Le Tram 83 par Fiston Mwanza Mujila (review)

Reviews 203 owns a bar called “Le Retour d’Ulysse”; Tim runs a souvenir shop; Mary works in the grocery store; and so forth. Their lives intersect frequently in this small town, often in the bar in the evening, and that is mostly where we hear their stories, thanks to the narrator. He is a curious bird, remaining anonymous throughout the novel. He is exceptional in other ways, too, for we know very little about his past, merely that he is French and that he has come up the coast from Long Beach, through Portland. “Ça débute comme un road story, quand on y pense”(15), he remarks; and it is not the only one, because all of the characters have been involved in their own road stories, before each of those stories crested and broke upon Cannon Beach. Other narratives circulate liberally in this fictional world. The narrator reads and rereads Lewis and Clark’s Journals, for instance, in a two-volume edition belonging to Perry. One night in the bar, the talk turns to the Odyssey—yet another road story, come to think of it—and Harry Dean knows enough of it to assure the others that it is a tale that ends in blood. That is just one effect among many others suggesting that this story will likewise end in blood. Catastrophe looms from the beginning of the novel. Pressure builds and will seek release, in an eruption as inevitable (and perhaps just as telluric) as that of Mount St. Helens, which the folks in Cannon Beach remember all too well. Reflecting on the events of the recent past in his motel room, gazing out at the sea day after day, the narrator comes to understand that he is involved in a story, though the question of what role he may play therein—witness or actor, victim or hero—is well beyond his ken. He tells his tale in an engaging, complaisant, dilatory manner, one that seems unconcerned until we realize that he is deferring an event which is far more painful to tell.“Dans mon idée, tout ça, c’est de la faute de l’océan”(86), he says. In a sense, maybe he’s right, because the ocean (like narrative itself) involves forces that are irresistible, in which even the strongest of swimmers may founder; and once you submerge yourself in it (again like narrative) you are necessarily a part of it, whatever else you may wish to be. University of Colorado Warren Motte Mujila, Fiston Mwanza. Le Tram 83. Paris: Métailié, 2014. ISBN 9-782864-249597 . Pp. 200. 16 a. The form and content of this work create a contemporary Africa that is fragmented and chaotic. “La Ville-Pays” and the “Arrière-Pays” are all that is left of the country (unnamed) after cycles of colonization, exploitation of its mineral riches, revolution and civil war.The novel opens with the following statement:“Au commencement était la pierre” (9). The vast deposits of precious stones underlying the city are the first cause of this turbulent world of possession and dispossession. The story begins at the railway station, undertaken then abandoned under the colonial regime, now a mass of twisted metal. This image returns as a leitmotiv. The epicenter of the Ville-Pays is a bar-cabaret, the Tram 83. There is no concrete description of this place, rather a texture of blurred, constant motion, composed of unfinished images and intersecting lines of unrelated sentences. The plotline, summary biographies and intercalated récits are constantly punctuated by the solicitation of the prostitutes, “Vous avez l’heure?” and brief advertisements of their specialties. The epigraph links prostitution to “la pierre” and the Fall: “tu gagneras ta vie à la sueur de tes seins.” The voice of an ironic omniscient narrator colors all, including the multiple biblical quotes, sustaining the sense that we are entering a counter-world, dehumanized and dehumanizing. Mujila invents bizarre, jolting or poetic juxtapositions of terms; the voices without bodies, or body parts (especially breasts) without persons proliferate. The fauna in the Tram are repeatedly enumerated, like a litany of anti-saints: les affreux, the miners and the students perpetually...