Alain Mabanckou is one of those writers who, after the isolation necessary to write his books, savor encounters with the public. It is enough to hear him narrate his life like a tale, to the point that it often becomes difficult to distinguish – but this is its whole charm – what comes from the real experience of what is pure invention, to understand how much the author likes to share.
Letters to a young Senegalese novelist, his new work, is thus offered as an invitation to share. He denies from the outset wanting to “draw up a catalog that would be a kind of roadmap for anyone who aspires to become a writer”. For the Congolese writer born in 1966 and who, this year, can claim thirty years of publishing, the idea consists rather of a fraternal exchange with brothers and sisters potential authors and eager as he was to access one day the publication.
Mabanckou’s vade-mecum therefore begins not with exercises or methods but with memories and, in particular, those precise and precious memories of his childhood, marked by orality in a community – that of the Babembé in the south of the Congo -, where “speech is never taken lightly. She is above it all.” The writer thus evokes two key figures who marked him by their art of storytelling: Lisapongué, an old man “maker of tales” from his neighborhood and his own mother, who later became an essential character in his writings.
Alain Mabanckou then discovered at school this other form of magic exercised by writing and books, starting with the alphabet of his French syllabary: “I discovered the power of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and (…) they seemed to me as mysterious as cabalistic. But long before using them to produce his own texts, Alain Mabanckou was passionate about books. Letters to a young Senegalese novelist thus recounts the real or virtual encounters that the writer was able to make through his readings of comics or novels, from Zembla to Robinson Crusoe or from Henri Lopes to Sony Labou Tansi, via… the conjugations of the New Bescherelle.
“In Africa, French, we ‘pick it up'”
By thus highlighting the salient points of his career over the course of nineteen thematic letters-chapters, the literature teacher who is Mabanckou takes over in turn from the novelist or the essayist, the children’s author yields to the poet, the writer even evoking his experience as a translator, in an exercise which “taught him humility, self-effacement, the role of those who act in the shadows”.
Mabanckou certainly distills over the pages some “secrets” of writing theorized from his experience, such as that which consists in giving importance to the secondary characters of his novels, essential counter-fires of the main character “since, in general , they support him, instill thickness in him, push him to the limit or pull him out of trouble. It’s actually on them that the success of fiction rests.”
He also discusses issues that sometimes agitate the French publishing community, such as the competition between fiction and autofiction or the so-called “decline of the French language”, recalling mischievously that, on the African continent, “French, we ‘pick it up’ in the street and we do what we want with it. We knead it, we mix it with red earth to obtain kaolin which we eat with a little salt. The message is clear: that aspiring writers relax and don’t hesitate to use their freedom.
But the real surprise of this hybrid text will be found in the allusions to the difficulties encountered by the Congolese author, whose success in recent years can make you forget what his career covers with work, pitfalls, including failures. This is how he introduces himself as Candide, having suffered refusals from publishers at the beginning of his career before publishing his first novel, Bleu Blanc Rouge (Présence Africaine), as a beginner author who, for a book of poetry, had to he, “to sacrifice two months of my scholarship to finally release my first collection at my expense”. He castigates himself even a little more, depicting himself as vain convinced from his first texts of his genius: “The greatest shock was to realize that the whole world had not stopped to applaud me after this publication. »
From self-publishing to classic publishing, from working-class circles in Brazzaville to the cenacle of star authors in Parisian houses, Mabanckou recounts a writer’s journey as much as a life trajectory dedicated to his passion for words and letters. The rest is trial and error and, perhaps, the key lesson to be learned is to stick to the task as best you can, as he has done for three decades with regularity, because “at some point I will feel the juncture, everything will fall into place, and only then will I launch myself into the unknown, never having planned what I I have to write, rather letting myself be carried by the current of the wave…”
