An absolutely hilarious African novel about French literature
Adam's Notes for August 29, 2024
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou, translated by Helen Stevenson. Soft Skull Press, 2010 (165 pages).
The owner of Credit Gone West, a bar in the Congo, hands one of his regulars a notebook and tells him to get writing, that he doesn’t want the history of the bar to be lost.
Broken Glass, our narrator, starts with the story of how the bar was almost burned down by churchgoing types who were upset at how the bar caused their Sunday congregations to dwindle. The story becomes a national incident, with the agriculture minister (a schoolboy friend of Stubborn Snail, the bar’s owner) stepping in and borrowing Emile Zola’s “I accuse1” to defend the bar from attack. “I accuse” becomes a catchphrase, so popular that mothers are naming their babies I Accuse, while prostitutes are having it tattooed to their backsides. The agriculture minister is promised a promotion: the first four letters of his title will be scratched off and he’ll become the culture minister.
But the president is incensed. Where’s his slogan? He locks his men up in the presidential palace and tells them not to come out until they have a slogan for him. Their letter to the only Black member of the Académie Française fails to produce a slogan, and so, “they decided to put all their ideas and everything they had found into a hat, they said it was called “brainstorming” in the smart colleges some of them had been to in the United States, and each of them wrote down on a piece of paper several phrases that had gone down in the history of this shitty world, and started to go through them, like they do in countries where you have the right to vote, reading each one out in a monotonous voice,” but each phrase comes with a veto, too funny not to quote at length:
Quote: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country” (Lenin)
Objection: “it’s disrespectful to the people, especially in a country where they can’t even pay their electricity bills, next!”
Quote: “War is too serious to be left to the generals” (Georges Clemenceau)
Objection: “no, no good, the military won’t like that, we’ll have a coup d’état every five minutes with that one, the president himself is a general of the armies, don’t forget, we need to watch our step, next!”
Quote: “Soldiers, from the height of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on you.” (Napoleon)
Objection: “no, no good, it makes the soldiers sound uncultured, as though they’ve never read the works of the great historian Jean Tulard, it’s our job to show people soldiers aren’t idiots, next!”
Quote: “This is the beginning of the end” (Talleyrand)
Objection: “no, no good, they’ll think we mean the end of our regime, and we’re meant to be in power for life, next!”
Quote: “To be or not to be, that is the question”
Objection: “no, no good, we’ve got past wondering whether we are or whether we aren’t, we’ve already settled that one, we’ve been in power here for twenty-three years, next!”
Quote: “Fight your brother when he’s shorn” (Frédéric Dard alias San-Antonio)
Objection: “no, no good, too many bald people in this country, especially in the government, we mustn’t rub them up the wrong way, I’m bald myself, next!”
Quote: “delenda Carthago” (Cato the Elder)
Objection: “no, no good, people in the south will think it’s some phrase in northern patois and the people in the north will think it’s a phrase in southern patois, best to avoid misunderstandings, on we go, next!”
That’s the book in a nutshell: always alluding to the great works of literature, and very funny.
From there, Broken Glass goes on to tell the stories of the other barflies. There’s a guy who was institutionalized and sent home from France after catching his wife in bed with his son from a previous relationship, and a guy who has to wear diapers because his butt leaks after being roughed up in prison. The funniest thing in the book is a miracle that occurs during a literal pissing contest between two of the barflies, Robinette and Casimir High-Life, it’s like something out of Rabelais, again worth quoting at length:
High-Life had turned a decisive corner, a miracle deserving of papal beatification, and we all dashed over to get a closer look, you should never miss a miracle, even if it doesn’t take place at Lourdes, you’ve got to try and witness those moments that people will be talking about centuries from now, better to witness it in person than have some parrot tell you a story of love in the time of cholera, so we all went hurtling over to Casimir High-Life to get a look at his historic miracle, we were all knocked sideways, something unbelievable was happening right before our eyes, you had to be there to believe it, we saw how Casmir High-Life had sketched in the dust with his urine a perfect outline of the map of France, his unremarkable output was now falling in the very heart of the city of Paris, “this is nothing,” he said, “I can do China, too, and piss on any given street in the city of Peking” and Robinette, thrown into disarray, turned round and threw us a glance before shouting “hey come back here, you lot, come back, what you all looking at down there then, you all a bunch of homos, then, or what?” but we were all quite captivated by the mysterious boastful contestant and began to applaud him and call him Casimir the Geographer, and he began to rise to the challenge “I’m a marathon man, I am, not a sprinter, I’ll screw her, I’ll wear her out, just you wait and see” he said, and whistled some more of his Trois-Cent riffraff’s anthem, and his baroque concerto and his number by Zao, and we applauded more and more as he added the various regions of France to his map, while alongside his magnificent drawing there was another little drawing, “hey, what’s that thing he’s drawn next to the map of France, what’s that then?” asked one witness, distracted by Casimir High-Life’s artistic flair, “that’s Corsica, idiot” the artist replied, without interrupting his flow, and we all gave a round of applause for Corsica, and for some the word Corsica was a new discovery, and people started mumbling, and arguing, till one guy who was seriously confused asked who the president of Corsica was, what kind of state it was, what its capital city was, whether the president was black or white, and we all shouted him down saying “idiot, imbecile,” and by now the two of them had been locked in urinal combat for over ten minutes, and I began to want to have a piss myself, often when one person’s pissing it makes you want to do likewise, that’s why when you go to the hospital the doctor says to leave the tap running to make you want to go, so anyway on they went
The second half of the book turns inwards, with Broken Glass dissecting his own life. He’s a former schoolteacher, we learn, fired for drunkenness (he used to piss in the corner of his own classroom). His wife tries to convince him to take a job out in the bush, where at least you can catch fresh game, the people are friendly, and “the dead never had to wait in line because there was always room for everyone in the village cemetery.” But he can’t even get hired there.
There’s a scatological incident that will test the limits of your disgust, and just when things seem like they’ve descended irretrievably into self-pity, they buoy back up again. Stubborn Snail’s gift of the notebook is revisited and it becomes a kind of touching moment, he believes in Broken Glass’ gift for writing, and there’s a long passage that I actually found quite moving that explores the joys of literature, and the need for a writer to have someone to believe in them.
The entire thing is written with “no full stops, only commas and more commas,” one ongoing sentence that flows for pages at a time. Stubborn Snail gets after Broken Glass for it at one point. I can never decide about that sort of thing. Mathias Enard does it and I’m not a fan. Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party does something similar and it’s a fun novel but I think it would work just as well as a conventional novel. Here though, it definitely works. For one thing, it gives the impression of someone trying to use every available scrap of a notebook, of a talented alcoholic in too much of a rush, trying to get everything down all at once.
I can’t remember where I first heard about Broken Glass. I think I must’ve wanted to read something about Africa, but it really doesn’t have anything much to say about Africa or the Congo. It could be set in the down and out part of any city, wherever people lose themselves to alcohol or cling to literature as a consolation.
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I wish the translator had kept I Accuse as J’accuse, which stands out more and which I think most readers would be familiar with from the Dreyfus Affair. And if you’re not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%27Accuse...!