THE
HEART
OF THE
LEOPARD CHILDREN
Global African Voices
DOMINIC THOMAS, EDITOR
I Was an Elephant Salesman: Adventures
between Dakar, Paris, and Milan
Pap Khouma, Edited by Oreste Pivetta
Translated by Rebecca Hopkins
Introduction by Graziella Parati
Little Mother: A Novel
Cristina Ali Farah
Translated by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi
and Victoria Offredi Poletto
Introduction by Alessandra Di Maio
Life and a Half: A Novel
Sony Labou Tansi
Translated by Alison Dundy
Introduction by Dominic Thomas
Transit: A Novel
Abdourahman A. Waberi
Translated by David Ball and
Nicole Ball
Cruel City: A Novel
Mongo Beti
Translated by Pim Higginson
Blue White Red: A Novel
Alain Mabanckou
Translated by Alison Dundy
The Past Ahead: A Novel
Gilbert Gatore
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager
Queen of Flowers and Pearls: A Novel
Gabriella Ghermandi
Translated by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi
and Victoria Offredi Poletto
The Shameful State: A Novel
Sony Labou Tansi
Translated by Dominic Thomas
Foreword by Alain Mabanckou
Kaveena
Boubacar Boris Diop
Translated by Bhakti Shringarpure
and Sara C. Hanaburgh
Foreword by Ayo A. Coly
THE
HEART
OF THE
LEOPARD CHILDREN
WILFRIED N’SONDÉ
Translated by
Karen Lindo
Foreword by Dominic Thomas
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Original publication in French
© 2007 Actes Sud
© 2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: N’Sondé, Wilfried, author. | Lindo, Karen, translator.
Title: The heart of the leopard children / Wilfried N’Sond?e ; translated by Karen Lindo ; foreword by Dominic Thomas.
Other titles: Coeur des enfants léopards. English
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Series: Global African voices
Identifiers: LCCN 2015047348 | ISBN 9780253021908 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Africans – France – Fiction. | Immigrants – France – Fiction. | Youth – France – Fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ3989.3.N76 C7413 2016 | DDC 843/.92 – dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047348
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
I dedicate this book
to my parents
Marie-Joséphine and
Simone ‘Wapiti,’
Thank you . . .
. . . From this land of which I have been robbed,
mother what turmoil my life is!
SERGE “MNSA” N’SONDÉ
From hazardous storms, we become more beautiful!
WILFRIED PARACLET N’SONDÉ
CONTENTS
FOREWORD / Dominic Thomas
The Heart of the Leopard Children
FOREWORD
The Heart of the Leopard Children:
Ancestral Memory and the Creative Imagination
Born in 1968 in the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), Wilfried N’Sondé moved to France in 1973 and grew up there in an outlying urban area of Paris. The author of four novels published by Actes Sud, one of France’s most prestigious publishers, Le cœur des enfants léopards (The Heart of the Leopard Children, 2007), Le Silence des esprits (The Silence of the Spirits, 2010), Fleur de Béton (Flower in Concrete, 2012), and Berlinoise (2014), he has received considerable critical attention and been recognized with important literary awards, most notably the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Senghor de la création littéraire. N’Sondé also publishes short stories and essays, his work has been adapted for the stage, and he has established a reputation in Berlin, where he moved in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and shortly before German reunification, as a pioneering musician and performer of afro-punk, rock trash, slam, and spoken-word.
N’Sondé is considered one of the shining lights of African, Afropean, and French writing. However, he is a writer who both exceeds and resists categorization, questioning the pertinence and even the validity of such mechanisms and in so doing, complicating attempts at circumscribing his work. As he contends, “The ethno-identitarian machine has become a deadly poison. . . . It has a tendency to regionalize and to persist in confining art and people to the arbitrariness of geography, to use questionable criteria in order to divide and categorize, driving us gradually further away from the essence of being and magic of words.”1 These questions are central in his first novel, The Heart of the Leopard Children, a work that “deals with the question of origin; human beings are not sites. Those are purely mental constructs. What am I supposed to answer when asked ‘Where do you come from?’ Congo, France, Berlin, Seine-et-Marne, Brazzaville? No. I come from my mother’s womb. We don’t have roots, we are not plants.”2
Yet, these, and related questions – postcolonial African society, diasporic identity, race relations, immigration policy, banlieues housing projects, and so forth – feature prominently in his work and provide readers with demanding and thought-provoking examples of how the literary imagination is able to appraise these and analogous issues. N’Sondé exhibits a concerted engagement with identity and belonging and close scrutiny of the ways in which geographic uprooting impacts those who have grown in French housing projects, on the “ambivalent”3 physical boundaries of society and emotional margins of “Frenchness.”4 A process of introspection defines the unnamed central protagonist’s quest to seek answers to life’s existential challenges. “Where do you come from?” (p. 2), are you “Black on the outside, white on the inside!” (p. 23), and “What are you anyway, French or African?” (p. 76). These are the questions with which he is confronted on a quotidian basis, and as N’Sondé has claimed, “In writing the novel I realized that the other characters, who did not come from the Congo, were nevertheless, in their quest for life, also leopard children, to the extent they shared in the ferocity and rage they brought to bear on life, but also in the same nobility of heart.”5 Writing thus provides the occasion to “insert some humanity into everyday news stories and to give a face, a heart, and feelings to a segment of French society, namely poor immi
grants.”6
