Alain Mabanckou - Broken Glass

in fact the Stubborn Snail took me aside one day and said with a confidential air, “Broken Glass, I want to talk to you about something that’s been bothering me, in fact I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, it’s important, I think you should write, I mean, I think you should write a book,” and I was rather taken aback and I said “a book on what,” and he pointed at the terrace of Credit Gone West and murmured “a book about us, a book about this place, there’s no other place like it on earth, except The Cathedral in New-Bell, Cameroon,” and I laughed, I thought he must have some other reason, that this was some kind of snare without end, and he said “don’t laugh, now, I really mean it, you ought to write, you know you can,” and the look on his face told me this was no two-Congolese-franc joke, and I answered “but you’re the boss, you’re the one who knows what goes on here, I wouldn’t know where to start,” and he poured me a drink before bouncing back with “believe me, I’ve tried it a few times myself, but it never works out, I just don’t have that little bug that writers have, you have, it shows when you talk about literature, your eyes light up and you look all wistful, but I don’t think it’s frustration, or bitterness either, because I know you’re not at all a frustrated man, or a bitter man, you have no cause for regrets, my friend,” and I said nothing, so he went on, “you know, I remember once you told me about a famous writer who drank like a fish, what was his name again,” and I didn’t answer and he continued “well anyway, since we had that talk, I’ve been wondering whether you didn’t start drinking in imitation of the writer whose name I’ve forgotten, and come to look at you, you do actually look like a writer, and the reason you don’t care much about your life is because you know you can invent all sorts of other lives and you’re just one character in the great book of life, of shit and tears, you’re a writer, I know, that’s why you drink, you are not of this world, some days I get the feeling you’re deep in conversation with those guys like Proust or Hemingway, guys like Labou Tansi or Mongo Beti, I can tell you are, so you should just let yourself go, you’re never too old to write,” and for the first time ever I saw him knock back his drink in one gulp, whereas normally he only ever drinks half a glass, and he said with a military air “Broken Glass, I want your inner anger out from inside you, go on, explode, vomit, spit, cough, or ejaculate, I don’t care how you do it, just turn out something about this bar for me, about some of the guys who hang out here, and especially about yourself,” for a moment his words stopped the words in my mouth, I felt like crying, I couldn’t remember which drunken writer it was we’d talked about, in any case, quite a lot of them drank, and some writers today drink lethal amounts, what had got into the Stubborn Snail that day, needling down deep inside me, huh, so in my own defense I said over and over, “I’m not a writer, and besides, who’d want to read about these people’s lives, or mine, there’s no interest in that, you’d never fill a whole book,” and he came straight back saying, “who cares, Broken Glass, you’ve got to write, it’s interesting to me, for a start,” and I felt proud that he’d asked me, and actually the idea began to take shape in my head from that point on, fueled by one glass of red after another, I outlined my real thoughts about writing to the Stubborn Snail, and it was simple to express myself, because it is easy to talk about writing when, like me, you’ve written nothing, and I told him that in this crappy country everyone thinks he can turn his hand to writing, even when there’s no life behind the words, and I told him that sometimes on the TV in a bar on the Avenue of Independence I’d see some of those writers who wear jackets and ties, bright red scarves, sometimes round glasses, smoking pipes or cigars, trying to look good, like smart young things, the kind of writers who take photos looking as though they’ve got great works under their belts and all they want people to talk about is their own navels, the size of a clockwork orange, some of them even fancy themselves neglected writers, convinced of their own genius, when they’ve produced nothing but sparrows’ droppings, they’re paranoid, embittered, jealous, envious, always convinced there’s some great conspiracy against them, and they say that even if one day they did win the Nobel Prize for literature, they’d categorically turn it down, they don’t want to find themselves with dirty hands, the Nobel Prize for literature is a mesh, a wall, iron in the soul, the bets have already been placed, to the point where you start wondering what is literature, and yes all these crappy writers would turn down the Nobel Prize in order to preserve the road to freedom, I’ll believe that when I see it, and I also said to the Stubborn Snail that if I was a writer I would ask God to grant me the gift of humility, to give me the strength to put my own writing into perspective alongside the giants of this world who have put pen to paper, and that I would say three cheers for true genius, and would keep silent rather than speak of the mediocrity all around us, and that would be the only way you could hope to write something remotely like real life, but I’d say it in my own words, twisted words, incoherent words, nonsensical words, I’d write down words as they came to me, I’d begin awkwardly and I’d finish as awkwardly as I’d begun, and to hell with pure reason, and method, and phonetics, and prose, and in this shit-poor language of mine things would seem clear in my head but come out wrong, and the words to say it wouldn’t come easy, so it would be a choice between writing or life, that’s right, and what I really want people to say when they read me is “what’s this jumble, this mess, this muddle, this mishmash of barbarities, this empire of signs, this chitchat, this descent to the dregs of belles lettres, what’s with this barnyard prattle, is this stuff for real, and where does it start, and where the hell does it end?” and my mischievous answer would be “this jumble of words is life, come on, come into my lair, check out the rotting garbage, here’s my take on life, your fiction’s no more than the output of a load of old has-beens designed to comfort other old has-beens, and until the day your characters start to see how the rest of us earn our nightly crust, there’ll be no such thing as literature, only intellectual masturbation, with you all rubbing up against each other like donkeys,” and to sum up I said to the Stubborn Snail that, sadly, I wasn’t a writer, I could not be a writer, all I ever did was watch the world, and talk to my bottles and to my tree, the one I like to piss under, to whom I had made a promise to come back in vegetal form, and live a new life alongside it, and because of that I would rather leave the job of writing to the intellectually gifted, the writers I so loved to read in the days when I still read in order to learn, I would leave writing, I said, to those who sing of the joy of life, who struggle, and who dream without ceasing of the extension of the domain of the struggle, those who invent fancy ways of dancing the polka, those who can astonish the gods, those who wallow in disgrace, those who walk steadfastly toward manhood, those who create a practical dream, those who sing of the land without shadows, those who live in transit in one corner of the earth, those who see the world through an attic window, those who, like my late father, listen to jazz and drink palm wine, those who can describe an African summer, those who tell tales of barbarous weddings, those who retreat to the summit of the magic rock of Tanios, and pass their time in meditation, I told him I’d leave writing to those who remind us that too much sun kills love, those who prophecy the sobbing of the white man, phantom Africa, the innocence of the black child, I told him I’d leave writing to those who can construct a town inhabited by dogs, who can put up a green house like the Printer’s or a house on the edge of tears to shelter the humble and homeless, those who sense the compassion of stones, yes, I told him, I’d leave writing to them, and rule out the nutters and the live wires, the weekend poets with their threepenny verses, and it’s just bad luck on the nostalgic Senegalese riflemen, who tear to shreds the very core of militancy, and the guys who think a black man shouldn’t speak of birch trees, of stone, of dust, of winter, of snow, of a rose, or simply of beauty for beauty’s sake, and rule out the integrationalist imitators that pop up like mushrooms, how many are their number, who congest the highway of letters, sully the purity of the universe, and pollute the true literature of our time