Broken Glass Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by Alain Mabanckou

  Title Page

  Dedication

  First Part

  Last Part

  Copyright Page

  Praise for the work of Alain Mabanckou

  Broken Glass

  “Whatever else might be in short supply in the Congo depicted by Alain Mabanckou, imagination and wit aren’t . . . Broken Glass is a whistlestop tour of French literature and civilization, [but while] its cultural and intertextual musings could fuel innumerable doctorates, the real meat of Broken Glass is its comic brio, and Mabanckou’s jokes work the whole spectrum of humour . . . Much of the writing from Africa (or at least most of the stuff we get to see) is of an earnest or grim character, and it makes a pleasant change to encounter a writer who isn’t afraid of a laugh.”

  —The Guardian (U.K.)

  “This is not cute Africa, as described by Alexander McCall Smith . . . Mabanckou is one of Africa’s liveliest and most original voices, and this novel pulses with energy and invention.”

  —The Times (U.K.)

  “A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humor and linguistic effervescence.”

  —Financial Times

  “Mabanckou . . . positions himself at the margins, tapping the tradition founded by Céline, Genet and other subversive writers. His bursts of grandiloquent magical realism are a promising approach for a region where realism and naturalism have become blunted in the face of intractable problems.”

  —The Independent (U.K.)

  “One of the most entertaining reads of the year . . . sad but hilarious raw and gritty stories . . . Great voice; great reading.”

  —The Barcelona Review

  “[Mabanckou’s] voice is original and penetrating, his language irreverent and precise . . . 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.”

  —The National

  “Witty, silly, funny and vivid, it is an insouciant novel in the very best sense.”

  —Spike Magazine

  African Psycho

  “This is Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation . . . a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’ that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Disturbing—and disturbingly funny.”

  —New Yorker

  “Mabanckou manages to write playfully about an alarming subject.”

  —Financial Times

  “A macabre but comical take on a would-be serial killer.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “The auspicious North American debut from a francophone author who most certainly deserves to be discovered . . . smart, stylish and plenty ‘literary’ . . . The French have already called [Mabanckou] a young writer to watch. After this debut, I certainly concur.”

  —Globe and Mail (Canada)

  “Mabanckou’s novel . . . discovers a fascinating new way to hang readers on those tenterhooks . . . African Psycho presents no gloomy Raskolnikov, nor the fixed sneer of Patrick Bateman, but a haunted burlesque.”

  —The Believer

  “Blackly funny . . . this is a distinctive contribution to the slum-fiction genre.”

  —The New Statesman (U.K.)

  “Taut . . . Dark and darkly comic . . . brings into sharp relief the life of an outsider, an anti-hero.”

  —The National

  “Alain Mabanckou is like this tree he has evoked in his poetry: Tall, graceful, peaceful, yet a powerhouse of ideas. One of the foremost voices in Francophone literature, this poet-novelist from Congo Brazzaville has always drawn from his African roots.”

  —The Hindu (India)

  Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in the Congo. He currently lives in California, where he teaches French literature at UCLA. One of Africa’s major writers, he is the author of six volumes of poetry and six novels. He received the prestigious Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine. He was selected by the French journal Lire as one of the fifty writers to watch out for this century.

  Also by Alain Mabanckou

  African Psycho

  To Pauline Kengué, my mother

  First Part

  let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I—Broken Glass—can turn out a book, because one day, for a laugh, I told him about this famous writer who drank like a fish, and had to be picked up off the street when he got drunk, which shows you should never joke with the boss, he takes everything literally, when he gave me this notebook he said from the start it was only for him, no one else would read it, and when I asked why he was so set on this notebook, he said he didn’t want Credit Gone West just to vanish one day, and added that people in this country have no sense of the importance of memory, that the day when grandmothers reminisced from their deathbeds was gone now, this is the age of the written word, that’s all that’s left, the spoken word’s just black smoke, wild cat’s piss, the boss of Credit Gone West doesn’t like ready-made phrases like “in Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns,” every time he hears that worn-out cliché he gets mad, he’ll say “depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down,” so I thought I’d jot a few things down here from time to time, just to make him happy, though I’m not sure what I’m saying, I admit I’ve begun to quite enjoy it, I won’t tell him that, though, he’ll get ideas and start to push me to do more and more, and I want to be free to write when I want, when I can, there’s nothing worse than forced labor, I’m not his ghost, 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, by the time he reads this, though, I’ll no longer be one of his customers, I’ll be dragging my bag of bones about some other place, just slip him the document quietly before I go, saying “mission accomplished”

