He was awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire, the jury having rightly recognized the emergence of a genuinely new voice. Mabanckou’s novel announced new directions for the Francophone African novel, expanding upon earlier themes of exile, migration, and travel, as he explored the trials and tribulations that accompany those attempts at living between Africa and France and in Africa in France.2 In turn, these new diasporic communities provide us with fascinating insights on the nature of twenty-first-century globalized, postcolonial, transnational networks—those very themes that are shaping the series Global African Voices at Indiana University Press.
In Blue White Red, the reader will discover those elements that have become defining characteristics of Mabanckou’s œuvre: a combination of humor and linguistic innovation (the inspiration can be traced to his esteemed compatriot Sony Labou Tansi), alongside discerning commentary and analysis of the contemporary challenges facing the African continent and in particular African youth. The period following African independence from colonial rule was devoted to the daunting task of nation-building, and now that some fifty years have elapsed since that process began, young people often find themselves alienated, disenfranchised, and with limited professional opportunities. As such, they are compelled to seek out employment prospects outside of their country of birth and invariably move toward the relatively more prosperous regions outside of the African continent. However, these developments in migration patterns have also coincided with the shifting framework of twenty-first-century economic, social, and political realities, which have yielded increasing control and legislation. Migrants now find themselves in additionally precarious circumstances, forced to confront racial profiling and arbitrary police round-ups and avoid detention centers and deportation procedures. In this framework, migratory “push” and “pull” pressures remain very real, yet the centrifugal draw of Paris has survived the end of colonialism.
In Blue White Red, Mabanckou tackles interesting facets of migration, bringing together two migrant groups, namely, the Peasants and the Parisians. The Peasants are economic migrants who have elected to leave the African continent in order to seek employment in Europe. The Parisians, however, are represented by a very particular category made up of African Dandys, whose members are mostly young men lured to France by the desire to acquire designer clothes in order to enact the all-important descent on the homeland and display their new acquisitions. The practice, known as La Sape, has roots in colonial times given that the attempt at controlling the colonized body through a standardization of clothing was challenged by the refusal to partially assume the external appearance of the other.3 La Sape, whose practitioners are known as sapeurs, designates the Society for Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance (some of its more famous adherents include the musicians Koffi Olomide and Papa Wemba). As Didier Gondola explains, with growing urbanization, “fashion, for instance, was one of the elements that manifested this gap [gender gap] and fostered the invisibility of women and, by contrast, the visibility of men.”4 Analogous mechanisms of social control were to be found in postcolonial Africa. Shortly after his election in 1970, Congo-Zaire’s President Mobutu outlined his project of “zaïrianisation,” effectively deploying a campaign of “authenticity” whose guidelines were provided by a conscious distancing from European influences, including when it came to clothing. People were encouraged to wear the short-sleeved “abacost” suit (which literally means “down with the suit,” or à bas le costume in French). La Sape is thus a strategy of resistance and self-affirmation, “there to conceal his social failure and to transform it into apparent victory,”5 and as Achille Mbembe has shown, “In the postcolony, magnificence and the desire to shine are not the prerogative only of those who command. The people also want to be ‘honored,’ to ‘shine,’ and to take part in celebrations . . . in their desire for a certain majesty, the masses join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology.”6
Blue White Red thus examines the tenuous relationship between Parisians and Peasants as they endeavor to share space in Paris’s diasporic African communities, while also maintaining their distance from one another. Their objectives are, of course, quite different. The novel offers an insider’s glimpse at the topography of “African Paris,” with its produce markets, hair salons, music stores, and so on, but the focus is provided by the survival skills, resourcefulness, and tricks performed by the sapeurs, who circulate “at the margins of the law.”7 As Lydie Moudileno has argued, “The peasant represents a threat to the fiction of emigration,”8 and Blue White Red “exposes not only the actions and the discourse that perpetuates the Parisian myth, but also points to the complicity of the migrants when it comes to certain elements of their experience.”9 Indeed, this could be considered the central purpose of the novel. Yet, paradoxically, this also happens to be where Mabanckou’s creative genius shines through, as he brings to life the originality and vibrancy of the sapeurs.
Blue White Red offers hilarious descriptions of the sapeurs’ gatherings. The playfulness reverberates in the language, so brilliantly captured in Alison Dundy’s translation, which is as seamless as the meticulously choreographed performances Mabanckou stages. Appropriating clothes made by a plethora of international designers such as J.-M. Weston, Valentino, Gianni-Versace, and Yves Saint-Laurent, the sapeurs, writes Justin-Daniel Gandoulou, now “initiate the dance of designer labels, which consists in allowing the protagonists to dance and show off their clothes and designer labels.”10 Often having altered the color of their complexion, deliberately gained weight (to be portly implies opulence!), and endeavored to express themselves in only the very best “French from France” (even committing to memory poems and passages from canonical French authors), they are ready to begin the “battle” for bragging rights:
My adversary stunned me by executing an acrobatic leap that left the spectators cheering hysterically. He was dressed in a black leather outfit with boots and a black buckskin helmet. He smoked a fat cigar and turned his back on me—one way to ignore me and make a fool of me. I moved calmly toward the center of the dance floor. I was wearing a colonial helmet and a long cassock that swept the ground when I moved. I held a Bible in my right hand, and while my adversary had his back turned to me, I read aloud in an intelligible voice a passage from the Apocalypse of Saint John. The audience was euphoric, swept away by my originality.
In Blue White Red, the paradigmatic figure all young men seek to emulate is Moki. Recognized as an accomplished sapeur, his status in the African community is enhanced with each descent on the Congo. As Didier Gondola notes, “The expression milikiste designates the young Congolese who live in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in North America. . . . Miliki in Lingala is the plural for mokili, the ‘world,’ and has become synonymous for Europe. When the French suffix is added, the word identifies the young who made it to Europe.”11 Whether eager “to define their social distinctiveness”12 through fashion or to pursue economic opportunities elsewhere, the Peasants and Parisians share in the “blue-white-red dream” (an obvious allusion to the colors of the French flag), and as Mabanckou writes, “We were allowed to dream. It didn’t cost anything. No exit visa was necessary, no passport, no airline ticket.”
Ultimately, we are left pondering how to reconcile the multiple components and facets of the migration adventure—the hopes and aspirations of those that are left behind, the quotidian difficulties confronting the migrants, and the disappointment and shame that will accompany a failed migration to the North. . . . To this end, Blue White Red joins a distinguished library of African works, as Mabanckou narrates the latest chapter in the African French experience. This intertextuality is powerfully evident, as we are reminded of the father’s parting words to his son, Laye, in Camara Laye’s 1954 novel, L’Enfant noir (The Dark Child): “I knew quite well that eventually you would leave us.”13 In Blue White Red, Massala-Massala now listens to his own father’s advice: “I have always thought that you would leave one day. Far, far away from here.” Mabanckou’s pioneering novel is thus concerned with the circulation of people but also of literature, and as such it raises important questions about African writing today, the places in which it is produced, published, and ultimately read.
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