Alain Mabanckou is a Congolese-born writer and professor who has won several literary prizes. He has published six novels and six volumes of poetry, including Black Moses, Broken Glass, and Memoirs of a Porcupine.
In 1966 Mabanckou was born in Pointe-Noire, Republic of the Congo. He studied law and literature in Brazzaville and France before moving to Paris to continue his studies. He later pursued a doctorate in Francophone literature at the University of Paris. Mabanckou has taught literature at various universities in France and the United States.
In 2002, he became writer-in-residence at Ann Arbor, Michigan, before being hired in 2006 by the University of California at Los Angeles. He has translated works from English into French, including Beasts of No Nation by the Nigerian-American novelist Uzodinma Iweala (later adapted into a film by Cary Joji Fukunaga). Alain Mabanckou is now a full Professor of Literature at UCLA.
Mabanckou had produced several novels before leaving Congo, which he began to publish while working for the Paris-based multinational corporation Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux. The first of his works to be published was a collection of poems called Au jour le jour (1993; “Day to Day”), as were the second and third. His debut work, Bleu-blanc Rouge (1998; Blue White Red), is about the discoveries of an African immigrant to France. When this book received the Association of French-Language Writers’ Literary Grand Prize of Black Africa, Mabanckou’s path looked clear.
Alain Mabanckou’s first novel, Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, published in 1998, gained him the Grand Prix Littèraire de Black Africa. This “book full of humor, which, never the less, portrays the sad fate of many African immigrants in Paris” (as presented by the editor) launched Mabanckou’s career, and he continues to publish novels, essays, and poetry collections on a regular basis.
The articles he published range from Africa to Europe, as well as racialism (Lettre à Jimmy, 2007), and are infused with a style that lends authenticity and a distinct sensibility to these autobiographical works.
Alain Mabanckou’s four collections of poetry, released between 1995 and 2001, were combined into one book in 2007 called Tant que les arbres s’enracineront dans la terre. Alain Mabanckou, however, is best known for his novels.
Verre Cassé was published in 2005 and received universal appreciation from the press and public. The author of Verre Cassé employs a forceful prosody devoid of frills or small talk. According to Jean-Maurice de Montrémy (Les Livres Hebdo, December 2005), it is a highly classical oratory discussion in which humor, poetry, and alcoholic sorrow come together beautifully.”
Alain Mabanckou won the Prix Renaudot for his work Mémoires d’un porc-èpic, which was released in 2006. “We adore this book from the dedication: To my mother, Pauline Kengué, who told me this story (give or take a few lies).” Its sensitivity already affects you. There is also malice and distance. Alain Mabanckou writes and tells stories in the style of fables. These Mémoires d’un porc-épic are a true delight, a monument to speech that delivers from the fear of death, written in one breath and without a single full stop. (Michel Abescat; Télérama, October 2006)
With Black Bazar, released in 2009, “we relish in this popular language that Mabanckou kneads, electrifies, and colors without regard for political correctness.” We laugh at this festival of clichés, on all these preconceived notions about Blacks, more or less black, Whites, more or less fair, and women, more or less calligraphic. A tremendous kindness from the author because, when it comes to colonization or Africa, this work is far more serious than it appears. In Michel Abescat’s word, “There is joy in grief; it is like that in my small country…”
In 2010, in Demain j’aurais vingt ans, “he puts himself in the skin of Michel, a ten-year-old boy living in the Congo during decolonization in the 1970s.” This realistic account about a child overwhelmed by adult difficulties is a true success. Mabanckou explains, always with comedy, what few essays have been able to do.
Alain Mabanckou’s book Le sanglot de l’homme noir was published in 2012. According to Valerie Marin La Meslée (Le Point, February 2, 2012): “Nourished by his own experience from Africa, where he was born, France, where he studied, and America where he teaches French literature, this opus illuminates the most contentious issues.”
Below is an excerpt from Black Moses, as published in Literary Hub:
In fact, until the year the Revolution fell on us like a rainfall which even the most celebrated fetishers hadn’t seen coming, I believed the orphanage at Loango was not an institution for minors who were parentless, or had been mistreated, or who had been born into a problem family, but rather a school for the very gifted. Bonaventure was more realistic, he said it was a place where they kept all the kids no one wanted, because if you love someone, if you want them, you take them out, go for walks with them, you don’t shut them up in some old building, as if they were in captivity. He based this on his own experience, and on his own inability to understand how a mother such as his own, who was still alive, could leave him there, surrounded by all these other boys and girls, each with their own ‘serious problem’, which led inevitably to their admission to Loango.
In my mind, our studies at Loango were designed to make us superior to most other children in the Congo. This was the impression we got from Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako. He liked to boast that he was Director of one of those public establishments whose academic results were equal in every way to those of the state primaries, secondaries and lycées. He’d puff out his chest and declare proudly that the masters and teachers at Loango earned more than their colleagues at the Charles-Miningou primary, Roger-Kimangou secondary and even the Pauline-Kengué lycée, the most prestigious lycée in Pointe-Noire. He was careful not to admit that if these teachers were indeed better paid, it was no thanks to the charity of the President of the Republic. The running costs of the orphanage and the salaries of the staff were provided for by the descendants of the former kingdom of Loango, who wanted to show that their monarchy continued to exist, at least symbolically, through the generosity of its heirs. However, as I perceived it, our orphanage was separate from the rest of the Congo, in fact from the whole of the rest of the world. Since the school was in the hinterland, we knew nothing of the neighbouring agglomerations of Mabindou, Poumba, Loubou, Tchiyèndi, or our own economic capital, Pointe-Noire, which was spoken of as though it was the promised land Papa Moupelo used to talk to us about.
Yet the village of Loango was only about twenty kilometres from Pointe-Noire, and according to Monsieur Doukou Daka, our history teacher, it had once been the capital of the kingdom of Loango, founded in the 15th century by the ancestors of the vili people and other southerners. It was here that their descendants had been taken into slavery. Monsieur Doukou Daka raged against the whites who had taken our strongest men, our most beautiful women, and piled them up in the ship’s hold to make that dreadful voyage to the land of the Americas, where they were branded with irons, some had their legs amputated, some were left with only one arm, because they’d tried to run away, even though it would have been impossible to find the path back to their village.
Monsieur Doukou Daka would turn his back, lower his voice, and look out of the window, as though worried he might be overheard, then confide in us, in aggrieved tones, that many of the rich business people in Loango had been involved in the trafficking and had sent their sons to a region of France called Brittany to study the secrets of the trade.
He seemed to bear a grudge against the vili, particularly since he himself was a Yombé, an ethnic group despised by the vili, who considered it a tribe of barbarians from the Mayombe forest. The vili and the Yombés, even though they were in the majority in the Kouilou region, each held the other responsible for the misfortunes of our ancestors.
We were shocked when, with his arms pressed to his sides, as though to emphasise his disappointment, Monsieur Doukou Daka shouted:
‘What’s more, the vili took the people of my own ethnic group into slavery and sold them to neighbouring kingdoms! So don’t come telling me that it was the white men who taught them about the bonds of slavery! White men still hadn’t arrived at that point. End of story!’
