Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

Alain Mabanckouwas born in 1966 in Congo. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He received the Subsaharan African Literature Prize for Blue-White-Red , and the Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine , which is published by Serpent’s Tail along with his earlier novels, Broken Glass and African Psycho .

“This bar-room yarn-spinner tells his fellow tipplers’ tales in a voice that swings between broad farce and aching tragedy. His farewell performance from a perch in Credit Gone West abounds in scorching wit and flights of eloquence … vitriolic comedy and pugnacious irreverence” Boyd Tonkin, Independent

“A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence” Melissa McClements, Financial Times

“ Broken Glass is a comic romp that releases Mabanckou’s sense of humour … Although its cultural and intertextual musings could fuel innumerable doctorates, the real meat of Broken Glass is its comic brio, and Mabanckou’s jokes work the whole spectrum of humour” Tibor Fischer, Guardian

“Deserves the acclaim heaped upon it … self-mocking and ironic, a thought-provoking glimpse into a stricken country” Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

“ Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation … a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’ that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time” Time Out , New York

“The French have already called [Mabanckou] a young writer to watch. After this debut, I certainly concur” Globe and Mail , Toronto

“Broken Glass proves to be an obsessive, slyly playful raconteur … the prose runs wild to weave endless sentences, their rhythm and pace attuned to the narrator’s rhetorical extravagances … With his sourly comic recollections, Broken Glass makes a fine companion” Peter Carty, Independent

“A book of grubby erudition … full of tall tales that can entertain readers from Brazzaville to Bognor” James Smart, Guardian

“Mabanckou’s narrative gains an uplifting momentum of its own” Emma Hagestadt, Independent

“Mabanckou’s irreverent wit and madcap energy have made him a big name in France … surreal” Giles Foden, Condé Nast Traveller

“Magical realism meets black comedy in an excellent satire by an inventive and playful writer” Alastair Mabbott, Herald

“Africa’s Samuel Beckett … Mabanckou’s freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat. It weds the oral culture of his mother to an omnivorous bibliophilia encouraged by his stepfather … Memoirs of a Porcupine draws on oral lore and parables in its sly critique of those who use traditional beliefs as a pretext for violence” The Economist

Four months have comeand 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. I’m trying to move out of this place, you see. I’ve had all I can take of my neighbour, Mr Hippocratic, he’s always giving me a hard time, he spies on me when I take the rubbish down to the basement and he lays the blame for all the evils on earth at my door. And another thing, I keep thinking I can make out the figures of my ex and the Hybrid stalking me at home. It’s not like I haven’t cleaned the studio from top to bottom, or painted the walls yellow instead of the sky blue that was there before. So there’s nothing left to remind me that a woman and child used to live here too. Except for the shoe that my partner must have forgotten in her rush. I guess she was worrying I might be back at any moment that day and that I’d catch her packing when I was just enjoying my Pelfort over at Jip’s. Finding that shoe was partly thanks to a tip-off from one of my pals at Jip’s, Paul from the big Congo. He’d confided in me over a couple of beers that when a woman leaves you’ve absolutely got to move your bed in order to draw a line under your past life and steer clear of nightmares involving small men who will haunt you and curse you. He was right. Sure enough, for seven nights after my ex left I had plenty of nightmares. I jumped off the Great Wall of China into thin air. I had wings, I could soar so high, I flew more than ten thousand kilometres in a few seconds, then I landed on a mountain peak ten times higher than the Himalayas and twenty-five times higher than our mountains in the Mayombe Forest. The pygmies of Gabon were circling me with their poisoned assegais. I couldn’t shake them off, they were flying faster than me. When I was a boy, people used to claim those pygmies had supernatural powers because they were the first people entrusted by God with the keys of the earth since the time of Genesis. It was to them that the Lord dedicated the fifth day of Creation when he said: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth …” At that time, the small men were still wondering what they would be able to eat down here, so God, who could read the thoughts of every creature, reassured our pygmies of Gabon by adding: “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth, and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” These days, mankind destroys the flora and perhaps that’s why the pygmies of Gabon come back to terrify us in our dreams.

During those nightmares, I would toss and turn in bed and sweat like I had a fever. The pygmies of Gabon were getting ready to hurl my daughter into a pot of boiling palm oil.

I called out:

“Oh no, boys, oh no you don’t! That’s my daughter! My daughter! My little Henriette! She’s innocent. You can take me instead, if you like. But don’t go putting humanity to shame, when you are our ancestors. Show the whole world that cannibalism doesn’t exist where you come from, that it was invented by explorers, above all by those Africans who write books!”

And the oldest of them came towards me with his grey beard, his red eyes and his yellow teeth:

“Who told you we were cannibals, eh? We’re vegetarians, one hundred per cent! We’re only sacrificing your child so that the rains will come. We need all her blood, then we’ll hand her back to you …”

I called out to my ex for help, and that’s when I woke up with a jolt to realise there weren’t any pygmies of Gabon, I was alone, and I’d fallen asleep without switching off the lights or the television.

It wasn’t until I moved my bed that those small men finally disappeared …

* * *

I’m a regular at Jip’s, the Afro-Cuban bar near the fountain at Les Halles in the 1st arrondissement, and these days you could say I’m even more of a regular than usual. Sometimes I doze off until I get woken by the sound of chairs being stacked by Lazio the security guard, who’s cursing under his breath because someone did a runner and he’s the one who takes the rap, when it’s his job to sort out the riff-raff from the banlieues not to worry about who has or hasn’t settled their bill. Willy the barman tells him there’s no difference between a thug who smashes the joint and a customer who hasn’t paid their bill. They’ve both got it coming, even if you pull your punches with the non-payer …