Blue White Red. Alain Mabanckou

      

      BLUE

      WHITE

      RED

      GLOBAL AFRICAN VOICES Dominic Thomas, EDITOR

      BLUE

      WHITE

      RED

      A NOVEL

      ALAIN MABANCKOU

      TRANSLATED BY ALISON DUNDY

      Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis

      This book is a publication of

      Indiana University Press

      601 North Morton Street

      Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA

      iupress.indiana.edu

      Telephone orders 800-842-6796

      Fax orders 812-855-7931

      © 2013 by Indiana University Press

      Original French edition © 1998 by Présence Africaine

      All rights reserved

      No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form

      or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying

      and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

      without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association

      of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions

      constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

       The paper used in this publication meets the

      minimum requirements of the American National Standard

      for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed

      Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

      Manufactured in the United States of America

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Mabanckou, Alain, 1966– author.

      [Bleu, Blanc, Rouge. English]

      Blue White Red : A Novel / Alain Mabanckou ; translated by Alison Dundy.

      pages cm. — (Global African Voices)

      ISBN 978-0-253-00791-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00794-0

      (e-book) 1. Africans—France—Fiction. I. Dundy, Alison, translator. II. Title.

      PQ3989.2.M217B5513 2013

      843.914—dc23

      2012042988

      1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13

      To the memory of my mother, Pauline Kengué.

       To L. Vague, always so close, the other light . . .

      —ALAIN MABANCKOU

      CONTENTS

       Translator’s Introduction

       African Migration and African Dandys

      DOMINIC THOMAS

       Blue White Red

      TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

      Alain Mabanckou’s writing is like a Chinese line drawing. His economy of words is a brushstroke that reveals a subject’s inner and outward character and an aching longing for place. Moki is a village hero in Blue White Red because he becomes a “Parisian,” the title conferred on those who “make it” in Paris. His presence there transforms a village father, who now holds forth in the proper French French of Guy de Maupassant, as befits a man whose son is in the country of Digol. Moki chastises his wannabes for speaking in French but not French and cautions those who dream of emulating his leap from the former colony to the métropole: Paris is a big boy. Not for kids.

      In Alain Mabanckou’s text, it is apparent when people break into French for affect to emphasize their class status and distance themselves from the miserable economic and political circumstances of postcolonial Africa. French French is generally italicized in the original novel. In an English translation of the book, I wrestled with how to convey the complex nesting of languages, French bursting out in conversations in African languages and vice versa, without flattening the contours of the text in English. I experimented with leaving the italicized French in French, followed by an English translation. That device, however, proved too heavy to carry over the course of the whole novel and drew attention to the translation instead of the originality of Alain Mabanckou’s book.

      I switched back to translating the French French into English, but left it in italics. This note is therefore to help readers understand that italicized text denotes not merely emphasis in spoken language but a shift to a different language for added emphasis. Some words remain in French to allow an English reader to travel with Alain Mabanckou to the places he writes about. That requires leaving home to wander rues, not streets, hop the Métro, not the subway, and calculate the kilometers, not miles, whizzing past as a captured sans-papiers is driven in defeat in the back of an unmarked police car to detention.

      This book exists because of my enthusiasm for Alain Mabanckou’s novel and because Susan Harris obtained permission to publish a short excerpt on the Words without Borders website. It also exists because Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press persevered for years to secure the rights to bring out the full text. Many thanks to Dominic Thomas for his careful reading of the translation and his suggestions, which finally brought Blue White Red into print for English readers as part of the Global African Voices series.

       Alison Dundy, January 2012

      AFRICAN MIGRATION AND AFRICAN DANDYS

      DOMINIC THOMAS

      Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in the city of Pointe-Noire in the Republic of Congo. After completing college in the Congo, he studied law in Paris and worked in the field of corporate law. Eventually he abandoned the legal profession and moved to the United States, where he is a professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

      Mabanckou has produced poetry, short stories, and several novels with such esteemed publishers as Gallimard, Présence Africaine, Le Serpent à Plumes, and Seuil. His novels include Les Petits-Fils nègres de Vercingetorix (2002), African Psycho (2003), Verre cassé (2005), Mémoires de porc-épic (2006), Black Bazar (2009), and Demain j’aurai vingt ans (2010), and he is the recipient of important awards, including the Prix Ouest-France Etonnants Voyageurs, Prix du Livre RFO, Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, and most notably the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes. He is also the author of two works of nonfiction: Lettre à Jimmy (on American writer James Baldwin, 2007) and Le sanglot de l’homme noir (on contemporary race relations in France, literature, and African history, 2012). Mabanckou emerged as a spokesperson of sorts for the collective of writers who published the Manifesto for a World Literature in French in 2007, a thought-provoking declaration that has endeavored to bring greater attention to the global diversity of writing in French. Mabanckou is widely considered one of the most influential African writers at work today, and he was recently described in a major article in the Economist as the “Prince of