Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou

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Touted as "a remarkable new African voice," Alain Mabanckou is in fact anything but. Born in Congo-Brazzaville in 1966, the author has, since the appearance in 1993 of his first book, a collection of poetry entitled Au jour le jour, enjoyed over a decade of prolific writerly activity. Now, with six novels, six volumes of poetry and a representative sample of prestigious francophone literary prizes to his name, Mabanckou’s prose is finally, having been woven into Hebrew, Korean and Portuguese amongst other languages, being made available to English readers.

Mabanckou remains a virtual unknown in the UK and, if you’ve heard his name so far, chances are it’s through comparison with Bret Easton Ellis and American Psycho, a novel which the skewed Bildungsroman African Psycho (originally published in France in 2003 and now the first of his works in English) overtly and gleefully parodies. "I want to conceive of everything from beginning to end and plant my foot upon my victim as a sign of satisfaction, like a hunter happy to have killed his first big game" relates Grégoire Nakomobayo, African Psycho’s troubled protagonist. In a state of mind not wholly dissimilar to that of Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, Grégoire believes that killing his girlfriend, Germaine, will endow him with the right status to transcend his tawdry life. His circumstances, as a car mechanic in a rundown suburb, could not be further from those of city slicker Bateman, though.

In fact, Bateman is far more recognisable in African Psycho as the character of the late "Great Master" Angoualima, a quasi-mythical serial killer whose reign of terror Grégoire seeks to ape, and with whom he, apparently, converses. Angoualima’s grisly trademark of leaving "twenty-five Cuban cigars burning" in the "thing" of any woman he cares to rape, for example, recalls American Psycho’s infamous rat scene. While Mabanckou details that he was “fascinated and captured” by the novel and wanted to create “a kind of tribute to Bret Easton Ellis,” it was far from his intention to fashion another polished serial killer. Asked how his project differed from American Psycho, he notes: “Bateman, the main character of that novel, looks so perfect when committing his murders. My idea was to create an awkward character far from Bateman, not at all well educated. A kind of loser – a would-be serial killer.”

African Psycho continues what Mabanckou himself identifies as a pattern of writing about losers, which he continues largely because “it is more exciting to get to know someone who is fighting and fighting again against his fate than someone who is successful in his goals.” With almost comic certainly, Grégoire’s various violent endeavours, despite meticulous preparation, are persistently ham-fisted. An armed (with a hammer) robbery on the offices of a corrupt local official ends in a botched, although not fatal, assault and a penniless retreat. It is almost possible to read Grégoire as a tragic hero, especially since his ultimate ineptitude, and isolation, is so poignantly depicted. As Mabanckou explains, “the end of my story shows a desperate character who seems to regret his gesture.” This, indeed, is a far cry indeed from the self-indulgent unravelling of Bateman.

Humour, however, mediates African Psycho’s tragic elements. Mabanckou is adamant that he “wanted to laugh in [the] book and to show at the same time that Africa does have its serial killers even if they don’t look like my main character Grégoire!” It is this fine balance, painstakingly maintained throughout the novel, which makes the characterization of Grégoire so effective: his rectangular head and hesitant manner make him more pitiable than menacing. Though he himself fails to realize it, he is, as Mabanckou notes, a highly improbable killer. By psychologizing Grégoire fully from an early stage as the product of a problematic childhood spent in various foster homes, Mabanckou enables a degree of understanding of his protagonist’s motivations. It is in this, and not simply the depiction of an outright loser, that he most notably diverges from Ellis’s model. Serial killers mean something quite different in African culture. Asked what precisely that is, Mabanckou says: “we [Africans] try to explain serial killers by stating that it is a mystery, that the killer is possessed by a spirit like my character who refers to his mentor Angoualima.”