  I’ll start by describing the row that broke out when the bar first opened, explain a bit about the sufferings of the boss, some people wanted to see him taking his final breath, drawing up his Judas testament, it began with the church people, who, noticing their Sunday congregations had dwindled, launched a holy war, flinging their Jerusalem Bibles at the door of Credit Gone West, saying if things went on like this it would be the end of Sunday Mass in our district, there’d be no more trances during the singing, no more Holy Spirit descending on Trois-Cents, no more crispy black wafers, no more sweet wine, the blood of Christ, no more choir-boys, no more pious sisters, no more candles, no more alms, no more First Communion, no more Second Communion, no more catechism, no more baptism, no more anything, and everyone would go straight to hell, and after that the Weekend-and-Bank-Holiday-Cuckolds Club waded in, claiming it was largely due to Credit Gone West that their wives no longer cooked for them properly, or respected them as wives did in the old days, they said respect was important, that no one respects a husband like a wife does, that’s always been the way of things, ever since Adam and Eve, and as good family men they saw no reason to change, let their wives continue to grovel and cringe, to follow men’s orders, all this they said, but it had no effect, and then we had threats from some old club of ex-alcoholics, who’d gone over to water, Fanta, Pulp’Orange, syrup, Senegalese jungle juice, grapefruit juice, and contraband Cola lite traded for hashish in Nigeria, a righteous band of brothers who set siege to the bar for forty days and forty nights, but again all in vain, and then there was some
mystical action from the guardians of traditional moral values, the tribal leaders with their gris-gris, which they flung at the door of the bar, casting curses at the boss of Credit Gone West, summoning up the voices of the dead, bringing forth prophecies, saying the barkeeper would die a slow and painful death, they would nudge him gently toward to his own scaffold, but that didn’t work either, and finally there was direct action from a group of thugs who were paid by some old assholes from the district, nostalgic for the days of the Case de Gaulle, for the life of a houseboy, the life of the faithful negro with his service medal, for the days of the Colonial Exhibition and the negro balls, with Josephine Baker leaping about in a skirt made out of bananas, and these paragons of respectability set snares without end for the boss, with their thugs in hoods who came at the dead of night, at the darkest hour, armed with iron bars from Zanzibar, with clubs and cudgels from medieval Christendom, poisoned spears from the time of Chaka Zulu, sickles and hammers from the Communist block, catapults from the Hundred Years’ War, Gallic billhooks, pygmy hoes, Molotov cocktails from May ’68, machetes left over from a killing spree in Rwanda, slings from the famous fight between David and Goliath, with all this heavy arsenal they came, but again, in vain, though they managed to destroy one part of the bar, and it was the talk of the town, and all over the papers, La Rue Qui Meurt, La Semaine Africaine, Mwinda, Mouyondzi Tribune, tourists even came from neighboring countries to get a close look, like pilgrims at the Wailing Wall, taking masses of photos, like tourists, I don’t know what for, but all the same, they took photos, and some of them even came from our own town, people who’d never set foot in Trois-Cents before, and were amazed to discover it, and wondered how on earth people could live quite happily surrounded by rubbish, pools of stagnant water, the carcasses of domestic animals, burned-out vehicles, slime, dung, gaping holes in the roads, houses on the point of collapse, and our bartender gave interviews all over the place, our bartender became a martyr overnight, and our bartender sprang up on every TV channel overnight, and spoke in the Lingala of the north, in the Munukutuba of the people of the Mayombe Forest, in the Bemba of the inhabitants of the bridge of Mouloukoulu, who settle their quarrels with knives, and now everybody knew him, suddenly he was famous, people felt sorry for him, they wanted to help him, and even sent letters of support and petitions on behalf of the good guy they started to call “the Stubborn Snail,” but the ones who really backed him were the drunks, who always stay loyal till the last bottle runs dry, and they decided to strike back and rolled up their sleeves to put right the damage caused by the people nostalgic for the days of the Colonial Exhibition, the Case de Gaulle, Josephine Baker’s negro balls, and for some this trivial matter became a national issue, they called it “the Credit Gone West Affair,” the government discussed it in cabinet, and certain leading politicians called for its immediate and permanent closure, while others opposed such a move, for scarcely more convincing reasons, and the country suddenly found itself divided over this petty spat until, with the authority and wisdom for which he became renowned, the minister for agriculture, commerce, and small and large businesses, Albert Zou Loukia, raised his voice in a memorable contribution to the debate, a contribution now regarded in these parts as one of the finest political speeches ever made, Minister Zou Loukia spoke, saying several times, “I accuse, I accuse,” a remark so stupifyingly brilliant that at the slightest excuse—a minor dispute, or some slight injustice—people in the street started saying “I accuse,” and even the head of government told his spokesman that the minister for agriculture was a fine speaker, and that his popular catchphrase “I accuse” would go down in history, and the Prime Minister promised that in the next reshuffle the minister for agriculture would be given the portfolio for Culture, all you had to do was cross out the first four letters of agriculture, and to this very day it is widely agreed that the minister’s speech was quite brilliant, quoting entire pages from books by the kind of great writers people like to quote at the dinner table, sweating as he always did when he was proud of having seduced an audience with his erudition, and that is how he came to defend Credit Gone West, first praising the initiative of the Stubborn Snail, who he knew very well as they’d been at elementary school together, and then summing up by saying—I quote from memory: “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Cabinet, I accuse, I wish to distance myself from our current moribund social climate, I refuse to condone this witch hunt by my presence in the government, I accuse the shabby treatment meted out to a man who has done no more than draw up a route map for his own existence, I accuse the cowardly and retrograde machinations we have witnessed in recent times, I accuse the uncivil nature of these barbarous acts, orchestrated by men of bad faith, I accuse the indecency and insubordination which have become common currency in this country, I accuse the sly complicity of all those who arm the thugs, I accuse man’s contempt for his fellow man, the want of tolerance, the abandonment of our values, the rising tide of hatred, the inertia of the individual conscience, the slimy toads in our midst and all around us, yes, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Cabinet, just look at how the Trois-Cents has become a sleepless fortress, with a face of stone, while the man we now call the Stubborn Snail, quite apart from the fact that he’s an old school friend of mine, and a very intelligent man, this man who today is being hounded is the victim of a cabal, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Cabinet, let us concentrate instead on the pursuit of real criminals, whereby I accuse those who with impunity paralyze the proper function of our institutions, those who openly break the chain of solidarity which we have inherited from our ancestors, the Bantu, I tell you the only crime of the Stubborn Snail is to have shown his fellow countrymen that each one of us, in his own way, can contribute to the transformation of human nature, just as the great Saint Exupéry has shown us in his work Wind, Sand and Stars and that is why I accuse, and will go on accusing forever”

