Alain Mabanckou: Black Bazar | Black Bazaar (2009)

Black Bazar (translated, unsurprisingly, into English as Black Bazaar) is about a black dandy from the Republic of the Congo who lives in a hovel in the 18th arrondissement, but who spends most of the money he earns on clothes, external things, and spends a deal of his time at the café Jip's in the 1st arrondissement, which may well remind readers of the bar in Mabanckou's earlier novel Verre Cassé. The café is frequented by a group of interesting characters such as Pierrot Le Blanc and Roger Le Franco-Ivoirien, and the narrator goes there to talk and drink Pelforth.

The narrator is only known by his nickname Fessologue, after the neologism fessologie, the study of (women's) 'faces B', or 'B sides'. The expression 'B sides' comes from the flipsides of vinyl discs which used to swing, like women's backsides, and Fessologue is an expert on those, always visually investigating them. He says 'The science of backsides has existed since the world began, when Adam and Eve turned their backs on the Lord.'

Fessologue called his former partner (by whom he has a child) Couleur d'origine: she has her origins in the Congo too, although she was born in France, but retains her 'colour of origin': colour is significant in the book, as well as buttocks, such as the narrator's implied criticism of blacks using whitening products. But Couleur d'origine walks out on him with their child, into the life of l'Hybide, a tam-tam player.

Books are important in this novel too, and many of them are mentioned, such as some by Louis-Philippe, who's from Haiti, who Fessologue meets at a book-signing session, and who is actually Louis-Philippe Dalembert, although his surname is never given here. Fessologue starts reading in earnest, and is now writing too, a book called 'Black Bazar'. He's bought a typewriter and writes everywhere he goes about his life, the things he does, the people he meets, the conversations he has, his Arab grocer opposite, Hippocrate the tenant from Martinique who thinks he's a concierge and is always watching him and complaining about cooking smells, etc.

And along comes Sarah, a Franco-Belgian girl with fine buttocks, who introduces Fessologue to Belgian culture, such as the Goncourt-winning Béatrix Beck's Léon Morin, prêtre (1952). She reads Fessologue's novel and says: 'I was waiting for you to finally finish your book to tell you that I'd like you to come and live with me.'

Highly readable.

My other posts on Alain Mabanckou:
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Alain Mabanckou: Verre Cassé | Broken Glass

Alain Mabanckou: Mémoires de porc-épic | Memoirs of a Porcupine
Alain Mabanckou: Lettre à Jimmy | Letter to Jimmy

Alain Mabanckou: Lettre à Jimmy | Letter to Jimmy (2007)

On the twentieth anniversary of the death of James Baldwin (1924–87), Alain Mabanckou writes the fascinating Letter to Jimmy to his idol, with whom he has more than a few things in common: Baldwin was black, born in America, and exiled himself in France, whereas Mabanckou was born in Africa, lived in France, and now lives in the United States.

Mabanckou uses a framing device to his narrative: a tramp on Santa Monica beach who looks as if he might be a character out of a Baldwin story who appears in the Avant-Lettre and the Après-Lettre and to whom he wants to dedicate the 170-page 'letter', which is throughout addressed to Baldwin using the familiar 'tu' form.

The book is in part a short life story of Baldwin, the story of an outsider: black, a bastard who never knew his father, born into a poor working-class environment, and who was a homosexual. His paranoid step-father hated himself and Baldwin left home at an early age and then at the age of twenty-four left the prejudice of the racist US for France, where his literary hero Richard Wright had gone a short time before.

Wright had been impressed by Baldwin's early writings, but the younger man had to break free from the influence of his literary father: unfortunately, in doing so he created a rift which would never heal. Baldwin was constructing an aesthetic which saw the 'protest novel' as superficial and harmful to the black cause and his essay 'Everyone's Protest Novel' started out as an attack on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) but became more of an attack on Wright's Native Son (1940).

In 1970 Baldwin moved to Saint-Paul de Vence in Provence, where he died from cancer seventeen years later. He was buried in Hartsdale, New York state, and is remembered not only as a great writer but as a strong fighter for civil rights.

Mabanckou seems to be haunted by Baldwin, and mentions the photo he has of him both at the end and the beginning. He bought the photo from one of the bouquinistes at the side of the Seine, a famous photo in which he's wearing a white shirt, holding a cigarette and looking upwards with a half smile and wrinkled forehead. Mabanckou asks: 'What's the weather like in paradise, Jimmy?'

