Book 139: Congo-Brazzaville (English) – African Psycho (Alain MABANCKOU)

 

Well, a few years after this trial, I would like to tell this public prosecutor that, by nature, I too detest society. I don’t give a damn about my past, which he would deem muddy. I cannot stand to see people teeming in the neighborhood of my youth. I am attached to this land that I take as mother and father, for wont of having had real parents. I am responsible for its honor, its reputation. Whoever speaks ill of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot offends me personally. Yes, I would have liked to live alone in this city and stroll at every hour of the day or night without encountering another soul. That’s why, until the day I accepted that Germaine was coming to live with me, I always lived alone. I wallowed in my solitude and derived from it a kind of satisfaction I wouldn’t have traded for anything in the world. Everything that happened outside meant little to me. My workshop was what counted most for me. It was society that didn’t understand me. As a result, aware that I was in the right, I had to erect a fortress between society and myself…

 

This was a book that I bought when I first started this project – it was on sale and I thought that I might have a lot of trouble finding a book from some countries like the Republic of Congo. (Still now, whenever I see an author with a slightly exotic name in a bookshop or library, I check to ses if s/he is from one of the countries I haven’t ‘acquired’ yet). I don’t think I would have bought a book with this title otherwise (I also would have read it in the original French), and having read it, I’m still not sure it would be my choice. But wait, I am sure that Mabanckou is a writer worth reading, he certainly seems to be the former French colony’s most prominent writer, and I wish another one of his works had materialised.

So – to African Psycho…

During the years it was waiting on my bookshelf (intimidating me, to tell the truth) I was hoping that when its turn came it would prove untrue to its title. But the product proved true to labelling…

Gregoire Nakobomayo is a petty criminal and sociopath who wants to be famous. He decides to kill his girlfriend Germaine, a prostitute from ‘the country over there’, and asks for advice from his idol the assassin Agoualima (despite the fact that the latter is dead). Nakobomayo has an ugly rectangular head and like his mentor has an extra finger on each hand. We learn where he is coming from: abandoned by his mother at birth, bullied at school, where he pretended to be stupid (or is he really just stupid?), when his older half-brother tries to rape him he pokes his eye with a whip-end.

So starts his pathetic career. He sets of in an imitation of atrocities while frequenting the courthouse. His motives are: envy (of the famous assassin); sex; and money.

However, he is stupid and incompetent. When it comes to his planning of the murder, he can’t decide on a weapon, or a place. He hasn’t fired gun and may not be able to! He tries to rape and kill a girl but can’t get it up.

He is also a hypocrite – he professes to be defending the honour of his slum but drags its reputation through the mud by committing his crimes there. He is egoistic and feels ‘insulted’.

He thinks he is clever for reversing his shoes, a trick that everyone who has read Baden Powell’s Scouting For Boys is aware of.

It is sometimes funny (such as the TV interview) – probably more often than I found it so, due to the grim topic. Certainly the place names, like that of his slum (He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot), are amusing.

Yes it is a great ‘black comedy’ but its humour and subject matter were a bit too black for me. Still I’m very eager to give another one of Mabanckou’s novels a go!

 

Mabanckou, Alain (1966 – ), African Psycho, translated from French by Christine Schwartz Hartley, London, Serpent’s Tail, 2007, ISBN 978 1 84668 632 0

(first published in French by Le Serpent à Plum, 2003)