This African boy’s life
Alain Mabanckou has been called Africa’s Samuel Beckett. The back cover of “Black Moses,” his latest novel, mentions Dickens, Hugo and Brian De Palma’s “Scarface.”
I get it: African writers can be a hard sell in the West. But when critics and publishers propagate such facile comparisons, nobody wins. Readers lured in this way are apt to exit in a fog of bewildered disappointment. Inaccuracy aside, these comparisons are insulting — as if an African artist’s worth is to be measured by how he stacks up against Western models. You can call the great King Sunny Ade “Nigeria’s Elvis Presley” until the cows come home and, in the end, you’ll be miles from understanding King Sunny Ade.
Alain Mabanckou is his own man. A native of the Republic of Congo, he moved to France in his 20s and now teaches at UCLA. Poet, novelist and essayist, he is 51 years old and has already won the Académie Française’s grand prix for lifetime achievement. “Black Moses” adds to his cycle of novels set in Pointe-Noire, the coastal city where he grew up. Any of these novels makes a fine introduction to the author. Or one could start with “Letters to Jimmy,” his book-length essay on James Baldwin, approached from an African perspective. And one shouldn’t miss “The Lights of Pointe-Noire,” in which Mabanckou, writing of his return to his native country, blends memory and presentday encounters to convey an immigrant’s existential duality; it’s among the most affecting memoirs I’ve read in recent years.
Whereas Mabanckou writes movingly of his family in “The Lights of Pointe-Noire,” the protagonist of “Black Moses” is defined by the absence of family. The book is split in two. The first half is set in the orphanage where the protagonist lives until age 13, and the second in Pointe-Noire, following the years after his escape. While far from a happy story, the narrative is shot through with humor — not all of it dark — and moves at a brisk pace.
Absence asserts itself from the very start. The protagonist tells us that he was dumped off as a baby by the parents he never knew. He wasn’t given a name until, a handful of years later, the orphanage priest christened him with a whopper, the translation of which runs, “Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors.” This priest, an immigrant from Zaire, visits the orphanage weekly, “not to evangelize us, but to distract us from punishments we’d endured over the last few days,” and to sell the children “hope at the lowest possible price.”
When the Marxist-Leninist revolution breaks out — the novel is set in the 1970s and ’80s — the children’s father figure is banished. In the meantime, Moses takes refuge in his friendship with Bonaventure, a sensitive boy so “obsessed with planes [that the] moment he heard one passing overhead, he’d leap up, run to the window and stay there until it vanished in the clouds.”
Moses makes his escape. He finds his freedom running around with a large gang of teenage boys in Pointe-Noire. Freedom, of course, is relative. The boys engage in petty crime to feed themselves. “As a rule,” says Moses, “when you’re hungry, your belly will push you to do pretty much anything.” By now he wears flip-flops attached with wire, and watches the gang’s blind and paralytic factions squabble at mealtime. The blind accuse the paralytics of taking the biggest pieces of meat; when the paralytics ask how they could possibly know this, the blind respond, “A piece of meat’s big if you spend more than forty seconds chewing it.”
Moses, who by now goes by the nickname Little Pepper, finds a temporary home at a brothel by insinuating himself there as a factotum. The prostitutes, with nicknames such as “Volcano Fire,” “Eleventh Commandment” and “5:00 a.m. Nutella,” become the narrator’s surrogate family. He becomes particularly close to the madam, Maman Fiat 500. When local politics force the prostitutes out of town, Moses/Little Pepper finds himself, once again, abandoned.
Two formal choices intensify the novel’s power. Mabanckou populates his tale with a range of colorful supporting characters who tell the narrator their stories — mixtures of truth and lie, of history and mythology and wishful thinking — and these voices imbue the novel’s relative brevity with a surprising polyphonic texture. Secondly, Mabanckou’s handling of time produces breaks and accelerations that make readers share in the narrator’s own sense of dislocation and inevitability.
Against all odds, with no family and next to no opportunity or meaningful social support, the narrator — who starts at zero, with no birth name whatsoever — must construct his own identity. Fittingly, the book’s own publication history reproduces this ambiguity: Its original title, “Petit Piment” (“Little Pepper”), has been changed to “Black Moses” for the English language edition.