Boris, the narrator of My Two Dads, is not Victor Hugo. He says it without shame when addressing a “you” whose identity we only discover on the last page of this formidable first novel. Suspense? Not really, since we quickly forget the mysterious interlocutor in whom this “fourteen-year-old kid” struggles to confide because he does not speak one language, but two: French (which comes in several idioms, including that of Bondy, in the Paris region, where he lives, the one learned at school and that of his aunt Béatrice, a Frenchwoman from a working class background) and the “Congolese”.
If this is not technically a language, the same word does not have the same meaning for a white man and for a Congolese, he specifies. “For example, with us, someone can tell you I’m coming and not come until two hours later without anyone taking offense or seeing an opportunity to ruin the evening,” he continues. In order to illustrate his thought, the narrator recounts a scene of reunion between his uncle Fulgence, with whom he lives, and his former classmates (who arrived three hours late to the great displeasure of Béatrice). Among the companions’ favorite exclamations is the word “really”:
“I don’t think a white man can understand everything a black man puts into a ‘really’ good guy. When someone tells you a story that is close to their heart, that really, said seriously, means whatever the person wants to hear: “I know what you are going through or what you have been going through. Life can be so hard! Continue your story.” »
Telescoping of feelings and memories
From the outset, Eric Mukendi, a French teacher in Rouen, who arrived in France at the age of 7 from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), displays the dilemma of his character: that of evolving in a context where he must constantly explain himself and clarify his words. Except that instead of making it the subject of a drama, the writer decides to force the line to the extreme. In addition to creating funny situations, this device pushes the reader to feel an immediate empathy for the character, which leads him to question his own value system.
As a good Congolese, as the author likes to point out, his hero does nothing like everyone else: he has two dads, one of whom (the real one) has been lost to sight for a long time and who knocks on the door at the start of the novel. Long ago, “Papa”, whom the narrator only knew in his early childhood in Kinshasa, sent him to live with his uncle Fulgence in France. As soon as he sees his son again, he hugs him. The latter shuddered:
“It was as if there were as many layers of unsaid and misunderstandings between us as the number of days we hadn’t seen each other, not to mention the number of days I had thought he was dead, nor all those tears I had shed to stay without news of him and this mourning that I had done, little by little, so he hugged me tight but on my side, there was no no feelings. »
Eric Mukendi manages as rarely to grasp the telescoping of feelings and memories in this moment of reunion between a father with a past full of mysteries and a son who had to build himself with the voids and silences of this man.
A constant crossbreeding and paradoxical state
However, the one he calls “dad” understands him less than his uncle, who raised him, passing on to him the art of good words (“What do I hate this fucking pasta, I think I am decidedly anti-pâtique!”), the love of Congolese music (the passage where the two dads dance to the music of Pepe Kalle is a real piece of bravery as well as a concentrate of emotion), just like the taste cheese and ham omelets. To the point of making him a “little white man”, laments “Dad”. The narrator quickly rises up against this returning father who sees France in black and white when his uncle, his friends and he are used to living in a constant mixed race and paradoxical state.
Dense and ambitious, Mes deux papas also tells the love story between Boris, “the gentleman from the Bois de Bondy”, and Hortense, from the 16th arrondissement of Paris, whom the narrator meets during a school trip to the museum of Orsay. Their relationship leads the novel towards a social study of the contrasts of Paris, divided between rich and poor, blacks and whites, prey and profiteers. Eric Mukendi’s concise and colorful prose allows him to grasp this complexity quickly – perhaps too much – before returning to the extravagant plan set up by Boris’ dad to obtain papers.
This plan should allow him to regularize his situation with the administration, his son and a family left behind in Tunis, on his way to Europe. There is something fascinating about this equally endearing and annoying father figure, victim and culprit. Let’s hope that Eric Mukendi takes it longer in a future novel. Because there is no doubt that he still has a lot to say.