Awu's Story

by Mintsa, Justine; Toman, Cheryl; Kuoh-Moukoury, Thérèse

  At the very end of the fourth part of the novel, Mintsa integrates an important moment in Gabonese history into Makôsu, that of Gabon’s 1991 adoption of a multiparty system of government (116). Although this borrowed event is meant to mark a hopeful period in the novel, the university and Govan are wracked by turmoil that presents challenges for the establishment of real democracy in the country. The unionization of university faculty has the full support of students, and subsequent hostile interactions with the Govanese prime minister create a situation that puts the entire academic year at risk. The novel ends on this uncertain note, with the cancellation of the rest of the school year in early May with, at best, a tentative return to classes scheduled for the fall (140).

  Perhaps Mintsa’s first novel did not gain as much attention as her subsequent ones only because the rather specific context of the African university may be less relatable for some as opposed to more universal subjects such as friendships and marriages presented in each of her other works. Nonetheless, Makôsu captures raw and authentic emotions on many levels through the interweaving of fiction and nonfiction and prose and poetry. The novel is arguably of historical value as well for its compilation of facts surrounding a very tumultuous period in contemporary Gabonese history. For these reasons alone, it is a work deserving of further critical attention.

  Yet another novel that appeared before Histoire d’Awu is Premières lectures (1997), a work still widely read today. Although it is well-received by upper-elementary-school students, Premières lectures is enjoyable and instructive for readers of any age. The story takes place in a village seemingly untouched by Western influence, but the arrival of Brian, a teenage British traveler, reminds us all that change is inevitable. Brian’s presence is not threatening, however, and it is significant that he also is perceived as a child. His interactions with Obone, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a village elder, reflect the open-mindedness of youth, as the two have heartfelt and enlightening exchanges that stop short of a romantic relationship, a clear message to Mintsa’s young readers to complete one’s education before dabbling in affairs of the heart.

  Obone is, in fact, the narrator of the novel, and this choice is clearly meant to empower Mintsa’s young female protagonist. In fact, Obone fairs much better than Brian, her counterpart, since she can speak her own native language plus French, two languages that are completely inaccessible to Brian. Obone states: “Even in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine that I, a young black girl, could speak French better than a white boy! I had to face the facts: I was more skilled than a white! I was more skilled than a man! I was superior to the white man!” (22).

  Of course, there is the suggestion that Brian, as an English speaker, ultimately does not need to learn Obone’s native language (nor even French, for that matter) in order to succeed, whereas Obone absolutely needs to rely on her knowledge of French to advance in life. However, Mintsa uses the metaphor of blindness to address the subject of race and race relations in the novel. Obone’s father, the village elder, is already physically blind, but this allows him to be more accepting of the British traveler (18–19) because race is a social construct that relies on what is seen. Brian’s blindness, however, is due to privilege—as a male and as a Westerner—and although ultimately his future will not be threatened because of his lack of knowledge of African languages or French, he is still shut out from the richness of Obone’s grandfather’s stories that he tells each night to other villagers.

  Without diminishing any character or way of life, Premières lectures manages to teach children the realities of racism and inequality in today’s world and encourages them to fight against it while maintaining an open mind. Thus, this particular novel embraces multiculturalism but cautions against “blindness” of all forms. The village is portrayed authentically and shown in a positive light—a detail likely to provoke lively debate among urban dwellers, schoolchildren included. African literature for children is not yet very abundant, and thus Premières lectures joins other celebrated examples of children’s literature brought to the forefront by major African authors such as Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo. Since Mintsa’s publication of Premières lectures, several works for children written by Gabon’s second generation of writers have also emerged, including Edna Merey-Apinda’s Les aventures d’Imya, petite fille du Gabon (2004) and other texts geared more toward adolescents such as Alice Endamne’s C’est demain qu’on s’fait la malle (2008). Thus Mintsa’s second novel has had much more of an impact on Gabonese society than its mere forty-one pages initially suggest.

  In addition to the two novels that precede Histoire d’Awu, Mintsa’s fourth novel, Larmes de cendre (2010), is also worthy of note and is the work that is the most similar to Mintsa’s masterpiece. In Awu’s Story, Mintsa alludes to the fact that what is most harmful about a custom is not necessarily the custom itself but rather how it can be manipulated by individuals in order to gain power. This is the main premise behind Larmes. The Fang ritual applying to widows is ever present in Mintsa’s most recent novel, but the violence of it is heightened here. For Awu, the particular cruelty of the ritual as it was carried out by her sister-in-law Akut is just one of several hardships and obstacles for her to overcome. In Larmes, however, the life of the main character, Biloa, is completely shattered because of the ritual, and this ultimately becomes the indirect cause of the protagonist’s death.

