Product of the Présence Africaine team, like his compatriot Mbougar Sarr, winner of the 2021 Goncourt Prize, Elgas is a journalist, essayist and novelist. With black malehis first novel, this talented first-time novelist delivers a disturbing and sensitive version of sentimental education of a young black man in this post-racial and individualistic beginning of the 21st century.
” I am a black male. Nothing else. A black man, infinitely like all the other males on this planet, infinitely different from them. An unspeakable male. (…) I am a black man, my life is a blank page, my family, my community have projected their expectations onto it. The world of reputations, fantasies. Between the narrow and crushing interstices, there remains a possibility of living. What they took from me was my carelessness. A treasure forever lost. What I claim is the right to leave without returning. The right to fully be, the right to betray. Looking, basically, at eye level. In my search for love, I found much more precious, much more urgent, like the condition of all being free. Be free. »
Thus speaks the character of black malefirst novel byElgas, real name Souleyman Gassama. The passage gives the measure of the lucidity about oneself and about the world that emerges from this novel from the pen of this young author and essayist, immensely promising. Born in 1988 in Saint-Louis, Senegal and a sociologist by training, Elgas has lived in France for fifteen years. He made a name for himself in 2015 by publishing his first book A God and moralswhich was a travel diary in the native country, whose author recounts the flaws and headlong rushes through slices of life and reflections of great acuity on culture and religion.
Bildungsroman
Released in 2021, black male is a particularly successful first novel, powerful and often poignant through the quest for self and otherness that it depicts. It is a novel of training or education, what the Germans call Bildungsroman. The story is built on the model of the classics of the genre, in line with the continuity of Sufferings of young Werther of Goethe, of The age of man from Michel Leiris, via The Princess of Cleves, The New Heloise or sentimental education.
Philosophical without being a thesis novel, largely autofictional, Elgas’s novel is presented as a diary, composed of 39 chapters or dated entries, with a temporal scope extending over an entire year, between December 2017 and December 2018. The notations relating to places refer to a wandering between Clamart and Nanterre, via Nice, Lyon, Les Aubrais and of course Paris. These indications also paint the map of an inner wandering.
Learning about the world is the subject of Black male. Social and moral education is coupled here with sentimental and sexual initiation. For the narrator, never named, landed in France at the end of adolescence, this education passes through the meeting. Hence a gallery of characters in these pages, men and women, in contact with which the character becomes aware of his place in the world as a “black male” and as a man. A story that is resolutely at the crossroads of the quest for identity and the imperative of the universal, as the author reminds us.
” The title ishe explains, more an expression of sarcasm, more the inversion of perspective, than a racial claim. I wanted to say evil black precisely to circumvent the stereotype. There is a snap that is attached to the black male. In the black man, very often, we see evil, his animality, his performativity. Precisely by posing the black evil, by telling the story, the approach, it is placing the black evil so that we can see through the black man, in what is infinitely fragile, what he is infinitely more universal with others. It is not a title which is in the claim, but which is not fooled. History still colors many of our relationships. »
nature and culture
Being black implies for the character, as he will say along the way, ” endorse a part of history, written before you. To be an heir, faithful to a memory “. This desire to be part of history no doubt explains why the novel opens with the arrival in France of the hero’s mother to attend her son’s thesis defense. She will accompany him to Caen, to the university where the event is taking place. The quality of the study submitted by the doctoral student is unanimously approved by the jury, arousing the pride of the mother. The title of the thesis: The original debt », inspired by the thought of the philosopher Marcel Mauss on the theme of gift and counter-gift.
This passage through studies is far from trivial in this story of the quest for identity that the novel tells. He reminds us that identity is a sum, the product of the encounter between nature and culture, something that Elgas sums up nicely, quoting George Balandier : “ Man is not necessarily a victim of his debate with History “. The refusal of historical and racial assignments, while recognizing our debt to the past without locking ourselves into it, is indeed one of the major themes of this novel. It is ” the condition of being free », major theme of the novel.
” I think that any act of writing, any act of literaturedeclares the novelist, is a conscious or unconscious quest for freedom. For me, this is a very particular concern, this question of freedom, but freedom as a much more vital impetus, as a much more total impetus, especially applied to the African societies where I grew up, where it seems to me that it is a commodity that is the most limited commodity, the most controlled, in a way. And that’s why all my nascent work tries to explore this question, to wrest freedom from the sights of historical wounds, colonial wounds, the temptation of resentment and the temptation, sometimes of revenge. »
The fire of passion
The quest for freedom is concomitant in these pages with that of love. The double of Elgas is a romantic hero, who seeks in love the answer to his existential anguish and his emotional lack which goes back to childhood. A handsome boy, he easily seduces, but most of his close combat rarely goes beyond the stage of sensual enjoyment, until he meets Mélodie and Désirée… They are two women of very different temperaments, one white and the other black. But how to choose between the snow that soothes and the fire of passion?
The unexpected finale, made up of the senses and despair, just like the tight construction of the plot, testify to a great talent for telling the story of tensions, but not without a sense of romanticism in this first-time novelist who came to writing, in her own words, while listening to her mother talk about classical theatre. ” My mother was a great lover of the 17th century, and especially of classical theaterrecalls Elgas. Me, I grew up with a mother who recited whole sections of Corneille’s Cid to me, which I knew when I was six or seven years old. I didn’t read a lot and I had to arrive in France at 17, in Nice, and in my maid’s room, all this loneliness of exile, all the reality that I was discovering, was corrected by a catharsis that was important to me, which was reading. And it was around that time, when I was 17, that I started writing a lot. I read as much as I wrote and created my first blog at the time. It was called “Achievable Utopia”. »
Something of the dream, of the achievable utopia of the adolescent exiled to Nice that he was, is perpetuated in black male which is, according to the author’s own words, a desperate attempt to reconnect with the candor of yesteryear to combat the chaos of our contemporary world. Elgas, remember that name. You will hear about it.
black male, by Elgas. Ovadia editions, 230 pages, 20 euros.