fact in order to become a value. Appiah shows that such positivism can lead to relativism (i.e., if people’s basic desires are different then their values are different), and relativism, he insists, does not encourage conversation, but becomes a reason to fall silent (2006: 13–31). Appiah explains that in order to understand how values work it is not enough to see how they work within a single culture. In other words, values must not be seen as guiding individuals on their own but as guiding people who are trying to share their lives. According to Appiah, we appeal to values through language (language of values or ‘evaluative language’)1 in order to get things done together, and this is part of being human. ‘We wouldn’t recognize a community as human if it had no stories, if its people had no narrative imagination […] Evaluating stories together is one of the central human ways of learning to align our responses to the world’ (Appiah, 2006: 29). However, Appiah is quick to add that eventually 1 ‘Evaluative language, I’ve been insisting, aims to shape not just our acts but our thoughts and feelings. When we describe past acts with words like courageous and cowardly, cruel and kind we are shaping what people think and feel about what was done – and shaping our understanding of our moral language as well. Because that language is open textured and essentially contestable, even people who share a moral vocabulary have plenty to fight about’ (Appiah, 2006: 60).

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there is nothing to guarantee that our stories will persuade everyone else of our view and this risk is inherent to cosmopolitanism (2006: 44). In his definition, if cosmopolitans suppose that all cultures have sufficient overlap in vocabulary of values to begin a conversation, they also believe, unlike some universalists, that a total agreement is impossible to achieve. The notion of evaluative language found in Appiah’s discussion of cosmopolitanism is useful in order to describe N’Sondé’s writing, as is Appiah’s underlying belief that understanding one another does not require us to come to an agreement (2006: 79); it necessitates first and foremost, that one enters into a conversation: Conversations across boundaries of identity – whether national, religious, or something else – begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. So I’m using the word ‘conversation’ not only for literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others. And I stress the role of imagination here because the encounters, properly conducted are valuable in themselves. Conversation doesn’t have to lead to a consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another. (2006: 85) This notion of cosmopolitan engagement as conversation that is predicated on the ‘engagement with the experience and the ideas of others’ is that which informs my reading of N’Sondé’s silence in Le Silence des esprits. Silence here is not silence as in secret, but silence as in language, in the sense of Appiah’s evaluative language, and as such becomes the shared space where cosmopolitanism as intelligence, curiosity and a challenge can operate. As both reason and affect, N’Sondé’s silence as communion is a metaphor for the practice of conversation, one that does not define itself as failed or completed. Cosmopolitanism as conversation does not end – hence it poses the challenge of continued engagement. Le Silence des esprits opens with a dream in which Clovis is visited by his sister Marcelline, who shares their common tragedy of ‘les traumatismes de la guerre’ [traumas of war] and ‘sa clandestinité’ [her irregular situation] (N’Sondé, 2010: 13).2 He awakens to find himself in the comfort and warmth of Christelle’s bed. Christelle is a middle-aged French nurse who meets a desperate and frightened young illegal immigrant on a suburban train and offers hospitality and shelter to a stranger in distress. The prologue hints at 2 This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author of this chapter.

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Clovis’s personal history of violence, one that he will share later with his hostess. ‘Bercé par sa tendresse’ [soothed by her tenderness] (2010: 65), his memory will take flight and his souvenirs will ‘s’empli[r] de courage’ [fill with courage] to reach the darkest corners of his shameful past (2010: 66). Clovis, ‘son humanité en lambeaux’ [his humanity in shreds] (2010: 63), will bring himself to share his most shameful and abject secret with his host – his horrific criminal past as a child-soldier turned dreaded tyrant and mass murderer, Amiral Rambo, in the Congolese civil war. ‘Parle, ça te fera du bien!’ [Speak! it will do you good] (2010: 63), suggests Christelle, and Clovis enters into a conversation with his hostess about himself, which becomes, as we will see, a communion between strangers in which both host and guest exchange stories in the evaluative language of suffering and compassion. N’Sondé’s narrative suggests the humanitarian potential for continuing conversation in a setting conventionally associated with violence, inhospitability and exclusion, the banlieue. Through the communion between strangers, Christelle’s apartment, ‘son petit deux-pièces, cuisine, salle de bains, toilettes’ [her two-room apartment with kitchen, bathroom and toilet’] (2010: 91) shielded from the ‘froid et saleté’ [cold and dirt] (2010: 93) of a ‘petite ville de la périphérie de Paris’ [little town on the periphery of Paris] (2010: 94), becomes transformed into the sensual and felicitous ‘notre paradis’ [our paradise] (2010: 165). Despite its location in a ‘univers décoloré’ [discoloured universe] (2010: 77), Christelle’s apartment, by virtue of its modesty and cleanliness, metamorphoses into an ethical space of simplicity and bliss. It is reminiscent of the hospitable rustic cottage commonly represented in European literature as a propitious site for confession and confidence (Montandon, 2004: 627). This haven of genuine and unequivocal compassion in a hostile environment contrasts with other places of hospitality that figure in the text, troubling regions where inhospitability and hospitality coexist. Christelle’s own childhood is a site of material security but remains an ‘inhospitable home’ for a child abused by her stepfather and ignored by her mother. The psychiatric clinic where Christelle is interned following the nervous breakdown caused by the departure of her abusive lover is another such location where hospitality and inhospitability intersect. As Juliette Vion-Dury points out, psychiatric clinics were considered spaces where hospitality could be offered to the ill (particularly the mentally ill) and as such were constructed as locations that would belong exclusively to them and therefore be beneficial to them. For the most part, they continue to exist as places where hospitality is offered in isolation and by isolating (Vion-Dury, 2004: 767). The hospital, on the other hand, the Pitié Saltpetrière in Paris, becomes the only place where, in the ‘chambres et couloirs aseptisés’ [disinfected rooms and corridors] (N’Sondé, 2010: 32), Christelle, playing

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host to sick and diseased bodies, can construct her identity. Otherwise, she remains invisible outside the hospital and outside the paradigm of hospitality. While her offer of hospitality (to her husband and her lovers) has only brought violence into her own home, her unattractive and ageing body receives both emotional and sexual attention from her patients in the hospital where she works as an auxiliary nurse. The foreigner, Clovis, by accepting her invitation and her hospitality without perverting it, allows Christelle to repossess her own home and reconstruct her identity within its walls. Even though it is Christelle’s love, care and her unconditional embracing of Clovis’s past that infuse the latter with hope, the conversation in Christelle’s apartment also shapes the hostess herself. Clovis notes: ‘Malgré mon apparence disgracieuse, j’avais envoyé des bribes de sensations douces à son coeur si souvent maltraité’ [Despite my disgraceful appearance, I had touched her oft ill-treated heart with my gentle feelings] (2010: 54). Clovis is a casualty of history. Abandoned first by his mother and then by his grandmother, Clovis becomes a child-soldier for his own survival and embraces violence systematically and unquestioningly for self-gratification to forget the painful wounds of his past until the day he can no longer suffer his own abjection. The memories of his sister, Marcelline, and her kindness remain his singular source of hope. Marcelline, we learn from Clovis’s dreams, on seeing her country and her future disintegrating into ruins around her, has also fled to France in search of a better life. Christelle, as we have already seen, is a pitiful victim in a patriarchal society that has exploited her goodness and has left her defenceless. In Clovis she discovers honesty and sincerity, something that she has never known in a man before; ‘Mes paroles ont mobilisé des recoins encore inexplorés de sa personne’ [My words mobilized the still unexplored corners of her being] (2010: 164). The conversation has engaged both human beings from different cultures, from different continents, from different times, through the evaluative language of suffering. Alas, ‘le rythme inquiétant des bottes’ [the disquieting march of boots] (2010: 168) intervenes and this union (which has lasted just two nights) is broken when the police arrest Clovis as he is returning to Christelle’s apartment from the bakery. He is beaten up brutally and taken away. Christelle is abandoned again, but the fact that Clovis is more anxious about disappointing Christelle than he is for his own future as an illegal migrant and war criminal reveals a mutual recognition of vulnerability, a value that is central to cosmopolitanism as compassion: ‘Christelle restera des heures, peut-être des jours, des semaines ou des mois à m’attendre, ses beaux yeux verts inondés de larmes acides et amères’ [Christelle will remain for hours, maybe for days, weeks and months waiting for me, her beautiful green eyes flooding with bitter acid tears] (2010: 170). If the conversation

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between Christelle and Clovis and the narrative of their encounter is to be measured in terms of its success or failure, then the narrative is a failure. However, if we choose to read it in terms of cosmopolitanism as conversation then the narrative takes on a different significance. When the narrative describes Christelle’s engagement as ‘quelque chose de plus fort que sa volonté’ [something stronger than her will] (2010: 63) we are reminded of Appiah’s affective cosmopolitan challenge that ‘conversation doesn’t have to lead to a consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another’ (2006: 85). The conversation that happens between N’Sondé’s protagonists, between two strangers, helps them to get used to each other’s stories: ‘Deux étrangers face à face, s’échangaient timidement des banalités, se renvoyaient des couleurs dans le regard. Des coups d’oeil furtifs et des sourires un peu forcés pour augmenter la confiance’ (2010: 49).3

Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality The ‘Afropean soul’ (Miano, 2008: 53) of N’Sondé’s text resides primarily in the structure of hospitality that frames this cosmopolitan conversation. To offer hospitality is to offer shelter – ‘Christelle m’avait recueilli au hazard d’un train de banlieue’ [Christelle had picked me up by chance in a suburban train] (N’Sondé, 2010: 19); to offer compassion – ‘Elle se pencha instinctivement vers moi et demanda, la voix pleine de douceur, ce qui n’allait pas’ [She leaned instinctively towards me and asked, in a voice full of sweetness, what was wrong] (2010: 37); and to offer friendship. Hospitality or the lack thereof in the context of immigration in France has dominated intellectual positions on French politics (Still, 2010: 32). Theoretical debates largely informed by Jacques Derrida’s work have provided the crucial framework to deal with questions of ethics and politics in a complex world of free and forced migrations. For the most part they centre on the idea of hospitality and the actual reception and treatment of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. At the heart of these discussions is the gap between ideal hospitality (unconditional hospitality and the absolute openness to the other) and the various ways in which hospitality is conditioned and limited (Still, 2010). As Judith Still describes, hospitality is a structure that regulates relations between inside and outside, between private and public (2010: 11). It is a way of theorizing the relation between the same and other. In other words, for hospitality to happen, there has to be a foreigner; conversely, for the foreigner 3 Two strangers face-to-face, timidly exchanging trivialities, sending meaningful glances. Furtive looks and slightly forced smiles to boost their confidence.’

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to appear foreigner there has to be hospitality. It implies letting the other into oneself, into one’s space. As such it is ‘invasive of the integrity of the self, or the domain of the self’ (Still, 2010: 13). Thus hospitality is both foundational and dangerous. As Gideon Baker notes (2011: 91–113), Derrida argues that to the extent that hospitality involves welcoming the stranger only on our own terms as hosts, hospitality is not universal enough. True universality can only be unconditional hospitality, which is open to someone neither expected nor invited, someone who is non-identifiable and unforeseeable, and as such which sets no limits to the coming of the other. The situation of Christelle and Clovis comes very close to this. Christelle invites a homeless and hungry stranger into her home without asking for his personal identification just because she relates to the abject state in which he finds himself: a ticketless, homeless traveller on a Parisian suburban train. Even if Clovis’s social identification (as an illegal immigrant, a sans-papiers) is not hard to recognize for someone like Christelle living in the banlieues, Clovis is the ‘absolute’ stranger, unexpected and unforeseeable. Is Christelle’s hospitality, then, unconditional? Derrida points out that unconditional hospitality is impossible since all finite hospitality requires sovereignty (Baker, 2011: 102). One cannot practise hospitality without a home and therefore pure hospitality cannot be written into law or politics. The paradox of hospitality is that in order to protect one’s own hospitality one can become virtually xenophobic. Derrida asserts, however, that even if universal hospitality is impossible, it is the condition without which the practice of limited hospitality (asylum, refuge, free passage and all that defines cosmopolitanism) cannot happen (Baker, 2011: 102). In Baker’s reading of Derrida’s hospitality as aporia (2011: 103), he argues that the two hospitalities (conditional and unconditional) are heterogeneous and indissociable – heterogeneous, because the gulf between unconditional and conditional hospitality can never be bridged by any political or juridical means, and indissociable because without laws and rights there can be no opening of doors to the other. In Le Silence des esprits, Christelle, through her cosmopolitanism as hospitality, her decision to offer unconditional welcome to an absolute foreigner, cannot overwrite the fact that Clovis, as war criminal (not victim but perpetrator) has no chance of accessing the limited hospitality that the host nation could offer to asylum seekers. The laws of hospitality (limited and conditional) would, at some point or other, have condemned him to incarceration or repatriation. However, as Baker notes, Derrida’s double law of hospitality urges us to calculate the risks without closing the door on the incalculable, that is, on the future and on the foreigner. This is what Baker calls the ‘decisionistic’ quality of Derrida’s cosmopolitan politics (2011: 103–05). Christelle’s act of hospitality translates

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this idea and the narrative’s cosmopolitanism lies in its ability to make place for this act, that of taking a risk. Baker calls our attention to the fact that while it has been argued that in politics there is no ethical relation, Derrida does not view cosmopolitanism and politics (citizenship) as antinomies. Citizenship (inside–outside a political community) is not about the valorization of a political community in and for itself; its significance lies only as much as it is necessary for its ethical relation to strangers, argues Derrida. Thus for Derrida, Baker explains, the necessary existential quality of the political decision becomes one of deciding, ‘impossibly and therefore singularly’, each time how to translate an unconditional hospitality into practical hospitality or conditional hospitality (2011: 103–04). Christelle’s decision is political in that it is a risk, one in which she factors in the incalculable to attain the affective: ‘Elle pouvait m’ouvrir ses bras, plus fort encore que la veille ou me rejeter à jamais’ [She could have opened out her arms to me wider than she had the night before, or rejected me for ever] (N’Sondé, 2010: 157). She decides to take the risk and ‘son coeur s’[est] ouvert à un monstre, bourreau et victime dans une même âme’ [She opened her heart to a monster, an executioner and a victim in one soul] (2010: 158). Baker notes that from a liberal cosmopolitanism perspective, ‘decisionism’ is pejorative. Liberals would view political action as the application of universal ethics orientated around human rights, and politics as the application of ethics in which no decision is called for. On the other hand, Baker notes that Derrida keeps ethics and politics in tension – in other words hospitality is neither sheer deduction of politics from ethics nor is it sheer pragmatics of politics. Derrida shows that the binary, identity and difference, in cosmopolitanism is ‘non-dialectizable’, a definition which for Baker means that hospitality articulates a cosmopolitanism that defies the dialecticism by placing ‘undecidability’ at its core: undecidability as in practising hospitality in the absence of ‘thematization’, in other words, practising hospitality as a risk (2011: 105–06). Le Silence des esprits, by placing risk at its core, defies such dialecticism through a narrativization of affective cosmopolitanism. If we extend Baker’s interpretation of Derridean hospitality as tension between ethics and politics, between the unconditional and the conditional in order to incorporate friendship into the structure of hospitality, there is also place for reciprocity. Drawing from Derrida, Leela Gandhi also uses singularity as opposed to individuality in the understanding of subjecthood. She argues that while individuality is amenable to perpetuation and extension, singularity is inassimilable within any system of resemblance. While states can recognise claims for identity they cannot tolerate that singularities should form communities without affirmation of identity. Friendship, she suggests,

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is ‘co-belonging of nonidentical singularities’ (Gandhi, 2006: 26–30), and she argues that the tropes of hospitality (Derridean) and guest-friendship (Epicurean version) are intertwined. She reminds us that, in the Aristotelian sense, friendship is politics, it is a homophilic bond that citizens owe to each other, a bond between those who are equal and similar. On the other hand, friendship in the Epicurean sense is philoxenia, love of guests and strangers. Friendship, whether Aristotelian or Epicurean, is risky in that it entails affective dependence; philoxenia is more risky in that it could cause felony against a country and it also carries the risk of becoming foreign to one’s own and to oneself. The ethical agency of the host-friend, Gandhi believes, lies therefore in his or her ability to leave himself or herself open to the risk of ‘radical insufficiency’. The host-friend is ever willing to risk becoming guest or stranger in his or her own domain, whether it is his or her home, his or her gender, his or her community, his or her nation. The open house of hospitality, like the open house of friendship, can never know its guest in advance as one might know a fellow citizen, sister or comrade (Gandhi, 2006: 28). For hospitality to be unconditional it has to be beyond reciprocity. But as has been pointed out, the two hospitalities (conditional and unconditional) are heterogeneous and indissociable and Derrida’s double law places risk at its core. Conceiving hospitality as guest-friendship makes it doubly risky because it could cause not only violence, but also dependency by exposing one’s ‘radical insufficiency’. Therefore, it can be said that Derrida’s double law of ‘hospitality as guest-friendship’, by placing the host at the risk of becoming ‘guest in need’ in his or her own domain, opens up the space for reciprocity by creating the possibility of placing the guest in the role of host. As Judith Still points out, ‘Derrida’s Law of hospitality lies beyond debt, exchange or economy and thus even reciprocity, yet its relation to the laws is simultaneously one of mutual perversion and one of mutual need’ (2010: 15). In this regard, the apartment door is central to the themes of guestfriendship and cosmopolitanism as hospitality in Le Silence des esprits. It separates the inside from the outside, the self from the other, the privileged from the homeless, the French citizen from the foreigner, Christelle from Clovis. To practise hospitality, one has to have a home into which the self lets the other enter. The guest crosses the door to accept the host’s hospitality. Since the host, as owner, enjoys the freedom of moving in and out of his or her home, the host at some point has to cross the door to be ‘at home’ just as the guest did in the first place. Christelle is out at work but she will return home in a few hours to her guest-friend: ‘D’ici quelques heures elle franchirait la porte, et tout recommencerait’ [A few hours from now, she would cross the door and everything would commence again] (N’Sondé,

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2010: 95). On the other hand, the guest-friend, Clovis, once having accepted the hospitality of his host, defines himself in this relationship and awaits his hostess-friend with trepidation: ‘Je me tenais debout face à la porte d’entrée’ [I stood facing the front door] (2010: 101). On the other side of the door, the hostess, having taken the risk of letting a stranger into her apartment, finds herself anxiously waiting to be welcomed back into her own home: ‘Christelle poussa la porte les genoux en coton… Elle s’effondra dans mes bras ouverts’ [Christelle pushed open the door her knees trembling… She fell into my open arms] (2010: 101). What N’Sondé refers to as the interminably long ‘jeu de la clé’ [game of keys] (2010: 100) is the risk that both host and guest take in showing and reciprocating hospitality. Christelle could have denounced the war criminal to the authorities and brought the police, but Clovis takes the risk and stays behind.

Escaping the ‘banlieue Narrative’ Le Silence des esprits does not allow itself to be confined by the code of the banlieue or the immigrant narrative. As Rose Duroux points out, the immigrant in France suffers from a negative profile. The term connotes birth outside France, the foreign worker, as well as the non-European other who threatens to corrode national values. The ambiguities of French law are such that despite the political difference between immigrant and refugee/ asylum seeker, they are not easily differentiated in reality (Duroux, 2004: 1479). The French offer of ‘conditional’ hospitality to foreigners includes the possibility of work, programmes for regroupement familial, health coverage and housing. But in order to be a good guest, the foreigner needs ‘papers’, a passport, work visas and residence permits. Paradoxically, these facilitators of hospitality create ‘irregulars’, sans-papiers and clandestins, those who do not have the required papers. Every national policy on immigration has multiple objectives: to regulate population flows, to integrate legal migrants and to close borders to illegal ones. This is turn has to be harmonized across nation-states. In the case of a supranational entity such as the European Union, where free circulation of legal migrants is crucial to its very existence and success, a number of complicated and severe measures have had to be implemented to cut down illegal migration (Duroux, 2004: 1473–1515). As Mireille Rosello has argued, since the 1980s ‘nous assistons à une prolifération de lois, de projets, de décrets et d’événements qui nous remettent sans cesse en face de la notion de la porte, de la frontière, de porosité, d’ouverture et de fermeture’ [we are witnessing a proliferation of laws, projects, decrees and events which bring us continuously to confront the notions of door, frontier, porosity, breach or closing] (2004: 1516). She draws our attention

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to the fact that in the contemporary context of hospitality and immigration in France, the idea of hospitality as a reciprocal gesture of friendship does not exist: ‘Lorsque les nations se mêlent à être hospitaliers, elles se mettent en effet à agir comme des invitants qui supposent que jamais les invités que l’on accueille n’auront l’occasion de rendre la pareille’ [When nations begin to act as hosts, they begin, in fact, to act as inviting people who suppose that their guests will never have the opportunity to reciprocate] (2004: 1523). This image of the ‘demandeur perpetuel’ [perpetual claimant] (2004: 1527) lies at the core of the politics of the representation of the banlieues in public and literary discourse. The banlieues around Paris were historically the zone on the periphery that first separated the working classes and the rich and then subsequently witnessed the construction of housing projects in which many immigrants would find housing – a ‘guest’ space that would pose a threat to the host nation’s stability and security. Since the 1980s, representations of the banlieues as centres of violence, crime and juvenile delinquency have been regular presences in the media and in political discourse, paradoxically justifying stronger measures of repression and greater police presence. The Beur movement of the 1980s in response to racism in French society contributed to consolidating this image. The women’s movement Ni Putes ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissive, 2002), by operating within the paradigm of secular values, has further reinforced the link between sexism, Islamist violence and the banlieues. For the most part, the 2005 riots were also attributed to Muslim fundamentalism and illegal immigration. French blacks also remain exposed to such discrimination and negative profiling, though to a lesser extent than the Maghrebis. In reality, anti-racist movements and immigrant unrest in France and especially in Paris have not only centred on banlieue violence but also seem to project a history of fragmentation and rivalry.4 N’Sondé is not caught up in these political representations of the banlieues. He affirms that: ‘Je n’ai pas de regard sur la banlieue parce que la banlieue n’existe pas’ [I do not have a view on the suburbs because the suburbs do not exist] (Mboungou, 2007). Le Silence des esprits, through its demonstration of the reciprocal nature of hospitality, wrests itself away from the confines of the ‘banlieue narrative’ and its associated politics of violence. The author achieves this through recourse to a number of strategies. First, he de-ethnicizes the .

4 In his article, ‘Black-Blanc-Beur: Multi-Coloured Paris’, Alec Hargreaves concludes that there are deepening divisions among minority ethnic groups in Paris today and that ‘Paris de toutes les couleurs’ remains more an idea than a reality (2005; see also Hargreaves, 2007).

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narrative. His novels bring together youths of different racial and ethnic origins and first-generation migrants from regions other than sub-Saharan Africa or the Maghreb. His first novel, Le Coeur des enfants léopards, places the violence inflicted on the police by a Congolese immigrant outside the paradigm of immigration politics and racial and ethnic discrimination and within a more cosmopolitan paradigm of mutual vulnerability, that of a policeman and father and that of a young man who has lost his friends. In Fleur de béton he draws together the anxieties, hopes and deceptions of a family of Sicilian immigrants living together with Arabs, Africans and Guadeloupians in la cité des 6000 housing estate. N’Sondé sees the term banlieue as a mask that hides the reality of the burgeoning creativity that these spaces represent. In his view, the banlieues are sites of continual movement: Je pense qu’on emploi le terme de banlieue pour ne pas reconnaître, pour masquer la réalité des choses. Et cette réalité, c’est la pauvreté, le brassage des populations venue des quatre coins du monde qui amène des changements qui font peur car on veut encore croire que les êtres humains, les identités et la culture sont des choses figées alors que depuis toujours les êtres humains bougent, se mélangent et créent des choses nouvelles. (Mboungou, 2007)5 Secondly, he lays emphasis on communion, friendship and hospitality: ‘C’est aussi pour cette raison que j’ai voulu écrire ce roman pour montrer que certes il y a de la violence et de la peur, mais au quotidien, il y a aussi de l’amour, des rêves, des gens qui vivent’ [It is also for this reason that I wrote this novel to show that even though there is violence and fear, in the everyday there is love, and there are dreams and people who live] (Mboungou, 2007). Because of the recurring topos of the Parisian banlieue in his works one reviewer labelled N’Sondé’s third novel, Fleur de béton, a ‘mélodrame banlieusard’ [suburbanite melodrama] (Liger, 2012). I argue that in all his novels, the author skilfully crafts lyrical and stirring poems in prose that recognize precariousness as a human value and revere compassion as a universal practice within what I suggest is his cosmopolitan vision for human rights. The ambiguity of the human rights question and its relation to hospitality is a significant theme in Le Silence des esprits. The paradox 5 ‘I think that this term is used in order not to recognize, in order to mask the reality of things. And this reality is poverty, the intermingling of populations from the four corners of this world, who bring changes and threaten because one wishes still to believe that human beings, identities and culture are static things, whereas human beings are always moving, mixing and creating new things.’

