Gabriel is back in Kenya after a first stay as a doctoral student from Europe. As a young geographer, he had been commissioned to map the water points of Kibera, the huge and infamous Nairobi slum. If he did indeed leave after a few months with a map of the place, he also knows that he has missed their underground complexity: “This city, he says, was liquefying as I gave it shape. »
Four years later, still obsessed with the popular neighborhoods of the Kenyan capital, Gabriel plunges back into Kibera, this time focusing on retracing the particular destiny of two women, Mbonoko and Nancy Gloria. Thus is set the scene for Rives d’où je vous vous Veille, the first work of fiction by the French author Jean-Baptiste Lanne. For this trip to the foundations of the city, its hero understood the need to open up to a world where the visible, the invisible, the terrestrial and the celestial coexist. Also the novel is structured around many mysteries.
Mystery of the characters first. Tel Joro, known as “the storyteller”. At the same time memory of Kibera, guide and companion of Gabriel, Joro takes the latter to meet Mbonoko, whom he describes as a woman phenomenon of almost 100 years “all in folds: folds in the eyes, folds in the neck, folds in soul and loins”, and whose name, in Nairobi slang, means “something wrong”.
First known as a radio host, Mbonoko left her mark on the inhabitants of the slum, giving their problems and their lives a dimension of madness. The outcome of a cockfight, for example, becomes the measure of all decisions: “In seven days, believe me, everyone has committed their lives to the bevelled pens of Providence. Send the kid to school? Stay ? Leave ? Sell ??the rice today? Tomorrow ? Will prices go up in January? Wait again? This year, when will the rains come? Redo my daub right away? The answer, suddenly, was extraordinarily clear: let’s wait for Sunday, let’s wait for the roosters! »
A city within the city
Raised in misery by sisters without affection, Nancy Gloria, she became aware very early on of the social violence of the slum. “These people, they weren’t investing anything. They lived as ghosts. In the village, they were warriors, farmers, clan leaders, shepherds with a hundred head of cattle. Women: respected mothers, storytellers, healers, traders. All of them found themselves servants in air-conditioned residences. Bitterness cracked their hearts. »
When a childcare program allows her to take classes at the Alliance Française, she uses this opportunity as a springboard to gradually create a place for herself in the sun. Shamelessly using false rumors and thanks to her innate commercial sense, she soon becomes the one through whom her entire neighborhood must go to access water and electricity. She also secures her reign by buying hair salons whose employees soon form her network of informants: “From today, you are my eyes and my ears. Whatever these women say, bring it to me,” she commands them.
By becoming adults, Mbonoko and Nancy Gloria will both hold their own in the great game of life where cynicism alone can escape misery: one by taxing without exception all those around him , the other expressing his authority through his fighting cocks. Through these two improbable characters, Jean-Baptiste Lanne depicts Kibera as a real city within the city, with its own laws and justice, its powers, its hierarchies, and where daily normality constantly yields to occult forces.
From the tale to the hallucination
Around Mbonoko and Nancy Gloria there is still a string of figures and as many life journeys, stories that the author skilfully embeds into each other, thus drawing readers into the mystery of an intrigue to which we are drawn. hang on without ever knowing which direction it will take. Finally, another mystery of this novel is undoubtedly located in its form, totally freed from the limitation to a single genre, capable of passing in turn from the false transcription of a story to poetic declamation in free verse, or even from tale to hallucination.
Investigation, dark novel, fantasy novel? Rives d’où je vigil is all of these things at the same time. We dive with happiness to discover a world where the little ones and the destitute find power. And where the shantytown, carried by a nervous language, sometimes disheveled to the point of oneirism, reveals itself as the ultimate character: “Another city, yes, a counter-city, a daughter of fluids, a daughter of kidneys, superimposed on the first one. In the back and forth of the hips, a city of the opposite oscillation. »