In The Heart of the Leopard Children, the central protagonist delivers, from a prison cell where he is being held in conjunction with the death of a police officer, an internal monologue that reckons with his childhood, adolescence, and young adult life, in a universe composed of interactions with the two other key figures in his life, namely his girlfriend Mireille (a Jewish pied-noir of Algerian descent) and his best friend Drissa (like him, of African descent). Reviewing his past provides the opportunity to question the ideals and values of the French Republic, to place these concepts and principles under pressure, in other words to test other forms of cultural, political, and social confinement, “the conviction in a color-blind ideology that has for a longtime sustained segregation in housing, discrimination in hiring practices, the reiteration of protracted historical amnesia in-school curricula and quelled the brimming buried rage by executing the long arm of the law” and “the physical isolation and alienation of banlieues communities from active participation within the Republican institutions that oversee the daily practices of citizenry remains startling.”7
In the following excerpt from The Heart of the Leopard Children, we can observe the tenuous conjunction between experience and personal development, the confrontation with racism and the awakening of consciousness:
The teacher, who really liked him, asked him to talk about his home country. He went up to the board, turned around, and faced the class. Not knowing what to say, he smiled, mumbled two, three fragments of history about ancestors, threw in a lion here, a banana tree there, and a village made from terra cotta that he’d seen on television the night before. He decided to leave the spirits out of it. It’s way too easy for them to see us as primitive and stupid. When he was done, everyone was silent, wanting to hear more. Drissa, you should have had a teacher like mine. She would take my notebook and ask me to keep a few steps back from her, don’t be angry my child but that odor, you understand, I’m just not used to it. She would shake her head, left to right, her palm elegantly placed in front of her mouth and nose. Personally, I liked her, like a child hungry for affection. She was so refined, not to mention the lovely pink lipstick she wore with her smile. So, the good and patient boy that I was, I would remain a good distance from her. That’s good, my boy. (p. 12)
N’Sondé’s recourse to social realism thus gives a voice to those “invisibles of the French Republic,”8 who are so often the subject of media and official governmental focus, yet only rarely included in the broader national conversation.9
In The Heart of the Leopard Children, N’Sondé draws inspiration from Kongo mythology, ancestral stories, and the recurrence of the figure of the leopard in these narratives and memories, collectively mined here for the purposes of the novel, “a cultural imaginary steeped in an African cosmology.”10 He writes, “Later on, we will dive body and soul into the Bakongo country, under the protective eye of the invisible eternal leopards, sit at the tombs of our ancestor without fear of sorcerers or witch doctors” (p. 37). Nonetheless, as Srilati Ravi has observed, in N’Sondé’s first three novels, “the impoverished Parisian banlieues serve as principle backdrop to the stories of second-generation immigrants. . . . While these narratives offer a realistic depiction of the life of immigrants (of all ethnic and religious affiliations) who are economically, socially and ethnically marginalized from mainstream society, they also contain in their unfolding the redemptory poetry of hope and shared understandings.”11 The 2008 French Nobel Prize laureate J.-M. G. Le Clézio fastens on this dimension, stating that “I am also very fond of francophone literature outside of France. Alain Mabanckou is someone quite remarkable, and so is Wilfried N’Sondé, the author of The Heart of the Leopard Children.”12 When the narrator recalls an outing into Paris with his beloved Mireille, the intensity of N’Sondé’s poetic sensibility and passion are palpable:
Mireille, oh Mireille, our meeting place, Place Saint-Michel, you in your flowery dress, and beneath, your perfume in which I would drown myself. Your warm lips with the taste of the rain, sweet venom, and a velvety kiss teasing my own lips. The wine of lovers. With a shared will to be good to each other, Paris became our conquered kingdom and opened itself up to us. Mireille, oh Mireille, I have fallen Mireille, a falcon with broken wings, a wild cat in captivity. I’m in prison, Mireille. Defiled, I have fallen so low. My darling, my secret, Mireille, oh Mireille, what is love, Mireille? Is it my tongue on your moist flower, when you murmur, no not there. Your eyes close a little bit, your lips trembling, you take my head between your tense fingers and passionately imprison my face in your hands. Your whole body melts ever so slowly, burning under my weight. Mireille navigating back and forth, my desire capsized in your storm. You whisper to me, don’t stop. I carry us into a marvelous shipwreck. Your cries and moans make a symphony. It’s a lover’s hymn. Without ever saying I love you, for that would be too banal for you. Mireille, those afternoons in my room on the ninth floor, on the roofs of Paris, the yellow light of the sun on your bare body, ornate with pearls of perspiration. These are the real jewels of lovers! (p. 13)
Aesthetics and politics are indistinguishable in the architecture of the world N’Sondé builds. “In the meanwhile,” as Karen Lindo writes, “as part of the creative possibilities by which the French cultural imaginary may flourish, the literary landscapes of writers like Wilfried N’Sondé paint their murals, which if we look close enough do color in the hope of belonging in postcolonial France.”13
N’Sondé’s journey has, as he himself recognizes, made him into “a cultural mosaic of sorts,”14 and it is perhaps not surprising that he was to find in the new German capital “a culture of tolerance.”15 Somewhat paradoxically,
This distance, moreover, made it easier for me to begin to understand the archaisms and contradictions that were specific to French culture. I realized that the decision to come to Germany had allowed me to finally distance myself from a kind of hexagonal schizophrenia: that of being at once a French citizen whose equal rights were clearly and loudly affirmed but yet whose skin color gave rise to such great rants and ravings that I became increasingly skeptical of what was still being taught at university. Only too accustomed to police checks and the standard disregard for formalities and the patronizing use of the familiar “tu,” I quickly had to learn to answer their stupid questions and accept the humiliation if only to avoid a more serious incident. I soon came to realize that this recurrent police harassment was inversely proportionate to the whiteness of one’s complexion.16
Notes
1. Wilfried N’Sondé, “Ethnidentité,” in Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, eds., Je est un autre: Pour une identité-monde (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2010), 100.
