The notebook

• Last Updated: February 06. 2009 4:02PM UAE / February 6. 2009 12:02PM GMT

Laila Lalami reads the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou's Broken Glass, a novel bursting with cultural references and irreverent humour.

Broken Glass
Alain Mabanckou
Serpent's tail
Dh42

“In Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns.”

When the Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ uttered these words at a Unesco assembly in 1960, he was attempting to draw attention to Africa’s tradition of oral storytelling. Little did he know that his aphorism would turn into one of the most persistent clichés about the continent, one that unfortunately reinforced the erroneous idea that there was no tradition of written literature in Africa prior to European colonialism. Early on in Alain Mabanckou’s new novel Broken Glass (to be published this month in translation from French to English), the proprietor of a seedy bar in Brazzaville, who is referred to only as Stubborn Snail, hears the slogan and derisively responds that it “depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down.”

In fact, Stubborn Snail is so sure of the power of the written word that he gives a notebook to his most regular customer, an old schoolteacher nicknamed Broken Glass, and asks him to write his customers’ stories. Broken Glass takes up the challenge, though he quickly warns the reader that “I’m writing this for myself as well, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he reads these pages, I don’t intend to spare him or anyone else.” One suspects that Mabanckou shares these feelings, that he has no time for pious and well-meaning clichés about Africa, and that he intends to write as irreverently and as freely as he pleases.

Dutifully, Broken Glass begins to take notes on the lives of the bar’s faithful clientele. There’s the Pampers guy, who suspects his wife of cheating on him with her spiritual guru and whose current misfortune is the result of a stint in prison. There’s the Printer, a Congolese man who used to live and work in France until he found his new wife cheating on him with his own son. There’s Robinette, who drinks more and can urinate for longer than anyone at the bar – hence her nickname, which means “little tap”. There’s Mouyeké, a crook who offers up a new, postcolonial exegesis of the Bible. And there’s Broken Glass himself, who finally tells the reader how, at age 64, he ended up spending all his days and nights in a dirty bar in Brazzaville.

Broken Glass tells this story in the form of one long sentence, separated only by commas, quotation marks and white space. Beyond the obvious homage to the oral tradition, this device enables Mabanckou to play with rhythm, his clauses expanding to the length of several lines, or, conversely, hitting up against each other in quick succession. He brings to the text a mix of high and low culture that was apparent in his earlier work, but in this case rises to a new level. Each page brims with literary or pop-culture references: Jean Genet, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Tintin, Camara Laye, Yves Saint-Laurent, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Lucky Luke, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Ionesco, Toni Morrison, Josephine Baker, Gabriel García Marquez, Muhammad Ali, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, the symbolism of Banania hot chocolate, Paris-Match, Dany Laferrière, Guigoz baby formula, André Brink, Iznogoud, Marcel Pagnol, Marcel Proust and Molière, to name just a few.

Such diverse points of reference are probably a reflection of Mabanckou’s upbringing and his position – both insider and outsider – within French literature. Born in the seaside town of Pointe-Noire in the Congo, he studied law in Brazzaville, then moved to France in 1988 to attend graduate school. He later practised law at a water distribution and treatment company while continuing to write. His first novel, Bleu Blanc Rouge (Blue White Red), the story of a Congolese man who dreams of emigrating to France, was published in 1998 and won him the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire. Six other novels followed, including African psycho, Verre cassé (Broken Glass), and Mémoires de porc-epic (Memoirs of a porcupine), which in 2006 won the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s major literary prizes, but has yet to be translated into English.

In 2002, Mabanckou moved again, this time to the United States, where he has been teaching at various universities. He recently became a tenured professor in French literature at UCLA. (Mabanckou joins a group of distinguished francophone African writers and intellectuals who have chosen to live in the United States, including Algeria’s Assia Djebbar, Congo’s Emmanuel Dongala, Cameroon’s Achille Mbembe, and others.) A prolific and outspoken writer, he has published six poetry collections, several short stories and a non-fiction book in the form of a letter to James Baldwin, all while maintaining a blog, where he regularly comments on francophone culture, literature, and politics. Recently he has even tried his hand at translation, rendering into French Uzodinma Iweala’s debut novel, Beasts of No Nation.

In Broken Glass, Mabanckou’s concerns appear to be mostly formal. He varies his prose rhythm to match the dramatic tension in the story; he gives his characters animal names or nicknames, in the grand tradition of African fables; he introduces puns and wordplays wherever he can. His voice is original and penetrating, his language irreverent and precise. Here, for instance, is Broken Glass explaining to Stubborn Snail why he is not a writer:

“I also said to the Stubborn Snail that if I was a writer I would ask God to grant me the gift of humility, to give me the strength to put my own writing into perspective alongside the giants of this world who have put pen to paper, and that I would say three cheers for true genius, and would keep silent rather than speak of the mediocrity all around us, and that would be the only way you could hope to write something remotely like real life, but I’d say it in my own words, twisted words, incoherent words, nonsensical words, I’d write down words as they came to me, I’d begin awkwardly and I’d finish as awkwardly as I’d begun, and to hell with pure reason, and method, and phonetics and prose, and in this s***-poor language of mine things would seem clear in my head but come out wrong, and the words to say it wouldn’t come easy, so it would be a choice between writing or life, that’s right, and what I really want people to say when they read me is ‘what’s this jumble, this mess, this muddle, this mishmash of barbarities, this empire of signs, this chitchat, this descent to the dregs of belles-lettres, what’s with this barnyard prattle, is this stuff for real, and where does it start, and where the hell does it end’ and my mischievous answer would be ‘this jumble of words is life’”.

