| Review: Voilà! Such dreams! An African novel has a very French twist 06/03/2001 By ISABEL NATHANIEL / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Alongside the children of French colonial officials, Emmanuel Dongala grew
up reciting the names of French kings. His country, now Republic of Congo,
was then part of French Equatorial Africa. "They believed every man's
greatest dream was to become French," he says. "Their gift to us was a
classical French education."In Little Boys Come From the Stars
, young Matapari sums up such ironies of his country's past: "[After
independence] we couldn't get rid of everything they'd brought with them,
things we'd lived with for a century; we made our ancestors come back
while keeping Jesus, the Bible, and the cross; we kept their language
along with ours, as well as their clothing, red wine, Brie, and baguettes."
Perhaps Mr. Dongala also kept something of the great satirists Molière
and Voltaire: the literary power of humor to combat hypocrisy and vice.
In this novel (first published in France in 1998) he censures, through
laughter, an assortment of fools, rogues, bunglers, braggarts and frauds
in a country where "coup d'état means only that someone new is robbing
the people." The Catholic priest, the rich merchant, the ambitious
adulteress and, occasionally, even dear Maman and Papa also come in for
playful ridicule.
|
Little Boys Come From the Stars
|
Emmanuel Dongala, translated from the French by Joel Rejouis and Val
Vinokurov
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22)
|
Fifteen-year-old Matapari, a modern African boy who wears Reeboks, reads
Japanese comic books and can discuss the origin of stars or Fermat's last
theorem with his scholarly Papa, serves as the innocent, straight-faced
narrator of the goings-on. The reader assumes the role of nobody's fool,
unduped by the schemes and tricks of Uncle Boula Boula as he moves up in
"scientific socialism" to be No. 2 in the Party, i.e., stooge to the
dictator, a.k.a. President of the Republic, Chief of our Revolution,
Beloved Beacon, Popular Leader, Supreme Guide, Man of the Masses,
Peacemaker, Man of Concrete Action, Friend of the Youth, Man Always Proven
Right by History.
Throughout Uncle's outrageous machinations, Papa (when he bothers to
look up from his books) is the voice of reason, remaining uncorrupted
and uninvolved. But when Uncle's political fortune changes and he is
sentenced to death, Papa's brain boils into action. He writes and
circulates a tract that includes such inflammatory words as "universal
suffrage," "popular sovereignty" and "constitution." Papa, too, is
jailed, but democracy blows in like a hurricane, liberating political
prisoners.
The author's satire, though, has still more to do. Democratization is
not without its own absurdities and corruptions. And Uncle Boula Boula
is not done with chicanery.
Mr. Dongala completed this novel in 1996, never imagining that it would
have a dark, real-life epilogue. In 1997, while he was visiting the
United States, civil war between rival militias broke out in Republic of
Congo. His city, Brazzaville, was reduced to ruins; his wife was in
hiding; a daughter was missing. Returning to his country where 10,000
people had been killed, among them his wife's brother, he disappeared.
American friends, including novelists Philip Roth and William Styron,
mobilized to find the family and get them out. Mr. Dongala, who had been
a professor of chemistry and dean of Brazzaville's university, now lives
in exile, teaching at Simon's Rock of Bard College in Massachusetts.
|
