The Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa is one of the great voices of Portuguese-speaking African letters. Since his first novel published in 1989, he has built, book after book, a work that is both serious and poetic, imbued with fantasy and humor, dealing with the dysfunctions of the contemporary world. His latest novel The living and the others which has just been published in French is no exception to the rule. He gives pride of place to imagination, utopia and the magic of poetic speech.
” Every time someone asks him “where are you from?” », Ofelia closes her eyes and sees […] a woman with ocher-red skin, thick braids, holding a little girl in her arms. “I’m from the South,” she replies. On other occasions, wanting to shock her interlocutors, she chooses […] a different formula: […] “I’m from where there are palm trees, damn it!” Neither Angolan, nor Brazilian, nor Portuguese. Where there is a palm tree, I am from there! I am from the sea, forests and savannahs. I come from a world that has yet to arrive: without gods, without kings, without borders, and without armies. »
This short passage is taken from alive and othersthe latest novel by the Angolan Jose Eduardo Agualusa, published in French translation at the beginning of the year. With some thirty books to his credit, novels, poems, reports, short stories, Agualusa is a major figure in African Portuguese language and undoubtedly one of the most fertile and inventive contemporary African authors.
The living and the others, which is the fifteenth novel from the pen of the Angolan writer, evolves around the theme of literary creation, its fortunes and misfortunes, against a backdrop of apocalypse and millenarian anguish of the end of the world. In the story, these subjects are carried by characters of African poets and novelists, some of whom are fictional, others displaying the names of contemporary authors, as illustrious as they are real: Breyten Breytenbach, Fatou Diome, Sami Tchak, Teju Cole , not to name them.
This alliance of fiction and reality, dreamlike and lived, is the trademark of José Eduardo Agualusa. In one of his previous novels, had he not assigned the role of narrator to a gecko inhabited by the spirit of the Argentinian master Jorge Luis Borgès?
A literary festival
A story that is both literary and anticipatory, The Living and the Others gives voice to African writers, brought together in the framework of a literary festival. While festival-goers talk, expound and celebrate their art, a tropical storm caused by a nuclear cataclysm hits the planet and, in turn, the island where the festival is held. ” The plot of my novel evolves around a group of African novelists gathered on an island, off the coast of Mozambique, summarizes the author. They are cut off from the world, maybe even the world has ceased to exist. But it is to these writers that falls the task of resuscitating the world by the magic of the stories that only they know how to tell. With The Living and the Others, I wanted to write a novel about the power of words, the power of stories, and literature in general. This book is also about our imperative need for utopias because I am convinced that it is by creating utopias that we can bring out the future. »
The utopia that the author calls for with all his wishes here is first of all literary. It is the metaphor for the freedom of imagination that African literature now enjoys, flourishing far from the prejudices and assignments of which it has long been the victim. But prejudices die hard in the literary world. This is undoubtedly the meaning of the story told by the star of the meeting, Cornelia Oluokun, a famous Nigerian novelist that literary critics are snapping up. Author of The Woman Who Was a Cockroachher best-selling novel, Cornelia remembers being harassed on French television during a popular show because there were no wild animals in her books!
But the literary utopia goes haywire under the effect of the cataclysm, with the rise of the oceans and the isolation of the island of Mozambique cut off from the mainland for seven days. Dysfunction also strikes the order of the imaginary, as evidenced by the flight of characters escaping from the novels to come and hold distraught authors to account. In one of the book’s memorable scenes, Cornelia is seen in tears, being chased by her ” cockroach woman », take refuge in his hotel room.
Creolization
Alternating between the unusual and political-philosophical reflection, The living and the others is part of the very socially committed work that Agualusa has been building since his first novel published in 1989. The man was born in Huambo, in Angola, of Portuguese parents during the colonization, and gave up his studies in agronomy and forestry, to devote himself to writing. He was first a journalist, before embarking on a literary career. Written in the middle of the civil war, his inaugural novel, A conjuredwas not autobiographical, but based on his own African experience as a white Angolan, the writer recounts the creolization that founds modern Angola.
” I wrote this first novel like my other books to try to appropriate my country and to find my place in my society. “, he likes to repeat. This quest for oneself, one’s country and history gives meaning to the great novels about the Angolan civil war that made Agualusa famous. His best-known novel on this theme is undoubtedly the poignant General theory of forgetting where the author brilliantly mixes a story of mourning and absence, against a backdrop of chaos and dust of Luanda in full revolution.
” My masters are named Jorge Amado, Borges and Marquez », recalls the author to explain the influence of magic realism on his writing and his reading grid « afro-latino ” of the world. ” And for passion, he saysI read a lot of poetry when I’m working on a novel, especially Senghor’s poems which have accompanied me since, so to speak, forever. “.
A little crazy and flamboyant
The Living and the Others is the work of a master at the top of his game. Sailing between Pirandello and the Bible, between characters in search of an author and the very biblical ” In the beginning was the word », the author rewrote the Genesis, whose organization in seven acts structures the project of recreation of the world which is at the heart of this novel.
” A novel that was not easy to write “says the author. And to continue: “AWith each book, I try to renew my point because I don’t like to tell the same story from one book to another. Sometimes I embark on writing projects that seem impossible at first glance, but I know from experience that the more complicated the project seems to be, the greater my chance of coming up with a strong and innovative text. I am an intuitive writer. When I start, I have no idea where my imagination will take me. An idea, a character, that’s all I have to start with. And then as I progress in writing, it’s the character who takes me by the hand to train me on the path he wants to take. »
We should perhaps write “paths” in the plural when it comes to alive and others, as the characters here are numerous, abundant, with sometimes contradictory logics. It is from their confrontation that the beauty of this somewhat crazy, but powerful and masterfully mastered novel arises.
The living and the others, by José Eduardo Agualusa. Novel translated from Portuguese by Danielle Schramm. Editions Métailié, 224 pages, 21.5 euros.