opportunities elsewhere, the Peasants and Parisians share in the “blue-white-red dream” (an obvious allusion to the colors of the French flag), and as Mabanckou writes, “We were allowed to dream. It didn’t cost anything. No exit visa was necessary, no passport, no airline ticket.”
Ultimately, we are left pondering how to reconcile the multiple components and facets of the migration adventure—the hopes and aspirations of those that are left behind, the quotidian difficulties confronting the migrants, and the disappointment and shame that will accompany a failed migration to the North. . . . To this end, Blue White Red joins a distinguished library of African works, as Mabanckou narrates the latest chapter in the African French experience. This intertextuality is powerfully evident, as we are reminded of the father’s parting words to his son, Laye, in Camara Laye’s 1954 novel, L’Enfant noir (The Dark Child): “I knew quite well that eventually you would leave us.”13 In Blue White Red, Massala-Massala now listens to his own father’s advice: “I have always thought that you would leave one day. Far, far away from here.” Mabanckou’s pioneering novel is thus concerned with the circulation of people but also of literature, and as such it raises important questions about African writing today, the places in which it is produced, published, and ultimately read.
1. “Prince of the Absurd: The Mad, Bad Fiction of Congo’s Alain Mabanckou,” Economist, July 7, 2011.
2. Dominic Thomas, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
3. See Phyllis M. Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
4. Didier Gondola, “Popular Music, Urban Society, and Changing Gender Relations in Kinshasa, Zaire (1950–1990),” in Gendered Encounters: Challenging Cultural Boundaries and Social Hierarchies in Africa, ed. Maria Grosz-Ngaté and Omari H. Kokole (New York: Routledge, 1997), 70.
5. Didier Gondola, “Dream and Drama: The Search for Elegance among Congolese Youth,” African Studies Review 42, no. 1 (April 1999): 31.
6. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 131–33.
7. See Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
8. Lydie Moudileno, Parades postcoloniales: La fabrication des identités dans le roman congolais (Paris: Karthala, 2006), 124.
9. Ibid., 128–29.
10. Justin-Daniel Gandoulou, Au cœur de la sape: Mœurs et aventures de Congolais à Paris (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), 209.
11. Gondola, “Dream and Drama,” 28.
12. Martin, Leisure and Society, 171.
13. Camara Laye, L’Enfant noir (Paris: Plon, 1954); The Dark Child, trans. James Kirkup (London: Collins, 1955), 181.
BLUE
WHITE
RED
The imagination culls its ingredients from reality.
Such is the price one has to pay to achieve a likeness. In the last resort, however, it is the author that must give his characters the fate he thinks is custom-fit to them, depending on the circumstances. From the time they are shaped, these characters borrow our ways. The good and/or the bad. None of the heroes (or antiheroes) presented here belong to any world other than the imagination.
I’ll manage to get myself out of this.
I don’t know which side the sun rises from or sets anymore. Who will hear my complaints? I’ve completely lost my bearings here. My universe is limited to this isolation I’ve grown accustomed to. Could I have behaved differently? I ended up building a space deep in my heart that isn’t enough for me. I follow deserted paths. I pass through ghost towns. I hear my footsteps on dead leaves. I startle the night birds sleeping on one leg. I stop. I start up the path again until the first glint of dawn . . .
Hold on to hope for as long as possible. Say, after all, nothing is lost in advance. I don’t undress. It feels like this all unfolded in a single day, in a single night. A long day. A long night. I’m split between a pressing anxiety that fills my lungs and this false serenity dictated by the way the situation developed. I forgot to be who I had always been. Calm. Serene. Attentive. Who, in similar circumstances, would lift faithfulness above and beyond reality? Vanquished by fatigue, my back up against the wall, it’s difficult for me to understand that I’ve come to that fateful moment, the one those in our small world dread, when the race ends in a cul-de-sac . . .
Believe me, it’s not so much the confrontation that makes me hopeless; I broke with that. Instead, it’s what I can foresee from here: all those wide-open eyes, all those hands held out, waiting for me. It’s a promise each of us carries like a turtle carries its shell. I can’t allow myself not to look at things from that angle. I can’t suddenly ignore all that. They are waiting for me. I am their only hope. I feel entrusted with a mission that must be accomplished at all costs. Otherwise, what will I say to them? That I couldn’t stick it out to the end? Will they forgive me? Will they understand me?
Things are going to happen really fast.
An almost logical continuation. I have never been a fatalistic preacher. I have always fought obstacles, even the most insurmountable. At some point, strength abandons us to our fate, as if to reassure itself that we can move beyond ourselves, without groaning, without wiping our brows, and without making the slightest grimace as evidence of our weakness. Then one feels alone. The wind howls above the rooftops. Little by little, the sun is eclipsed and leaves a lasting, scorching heat. The horizon unfolds, while the land, scattered with rough spots, leaves us no choice but a painful march and burning feet.
At bottom, I feel like I’ve anted up my fate and it will be decided by how the poker game is played. Some will think that I’m looking to justify myself, to plead atonement before the Supreme Being. I am far from thinking that. I’m not one to whimper over my fate or lie on the sly when the time comes to explain myself, even if that particular moment is the most painful for someone who has lived in our milieu, a world one doesn’t escape from again once the door is shut.
Yes, the door that slams shut.
That mechanical noise, here, there. The clicking of the lock. Advancing footsteps. A hand gestures, pointing a finger at you, singling you out. And you, you say that you’re in here for no reason. You raise your right hand. As high as possible. You swear. In the name of God. In the name of your family. They insist, they prove the opposite. Proof with supporting evidence. You were there, at that place, at that hour, with Mr. So-and-so, this is what you did, you left on this street, you passed a thin, small man in a suit. The man gave you an envelope, you took it, you opened it, you exchanged a few words, you got on the subway together. That’s it. Would you like us to continue the description? Here’s a photo. Take a good look. You’re with the man in a suit. What do you have to say about it?
They’ve won.
I would like for everything to be put back in chronological order. For every link of the broken chain to be put back in its place. For every