The final sentence in the book is left to Baldwin, a quotation from The Fire Next Time: Mabanckou says 'Jimmy' based his dream on the redemption of 'human nature' – a fuzzy concept that Sartre (a man Mabanckou calls Baldwin's 'friend') incidentally went out of his way to deny the existence of – the recapturing of what we lost a long time ago: the beauty of life. He finds this sentence a great inspiration:

'Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have.'

My other posts on Alain Mabanckou:

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Alain Mabanckou: Verre Cassé | Broken Glass

Alain Mabanckou: Mémoires de porc-épic | Memoirs of a Porcupine
Alain Mabanckou: Black Bazar | Black Bazaar

Alain Mabanckou: Verre Cassé | Broken Glass (2005)

Is this a novel or a runaway train? Although there are no paragraphs in the novel, there are a number of breaks here in the form of white spaces, and although there are many commas where commas would normally be expected, and capital letters for proper names, the narrative (as with the breaks) begins with a lower case letter and there isn't a single full stop, period, point final, call it what you will, this is just one continuous sentence for 248 pages, as if these were the ramblings of a drunk in a pub, or the rants of a madman. I suppose they could be both.

The narrator here is a guy called Verre Cassé (or Broken Glass), and almost from the beginning of his narrative he gives the Republic of Congo's Minister of (Agri)culture's 'J'accuse' as nothing so elevated as Zola's accusations related to the Dreyfus case, but just someone defending the attacks levelled at the 'Le Credit a voyagé' bar and its boss L'Escargot entêté (lit. 'The Stubborn Snail'): the name of the bar (one meaning being something like 'This bar doesn't accept credit') is a reference to Louis-Ferdinand Céline's two novels Voyage au bout de la nuit and Mort à credit, and this underlines the nature of a novel that is resolutely literary, although also resolutely experimental as opposed to conventional.

L'Escargot entêté is also – no surprises – the title of a novel by the Algerian author Rachid Boudjedra. L'Escargot entêté (the character in Verre Cassé the novel) wants Verre Cassé the man and regular of his bar to write about the characters in it, to preserve the bar for ever. Verre Cassé takes L'Escargot entêté's notebook and starts casually interviewing the bar regulars, although he makes it known to the readers from the beginning that this will be no ordinary, ass-licking account.

But then the characters, the regulars in the bar, are far from ordinary. There's 'le type de Pampers', for a start, who wears four layers of adult diapers because of the homosexual abuse he suffered at the, er, hands of prisoners when he was unfairly jailed as a result of his wife's lies about him.

And then there's L'Imprimeur (the printer), who is accused of paedophilia by his wife, and is sent to the bin for it. Of course, his future is ruined.

Women aren't exactly seen as friendly partners in this book about failed, drunken males, but then there's Robinette (a female version of 'robinet' meaning 'tap'), who can piss for two whole minutes. But when she challenges newcomer Casimir to a pissing contest with the prize of him screwing her whenever and wherever he chooses, he wins genitals down, even 'writing' a map of France including Corsica into the bargain.

And we mustn't of course forget Verre Cassé himself, who has a serious drink problem, which is made worse by him losing his position as school teacher, as well as his wife ditching him. That's probably why in the end he decides, at the age of 64, to drown himself and join his mother in the River Tchinouka. But has something been lost by way of unreliable narrative? We'll never know.

As I suggested at the beginning of this post, there are many literary references in this book, which in fact includes a huge number of titles, the vast majority of them not indicated as titles but playfully embedded in the narrative, and of which the following are just a small number, and I've added the name of the author in brackets: Je m'en vais (Jean Echenoz); Apprendre à finir (Laurent Mauvignier); Orange méchanique (Anthony Burgess); Les Mains sales, Les Chemins de la liberté, and the expression 'l'enfer c'est les autres' from Huis Clos (Jean-Paul Sartre); Trop de soleil tue l'amour (Mongo Beti); L'Enfant noir (Camara Laye); À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Marcel Proust); Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (Ousmane Sembene); La Cantatrice chauve (Eugene Ionesco) – also, like L'Escargot entêté, a character in the book; Journal d'un curé de compagne (Georges Bernanos); Chronique de la dérive douce, L'Odeur du café, and Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (Dany Laferrière); Les Particules élémentaires (Michel Houellebecq); Requiem pour une nonne (William Faulkner); On ne badine pas avec l'amour (Musset); Le Paysan parvenu (Marivaux); Tartuffe, Le Malade imaginaire and Le Misanthrope (Molière); Vipère au poing (Hervé Bazin); Belle de seigneur (Albert Cohen); La Porte Étroite (André Gide); Les Enfants terribles (Jean Cocteau); La Vie devant soi (Romain Gary as 'Émil Ajar'); Querelle de Brest (Jean Genet), etc, etc. In addition, Mabanckou claims that Frédéric Dard (or San Antonio if you prefer) said 'Il faut battre le frère quand il est chauve' – meaning 'You've got to strike your brother when he's bald', instead of the traditional proverb 'Il faut battre le fer quand il est chaud' (or 'You've got to strike when the iron's hot'): this is a pun that just doesn't work in English, but gives some idea of the literary games in this book. Oh, and there's even a reference to Georges Moustaki with 'ma gueule de métèque'.

