Zmeškal was born in Prague in 1966 to a Czech mother, Anna Zmeškalová, and a Congolese father, Joseph Lukoki, making him the first “Afro-Czech” writer, as he refers to himself. His mother came from a village called Běleč, near the city of Kladno, famous as the birthplace of Czech heavy industry, with coal mining dating back to the mid-eighteenth century and iron production to the mid-nineteenth. His mother studied several foreign languages (English, German, Spanish, French) and had a knack for them, but worked much of her life in dull office jobs dealing with foreign trade. His father was an intellectual, a student of economics, who traveled thirty-seven hundred miles overland from Léopoldville, capital of the Belgian Congo, to Conakry, in Guinea, then another thirty-two hundred miles in the air to the capital of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, in November 1959, under an assumed name, to win support for the soon-to-be independent Republic of Congo.
The only reason I know these facts is that Zmeškal revealed them in his third book, Sokrates na rovníku: Rodinné reportáže (Socrates at the equator: Family reportages), a work of literary nonfiction published in 2013. Previously, Zmeškal had shared details of his personal background only in dribs and drabs, sprinkled across interviews. (The sole reference to his African heritage in Love Letter, in fact — more of a nod, really — is the character Václav, who appears in Chapter 6: “‘This is my brother doctor, friends,’ said the pastry chef. ‘And these are my friends, doctor. This is Václav,’ he said, pointing to a brown-skinned African man of average height eyeing the doctor suspiciously.”) In Socrates, however, Zmeškal recounts the years that he spent trying to track down his “prodigal father,” who left Zmeškal’s mother and Czechoslovakia in the late sixties, and of meeting his extended family in Congo for the first time.
As a child, Zmeškal said in an interview with Naše rodina in 2010, he “was always scrawling something.” Still, as a teenager he ended up at a technical high school for civil engineering rather than at a gymnázium, studying liberal arts. “My friends saw me writing all the time and said I should go study Czech and Czech literature, but when I asked about it, I was told in no uncertain terms that I would have to join the [Socialist] Youth Union, or even the Party. And I didn’t want to do that.”
While Zmeškal for the most part chose to leave his personal life out of his debut, his second novel, Životopis černobílého jehněte (2009; Biography of a black-and-white lamb), which he wrote in 2005 and 2006, while still seeking a publisher for Milostný dopis klínovým písmem, contains several chapters he describes as “inspired by personal experience,” though, he insisted in an interview with Radio Prague in 2012, “the main line is not autobiographical.” Again the story takes place under communism, again it centers on a family, but this time the main characters are twins, Václav and Lucie, born to a Czech mother and an African father. The difficulties they face growing up black in a near-lily-white society are drawn directly from Zmeškal’s own experience. In one episode of Životopis, for instance, a military orchestra rejects Václav because of his skin color. As Zmeškal told Reflex in 2010, “I auditioned for that orchestra as an amateur clarinetist, and I passed, but in the end they didn’t take me because the politruk [Communist Party overseer] got his hands on a photo of me. It was clearly due to my origin.” Still, the novel’s main concern is not racism per se, but the crushing conformism that permeated every aspect of life in 1980s Czechoslovakia.
In 1987, at the age of twenty-one, Zmeškal received a permit from the authorities to leave Czechoslovakia and travel to London to marry his English girlfriend, whom he had met in Prague. Two years later, the Iron Curtain fell and the East bloc dissolved. Zmeškal’s homeland was no longer a Soviet satellite. Yet he decided to stay in London, studying English language and literature at King’s College, then teaching English himself and delivering the English mail. Over the next eleven years, he traveled back to Prague repeatedly, at one point remaining for a year before returning to London. Finally, in 1998, he made up his mind to resettle in his native city. As he told Radio Prague in 2012, “I’m a city person. I love the countryside, but the city is where I want to be, because I love art and culture and I love meeting people, and Prague is definitely my home, for sure.” Since then he has worked as a lecturer in English literature at Charles University, as well as a translator and interpreter. He is currently employed as a high school English teacher, as well as offering private lessons in creative writing, and is at work on a third novel.
It was a genuine pleasure to find my way through the maze of Zmeškal’s Love Letter, and I hope to be able to translate another one of his books before long.