Alain Mabanckou - Broken Glass

the day after Minister Zou Loukia’s speech, the president of the republic himself, Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi, flew into a rage, stamping his favorite daily dessert of grapes beneath his feet, and we were informed by Radio-Curbside FM that President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi, who also happened to be General of the Armies, was jealous of the minister of agriculture’s phrase—“I accuse,” indeed, he wished he had said it himself, and couldn’t understand why his own advisers hadn’t come up with a similarly short but snappy slogan instead of feeding him turgid set pieces along the lines of “ All things, like the sun, rise on the distant horizon and set each evening over the majestic Congo River ,” so President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi, in his vexation, mortification, degradation, humiliation, and frustration, called a meeting of the supposedly devoted bunch of negroes in his cabinet and bid them slave as they’d never slaved before, he was through with turgid set pieces dressed up in so-called lyrical language, and the Negroes in his cabinet leaped to attention and lined up, from the smallest to the tallest, like the Daltons in Lucky Luke, when he’s tracking them through the cactus plains of the Wild West, and the negroes all said as one man, “yes sir, Commandant sir,” when in fact President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi was a general of the armies, and was longing for civil war to break out between north and south so he could write his war memoirs and give it the modest title Memoirs of Hadrian , and the President and General of the Armies called on them to find him a phrase that would be remembered by posterity as Minister Zou Loukia’s “I accuse” would be, and the negroes in the presidential cabinet worked all night long, behind closed doors, opening up and looking through — for the first time ever — encyclopedias which stood gathering dust on the presidential bookshelves, they looked in large books with tiny writing, they worked their way back to the dawn of time, back through the age of some guy called Gutenberg, and back through the age of Egyptian hieroglyphics as far back as the writings of some Chinaman who it seems had a lot to say about the art of war and was supposed to have been alive in the days before anyone knew that Christ was going to be born by the power of the Holy Spirit and lay down his life for us sinners, but Adrien’s Negroes could find nothing as good as Minister Zou Loukia’s “I accuse,” so the President and General of the Armies threatened to sack the entire cabinet, unless they found him a phrase for posterity, and said: “Why should I go on paying a bunch of idiots who can’t find me a decent enduring and memorable slogan, I’m warning you now, if I don’t have my slogan by the time the cock crows tomorrow at dawn, heads will roll like rotten mangoes, that’s all you are, the lot of you, rotten mangoes, let me tell you, you can start packing now, go into exile in some Catholic country, take your pick, exile or death, d’you hear me, starting now, no one leaves this palace as of this moment, I’m going to sit in my office and I don’t want to pick up even the slightest whiff of coffee, not to mention cigars, Cohibas or Montecristos, there’ll be no water, no sandwiches, nothing, zilch, niente , it’ll be healthy eating all round, till I get my personal slogan, and anyway how did this little nobody of a minister Zou Loukia come up with his “I accuse” that everyone’s talking about, eh, the Presidential Security Services tell me people are even calling their babies “I accuse,” and what about those young girls on heat getting it tattooed onto their backsides and the clients who, in an ironic twist, demand that the prostitutes have it, you’ll appreciate, I think, what a colossal fuck-up this represents, it’s not even as if it was rocket science to think up in the first place, a phrase like that, are the minister for agriculture’s negroes better that you, eh, do you realize, I wonder, that his negroes don’t even have an official car each, they get the ministry bus, they live off pitiful salaries, while you loll about here in the palace, swimming in my pool, drinking my champagne, sitting about watching foreign TV on cable, listening to their lies about me, eating my petit fours, eating my salmon and my caviar, strolling about in my garden, taking your mistresses skiing on my artificial snow slopes, I’m surprised you don’t sleep with my twenty wives, I’m beginning to wonder why I even have a cabinet, is that what I pay you for, to sit around here all day doing nothing, eh, why don’t I just hire my own stupid dog as head of cabinet, tell me that, you bunch of good-for-nothings,” and President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi walked out slamming the door of cabinet behind him, still shouting “you bunch of negroes, things are going to change in this palace, I’ve had it with fattening up slavering slugs like you, let’s start judging by results, to think some of you went to ENA and the écoles polytechniques , ENA my ass!”

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the negroes of the cabinet set about their arduous task with a Chaka Zulu spear and a sword of Damocles dangling over their heads while the palace walls still echoed with the president’s final words, and around midnight, since they still hadn’t thought of anything — there’s plenty of gas in this country, but not many ideas — it naturally occurred to them to phone a well-known member of the Académie Française who was apparently the only black in the history of this august assembly, and everyone applauded this last-minute idea, and everyone said the academician in question would consider it a great honor, so they wrote him a long letter full of smoothly phrased imperfect subjunctives, and even some particularly moving passages composed in classical Alexandrines with identical rhymes, they checked it carefully for punctuation, they didn’t want to be sneered at by the academicians, who would take any opportunity to prove their usefulness to the world, beside handing out the Top Prize for Best Novel, and the president’s negroes almost came to blows over it, because some of them said there should be a semicolon in place of a comma and others didn’t agree and wanted to keep the comma to move the phrase up into fifth gear, and those in the latter camp stuck to their point even though it was contradicted by a certain Adolphe Thomas, in the Dictionnaire des difficulteś de la langue française , whose view supported that of the first camp, and the second camp refused to yield and the point of all this was to get on the right side of the Black academician who, as they were humbly aware, was one of the first ever doctors of French grammar from the African continent, and everything might have passed off smoothly if Adrien’s negroes hadn’t then said that the academician would be slow to reply, the spear of Chaka Zulu and the sword of Damocles would come down on them before they received word from the Coupole, which is the name given to the onion dome beneath which these immortal sages sit listening to the distant babble of the French language and decree absolutely that such and such a text is the degree zero of all writing, but there was another reason why the negroes beat a retreat, one member of the cabinet, who’d come in top in his year at the ENA and owned the complete works of the black academician in question, pointed out that he had already produced a phrase for posterity, “emotion is black as reason is Greek,” as an ENA graduate himself he explained to his colleagues that actually the academician couldn’t come up with a second slogan because posterity isn’t like the court of King Petaud where nobody’s boss and anarchy rules, you only get one chance to coin a phrase, otherwise it’s all just hollow chatter, much ado about nothing, that’s why phrases that go down in history are short, sharp, and to the point, and since such phrases survive through legends, centuries, and millennia, people unfortunately forget who the true authors were, and fail to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s