Laughing through
the Back of the  Face

Wandia Njoya

For an academic literary critic interested in identity slippages, the works of Sandrine Bessora Nan Nguema, who writes under the pen name, Bessora, are the best to study. The fact of her Gabonese-Swiss parentage, combined with her having being born in Belgium, her having lived in the USA and her present residency in France, provide fodder for an easy dissertation on the “not-here, not there” theme of fluid identities. It is therefore not surprising that a search on Google or academic search engines reveals that most commentaries on her work begin by stating whether her latest book tackles metissage or bi-racial identities or not. However, a closer look at her literary works makes such a focus not only boring, but it also downplays the complex issues and variegated literary style that are peculiar  to her work.

I met Bessora in June 2005 while on a trip to Paris, funded by The Pennsylvania State University, to interview her and two other relatively recent African authors, who have  published novels with African migrants in France as their main protagonists. I had chosen to study her work for my dissertation entitled “In Search of El Dorado? The Experiences of Migration to France in Contemporary African Novels” for two reasons. Firstly, I had hoped to work on novels by writers from East and Central Africa because I was keen on knowing more about African countries ambiguously dubbed “Francophone” even though they were close to my home country of Kenya. After exhausting the possibility of studying recent writers from Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and discovering Abdourahman Ali Waberi too late to include in my study, I cast my net towards the Congolese Republic, Cameroon, Gabon, and Central African Republic. Landing Bessora’s first novel, 53 cm (1999) was a godsend, particularly because the only other Gabonese author I had read was Ntyugwetondo Rawiri. One would think that a PhD student of African literature in French would be more familiar with writers from the aforementioned region, which indicates the limited scope of Francophone African literature studies in the Euro-American or African academy, currently dominated by Cameroonian and Senegalese writers, with a sprinkling of Ivorians such as Ahmadou Kourouma and his successors.

Secondly, my interest in Bessora’s first novel was provoked by its rich humour, which camouflages a profound critique of French immigration laws. 53cm exposes the hypocrisy of French immigration policy and establishes it as sharing the same racist foundation in the idea of rationality, the discipline of anthropology, and in the event of slavery. Bessora’s insight is not surprising when one considers that she pursued her doctoral studies in anthropology, which culminated in her dissertation study on “mémoires pétrolières” (petroleum memories). During my interview with her in Paris, she informed me that her research was about the saturation of the petroleum economy in the cultural life of Gabon. Her research pointed at the general fatigue, expressed through the local myths and legends, with the dependency of the economy on petrol. It also inspired her fourth novel Petroleum that appeared the previous year.

Bessora’s profile is noticeably different from that of those writers literary critics sometimes refer to as first- and second-generation writers in colonial languages. Unlike the previous generations who are born and raised in Africa and only reside in France as adults, Bessora is no stranger to the world outside the continent. Having a French-trained diplomat father meant that she would be born in Belgium and live in the United States as a child before moving to Gabon until her teenage years. She would later attend high school in Switzerland and contemplate a career as a flight attendant before briefly pursuing a career in business. In my interview with her, she indicated that the well-paying job was not stimulating, prompting her to move to France, where she pursued advanced studies in anthropology. An additional aspect of her distinct cultural heritage is the fact that her mother hails from the German-speaking region of Switzerland, as opposed to the French one as would have been expected of a writer who works in the French language. As far as the general perception of most African writers goes, Bessora breaks the mould.

I must admit that by the time I interviewed Bessora, the profound richness of 53cm had eluded me. I was obsessed with the fact that, despite its mockery and criticism of 19th century French intellectuals, the novel seems to redeem anthropology. At the time, my hostility towards the discipline had almost reached its zenith, and so I repeatedly asked Bessora to justify her use of anthropological discourse to describe Zara’s futile attempts to acquire a carte de séjour. I was also concerned about the novel’s conflation of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide in order to mock democracy, for I am a firm believer that comparisons are odious, that human horrors of such magnitude are incomparable and should not be reduced to comic treatment. I therefore asked Bessora if the Jewish community had voiced any concerns to that effect, to which she replied in the negative.

The most interesting aspect of our conversation arguably centred on the absurdity of French immigration laws. Like the author, the protagonist Zara is made to shuttle between different government agencies that give her conflicting instructions. She is eventually advised that the only way her child could get a residency permit – which the government insists a child does not require – was if Zara applied for a residency permit as a Swiss rather than Gabonese citizen. However, when she does attempt to do so, the sceptical officer in the section for European citizens questions the authenticity of her citizenship. Bessora explained to me, at the time a disbelieving listener, that the reality is indeed as absurd as the book portrays it. I have since learned that nothing is too absurd when it comes to French government policies.

In my view, 53cm and Petroleum represent the most profound and socially conscious novels amongst of Bessora’s work. 53cm makes the formidable point that race and reason have their etymological roots in the Latin word ratio. The significance of this common foundation is reflected in the experience of Saartje Baartman, the overarching symbol of the novel, known in English-speaking circles as Sarah Bartman and in popular circles as the Venus Hottentot. Baartman was the victim of 19th century anthropologist George Cuvier’s evil and despicable study in which he observed Baartman’s private parts, dissected her corpse and proudly announced to his “esteemed” academic colleagues that he had used the evidence to arrive at the conclusion that Africans had no civilization. The absurdity, foolishness, and sheer intellectual incompetence that allowed Cuvier to “rationally” arrive at an improvable conclusion highlight the fundamental problem which has plagued Western science and anthropology since slavery, and more particularly, since the Enlightenment: the inability to accept that humanity cannot be understood in its entirety through reason, calculations or formulas.

The genius of 53cm is to link this malady to racism. In the artificial world created by Western Europe in which everything can be scientifically measured and calculated, intellectuals have continually sought to prove through research that Africans are biologically or culturally inclined to be slaves, to be poor and underdeveloped, and in the case of migration to France, to be incapable of “integration” into modern French society. Despite this obviously racist foundation of the French republic and its intellectual tradition, the country still vaunts itself as the home of human rights. In the novel, the state authorities self-righteously inform Zara that her child does not need a visa because the bill of human rights considers all children equal regardless of faith, gender, ethnicity or creed. In the meantime, Zara is required to produce her daughter’s visa in order to enrol her in school. In the face of such absurdity, one can understand her exasperation and sarcasm when she says at one point: “Long live the Fifth Republic”.

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