Pointe-Noire jealously preserves its past as a colonial town, and the roundabout recalls the demarcation line between what was once ‘white city’, on one side, and the ‘native quarters’ on the other. In those days native inhabitants would leave their insalubrious shacks first thing in the morning and go into the ‘white town’ to sell their labour as gardeners, kitchen hands, boys, etc. Of all francophone African writers, it is probably the Cameroonian novelist Eza Boto (Mongo Beti) who best describes a colonial town. In his novel Cruel City, the northern part of the city of Tanga is a ‘little France’, imported into the tropics, with its sumptuous buildings, its streets in bloom, while the southern part rots in extreme poverty, without electricity and, when the town sleeps, terror is spread through the streets by criminal gangs.
Downtown Pointe-Noire is in this sense a kind of French territory, as the commemorative plaque at the Kassai roundabout seems to suggest. Unsurprisingly, just a stone’s throw away, is the French Cultural Centre — now known as the ‘French Institute of the Congo, Pointe-Noire’, to the irritation of the Pontenegrins, who wonder why this title is any better than the old one, which is fixed in people’s memories.
It’s a two-storey building, with four apartments on the first floor: the director’s and three others for international charity workers, writers and artists invited by the Institute. For the past ten days I have been staying in one myself, and I will be leaving the day after tomorrow. Several works by Congolese artists hang on the living-room walls. I look, in vain, for the names of these artists, whose talent will probably never be known to the public. One painting in particular intrigues me: it shows a young woman, whose blank stare introduces a note of sadness into the room. When I arrived I thought I might move her, then I kept putting it off to the next day, perhaps out of laziness, or perhaps because of the secret power of the subject, who, I somehow felt, would not appreciate the gesture. To avoid her stare, I stopped turning my head to the right when I sat in the chair to write. Sometimes I turned my back to her, but that never lasted long; a voice whispered to me that the woman was reading over my shoulder and was responsible for most of my crossings-out. As though she objected to my daily writing-up of the past, though she knew nothing about my childhood and I must have been older than her, despite the age assigned to her by her creator, catapulting her into the past. With only two days left here, moving her would bring me more qualms than relief. She was there before, she will still be there, and I am only passing through. The director of the Institute, Eric Miclet, has assured me that he found her in this position when he took over his duties, and that his own inclination was, if something blends into the background, let it be. Teasingly, he said:
‘She’s a bit like the guardian of the apartment! She’s seen everything, heard everything, for years now. But she’s never once, in all that time, told tales on the guests who’ve stayed here.’
As soon as the door opens, the woman frowns and seems to resent the light. So until now I have been sure to close the door quickly behind me, to preserve for her the image she likes to give of herself: a woman alone, with an expression of gloom pulling lines around her lips and eyes.
The background of the painting is incomplete, some of the birds have no wings, and the sky is only vaguely sketched in. Occasionally it makes me think of the film The Painting by Jean-François Laguionie, in which a painter leaves a picture unfinished, and you see a castle, gardens and a strange forest. There are three categories of people in the work: the Allduns — completely painted — the Halfies — still with some things missing — and the Sketchies, who are only vaguely there. The Allduns hunt down the Halfies and take the Sketchies into captivity. The only person who can establish peace between the protagonists is the Painter himself. Ramo, Lola and Plume set off to look for the artist, so he can come back and finish the painting…
I have no wish to track down the painter of this Congolese picture. I will settle for what Eric Miclet told me: if something blends into the background, let it be…
House of stories
Each time I go up the stairs in the Institute I remember how I used to climb them when I was only twelve years old, and there was nothing up there but books and readers from the remotest districts of Pointe-Noire. Since that time there’s been a lot of building work, and I still can’t find my way around. The old theatre has gone, and a new performance area has been created at the rear of the building. Young people arrive in the morning at the cyberspace in the basement, and don’t leave again until closing time.
This used to be the only library in the whole town, with a children’s books section which we made great use of. I’d put myself in a corner, near the window, and lose myself in comic strips whose heroes were trapped in this room, unable to leave and have new adventures because we wouldn’t let them out, for fear they’d go and bewitch other children, in a different country. For us they were living people, of flesh and blood. We entered the premises with the sense that we were leaving Pointe-Noire for a long journey through a fantasy world where we were held captive. Was there a single one among us who didn’t take on the names of our heroes, and act like them? Take Sosthène, for example, a muscular young man from the Rex district. He worshipped Tarzan so much, he adopted his name, but we knew he wasn’t the real one because every time he tried to swing from branch to branch he fell and limped for the next three days. Zembla was much more like us, we found his name ‘very African’, compared to Tintin or Blek le Roc. We were particularly fond of his friends Rasmus, Pétoulet, Tabuka, Satanas, Bwana and especially Yéyé, a black child, like us. We didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. The useless conjuror, Rasmus, had us doubled up with laughter. When his magic tricks went wrong we felt sorry for him and hoped that some day or other he would become the greatest magician in the world. Many of Zembla’s friends were animals — which we found reassuring, as we believed animals had souls, that they were the origin of the human species, and that each of us had an animal double hidden somewhere in the forest. We were amazed by Pétoulet, the kangaroo, as there was no such animal in our country, it came from a continent we couldn’t find on the world map pinned up on the classroom wall. For this reason Pétoulet was our favourite of all the wild creatures. The lion and the panther were carnivores. Pétoulet, on the other hand, was what nowadays would be called a vegetarian. But he still had to go hunting, to feed all Zembla’s animal friends, especially that greedy Satanas.
The lion, Bwana, terrified us, though he was less wicked than in our traditional stories, where he was a carnivore who ate up all the children until finally the smallest of them all, aided by the spirits of the forest, managed to slay him. The name Bwana — which featured in Tarzan too — meaning ‘master’ in Swahili, was not offensive to us, even though it later came to symbolise submission, domination.
I didn’t realise that in the library you could read whatever you felt like reading, picking things randomly off the shelf. I worked my way through in alphabetical order, starting to read the authors of French classical literature, beginning with ‘A’. Alain-Fournier was there, with Le Grand Meaulnes. Jean Anouilh with Antigone. Guillaume Apollinaire, whose only work of any interest to me was Le Pont Mirabeau. Similarly with Louis Aragon, I read only Les Yeux d’Elsa from the collection of the same title. I remember I skipped Antonin Artaud and Marguerite Audoux, and went quickly on to Marcel Aymé and The Wonderful Farm — I loved the cat who could make it rain, and admired Garou-Garou, who could walk through walls. Missing out Artaud and Audoux meant I got all the more quickly on to Balzac, whose novels alone took up a huge amount of space on the shelves. At this rate — unless I missed out quite a few writers — it was going to take me a very long time to get to Zola. Every time I saw a reader with one of his books I wondered how they could have managed to read all the books in the library. I reassured myself by saying they must have cheated, that he was just showing off with the works of Zola, to impress the girls. So whenever I was alone I would get on with The Wonderful Farm, but the moment I spotted a girl, I’d open up Germinal, with the look of someone so extremely studious they’ve actually finished reading the entire library. If a friend came over and was surprised to see Marcel Aymé on my table, I had an answer ready to hand: ‘I’ve finished all the books from A to Z, now I’m reading the first and the last ones again.’