As full of life as such passages are, they should still come from real characters. Unfortunately, there is so much style in this novel that there is little room for substance. Mabanckou’s characters often end up with similar backgrounds, similar life experiences and similar quandaries: the husbands drink, the wives cheat, hilarious and dangerous encounters ensue. Of course, in Broken Glass this could also be a function of the narrative structure – following so many different characters doesn’t allow for deep characterisation.

African Psycho, the first of Mabanckou’s novels to be translated into English, presents a sharp contrast. Where Broken Glass is delightfully diffuse, meandering between different life stories, African Psycho is taut, focused as it is on the travails of one character. Grégoire Nabokomayo, a mechanic from the neighbourhood of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, has decided to kill his girlfriend Germaine: “To Kill — a verb I have worshipped since coming of age. Fundamentally, all the small jobs I carried out were done in the hope of later being able to conjugate this verb in its most immediate and fully realised form.”

Nabokomayo has made this decision in honour of his “idol and great master”, a 12-fingered serial killer named Angoualima who is in the habit of “sending his victims’ private parts to the national press and to the press of the country over there by registered mail.” Neither the African country nor the “country over there” is identified. They could be the Congo and France, respectively, or, just as easily, Mozambique and Portugal.

In his day, Angoualima stole, raped, tortured and murdered to such an extent that he became a hugely popular celebrity in He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot. He was the subject of a hit song by the Brothers the Same-People-Always-Get-To-Eat-In-This-S*****-Country. His psychological health was discussed on radio and television, with distinguished guests from Me-I-Know-Everything-Because-You-Don’t-Understand-Anything High University. Still, Angoualima managed to evade arrest, and died on his own terms by committing suicide. Now he is buried in the cemetery of The-Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-To-Sleep, which is where Nabokomayo comes to visit him and commune with him. “I get up every day and whisper Angoualima. I go to bed every night and whisper Angoualima. He hears me, I know. He has become the father I have not known and haven’t tried to know, for fear of forever losing my identity.”

Nabokomayo is rather a failure in his chosen profession; he prefers to endlessly discuss the pros and cons of a knife or a gun, rather than to actually use either weapon: “Knives? I don’t deny their effectiveness. Back when I was still reading, I saw that several famous authors let their characters use them. I am thinking especially of Camus’s Arab in The Stranger. OK, that’s another story altogether. It’s true that the Arab indeed pulled out his knife, but did he kill the narrator with it? No, it was the narrator, rather, who used a pistol! Better yet, he fired four times on his already inert body!” When Nabokomayo does manage to break into a law office and hold up the occupant, his crime is attributed to his idol.

Dark and darkly comic, the novel satirises people’s needs for role models and obsession with celebrities, concerns that few Westerners would associate with Africa – and that is precisely Mabanckou’s point. It also brings into sharp relief the life of an outsider, an anti-hero, another one of those wretched of the earth that populate Mabanckou’s work. Unfortunately, its telegraphic style doesn’t quite suit the challenges Mabanckou faces, which include making the reader want to continue reading the ranting of a brutal psychopath who plans to murder his girlfriend. Nabokomayo remains a mysterious rather than a fully-fledged character, his actions seemingly driven by the needs of the plot instead of his self. And the female characters, like those in Broken Glass, never quite rise beyond vague outlines.

Broken Glass and African Psycho have different translators (Helen Stevenson and Christine Schwartz Hartley, respectively) with the result that there are natural differences in sound. Mabanckou’s gorgeous prose occasionally suffers in the course of translation, perhaps in part because of his frequent use of puns. In Broken Glass, for instance, the seedy bar in which most of the action takes place is called “Le Crédit a Voyagé”, a play on “Crédit Voyage”, the name that French banks give to holiday loans. In the English-language version, the phrase is rendered as “Credit Gone Away”, which of course loses the pun, and loses the connotation that the bar is a place to which no one in his or her right mind would travel.

These flaws, however, cannot overshadow Mabanckou’s sheer energy. His inventive wordplays, his love of books and his desire to break down clichéd perceptions of African and European literatures and cultures create a world in which every reader will find a home. Broken Glass is an exuberant comic novel, the perfect antidote for those still looking for Africa’s burning libraries.

Laila Lalami is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, a collection of short stories, and the novel Secret Son.