Born in the DRC and now living in London, JJ Bola is the rising star of what is called the ” black british literature “. Entering literature through poetry, the man is also a novelist and essayist. Her first novel Nowhere to lay your head, which has just been published in French, recounts the torments of a family of Congolese refugees in England, confronted with racism and precariousness. A book that is also a reflection on migration, exile and belonging.
Poetic recital evening in London. On the platform, JJ Bola, a guitar in hand. ” Something beautiful is happening…”, declaims the Anglo-Congolese poet, evoking the beauty of the world to come, the harmony of the evening conducive to the meeting of souls and the song of ancestors who disappeared too soon… Poet, novelist, street educator, activist for the cause migrants, the 30-something is one of the rising voices of the new generation of British writers with an immigrant background. Born to Congolese parents from the DRC, refugees in England fleeing the Mobutu dictatorshipJJ Bola grew up in London where he landed at the age of 6, in the early 1990s.
” To be a refugee is to live in perpetual crisis Bola likes to repeat. Writing allowed him to ward off his ghosts and reconnect with the vibrations of life. The young man became known by participating in public poetry readings. His poetry, close to rap and hip-hop, recounts the fortunes and misfortunes of life, the quest for identity and the traumas of everyday life.
“Always, my heart will beat for poetrysays Bola in a telephone interview with RFI.I practice poetry as well as prose, but I remain fundamentally a poet. Poetry is a creative way of approaching the world, because it appeals to the heart rather than to the mind. The poetic phrase is also endowed with a musical, even vibrational energy. We see it during public readings, with the poets who come to declaim their own compositions on stage. I have often attended poetry recitals where I have sometimes seen the audience merge with the poet in a vibrational and emotional symbiosis. This is the true power of poetry. »
Metaphorical and evocative
JJ Bola has three collections of poems to his credit, with metaphorical and evocative titles: Elevate or “Rising” published in 2012, Daughter of the Sun or “La fille du soleil”, published in 2014 and Word or “Vocable”, dated 2015. His poems, especially in his latest collection, explore the feeling of belonging and the torments of double culture. Bola is also the author of an essay devoted to deconstructing the myth of virility in contemporary societies and, finally, of two novels.
Her first novel, Nowhere to lay your head, which has just been published in French translation by Mercure de France, is largely autobiographical. His subject: the schizophrenia of the refugee, torn between nostalgia for the lost country and the imperative need to find his place in his host country despite hostility and rejection. Jean Ntanga, a 10-year-old refugee in London with his little sister and his parents, is the main character of the story. It is through the eyes of this naive narrator, confronted with the bad weather of life, that the story is told.
The Ntanga family fled the atrocities and repression in Marshal Mobutu’s Zaire in dramatic conditions. The father, who had studied medicine, had to accept a security job by settling in London in order to support his family. The mother, daughter of a notable of the Congolese regime, works as a school canteen assistant. Even more worrying for the family, their asylum application having not yet been successful, she lives under the threat of being deported overnight. Their administrative and financial precariousness did not, however, prevent Jean’s parents from hosting in their homes, out of a sense of solidarity, other Congolese in need, having fled the dictatorship and chaos just like them.
Despite the echoes of the outside world which sometimes come crashing against the walls of their small apartment on the seventh floor of a building located in the popular district of the city, Jean and his sister grow up carefree, protected by the solicitude of their parents. At home, the children live in the Congolese way, eating laid and kwanga, listening to their dad tell the legends of their country of origin and the stories of its brave warriors, on a background of rumba poured out by a vinyl. Having also grown up in a family that knew how to keep the nostalgia of his native Congo alive, the author JJ Bola likes to tell how much rooting in his African heritage was precious for him and allowed him to structure himself.
” At home, we lived in the Congolese way but, outside, it was difficult to be more Londoners than us, remembers the author of Nowhere to lay your head. Between us, we expressed ourselves in a kind of sabir that I used to call “frangala”, where Lingala mixes with French and English expressions. Our daily life inside the house was punctuated by music from home and the sounds of Congolese TV. This African ecosystem in which we lived helped me a lot later to forge an identity and to assume my “congolitude”, despite the hostility that my difference can sometimes arouse in the street. »
A learning novel
Driven by an astonishing economy of means for a first novel and a poetic language, Nowhere to lay your head is a bildungsroman, a novel of learning about life and the world. The great luck of Jean, the protagonist of the story, is to have been supported at school by an available and open-minded teacher, who believed in his potential from the start. From the first day of the new school year, Monsieur David takes the kid to the library, hoping that he will find answers there to his questions about the way the world works and his place in society. He also offers her a beautiful brown notebook, recommending that she keep her diary.
These scenes are inspired by the stages in the life of the author, JJ Bola, who recounted how reading George Orwell’s novels, discovered in his high school library, had enabled him to understand the mechanisms of the dictatorship that his parents had to flee. The world is collapsing of Chinua Achebe helped him to look at Africa other than through the Western colonial grid. It is this story of learning about the world that he tells in his poetry as in his prose, drawing on writing for resources to structure himself.
The man maintains an almost mystical relationship with writing, as he explains when answering the unavoidable question of this column: ” Why are you writing, JJ Bola? “The response fuses:” I write because I can’t do otherwise. I cannot explain the phenomenon, but I only know that there is a force deep inside me that pushes me to write. It’s a small inner voice, which imposes itself on me. I am forced to listen to her, letting her guide me on the path to writing. I must follow his dictate without fail. Writing stems from an imperative need to express myself which has its roots in the impenetrable depths of my consciousness. »
By closing Nowhere to lay your head, we do not know if his young hero will find, in turn, in writing the key to his accomplishment. Faced with the essential question of his place in the Western society in which he has chosen to live, Jean nevertheless delivers a reflection as lucid as it is poignant on his quest for home as an exile, a quest forever satisfied. .
Nowhere to lay your head, by JJ Bola. Translated from English by Antoine Bargel. Mercure de France editions, 318 pages, 24 euros.