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of liberal cosmopolitanism is that hospitality would be refused to Clovis in the name of sovereignty and human rights.6 From such a viewpoint, providing refuge to Clovis Nzila, alias Rambo, would go against the ‘universal structure of particularity’ that liberal cosmopolitans subscribe to, whereas within Derridean cosmopolitanism as hospitality Clovis is the unforeseeable stranger and can thus receive hospitality. A brief discussion of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s concept of multicultural human rights will provide us with the framework to further refine these intersections between the immigrant, guest-friend hospitality and cosmopolitan conversation in an age of globalization where questions of human rights need to be reconsidered.

Afropean Cosmopolitanism: Towards a Definition of Hospitality within a Multicultural Human Rights Paradigm According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the world system is a ‘web of localized globalisms and globalized localisms’ (2002: 14). By ‘globalized localism’ de Sousa Santos means that which is local and successfully globalized, and by ‘localized globalism’ he refers to the impact of global practice on local conditions. He asserts that the intensification of global interactions has produced cosmopolitanism and a common heritage of humankind outside of globalized localisms and localized globalisms (2002: 12–16). De Sousa Santos describes ‘globalized localisms’ and ‘localized globalisms’ as globalization from above, while he considers cosmopolitanism and the common heritage of humankind as globalization from below – solidarity in the defence of common interests using the benefits of ‘transnational interaction created by the world system’ (2002: 14).7 By ‘common heritage of humankind’ de Sousa Santos means issues (resources) that, by their very nature, must be administered by trustees of the international community on behalf of present and future generations (the environment, outer space etc.); by cosmopolitan activities he refers to all movements on the periphery of the world system in search of alternative, non-imperialist cultural values. 6 Liberal cosmopolitanism is seen as ‘continuing the statist attempt to describe a universal structure of particularity in world politics replacing international with global civil society as the instantiation of this universality’ (Baker, 2011: 13). 7 According to de Sousa Santos, ‘Cosmopolitan activities involve, among others, South–South dialogues and organizations, new forms of labor internationalism […] networks of alternative development and sustainable environment groups, literary, artistic and scientific movements in the periphery of the world system in search of alternative, non-imperialist cultural values, engaging in post-colonial research, subaltern studies, and so on’ (2002: 15).

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What is relevant to my discussion on cosmopolitanism as hospitality and conversation, in other words cosmopolitanism as risk, is de Sousa Santos’s definition of human rights within his paradigm of ‘globalization from below’. He argues that as long as human rights are conceived of as universal human rights, they will tend to operate as ‘globalization from above’. To be able to operate as a cosmopolitan, counter-hegemonic form of globalization (i.e. globalization from below), human rights must be reconceptualized as multicultural. In order to consider human rights as a cosmopolitan project, one must, de Sousa Santos says, first acknowledge that both cultural universalism and cultural relativism as philosophical postures are wrong. He goes on to explain that all cultures have conceptions of human dignity but not all conceive of it as a human right; that all cultures are incomplete and problematic in their concept of human dignity; and that all cultures have different versions of human dignity (even within Western modernity, a liberal and socio-democratic version of human dignity privileging civil and political rights coexists with a Marxist version that privileges social and economic rights). He also adds that not all equalities are identical and not all differences are unequal. In such a context, understanding a given culture from another culture’s topoi may therefore prove to be very difficult, if not impossible. In response, de Sousa Santos proposes a ‘diatopical hermeneutics’ based on the recognition of ‘reciprocal incompletenesses’ (2002: 20). This definition, I believe, aligns itself with the idea of cosmopolitanism as ‘conversation’, as a practice that acknowledges its own incompleteness (Appiah, 2006), and with the structure of hospitality that acknowledges its own ‘undecidability and insufficiency’ (Baker, 2011; Gandhi, 2006) – concepts that were discussed in the earlier sections of this chapter. De Sousa Santos, however, realizes that such a premise for cross-cultural dialogue could become problematic when one of the cultures has itself been moulded by massive and long-lasting violations of human rights perpetrated in the name of the other culture, if we consider that there are cultures that have been ‘incompleted’ by Western imperialism (2002: 24–30). Postcolonial Europe is a case in point, where the arrival of illegal immigrants could be perceived as the indirect result of neo-imperialist investments in postnational African states. In this case, interactions can only lead to further cultural conquests or cultural closures. So is a conversation ever possible between Europe and postcolonial Africa, between the French hosts and their foreign guests? As de Sousa Santos shows, if a given culture considers itself complete, it sees no interest in entertaining inter-cultural dialogues. If, on the contrary, it enters such a dialogue out of a sense of its own incompleteness, it makes itself vulnerable and, ultimately, offers itself up to cultural conquest. De Sousa Santos agrees that there is no easy way out of this dilemma and sums

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up the conditions for cosmopolitanism or ‘progressive multiculturalism’ through diatopical hermeneutics: Diatopical hermeneutics is based on the idea that the topoi of an individual culture, no matter how strong they may be, are as incomplete as the culture itself. Such incompleteness is not visible from inside the culture itself, since aspiration to the totality induces taking pars pro toto. The objective of diatopical hermeneutics is, therefore, not to achieve completeness – that being an unachievable goal – but, on the contrary, to raise the consciousness of reciprocal incompleteness to its possible maximum by engaging in the dialogue, as it were, with one foot in one culture and one in another. Herein lies its dia-topical character. (2007: 20) De Sousa Santos’s ‘diatopical hermeneutics’ allows for a more nuanced understanding of human rights within cosmopolitanism as guest-friendship and cosmopolitanism as conversation by further insisting on the creation of a self-reflective consciousness of cultural incompleteness; by raising consciousness of the internal variety of each culture and believing that the ‘reversibility of the dialogue is crucial to defend dialogue itself from becoming reciprocal cultural closure or unilateral cultural conquest’; by centring itself on isomorphic concerns and ‘on common perplexities and uneasinesses’ instead of centring itself on ‘same’ issues (2002: 28–30). Such a conceptualization allows us to better read the notion of choice and condition in the interrelated thematic of hospitality and the illegal immigrant. In Le Silence des esprits, the risks undertaken by both the hostess and the guest translate the belief that the ‘reversibility of the dialogue is crucial to defend dialogue itself from becoming reciprocal cultural closure or unilateral cultural conquest’. The conversation between Christelle, victim in a patriarchal society, and Clovis, victim of poverty, in the absence of support structures and the context of state corruption, is an exercise that revolves around ‘common perplexities and uneasinesses’ and is articulated in the ‘evaluative language’ of compassion and hospitality. Their conversation has the potential to operate as ‘a cosmopolitan, counter-hegemonic’ form of globalization (de Sousa Santos, 2002: 15). Like Marcelline’s spirit, which reveals itself to Clovis ‘Légère, heureuse, guidée par la mère de la Terre’ [Light, happy, guided by the mother of Earth] (N’Sondé, 2010: 162), Le Silence des esprits, through its evaluative language, shows us a door into the Derridean ‘incalculable’, the ‘invraisemblable’ [unlikely] (2010: 171). It is this ‘door’ which allows Clovis to believe in ‘La magie, la folie de crier à l’incroyable’ [Magic, the madness of believing in the unbelievable] (2010: 171). Leela Gandhi believes that in today’s world utopianism is not misplaced – it shows the way to genuine cosmopolitanism,

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always ‘open to the risky arrival of those not quite, not yet covered by the privileges that secure our identity and keep us safe’ (2006: 31). In her definition of affective cosmopolitanism as the intertwined trope of hospitality and guest-friendship, cosmopolitanism can be perceived as the means to ‘puncture those fantasies of security and invulnerability to which our political imaginations remain hostage’ (2006: 32). It might teach us that risk sometimes brings with it a ‘profound affirmation of relationality and collectivity’ (2006: 32) in the peaceful and reciprocal silence of the spirits: ‘Un echo dans le silence. Un murmure à peine perceptible’ [An echo in the silence. A murmur hardly audible] (N’Sondé, 2010: 64).

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism – Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Baker, Gideon. 2011. Politicizing Ethics in International Relations: Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality. London: Routledge. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2002. ‘Toward a Multicultural Conception of Human Rights’. Beyond Law 9.25: 9–32. Duroux, Rose. 2004. ‘Immigration: France/Europe’. In Alain Montandon (ed.), L’Hospitalité – L’accueil des étrangers dans l’histoire et les cultures. Paris: Bayard: 1473–1515. Gandhi, Leela. 2006. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hargreaves, Alec G. 2005. ‘Black-Blanc-Beur: Multi-Coloured Paris’. Journal of Romance Studies 5.3: 91–100. —. 2007. Multi-ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society. London: Routledge. Liger, Baptiste. 2012. ‘Wilfried N’Sondé dans la cité des enfants perdus’. http:// www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/fleur-de-beton_1109154.html (accessed 22 October 2012). Mboungou, Vitrolle. 2007. ‘Wilfried N’Sondé livre “Le cœur des enfants léopards”’.  http://www.afrik.com/article11755.html (accessed 27 October 2012). Miano, Léonora. 2008. Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles. Paris: Flammarion. Montandon, Alain (ed.). 2004. L’Hospitalité – L’accueil des étrangers dans l’histoire et les cultures. Paris: Bayard. N’Sondé, Wilfried. 2007. Le Cœur des enfants léopards. Paris: Actes Sud. —. 2010. Le Silence des esprits. Paris: Actes Sud. —. 2012. Fleur de béton. Paris: Actes Sud.

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Rosello, Mireille. 2004. ‘Immigration: discours et contradictions’. In Alain Montandon (ed.), L’Hospitalité – L’accueil des étrangers dans l’histoire et les cultures. Paris: Bayard: 1516–28. Still, Judith. 2010. Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vion-Dury, Juliette. 2004. ‘Psychiatrie: accueillir la maladie mentale’. In Alain Montandon (ed.), L’Hospitalité – L’accueil des étrangers dans l’histoire et les cultures. Paris: Bayard: 762–88.

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Afropean Masculinities as bricolage Ayo A. Coly

Afropean Masculinities as bricolageCHANGE THIS

Afropean literary narratives exhibit a discursive preoccupation with masculinity that is not necessarily present or sustained in earlier literatures focusing on the African presence in France. This novel preoccupation aligns with the frenzied coalescence, starting in the mid-1990s and peaking in 2005, of a latent, and hence hitherto unmined, French public discourse on Afropean masculinities. In the early 1980s, the African immigrant woman took centre stage as a national problem, when the politicization of the immigration question and the ensuing debates on citizenship and nationality targeted her alleged excessive fertility (see Freedman, 2000: 13–18; Raissiguier, 2010: 72–90). If the new focalization of the immigration question upon the Afropean male has not been fully addressed in scholarship on immigration and Frenchness,1 Afropean literary discourse has certainly engaged with the troping of the Afropean male: a discursive event, in the sense that this irruption of masculinity on to the French landscape has caused a shift in discourse and introduced a new regime of representation of Afro-descended French populations. The figure of the Afropean male has, accordingly, come to constitute a prime discursive site for writers such as Sami Tchak, Alain Mabanckou and 1 Nacira Guenif-Souilamas (2006) argues that until the social unrest of 2005, young black men were almost invisible, whereas the Arab male was the focus of immigration discourses.

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Léonora Miano. This chapter proposes to explore the ways in which the protagonists in these writers’ projects place Africanness and Europeanness under duress, but it is also interested in sketching pathways between, into, across and away from these categories. In their shared deconstructive concerns with the identity scripts of Afropean masculinities, Place des fêtes (2001) by Sami Tchak,2 Tel des astres éteints [Like Extinguished Stars] (2008) by Léonora Miano and Black Bazar [2009; Black Bazaar, 2012] by Alain Mabanckou exemplify how Afropean literary texts are reflecting and deflecting the French societal anxieties displaced on to the trope of the Afropean male. The ideological model of Afropean masculinities that these writers develop is of particular interest for its unapologetic and uninhibited investment in disentangling, by way of bricolage, the Afropean male subject from narratives and projects of collective identity. The notion of bricolage, employed here as a (counter)practice of identity, articulates post-identitarian idioms of self-understanding, identification and affiliation. Through the masculinities of bricolage thus proposed, a new face of Afropeanism is revealed in engagement with post-identitarianism and most certainly in grand contemplation of the ‘planetary humanism’ or ‘postrace humanism’ envisioned by Paul Gilroy (2000). The African immigrant mother is by no means obsolete in French discourses on immigration. This figure stands in the immediate background, as the birth-control-challenged mother of what the then-Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy infamously referred to as racaille [scum] when visiting a banlieue housing project outside Paris on 25 October 2005. Sarkozy’s tirade publicly and officially singled out male ethnic minorities as public enemies of the nation and specimens at odds with the precepts of French manhood. As such, his tirade is important for what it reveals about the gendering and gender of the subject of current French discourses on immigration, especially when we consider the ways in which ethnic minorities and Afropeanness become interchangeable. In public debates, government-commissioned studies and French media coverage of the 2005 uprisings, the Afropean male was troped as an unfolding national problem. Michel Kokoreff, Pierre Barron and Odile Steinauer (2006: 30), co-authors of a case study of the banlieue of Saint-Denis, correctly pointed out that French media coverage had privileged an interpretation of the uprisings as a confrontation between the police and young ethnic men from the banlieues. However, by focusing on the social emasculation of these young men as the explanation for the riots, the Saint-Denis study ultimately participated in the very process of troping it sought to denounce. Quand les banlieues brûlent [The Banlieues are Ablaze], Place des fêtes is in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.

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an edited volume by Véronique Le Goaziou and Laurent Mucchielli (2006), offers yet another example in which the issue of immigration is inseparable from young males from the banlieues. Already in the introduction, entitled ‘Les émeutes de 2005: les raisons de la colère’ [The 2005 Riots: Getting to the Root of the Anger], 3 the editors set up an analytical framework in which subalternized and stigmatized masculinities ultimately serve to construct the Afropean male body as a site of anxiety. Probably most revealing is the Plan espoir banlieues [Hope Plan for the banlieues], launched in 2008 by the French government as a remedy to the crisis and with the objective of facilitating the integration of the youth. Taken together, the initiatives and programmes proposed by the plan were mostly geared towards ‘fixing’, if not containing, the young men from the banlieues. President Sarkozy, speaking on Radio France International in February 2008, confirmed this when he introduced the plan. Sarkozy started by outlining a ‘projet de civilisation’ [civilization project] which would ‘réinventer la ville’ [reinvent the city] and ‘promouvoir les valeurs républicaines’ [uphold republican values]. Then, in muscle-flexing mode and deploying a language of warfare, Sarkozy went on to declare a ‘guerre sans merci’ [merciless war] on the ‘bande de voyous’ [hoodlums] and ‘délinquants’ [delinquents] in the banlieues. The French angst towards young Afropean men pertains to the type of place and space to which this new citizenry stakes claim and the extent to which the nation is equipped to fulfil these demands. Afropean males are, for the most part, born and raised in France, and are not therefore some kind of transient presence. In recent years, ethnic minority populations in France have made claims and demands based on this reality, in many cases articulating these in unprecedented ways when compared to earlier generations of African descendants in France. As such, the Afropean male is visible in ways quite unlike the figures of ‘le bon tirailleur, ce grand enfant’ who smilingly served France, the colonial student, or for that matter the compliant immigrant worker whose portrayal by Congolese painter Chéri Samba astutely adorns the cover of Dominic Thomas’s book Black France (2007; see Blanchard and Bancel, 1998: 68, 80). Alain Mabanckou, in Le Sanglot de l’homme noir [The Black Man’s Sorrow] (2012b: 152), favours the affective detachment towards Africa that Sami Tchak grants the Afropean male narrator of Place des fêtes. Of these Afropean decentrings of Africa and disavowals of the idiom of Africanness, Mabanckou writes, ‘L’Afrique n’est plus seulement en Afrique. En se dispersant à travers le monde, les Africains créent d’autres Afriques, tentent d’autres aventures 3 This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author of this chapter.

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peut être salutaires pour la valorisation des cultures du continent noir’ (2012b: 159–60).4 Mabanckou thus joins Dominic Thomas in challenging Odile Cazenave’s main argument in Afrique-sur-Seine (2003) that Africa has disappeared from the affective cartography of Afropean writers. Thomas has shown that a non-static approach to geography that is able to differentiate place from territory reveals that Afropean writers ‘have transformed Africa into a global territorial signifier, one that exceeds Africa as “place” […] but from which Africa itself is never absent’ (2007: 22). Achille Mbembe (2010: 225) has similarly noted that the new African novel, of which according to him Black Bazar is a prototype, conceptualizes Africa as an inexhaustible citation that is open to multiple combinations and compositions. The three novels considered in this chapter are indeed examples of these new literary figurations of Africa. The novels’ experimentation with multiple geographies of identity entails multifarious ways of invoking, reformulating and repurposing Africa. The investment of the narrator of Place des fêtes in resisting his confinement to Africanness is in itself an engagement with Africa. The unnamed narrator was born in France of African immigrant parents, and the novel describes his sexual exploits, including his incestuous relations with his mother and sisters. The unbridled sex found throughout the novel, and near total symbolic sabotage of the family concept and assigned identities, is a guiding metaphor for the sacrilegious practice of identity that Afropeanism represents, in its demystification of origins, denaturalization of so-called blood ties, rejection of filial identities and promiscuity towards any culture at hand. In that sense, the narrator of the novel puts into practice the kind of identity bricolage that Mabanckou upholds in the above-quoted passage. Furthermore, the notion of ‘aventure’ in Mabanckou’s statement, in its connotations of extra-marital affairs, barely licit undertakings and evasions of norms, performs a systematic deconstruction similar to that found in Tchak’s novel. The works of Mabanckou, Miano and Tchak favour, I would argue, the more proactive notion of bricolage over that of hybridity in order to frame Afropean identity practices. Where hybridity describes a condition and a location, bricolage, as conceptualized by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1966), captures the agency and creativity embedded in Afropean identity practices, including the idea that Africa is a citation that Afropean writers may combine and compose at will (Mbembe, 2010: 225). For Lévi-Strauss (1966: 16–22), the bricoleur, unlike the engineer who proceeds in an abstract 4 ‘Africa is no longer exclusively in Africa. As Africans disperse into the world, they create other Africas, try other adventures that probably aid in the valorization of the cultures of the black continent.’

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and methodical manner, improvises and makes do with whatever is at hand in order to adapt existing material to his needs and present situation. The examples we find in Mabanckou’s writings suggest that Afropeanism entails choosing to pursue new adventures, and this position aligns very well with the ludic, improvisational and experimental traits of bricolage. Mabanckou’s novel, appropriately titled Black Bazar, is fore-echoed in Place des fêtes when the unnamed narrator equates Afropean lives to a bazaar (Tchak, 2001: 10). The metaphor of the bazaar points to a second feature that distinguishes bricolage from hybridity: the often cobbled and patched aspect of the finished product. Theorists of Créolité have pushed the concept of bricolage in the latter direction. In ‘Créolité et francophonie: un éloge de la diversalité’ [Creoleness and francophonie: in praise of diversalité], Raphaël Confiant (2004: 251) describes the Caribbean as a product and process of bricolage, stating that the mixture of cultures in the Caribbean has occurred ‘sous le mode de la diffraction, de l’hétéroclite, du “bricolage culturel” au sens de Lévi-Strauss et loin de fusionner jusqu’à effacer les traces de leurs origines, les apports culturels des quatre continents se sont ici agrégés là juxtaposés sans presque jamais disparaître en tant que tels’.5 Black Bazar is a model of this cobbled, patched and plural literary text, with an Afropean male narrator whose original self-understanding as a Congolese sapeur and an African man in France falls apart in the course of writing his novel. Fessologue [Buttologist], the narrator, is indeed the writer of Black Bazar, a journal he sets out to write after his girlfriend leaves with their daughter. Fessologue’s disjointed narrative lacks a plot because his writing provides a Gramscian inventory of his categories of identification, an investigation of their usability and an exploration of new pathways. Additionally, his failure to maintain the allegorical African romance and family places his self-understanding under pressure. Throughout the novel, Fessologue’s Afrocentric North African grocer applauds the allegedly strong African family values and proud African bearings of the young male narrator as shining examples of African manhood. That Fessologue falls apart when his family breaks down attests to his Althusserian interpellation and capture as an African man in but not of France. He lacks the creative and critical leeway that permits the sacrilegious acting-out of received ideologies in Tchak’s Place des fêtes. Fessologue is only able to gain such leeway when he embarks on his writing project. As he works at crafting his own narrative and 5 ‘through the mode of diffraction, of the heteroclite, of “cultural bricolage” in Lévi-Strauss’s sense of the term; and far from fusing to the point of erasing the traces of their origins, the cultural contributions of the four continents were aggregated here and juxtaposed there, without ever disappearing themselves’.

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developing a distinct narrative voice, he is led to overhaul his categories of identification and to drift away from prescriptive discourses of Africanness, Frenchness and blackness. Writing evolves into an exercise and adventure in self-fashioning. Identity becomes a creative project, with no planned itinerary or final destination: ‘J’écris comme je vis, je passe du coq à l’âne et de l’âne au coq’ [I write the way I live, I jump from one topic to the next] (Mabanckou, 2009: 19). The result of this identity bricolage is a highly intertextual and extroverted text. The profusion of eclectic and unexpected literary allusions and artistic influences builds new and nonconforming filiations and territories in which the significations of Africa are constantly in flux. Dany Lafferière, Dominique Rolin, Amélie Nothomb, Günter Grass, René Magritte, Maurice Maeterlinck, Gabriel García Márquez, Yambo Ouologuem, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ernest Hemingway, Compay Segundo, Georges Simenon and Miles Davis, handpicked as literary forefathers and foremothers, are made to inhabit the same discursive space. In the work of postmodern critics such as Dick Hebdige, bricolage is a form of subversive intertextuality because the bricoleur ‘re-locates the significant object in a different position within that discourse, using the same overall repertoire of signs, or when that object is placed within a different total ensemble, a new discourse is constituted, a different message conveyed’ (1979: 104). This description is well suited for the eccentric genealogies and kinships that Black Bazar cobbles up through heterogeneous influences and multifarious citations of Africa that subsequently plug the Afropean narrative and Fessologue himself into infinite networks of signification. Léonora Miano deploys a similar narrative methodology that features bricolage. Jazz is a musical practice and product of bricolage, and jazz provides an apt framework for Miano’s Afropean narrative project Tels des astres éteints. The novel lays out the different identity postures of three young Afropeans in an unnamed European city. At the centre of the novel is an Afropean black nationalist separatist organization with a short-term project of cultural disaffiliation from Europe and a long-term project of returning to Africa. The three characters relate differently to the organization. Amandla, who was born in the French Caribbean, adheres to the organization’s programme. Shrapnel hails from Africa and is also an active member of the organization, but he rejects the programme of a physical return to Africa and prefers instead to ground his project of African renaissance on European soil. Amok grew up with Shrapnel in Africa and is romantically involved with Amandla. He declines membership in the organization and rejects entirely its agenda and ideologies, displaying a general attitude of complete affective disengagement from both Africa and Europe.

