With his Nation cannibalehe invites us into the luggage of an average writer, originally from the greater Congo, the former Zaire, who left for Haiti. Faust, that’s his first name, set down his bags for a literary fair, to rediscover the links between the island and its Congo from which many Haitians today come (“I really know this island and I have never felt like a stranger there”), but also to put as much distance as possible between him and the French justice system which is investigating cases following several complaints from women who accuse Faust of touching. The man does not deny, he minimizes.
The Jean Muno Prize for “Congolese Mathematics”
In Koli Jean Bofane will constantly take us between his two nations. He will summon a plethora of artists who will all become characters in this human whirlwind which shatters at the will of the most powerful. Everyone, regardless of their talent, gets devoured. All are slaves. Everyone has a price to pay for their semblance of freedom. A role to play. A place to hold. The artists, in Koli Jean Bofane, almost 70 years old, an adopted Brussels resident for a long time, loves them, admires them. he makes them beacons that try to make this world bearable. Among them, his great friend Freddy Tsimba, a Kinshasa sculptor who shapes his works with ammunition recovered from the battlefields. There is no question of changing the names of these artists. “I tried but it didn’t work. So, I contacted them to tell them that they would be in my next novel. They all played the game.”.
The great pygmy and Aude’s orgasm
-He also evokes a Congolese “hero”, ageless, active under Leopold II, present – a terrible scene in the novel – during the definitive “disappearance” of Patrice Lumumba. Without forgetting the presidential couple. Him, PS4 champion, overthrown and revengeful. She, as a groupie in love with a glossy telenovela star. A crazy world that crushes its characters, which manipulates them to pursue its hidden agenda. “We have to get away from reason to have a chance of understanding this world which is steeped in absurdity.”. In Koli Jean Bofane, his gaze, his rhythm, his phrasing, are the demonstration of the universality of literature.
⇒ Nation cannibale | Novel | In Koli Jean Bofane | Denoël, 350 pp., €22, digital €16