  the day after Minister Zou Loukia’s speech, the president of the republic himself, Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi, flew into a rage, stamping his favorite daily dessert of grapes beneath his feet, and we were informed by Radio-Curbside FM that President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi, who also happened to be General of the Armies, was jealous of the minister of agriculture’s phrase—“I accuse,” indeed, he wished he had said it himself, and couldn’t understand why his own advisers hadn’t come up with a similarly short but snappy slogan instead of feeding him turgid set pieces along the lines of “All things, like the sun, rise on the distant horizon and set each evening over the majestic Congo River,” so President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi, in his vexation, mortification, degradation, humiliation, and frustration, called a meeting of the supposedly devoted bunch of negroes in his cabinet and bid them slave as they’d never slaved before, he was through with turgid set pieces dressed up in so-called lyrical language, and the Negroes in his cabinet leaped to attention and lined up, from the smallest to the tallest, like the Daltons in Lucky Luke, when he’s tracking them through the cactus plains of the Wild West, and the negroes all said as one man, “yes sir, Commandant sir,” when in fact President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi was a general of the armies, and was longing for civil war to break out between north and south so he could write his war memoirs and give it the modest title Memoirs of Hadrian, and the President and General of the Armies called on them to find him a phrase that would be remembered by posterity as Minister Zou Loukia’s “I accuse” would be, and the negroes in the presidential cabinet worked all night long, behind closed doors, opening up and looking through—for the first time ever—encyclopedias which stood gathering dust on the presidential bookshelves, they looked in large books with tiny writing, they worked their way back to the dawn of time, back through the age of some guy called Gutenberg, and back through the age of Egyptian hieroglyphics as far back as the writings of some Chinaman who it seems had a lot to say about the art of war and was supposed to have been alive in the days before anyone knew that Christ was going to be born by the power of the Holy Spirit and lay down his l
ife for us sinners, but Adrien’s Negroes could find nothing as good as Minister Zou Loukia’s “I accuse,” so the President and General of the Armies threatened to sack the entire cabinet, unless they found him a phrase for posterity, and said: “Why should I go on paying a bunch of idiots who can’t find me a decent enduring and memorable slogan, I’m warning you now, if I don’t have my slogan by the time the cock crows tomorrow at dawn, heads will roll like rotten mangoes, that’s all you are, the lot of you, rotten mangoes, let me tell you, you can start packing now, go into exile in some Catholic country, take your pick, exile or death, d’you hear me, starting now, no one leaves this palace as of this moment, I’m going to sit in my office and I don’t want to pick up even the slightest whiff of coffee, not to mention cigars, Cohibas or Montecristos, there’ll be no water, no sandwiches, nothing, zilch, niente, it’ll be healthy eating all round, till I get my personal slogan, and anyway how did this little nobody of a minister Zou Loukia come up with his “I accuse” that everyone’s talking about, eh, the Presidential Security Services tell me people are even calling their babies “I accuse,” and what about those young girls on heat getting it tattooed onto their backsides and the clients who, in an ironic twist, demand that the prostitutes have it, you’ll appreciate, I think, what a colossal fuck-up this represents, it’s not even as if it was rocket science to think up in the first place, a phrase like that, are the minister for agriculture’s negroes better that you, eh, do you realize, I wonder, that his negroes don’t even have an official car each, they get the ministry bus, they live off pitiful salaries, while you loll about here in the palace, swimming in my pool, drinking my champagne, sitting about watching foreign TV on cable, listening to their lies about me, eating my petit fours, eating my salmon and my caviar, strolling about in my garden, taking your mistresses skiing on my artificial snow slopes, I’m surprised you don’t sleep with my twenty wives, I’m beginning to wonder why I even have a cabinet, is that what I pay you for, to sit around here all day doing nothing, eh, why don’t I just hire my own stupid dog as head of cabinet, tell me that, you bunch of good-for-nothings,” and President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi walked out slamming the door of cabinet behind him, still shouting “you bunch of negroes, things are going to change in this palace, I’ve had it with fattening up slavering slugs like you, let’s start judging by results, to think some of you went to ENA and the écoles polytechniques, ENA my ass!”