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Bricolage as an identity process has a different modality in Tels des astres éteints, unlike the more blatant practice of bricolage in evidence in Black Bazar and Place des fêtes. Of the three characters in the novel, Amok is the bricoleur; he has no planned itinerary and makes do as he goes. Although in his lethargy and apathy Amok appears to be lacking in the type of creative agency embedded in bricolage and found centre stage in Black Bazar and Place des fêtes, his friend Shrapnel often points out the anti-conformism and non-normativism of Amok’s noncommittal posture. By not following a paradigm or designated pathway, Amok, like the bricoleur, works at his individual life project on his own. He is a Do-It-Yourself kind of guy. Furthermore, Amok is not only a reader, but a very engaged and critical reader. As he reads, he writes detailed notes and responses. For Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur is first and foremost an engaged reader who ‘interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed to discover what each of them could “signify” and so contribute to the definition of a set which has yet to materialize’ (1966: 18–19). Conversely, Michel de Certeau describes how readers engage in a process of bricolage by poaching texts to craft new stories, suited to their own agendas (1984: 29–42). This is certainly true of Fessologue in Black Bazar. In Tels des astres éteints, the narrative does not let the reader into Amok’s own readings or the details of his critical responses, but he appears to be a very prolific and eclectic reader like Fessologue. One can venture that his unique self was fashioned out of the critical practice of reading. Amok works and combs his way through texts to unravel and elude the various narratives of identity that claim him. If Amok appears to be stuck in a perpetual state of counterproductive lethargy and disengagement, a Césairian passive spectator with crossed arms and a sterile demeanour, so to speak (Césaire, 1939: 47), it is because Miano is less interested in a process of transformation than she is in a condition of transformed identities. In his nonconformity to community codes that would mark him as an Afropean man, including his non-adherence to the sartorial practices of young Afropean males, Amok is at the end of the trajectory on which Mabanckou sets his narrator. Mabanckou emphasizes that Fessologue is moving forwards and that he is able to do so because, like Sami Tchak’s narrator, he has allowed himself to venture away from prescribed identities and assigned subject positions. In Black Bazar, Fessologue’s retrospective narrative gradually moves forwards and away from its entanglement in questions of Africanness as well as its focus on the African immigrant community. A now unencumbered Fessologue abandons the fashion practices associated with la sape, a key marker of his Congolese manhood, which allowed his girlfriend to identify him upon their first meeting as ‘un vrai Congolais des pieds à la tête’ [a real Congolese man, from head to toe] (Mabanckou, 2009: 81). Instead he now engages in

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new sartorial experiments, adopting a hippy look that is totally at odds with his previous persona and the performances of Congolese masculinity. Thomas explains that la sape is, among other things, a status symbol, an impersonation of upper-status masculinity and a claim for substantial social space and capital (2007: 155–84). Following Michael Kimmel’s point that masculinity is performed through the accumulation of culture-specific symbols that denote manhood (2001: 270–71), Fessologue’s abandoning of la sape, very much like Amok’s nondescript sartorial choices, effectively amounts to a counterperformance of masculinity and denotes a major shift in his practice of identity, but most importantly in the audience of his masculine performance. La sape as a social language of masculinity is specific to the Congolese community. In one hilarious scene, Fessologue is parading on a metro platform in an expensive designer suit. Since the audience of his performance does not recognize the socioculturally situated codes of hegemonic masculinity that he is displaying, Fessologue is mistaken for an employee of the French national railways service whose employee uniforms happen to match the green colour he is sporting. This prompts the realization that he is not in fact ‘recognizable’ (Butler, 1997: 5) outside Congolese discourses of masculinity. Fessologue’s mistake, and hence his misperformance of masculinity, exposes his lack of fluency in the codes of dominant French society. This ignorance results from his lack of engagement with that society and the circumscription of his world and identity by and to African and Congolese immigrant milieus. If, as Raewyn W. Connell (1995: 71–77) argues, masculinity is a socioculturally situated gender project, then Fessologue’s abandonment of la sape reveals a redrawing of his geography of identity in such a way that the Congolese and African communities are now decentred. When Fessologue notes repeatedly that ‘je suis un autre homme’ [I am a new man] (Mabanckou, 2009: 243) and ‘j’étais devenu un autre homme’ [I had become a new man] (2009: 260), he is declaring his adoption of new codes of masculinity and ensuing affiliation to new communities. Parallel to the intertextuality in his book project, his new masculinity project articulates a nonconforming genealogy and kinship. Fessologue refuses to be bound by norms and codes and, in line with his abandoning of la sape, he revises his social and spatial geography through new practices of space and everyday life. The homosocial space of the Afro-Cuban bar where he meets daily with fellow African immigrants, the Congolese party scene and the North African grocery shop are in turn decentred by the public garden, the Chinese grocery store and his adoption of new socialities. Similarly in Miano’s novel, Amok is the only one of the three protagonists who expands his sociocultural geography beyond the Afropean community. Both Shrapnel and Amandla, in their practice of space and everyday life, circumscribe their territory to the Afropean community.

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Amok, Fessologue and the narrator of Place des fêtes are not in pursuit of identity. Rather, they are sidestepping the logic of identity, even coming close to walking away from identity. They are ‘corps sans patrie’ [bodies without homelands] (Tchak, 2001: 290), chronically indecisive about whether and where to unpack their luggage (Miano, 2008: 353), or in the case of Fessologue, in a Deleuzean state of becoming-otherwise. Miano’s novel is more than an account of three different postures of identity. That Miano has Shrapnel die unexpectedly and mysteriously (a way of expelling him from the Afropean narrative the novel is crafting and maybe signalling the non-usability of his paradigm of identity), while Amok, who throughout the novel is the object of failed identitarian rescue attempts by Amandla and Shrapnel, lives on, is an important cue. The narrative destinies of Miano’s characters reveal her standpoint on identity and projects of collective identity. Through these destinies the narrative discounts identity projects as viable paths. The decision to allow Amok to live and carry on his unencumbered existence amounts to a discursive and ideological vindication of his position, and in this instance we find points of commonality in the ways in which Miano’s and Mabanckou’s works envision a post-identitarian Afropeanism. For Fessologue, post-identitarianism is a matter of survival, of securing a future: ‘un lâche vivant vaut mieux qu’un héros mort. […] la désertion est héréditaire dans ma famille puisque moi aussi j’ai fui les obligations dans mon pays d’origine. […] J’imagine que la Troisième Guerre mondiale est proche […] qu’on va appeler les fameux tirailleurs sénégalais à la rescousse comme autrefois’ (Mabanckou, 2009: 178–79).6 The motif of survival in Mabanckou and Miano finds discursive and ideological support in Achille Mbembe’s Sortir de la grande nuit [Shake Off the Great Mantle of the Night] (2010)7 which charts a way out of the dark postcolonial African night and economy of death described in his 2001 classic On the Postcolony. In this new book, Mbembe upholds the antidote and lifeline of ‘Afropolitanism’, an aesthetics and poetics of the world which disavows the zombie identities and constricting racial solidarities prescribed by Negritude and pan-Africanism (2010: 232–33) in order to resuscitate African imaginaries and creativities. What is suggested by this resonance between Mbembe and the novels of 6 ‘I’d rather be a living coward than a dead hero. […] desertion is hereditary in my family because I also have evaded obligations to my native country […] I imagine that the Third World War is impending […] that the famous Senegalese tirailleurs will be on call again to help liberate France.’ 7 Mbembe’s title is inspired by Frantz Fanon’s call in The Wretched of the Earth: ‘Now, comrades, now is the time to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of the night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light…’ (2004: 235).

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Mabanckou, Miano and Tchak is a convergence between Afropeanism and Afropolitanism. As I shall argue, Afropolitanism’s more nuanced approach to race allows Afropeanism to gain proximity with the planetary humanism of Gilroy (2000). The earlier reference to the tirailleurs signalled a nonconforming practice of anti-heroic masculinity, meaning a refusal to be recruited into a preordained practice of masculinity but also a refusal to embody the type of ‘safe’ African masculinity that the tirailleurs represented. In their noncompliance with the normative codes of masculinity, the three novels considered here represent dissenting and against-the-grain masculinities that adhere to a counter-hegemonic practice of masculinity.8 In the process, these alternate masculinities elucidate Afropeanism as a purposeful perversion of received ideologies, including Africanness, Frenchness and blackness. This is where Afropeanism as a practice of bricolage parts company with Lévi-Strauss to veer towards Jean and John Comaroff’s re-theorization of bricolage in which they contend that Lévi-Strauss ‘condemns the dominated to reproduce the material and symbolic forms of a neocolonial system’ (1985: 261). Having studied how the Tshidi populations of Botswana and South Africa adopt and then adapt biblical signs and metaphors in their resistance to mission Christianity, the Comaroffs overhaul bricolage as a subversion of the signifying structures and ideologies of the dominant order. This is exactly the type of perversion of dominant regimes effected by the narrator of Place des fêtes. Each chapter of the novel begins with the expression ‘Putain de…’ [Fucking…] and takes aim at a specific ideological construct or category of identity. In each case, the narrator dismantles oppressive constructs and categories by sullying them through his nonconforming practices of identity and subsequently pre-empting their pretences to purity, cohesion and integrity. There is, however, an important caveat that needs to be addressed at this point. The prototype of the unfettered subject upheld in the Afropean narratives of Mabanckou, Miano and Tchak bears probably too close a resemblance to the escapist and free-floating subject of discourses of deterritorialization, postnationalism and post-identarianism. One can certainly join Stuart Hall in wondering about the political consequences of these discourses of ‘minimal selves’. Indeed, Hall is useful for pinpointing the potential pitfalls of the Afropeanism envisioned by these three writers, as he reminds us that categories of identity and collective narratives perform crucial work, whereas ‘the politics of infinite dispersal is the politics of no 8 In their resistance to the logic of accumulation whereby success and winning underpin constructions of normative masculinities, these Afropean masculinities are a good fit for what Judith Halberstam (2011) calls ‘the queer art of failure’.

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action at all’ (1996: 118). However, while Hall rightly stresses the productive uses to which categories such as Africanness or blackness can be put and argues that social transformation and individual development are impossible without mobilizing these categories, the three Afropean authors demonstrate that it is precisely these categories that eventually short-circuit social change and individual development. To return to the metaphor of the tirailleurs, the refusal to be drafted is not as much an evasion of responsibility or a lack of political maturity as it is a refusal to contribute to what the three novels portray as socially ineffective and politically void strategies of advancement. Instead of the forms of political mobilization proposed by Hall, the novels suggest the potential ways in which bricolage may be politically appealing as an act of warfare against oppressive entrenchments. Amok explains that his refusal to endorse a black cause is ultimately political, asserting that ‘il n’y avait pas de Cause noire. Il y avait tout au plus une expérience noire. Particulière. Unique. […] Il ne supportait plus qu’on en parle tout le temps. En gémissant, on s’absentait encore de sa propre destinée’ (Miano, 2008: 285–86).9 By refusing to subscribe to the idea of a black cause, Amok is refusing to reify ideologies of racial difference. He aspires to limit the ideological and discursive footprint of race: ‘Amok était un individualiste. Il disait qu’il n’y avait pas de communauté, que l’humain était seul. Il disait ne pas se lever le matin avec en tête l’idée de la couleur. […] Il était noir. Il le savait. Il y était habitué. Ce n’était ni source de joie, ni un motif de tristesse’ (2008: 152).10 Amok believes that the refusal of race as ontology allows the human to emerge and new solidarities and filiations to be forged. Thus, Afropeanism as a practice of bricolage and a politics of minimal selves paves the way for a new humanism by refusing to invest politically, psychically and affectively in absolutist categories, race included. While Mbembe’s Afropolitanism also affirms such renunciation, mostly of cultural nationalist ideologies and twentieth-century African nationalisms, as a political gesture (2010: 232), there is a slight distinction here between Afropolitanism and Afropeanism. Mbembe is not clear cut on race and the ability to walk away from racial identifications. Afropeanism, in its bolder push for a renunciation of the idea of race in Tels des astres éteints and in its 9 ‘there was no black Cause. At most, there was a black experience. A particular one. A unique one. […] He could no longer bear to hear about this all the time. When people moaned, they missed their own destiny again.’ 10 ‘Amok was an individualist. He said that there was no community, that human beings were alone. He said that he did not wake up in the morning thinking about skin colour. […] He was black. He knew it. He was used to it. This was cause for neither joy nor sadness.’

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trivialization of, if not blindness to, race in Black Bazar and Place des fêtes, veers towards Paul Gilroy’s concept of planetary humanism. There is a striking, almost uncanny, correspondence between some of the lines spoken by Amok in Tels des astres éteints and Paul Gilroy’s statement in Against Race that black people must ‘take the step of renouncing “race” as part of an attempt to bring political culture back to life’ (2000: 40). Gilroy names this project a ‘planetary humanism’ or ‘postrace humanism’, not to be confused with liberal humanism, for the latter further entrenches the category of race. Reading Afropeanism through Gilroy may assist us in the process of clarifying the political valence of Afropeanism. Gilroy argues that the compartmentalization of the human experience into racial, national, cultural and religious camps is politically counterproductive and psychologically debilitating. Targeting racial identifications and the language of race, especially as adopted by people of African descent, Gilroy argues that they are a setback because they invite a gaze of differentiation onto black bodies, reiterate racist ideologies of racial particularity and constrain political sensibilities and imaginations. Race then, for Gilroy, is a political death-trap that must be actively renounced, particularly by black people. We find distinct echoes of this position in the rhetoric of survival in Black Bazar and Tels des astres éteints, most notably in the symbolic death of Shrapnel. Calling the renunciation of race ‘an abolitionist project’ (2000: 15), Gilroy proclaims the advent of a postracial humanism that would respond to the Fanonian injunction to ‘start a new history of Man’. Fanon’s calls for a ‘new man’, also echoed in Mabanckou as the reader is constantly reminded that Fessologue is a new man, undergird Gilroy’s project of ‘thinking without race’.11 Gilroy’s seductive planetary humanism is ultimately disconcerting if only because there are, on the one hand, no directions for getting to postrace humanism, and because, on the other hand, Gilroy conveniently chooses to disregard the lived experience of race and the material effect of race (see Collins et al., 2002; Gikandi, 2002; Robotham, 2005). How does one ‘turn against racial observance’ (Gilroy, 2000: 12) as he advocates? How does one implement Gilroy’s prescriptions in practical terms when institutionalized race-based social exclusion and the ‘fact’ of blackness prevail (see Keaton et al., 2012)? Stuart Hall (1996) re-enters the conversation again for his scepticism about the pitfalls of the politics of minimal selves. For groups and communities which already face discrimination, a politics of minimal selves is, of course, suicidal. Therefore, for such groups, and contrary to Gilroy’s admonition, postrace thinking is precisely where the death-trap 11 Laura Chrisman (2011) argues that Gilroy (conveniently) misreads and distorts Fanon’s thought.

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awaits. Having previously read Afropeanism through Gilroy, it now becomes instructive to test Gilroy’s project through some of the questions left unresolved in the three Afropean novels under consideration. The narratives in these three novels are stuck between a kind of utopian Afropeanism and the reality of race. Gilroy, operating on a more philosophical and theoretical level, is able to ignore social realities by grounding his argument in abstractions. The literary narratives are, however, founded on a concrete social landscape and have to acknowledge perforce the realities of racial nationalism and race discrimination in France. As the narratives try to push their model Afropean subject forward, one must ask how a subject clearly marked as black and foreign by her/his environment can think without race and beyond racial identification? Mabanckou is able to sidestep this question and end his text on a happily-ever-after note because he glosses over the racialism in the French social landscape that Fessologue occupies.12 Fessologue only encounters racism from his xenophobic Afro-Caribbean neighbour. As for Miano, she is more mindful of the difficulty of implementing Amok’s brand of Afropeanism. There are references throughout Tels des astres éteints to the criminalization of the Afropean male body and the assignment of the Afropean male subject to the lowest social rung. Stuart Hall complicates the Derridean idea that ‘signification depends upon the endless repositioning of its differential terms’, proposes that subject positions in narratives of collective identity are moments of meaning and self-understanding, and contends that, for meaning to occur, there needs to be ‘a contingent and arbitrary stop – a necessary and temporary break in the infinite semiosis of language’, calling this arbitrary and necessary full stop in the Derridean sentence a ‘cut of identity or a positioning’ (1990: 225), which says ‘just now, this is what I mean, this is who I am’ (1996: 117). The uncertain ending of the text, with Amok appearing to long for a place of belonging and in a suspended state of malaise, makes it clear that he is lost and probably longing for the comfort of a category of identification that may allow him to move forward. Yet Miano does not let go of her Gilroy-styled Afropeanism. The Afropean project is propped up in the concluding lines of the novel, spoken by an omniscient narrator: Une faiblesse vitale s’est glissée en nous, qui nous ramène inlassablement à la couleur. Ce n’est plus l’œil du voisin, avec sa paille, qui nous accroche à 12 In Lettre à Jimmy, Alain Mabanckou defends the artistic autonomy and individuality of the black writer against the constricting expectation that black literatures should address race and racism (2007: 74–78). While I fully endorse Mabanckou’s position, my point with regard to Black Bazar is that explorations of the identity reinventions of a black African male protagonist in contemporary France cannot bypass the factor of race.

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la couleur. C’est le nôtre […]. Notre regard ne voit que la couleur. Résident de l’affect, il défaille devant l’analyse, la seule question qui vaille. La régénérescence. La recréation. L’avènement d’un être neuf, qui aurait digéré sa peine. (Miano, 2008: 402–03)13 Still, the question of how one gets from here to there is left unanswered. In Place des fêtes, the otherwise exuberant narrative falls flat at the end of the novel. The narrator can hardly hide his angst about being ‘un corps sans patrie’ [a body without a homeland], as he eventually reveals that he ‘préfère faire comme s’[il] avai[t] une patrie’ [prefers to act as if he had a homeland] (Tchak, 2001: 290). Like Amok, Tchak’s unnamed narrator is stuck in non-felicitous territory and his lines, as the novel ends, reveal that he was chosen by deterritorialization and not the other way around. Elsewhere, I have argued the affective and ideological implausibility of the unfettered Afro-descended subject as sketched by Afropeanism. On that occasion I maintained that the realities of late imperialism and racial nationalism in some European nations pre-empted the formation of that unencumbered subject (Coly, 2010: xi–xv). Simon Gikandi (1996) has similarly argued that this unfettered postcolonial subject is a fallacy, and his scepticism about Salman Rushdie’s postnationalist migrant in The Satanic Verses resonates with my own perplexity about the planetary humanism towards which Afropeanism appears to gravitate. In his analysis of Rushdie’s novel, Gikandi demonstrates that the novelist’s desire to relocate his postcolonial migrant subject into postnationalist time-space ends up being upstaged by the ‘weight of imperial history and its institutions, including the idea of the nation itself’ (1996: 196). Gikandi’s contention, and also the crux of my reservations against the brand of Afropeanism discussed in this chapter, is that responses to questions of identity ‘depend not so much on where one chooses to go but where one comes from’, and ‘to choose to transcend nation and patriotism, à la Rushdie, is to claim some choice in the staging of one’s identity’ (1996: 199). My reading of the uncertain denouements of the three novels suggests that identity and identifications catch up with the aspiring post-identitarian Afropean protagonists. That said, Afropeanism as an identitary space and an opportunity for experimentation with various articulations and cross-articulations of the categories that the lives of Afropeans span opens up multiple prospects and possibilities 13 ‘A vital weakness has slipped into our beings to bring us tirelessly back to colour. It is no longer the eye of the neighbour, with its straw, which bonds us to colour. It is our own […]. Our gaze can see only colour. As it dwells in sorrow, it falters at analysis, which is the only valuable activity. Rejuvenation. Recreation. The advent of a new being who would have overcome their sorrow.’

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for both Afropeans as well as the categories of Africanness, Frenchness, Europeanness, blackness and whiteness.

Works Cited Blanchard, Pascal, and Nicolas Bancel. 1998. De l’indigène à l’immigré. Paris: La Découverte. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge. Cazenave, Odile. 2003. Afrique-sur-Seine: une nouvelle génération de romanciers africains à Paris. Paris: L’Harmattan. Césaire, Aimé. 1939. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine. Chrisman, Laura. 2011. ‘The Vanishing Body of Frantz Fanon in Paul Gilroy’s Against Race and After Empire’. The Black Scholar 41.4: 18–30. Collins, Patricia Hill, Robert J.C. Young, Troy Duster and Paul Gilroy. 2002. ‘Review Symposium: Between Camps/Against Race’. Ethnicities 2.4: 539–60. Coly, Ayo A. 2010. The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Comaroff, Jean and John. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Confiant, Raphaël. 2004. ‘Créolité et francophonie: un éloge de la diversalité’. In Diversité culturelle et mondialisation. Paris: Autrement: 240–53. Connell, Raewyn W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove. [First published in 1961]. Freedman, Jane. 2000. ‘Women and Immigration: Nationality and Citizenship’. In Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr (eds), Women, Immigration and Identities in France. Oxford: Berg: 13–28. Gikandi, Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2002. ‘Race and Cosmopolitanism’. American Literary History 14.3: 593–615. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guenif-Souilamas, Nacira. 2006. ‘The Other French Exception: Virtuous Racism and the Wars of the Sexes in Postcolonial France’. French Politics, Culture & Society 24.3: 23–41. Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Hall, Stuart. 1990. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’. In Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Différence. London: Lawrence & Wishart: 222–37. —. 1996. ‘Minimal Selves’. In Houston A. Baker, Jr, Manthia Diawara and Ruth Lindeborg (eds), Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 114–19. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Keaton, Trica Danielle, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Stovall (eds). 2012. Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kimmel, Michael. 2001. ‘Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity’. In Stephen Whitehead and Frank Barrett (eds), The Masculinities Reader. Cambridge: Polity: 266–87. Kokoreff, Michael, Pierre Baron and Odile Steinauer. 2006. ‘Enquêtes sur les violences urbaines: comprendre les émeutes de 2005, l’exemple de Saint-Denis. Rapport final’. Paris: Centre d’analyse stratégique. Le Goaziou, Véronique, and Laurent Mucchielli. 2006. Quand les banlieues brûlent: retour sur les émeutes de novembre 2005. Paris: La Découverte. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mabanckou, Alain. 2007. Lettre à Jimmy. Paris: Fayard. —. 2009. Black Bazar. Paris: Seuil. —. 2012a. Black Bazaar. Trans. by Sarah Ardizzone. London: Serpent’s Tail. —. 2012b. Le Sanglot de l’homme noir. Paris: Fayard. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 2010. Sortir de la grande nuit. Paris: La Découverte. Miano, Léonora. 2008. Tels des astres éteints. Paris: Plon. Radio France International. 2008. ‘Nicolas Sarkozy a présenté le plan “Espoirs banlieue”’. http://www.rtl.fr/actualites/politique/article/nicolas-sarkozy-apresente-le-plan-espoirs-banlieue–41325 (accessed 7 November 2012). Raissiguier, Catherine. 2003. ‘Ces mères qui dérangent’. In Madeleine Hersent and Claude Zaiman (eds), Genre, travail et migrations en Europe. Paris: Université Denis Diderot: 25–43. —. 2010. Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship in France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Robotham, Don. 2005. ‘Cosmopolitanism and Planetary Humanism: The Strategic Universalism of Paul Gilroy’. South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3: 561–82. Tchak, Sami. 2001. Place des fêtes. Paris: Gallimard. Thomas, Dominic. 2007. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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SHORT STORIES

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The Old Man and the Boat Fatou Diome

Fatou Diome: The Old Man and the Boat

A title on a book jacket, suddenly, a face takes shape and carries us in its wake. Memory is a falcon that grips us in its claws, flying over faraway lands. Nothing that has been is lost, so long as there are books to record life. Reminiscence or anamnesis? No matter, sometimes we remember like we give into the caress of a sweet kiss. I remember! I was six years old and, crossing the millet fields, I held his hand as one clings to a wrought iron railing. I was six and I didn’t care about fairytale princesses, since he had made his heart my throne and was always telling me the marvellous story of the Guelowar. I was six and I didn’t know that he could suffer, since he was my Hercules, lifting me up with one hand and finding an answer to everything that seemed impossible to me. At his side, the world could have crumbled, to me it would have been a mere bump in a wonderful game of trampoline. Naturally placid, his eyes wrapped me in a cocoon of serenity, calming all my fears. A Guelowar must never be afraid, he would say, teasingly. And to make him happy, I would promise him that I wouldn’t be scared even of a lion, though I would always call for his help at the sight of a mouse. He downplayed everything. And whenever something from outside disturbed the bath of tranquillity in which he sought to keep the ones he loved, he would say, in an even tone: that’s life. I was six and two thick braids drew an alley on my head where shea butter and question marks ran. So one day I retorted impishly, without understanding my own words: That’s life, that’s life, but what is life? He 173

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laughed so hard he cried. Then, running a hand over my head, he whispered, as though telling a secret: Life is getting your sea legs. I was six, I would go fishing with my grandfather, I didn’t get seasick, so I figured I understood what he was saying. That was far from the case. For a long time, I only saw my grandfather’s job as a fisherman in terms of our time at sea and our delicious discussions in which stories did a wonderful job of summing up the world. For a long time, I didn’t see his pain, I was blinded by his striking smile, deafened by his reassuring voice, which blended with the lapping of the waves and rocked my child’s heart. And though I could guess the bitterness of the quotidian, the gentle curtain that he tried to keep between me and reality limited what I could see. For a long time, life was as sweet as a sea breeze, and my perception as blurred as a winter sky. Yet hiding in me lurked a girl who no longer believed in stories and who was starting to wonder. Then, the years went by. I filled several notebooks, got a few degrees, explored the paths of the French language, up to the Demba Diop high school in M’bour. Little by little, reading started to take the place of my grandfather’s boat. The world now opened itself to me like the pages of a book. I went from one book to another as though roaming a city, looking for people to call my own. Through random discovery or on the advice of my teachers, I began to accumulate books like one amasses friends. After school, on days when there were no classes, and every time one of my odd jobs gave me some free time, I would, with great affection, greet all those characters who invited me to follow them around the world. And in my little high school bedroom, way out in a sandy suburb of M’bour, far from Niodior, my native island, I no longer felt alone, since I had found people to call my own. And when the candles burnt out, I would fall asleep surrounded by seminal works, like lighthouses planted in life’s ocean, shedding light on the thousand facets of the human condition. Among these shining lights was Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. But how does one climb a tree that hangs above the canopy? Altitude! I don’t know a thing about mountaineering, but I can imagine the grooves in the sides of the mountain in which to stick our trembling fingers. Altitude! Suddenly, a text carries and hoists you up the summit of human nature. Altitude! Kilimanjaro is so tiny compared to our internal mountains. Altitude! And the spirit soars, provided the breath can go the distance. Altitude! Defying all our canyons, we hang on until our fingers break. And the climb lasts a lifetime. Heave-ho! To read is to dare to lose control. You can read as though bowing down, with reverence, awed by the brilliance of a beautiful mind. Blindness! Those who do not guide me lose me! All I want is to find my way. Let us then keep an eye peeled!

