live you and so long live me
“My people are so beautiful when they dance to my poems!”
“They are, Mr. President.”
Rue Fortio, rue Amela, rue Fontaine, this city, ah this city, rue Foreman, boulevard ex-Duchaillu. . . . He reaches the banks of the “Rouviera Verta” and God damn it this city’s stunning at this time of day! He then starts telling the story of how that pig Oxbanso, on the very day I appointed him Minister of Imports, tried to sleep with National Mom, but I didn’t kill him for that. You see Vauban, this is Satan’s village, only he whom you love can betray you. . . . His slippers are covered in mud. A dead dog has been abandoned in the middle of the road; doesn’t anyone work around here: he moves the dead dog out of the way. Zamba-Town, a city in the south, even hotter at midnight than at noon, with its muddy swamps, breeding grounds for mosquitoes, where those who’ve managed to escape the stifling heat of their hut make love out in the open which is why you can hear the darkness groaning panting weeping and coughing. Zamba-Town, its symbolic hand extended out in peace, rue Gaza and the lingering signs of the latest curfew (now lasting sixteen months). And on the opposite bank of Lake Oufa: the Cité-du-Pouvoir, as exquisite as a love dream, oh how beautiful my hernia is, a monument built to them: thirty-five million dollars and now a patrimony of the state, a valued possession for them to enjoy today and in the future when my hernia has passed away. Well done to the nation!
It’s still not quite that hour when the loudspeakers left behind by our late Colonel Pouranta Ponto start pouring my speeches into my people’s ears; this innovation is hardly new, it was National Laountia’s in fact, and Manuelo Sanka kept it up. Entire districts yelling because people have the shameful habit of changing stations when I speak, I ask Colonel Minister of Borders to install loudspeakers in every district, and to make sure they’re all functioning properly while my hernia is at work, because it would be utterly shameful for a people not to listen to their president’s speeches; make sure they’re installed, Carvanso, and blasting so that they can hear me in their shameful wild animal sleep, so that they can hear me as they mount their wives, curse me and plot against me, as they insult me; at least make sure they can still hear me and let my voice deflower them, if they won’t love me at least they can fear me, know me, smell me.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Rue des Toudonides, rue Whitman, rue Delaronzo: Eckerd Drugs, open till Midnight . . . his skeletal face starts to look like a mummy, he’s scouring the different districts, he can feel a tickle tickle in his hernia, hang in there Vauban and I’ll show you this country, fuck yeah: isn’t it great here! A light rain had started to fall, wetting his denim uniform, he shrugged his shoulders: ever since I got a taste of that White woman that’s all I want now, but tell me, old moldy dick Vauban: Why do you prefer men? And he launches into the anecdote about my war against Russia: eleven months in the rotten forest, without love, soulless, and I swear, Vauban, testicles are the next heart.
It was now Wednesday. The meeting got underway on time. You’re going to laugh, yes, for sure you are, because Colonel Martillimi Lopez made Africa and the rest of the world laugh too. No no and no again: I wouldn’t have seized your crappy power if my predecessor hadn’t taken it upon himself to piss all over the fatherland’s business, if he had just left you to starve to death rather than killing you off like rats, if he hadn’t squandered seventy percent of the budget on Russian scrap metal. Here, that’s the way things are—you visit any household you like at night and you’ll hear the story of the late Colonel Martillimi Lopez, Commander-in-Chief of love and fraternity, and each version will have its own tone, saliva, dates, places; each household will allow their imagination to run wild, but this is the true story of the life of Colonel Martillimi Lopez, the son of our National Mom, as it is told by those in my ethnic group, with their taste for myth, amidst gales of laughter, Mom’s very own Lopez who now lies in state in a stone casket in the National museum, his right eye permanently open, let him look at the fatherland for centuries to come, watch over us from his father’s rotting sleep, let him protect us from tyrants, his dead person’s gaze will continue to germinate in the memories of our children’s children, it is the very symbol of our past, God is great! And this dead eye that watches over us is a miniature of the nation. No more bullshit, my brothers and dear fellow countrymen: let us love Lopez. He was a hundred times better than Dolsano Maniana is today.
1. Sony Labou Tansi’s experimentation with language is a defining feature of his pioneering corpus of works. A range of devices are used, including subversions of well-known proverbs or translations of these from the original Lingala directly into French. Attempting to explain each and every translation choice would be futile. In this particular instance, however, the original French text read “L’eau chaude ne brûle pas le linge,” a direct translation from the Lingala “Mai ya moto etumbaka elamba te”—the closest equivalent phrase in English might very well be “Don’t let yourself be intimidated.”
“MY HERNIA IS SAD TODAY.”
He grabbed the sides of his baggy kaki shorts and hoisted them up toward his belly-button, rearranging his big greasy herniated balls in their sack that reeked of corn beer and mustard.
“My brothers and dear fellow countrymen, my hernia is sad today.” Not really sure why, but we applauded. That happens when you’re in a crowd: one person does something and everyone joins in. Long live Lopez, Long live National Mom! And he says it again: “My hernia is sad.” All of a sudden, I’m pretty sure, his handsome face looked much older.
“Ah, Mom! My hernia is sad. All because Cataeno Pablo, that shameful national, that sellout, but how could an insect like that Cataeno Pablo betray us in this way, how could he, how could he? Barely for the price of a tin of sardines, how shameful for us . . .”
Vauban, the head of personal security, stood at his side as he delivered his speech to the nation. His hernia was sagging, giving off a nauseating stench of eggplant and spices, scales were breaking out all over his body in protest at the sweltering heat, and there was also a hint of sugar and the aroma of wormwood, and a smattering of sour urine along with the musty vapors of his nocturnal juices, that kaki odor, a terrible noxious smell. He spoke loudly, our tricolor colonel did, barricaded off from his nights as national lover, conqueror of virgins! Let my people sing and dance: I adore them with the love of a mammal, Lopez one Tuesday night came directly into the world making mystical sounds, right in front of the Pope, and was then raised in poverty and total destitution, National Mom wiped his backside with a hemp rag, just regional Lopez at the time of Sanamatouff, then later Lopez of my ethnic group under Faramento, and today Lopez that my people sing and dance to, Lopez of my people who don’t want me to step down because of the prestige I embody, Lopez for peace, after all I gave the people back to the people, the world back to the world, Lopez aimed at swine like Cataeno Pablo, that miserable national who who who went into hiding with Laure and her mother, Cataeno Pablo whose meat we were going to distribute here today to those of you at this meeting, to you the national, and not to the you of expatriates who shamefully support the rebel command by handing them seventeen Mauser-52 rifles and eleven Sten guns. Come to think of it, is mister the diplomat in charge of the Belgian embassy and all its “flemishings” here today? Close down their diplomacy, close it down right now and take the first plane in the first direction, and if you don’t want to, in the name of Lopez, I’ll ship you to His Majesty of the shame of the “Flemish” who have always pecked at us, go ahead and close it down, and I’ll also ask the whole Flemish colony settled throughout my hernia to leave the sovereign territory and return to their native Flemishything, in the name of the Revolution, in the name of National Mom and in my own name too, and the same decision of my hernia goes for Italy, yes, my brothers and dear fellow countrymen, Italy has also been mixed up in Cataeno Pablo’s harebrained nationalist
