Une enfant de Poto-Poto by Henri Lopes

Abstract

60 World Literature Today reviews Baybars threatening to kill him. He went to the Ka‘ba and, while having feverish visions, saw Baybars’s soldiers surrounding him, pounding and throttling him, and finally slitting his veins with his own dagger. The novel ends here with Ibn Sab‘in saying, “As I breathed my last, I kept repeating: ‘A Lord ruling, a servant dying, a vision looming, a truth proceeding , and you thus being; A Lord ruling, a servant dying, a vision looming a truth proceeding. . . .’” While a dying man cannot report his own death (let alone write his life story), there are historical records that Ibn Sab‘in committed suicide at the Ka‘ba. Issa J. Boullata Montréal Henri Lopes. Une enfant de PotoPoto . Paris. Gallimard. 2012. isbn 978-2070136087 Henri Lopes has written novels for over thirty-five years. In Une enfant de Poto-Poto, his eighth novel, he returns to the Congo (Brazzaville, the former French colony) in the first years of independence. The story begins with the celebration of “Dipanda” on August 15, 1960. Lopes relates its history through the voice of a novelist, Kimia, who tells of her lasting friendship with another young woman, Pélagie, and the affairs both of them have with Franceschini, a charismatic teacher, who influences their studies as well as their emotional lives. The novel refers to the politics of the period, during part of which Lopes himself was prime minister: the violence shown to opponents of the regime, the frequent coups d’état, and the prevalence of plots against enemies of the regime. Literature and culture are, however, more important. Franceschini reads to his students Shylock’s speech from The Merchant of Venice, substituting “black” for “Jew.” He frequently quotes from Senghor, Césaire, Jacques Roumain, but also from Beaumarchais, Céline, and less well-known figures: AuluGelle , an ancient grammarian, and René-Guy Cadou, a French poet of the 1940s who wrote of the barbaric behavior of the Nazis. Another theme is the use of the French language. Kimia records whether conversations are in French or in one of the Congolese languages. She muses about French rules of gender : Should there be a feminine form of témoin (witness)? What would be the correct word for a male mouse (as souris is feminine)? Most amusingly , she invents a feminine form of voyou (rascal), as voyelle (which literally means vowel). She notes that during the colonial period the administration used the tu form for natives and vous for the French, and that the new independent government does the same. After Kimia has been abroad, she loses the habit of being called maman and forgets many Congolese expressions. Her French is considered too slow and insufficiently musical to Congolese ears. Franceschini grew up in the Congo,and,whilenotraciallyamulatto , dances and thinks like congolais. Mulattos and questions of skin color have been frequent themes in Lopes’s work. When criticized for lightening their skin and straightening their hair, schoolgirls reply that appearance does not affect their personalities , just as white girls remain white even when they get dark suntans. Pélagie attributes her almost white baby to her Congolese husband, who obligingly suggests he has one partwhite ancestor, but the baby is really Franceschini’s. Kimia’s husband is a West Indian chabin, another term for mixed racial heritage. Kimia becomes a well-known novelist and teacher in the United States, a career that is recounted briefly, with mentions of conferences and prizes, but no detail. The interest of the novel is the Congo of the 1960s, which Lopes describes with affection. At one point Kimia writes a novel with a man as narrator, an inversion that makes the reader aware that she is indirectly the voice of Lopes himself. Adele King Paris Péter Nádas. Parallel Stories. Imre Goldstein,tr.NewYork.Farrar,Straus& Giroux. 2011. isbn 9780374229764 Péter Nádas’s monumental, labyrinthine novel, Parallel Stories, is the first of his works of fiction not written in the first-person singular; only in the chapters that focus on a young man named Kristóf Demén, whose biographical particulars are closest to those of the author, does the narrative...