  In Larmes the reader is introduced to Kan, a young doctor and enthusiastic painter who is first attracted to Biloa when he runs into her at the airport. After this initial encounter he cannot stop thinking about her, and he thus devotes his time to painting her portrait. Several months pass until Kan realizes that his father, who is an attorney, is representing a rape victim—a widow who was violated during the ritual of atonement. This client is none other than Biloa. The same woman who was stunningly beautiful and full of life at the airport some months prior is now a shadow of her former self; she is unable to speak and severely traumatized—a “body without a soul” (83). Biloa is brought to Kan’s medical office by Cécile, the very sister who is among those responsible for arranging the brutal rape during the ritual. However, Cécile is at first unaware that it is actually Kan’s father who is representing Biloa. Kan prescribes art therapy and gardening to aid Biloa in the healing process. Her condition eventually improves, and after several years Kan and Biloa fall in love and marry. Biloa, however, refuses a traditional ceremony in light of what has already happened to her in the name of tradition. Both sides of the family are less than pleased with this marriage for a variety of reasons, and this merely complicates matters for Biloa.

  The reader eventually learns that revenge is behind the extreme brutality of the widow ritual for Biloa’s apparent violation of the akagha, a Fang word roughly translated as “an order handed down by the gods.”14 In this particular case the akagha was initiated by Biloa’s childless aunt. It ensured that the daughters in the family would be powerful and of high social standing, but they were prohibited from marrying or having children without risking their own death (21). Cécile willingly accepts this fate, but Biloa categorically rejects it by marrying her first husband, who eventually becomes ill and dies in the beginning of the novel. In fact, Biloa dares to defy the akagha yet again not only by her new marriage to Kan but also by the couple’s decision to have a child; the prophecy of the akagha indeed manifests itself as Biloa dies just hours after giving birth to the couple’s daughter (129). As the couple never had a traditional marriage, Kan’s right to claim his wife’s body for burial is denied until he pays what can be perceived as a ransom. He refuses to do so solely on the grounds that those manipulating the tradition would triumph, and he believes this would be a sign of disrespect for Biloa, who loathed such dark aspects of prevailing customs. Completely defeated, Kan utters: “This tradition has finally caught up with us” (137). But Cécile does not emerge as a winner either; by the end of the novel, she loses her job and the wealth and status that comes with it and is
eventually admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

  Perhaps it is Biloa’s commentary on the manipulation of tradition that will be difficult for Mintsa’s readers to forget: “I would be lucky if I lived in a country where tradition is not a weapon of intimidation that obliges people who are respectful of their culture to serve the interests of the unscrupulous, calculating people of the lowest kind. For me, true luck is to enjoy freedom while showing respect for the other” (114).

  The fact that Mintsa addresses age-old traditions, conveys ideas handed down through Fang oral literature, and accords the village an important place in her works sometimes leads critics to believe that she is not writing about contemporary issues. But as Fortunat Obiang Essono explains: “Modernity in the work of Justine Mintsa comes through in the expression of concern and disillusionment over the post-colonial world, prisoner of its own contradictions between progress and decline, novelty and archaism (2006, 163).” In this sense, Mintsa is very much an author writing about the contradictions facing African countries today as Africans attempt to define and shape for themselves what their own societies should look like.

  A Novel Defying “Invisibility”

  Gabon is an exception in the history of literature; it is the only country worldwide whose first novelist was female. Although oral tradition in Gabon is centuries old, Angèle Rawiri is credited for having published the first novel in the country, her 1980 work entitled Elonga. Admittedly, the novel arrived late in Gabon compared to other countries on the African continent and beyond, but nonetheless it is revealing that this significant fact about Gabon’s first novelist is not widely known, not even among literary scholars. Indeed, Gabon’s literary production since the publication of Rawiri’s landmark novel is quite simply astonishing. While it is normal for a given country to have decades with stronger literary production than others, Gabon’s writers, once they had started, have never stopped. Furthermore, most of the first generation of women writers are still publishing, although now there is a young and vibrant second generation that have added their voices as well. Of course, the country also boasts many male authors. However, by 2011, the president of the Union des Écrivains Gabonais at the time, Sylvie Ntsame, had already noted that half of Gabon’s published writers were women, and that number has only increased to surpass the number of male writers in the country today (Toman 2016, xv).

  There are other realities worthy of note that show the predominance of women writers in Gabon. Of course, Justine Mintsa was the first female African author to publish her novel, Histoire d’Awu, with Gallimard in Paris, but she is also considered the second female novelist in Gabon after Rawiri. Moreover, women writers such as Chantal Magalie Mbazoo Kassa and Sylvie Ntsame founded some of the very first publishing houses on the African continent, La Maison Gabonaise du Livre and Éditions Ntsame, respectively. Similarly, novelist Nadia Origo had her own innovative idea when launching La Doxa Éditions in Paris in 2010, with a mission of providing African writers the opportunity to have their writings with a focus on social justice published in Europe without the need to tailor their works for a specifically European audience. Most recently in June 2016, Edna Merey-Apinda, who lives in Gabon’s economic capital of Port-Gentil, created the very first virtual bookstore in the country. This bookstore, known as La Bonne Page, operates from wherever the author has her computer and has no physical premises; nonetheless, it is incredibly successful in distributing Gabonese literature and numerous other titles to those who might not have access to it otherwise.15

