cover feature alain mabanckou
How to Become Globalized
Without Losing Your Mind
A Conversation with Alain Mabanckou
by Rokiatou Soumaré
D
uring his visit to the Univer-
sity of Oklahoma in April,
Alain Mabanckou sat down
with Rokiatou Soumaré—a
graduate student in OU’s Department of
Modern Languages, Literatures, and Lin-
guistics—to discuss his work. Their public
conversation, in front of a packed audience,
has been adapted and abridged below.
Rokiatou Soumaré: My first question relates
to your recent sojourn in France, where you
were the first writer to hold the Chaire de
Création Artistique at the Collège de France.
Could you share your experience with us?
Alain Mabanckou: My experience at the
Collège de France is different from what
I’ve been teaching so far because you have to
teach in front of eight hundred people, gath-
64 WLT SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2016
ered in an auditorium, and then you have
people in another room who are watching
you on a screen. It’s the first time for me to
teach in France, after teaching in the United
States for fourteen years. And for the first
time since the sixteenth century, the Collège
de France decided to sponsor a lecture on
African literature. So the class is full of Afri-
cans, young students, because anybody can
come to the Collège. So the challenge for me
is to speak to the specialists and nonspecial-
ists alike, so it’s not that easy: you have to
be specific at the same time you are trying
to explain the first lesson to someone who
perhaps never heard about Aimé Césaire,
Édouard Glissant, or René Maran.
RS: Hopefully this will open new doors for
African writers. Your first lecture at the Col-
lège de France was entitled “Lettres noires:
des ténèbres à la Lumière” (Black Literature:
From Darkness to Light). Could you sum-
marize it for us?
AM: In that lesson, I try to explain how
French literature in the nineteenth or even
in the sixteenth century treated African
literature or Africa like the continent of
darkness, as if we couldn’t speak, couldn’t
think. I explain that we weren’t in dark-
ness, however. It was maybe the ignorance
of France that made people think Africa
was the continent of darkness, which was a
reference to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. At
the same time, I try to explain how African
people did their best to escape from these
prejudices in order to create another kind
of literature in which they were trying to
demonstrate what Africa was; they wanted
to show that we had culture even before the
white man came to Africa, so our history
didn’t begin with colonization. We had great
empires in Mali and Ghana, and people for-
get that the empire of Ghana was twice as
big as the empire of Charlemagne in France.
So the darkness was on the side of Europe,
not on the side of Africa.
So it’s tough to explain that idea at the
Collège de France, in the shadow of Barthes
or Foucault or Eco, who were teaching Euro-
pean literature. It was for me a way to tell
how we came from that kind of darkness and
we were trying to learn European literature
in order to create our own literature, which
René Maran did so powerfully with his novel
Batouala (1922). We have a lot of writers like
Mongo Beti, Camara Laye, and so on. I gave
that lecture in order to explain even to some-
one who didn’t know anything about African
literature that they need to read us even to
understand French literature because African
people read French literature. That way we
have this kind of step forward compared to
French perceptions of African literature.
RS: Let’s talk about your novels now. Many
of them include intertextual references, such
as Broken Glass or African Psycho, to name
a few. What motivated your choice to use
so many references to other literary works?
My literary family is very diverse. I’m not an African writer
who is just reading African literature because I don’t like only
using what I have. I need to seek something new, something
that can shake me in order to write something original,
which is not only African.
AM: I began to write Broken Glass when
I was teaching at the University of Michi-
gan—maybe I was feeling bored because of
the snow. I was surrounded by a lot of books
I was reading at the time, and it crossed my
mind: what if I put all my books inside one
book so that if they all burn, my books will
survive. It was at the same time a game and
also a pleasure for me to create a story in
which the books are talking among them-
selves. But it remains a book about Africa
and how a human being is trying to face his
fate, to struggle, to maybe seek his freedom
through the culture. It remains for me one
of the books I was most excited about writ-
ing—I felt like I was trying to define what I
would write later on.
RS: So the references go beyond franco-
phone African literature and even beyond
literature written in French?
AM: Yes. I’m glad you said that because
French people think that it’s full of French
literary references, but you have Latin
American, Italian, French, and Russian,
García Márquez and Dostoyevsky, you even
have The Catcher in the Rye.
RS: On the twentieth anniversary of James
Baldwin’s death, you wrote Letter to Jimmy
in his honor. How did you come across
Baldwin’s work, and why did you decide to
dedicate an entire book to him?
AM: When I arrived in Michigan I couldn’t
speak a single word of English, so I thought
the best approach was to read books in
English. Baldwin seemed to me one of the
best writers to read in order to achieve
that goal, so I began with Giovanni’s Room
and then read all his nonfiction books. I
was also teaching Baldwin in the Depart-
ment of Afroamerican and African Studies.
The connection between Baldwin and Paris
interested me, because Baldwin lived in
France until his death. As I was reading, I
said to myself, I’m going to try to write a
letter to James Baldwin in order to explain
how he is still in our lives even if he is no
longer with us. When I sent it to my pub-
lisher, they were celebrating the anniver-
sary of his death at the time. The book was
released in 2007, and I was surprised by its
success. Even Gallimard decided to reprint
all of Baldwin’s novels, and I was glad to see
that such a powerful novelist was being read
by French people again. It was my small
contribution to bring Baldwin back to the
attention of the French reading public.
