Author of a corpus of thirty books in which fiction co-exists with poetry and essays, the Congolese Alain Mabanckou is also a professor of literature in California. In the fall, the author publishes “Rumors of America,” a collection of essays, halfway between sociological reflections and journalistic chronicles that tell American life and its turbulences.
“I came to literature from excessive loneliness and lived in Africa as the only child who carried amazement in his dreams. And then there was this kind of fear of reality that gradually led him to invent reality through fiction. Let’s say I don’t know when I started writing, but I know I caught myself writing and it was already too late to come back. “It’s actually hard to step back when your name is Alain Mabanckou and you are the most famous African writer in France and Navarre.
Alain Mabanckou made a name for himself by publishing his first novel Bleu Blanc Rouge in 1998, which won the main literary prize for Black Africa. In just over twenty years of literary career, the Congolese has become the symbolic writer of his generation. His earthly and inventive imagination, in which Rabelaisian laughter coexists with elegiac lyricism, has largely contributed to the renewal of African literature and made it a true world literature, where the local and the global collide.
The black condition in times of migraine
Into literature through the door of poetry while still living in Pointe-Noire in Congo Brazzaville, Alain Mabanckou is above all a novelist and essayist. A prolific writer, the man has about thirty books to his credit, including novels that have become classics and whose title, to name the most famous: Broken Glass (2005), Black Bazar (2009)), Lumière de Pointe-Noire (2018), Storks are immortal (2018). Awarded several prizes and translated into several languages, they carry the autobiographical and the fictional, the historical and the political in order to stage the black state in times of “migritude”.
Rumeurs d’Amérique, the new work from the pen of this abundant author, is a collection of essays devoted to the contemporary United States, where Alain Mabanckou landed in 2002 to write residency before retraining as a professor of literature. African, which he teaches today at the famous UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles. The book, which its author describes as a “vagabond travelogue,” tells the story of America day by day.
Rumeurs d’Amérique consists of about fifty essays or chronicles and aims to make the cling of American cities heard through their stories, their daily lives and the fortunes and misfortunes of their multicultural population. From the balcony of his apartment, located high in the heart of the city of Los Angeles, the author looks at the metropolis and meditates on its turbulence, while exploring his own state as a globalized Congolese reader living in nostalgia of Pointe-Noire and of Brazzaville where he grew up and Paris where he lived some of the fundamental moments of his life as a man and writer.
“Rumors of America,” the author explains, “despite the fact that the title is not just a book that focuses on the United States, when in fact I am trying to get a glimpse of what is left throughout the United States. in me from Africa and what was left of Western culture. From this balcony, when I look towards the horizon, I see the city of Pointe-Noire, the city of my childhood, I also see the political capital, Brazzaville, but I also see Paris, the Château Rouge, the Water Tower, the Forum des Halles, the 18th arrondissement. .. I am more of a writer taking stock of nostalgia in the three territories: Africa, Europe and America. ”
America’s strength
Alain Mabanckou likes to say that his dream of America goes back to his early childhood in Pointe-Noire, where he grew up in the company of books. All kinds of books. From San Antonio novels “with naked women on the cover” that pass Westerners left in hotel rooms where the author’s father was a receptionist, to great classics and comics. It was while flipping through the comics dedicated to the adventures of Blek le Roc or Tex Willer that took place in the United States that little Alain discovered an unusual America where adventure was possible. Unfortunately, he did not find this imaginative America when he landed in Michigan in 2002. In the end, cities and countries are not primarily drawn by experience, by disappointments, joys, and surprises as one experiences it, the author wonders.
It is this America between the imaginary and the real that is undoubtedly the real subject of this collection of essays, which equally deals with serious themes such as racism, African intellectuals’ debts to writers and black American activists, as well as unusual topics such as “time management in basketball “, visits to Witch’s House or even obsession with veganism.
There are some of the Persian letters on these pages and in the spaces with false naive observations, perhaps the novelist’s eager desire to find in American vitality something to renew his romantic inspiration. “The United States gives me even more reason to write because I’m so far away from the space I knew. The United States has deepened my loneliness, the United States has pushed me to the extreme, and the United States allows me to reflect on what I no longer have or what is very far from me. Maybe that’s America’s strength, ”says the author of Broken Glass.
We can bet that Alain Mabanckou’s next novels will be very different from the fiction of back and forth between Africa and France, to which he has become accustomed.
Rumeurs d’Amérique, by Alain Mabanckou. Plon, 256 pages, 19 euros.
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