  Despite the noteworthy accomplishments of its women writers, Gabonese literature remained almost inexplicably invisible until only recently. Ironically, the very reason for its uniqueness was the probable cause of its invisibility—the fact that women are at the forefront. The acclaimed literary critic Irène Assiba d’Almeida has spoken famously of an “empty canon” in African Francophone literature, and the careers of the continent’s women writers have been affected by this the most. The empty canon acknowledges that actual literary works exist, but they have remained “unknown, unpraised, uncriticized” because no one bothered to look at them (d’Almeida 2009, xxii). Of course, Gabonese women writers are not the only ones who have historically found themselves in the empty canon; female authors have consistently been overlooked universally for the simple reason that in a patriarchal society, a man’s words are generally considered more valid and more important than a woman’s. Cameroonian Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury, the first woman novelist of sub-Saharan Africa, had finished her manuscript for Rencontres essentielles in 1956 but did not find a publisher until 1969—some fifteen years after her male counterparts such as Mongo Beti and Ferdinand Oyono had already found publishers for their works.

  Having published much later than their peers in other African nations, Gabonese women fortunately did not face similar hurdles in their own country and, in fact, their works have always been well-received at home. But the fact remains that their works were for a long time invisible to those outside of Gabon, proving how Africans often are not allowed to determine what works make up their own literary canon. However, prominent literature scholars in Gabon such as Pierre Ndemby-Mamfoumby and Pierre Claver-Mongui have over the last several years produced outstanding volumes and essays of literary criticism that have allowed the Gabonese to begin to take back their own canon from outside critics. One text that has defied the empty canon from the beginning, attracting the most critical attention both inside Gabon and out, is Justine Mintsa’s Histoire d’Awu. Thus, this work has greatly contributed to the visibility of the country’s literature overall; its English translation, entitled Awu’s Story, promises to thrust Gabonese literature into the spotlight with a new audience of non-French-speaking readers. Although a few titles of Gabonese literature have already begun to appear in English translation, Awu’s Story is probably the most significant considering its continued success with Gallimard since its original publication in French in 2000.

  Awu’s Story is ageless; at times, it reads like an ancient tale of oral literature, and indeed such narratives have served as its inspiration. However, Mintsa clearly reminds us in part two of her novel that we are indeed “at the dawn of the twenty-first century” (67). The novel’s characters are entirely relatable, and Mintsa manages to convey profound emotions in a love story that is unconventional, which makes the novel all the more attractive. The story’s ultimate tragedy is important and central, but it does not take away from Awu’s moments of strength and hope that transform her into the unintentional hero of the novel, providing a lasting sense of optimism for the reader.

  Histoire d’Awu and now its English translation, Awu’s Story, defy the invisibility that has unfortunately plagued too many other titles of African literature; both Gabonese and non-Gabonese critics have ensured this novel a definitive place in the canon. Its continued success also elevates African women’s writing in general. Furthermore, the novel’s discussion of cultural references and symbols from the Fang ethnic group contributes to an African feminist discourse, which in turn has become richer lest we forget that African feminists, too, have struggled against invisibility, so often overshadowed by the Western discipline, which has not always been inclusive and appropriate. Justine Mintsa’s work has definitely filled a void in this regard. Mintsa’s depiction of a women’s space in transition—the widow’s ritual carried out exclusively by women—shows us that almost every female character in Awu’s Story has defied tradition in some way in order to live the way in which she chooses. In fact, nearly all of the female members of Obame Afane’s family are incredibly forward thinking except for Ekobekobe, described as a “sister-in-law from the village” (99) who attempts to brutalize Awu during the widow’s ritual. After quickly being put in her place by Ntsame and Ada, Ekobekobe leaves the village in shame (102–3), as there is clearly no place for her in this feminine space undergoing transformation. In contrast, Obame Afane’s eldest sister, Ntsame, is an extremely strong and outspoken character in the novel who als
o becomes Awu’s best advocate. Inarguably feminist, Ntsame rejected both traditional marriage and children, going off to the city alone and associating with revolutionaries before finally coming back to the village to catch her breath a bit. Ntsame famously stands up to men and cares little about what the village thinks of her (53). Although villagers may criticize her in private, she is a woman who commands respect and knows how to assert her power when she needs to. It is clear that the young Ada will follow in her footsteps as she also stands up against the harsh treatment of her Aunt Awu, revealing at the same time the injustice of a society in which girls away at boarding school are sexually abused at the hands of their teachers and administrators with no recourse to speak of. It can even be said that the misguided Akut has also made an attempt to live her life differently than a traditional woman of the village would, but her mistake is that she was not interested in formal education early on. Thus, she does not have the tools or the respect of Ntsame to make her plan work. This is also why it is important that the young Ada return to school so that she will not end up like her mother, or else hopelessly caught in the harmful practices of tradition like Ekobekobe. Thus, it is not only through the revered schoolteacher known as Obame Afane—also named Sikolo, the Fang word for “school”—that the importance of education in the novel is conveyed. It is important to remember that Awu, too, has a diploma and was once employed as a teacher and that she continues to educate those around her until the end of the novel. African feminisms are therefore successfully asserted by educated women who have the tools necessary to reconcile contemporary and traditional practices for the good of everyone.