RS: Who would you consider to be your
literary brothers or sisters today? Who are
the writers with whom you share a com-
mon vision?
AM: Besides Baldwin, I would also men-
tion Sony Labou Tansi, because I was
happy to write a foreword to his most
recent book, L’État honteux (Eng. The
Shameful State, 2015). I met Tansi a lot of
times when I was young—I went to see him
in Brazzaville and asked him if he could
help me become a writer. At the time I was
writing poetry; he said to me, If you keep
on writing poetry you’re not going to find
a publisher, nobody is going to read you.
At the time I thought that I couldn’t write
a novel. I couldn’t envision writing three
hundred pages. In poetry, silence is more
important than what you have to say. If
you just put the letter “A,” people are going
to write a dissertation about that page: why
did you mean “A” . . . ?
WORLDLIT.ORG 65
cover feature alain mabanckou
I also have the same kind of admiration for Gabriel
García Márquez, who taught me how it might be
possible to write about the Congolese landscape and
dictatorship. I have also admired poets like Tchicaya
U Tam’si from the Congo and Tati Loutard. In French
literature, I like reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline and
Albert Camus. Among the Italian writers, I like Giaco-
mo Leopardi. In the United States, I admire Faulkner
(The Sound and the Fury) and Hemingway (The Old
Man and the Sea). Even in Asia, I’ve been reading
Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburō Ōe, so my liter-
ary family is very diverse. I’m not an African writer
who is just reading African literature because I don’t
like only using what I have. I need to seek something
new, something that can shake me in order to write
something original, which is not only African. I think
that the best way to deserve the freedom of writing
is to explore new writers, new literature. I still have
a lot to read—Arabic literature, Indian literature—so
I know that I have a lot to find in order to have a big
and diverse family.
RS: Lumières de Pointe-Noire (Eng. The Lights of
Pointe-Noire, 2015) deals with your return to Congo
after a long absence. It has an autobiographical com-
ponent and offers readers flashbacks from your child-
Rokiatou Soumaré hood. It also includes pictures of your family members
is a PhD candidate and yourself. What sets The Lights of Pointe-Noire
in francophone sub- apart from your other works?
Saharan literature
at the University of AM: I think that I gave Lights of Pointe-Noire to my
Oklahoma, where readers to help them understand where I came from,
she is currently why I became a writer, and my emotional attachment
writing her to Pointe-Noire. The Lights of Pointe-Noire is my per-
dissertation on Alain sonal Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Reading the
Mabanckou’s work. book, you can feel like you have already read all my
Prior to enrolling at books: like Tomorrow I Will Be Twenty, like Broken
OU, she graduated Glass with the people in the bar, like Memoirs of a Por-
from the University cupine because of the belief systems or cosmogony. It
of Perpignan, France, also deals with all the people who disappeared or who
with a bachelor’s in are still there and the fact that when you live abroad for
city planning and a a while, coming back to the country is a struggle. You
master’s in tourism are not Congolese anymore, you are a stranger, so they
and hospitality are going to consider you a stranger. After my return,
management. for the first two weeks people were happy, but begin-
ning with the third week they were asking me, When
Editorial note: Turn are you going back? Because they didn’t want me to
to page 99 to read a stay. If you stay in the country you left for twenty years,
review of The Lights they’re going to think that you returned as a failure.
of Pointe-Noire. So they say, Go back to America so we can be proud
66 WLT SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2016
to explain to people that our native son is living in the
United States. . . .
RS: Let’s talk about identity. Can you give us your take
on the notion of identity?
AM: The way I see it, identity is something you cannot
define because it’s always changing. Living in France
helped me understand what identity is when I am in the
United States. In France, French people will consider
me African, but when I meet them here in the United
States, seeing me speaking French, they are going to
say, “Thank God someone is speaking French,” and
they are going to call me a French guy. But back in
France, they will think of me as someone who is speak-
ing French with an accent, an African accent, etc. So
identity changes if you move from here to there. At the
same time, I think that we need to add other cultures
to our culture in order to become globalized without
losing your mind. Identity doesn’t mean that you have
to erase your own mind or erase your own beliefs in
order to adopt another one. You have to keep yours but
remain open in order to receive what is most helpful in
achieving your own goal. In French politics, identity is
very complicated because they want everybody to be
like white people. I don’t want to be just a white man or
just a black man. I need to be a kind of mixture in which
Congo is part of me, France is part of me, along with my
American experience and maybe, tomorrow, my Asian
experience. That addition is very important to me.
RS: So what is your stance on littérature engagée?
AM: When you are writing a novel, you are always
taking part in a discussion about society. Even if you
are talking about flowers or snow, it’s a kind of engage-
ment. In engaged literature, you are trying to explain
to people how the world is beautiful, how the flower
deserves to be respected, how the snow is great if you
don’t see it for ten years, so that’s a kind of hope you
can share with people. Sometimes people think that
engagement is just wanting to fight, to struggle. No.
Engagement is not just about struggle. Even being in
love, you need to understand how to respect others.
You need to spread a kind of song that is going to
help people find happiness, so I’m still convinced that
engagement is everywhere in literature, even where
people don’t always see it.
April 2016
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.