Enriching what could otherwise be (and has been, in the hands of Ellis) a bleak psychological portrait, Mabanckou foregrounds the sense of folklore which permeates African Psycho’s every word. It is his seamless deployment of Congolese oral tradition which means Mabanckou is spoken of in the same breath as such post-colonial giants as Chinua Achebe, whose seminal Things Fall Apart (1958) combined folklore and proverb to create an enduring portrait of a Nigerian farmer. Grégoire, psychotic tendencies aside, is a master storyteller: whether explaining why his home village is known as "He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An Idiot" (due to its proliferation of pubs), or detailing, with due reverence, the history of his "idol" Angoualima—"[h]e had six fingers on each hand and a harelip"—Grégoire represents an authentic folkloric voice.

Such an innate cultural awareness is liable to be diluted in translation: was Mabanckou worried about this? Not a bit of it, he demurs: “I think translation should not be considered like just a flat translation of what an author wrote previously. That why I am always amazed to discover how a translator is dealing with my books since I write in a kind of oral language inherited from my Congolese culture. So far I have been very happy when reading my work translated.” This notion of the text as dynamic, imbued with a significance not fixed by its author, very much pitches African Psycho as a contemporary fable.

Mabanckou is not alone in his aim to imbue contemporary fiction with a sense of tradition in this way. Certain criticism of African Psycho following its US release last year alluded to the author’s as part of an African "blank generation" loosely analogous with the American equivalent, which came to prominence during the 1980s. Asked how he feels about such comparisons, Mabanckou is adamantly positive: “I am not irritated by the drawing of these parallels. I do believe that we are in the age of an African blank generation which began around the 80s – like in America. That blank generation does not want to write in a ‘French way’, the task is to break the language and the rules of the French language. Most of the writers from African blank generation were born after 60s when Africa was earning its independence. The goal was then to build another ‘littérature’, to rethink the French language and the role of francophone literature in the world. We are trying to move forward in that direction.”

This raises a number of issues, but most notably suggests that perhaps Mabanckou ought to be irritated by such parallels, as the African blank generation's project seems entirely opposed to the casual nihilism commonly attributed its US equivalent, whose exponents included Jay McInerney, Dennis Cooper, Lynne Tillman and—predictably—Ellis himself. Further, it suggests a sense of proximity to, and yet estrangement from, his own language, and country, which once again recalls Achebe. Questioned about how the distance between the writer and his subject affects its presentation—he has lived in California, where he is currently Professor of French Literature at UCLA—Mabanckou says: “distance does affect the subject. Living and writing abroad modify our way of seeing the world. That's why I try to go back to my native country each year. I need to take from the world without losing my roots.”

This relationship between writer and context entirely underpins Mabanckou’s literary ethos. The need to appropriate, amuse and illuminate particularly informs his presentation of the more problematic aspects of Congolese culture, and in particular the circumlocutory obscurity of its media, which African Psycho heavily satirises. Mabanckou summarises that “the fiction is always close to the reality”, and adds that “satirizing the media is my way of requesting its freedom in my country” – the blank generation desire for change once again emerging strongly. Asked whether his personal relation to the media is equally problematic, however, Mabanckou’s humour surfaces: “as a writer I have a great experience with the media. Journalists from my country then have the opportunity to discuss literature instead of politics – even if sometimes I criticize the system.”

Given his almost revolutionary zeal, and desire to turn literary tradition on its head, Mabanckou is perhaps not the most obvious doyen of the French literary establishment. His latest novel, Memoires de porc-épic (Memoirs of a Porcupine), however, won him the prestigious Renaudot Prize in 2006. Second only to the Goncourt, France’s Booker Prize, the Renaudot’s previous winners include heavyweights such as Louis Ferdinand Céline and Georges Pérec. It is any wonder, then, that Mabanckou sees the prize as “my most significant achievement to date.” With the significance of his literary project now appreciated, what is next for Mabanckou? “I would like to write a novel which will deal with America since I am living and teaching there”, he relates. The erstwhile US blank generation had better watch out, then, as the recontextualizing energy which his parody brought to bear on American Psycho can only have a yet more devastating effect when unleashed on its home turf.

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