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Errancy! You can read as though exploring: I have never been to Minas Gerais and I do not have an uncle Jaguar but rather Diadorim! Joao Guimarães Rosa made me a gaucho, hooked to a leash of words, wandering the Sertao from my sofa. But what would my enthusiasm be without my past? Memoría! The mast that holds the sail always needs its base. You can thus read as though remembering, for behind every book, you read other books, some of which have never been written, but which lurk deep inside you. A day of reading, a day of encounter, a day awake. Let’s rub our eyes! Sometimes an author, a demiurge, lifts the curtain, and unveils everything you did not know about a loved one you thought you knew. It was Hemingway who taught me everything about courage, will, abnegation, dignity, the condition of my grandfather, a fisherman from Niodior. So when people talk to me about an author’s identity or origins, I reply: nonsense! To read through such a lens is pure literary heresy. Human fragility, existential issues and a vision of the world that good authors know how to convey make all borders porous. A literary genealogy is wide-reaching and rises above all divides. We are scattered over the planet, but literature weaves us together. People who have read the same books, people interested in similar questions, people of the same sensibility, supporting the same rebellion, joined together for a common fight. We find common denominators in books, recognizing one another, beyond the narrow confines of identity. Maybe Jesus will find his people in their library! Identity cards and Hemingway’s melanin levels, I couldn’t care less! He is one of my own because he told me about the everyday heroism of my grandfather the fisherman, and he told it better than the people who ate his fish. Whether you’re Hemingway or not, when you cast your line into words, you’re always trying to catch a little of the human. The Old Man and the Sea is more than reading, it’s a reunion! Suddenly, in memory’s labyrinth, a puzzle is reassembled, the contours of a face begins to emerge on each page. He was there, he is there, he will always be there, my old man on his boat, since I will always remember. Of medium-height, my grandfather was the first of my great men. I have admired many, and for different reasons. But he was the only one to wipe away my tears. No one could drive away my nightmares like him. No one carved me a paddle and taught me how to use it like him. No one took me fishing like him. No one called me my boy like him. Of all my great men, only my grandfather was big enough to see and tell me what was way up high, behind the sky, when, young and curious, I would ask: ‘Tell me, what’s up there, behind the sky?’ ‘Do you remember your dream?’ ‘Which one’, I would say, dubiously. ‘The one you told me the other day.’

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So, I would tell him something. ‘No, that’s not the one. The other one was more beautiful.’ I would tell him something else. ‘No, it was even more beautiful!’ And it would go on like that, until finally I would tell him a really happy story. Then he would take on a most serious air and say: ‘There you go! That’s what’s behind the sky! All of your beautiful dreams are real, and they’re waiting for you there’, he would say, raising a finger towards the sky. ‘If you think of them often, they really will come true. But be careful not to forget them, otherwise you’ll stop growing. Because you don’t grow any more once you forget your dreams.’ ‘And do you remember your dreams?’ I asked him. ‘No, only the most beautiful ones.’ ‘Tell me, please tell me!’ ‘Well, when I was little, in my father’s boat, I would dream of being a great fisherman, too.’ ‘And you never forgot?’ ‘Never. Look, today I have my own boat.’ ‘And what else did you dream of?’ ‘Taking my grandson fishing.’ ‘And?’ ‘Well, here you are, my pain in the neck little girl, you are my boy.’ We would both laugh heartily. In the village, a lot of people were surprised to see him take me fishing. That’s no activity for a girl, they would say. Why wouldn’t a girl go fishing, she eats fish, after all, he’d retort. In spite of his level tone, my boatswain was boxing with words. I was not yet familiar with the word feminism; it wasn’t part of his vocabulary either, but I was delighted to see him hold his own and keep me on as his seaman. I wouldn’t have traded our special outings at sea for anything, not even Cinderella’s carriage. While he drew the fishing line from the water, he would trust me at the helm. The anchor didn’t touch the bottom and so we would slowly drift, and even though I wasn’t able to keep us completely steady, the simple achievement of keeping us pretty much on course filled me with joy. Bravo captain! he would say, and rays of sunshine would well up in my mouth. Pride is a kindly look that makes you stand up straight. I refused to hear any hint of irony in my grandfather’s praise, forgetting the wind and the cold, feeling full of life. He made me believe my efforts were essential; meanwhile, he was wearing himself out. With his feet firmly planted, he would bend his athletic body forward and seize the fishing wire in his chapped hands. Heave-ho! Sometimes he would brace himself, pivot, move in one direction, and his heavy steps would soak

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the wood of the boat. Heave-ho! Sitting in the stern of the boat, I had front row seats to a show that had been going on for centuries. But his struggle affected me more than all those that had come before, though the setting was the same. For him, it was our joy, our calm nights, our daily bread that he was pulling from the tide. Heave-ho! He was my actor, my dancer, my wrestler, my champion. I would watch him. I would intensely scrutinize him. Heave-ho! In a dance punctuated by the lapping of the waves, the muscles on his back would fold and unfold, his arms would come and go, unceasingly. Heave-ho! His breath alternated with the creak of the ropes at the edge of the boat. When the catch was good, the weight of the line would threaten to break the two taut cables linking his neck to his shoulders. Heave-ho! Every so often, he would straighten up, put a knee on the line to keep it from unwinding, and, with a hand on his lower back, he would breathe deeply and stretch, before going back to work. Heave-ho! Lord, what strength must a human muster to carry his or her destiny? For his part, the man on the boat worked tirelessly, selflessly. Every day took as much out of him as the day before. And when I asked him: Are you in pain? He would turn around, smile, and invariably reply: That’s life. He never once complained. And, since I did not know to applaud such a scene, I would talk to him, simply to show how happy I was to be at his side. And I would find an excuse to ask him a question he had already answered a thousand times. ‘So, under water, what’s under water?’ ‘Nightmares: when you have a nightmare, tell it to a shell in the morning. After, spit in the shell and throw it in the sea, that way the nightmare will never come back and haunt your sleep. But there are also good things under water. Look’, he would say, pointing to the catch wriggling in the hold, ‘Look at all the fish that Sangomar, the god of the sea, is giving us to eat. And never forget about your friends the dolphins. You like the dolphins, don’t you?’ I had a passion for dolphins, and I was always hoping they would come by before we had to go back ashore. Sometimes we would see them, but we couldn’t expect them. They were the ones who decided where and when they would give us the gift of an unexpected visit. However, ever since my grandfather had told me a story about how the mammals were generous protectors who would adopt and raise lost or orphaned baby dolphins, how they would rescue shipwrecked fishermen and guide them to the shore, I couldn’t help but keep an eye out for them. I was obsessed with the story. Tell me the story about the dolphins! I would cry. But you already know it quite well by now, he would say, before telling it again, amused and touched by my insistence. And every telling was more beautiful than the last. His words, his stories, I never knew if he made them up or if he had heard them somewhere before, but in any case they kept us warm; they were our fire of

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joy, and he could liven them up at will. Our imagination had to be bright in order to extinguish the shadows of the everyday. My grandfather painted with words, as though the Ocean blue flooding the sky needed other colours. In his boat, a few phrases were enough to transport us far away from where we were fishing. I could tell the fishing was taking a toll on his body, and I worried about him. Whenever he noticed, he would use a thousand tricks to chase the sadness from my eyes. In fairy tales, evil witches don’t smile, and I know that in life it’s the same, he would joke, and I would give him a big smile, showing all my teeth. I had no desire to fly off on a broomstick, leaving him alone on his boat. That was life, our life. We inhabited an island, lived from the sea. A sober life in the countryside, where the days went by slowly, replicating one another like twins dressed in the same rough cotton. Luxury came in the guise of the red golden powder that painted the sky at dusk. High tide, low tide! Shifts in mood were attributed to the cycle of the moon. We preferred analysing the sea’s currents over our feelings. Silence wasn’t a sign of austerity, it was the sweet unction of mutual understanding and restraint. In their daily lives, the humble have the elegance of those polished by labour, and they only ask the Lord for the strength to remain standing. Islanders are quiet people, and those from Niodior are no exception. When I was little, I wondered why. Now, I tell myself they are quiet because they know that words don’t make the grain grow. They are quiet because words don’t lure swordfish. They are quiet because each one among them is living what another could have told him or her in a story. They are quiet because truth resides in the eyes. In that part of the world, only the sea is arrogant. And the garrulous waves throw their dithyrambs on to the shore, distracting humans from their condition. The island of Niodior floats on the Atlantic like a breast that has slipped out of a beautiful woman’s bodice. But her beauty does not make anyone’s head spin. Fishermen are tough, ever diluting the sea with their sweat. In an effort to improve their existence, these brave alchemists can only add salt to salt. That’s life! Today, I traded my paddle for a pen, but my boat continues to sway, still drawn to the horizon. When I feel nostalgic, and my heart longs for the mist of childhood, I go to my bookshelf and, with closed eyes, find my talisman: The Old Man and the Sea. Suddenly, I hear my grandfather’s voice: To live is to get your sea legs. I still don’t have my sea legs, but I continue to navigate and, no matter the swells in the tide, I know my grandfather will never leave my side. And neither will Hemingway. Translated by Alexis Pernsteiner

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Paule stared at the doctor who had just suggested that she go on a diet. The man looked back at her, meeting her gaze, his hands stretched out on the desk in front of him, his body leaning forwards. Paule didn’t cough to clear the hoarseness that had lodged in the back of her throat, didn’t look away. Bertrand, she said, a touch of weariness in her voice, Bertrand, I diet all day, from six in the morning until half eight in the evening. Then I come face-to-face with my loneliness. That’s when dieting becomes impossible. She fell silent. The doctor didn’t say anything else, didn’t say that it was just a matter of not keeping the forbidden foods in her cupboards or in the fridge. He didn’t tell her that it would be good to start exercising, that there wasn’t anything stopping her from going running in the Buttes Chaumont park. The man left these words unsaid, knowing how difficult it was to adopt a rational attitude in these situations. And then, Paule continued, there’s the rain-maker case. You know, I told you about that. Yes, replied the doctor. Are they still falling? The woman nodded. At the beginning, it was just a shower. Now it’s more like a downpour… Bertrand changed the subject, didn’t ask Paule about the nightmares that she’d been having since she’d been trying to find the rain-maker, as she called him. The story made Bertrand’s blood run cold. The first two incidents had been reported in the press but nothing had been written about the others, and if Paule hadn’t confided in him, he wouldn’t have known anything about them. No doubt there was a case for arguing that the general public shouldn’t be alarmed, already oppressed as they were 179

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by the economic crisis, already suffering from anxiety in lives where nothing was certain. He tapped away rapidly at his computer keyboard and printed off a prescription. Your results are fine for now, but you still need to be careful. I’m prescribing you something to help control your sugar cravings. And something to help you sleep, if you’re finding it difficult… As she went down the stairs to the exit, Paule clung on to the banister. The steps were steep. The lighting didn’t work in the communal parts of the old building. The problem had been going on for several months, the owner and the residents jousting with each other. The owner wanted to transform the place into a commercial building, and was doing his best to get the residents to leave. The crazy prices that Parisian rents had reached, even in this working-class district, meant that, for most of them, this would mean moving out to zone 4. The woman soon reached the corner of rue de Romainville and rue de Belleville. She stopped at the pedestrian crossing, started counting the seconds until the little man turned green, wondered, without it being more than just a passing thought, why the little man wasn’t a little woman. From time to time, a little woman. Every other time. Or even every other other time. Her mobile started blaring the chorus from Little Red Corvette, the music getting more and more strident as she rummaged in her bag for the phone. She found it at last, saw that the light had gone red again for pedestrians, answered the phone. A harsh, muffled voice rattled out some words. The caller had rung off before Paule had had time to take on board what the voice had said. The light turned green and she crossed the road, going over the caller’s words in her mind. She couldn’t tell whether it had been a man’s voice or a woman’s. The Seventeenth is on the rue du Renard. Hurry… And then they had hung up. The Seventeenth. My God. Paule dashed towards the metro station. With a bit of luck, she would get there in time. She pictured rue du Renard, trying to work out whether it was better to get off at Rambuteau or the Hotel de Ville. She went for the second option, unsure how far up the road The Seventeenth would be. Paule clapped down a seat and flipped open her mobile phone cover again, looking at the call history. The caller’s number was ‘unknown’. Usually, she was careful not to pick up in those cases. Today, she’d forgotten. She swore under her breath, looked at her watch. 8:15. Strange. The other times, everything had happened in the middle of the night, at an hour when the most devoted night revellers had long since laid down their arms. It was usually the early-morning workers, often women or men with thick foreign accents, who sounded the alarm before jumping in the first metro train of the day. Once it had been a baker who had called the police. Another time, it had been the owner of a café that opened at dawn. In fact, in fourteen out of the sixteen cases, the police had been contacted by people with very

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similar profiles. Not that that was particularly significant. Just a combination of circumstances. This time, though, the fact that it was past eight in the morning made this one worth lingering over. It was an important change, an indication that things hadn’t worked out as hoped, that there had been some kind of snag. Paule sighed impatiently, looked at the station name on the wall of the platform. Arts & Metiers. Two more stops. She wondered how the caller had got hold of her number. And why. Her interest in the affair wasn’t public knowledge. A colleague from the newspaper had signed the articles that described the first two discoveries. And in fact he’d only written his initials at the bottom of the page: O.P.A. Paule wondered if she’d let herself become too exposed. Maybe she’d been seen hanging around the crime scenes, all those different crime scenes, in Charenton, Vincennes, all the way from Rambouillet to Montreuil, from Levallois to Antony… In all, twelve towns from the Île de France region and four of the Paris districts had been affected. After the first two events, it had been her friend Erna who had kept her informed, showing her the photographs. Paule recalled each one of their meetings. Erna always stammered the same thing before opening the brown envelope and showing her its contents: If the bosses find out, I could lose my job, but I can’t keep it to myself. There are things here that jump out at you just as they jump out at me – things that my colleagues don’t notice. It was true. The investigating officers were only touching the surface. They didn’t have any inside information. Paule’s theory was only based on intuition, but she was pretty sure she wasn’t too far from the truth. The missing puzzle pieces needed insider knowledge – it was a sort of family affair, in a way. If the web was going to be untangled, it needed someone who knew the culture, the way things worked. Ways of thinking, behaving. And how they came about. But no-one was interested. No-one wanted to know. At the paper where she worked, her colleagues on the newsdesk often stubbornly refused to take such things into consideration. She understood why, sometimes: not knowing about things meant you could have nothing to do with them without feeling guilty. Paule took a notebook out of the bag that also held her laptop, scribbled a few lines, questions that her article might address: Individual personalities do not appear sui generis. They grow in complex soils where past and present, personal and collective experiences are all jumbled together. 1/ How is subjectivity constructed when the individual belongs to a minority? 2/ How does the field of significations linked with colour make it possible to talk about specific experience? 3/ When we say Black/White, what are we really saying? Paule raced out of the metro at the Hotel de Ville stop, and shot past the Pompidou Centre towards the bit of the rue du Renard where the crowds

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would undoubtedly be gathered – if it wasn’t already too late. As she ran, she heard Erna’s voice inside her head. At their last meeting, struggling to swallow their cups of tea in a café on the rue de l’Amiral Coligny, her friend had whispered: In my opinion, only a woman could be responsible… Choosing them on that basis, arranging everything like that. Particular care had been given to the way things were laid out. Whoever it was took time to create a visual work of art, a macabre one of course, and chose a soundtrack to go with it. There was always music. As soon as it was touched. Hits from the 80s, a generational element which linked all the cases. From memory, Paule could cite them. Shake You Down by Gregory Abbott. This was the song that had led her to believe that she could get into the rain-maker’s mind. Mr Abbott’s sole hit single lived on only in the memory of certain types of individuals. Candy, by Cameo, had confirmed those impressions. Paule had been struck dumb when she had discovered that You are my Sunshine by Mtume was another of the gems tarnished by the rain-maker. Things were serious, very serious. Perfect Lovers by Ray Parker Jr had revealed the questionable humour of the one who was signing this sinister choreography, and had reinforced Paule’s intuitions: the rain-maker was male. The deathly soundtrack also included: Ain’t Nothing Going On But the Rent by Gwen Guthrie – which may have concealed a fairly precise clue, and Baby Come to Me by Regina Belle. Yes, even that song, and Paule considered that to be the ultimate sacrilege. It was Erna who had revealed the rain-maker’s playlist to her. Paule had never had the chance to get to the scene at dawn herself, when the bodies were first discovered, but had always arrived slightly later. She had paced up and down the pavements which were still wet from being cleaned, like after rain, the material proof already stored away, mostly on the photographs that Erna showed her. This time, Paule soon spotted the area that had been cordoned off by the police, the residents being held up by roadblocks, the closed-off entrances to the Pompidou Centre library and Rambuteau station. She did her best to edge towards the first row of onlookers. A tourist was secretly trying to film the scene on her phone. A man in uniform wrenched it out of her hands. With an air of authority, he deleted the photos and smiled tersely as he returned the phone. Paule decided that there wasn’t any point getting out her press pass. It always put the police on to the defensive. She placed herself behind the tourist. She was too far away to make out all the details, but what she saw was amply sufficient. The forensics experts were finishing taking samples. The photographers then took over. After that, they lifted up The Seventeenth, who didn’t seem to weigh any more than a drop of rain. Along with the rest of the crowd that had gathered, Paule heard the music: Little Red Corvette by Prince. She loved that song. It hadn’t been for nothing that she’d tracked down a lousy ringtone version of it and put it on

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her phone. Paule felt her body, her whole being, grow tense, anger rivalling dread inside her. She left the scene as they were lifting The Seventeenth into the ambulance. The poor wretch didn’t need any more medical attention. A bit disoriented, Paule wondered what she should do next. The perpetrator must know that someone had worked out the basis of his little game. He wasn’t the only one to have listened feverishly to these unforgettable songs, and now his motives had been exposed. Although it was impossible to know what the rain-maker looked like, she could certainly start to sketch an outline of his psychology. Paule needed to write. Setting things down on paper always helped her think things through more clearly. The woman retraced her steps in the direction of the Hotel de Ville metro station and hurried across the road. She pushed open the door of a café at the corner of rue du Temple and rue de la Verrerie, cast her eye over the gloomy room, and headed like a robot towards the table in a dark corner at the back. A table from where she could see without being seen. Observing without others noticing her had become an almost automatic reflex. A grouchy waiter came and stood in front of her, a waiter’s cloth draped over his arm, his eyes misted over with a weariness that was as profound as it was incurable. Paule resolved not to be the one to speak first. She finished making herself comfortable, put her laptop on the table, turned it on, and then gave him her full attention. She found his aristocratic air out of place and suppressed the urge to laugh. He obviously thought himself good-looking, and believed that his looks, for which he couldn’t actually claim any credit, conferred special rights on him over other people and things. A woman with a cocky, old-fashioned humour, who was obviously the café owner, called out to the waiter from the counter where she was busy serving coffees and the odd half-pint to those who liked to start wetting the whistle in the mornings. She was small and rotund, and had her hair in a high bun that made her look like the granny in Tweety and Sylvester. The woman’s voice filled the room, making everyone turn to look at the immobile silent waiter. Hey, what’s up? What’s wrong with our Fulani prince this time? Can’t he serve a woman? The waiter left Paule’s table, and the owner carried on cursing him: For heaven’s sake, honestly… He returned shortly, a menu in his hand, which he held out to Paule. She smiled at him. He’d played it well. Now that he’d given her the menu, she would be obliged to say what she wanted. Formulate. Verbalize. The order. Paule didn’t want to be beaten that easily. She put the menu on the table and pointed to the hot drink that she would find it agreeable to consume. His highness acknowledged her order with an almost imperceptible nod of the head and moved away. Paule waited to be served before she opened the files that she wanted to look at. One by one, she looked at the photos relating to the sixteen other

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women, jotted a few things down in her notebook, re-read the information that went with the photographs. The sixteen cases had a lot in common. Gender. Social class. Matrimonial status. Skin colour. It couldn’t be a coincidence. It was too striking. Even for those who didn’t like to differentiate, it was visible. She had only seen The Seventeenth from a distance, but she was sure that she belonged to the same category. Paule took a gulp of her tea, which had started to go cold, turned off the computer. Head bent over the white page of her notebook, she seemed to be looking, on this virgin space, for the words with which to say everything. Once she’d done that, she would think about how to go about convincing her editor. Everything in its own time… After a long pause, she began. With the title, as always. With a firm hand, Paule inscribed the words: Tropical storm over the Île de France. This would be the title of her article. She had spent weeks coming up with it. The words that followed didn’t take long to come. She had been carrying them within her ever since she had started to grasp what was happening. It is raining. For several months, the rain has been falling. Showers of flesh. Downpours of blood on the pavements of the Île de France. It is raining bodies of women… All of them were discovered at the foot of the blocks of flats that they lived in. At first, the police thought they were suicide victims. Then, more fell. They lived in different parts of the city, far away from each other, didn’t know each other, their lives probably didn’t even cross. The list of countries that their parents – or the women themselves – came from before settling in France doesn’t indicate what they had in common. Cape Verde. Cameroon. Guadeloupe. Gabon. Haiti. Angola. The Comoros. The Democratic Republic of Congo. Guyana. Florida. Senegal. Brazil. Martinique… The stunning litany of their first names could have been some kind of poem, some kind of ode to femininity. But it is not. On the contrary, it has become a list that darkens our days. And yet they must be named. Before anything else is said about them. We must name them so that we remember that they did not fall from the sky like a surprise storm. Someone orchestrated the deathly avalanche of their corpses onto the concrete of the pavements, the tarmac of the streets. Someone made it rain, in the four corners of the Île de France, someone made it rain down the lifeless bodies of these black women. In fact, things are not quite that simple. We need to A man cleared his throat next to her. Paule looked up. It wasn’t the waiter, who had brought her the bill together with her order. In return, she had put the money – the exact amount – on a corner of the table. The man who was standing opposite her now was a more average height. A peaceful vitality emanated from him. A cheeky smile tugged at his lips, brightening up his

