Laughing through
the Back of the  Face

Wandia Njoya

As I have already mentioned, Petroleum is my other favourite of Bessora’s novels. This is particularly because of the recent spate of trips to the African continent in which Hollywood stars give birth in game parks, steal African children from their fathers (who says slavery ended?), organize music concerts in aid of Africa but without African musicians, and, most despicable in my book, intrude with cameras on the homes of the sick and dying in Africa in order to treat Western viewers in cheap voyeurism. All these gestures, symptoms of what Pius Adesanmi has rightly called the “Mercy Industrial Complex,” reinforce the message that African existence is solely biological; therefore as long as Africans have food, shelter and access to Western schools, they do not need to have their basic human dignity respect. Although Bessora’s novel is not addressed to this specific global situation, it makes the important point that a high GDP and a highly lucrative mineral resource such as petrol do not necessarily give people dignity. Gabon’s economy is based almost solely on petroleum, so that infrastructure and economic activities revolve around petrol dollars. It is rumoured that luxury hotels in Gabon are among the most expensive hotels in the world, and acquaintances who have visited Gabon inform me that the petroleum wealth has created a complacency that stifles creativity and a promotes a general joie de vivre. But Bessora demonstrates that Gabonese citizens are not satisfied with this status quo, which, her protagonists find out, is difficult to challenge without risking one’s life. Meanwhile, France has largely controlled the exploitation of petrol since the discovery of the precious resource a few years after independence. Since then, Gabon’s independence has been largely ceremonial, subject to the rigorous control of the notorious Elf Company, which insures President Omar Bongo’s current status as one of the world’s longest ruling presidents.

Petroleum aptly depicts the utopia in which the expatriate community lives, a situation which could arguably be seen as a Gabonese version of a similar scenario in The Stepford Wives. Moreover, anyone tired of the worn-out anthem that delivering scraps of food to Africans is a life-altering experience for the ‘poor hungry souls’ – I heard one Western charity criticize donations of computers by arguing that Africans “need food, not computers” – will welcome Bessora’s novel as one that shows that donor-goods or wealth does not buy dignity, a sense of purpose or autonomy.

Between 53cm and Petroleum, Bessora published two novels, Les Tâches d’encre [Ink Stains] (2000) and Deux bébés et l'addition [Two Babies and the Bill] (2002) and a short novel Courant d'air aux Galeries [A Breath of Fresh air in the Galleries] (2003). This year marked the release of another novel Cueillez-moi, jolis Messieurs (2007). Each of these novels reflect Bessora’s characteristic style of word play, caustic sarcasm and humor on serious issues such as immigration and racism. She received a prize for her 2002 novel Deux bébés et l'addition.

It is evident that Bessora is an interesting writer who will cause ripples in the academic and literary world in the years to come. I am, however, concerned about the moral implications of her writing style on the serious issues that she tackles. The satirical tone which dominates her work is, in my opinion, inappropriate for the often morbid issues that she explores. For instance, the title of her first novel, 53cm, reflects the hip size of the protagonist and is aimed at mocking the standard measurement of African women’s hips that Cuvier set at 791 cm. However, the mockery eventually falls flat when one realizes that the subject of the experiment was Baartman, whose humiliation continued even in 2001, almost two centuries after her death, when the French government initially refused to expatriate her remains on the grounds that they were required for scientific research. Any African troubled by the humiliation that Baartman was subjected to (the gory details are available in Sharpley-Whiting’s Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French and also in Pius Adesanmi’s recently widely-circulated drubbing of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar for their shoddy selections in the Norton Anthology of feminists literary theory they recently edited) may find it difficult to see the humor in Zara’s lament that her hips are not as large as Baartman’s.

Reading the novel therefore leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I initially laughed at Zara, but after a while the laughter froze on my face when I realized that I was laughing not only at Baartman, but also at the humiliation of African women. African women readers may therefore sympathize with me when I say that the novel reminded me of the final scene in Russian writer Nicolai Gogol’s play The Government Inspector, in which an embattled mayor reminds his laughing colleagues that they are in the same predicament as he is by shouting: “What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves!”

Another striking aspect of Bessora’s fiction is the juxtaposition of stark contrasts and the preponderance of absurd scenes in her novels. Her latest novel, Cueillez-moi, jolis Messieurs, has two women of particularly odd personalities, one black and the other white, as the main characters. I personally find it difficult to visualize the relationship between the homeless African widow and the French teacher, and so the book appears more as exploration of race relations as they occur in an overtly constructed setting rather than in normal life. Bessora’s novel Deux bébés et l’addition depicts a woman in labour engaged in an odd debate with the male midwife about the reason why the professionals are called “sage-femmes.” In addition, her fiction generally treats readers to numerous references to the physical body and particularly to the intimate parts, which eventually becomes tedious.

I raise these issues because of my reservations about the significance sometimes attached to what is now called ‘third generation Africans’ who write in colonial languages. This generation, to which I belong, has been dubbed by some observers such as Abdourahman Waberi as children of the postcolony. It has been characterized as comprised of Africans born after independence, who sometimes carry Western citizenship and purportedly do not have scruples about embracing that citizenship as previous generations may have had. It is also distinguished by the fact that many of its members are living in the West, as opposed to previous generations, who usually returned home after a brief sojourn in Europe. While these trends may be peculiar to these writers, Bessora’s fiction indicates that they may not be revolutionary but instead conciliatory and even naïve on the nature of global capitalism and racism. The subjects that drew the wrath of Mongo Beti and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or the tragic vision of Ousmane Sembène and Aminata Sow Fall seem to now attract the humour and satire of Bessora and her contemporaries such as Senegalese writer Fatou Diome and Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou. If satire, as many critics say, is the laugh of the oppressed, who feel powerless to change their conditions and therefore resort to ridicule, then we may be a generation which retreats into humour because we are intimidated by the global dimensions of our condition as Black people in today’s world. However, this phenomenon extends to writers of earlier generations such as Ahmadou Kourouma or even the third generation Calixthe Beyala, who treat serious subjects such as disillusionment after independence, civil conflicts in Africa and racism in France with humour, often leaving African readers feeling humiliated while Western readers praise the bastardized (dubiously called Malinkenized) French and Beyala’s purported feminist vision.

Nevertheless, the issues I raise here about Bessora’s fiction may be a matter of personal taste. I am a strong adherent of the Soyinka school of thought, amplified in his book Myth, Literature and the African World, which sees fiction as a means through which human beings situate themselves in their social, physical and temporal space. Bessora’s fiction, by contrast, attracts the readers’ attention to the style of the novels rather than the existential questions that Soyinka raises, reminding one of French neo-fiction tradition in which authors sought to write novels that sound like linguistic experiments. In terms of style, I enjoy the lyrical prose and the developed characters that one may find in Achebe’s or Ousmane’s fiction rather than the taut and unsympathetic treatment of characters in Bessora’s. For this reason, Bessora’s work may appeal to readers looking for edgy and fresh direction in African literature. Whatever one’s tastes or worldview, Bessora intellectual depth and formidable work definitely makes her a writer to watch.