Alain Mabanckou - Memoirs of a Porcupine

Letter from the Stubborn Snail concerning the origin of the manuscript Memoirs of a Porcupine

Monsieur Stubborn Snail

Literary executor of Broken Glass

Bar owner of Credit Gone West

To Editions du Seuil

27, Rue Jacob

75006 Paris — France

Subject: Submission of manuscript Memoirs of a Porcupine , posthumous text by my friend Broken Glass

Madame, Monsieur,

I am writing to you in my capacity as literary executor to my lifelong friend, the late Broken Glass. I should like this letter to be published at the end of his book Memoirs of a Porcupine , to inform the readers of certain details regarding the origin of the text.

Last year, just after his death, I sent you, by registered post, what I believed to be his one and only manuscript, since it was I who had commissioned it, with a view to immortalising my bar, Credit gone West. You published this first text several months later under the title of Broken Glass , despite my having formally expressed a wish that it be called Credit Gone West . You appear to have decided — in the interests of the book — to take no account of this…

Be that as it may, the purpose of this letter is not to enter into a polemic on that subject. On the contrary, it gives me great pleasure to enclose this second manuscript, which one of my employees, the bartender, Mompéro, found in a thicket down by the river Tchinouka, where the body of the lamented Broken Glass was fished out. The original document — an old school folder filled with loose papers — was in such a deplorable state that great care had to be taken to put the pages together in order and number them. To this end, whenever the bar was not too busy, my two bartenders and I would sit round the table where Broken Glass usually sat. We would decipher the passages smudged with dust, rain and dew. We argued between ourselves, to avoid any temptation to ascribe to the deceased words which he had not in fact written. Our discussions, I confess, were often bitter and heated, which exasperated a number of my clients. Several of them, including the Pampers guy and Robinette, continue to deny certain scenes attributed to them in the novel Broken Glass . As a result, they were most displeased to hear of the existence of a second notebook, thinking, wrongly, as it happens, that Memoirs of a Porcupine was simply a sequel to Broken Glass ! In fact they were worried that once again they would find themselves caricatured by the man they continue to regard as an outright traitor who stole whole sections of their lives before going to join his mother in the murky waters of the river Tchinouka

But let us return to the new manuscript!

Once the difficult task of piecing the work together was done, I personally engaged a student at the Technical Lycee of Kengué-Pauline to type up Memoirs of a Porcupine . She invoiced me, believe it or not, to the tune of 200 °CFA per page, that is to say, the cost of a bottle of good red wine in my bar! She justified the high cost per page of typing by saying that Broken Glass’s handwriting was indecipherable, and the poor girl sometimes had to read the same line twice or three times over, all because of the author’s determination to use only commas by way of punctuation.

These difficulties, dear Monsieur, dear Madame, account for the late arrival of this manuscript, and it is with great relief that I enclose it herewith, along with the original document, in order that you may, should it prove necessary, check certain of our reconstructions, particularly in the last two sections, entitled respectively ‘on how last Friday became black Friday’ and ‘how this porcupine isn’t finished yet’. These sections were the most damaged of the entire document.

Broken Glass is absent from the text, featuring neither as omnipresent narrator nor as a character in the story. Deep down he was convinced that the books we really remember are those which reinvent the world, revisit our childhood, pose questions about the origin of all things, examine our obsessions and question our beliefs. Accordingly, in this final tale entitled Memoirs of a Porcupine — and I sincerely hope that this time you will not change the book’s title — Broken Glass was providing an allegorical version of his own last wishes. As he sees it, the world is just an approximate version of a fable which we will never understand as long as we continue to take account only of the material representation of things.

I must confess that I was quite carried away by this tale of the fortunes and misfortunes of this singular porcupine, so likeable, chatty and restless, with his deep knowledge of human nature and his way, even up to the final page, of wielding digression like a weapon, his aim being to draw a portrait of us human beings, and often, indeed, to blame us. And reading it has changed my view of animals. After all, which is really the beast, man or animal? A huge question!

I look forward to collaborating with you once again, and offer you, Madame, Monsieur, my most respectful greetings,

Stubborn Snail

Literary executor to Broken Glass

Bar owner, Credit Gone West