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gaze, creating dimples in the middle of his cheeks. He was wearing beige linen trousers and a sky-blue shirt under a navy-blue jumper. Respectable colours. Conventional. Conservative. I don’t want to impose, he said in a voice that was only semi-serious, but… Can I share your breakfast with you? Paule asked: Why? He shrugged his shoulders: So that we can get to know each other. Paule didn’t say that she was busy, that she had better things to do. She didn’t even think it. The first thing that came to her mind was that a man who wasn’t at work at this time of day had to be at least slightly disreputable, despite his classical appearance. She closed her notebook and put it away in her bag, while the man sat down calmly at her table, apparently taking her silence for permission. He told her that his name was Philippe, catching her attention when he added: I noticed you just now in the crowd. I live right next to the spot where that poor woman was found. Paule quizzed him: Did you know her? Not really, he replied. All I know is that her name was Candace. I wasn’t in a hurry to get to work, after that… In the end they didn’t talk much about the murder. Paule didn’t want to reveal the information that she had, and the man didn’t seem to be able to tell her any more about The Seventeenth. Nothing more than that name: Candace. She told him that the candaces were the black queens of Meroe. Forgotten figures from the ancient history of the African continent. Philippe was fascinated by her knowledge of history. Paule talked a lot, smiled frequently, blushed several times under the heat of Philippe’s gaze. It was he who brought their conversation to an end. He couldn’t stay away from the office for the whole day. He wrote his number down on a paper napkin and took his leave, saying: I hope you’ll call me, and Paule was pleased that he was leaving things up to her. Most men put pressure on her to give them her number. Sometimes she had to give them a fake number to get rid of them, praying that she never saw them again. Philippe had nothing in common with those louts. Of course she would call him, she already wanted to. As she was leaving the café, Paule’s phone rang. It was Erna. Paule told her that she already knew about it. She had been told in an anonymous phone call, had hurried to the scene. Her friend thought she probably shouldn’t have: If they called you, it means you’re being followed. Someone knows that you’re interested in this story, and no doubt also that I’m giving you information. We need to be more cautious. Erna decreed that from that day, they wouldn’t meet in public places any more. And from that minute on, they would communicate by text message, deleting the messages as soon as they read them. That wouldn’t be the panacea, Erna knew, since their conversations could still be retrieved, but they would at least avoid being spied on. Paule sent a text to say: I’m working at home all day today. Erna replied: I’ll come round at about 8 pm. They then erased all traces of the exchange. It

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was nearly one in the afternoon by the time Paule got back to her two-room flat on the rue Pelleport, in the 20th arrondissement. A fine drizzle started falling as she opened the balcony door. She closed it again swiftly. The rain, whatever its intensity, made her hair stand on end. Once she had understood what was going on with the rain-maker, she had started having nightmares in which she saw herself falling, breathtakingly, from the balcony of her flat. She fell interminably, silently, eyes closed. In her dreams, other women tumbled down in the same way, simultaneously, hundreds of apparently dumb, sleeping women. Black women with light skin. Exclusively. All lived alone. All were nearly forty, had been teenagers in the 1980s. All were members of the middle classes, financially independent. None of them had children. The woman shivered, and moved away from the balcony door. These details reminded her that she was an exact match for the victims targeted by the rain-maker. That was part of the reason for her nightmares. To chase away the anxiety that was rising up inside her, she started tidying the papers that were piling up on her desk, the unsharpened pencils, the ball-point pens without their lids. The clearing up rapidly calmed her thoughts. Paule wasn’t good at keeping things tidy, and she was even worse at cleaning. For that, she relied on the services of a cleaning agency, but the results were hardly convincing. She kicked away a clump of dust that was rolling around slowly under her desk, sat down on the chair. She would have a word with the cleaning lady. Before carrying on with her article, Paule decided to note down the elements that had come to mind regarding the rain-maker’s profile. She wrote: 1/ A black man. 2/ Same generation as the victims, who look like girls he might have known. Girls who didn’t pay him any attention. 3/ Single or separated. Probably left by his partner, if separated. 4/ Inferiority complex owing to his skin colour, which is undoubtedly darker than the women’s. 5/ Castration syndrome as well. As indicated by the bank cards slipped into the hands of the victims. Paule paused for a moment. What she had to do now was translate her intuitions into something comprehensible and credible, not only for the readers who didn’t know anything about these matters, but above all, for the chief editor of the newspaper. It would be important to convince him, if she wanted to see her article published. In the rain-maker’s case, ‘castration syndrome’ didn’t refer simply to the syndrome to which a large number of men were falling victim in a society that was still unequal, but in which women were expressing their demands ever more urgently. Rather, it was about the pain of the black man, who, living in a patriarchal environment, saw himself refused the privileges enjoyed by his Caucasian fellow creatures. The Caucasian, who was in a position of power owing to history and strength in numbers – his majority status – clearly didn’t want to share his heritage

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with non-white males. You only needed to turn on your television to see that ethnic diversity was usually manifested in feminine form, with the exception of the sports news. Black women seemed to climb the social ladder quickly, achieving high-up positions, while their male alter-egos wasted away their lives weaving between policemen authorized to carry out checks on them from morning till evening. Paule didn’t know how to present these issues. What proof to offer. There were no statistics. Her knowledge on the topic was empirical. In addition, in drawing attention to the malaise of these men, it was important not to give the impression that the rain-maker’s victims were, in some way, responsible for what happened to them. What was really needed was a series of articles, a special report, allowing the reader to grasp all the complexities of the situation. She sighed, reflecting that the newspaper’s editorial board would never agree to devote a special issue to the private life of blacks in France. People were only just beginning to develop an interest in how they came to be there. An analysis of the consequences of their presence on the psyche wasn’t something anyone was looking for. She mulled the problem over for a while and decided that she had to go ahead, even if it meant submitting her articles to a publisher, if the newspaper refused to touch them. She could even publish them online on a blog. Paule decided to tackle the murderer’s modus operandi. 1/ He wins their confidence. 2/ He visits them at theirs. 3/ The women are unconscious when they fall. 4/ It is when they hit the ground that they die. 5/ The man then goes down to arrange his tableau. 6/ He applies make-up to the women’s faces (using waterproof products). 7/ He turns them over so that they are discovered face-down, as if they were eating dirt. 8/ He slips a bank card into their right hand – it’s always one of their own. 9/ He hides a sophisticated mechanism underneath the women’s bodies, unleashing music as soon as they are moved – the man has good technical capabilities; has he done advanced studies? 10/ He doesn’t leave any traces that can be of any use to the police, operates at night. And now, what should she say about the victims? Paule found writing about them difficult. It was like writing about herself, and it made her ill at ease. She couldn’t distance herself sufficiently from them, and was still trying to work out what to write when the doorbell rang. She checked the time before getting up and going to the door: 8:30 pm. It was true that she’d had a break or two, had made herself a cup of tea, but apart from that, she didn’t feel that she’d been shirking. And yet, she hadn’t really made much progress. Erna’s distorted image appeared in the peephole. Paule quickly opened the door and gave her friend a kiss on the cheek. Her visitor seemed agitated. What’s going on? You were right, Erna replied, the girl’s name was Candace. What you don’t know, though, is that this time something went

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very wrong. He didn’t have time to put any make-up on her… But the main thing is, Candace is in a coma. We’re hoping that she’ll wake up, but there’s not a huge chance of her remembering anything. Erna sat down on the sofa to get her breath back. In her nervousness, she was crushing the paper bag that she was clutching, and Paule eased it out of her hands. She had come via the local Thai restaurant. Paule thanked her for bringing the food and tried to calm her down, offering her a drink. I’d like a scotch, if you’ve got any left. Erna couldn’t relax. Like Paule, she was all over the place because of the rain-maker case. Candace, she revealed, had had a visitor while the murderer was with her. That had disturbed the proceedings. The man had had to sort out the problem before he could finish dealing with the one he was really interested in. You mean there are two bodies? Paule exclaimed. Erna nodded and added: A neighbour was discovered in the bathroom, her face all swollen, her body covered in bruises. He beat her, then suffocated her. Paule observed: You’re calling him a ‘he’, aren’t you. We still don’t have confirmation of that, Erna admitted, but I don’t see how a woman could have committed such a horrific crime. Paule almost exploded, unable to understand how a policewoman like Erna, who spent all her time hunting criminals, could still be under any illusions concerning the kind of violence that women were capable of. It’s not the violence that tells us what sex the murderer is, Paule explained. It’s the other details… Once again, she set out her ideas. For Erna, it wasn’t enough. I don’t see what that proves, she said. It could just as easily have been a woman with dark skin who committed the crimes out of jealousy. Paule argued that a woman wouldn’t have bothered to apply make-up to the victims in the way that the rain-maker had. The position he leaves them in has a double significance: they look the way they were when they were unavailable, and they also look the way he would have wanted them to be. What do you mean? asked Erna. Beautiful and submissive, Paule murmured. Magnificent, and at his mercy. That’s what placing them face-down signifies: submission. Erna repeated her doubts about Paule’s theory. In her opinion, putting make-up on the faces of women with fractured skulls had nothing to do with preserving their beauty, but was more about deriding them. And that, you see, is something a woman would do. Well, as I said, we don’t have any tangible information about the killer. Paule got up and went to serve up the meal. From the kitchen, where she was emptying the little containers on to plates, she called: OK, I’ll need to have another serious think about it all. Do you want to come through? We’ll eat in here. Erna came to join her. As they took their first mouthfuls of spicy green papaya and mango salad, Paule admitted that she needed to clear some mental space. She had got too close to this case, and she needed to step back. Oh, I don’t believe it, she

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cried suddenly, I completely forgot to tell you about Philippe! Erna looked at her in surprise, and Paule talked and talked and talked. Even more than she had when she had talked about the candaces, the powerful warrior queens of Meroe. Paule’s eyes shone as she admitted that she perhaps hadn’t been concentrating on work that day because of this man, Philippe, who she couldn’t stop thinking about. She had almost had to sit on her hands to stop herself calling him, was already realizing how difficult it would be to let several days go by before contacting him. He could call you, couldn’t he? Erna asked. No, he couldn’t, I didn’t give him my number… And Paule carried on talking, about his class, the unbelievable stylishness of a man who had known to propose and wait for woman to dispose. She told Erna about his mischievous dimples. His deep male voice, devoid of harshness. When her friend left her and she went to bed, she had wet, but not bloody, dreams… In the days that followed, Paule went to work at the newspaper and tried to take an interest in the different and diverse topics that were suggested to her. She wrote about the merchant banks’ redundancy schemes, the Wall Street occupation, the Spanish property crisis, unemployment among recent graduates, the circular issued by Claude Guéant forcing students from outside the EU to return home after graduation. Societal issues were as numerous as they were depressing. Needless to say, the rain-maker’s victims and their relatives were never far from her mind, but she was no longer so sure of the angle to take when writing about the case. The profile of the killer, as she had drawn it, still seemed valid to her. But Erna’s reservations didn’t leave her indifferent, and she felt the need for caution. Before informing the public she needed more than suppositions: she needed proof. And she didn’t have any. On the evening that Erna had come to visit her, bringing a USB stick with photos of Candace and details of what had been found at the crime scene, Paule had told Erna a little bit about the article that she’d started writing. When she heard the title, Erna had pulled a face: OK, so ‘tropical storm’ is a nice metaphor for the case, but doesn’t it risk presenting these women as coming from far-away places? Most of them were French nationals. It’s important that the public identifies with them as such. Paule had replied that yes, that pitfall did exist. But she didn’t think it was a problem, since France wasn’t limited to metropolitan France, a fact that people often forgot. Besides, the reference to the tropics carried the advantage of not raising the colour issue straight away, even if it would be difficult, given the vocabulary that was in common use, to avoid presenting the women as black. It was also feasible that the rain-maker’s victims had kept some elements of their original cultures, transmitted by their parents. A bit drily, Erna remarked: It might be feasible, but it’s not a fact. Writing the article would amount to setting a large

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cat among the pigeons in the police force. The best thing would be to exercise full caution and not say anything that might be discredited later. From the beginning, Erna had supported Paule and had helped her in all sorts of ways, at her own risk. That was why Paule made it her business to listen to her friend and take her questions and warnings into account. As a result, Paule’s article was now at a standstill. What wasn’t at a standstill, on the other hand, was her relationship with Philippe. She had phoned him after a few days. They had seen each other again, had had lunch together several times, the man leaving his office in La Défense to meet Paule near the Opera. Away from the eyes of their respective colleagues, they had flirted softly with each other, telling each other about their childhoods, recounting stories about their families. Once, when they had been sitting in the Japanese restaurant that had become their canteen, the man had tried to tell her about the sounds that you could play on a queen conch. As he didn’t have a shell on which to demonstrate, he had ululated in the middle of the meal, sending Paule into hysterical laughter and almost making her knock over the table. Out of politeness, the businessmen who were nibbling at their sushi hadn’t said anything, but their conviction that people like that didn’t know how to behave had been clearly reflected in the eyes of their white faces. Paule and Philippe had left the restaurant and walked for a bit, still conversing about this and that. They had said goodbye on the platform of Auber station and had agreed to meet for their first evening out. It was he who had suggested going to see Desdemona, by Toni Morrison, at the Amandiers theatre. Paule’s life had been bathed in a new brightness since meeting Philippe. It had been a long time since she had gone out with anyone, and she had put love away in a double-locked safe, replacing caresses and kisses with caramel- or cherry-filled chocolates. Sometimes, when the chocolate started to make her feel sick, she replaced it with ice-cream, with a preference for vanilla or rum and raisin. More than anything, it was work that kept her busy. The intrusion of Philippe on this perfectly balanced mechanism blew a light breeze over her life. When they had embraced after the theatre, he had given her the name Golden, running his hand with infinite tenderness through her coppery hair. This nickname, so original, had given her the feeling that she was someone special. Unique. Paule would soon need more than just kisses. The slightest chance of a meeting with Philippe resulted in her spending hours in front of her wardrobe, and often gave rise to an appalling realization: I haven’t got anything to wear. To solve the problem, Paule decided to go shopping after work. She knew just the place to go to avoid getting hung up about her weight. Size 16 was far from obese, but a lot of clothes were only available in sizes up to 14. But she knew a great shop, in the rue du Four, not far from Robert

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Clergerie’s flagship store. Perhaps she would pop in. She felt like going crazy. Paule looked up at Olivier Pierre Angilles, her colleague, who had apparently been talking to her. She hadn’t heard a word. You’re away with the fairies, my dear, he said, annoyed that she wasn’t giving him her full attention. O.P.A. liked being the centre of the world. She smiled, but didn’t ask him to repeat what he had said. Whatever he’d said didn’t matter much. In the rue du Four shop, Paule tried on dozens of dresses, and ended up buying three, which she paid for on her credit card. It came to 800 euros. Plump women obviously had to pay the price of their nonconformity. She picked up the dresses, which had been wrapped in silk paper and packed into boxes, and went out into the street cheerily. It was half-past seven in the evening, and the cafés all around were buzzing with casual conversations, which echoed off the warm tarmac. The city was alive, hot. Paule didn’t feel like heading home straight away. She walked to the Gare Montparnasse, her gaze resting on couples who were holding hands, or who were sitting opposite each other in the bistros, smiling at each other over their menus. When she reached her destination, the woman jumped on the 96 bus. She liked this bus route, which crossed Paris from west to east or vice versa, going via some of her favourite spots. She got off in the avenue Gambetta, and walked the rest of the way to rue Pelleport, where she lived in a flat at the top of the hill. Paule was a little out of breath when she went past the caretaker’s lodge, which was closed at this time of the evening. She didn’t feel like climbing the steps to her fifth-floor flat, and took the lift instead. A shiver went through her when she got to her front door: she thought she could hear a noise coming from inside her flat. The woman shook her head, thought about the lentil soup that she would reheat for dinner, vowed not to touch a single chocolate, and turned her key in the lock. The packages containing her clothes almost fell from her hands. The table that had pride of place in a corner of the sitting room had been laid. Two red candles were shining orange halos of light on to the immaculate tablecloth. Silver cutlery and wine glasses were sparkling in the semi-darkness. A smell of roast chicken filled the air. As she reached out for the switch to turn on the lights, a man’s voice, devoid of harshness but firm, called out from the kitchen: Don’t turn the lights on. Come in here. Paule closed the door behind her, sensing that her legs were giving way, not sure what she felt. She walked towards the kitchen as instructed, and found Philippe busy making a salad with heirloom tomato varieties – Black Crimea, Rose de Berne and Golden Delicious. He had chopped some fresh basil, and the smell perfumed the room. And yet Paule didn’t like what she saw. Her voice was icy as she asked: How did you get into my flat? He looked up at her, smiled, wiped his hands on the apron that he must have brought with him

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along with everything else, opened the bottle of balsamic vinegar, smelt it, smiled again, said that it hadn’t been difficult. Paule watched him laughing, feeling her muscles tensing one by one. His manner was odd, different to how it normally was, and she decided that it would be wiser to keep calm, above all not to scream like she wanted to, or to make a run for the door. At the same time, there was no point pretending to be pleased, and she said: I don’t like the way you’ve admitted yourself into my flat. Philippe shrugged sheepishly. I just wanted to surprise you. I’ll go straight after dinner, but please, Golden, don’t look at me like that and don’t use such formal language… Paule nodded to express her agreement, but she couldn’t relax straight away. By getting into her flat without her knowing, the man was moving things on faster than she wanted, but that wasn’t the only thing that was bothering her. If she had wanted to, there was no way she could have got into Philippe’s flat: she didn’t know where he lived. Philippe had just needed to see her home in a taxi, the evening that they’d been to see Desdemona, to work out where she lived. To know exactly where she lived. That evening, she had thought his insistence on her being dropped first charming. Now, she was less pleased. Leaning back against the door frame, she carried on watching him, unable to decide what to do. Still looking embarrassed, almost sad, he suggested she go and have a bath to relax while he put the finishing touches to the dinner. He had planned a poulet de Bresse, which was roasting in the oven, and, for dessert, a fruit mousse, which he hadn’t made himself but which wasn’t bad at all. They would eat together and then he would disappear, if that was what she wanted. The woman nodded in agreement. Once in the bathroom, she tried again to decide how to behave. This intrusion into her home felt like an assault. Paule sent a text to Erna: Philippe is at mine. Something’s bothering me. Please can you come over? Her friend’s reply came through almost immediately: On a case. I’ll come as soon as possible. Paule ran a bath and slipped into it, shivering. She heard Philippe whistling, which wound her up even more, but she didn’t want to make a scene. When she reappeared, wearing a loose dress made of adire cloth, he was in the living room, had opened a bottle of wine and was serving the tomatoes as a starter. Paule sat down opposite him, emptied the glass of wine that he had already poured for her, and asked for more. They started eating without exchanging a word, and then, after several minutes, Paule burst out laughing. I’m sorry, she said, I’m being so silly… Your salad is delicious. That’s great, Philippe replied simply. Wait until you taste the chicken. I’m serving it with a sweet potato mash. When Philippe went out to the kitchen to fetch the plat de résistance, Paule put on some music. A sweet lethargy was coming over her, she thought she’d probably drunk too much, which made her laugh again. The first notes of

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Hanging on a String by the English group Loose Ends wafted into the room, and she began to dance, staggering around cheerfully. It was in this state that Philippe found her. He put the plates on the table, each in their proper place, and came and put an arm around her. We can dance afterwards, if you like? I don’t want the food to get cold. She kissed him, saying: I haven’t even said hello properly. I really am all over the place… He returned her kiss and said: You’re fabulous. I don’t understand why you’re single. Paule moved away from him, laughing, sat down at the table. She said: I hadn’t met you yet. The rest of the meal was spent in the warm ambience that characterized their usual meetings. They did justice to the Bresse chicken, which Philippe had marinated in spices before roasting. The sweet potatoes had been carefully selected. Their flesh was delicate and not overly sweet. There wasn’t a crumb of the feast left and not a drop left in the bottle of wine, when the man whispered: You’re more cunning than the others. This evening is the first time that anyone’s ever given that reply: I hadn’t met you yet. You almost had me there. There wasn’t any fruit mousse. Paule wouldn’t have been able to eat it anyway. Her muscles were paralysed. Unable to move even her little finger but fully conscious, she heard Philippe’s words, which didn’t call for any response. Soon, she fell from her chair, thinking, as her body hit the floor: I was wrong. They weren’t unconscious when they fell. The man carried on talking. Sitting on the floor, right next to Paule, he whispered, putting on a harsh, muffled voice: The Seventeenth is on the rue du Renard. Hurry… He chuckled. Of course I had spotted you, Golden. Even before I came to talk to you the first time, I knew where you lived. I knew everything about you. Well, everything that I needed to know. Very quickly, I decided that you would be The Eighteenth. The one who would complete my second Ennead. You are a top-quality item. A veritable trophy. Where I come from, we call light-skinned girls like you, we call them golden Chabines. Philippe carried on talking, confessing the unspeakable. The girls with light skin who’d treated him as if he were see-through, invisible. The girls from his youth, the girls from his whole life, that could be admired but not touched. All the women who, in their prime, preferred to live alone, rather than with a man like him, who longed for them. OK, so sometimes they want to have sex. When asked why they weren’t in a couple, all of them had replied that they hadn’t found the right one. That special someone. That kindred spirit. Preferred being alone, to being with the wrong one. Can you tell me what that means, ‘being with the wrong one’? Those women were pickier than the heron in the fable. No-one was good enough for them. Not cultured enough. Not wealthy enough. Not presentable. Not from the same background. What would Paule have said, if he’d told her that he was actually just an electrician? A craftsman who loved

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books and the theatre, yes, but only that: an electrician. No doubt she would have run away as fast as she could wanting to protect her life insurance, the little flat which she paid for herself, her singles holidays, her Christmas bonuses. She would have curled up into her loneliness rather than open up to him. And this country would have helped her, too. This country that liked black women, and wanted to save them, wherever they were, from these men who were decidedly lacking. From the Sahel to the Parisian suburbs, it was only the women who were given the opportunities. That was all well and good, but the whites, when they wanted black women, preferred the ones with dark skin. We’re the only ones that dream of you, and you’re more difficult to please than white women. As far as romance went, the country didn’t have anything to offer Paule. There weren’t enough black men in the higher social classes. I almost believed that you were different. And then, you looked at me that way, just now. The same way that all the women do when they find me at theirs. The distrust. The fear. As if I was a wild beast. Philippe whispered that, for Paule, as he’d spent such good times with her, he’d chosen one of his favourite songs. Sign your Name by Terence Trent D’Arby. It was still a bit early, but he wanted them to listen to it together. Afterwards, he would put a beautiful dress on her and make her fall from on high. Fall from her pedestal. Descend from her greatness. He had read her notes, found the name of rain-maker that she had given him rather poetic. He had been touched. She really was someone a bit special, and he liked her curves. Things could have been so different between them. If only she hadn’t looked at him that way. He put on the song and got up. I need to do the cleaning. You know I don’t leave any traces behind. Huh, doudou, you know that, don’t you? Paule didn’t see him put on his pair of gloves. A tear had crystallized in the corner of her eye as if it, too, was paralysed. The woman could only cry inside. Her screams lodged at the back of her throat and, soon, they became the only thing she could hear. Nothing, except this imprisoned howling inside her chest. Philippe was getting ready to push her into the void when there was an insistent ringing on the doorbell. A car had just gone past, he had seen it disappear towards the rue de Belleville, had waited a few moments before grabbing Paule by the legs. He put her down gently on the balcony floor. Paule wanted to close her eyes so that she didn’t have to watch him leaning against the wall, looking at the front door. He had no intention of opening it. The visitor would eventually go away. The man remained silent. They both heard a car park at the bottom of the block of flats, heard someone get out, say something to the driver. The car didn’t leave. Philippe muttered a swear word, tiptoed towards the door. Placing his ear against the wood, he listened. Someone was trying to force the lock. The mechanism wasn’t complex

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enough to resist for long. He looked at his watch. It was nearly 2 a.m. It had taken the man a long time to clean everything, tidy away the crockery that he had brought, put on disposable slippers, scrub down the floor and all of the furniture that he had touched. After that, he had rummaged in the wardrobe, chosen an outfit for Paule. He had undressed her and then put on the adire dress that she had been wearing that evening over his shirt. That way, when he threw her out into the void, his own clothes wouldn’t leave any fibres on the victim’s body. When he lifted them up to make them ‘fall from on high’, as he liked to put it, he had to clasp them close to himself. Their bodies rubbed together, and that was why he had taken to wearing the victim’s clothes, which he then kept. When he had had to open the door to Candace’s neighbour because she was screaming and knocking on the door, he had been wearing an apple-green blouse and a saroual that was a bit too tight. The visitor hadn’t had time to laugh. That bitch had given him loads of extra work. He had had to start cleaning all over again, and that had made him waste precious time. Philippe had had to do a slapdash job. He’d more or less chucked Candace out of the window, had sprinted down to turn her over, hadn’t put any make-up on her, hadn’t put her gold credit card in her hand, had just slipped the musical mechanism under her body and run away with the feeling that he’d only half-finished the job. He was determined that things wouldn’t happen that way with Paule, his golden Chabine, the showpiece of his second Ennead. Philippe had a quick think. He stepped nimbly back on to the balcony and closed the door behind him. It was dark in the flat. Whoever was trying to force the lock would have no reason to look on the balcony. If it was a stranger, it would be a burglar, who would just want to take whatever he wanted and scarper as quickly as possible. If it was one of Paule’s friends, she would call out for her, look inside all of the rooms inside the flat. In either case, he would have time to carry out his plan. The most important thing was to keep his cool. Erna was just smashing through the front door when Philippe remembered that there was a car parked down in the street, right in front of the block of flats, and that there was someone inside it. Translated by Kathryn Batchelor