Oddly, I didn't notice a single reference to a female author, but surely there must be some? Still an amazing, hilarious book in spite of the lack of women.

My other posts on Alain Mabanckou:

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Alain Mabanckou: Mémoires de porc-épic | Memoirs of a Porcupine
Alain Mabanckou: Lettre à Jimmy | Letter to Jimmy
Alain Mabanckou: Black Bazar | Black Bazaar

Alain Mabanckou: Mémoires de porc-épic | Memoirs of a Porcupine (2006)

A few reviews have remarked that Alain Mabanckou's Mémoires de porc-épic – translated as Memoirs of a Porcupine, although I prefer 'Porcupine Memoirs' – only contains one sentence, but it doesn't even have that: there isn't a single full stop in the whole 221-page novel, and the only capitalisation used is with proper nouns. But this doesn't make it what I would call an 'experimental' novel. It has six titled divisions, and many other divisions within those divisions: it just doesn't use sentences, preferring often long, comma-strewn passages.

 

The book is heavily influenced by African stories and legends, the principal one being the concept of human beings having an animal double. It's also influenced by writers from the Americas, and García Marquez's Macondo is mentioned, and there's also a passing reference to Edgar Allan Poe, although the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga is dwelt on a little more.

 

But to return to doubles, the central (human) character is Kibandi, whose male ancestors have had animal doubles since way back. Kibandi's father initiates him, making him take the magic potion mavamvunbi, leading him to a porcupine double – although this is a double that performs bad as opposed to good things.

 

We only learn very near the end that Kibandi called the porcupine Ngoumba – we aren't told this before because 'Ngoumba' means 'porcupine', and the porcupine thinks he's rather more than just a porcupine, which he certainly is, but as we have no other name how else can we refer to him?

 

Ngoumba is the narrator, and as he has no friends to talk to at the end of the novel he addresses the story to the baobab tree in which he lives. And his story is very funny in spite of its black content, as it is partly a satire on human – especially white human – folly. Ngoumba may be a bad double, but he's pretty cultured – he reads, for instance, although he doesn't think much of the Bible. He even has a conscience, and although he is directed to kill people (acts which he's more or less obliged to fulfil as Kibandi's double) he's by no means always happy to do so.

 

Amédée, for instance (and unless I'm wildly out this surely calls to mind Ionesco's play?), is a pretentious asshole who may be highly learned but he wants everyone to know it, especially all the young girls who fall at his feet, and as he has nothing but insults for Kibandi he has to be killed. Interestingly (and this brings us back to Horacio Quiroga), Amédée has unwittingly spoken of his own downfall: with a group of young virgins at his feet hanging on to his every word but not hanging onto their virginity for long if Amédée can help it, he speaks of a short story by the Uruguayan writer.

 

This (although the title isn't mentioned) is Quiroga's 'El almohadón de plumas' ('The Feather Pillow') from his collection Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (1917) (Stories of Love, Madness and Death), which concerns the death of Alicia, who has had the blood sucked out of her temples for several days by a small monster living in her pillow: the porcupine kills more rapidly than this, by injecting his quills into the temple or base of the skull, although the result is the same (albeit less visible as he licks off the blood and waits a few seconds for the mark to disappear).

 

The porcupine doesn't at all like killing the baby of a dull-witted drunkard Kibandi has a grudge against because the man owes him money and insults him, and the killings increasingly lose any justification, until the porcupine fears – after 99 murders – that the next will be the last and be a disaster. By avoiding it, it doesn't happen, although the terrible twins Koty and Koté kill Kibandi, and yet the porcupine lives on after the death of his double, talking all the while to the baobab tree – maybe he's reprieved, can settle down and have kids. The reader hopes so.

 

Humans lose out in this book, but readers (in spite of all those, er, white lies) don't. This is entrancing, gripping, and although it may sound a little gruesome the violence is on a cartoon level: think of Astérix. Most of all this is a very original – and human – read.

My other posts on Alain Mabanckou:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Alain Mabanckou: Verre Cassé | Broken Glass
Alain Mabanckou: Lettre à Jimmy | Letter to Jimmy
Alain Mabanckou: Black Bazar | Black Bazaar