2. Fabienne Arvers, “Entretien avec Wilfried N’Sondé, auteur du Cœur des enfants-léopards,” Les Inrockuptibles, March 12, 2011, http://www.lesinrocks.com/2011/03/12/arts-scenes/scenes/entretien-avec-wilfried-nsonde-auteur-du-coeur-des-enfants-leopards-1118636/ (accessed August 19, 2015).
3. See Véronique Bragard, “Parisian Alternative Cartographies: Meandering the Ambivalent Banlieue in Wilfried N’SondeÏ’s Fiction,” in Pascale de Souza and H. Adlai Murdoch, eds., Metropolitan Mosaics and Melting-Pots: Paris and Montreal in Francophone Literatures (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 136–155.
4. See for example Dominic Thomas, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), and Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, eds., Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
5. Vitraulle Mboungou, “Wilfried N’Sondé livre ‘Le cœur des enfants léopards,’” Afrik.com, May 19, 2007, http://www.afrik.com/article11755.html (accessed August 19, 2015).
6. Mboungou, “Wilfried N’Sondé livre ‘Le cœur des enfants léopards.’”
7. Karen Lindo, “N’Sondé’s Post-2005 Youth Mural: Exploring Afro-Europe in Wilfried N’Sondé’s Lit
erary Landscape,” in Dominic Thomas, ed., Afroeuropean Cartographies (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 113.
8. See for example Achille Mbembe, “The Republic and Its Beast: On the Riots in the French Banlieues,” translated by Jean Marie Todd, in Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, eds., Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 47–69.
9. For an overview of other works in this genre, see Romuald-Blaise Fonkoua, “Ecrire la banlieue: la littérature des ‘invisibles,’” in Nicolas Bancel, ed., Le retour du colonial, Cultures du Sud 165 (April–June 2007), 89–96.
10. Lindo, “N’Sondé’s Post-2005 Youth Mural,” 115.
11. Srilati Ravi, “Toward an Afropean Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Friendship and the African Immigrant,” in Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas, eds., Francophone Afropean Literatures (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 138.
12. François Dufay, “J.-M. G. Le Clézio: On ne peut pas faire barrage au métissage,” L’Express, October 10, 2008, http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/jmg-le-clezio-on-ne-peut-pas-faire-barrage-au-metissage_587614.html?p=2 (accessed August 19, 2015).
13. Lindo, “N’Sondé’s Post-2005 Youth Mural,” 126.
14. Mboungou, “Wilfried N’Sondé livre ‘Le cœur des enfants léopards.’”
15. Arvers, “Entretien avec Wilfried N’Sondé.”
16. Wilfried N’Sondé, “Francastérix,” translated by Karen Lindo, in Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas, eds., Francophone Afropean Literatures (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 204.
THE
HEART
OF THE
LEOPARD CHILDREN
PROLOGUE
From Vancouver to Brasilia, from the gangsters in New York, Bahia, Lagos, behind the bars at the Fleury-Mérogis prison, on the benches of the amphitheaters at the Sorbonne, for some of the junkies at the central station in Amsterdam, for the AIDS orphans of Mombasa, the commuters pressed and packed into the RER train on line A heading into Paris, for the memories of the deceased watching over Kongo, all the faces of voodoo ceremony participants in Haiti, those buried for centuries below the African continent, beneath the uniforms of ear-cutting Senegalese soldiers, the drug addicts, the fanatics, those stuck in the trenches in the Flanders during the Great War, the bones of those scattered at the bottom of the Atlantic, the asylum seekers, the EU authorities, for the female vendors in the Brixton market, the jubilation of the sound systems in Jamaica, and especially for those genocided in Rwanda,
The Heart of the Leopard Children Page 1