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The Squirrels of Wannsee Abdourahman A. Waberi

Abdourahman A. Waberi: The Squirrels of Wannsee

I feel good wherever the shadow of priestess Frau Ras Maskan precedes me, inviting me to place my steps securely in hers. And I have to say that in Berlin, I feel especially good in her company. As I remember it, it is through the eyes of Ras Maskan that I discovered the capital for the first time a good dozen years ago or so, and after each visit, a new page, a new layer of our common past has been revealed to me. Like opening the door to an abandoned garden. I arrived in Berlin three days ago, and to be frank, I was in a singular psychic state. Berlin had the distinct advantage of being the final stop on a long concert tour that, week by week, month by month, broke up the band. The lack of privacy, stress and fatigue had left their indelible marks on One Love, the band that I started four and a half years ago. And to put the icing on the cake, I had to keep a sharp eye on our pianist who was in great danger, overtaken as he was by his old demons. As for our Bahianese drummer Zé Preto, he had dumped us in Hamburg. Just up and left without any explanation at all. We recently learned from a Swedish journalist that he had joined the Odun Ifa band, a Scandinavian quartet that had just raised Fela to the level of pantheonic Afropunk god. On tour, bad luck never left us. And guess what I did when I got off the plane? I took a taxi to Tegel and twenty minutes later, I was literally in the arms of Frau Ras Maskan. As she welcomed me in, Frau Ras Maskan whispered that Berlin is nothing like the cold and empty city drowned in fog depicted in those 1950s espionage 196

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films. I drank her words with the same fervour as I swallowed the fragrant tea so graciously served by the house of Arkin Dede. I felt as if I were being reborn: the air, the light, the surrounding commotion kept me company. It was enough just to be alive there – amidst a crowd of strangers. Frau Ras Maskan knows everybody in this part of the city, and in Kreuzberg everyone has a word or a smile for this tiny spring-mounted bit of a woman. Nothing escapes her attention. Her headquarters are none other than the Turkish Café Arkin Dede. For anyone who keeps an ear cocked as she does, Berlin is crawling with life by day and especially by night. Strangely for a metropolis criss-crossed with buses, trains, metro lines and straw-coloured yellow taxis, the wooded areas of Berlin teem with wild animals. Wild boars, stags, reptiles and even wolves have retaken a territory once lost to human conquest. That man no longer rules the centre of the city is an idea that I find particularly pleasing, she announced to no one in particular, attracting the attention of all present like a magnet draws iron shavings. That one section of urban space is now reoccupied by man’s feathered, winged, webbed and horned brothers really pleases me, she clucked, touching one of the long braids that are like the dreads of Patrice and B-Tight, two afrodeutscher artist friends. Men, plants and animals coexist in the big parks of Tiergarten and Grunewald. Frau Ras Maskan has told me over and over again that the Berlin of today is nothing like the prudish and conventional metropolis of Munich. And yet it is not free from the stain of colonialism. Certainly, it was not like London, Paris, Lisbon or Madrid, at the heart of a vast empire. But when Germany threw itself into colonial predation, she did it with a vigour that was all Prussian. Do you know, she asks me with a gesture, that quite near here, in my so-called Turkish Kreutzberg neighbourhood, there is a little street that follows the Spree river and that carries the gentle name of Otto Friedrich von der Gröben. Few school children know that this baron faced many a storm in order to reach the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana). On 1 January 1683, the standard of the Prussian eagle was raised above the colonial fort that Gröben built. So you see that here too, we have had our share of adventurers, explorers and missionaries. If I keep returning to Berlin to recharge my emotional batteries, it is to see my priestess again and inhale the mildewed residue of the history that I have inherited. I never tire of roaming its wide avenues traveled by the North Wind. Nor of admiring its sky scattered with stars, peopled with spirits, permanently inhabited by humans and by ghosts like Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck who oversaw the division of the African continent and allowed tiny Belgium to devour the vast Kongo territories. And now my inner ear unexpectedly opens up. And I can hear columns of birds rising to

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the firmament. I listen to their martial whistling, the beating of their wings. The past is here, just below the pavement. I feel the four fangs of the boar at my flank. I fear the return of the vulture with its demonic profile. Deep inside me, I know that Berlin’s nights do not frighten the innocent who have nothing to fear from the tribunal of history. The trick is to keep our personal opinions at bay and to gaze discerningly upon the German past as Frau Ras Maskan encourages us to. Yes, I remember my second-to-last stay in Berlin. It was just after the weather had cleared in Paris. Berlin lay under a shower of stars. If I were attempting to wax poetic, I would say that the left hand of Providence was trying to pour its inkpot onto the blue of the Berlin sky. But the right hand did what it was supposed to do. Instead of turning black, the sky made itself quite beautiful. Quite blue. An ardent blue. Beneath that sky of bluish crystal, summer and autumn declared a truce and the Maria am Ostbahnhof nightclub lived up to its reputation. It was still there, true to its musical vows. Sheltering the same warm and valiant heart that beats time in each and every season. The first night, the crowd was very enthusiastic, although of modest proportions. It warmed the pianist’s heart, and he was smiling as I have rarely seen him do since. And as if by contagion, my spirits were lifted too. Just like in the old days. In the days when I still enjoyed spending the night in his company. I had the strength to face the weariness of being on tour, and the resilience required to accomplish my mission on this earth: to remain friends with this tormented and genial pianist. And we had witnessed an extraordinary event during our stay. While the television cameras of the entire world were permanently trained on Knut, the little polar bear cub of the Zoologischen Garten, other, more ferocious animals walked with the ghosts of Nama and Herero, exterminated at the dawn of the twentieth century by German colonists. More than once, my bedazzled eyes saw their skeletal silhouettes strolling down the Ku’Dam or walking up Unter den Linden. The mascot of the Berlin zoo had become a planetary figure in just a few days. He was holy dough for the ad agencies. Everybody was vying for his attention. He had been given an outrageous nickname. They call him ‘The Emperor’. Kaiser Knut headlined Bild, the most lyrical of the German dailies. The phenomenon that the world press named Knutmania tested his direct competitors severely. Those idiotic journalists repeated that his fame would outshine the renown of the Queen of England, the fortune of the Pope in Rome and the sparkle of Michael Jackson. If you don’t believe me, the polar bear cub was born on 5 December 2006. From above, Our Lord, in his infinite goodness, called him back to his side on

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19 May 2011. I don’t know whether Papa Legba will also allow him to ascend to the seventh heaven of the holy. I like to think that the little cub could be cuddling in the arms of Michael Jackson, who died on 25 June 2009. The mansion that houses the American Academy of Berlin is located in the suburb of Wannsee. Accessible by train, it is perfect for retiring and rehearsing. So we went to Wannsee, to its lake, its holiday homes, its deep and tranquil forests. We had spread out there, since space is not lacking in the mansion. The pianist and the whole band slept and rehearsed on the first floor. I used to tease the squirrels that live in the grounds. Something unusual stood out while I was playing with the squirrels. I was able to catch one squirrel after another without much effort on my part. Usually, squirrels are little pests that scamper up to the tops of trees in just a few seconds. But the ones living on the grounds were strangely slow to run away. It didn’t take me long to figure out that their little bodies were carrying the burden of all the suffering of the past. It didn’t take me long to feel enormous compassion for the squirrels, who were distraught but helpless, and to understand that the mansion has a long history behind it, of the kind that leaves few traces in the annals of history. It had belonged to the family of the banker and philanthropist Hans Arnhold whose tumultuous life is tied to twentieth-century Berlin’s tragic history. Few visitors know that it was in Wannsee, in one of these grand hotels that border the lake, that the important officials of the Third Reich took the decision to launch the Final Solution and its cortege of catastrophes. The squirrels had lost their agility and perhaps their ability to sleep as well. From the upstairs windows I could hear a sad melody that seemed to come straight out of Chet Baker’s trumpet. I felt my legs start to shake for no apparent reason. Was it a bad omen, or just that night had abruptly started to fall. I had made up my mind to leave the squirrels with their torments. I was just about to go up to my room when out on the steps a volley of sad notes rose to greet me. The trumpet player was drawing his inspiration from Chet, a victim of suicide. The American Academy of Berlin opens its doors to researchers and foreign artists who wish to live and work in the capital. The studio apartment that I occupied with the pianist was on the first floor. It looks just like a small apartment in a Manhattan or Kansas City condominium. The set-up was comfortable, spacious and well equipped. There was a big bed, a bright sitting room, a bathroom and a little corner kitchen. A Mac computer connected to the Internet, a miniature stereo system and a high-tech television set diminished the spartan aspects of this residence for learned monks. The highlight is the view of the vast manicured gardens, and beyond that,

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the lake, where pleasure boats glide lazily over an iridescent blue canvas on breezes that blow in from the surrounding forests. Sculptures in the classical style hide under the great oaks leading to the front steps of the mansion. The classical décor is a constant reminder that you are not just anywhere. And that you are probably not just anyone. I relished those infinitesimal instants when my mind would fly from continent to continent, from epoch to epoch, from the genocide of the Herero people of Namibia to the pogrom of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. For the band, Wannsee is at the ends of the earth; you need a taxi, a good hour and a half, and some banknotes in your back pocket. In Berlin as well, the pianist had given us the slip. He didn’t like the quiet of the mansion. I’m going to go see the real people who live nearby he had warned us without going into too much detail on the subject. Of course, we were very worried, but stubborn as he is, we knew that the worst thing we could do would be to try to hold him back. He had slipped away late in the afternoon with one of the other musicians. We knew that they had checked into the Savoy hotel, a chic establishment located in the Charlottenburg district, a crow’s flight from the zoo. The next morning, we showed up early at the hotel. We were counting on finding the pianist and his musician in the lobby of the Savoy. The musician was there. But not the pianist. He had not bothered to come down to breakfast, we were told. He wasn’t in his room either. He had to have taken off in the middle of the night, or perhaps he had stolen away at sunrise. Nobody knew where the pianist was holed up. The journalists and the tour organizers could no longer contain themselves. Their insurance certainly did not cover this type of mishap. So where was he? Where did he go? In vain, the question ricocheted off our temples. We lost ourselves in speculation. Is he hiding in a Prenzlauer Berg bar, in the arms of a new lover or cloistered somewhere, trying to find a vein to shoot up? In the newspapers, the polar bear cub was the only newsworthy topic. At his birth, Knut had been rejected by his mother Tosca, who herself had been born in a zoo in Canada. The scientists admitted that they did not know the reasons why the mother had ignored Knut and his nameless brother. Certainly their father Lars was thirteen years older than Tosca. But that did not constitute reason enough to explain why Tosca would deprive her offspring of her affection. Because of this unprecedented rejection, Knut and his nameless brother were rescued by the keepers of the Berlin zoo. Probably panic stricken, the two little bears had crept to the back of a cave that was difficult to get to. It had taken all the skill of the two employees armed with a long fishing pole in order to pry them from the jaws of death. Four days later, Knut’s nameless

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brother was found dead. At that precise moment, I knew that Knut would meet a destiny uncommon for a bear. The sceptics firmly believe what they read in their papers in the early morning hours before they gulp down their café au lait and duck into the city’s circular train line. Knut’s nameless brother had been overcome by a pulmonary infection, the official communiqué briefly announced. I will not lift my snout in an effort to persuade the sceptics to the contrary. Although he had been coddled considerably by the staff at the Zoologischen Garten, Knut had been the size of a guinea pig when he was born. His life had hung by a thread. No problem! Impossibility is not acceptable in Berlin! Desperate times require desperate measures! For forty days, he had lain in an incubator. Thomas Dörflein, his guardian angel, watched over the future emperor morning, noon and night. He slept with him, ate with him. And above all, he played with him while days passed into night. Washed, brushed and pampered like a little prince, Knut had been presented to the public on 23 March 2007. For the sceptics, Knut had been born on that particular day. Over 400 journalists from all over the world had taken their stations in front of the bars of Berlin’s main zoo. Flashbulbs snapped endlessly. Envoys wearing orange armbands took it all down in little notebooks so that they could report on the fairy tale live. Others typed frenetically on the keyboards of their laptops, while still others filmed Knut’s every movement. If he raised a paw over his head, there was a mad dash to the zoo. 23 March 2007 was baptized Emperor Knut Day, or more mundanely Knut Day. From Boston to Bangkok, thousands of children went to bed the following night with a stuffed bear the same size and the same snowy colour as Knut. You could bet that those children would grow old, and that before death overtook them, they would ask to be put in the ground with only their stuffed Knuts for company. On that 23 March 2007, the pianist had not followed Knut’s crazy day as everyone else had. He had not heard how Knut had been bottle fed by Thomas Dörflein and his co-workers. How he had regained his strength with a special porridge prepared just for him. It was a reinvigorating mush made from cat food and cod liver oil, enriched with an array of vitamins. The pianist had heard nothing about Knut’s two daily appearances before the international press corps, like a princess at her crowning and seconded by Thomas Dörflein, his guardian angel. At the smallest glitch in this princely agenda, the entire panic-stricken media would spread the word, peddling dire rumours about the baby bear. The pianist would never have imagined how the media had been so quick to bury Knut, sealing his fate on that 16 April 2007, after taking a ludicrous leap of faith.

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That morning Knut had been standing at a slight distance from the enclosure where the public was used to seeing him on display. And immediately, a rumour concerning a fatal illness from which Knut was supposedly suffering raced around the globe. It spread like wildfire in the blogosphere. A Japanese journalist thought he had heard that the little polar bear cub would not make it through the night, and all Japan was in turmoil. The sceptics rushed to pray to Saint Rita, the patron saint of desperate causes and terminal illnesses. The truth was much simpler. Knut was suffering from a slight teething problem. The upper right canine had been emitting signals to the cortex. A few hours later, the pain was forgotten thanks to the attentive care of the gentle Thomas Dörflein. From Tel-Aviv to Rio, children were falling asleep with their beloved teddy bears in their arms. About all that, the pianist had known nothing. He had been missing for three days and as many nights. The searches undertaken by Frau Ras Maskan had come up with nothing. The concert in the Maria Club was now just a distant memory. Three days later, the city police found his body in a cellar in Schöneberg. How he had made it to that squalid hole nobody knew. They found a pipe, a Buddha ashtray, a piece of aluminium foil and his old army lighter. Translated by Jeanne Garane

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Francastérix1 Wilfried N’Sondé

Wilfried N’Sondé: Francastérix

I left Paris and the region of Île-de-France for Berlin at the beginning of the 1990s. Seduced by the prospect of living history in the moment, it was in this city that only a few years later would become the capital of reunified Germany, and on the ruins of the Berlin Wall, that I seized the opportunity to finally become the creator and master of my own image and identity. Ever since the end of the hostilities in 1945, Berliners were accustomed to rubbing shoulders with Afro-American soldiers, based in the enormous barracks, close to the southern border of the city. At the end of the week, GIs would parade on Kurfürstendamm, at the wheel of their luxury cars, registered in Illinois, the State of New York or South Carolina, hip-hop music blasting from the loudspeakers, sporting baseball caps, their bulging biceps hanging ostentatiously alongside the car doors. Beginning in the early 1980s, asylum seekers from Africa gathered at the foot of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a black building, half of it destroyed, and bearing the scars of the last battles between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. There was also a small group of very active Caribbeans and Latin Americans, quite 1 An earlier version of this text was published in French in the Nouvelle Revue Française in May 2011. Asterix is of course the eponymous hero in the French comic books written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo, whose multiple adventures defending the Gauls from various Roman attacks are the subject of each volume in the series.

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well-known in the music world. This is more or less what a ‘black’ person corresponded to in the mind of the average Berliner at the time. As soon as I landed on this cultural landscape, I was considered different. Somewhere between an enigma and a curiosity, in many respects a question mark hung over me. A French man, of dark-brown complexion, holding degrees from Parisian universities… In Berlin, I resembled nothing with which they were familiar. I was a novelty, an empty rubric for which no previous category existed, no clear label. Few prejudices could be attributed to me and this was an advantage. The general ignorance made it easy for me to completely reinvent myself. There were no preconceived ideas to contend with, no intellectual aberrations from another time to lament. This distance, moreover, made it easier for me to begin to understand the archaisms and contradictions that were specific to French culture. I realized that the decision to come to Germany had allowed me to finally distance myself from a kind of hexagonal schizophrenia: that of being at once a French citizen whose equal rights were clearly and loudly affirmed but yet whose skin colour gave rise to such great rants and ravings that I became increasingly sceptical of what was still being taught at university. Only too accustomed to police checks and the standard disregard for formalities and the patronizing use of the familiar ‘tu’, I quickly had to learn to answer their stupid questions and accept the humiliation if only to avoid a more serious incident. I soon came to realize that this recurrent police harassment was inversely proportionate to the whiteness of one’s complexion. My bodily levels of melanin in fact meant: ‘Watch out for me, I am a delinquent!’ Students of fairer complexion were never asked to prove their identity. We shared the same benches in the Sorbonne’s amphitheatres, attended the same classes, but I had a harder time declaring that I was French. To be honest, many of them had a hard time believing me… It was in Berlin that I pronounced for the first time, albeit reluctantly, the words ‘I am French!’ In Paris, the process of combining these three words was repeatedly blocked somewhere on the journey from the brain to the throat. I just couldn’t feel it. Something rang false. The words would not come out. I was afraid of being ridiculed, of coming up pathetically against a false note, especially because the same question kept coming back over and over again: ‘Hey, what’s-your-name, where are you from?’ Now, I can’t exactly hold a grudge against the whole world for not knowing Le-Mée-Sur-Seine, a small town, some 25 miles or so to the south of Paris where I grew up. And I agree that it’s probably a lot classier to say, ‘I come from Africa’. But, like it or not, Le-Mée-Sur-Seine is where I grew up! Determined not to be what others imagined I should be, I left the bards of Africanism and Negritude muddled, those staunch defenders of a communal

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attachment, all strangely enough founded uniquely on a colour, stay black. I had, I will admit, the ambition of being a little bit more than a colour, however dark and beautiful that colour may be. I therefore irritated those fervent advocates of the return to our roots, who believed we could backtrack to the ‘good old days’ of absolute bliss and simple pleasures… I preferred to dream of the beauty and intoxication that came of a movement forward, towards the unknown and that might yield something new, something refreshing… A one-way ticket for the Zoologischer Garten allowed me to get away, at least for a time, from everyone’s racial prejudices, inherited from a long history of errors and suffering. I firmly rejected the stunted categories into which they hoped to confine me and finally came to grasp the scope of all that had marked, influenced, nourished and shaped the person that I had become. I was raised with the Bantu and Kongo values of respect and excellence, taught lovingly by my parents. My grey matter had benefited from twenty plus years of rational and effective ‘formatting’, the result of having kept my bottom firmly and wisely planted on the benches of the French national educational system. I also took note of the important role that pop culture and musical genres had played in my upbringing, from country, blues and techno, to jazz and reggae, alongside centuries of literature, especially from the Romantic period, art, cinema, television… Secretly, I cherished with pride the fact that I was not limited to a rigid monolithic culture. I considered myself, and quite rightfully I believe, the bearer of a striking diversity, indeed of an appealing complexity. But no. Nothing I could do. Two words alone were sufficient to describe me. He is black… an African! Everything had started out so well! Brazzaville, the city that had witnessed my birth, has a unique status in the world. It is the only city, to my knowledge, that has had the honour of having been the capital of France at one point, during the dark hours of Vichy collaboration and the National Revolution. In fact, during that tragic period, the blue, white and red flag found refuge under the Equator, and this tricoloured destiny worked well with the Congo, believe it or not, now transformed into a land of asylum and a safe haven for French liberty… Convinced of our shared fraternity, which I assumed was reciprocal given that friends had recognized each other in adversity, I came to France a little more than thirty years ago. In those days, out of economic necessity, France still held her doors wide open to the world, especially to those coming from the South. During the mid-70s, immigrants still arrived with a big grin on their thick lips, expecting a warm welcome as a friend of the family. They would soon come to realize how mistaken they were. The native Gaul certainly considered him a neighbour of sorts, but one about whom he knew nothing. Best be cautious because with these people, you never know! The

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newcomer earned points for behaving as a timid guest, being discreet to the point of mute, and for showing infinite gratitude for being seated at the banquet of Modernity. The colonized native of yesteryear, whose wounded spirit remained submerged in the immense tidal wave that had carried colonial thought, kept his head low and proceeded, however unsure he was of his footing on French soil. On his way, he would occasionally hear teeth gnashing and his own teeth would, in turn, chatter from fear. Our parents would keep a low profile in the poor neighbourhoods, far from the capital, reluctant to put their feet down for fear of further soiling the streets. They barely opened their mouths, afraid to betray their broken French. We, their children, curious and excited to discover our new environment, determined to make it our own, put away our meagre belongings, opened our eyes wide and raised our heads with pride! One might have thought we had provoked a cataclysm. Onlookers became gravely concerned that a number of the great minds had stopped functioning, no doubt infected by some strange illness that was now clearly making itself manifest. Fear of the other. A gangrene, an anxiety that is all the more difficult to control because it eludes the gaze and disrupts one’s hearing. Soon patients can no longer distinguish between reality and an illusory past, and they start spewing a nauseating bile of xenophobia and hate. You cross them on construction sites, at railway station cafés, all the way up to the highest levels of government. They all gladly participate in a one-upmanship of narrow-mindedness and ridiculousness that fortunately does not kill. So we avoid the carnage. What remains today of that beautiful French dream of the universal that pursued the essence of men and women over and above their social condition, their respective religions and the colour of their skin? Perhaps it is but a tenacious illusion, firmly wedded to a discourse, but disconnected from reality. Several years ago, on the night of the first round of the French presidential election in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, one of the candidates still in the running, launched an appeal to French people of all races and social classes to vote for him… Other political groups denounced him as an impostor and decried his demagoguery, especially the so-called left-wingers, who hold to the idea that all citizens will effortlessly come to enjoy equal rights. Listening to them, one might think that the universal will naturally diffuse a new form of religiosity that will in turn propagate among us, and lead us to better get along and live together. Blinded by this powerful light, they forgot to come back down among the men and women, still confounded by the vast discrepancy between discourse and reality. From its early days as a banner, the universal has become a defence against a clear reading of a changing society.

