Notes
By
François Busnel
Translated by
Kate Deimling
How many times have you heard someone say, “In the Trump era, truth is stranger than fiction”? This is why some friends and I founded a magazine in which specialists in fiction—novelists—can describe the reality of America.
America came about after Donald Trump was elected. The idea was to tell the story of the world’s number one superpower on a quarterly basis, for the length of a presidential term. Trump’s victory didn’t just stun many Americans. It shook the whole world. As a Frenchman, I feel I belong to what is sometimes called, without irony or submissiveness, the fifty-first state. In other words, the rest of the world. Whether we like it or not, we are all deeply affected by what happens in the United States. If we accept the prevailing cynicism and see Donald Trump simply as a clown, we’re just fooling ourselves. The current resident of the White House is much more astute than people think. He shrewdly proves the Mark Twain maxim “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.”
Since America is anything but homogeneous, America has sent writers all over the country, to big cities and little towns, to collect impressions and opinions face-to-face in unbiased fashion, so that literature can cast its net to capture the images that are the truest, the strongest, and sometimes the most disturbing.
Novelists’ inspired visions, which are the basis of our approach, seem to be more necessary than ever. We are currently experiencing one of the biggest challenges to democracy: in a puzzling paradox, it seems the more we know about our world—with the Internet, new technologies, and the accessibility of the written word—the less we know what to think about it. There is only one solution: novels. When the authorities preach, novelists take a skeptical stance. When experts try to simplify things, novelists restore complexity. When politicians spin the facts, novelists pull back the curtain on deception. How? By asking questions. By telling stories. How did Trump’s reign happen? How did the populist wave triumph, with its accompanying intolerance, ignorance, racism, and partisanship? How are Americans living today, both those who brought this movement to power and those who are simply enduring it? What does the United States of America look like today, after four years of a reign marked by huge political turmoil, threats of war, a surge in protests fighting for racial justice, and the worst public health crisis the country has faced in the last century? A line from investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr has inspired my readings and travels for years now: “You may know the facts, but you don’t know the story.” Like many people, I’m a collector of stories.
Novelists don’t affirm anything; they seek. Their job is not to solve problems, but to express them. It’s quite possible that human stupidity comes simply from trying to have an answer for everything. The novel’s wisdom is to have a question for everything. America wants to take up this challenge: to understand rather than to judge.
By
Alain Mabanckou
Translated by
Helen Stevenson
Dear Marc-Antoine,
Thank you for your e-mail, from which I learned that you spent three days in Los Angeles and were disappointed to discover it was actually just a heap of miserable skyscrapers and towers held hostage by giant motorways. To illustrate the full scope of your resentment, you even say that in the center of town some drivers were so concerned to see you walking, they’d slow down, draw up alongside you, and ask with a kindly air:
“Are you okay, sir? How can I help you?”
You also claim that the City of Angels, which features in the dreams of every global tourist, is ultimately no more than a showcase for extravagance and ostentation, its lethargic inhabitants lounging by the ocean with a glass of mint lemonade. I have to tell you I burst out laughing at this point, because I’m always looking for these people, and it’s starting to feel like they only ever appear to lucky travelers like yourself! Also, this caricature of a Californian reminded me of when I lived in France and spent my whole time in the streets trying to find the famous “average Frenchman” with his baguette, Basque beret—and maybe a bottle of red wine and an overripe Camembert . . .
Continuing in the same vein, you tell me that in Venice Beach, where you’ve rented a small studio, you were appalled to find canals and an artificial lagoon—a “hideous” stage set, a feeble imitation of the real Italian city built on wooden stakes, with its four hundred bridges, a far cry from the vulgar reproductions that obsess Americans and expose their lack of taste and culture, further demonstrated by the replicas of European monuments in Las Vegas.
You conclude by wondering how a cultured man like myself can bear to live in such a place, having experienced both the festive clamor of African capitals and the architectural splendors of the old European cities which, unlike Los Angeles, have their own real history, genuine traditions and unique character . . .
To come straight to the point, my dear Marc-Antoine, I have to say I do not share your view, but I’m sure you are not one of those travelers who, after a very brief stay in a place, consider it “done,” and set themselves up as intransigent specialists, to the point of even churning out one of those bestsellers, stuffed with superficial insights and Épinal print–style clichés, that seem to afflict all great American cities. My worry—to be quite frank with you—is that the meager memories you took home with you to Lyons will become your abiding image of Los Angeles and its surrounding area. It’s this concern that has moved me to come up with a loose description of where I live, a few unusual places that I love and that fascinate me, those small treasures, you might say, that contribute to my delight and joy in living in California. Delight can also have its dark side, as I know too well, which is why at the end of this letter I will also share with you some of my concerns as a Californian in the wake of the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.
Santa Monica, outpost of Pointe-Noire
As you know, I have lived in Santa Monica, a coastal city on the west side of the county of Los Angeles, for over ten years. With each passing year I have felt an increased sense of belonging, that the city is stretching out its long arms affectionately toward me, and I am drawn to it as I am to Pointe-Noire and Paris. Santa Monica has not just one soul, but many. I need only close my eyes to sense the breath of its first inhabitants—Native Americans of the Tongva tribe—and to hear the distant tread of the Spaniards who made landfall here in the eighteenth century, occupying the exact neighborhood where I live, close to Wilshire Boulevard.
Not a day passes without my sensing the shadow of the Spanish explorer and colonizer Gaspar de Portolá in the features of an old tree, the dead leaves of which, lying at its feet, embody the suffering of those indigenous people whose descendants today are practically strangers in the land of their ancestors. Santa Monica—such a pretty name, a sweet name, derives from Monica of Hippo, a Berber woman, whose saintliness was recognized by both Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. She was the mother of Saint Augustine, who himself—if I can say this without trampling on the certainties of historians—was an African, since he was born in what at that time was called “the province of Africa,” which covered present-day Tunisia and a few parts of Libya and Egypt.
As you will have