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Schizophrenia is in full swing. You could almost lose your mind. The far right chants, ‘The French first!’; the country hears, ‘Blacks and Arabs out’… Who is to blame? ‘Integrate, reintegrate’, they say! But who are they talking about? The newspapers, the television, the schools, the ministers, they all oversimplify what is at stake. They allude to the immigration of our mothers, our fathers and sometimes even our grandparents to explain our smallest deeds and gestures. We who are expected to waste no time integrating and reintegrating, also learn that an unlikely double culture risks contaminating our minds. I conjure up our zebra identities: Africans in the morning, French in the afternoon, and a threat to the general public by evening, especially at the weekends. A new species of women and men, with neurons going in every direction. This is unheard of. It’s disturbing. We are exploding homogeneity and spreading among the masses. Diversity is our flag. But no. Impossible. It can’t be. The intelligentsia are called upon to mobilize on our behalf. Sociologists feel sorry for us. Horrified by the absence of roots beneath our feet, they see us as static plants, forever rooted in an ancestral land, unchanging. These well-meaning and compassionate souls would like us to hold on to some imaginary past that would allow us to rediscover the innocence and kindness of our harmless, indolent ancestors. What nonsense. We are trying to look forward, over there, towards the horizon, where there is a whole world waiting to be built. They may have chosen to stop and sit on their fixed roots, without us, and wait for the storms of change to rumble, but we are eagerly getting our legs going and dreaming of spreading our wings as wide as possible. Put integration away in a drawer, throw away the key and relax. Turn off the television and the radio. Look at the world through the window. Take a deep breath. Smile, and let’s start living together! But no. They persist in their blindness. Literary critics enthusiastically and benevolently hunt for signs of orality in our writing. Let’s offer them some earplugs and make sure that they keep their eyes open and read meticulously! Deploying a succession of complicated concepts, they aspire to ease our trauma. As soon as our practices escape what is expected, self-assured intellectuals, cushioned in their cosy offices, get to work analysing and weighing in on what might be left of our origins. Specialists note, much to their dismay, that we are dynamic, changing, flexible, endowed with an exceptional capacity to create and adapt. We are only humans, to be sure, universal humans. The great minds are thus even more confused. Top officials persist all the same with their tasteless racist jokes. Enough of all the goodwill and analyses. There doesn’t seem to be a suitable lens through which to apprehend these mutants. Let’s just keep things really simple! What a disaster. Xenophobic cacophony is weighing us down in France! The simplicity of the message of freedom, equality and fraternity has become muddled in the

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brouhaha of the arcane debates on national identity. The Internet is nothing but the receptacle for a hotchpotch of animosity and resentment, logorrhea at such a base level that the philosophers of the Enlightenment would be ashamed. Beginning in primary school, then in secondary school and high school, right up to the amphitheatres of the Sorbonne, I learned French values. They all seemed so simple and clear to me, inscribed as they were in capital letters, black on a blue background, beneath the plastic film of my identity card. I have a migraine and a bitter taste in my mouth. Would it be enough for me to do penance and humbly traverse all of France, my head lowered, keeping a low profile, repeatedly excusing myself for having been born a long way south of the Mediterranean? Must I beg forgiveness of those who try to integrate me by showing me all that I must do, pray constantly and hope desperately for the advent of that saving miracle that will convert my epidermis into that of an ancient Celt? Better yet, why not metamorphose into a person who proudly wears the colours of the flag from head to toe? Nonsense, blindness, disaster – these make up the sinister trilogy of Francasterix, hiding behind its illusions of grandeur and superiority, fearful of ideas of change, insular and impenetrable to any kind of evolution – a fortress. The tone has been set. Nostalgia takes over. Everyone everywhere retreats… ‘We were better off when it was just us…’ A disturbing eulogy for inaction and for social and cultural incest: ‘They should just go back home; we were much better off before they showed up!’ But what is this really about? What exactly do they regret? To which glorious past are they actually alluding? One can only assume it’s a time when differences were harmoniously reorganized in the collective ‘we’? But did such a time really exist? I get cold sweats when I recall the centuries of institutional racism during which France legislated on the condition of men and women from Africa, assigning them the status of furniture subject to the desires and intentions of their owners… In accordance with the laws, people were tortured and whipped, and sold their own children without the slightest hesitation. Bravo! It was great. Let’s keep it up! Centuries of deception, entire generations of French people convinced that a difference in skin colour was enough to dispense with family ties and to authorize the dehumanization of others, including one’s own descendants. Can we seriously be proud of a Republic that granted itself the right to civilize other nations with bayonets and guns, and then proudly to display these conquered peoples in Parisian zoos right up to the beginning of the twentieth century? In the absence of a glorious past, perhaps we ought to look towards new historical moments where we can, for example, proudly applaud the monumental task that troops coming from Africa undertook to save France’s honour by giving their lives in order to bring down the Nazi beast? And why not teach all the pupils in

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French schools that the whole nation is both proud and indebted to their ancestors, be they dark-skinned, black, white or yellow, who together shed their blood to free their country? Sadly, French history has become a mill caught in contradictory winds, in which hundreds of thousands of women and men come and go according to presidential whims… This ebb and flow syndrome persists and pervades everywhere. In 2011, it was impossible to enter France. The country was enclosed by steel rails with reinforced locks, spiked with barbed wire, and walls encrusted with broken glass that cannot be scaled. ‘Stop, no one gets in!’ Particular recognition was given to those law enforcement officers who were resolute in their efforts and protected us even from those who were merely passing through. So great was the fear that the village of the indomitable became a fortress. How farcical what we call danger today! Asterix and his twenty-first-century acolytes, mobilizing to protect a monolithic pale-faced nation on an imaginary battlefield in which true France is under siege from indistinguishable hordes of Roma, blacks, dark-skinned people, youth from the banlieues projects, Muslims and Afghans, all lumped together. And with good reason, because they all hide out in the banlieues from where a vast conspiracy is being hatched! Together they have vowed to corrupt the Republic’s values and bring down the Nation! All that is missing in this picture is the ‘brave and loyal Roland’, whose horn is poised to sound the alarm and save douce France… The time has come to bite the hand that feeds you this cocktail of intolerance and shortcuts. The question of origins still weighs heavily; it is an indelible mark that withstands time and generations. What is the point of me getting hoarse from explaining who I am or who I would like to be? There is nothing I can do. My thoughts are being kept in check. My words have no meaning. They believe they have summarized my ideas intelligently by reducing me to a series of nostalgic and exotic images, filled with a mixture of compassion and guilt, all well-intentioned. A romantic sketch, inherited from colonial haze and archaic prejudices. Even our cherished literature, a purportedly neutral sphere, suffers, especially when it is no longer organized according to content but in line with the colours of the continents. Don’t open a book before you have had a chance to scrutinize the pigmentation of the author! Fortunately, these sinister discourses mainly pollute today’s political arena, a limited space for reflection where everyone cheats and disposes of fundamental principles all in the name of gaining a strategic advantage in the upcoming elections. What is sorely lacking are women and men at the top who have a vision for the future and who actually care about the generations to come. The cultural and intellectual elite also appear to be disconnected from the dynamics of coexistence. These may well present challenges, but are

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nevertheless inevitable for acceptance and respect of today’s ever-changing differences, evidence of which can be found in larger cities and in their peripheries. I have the privilege of travelling the world for both my musical and literary career, and I pass through France on a regular basis. Even when, and who knows why my identity poses so many questions, the local police do stop me and cause me to lose time, I still appreciate those neighbourhoods in the northern and eastern quarters of Paris, where the streets bring together populations that call to mind Africa, Asia, Portugal and Normandy. Why not marvel at, celebrate and cry out a little louder for this diversified France, that comes in a variety of faces, a plural gastronomy, countless inspirations coming from every corner of the globe, an original and promising mosaic at every intersection! I always respond enthusiastically to the invitations I receive from associations, schools and media centres. With joy and in good spirits, I travel around France, to St Malo and Lyons, as well as Angoulême, Lille, Montpellier and Chambéry, meeting people from all walks of life interested in universal art, and for whom the quality and delight of the senses are standards of appreciation. What we have in common is the thirst for discovery and hunger for inspiration that comes from the encounter with a stranger, as well as in the desire to share and exchange. So be it if this is not what the specialists of identity, immigration and integration want to hear. Vive la France of tomorrow! Translated by Karen Lindo

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At the Borders of My Skin Sami Tchak

Sami Tchak: At the Borders of My Skin

Madame, you asked me this other question: ‘Mr Sami Tchak, do you also consider yourself a French writer?’ I’ll give you the long answer. Do you remember when the banlieues projects were burning? I bring it up because I happen to live in the Seine-Saint-Denis department north-east of Paris. Well, in 2005, during what was being called ‘The banlieue crisis in France’, I wrote an article for a German newspaper. Back then, I emphasized the obvious, like the fact that Arabs and blacks were not the only ones to inhabit these bad neighbourhoods, but that these had ended up taking on the exotic hue of inassimilable populations, those at the margins who cause politicians and journalists to come up with sensationalist expressions: volatile, lawless, unsafe, racaille [scum]. Especially the word racaille, one little word that caused a lot of fuss, I am almost tempted to say for nothing, since scum does indeed exist, ruining the lives of thousands of men and women who can neither rid themselves of it nor gather the means to move away. The real tragedy is that this scum, a statistical minority but one whose actions leave a lasting impression, is a well integrated part of the social body. In fact, it is intimately tied to the social body, a product of it. Not only does it cause gangrene in the social body, but it is also a symptom of gangrene. But that’s not the end of the story, since it is accompanied by the temptation to explain everything in social terms – ‘This is a consequence of poor integration policies’, ‘They are neglected, discriminated against’, etc. – or to negate social and economic factors in favour of bigoted explanations. Indeed, for some, 211

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the behaviour of blacks, Arabs and Muslims is attributed to the colour of their skin. Madame, is there anybody today who could, in all seriousness, argue that the growing number of immigrants and their descendants on French soil has not given rise to specific issues? Who can deny that the radicalization of certain identity-groups is without consequences, or that the accompanying violence or the desire, even the need for violence, is unrelated? Who can deny the specific, integration-related difficulties that some exotic populations encounter? How can we address these questions calmly? When he was Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bosca, also known as Nicolas Sarkozy, used the word racaille. But let’s be honest, he never applied that term to all the inhabitants of the neighbourhoods in question. Rather, he suggested cleaning these neighbourhoods with a Kärcher [high-pressure hose], and flushing out the scum. Too bad, too bad, a thousand times too bad that this turned out to be all talk and that no action was actually taken to accomplish this mission of purification! He knew only too well that he couldn’t do it. He was just campaigning at the time, and he knew that his words might very well spark things off, what with the rising tensions over the dead bodies of two teenagers, seventeen-year-old Zyed Benna and fifteen-year-old Bouna Traoré, both electrocuted by an electrical transformer while running from the police. They had committed no crime. The words racaille, Kärcher, came from the mouth of a future presidential candidate, who also said: ‘More must be given to those with less.’ He himself had an immigrant background. He was even an advocate of positive discrimination as a way of helping more of those who, partially because of racial discrimination, were piling up at the foot of the social ladder. To be sure, later, during his presidency, there was the Ministry of National Identity and Immigration, with ministers like Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant at the helm. Although Sarkozy distanced himself from the widespread hypocritical tendency to deny blatant forms of racial discrimination, and alhough he dared to speak the truth, admittedly without Madame de La Fayette’s refined prose, he was and remains first and foremost a seasoned politician, a man who, from a young age, was driven by great ambition, a man who knows what a promise is not. ‘Give more to those who have less’, ‘Work more to earn more.’ But give more to those who have less? Most people did not accept such an idea. Also, and this is the most important point, had positive discrimination been adopted in good Republican faith, its impact would have been at best only limited. It would not have solved the deep-seated problems facing immigrants of colour, or those from the French West Indies and other French territories overseas, those who have

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been French for centuries, but who remain Other, not because they come from faraway places, but because many of them are and always will be black. Some are considered immigrants even though they are French by birth, the descendants of French parents, of mothers and fathers who, regardless of the years they have lived in France or the number of diplomas they have earned, will never be as French as European immigrants or the children of Caucasian immigrants, such as Sarkozy, Copé, Kosciusko-Morizet, Valls, Devedjian, Moscovici (to mention only a handful of the politicians who, in recent years, have become a part of daily life). Cars were burned in 2005, neighbourhoods went up in flames, the media aestheticized these dramatic events; it had, it still has the power to make the parts bigger than the whole. In reality, beyond the at-once beautiful and tragic images, there was, there are, there always will be poor French people from the slums knocking at the capital’s gates, at the gates of all the big cities. These social and economic differences do not necessarily correspond to levels of competency, but they nevertheless make apparent the borders between skins, the tragedy of certain skins. In this longstanding fracture between the French and those who are French differently, one finds contradictory speeches, circumstantial decisions, and commonsense policies turned rotten before they have had the chance to ripen. Whether the cars continue to burn or not, what remains unchanged is the reality of a country in which racial hierarchies are frozen. What will remain are the increasingly deteriorating slums, some of which are unbearable to the eye and nose, and infested with rats. There, the noise and the rage are not signs of vitality, but of despair, resignation, bitterness, resentment, frustration, powerlessness, degradation. They are signs of sometimes murderous impulses, of incivility and incurable noxiousness. What will remain is this: people with no way out giving birth to kids with no way out who will one day have kids of their own with no way out. And you end up with citizens, the majority of whom lay claim to a Nation which does not necessarily claim them back. What will remain is a deep divide between true France and the miry underbelly of an exotic France, populated with blacks and Arabs. Let’s not mince words: Arabs and blacks will never truly be absorbed into French society, they will never become invisible, which is to say assimilated, like Italian, Spanish, Russian – white immigrants have been. They will never be confused with France nor with the French. Madame, you should know that a friend recently gave me a copy of La France noire. Trois siècles de présences [Black France. Three Centuries of Presence], a timely gift.1 It made me rethink those somewhat dubious 1 Pascal Blanchard, Sylvie Chalaye, Éric Deroo, Dominic Thomas and Mahamet Timera, La France Noire: trois siècles de présences (Paris: La Découverte, 2011).

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thoughts of mine, the ones I’ve just outlined. It’s a fine book, in every sense of the word, filled with illustrations and photographs, and teaches us about the long history of blacks in France. The iconography is as eloquently informative as the texts themselves, written by a number of contributors – historians, philosophers, writers, etc. I can’t begin to summarize it; instead, I would heartily recommend everyone read it. It has inspired in me several reflections, the primary one being: all conquerors gain strength from new acquisitions, but, if they prove unable to adapt to the inevitable biological and spiritual upheavals of their ventures, then those ventures can only weaken them. They become weakened in the sense that they open themselves to the Other, even though they constructed this Other in negative terms and reduced them to a non-human state, thereby justifying their right to do as they please with them according to their personal interest and enjoyment. But the conqueror forgets the obvious: the Other is a dynamic force and, when placed in a new context, becomes an ‘incurable’ element in a visible and internal metamorphosis. Through the very act of conquest (slavery, colonization, etc.), the conqueror becomes a kind of object of conquest. He exposes himself without thinking of the consequences of such exposure. Only much later does he begin to understand, once a new and complex reality appears before his eyes, a reality that threatens him, or at least threatens his ‘purity’. We can talk all we want about racism, a universal phenomenon, but beyond racism, we have to take into account the extant rage towards the elevation of the Other as a human being, which he never stopped being. Even if he is relegated to certain roles, to certain territories, even if things are pushed to the extreme and his elimination envisioned, The Other is always there. The colour of his skin can even blend in with our own, but that would change nothing (for example, differentiating between Jews and Caucasians is not always an easy task. Was this not why they were forced to wear obvious signs of identification?) Sometimes, I enjoy re-reading certain texts which, at different historical periods, offered solutions to avoid the inevitable: the mixing of blood, miscegenation with inferiors. Charles Richet, a great French physiologist and Nobel Prize winner in medicine and physiology (1913), wrote: In order to preserve and augment our mental strength, when it comes to the yellow race, and, to an even greater extent, the black race, individual selection as practised by our white brothers must not be permitted, rather, all mixing with inferior races must be strictly avoided, and a practice of specific selection upheld.2 Charles Richet, La Sélection humaine (Paris: Alcan, 1919), 81.

2

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This was not a fantasy. These words express a fear born out of the belated realization of the Other’s humanity – of the repulsive yet familiar Other, who would have been more likeable had he simply been a giraffe, a zebra, a gorilla. Alas, he was human. And between humans, the most tenacious contempt will never erase irrational feelings and desires. The biological threat is there; it is the source of all fear, of all madness. General de Gaulle understood this well, expressing the same fears about the future of a France that would risk assimilating millions of Arab Muslims (if only we had listened to him, what might we have avoided?) Indeed, Alain Peyrefitte spoke of this in his book C’était de Gaulle, reporting on a conversation he had with the great Charles on 5 March 1959, on the issue of the events in Algeria: It’s a good thing there are yellow French, black French, dark-skinned French. They show that France is open to all races, and that it has a universal calling. But they must remain a minority. Otherwise, France will no longer be France. We are, after all, a European, white race, of Greco-Roman culture and Christian faith. Let’s not kid ourselves! Have you gone to see the Muslims? Have you seen them with their turbans and djellabas? They’re obviously not French! Those who extol the virtues of integration have hummingbird brains, even if they are very learned. Try to mix oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. In a moment, they separate out again. Arabs are Arabs, the French are French. Do you really think that the French populace can absorb ten million Muslims, who tomorrow will be twenty million, and the day after forty? If we were to integrate them, if all of Algeria’s Arabs and Berbers were considered French, how would we keep them from moving to mainland France, where the standard of living is so much higher? My little village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises in the Haute-Marne department in north-eastern France would have to be renamed Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées!3 I like to imagine the General coming back from beyond the grave and having to spend two long hours at the Gare du Nord train station (which I have rechristened the Gare du Noir [Black Station], and which others unflinchingly call the Gare Urinoir [Urinal Station]) or in the Barbès and Château-Rouge neighbourhoods. I don’t know what he would have to say to all these French negroes, he who lost his temper with his adviser Jacques Foccart on 8 November 1968, and said (assertions reported by the latter in volume 2 of his Journal de l’Élysée): 3 Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle, volume I (Paris: Éditions de Fallois/Fayard, 1994), 52.

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You know what, I’ve had enough of all your negroes. You keep prodding me, and now they’re all we see. There are negroes at the Elysée every day, you make me receive them, you make me invite them to lunch. I’m surrounded by negroes here. And it’s all a complete waste of time! I’ve had enough. I don’t want to see another one around here for the next two months, do I make myself clear? No more special audiences for two months. It’s not only about all the time it takes, though that in itself is annoying, it’s more that it looks bad: all people see are negroes coming and going. And to be honest, it’s a complete waste of time.4 Seeing all the little negroes, perhaps he would have smiled tenderly, nodded his head, and reminded them that ‘of course, back when colonization was the only way of reaching these backward, slumbering peoples, we were colonizers, sometimes imperial and harsh. But on the whole, what we accomplished was mostly beneficial to the nations we colonized.’5 (At the Gare du Nord, Hitler would have exclaimed: ‘I was right, I was right.’ The Führer predicted in Mein Kampf (1925–26) that the ‘negro invasion in France is making such rapid progress that one could really speak of the birth of an African state on European soil […] If France were to continue to evolve in this way, three hundred years from now, the last traces of French blood would disappear into the mulatto African-European state that is currently being formed: an immense territory of autonomous people would extend from the Rhine to Congo, and would consist of the inferior race that is slowly emerging under the influence of prolonged miscegenation.’) So, ‘Do you also consider yourself a French writer?’ Well, dear Madame, I can now answer your question. As you had guessed, I am a black writer. Translated by Alexis Pernsteiner

4 Jacques Foccart, Journal de l’Élysée, volume II: Le Général en mai (1968–1969) (Paris: Editions Fayard/Jeune Afrique, 1998), 427. 5 Charles de Gaulle, De Gaulle vous parle (Montreal: Éditions du jour, 1967), 54.

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Confessions of a sapeur Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou: Confessions of a sapeur CHANGE THIS

when I first set foot in France I lived in Nantes, a town in which, apart from going out to a few local bars, I was bored out of my mind, with no escape in sight, I paced up and down in my dorm room, stepped out occasionally to chat up some fifty-year-olds, for the most part birds who were either divorced, seperated, or widowed, who I’d crash for a week or two with, sometimes even a whole month, to the point that my mates started calling me a thieving gigolo bent on nicking the pensions of old French women, but I couldn’t care less about what they said and had no misgivings since ‘France had helped itself to my country’s wealth, and it was time for her to pay us back’, and this was my way of being reimbursed, chasing after these neglected women I ran into at the Mambo Club or in Commerce Square where I hung out on the weekends, well turned out, clean-shaven and smelling good, and it was easy to stand out, to be the centre of attention, even in midwinter I could wear bright red, light green, or golden yellow clothes, people checked me out, some burst out laughing, others looked the other way, but I was there, always well turned out, clean-shaven and smelling good, I never failed to bring a cute blonde home with me, someone who at first had mocked my outfit, but then it was with her I’d end up, always dumping her the next day so I could set out to unearth another one, but this wasn’t a real life, I needed to move forward, I was aware of that, and my childhood friend Benoît, who lived in Paris, convinced me to move to the capital because for him the provinces were a dead-end, and so it was him who sorted out counterfeits of my 217

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documents so that I could get a room in a hostel for young workers, and he said ‘don’t worry, that’s how it works, you’ll be a new man, a young man, and the gates of Paris will open for you’, and he put together pay slips with salary figures even I worried about, but in the end it had all worked out, and I lived in room 702 on rue Didot in the 14th arrondissement, I was proud to have a roof over my head, my own little kingdom where I could sleep in peace, have some friends over, down a few beers, in short, live a normal life, a life less monotonous than the one I had lived in Nantes, and that’s where, in this hostel, I met Alphonsine who lived just below me on the sixth floor, she’d been living there for two years, but we hardly ever saw her because she rarely left her room, but I knew she could hear me moving around, the squeaky floor, the sound of the toilet flushing, occasionally we’d meet in the lift, she’d say hello, lower her eyes and dash off as soon as the lift doors opened and disappear down the hallway as the door closed, I barely had the time to check out her behind and to realise that she wasn’t bad at all, yes, those are the kind of thoughts I had and I wondered who her feller was since I’d never heard any noise coming from her room, as if no one ever stopped by and that she had some kind of phobia of the outside world, and during this time I still had to work to make ends meet, I didn’t have proper papers, and once again it was Benoît who came to the rescue, he knew some white bloke who ran a cleaning company, he worked out some kind of deal and so now I worked at the McDonald’s on boulevard Saint-Germain, the pay was lousy but I had no other options, it was that or nothing, and so rather than getting evicted I told myself this was a temporary solution, but the worse was that I hated having to get up at the crack of dawn, and I had started working there in the middle of winter, I was always late, the manager kept complaining to our boss saying things like ‘you’ve hired a real slacker, he shows up late, he’s a complete layabout, he doesn’t even know how to wipe down the windows, he never fails to leave smudges all over them, where did you find such a useless bastard, I don’t want to see him around here any more, find me someone else or else I’ll tear up the contract with your cleaning company’, so I got this letter warning me, I knew it was all over, that I was in trouble, that my days were numbered at the restaurant, that I had better make an effort, show up on time, take extra care cleaning things up and make sure everything was spotless, so that’s what I did, but the manager couldn’t care less, he wanted me gone, he watched over me constantly, I could feel him breathing down my neck while I worked, and then one day I broke the handle on a window that opened on to the street and that I had trouble opening, so he fired me on the spot, on a winter morning when I had come to work on time, the bloke said to me ‘get out of here before you break anything else, I never cared for you anyway you sad moron, and you can forget about any kind of severance

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pay because you busted one of my window handles and it’s going to cost an arm and a leg to fix’, my boss showed up and agreed with the manager, I put my cleaning gear away, grabbed my clothes, got dressed as fast as I could and, as compensation, our boss handed me a metro ticket, Benoît explained why I couldn’t expect any unemployment pay because my papers were fake and if I tried to sign on at the employment agency they’d just arrest me, I’d end up in prison where I’d spend a year until they finally deported me, and once again Benoît took care of me and hooked me up with another position because he was really well connected, not with another cleaning company but this time in a warehouse, so from now on I stacked shelves in a shoe shop at the Bercy 2 shopping centre, I worked down in the basement where the crates arrived straight from the factory and I sorted them out, all of this was a little mind-numbing and spending the entire day face to face with heaps of multi-coloured shoes made me feel queasy, and there was no way to take a break because the boxes kept on piling up and the shoes had to be unpacked as fast as possible so that the sales staff could serve their clients, I felt as if I was about to break down again, that I wasn’t cut out for this kind of work just like I wasn’t cut out for cleaning jobs in McDonald’s restaurants, I said as much to my mate Benoît, I admitted that I’d basically had enough, that I was getting tired of staring at shoes all day, he looked at me in a sad way and said to me ‘listen mate, try and hang in there for six months and then you can look forward to unemployment benefits for a good stretch of time’, so I continued working there, staring at boxes all day long, lifting them, opening them, shelving the contents by shoe size, indicating when we were out of a given model, I even started to enjoy the work although I was functioning more like a robot by now, I showed up for work looking good, smelling good, the shop manager almost sniggering at me because he couldn’t quite understand why I would dress up to the nines for such a position, I had a bit of money now, enough to cover my rent, to party in various Afro nightclubs, up until the day when Alphonsine crossed my path, but this is only a vague memory now since she left me, but I do still remember the day when I finally got to meet her, this was at the time when she kept on turning her back to me when we shared the lift, to the point I even told myself I would never get to hear her voice, I would never know whether her voice was deep, high, or quavering, it all started with a loud noise coming from my neighbour in room 703, the bloke was drilling a hole in God knows what around eleven o’clock at night, disturbing everyone, making the whole building shake, and no one had dared knock on the guy’s door to tell him to stop whatever the hell he was up to, in fact the noise didn’t die down and even started to get worse, then I heard someone knock on my door, but I wasn’t expecting anyone, by some miracle the drilling had stopped, so when I opened the door I found

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myself face to face with Alphonsine, and that was the first time I heard the sound of her voice as she yelled at me ‘you bloody Negroes, you lot are always preventing us from sleeping’, and not knowing what on earth was going on, I answered ‘what are you talking about, from what I can see, miss, you’re just as dark as the Negro standing in front of you, and it’s not your skin colour that’s keeping me up in this hostel’, and she started telling me about the noise some chainsaw was making, I opened my door as wide as I could and said to her ‘come on in and show me the chainsaw you’re talking about’, and that’s when my neighbour poked his nose out of his room, holding up a chainsaw, he was a white guy, and I couldn’t help smirking as I told Alphonsine ‘the chainsaw miss, it’s the other guy who’s using it, so why don’t you let the Negro sleep in peace and sort it out with the white guy who’s staring at us’, and I thought she was going to jump on the guy, start yelling at him just like she had at me, well, that didn’t happen, she just stood there speechless for a few seconds and then walked off seemingly confused, as if she was afraid the neighbour might just start using his chainsaw at the slightest criticism, for my part I burst out laughing, and for the next few days Alphonsine did her best to avoid me, when the lift arrived and we were both waiting for it she wouldn’t get in, letting me go first, and when I ran into her in the canteen she would avoid looking me in the eye, and this rigmarole lasted for two weeks until the day she no longer had a choice, she could no longer avoid me, she was waiting for the lift at the very moment I arrived, she rushed inside and I also made it in just before the doors closed, she muttered some kind of excuse saying she hadn’t seen me coming, I knew she was talking rubbish, I mentioned the chainsaw that we no longer heard and for the first time I saw her smile, she said goodbye when she got out, and then we started saying hello, we ate together in the canteen, we became friends, I even think we started to wait for each other in front of the lift, we looked out for one another, and she agreed to come down to my room for a coffee, it all went well, I was courteous, gentlemanly, she appreciated my being this way, I did my best to avoid staring at her large breasts, we talked about my country, about Africa, she had never been there, her prejudicial beliefs were the same as those held by other people who had not been there, for her, we Africans were a little backward, she even said as much with a half-smile, I didn’t hold it against her and even joked a bit telling her to be careful because us lot from the dark continent tended to be a little cannibalistic, we were really getting closer and closer, we saw each other every day now, she could come over to my room whenever she liked even if I hadn’t been to her place yet, I made her listen to Congolese music, she’d lend me the latest hits from the French West Indies, for the most part Zouk tracks, and on one occasion she prepared a Colombo chicken recipe, a speciality from the islands she told me, a dish I

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really couldn’t see what was so spectacular about given that it was mostly made up of rice, chicken and a yellow sauce that pretty much looked like diarrhoea, and then we started to go out dancing, at the Atlantis over towards the embankment at Austerlitz, or sometimes we would go to the Balizier near Les Halles, and one evening when we got home drunk we ended up having a little hanky-panky on the sixth floor, in her room, legs sprawled in all directions, and now the whole building knew we were going out, we were really in love, dreaming grandiose dreams together, when she came over to my room she would cast a glance at my typewriter and ask ‘you’re a student, right, and you’re writing a thesis’, and I’d nod my head, but I’d dropped out of college a while ago, I’d become a sapeur, my whole life was now devoted to the cult of clothing, my whole paycheck was set aside for clothes, and I was always well dressed, clean-shaven and smelling good, with crocodile-skin shoes made by Weston and a Rolex watch purchased on the black market at Château Rouge, I know this is partly why we were together, because I had been laid off for economic reasons at the shoe warehouse, I was too lazy to look for another job, and Alphonsine and I had already found another place to live up by the Gare du Nord, for a year we lived the good life, and then, as if bitten by a wasp and after two years of living together, she came out and said to me ‘you’re a good-for-nothing, you’ve stopped working, you wear luxury shoes, I can’t build a life with a guy like you’, to which I answered ‘I couldn’t care less, the Sape is my life, if you criticize that then you’ve obviously never truly loved me’, and off she went to live with her countryman who hailed from the same area of Guadeloupe, I once saw them at the Etienne Marcel metro stop, the guy was ugly as sin and really badly dressed, and I wondered how one could leave home looking that way considering that Paris was the fashion capital, well, in any case, that was hardly my concern any longer since I am a Sapeur, I will always be a Sapeur, I will die a Sapeur, I even insist on being buried in a Francesco Smalto suit and Church shoes ordered directly from England, that way I won’t fail to impress the Angels in Paradise, so be it… Translated by Dominic Thomas

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Notes on Contributors Notes on Contributors

Ayo A. Coly is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and African Studies at Dartmouth College. She is author of The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures (Lexington Books, 2010) and co-editor of the thirtieth anniversary issue of Callaloo (2007). Her articles on African literatures and photography have appeared in Research in African Literatures, Nottingham French Studies, The Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature and Third Text. Fatou Diome is a Senegalese writer living in Strasbourg, France. Her books include Préférence nationale et autres nouvelles (2001), Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (2003), Kétala (2006), Inassouvies, nos vies (2008) and Celles qui attendent (2010). Dawn Fulton is Associate Professor of French Studies at Smith College, where she also teaches in comparative literature and film studies. Recent publications include Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism (University of Virginia, 2008) and articles on urbanism, immigration and Creolization in the works of such writers as Calixthe Beyala, Leïla Sebbar, Mohand Mounsi and Alain Mabanckou. Nicki Hitchcott is Associate Professor and Reader in African Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on African women’s writing in French, particularly on the work of Calixthe Beyala, and is the author of Women Writers in Francophone Africa (Berg, 2000), Francophone Literatures: a Literary and Linguistic Companion (with Offord et al., Routledge, 2001) and Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration 223

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(Liverpool University Press, 2006). As editor, she has published African Francophone Writing: a Critical Introduction (with Laïla Ibnlfassi, Berg, 1996); Gender and Francophone Writing, special issue of Nottingham French Studies (2001); Black Paris, special issue of Journal of Institute of Romance Studies (with Sam Haigh, 2005); and Textual Ownership in Francophone Africa, special issue of Research in African Literatures (with Alec G. Hargreaves and Dominic Thomas, 2006). She is currently working on fictional responses to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Kathryn Kleppinger is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She earned her PhD in 2011 in the Joint Program of French Literature and French Studies at New York University where she served for one year as a Morse Postdoctoral Fellow. Her current book project, tentatively titled Branding the ‘Beur’ Author: Television and Minority Writing in France, 1983–2013, analyses the discussion and reception of literature written in French by the children of North African immigrants to France. In addition to articles based on this topic, she has also published on the Littérature-Monde manifesto and the work of Alain Mabanckou. Kathryn Lachman teaches French and Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A native of South Africa, she holds a PhD in French from Princeton University, MA and BA degrees from Yale, and diplomas in music performance from the Paris Conservatoire. Her publications include an edited volume, Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism and the Caribbean Text, journal articles in Research in African Studies and Music, Sound and the Moving Image, and various book chapters on African and francophone literatures. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Literature and Dissonance: the Music of Transnational Fiction, a study of the relationship between musical forms and democratic ideals in the work of Assia Djebar, J.M. Coetzee, Nancy Huston and Maryse Condé, to be published by Liverpool University Press. She co-chairs the Five College Faculty Seminar in French. Alain Mabanckou is a Franco-Congolese author and Professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. His collected poetry was published in Tant que les arbres s’enracineront dans la terre in 2007, and his novels include Bleu-Blanc-Rouge (1998), L’Enterrement de ma mère (2000), Et Dieu seul sait comment je dors (2001), Les Petits-Fils nègres de Vercingetorix (2002), African psycho (2003), Verre cassé (2005), Mémoires de Porc-épic (2006), Black Bazar (2009), Demain j’aurai vingt-ans (2010) and Tais-toi et meurs (2012). He has

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also published several essays, Lettre à Jimmy (2007), Le Sanglot de l’homme noir (2011) and Lumières de Pointe-Noire (2013). He has received numerous literary prizes, including the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique noire, Prix des Cinq continents de la Francophonie, Prix Ouest-France Etonnants-Voyageurs, Prix du livre RFO, Prix Renaudot, Prix Georges Brassens and in 2012 the Grand Prix de Littérature Henri Gal from the Académie Française for his life’s work. Léonora Miano was born in Cameroon and has lived in France since 1991. She is the author of numerous prize-winning works, including L’Intérieur de la nuit (2005), Contours du jour qui vient (2006, Prix Goncourt des lycéens), Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles (2008), Tels des astres éteints (2008), Les Aubes écarlate (2009), Soulfood équatoriale (2009), Blues pour Élise: Séquences afropéennes I (2010), Ces âmes chagrines (2011), as well as several essays, notably Écrits pour la parole (2012, for which she received the Seligmann Prize) and Habiter la frontière (2012). John Nimis is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His main research interest is in the literature and popular culture of Africa, with a focus on the music of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was a Fulbright scholar, and the Lingala language. He works at the cross-section of literary studies and music theory, focusing on aesthetic and organizational principles in verbal and non-verbal texts, and showing their different expressions across media, especially print and sound recording. He holds advanced degrees in French (PhD New York University, MA Miami University, Ohio) and music (MM University of Michigan–Ann Arbor), and has secondary interests in literary theory, the cultures of the African diaspora in the Caribbean and US, music and literature in nineteenth-century and early modern Europe, and popular culture in the Global South, including cinema. Wilfried N’Sondé was born in the Congo and grew up in France. He is widely considered one of the shining lights of the new generation of African writers, and his three novels, Le Coeur des enfants léopards (2007), Le Silence des esprits (2010) and Fleur de béton (2012) received considerable critical attention and have been translated into several languages. Srilata Ravi taught at the National University of Singapore (1994–2003) and at the University of Western Australia (2004–10) before moving to Canada where she holds the position of Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the University of Alberta (Campus Saint-Jean). She is also

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affiliated with the School of Humanities of the University of Western Australia as an Honorary Research Fellow. Her principal interests are in comparative cultural studies and postcolonialism in the French-speaking world. Her most recent publications include Rainbow Colors: Literary Ethno-topographies of Mauritius (2007), Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: penser l’altérité (co-edited with Véronique Bragard, 2011) and Rethinking Global Mauritius: Essays on Mauritius Literature and Culture (2013). She is currently working on a new project that looks at migrant cultures in Western Canada from a comparative ethno-linguistic perspective. Sami Tchak is a Togolese writer living in France, who has published several novels – Place des fêtes (2001), Hermina (2003), La Fête des masques (2004), Le Paradis des chiots (2006) and Filles de Mexico (2008), as well as numerous essays, including Formation d’une élite paysanne au Burkina Faso (1995), La Sexualité féminine en Afrique (1999), La Prostitution à Cuba (1999) and L’Afrique à l’épreuve du sida (2000). Dominic Thomas is Madeleine L. Letessier Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of Nation-Building, Propaganda and Literature in Francophone Africa (Indiana University Press, 2002), Black France: Colonialism, Immigration and Transnationalism (Indiana University Press, 2007), Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism (Indiana University Press, 2013) and Noirs d’encre: colonialisme, immigration et identité au cœur de la littérature afro-française (La Découverte, 2013), and co-author of New Francophone African and Caribbean Theatres (with John Conteh-Morgan, Indiana University Press, 2010) and La France noire: trois siècles de présences afro-antillaises et noires (with Pascal Blanchard, Sylvie Chalaye, Éric Deroo and Mohamet Timéra, Editions la Découverte, 2011). As editor, recent publications include Museums in Postcolonial Europe (Routledge, 2010), A Companion to Comparative Literature (with Ali Behdad, Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2011), ‘Francophone sub-Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts’ (with Alain Mabanckou, Yale French Studies, 2011), ‘The Francophone Documentary’ (with Philippe Met, French Forum, 2011), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution (with Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, Indiana University Press, 2013) and ‘Racial Advocacy in France’ (French Cultural Studies, 2013). Allison Van Deventer is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. She received her PhD in comparative literature from UCLA in 2011. Her research focuses on race and immigration in contemporary

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Afro-European fiction in French, Italian, English and Portuguese. Her work has appeared in A Companion to Comparative Literature (Blackwell Publishers, 2011), Il Tolomeo and Expressions Maghrébines. Abdourahman A. Waberi is a Franco-Djiboutian author. He was the recipient of a DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm Fellowship in Germany in 2006–07, a Fellow at the Newhouse Humanities Center at Wellesley College in 2007–08, and has taught at several American universities, including Claremont Colleges and George Washington University. His novels include Le Pays sans ombre (1994), Cahier nomade (1996), Balbala (1997), Moisson de crânes: textes pour le Rwanda (2000), Transit (2002), Aux Etats-Unis d’Afrique (2005) and Passage des larmes (2009). John Patrick Walsh is an Assistant Professor of French at the University of Pittsburgh. Research interests include the literature and history of Haiti and the French Caribbean, as well as francophone literature of sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author of Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposition (Indiana University Press, 2013). He has also published articles in Research in African Literatures, Transition Magazine, The French Review, Small Axe and The Journal of Haitian Studies. He is at work on a second manuscript, Literature of Reconstruction: Haitian Writers at Work.

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Index Index

Adesanmi, Pius 68, 70 Afropean ‘Afropean’ generation contrasted with ‘diasporic’ generation 66–73 female 124–127, 155 identification as migrants 20–21n2 impact of migration on African women 37–40 male 155–167 origins of term 3–4, 6, 7, 48–49, 64 ‘reciprocal embeddedness’ of Africa and Europe 4–5, 8, 10–11, 32n1 see also European; hyphenated identities Appiah, Kwame Anthony, Cosmopolitanism – Ethics in a World of Strangers 139–140 Asad, Talal 107n10 Bâ, Mariama, Une si longue lettre 36n9 Baartman, Sarah 49, 55–56, 58 Baenga, Bolya, La Polyandre 87, 90 Baker, Gideon 144–145 Baker, Josephine 132 Balzac, Honoré de, Sarrasine 58

banlieues 8, 42, 71, 92n13, 141, 147, 156, 157 Barron, Pierre 156 Barthes, Roland 58 Beck, Béatrix 121 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio, The Repeating Island 33 Berlin, colonial commemorative structures 17–18 Bernault, Florence 71 Beschea-Fache, Caroline 52, 58n5 Besson, Éric 8 Bessora 6, 69 53 cm 48, 49–62 métissage and animals theme 55–58 métissage and food theme 49–50, 52–55 ‘stéatopyge’ categorization 50, 54, 58 symbols of ‘otherness’ 49–52 wordplay 58–62 Beti, Mongo 85 Beur movement 76, 148 Beyala, Calixthe 69, 126 Lettre d’une africaine à ses soeurs occidentales 26

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Index Lettre d’une Afro-française à ses compatriotes 26 Biyaoula, Daniel 67, 68 Black Atlantic 33–34n2, 38 see also Afropean Black Europe see Afropean blackness and belonging 65 black female stereotypes 126 as a social construct 4–5 Blakely, Allison 4, 22, 128, 131 Boubeker, Ahmed 76 Brancato, Sabrina 4, 5–6, 20, 97–98, 100–101 Britain hyphenation of national identities 4 perceptions of race 1 British Race Relations Act (1976) 1 Byrne, David 3 Campt, Tina M. 20–21n2 Cazenave, Odile 40 Afrique-sur-Seine 6, 69n3, 158 Césaire, Aimé, Discours sur le colonialisme 105 Chamoiseau, Patrick 133n13 Chariandy, David 73 Chevrier, Jacques 6, 21 Chirac, Jacques 68–69 Chrisman, Laura 166n11 Cohen, Jeffrey H. 38 Cohen, Phil 126–127 colonialism, structures to commemorate 17–18 Coly, Ayo 9–10, 40 Commission for Racial Equality 1 Condé, Maryse, En attendant le bonheur 90n11 Confiant, Raphaël 133n13, 159 Connell, Raewyn W. 162 Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires (CRAN) 128

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CRAN (Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires) 128 crime fiction see noir fiction Dadié, Bernard, Un nègre à Paris 18–19 Dalembert, Louis-Philippe 105–106, 120, 121 Davis, Miles 160 de Certeau, Michel 161 de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine 160 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura 150–152 Derrida, Jacques 143, 144 detective fiction see noir fiction Diagne, Blaise 132 Diome, Fatou 5, 6, 7, 19, 32–45, 126 Atlantic aesthetics 33–34, 44–45 Celles qui attendent 22–23, 25, 33, 35, 37–41, 42–44 Inassouvies, nos vies 33 Kétala 33n3 La Préférence nationale 33 Le Ventre de l’Atlantique 22–23, 25, 33, 34–37, 40, 44 ‘The Old Man and the Boat’ 33, 36–37 Diop, Papa Samba 69 Du Bois, W.E.B. 132 Duroux, Rose 147 Eburne, Jonathan 86n8 Edwards, Brent Hayes 37, 95, 99–100n5, 107n10 Ekué, Lauren 19 Icône urbaine 22–23, 24 El-Tayeb, Fatima 7, 8, 19–20, 28–29, 127–128, 130 European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postcolonial Europe 2–3, 71–72, 73 Essed, Philomena 91 Essomba, Jean-Roger 6

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Alerte à la bonté 81, 84–87, 89, 90, 92 Le Dernier Gardien de l’arbre 84 Le Paradis du nord 84, 87–92 Une Blanche dans le noir 84 European ‘European’ identity 19–20 see also Afropean European Union, attitudes to race and ethnicity 2, 19 Fassin, Éric 3, 18 female, Afropean 124–127, 155 Foucault, Michel, L’Archéologie du savoir 100n5 France 2005 urban riots 8, 42, 71, 74n7, 76–77, 128, 148, 155, 157 African immigrants predominantly painted as working-class and underprivileged 24–25, 126 ‘Afro-Parisianism’ 6, 21 ‘Afropean’ generation contrasted with ‘diasporic’ generation 66–73 attitudes to race and ethnicity 1–2, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9, 19, 65–66, 67, 69–70, 72–73, 91–92, 130, 148 black American community 131–132, 134 black female population 124–127 effect of colonialism on migration to France 18–19 immigration policy 8, 19, 23, 34, 38, 42, 49, 128, 147 non-white residents regarded as migrants or foreigners 65–66 Republican values 1, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 128, 157 studies of former colonies 48–49 ‘francophone’ studies 48–49 Fulton, Dawn 10

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Gandhi, Leela 145–146, 152–153 García Márquez, Gabriel 160 Garvey, Marcus 117 Gaye, Marvin 132 Gikandi, Simon 168 Gilroy, Paul 11, 20–21n2, 32n1, 44, 156, 166–167 Against Race 166n11 Postcolonial Melancholia 122 There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack 1 understanding of ‘Black Atlantic’ 34 Glissant, Édouard 133n13 Le Discours antillais 98–99 Gordimer, Nadine 41 Gorrara, Claire 82 Grass, Günter 160 Guenif-Souilamas, Nacira 155n1 Guimarães Rosa, João 32–33 Uncle Jaguar 33n2 Halberstam, Judith 164n8 Hall, Stuart 164–165, 166, 167 Hane, Khadi 19 Des fourmis dans la bouche 22–23n4, 25–26 Hargreaves, Alec G. 6–7 ‘Black-Blanc-Beur: Multi-Coloured Paris’ 148n4 Hebdige, Dick 160 Hemingway, Ernest 32–33, 160 Hesse, Barnor 2, 20, 66 Higginson, Pim 82, 85 Himes, Chester 85 Hitchcott, Nicki 7, 10, 23 Houellebecq, Michel 68 hyphenation of national identities 4, 23, 49 Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, Black-Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape 6, 21

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Index Kane, Cheikh Hamidou 69 L’Aventure ambiguë 18–19, 97n3 Keaton, Trica Danielle 131–132 Kimmel, Michael 162 Kimmelman, Michael 134 Kleppinger, Kathryn 9 Kokoreff, Michel 156 Kourouma, Ahmadou 69 Lachman, Kathryn 7 Lafferiére, Dany 160 Larcher, Gérard 74n7 Le Goaziou, Véronique 156–157 Lefebvre, Henri 124 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 161 The Savage Mind 158–159 Lionnet, Françoise 72 Loichot, Valérie 133n13 Mabanckou, Alain 5, 6, 19, 65, 69, 77, 155–156 Black Bazar 9, 22–23, 27–28, 97, 102, 103–108, 110–122, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161–162, 165–166, 167n12 Bleu-Blanc-Rouge 22–23, 27, 67–68, 87, 95–97, 98–101, 102, 104 ‘Confessions of a sapeur’ 9 Le Sanglot de l’homme noir 27, 157–158 Lettre à Jimmy 27, 167n12 Tais-toi et meurs 22–23, 27–28 treatment of Afropean male 155–156, 159, 161 Verre cassé 97, 101–103 Maeterlinck, Maurice 121, 160 Magritte, René 160 male, Afropean 155–167 Mayfield, Curtis 132 Mbembe, Achille 1–2, 17, 35, 70–71, 158, 165 Sortir de la grande nuit 163–164n7

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Miano, Léonora 5, 6, 9, 11, 19, 32n1, 155–156 Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles 3–4, 22, 32n1, 64–65, 97, 108, 130 Blues pour Élise 3, 7, 10, 22, 23–24, 26, 64, 124–136 soundtrack 129, 131, 132 Écrits pour la parole 3, 22, 128 Habiter la frontière 3, 21–22, 26 L’Intérieur de la nuit 38–39 Tels des astres éteints 64, 110–122, 156, 160–161, 163, 165–168 treatment of Afropean male 155–156, 160–161, 163 ‘migritude’ 6, 21 Mongo-Mboussa, Boniface 65 Montaigne, Michel de, Essais 60–61 Moudileno, Lydie 67, 83n6 Mucchielli, Laurent 156–157 Murdoch, H. Adlai 24, 26 Naudillon, Françoise 83 Ndiaye, Pap 7, 19, 128 La Condition noire 131 Ngoye, Achille, Ballet noir à Château-Rouge 87, 90 Niang, Mohammed Amine 36 Nimis, John 6 noir fiction 10, 81–92 trope of migrancy 83 urban landscape 81, 83 Norman, Lulu 36n8 Nothomb, Amélie 121, 160 N’Sondé, Wilfried 5, 6, 8–9 Fleur de béton 138, 149–150 ‘Francastérix’ 7 Le Coeur des enfants léopards 138, 149 Le Silence des esprits 138, 140–143, 144–147, 149–150, 152–153 Obama, Barack 128, 132–136

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Ouologuem, Yambo 160 Oyono, Ferdinand, Chemin d’Europe 18–19 Paris banlieues 141, 147, 156, 157 black female population 124–127 colonial commemorative structures 18 Pearson, Nels 83 Pepper, Andrew, Contemporary American Crime Novel 82n1 Phillips, Caryl 4, 29 Colour Me English 1, 17 polar fiction see noir fiction Purcell, Mark 124 Raissiguier, Catherine 71n5 Ravi, Srilata 8 Rolin, Dominique 160 Rosello, Mireille 73–74, 147–148 Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses 168 Samba, Chéri 157 ‘Paris est propre’ 90 Sané, Insa 133n12 SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes) 96, 120, 159, 162 sapeurs 27, 96, 120, 159, 162 Sarkozy, Nicolas 8, 42, 91–92n13, 156, 157 Schwartz, Ros 36n8 Segundo, Compay 160 Sembene, Ousmane, Le Docker noir 18–19, 75n10 Sex and the City 124–125 Simenon, Georges 160 Singer, Marc 83 Sirkeci, Ibrahim 38

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Small, Stephen 4 Socé, Ousmane, Mirages de Paris 18–19, 87 Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes (SAPE) 96, 120, 159, 162 Steinauer, Odile 156 Stevenson, Ricki 132 Still, Judith 143–144 Tchak, Sami 5, 6 ‘At the Borders of My Skin’ 8 Place des fêtes 7–8, 65–77, 156, 157–158, 159–160, 163, 165–166, 168 treatment of Afropean male 155–156, 157–158, 159–160, 163 use of immigrant stereotypes and clichés 68–69, 73–74, 75–76 Thomas, Dominic 3–4, 5, 8, 11, 84, 158 Black France 157 tirailleurs 163, 164, 165 Ugochukwu, Françoise 88 Vallet, Bruno 86, 89, 90 Van Deventer, Allison 3–4, 7 Vion-Dury, Juliette 141 Waberi, Abdourahman 5, 6, 17 Aux Etats Unis d’Afrique 38 The Squirrels of Wannsee 5 Walsh, John 8–9 Westmoreland, Jennifer 51 Wright, Richard 132 Zap Mama 130 Adventures in Afropea 3 Zeleza, Paul 45

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