It all starts with a drama. In a fictitious country, a demonstration hostile to the power in place is brutally repressed. The police do not hesitate to fire live ammunition at the protesters. Among the victims, Dora, a student hit in the back, collapses in the arms of her boyfriend. He is the narrator of the facts. The author of the fatal shot is not unknown to him, he is a soldier and his lifelong enemy, Jean-Charles Akambi. The murder was not perpetrated by chance, but with the intention of reaching the boy in what he holds most dear.
The hero’s grief is thus coupled with the guilt of not having been able to protect his friend, but these feelings only fuel a long-held hatred and give rise to his desire for revenge. From then on, the boy makes a promise to himself to settle his account with his enemy. “The scalding smell of the shield the cop was slamming into my face, my muscles tensing to tearing, our gasps mingling, the dust burning my nostrils and my right arm thumping, thumping; I knocked and I saw Dora, her eyes extinguished and full of blood. The spiral of violence is not about to stop.
Second novel by the Beninese writer Jérôme Nouhouaï, The Death of Tomorrow very quickly takes on the appearance of an action film, except that this fiction, imbued with a strong realism, does not necessarily tick the box of the happy ending. The political situation of the country mentioned easily recalls those, present or past, of some African States. The hero explains thus: “Two days before I was expelled from my mother’s womb, he conquered power by arms by assassinating the democratically elected president of the time, Emile Djankaki. A coup d’etat which, it seems, had marked the annals of African history with its violence and savagery. Thousands of deaths and summary executions which were only lightly condemned by the international community, relieved to see ousted a president too close to the Soviet bloc. »
Armed with his military arsenal, the potentate reigns terror in this country, which is also plagued by corruption. Only a tiny minority of the population benefits from economic resources, while the vast majority live – if not survive – by striving to escape poverty. Any resemblance to an existing situation is assumed by the author.
law of retaliation
Because never named, Jérôme Nouhouaï’s narrator embodies a universal hero, plagued by despair and nevertheless driven by a deep desire for change. How to live in such conditions? Should we protest? Go into exile? Trying to overthrow the despot in turn by risking his own life? After the carnage of the protest, the choice of narrator is made: “If everything that happens to us is largely the result of our actions and our choices, then I chose to instill fear rather than suffer it.” I was choosing to kill myself rather than let someone take my life away. »
With a lively, raw and breathless writing, and from jolts to twists and turns, the novelist leads the reader in the wake of his character, the senses on the lookout, in flight as in confrontation. Each of his steps is a confrontation with injustice, cruelty, machismo, savage repression to degrees reaching madness, with the only possible law, that of retaliation. “Humiliation often finds its relief only in jolts of violence,” he says. We couldn’t contain it indefinitely. One day or another, it will have to eject and cause the pain necessary for its appeasement. »
After a first novel, Le Piment des plus beaux jours (ed. Le Serpent à Plumes) in which he depicted a group of terrorist students, Jérôme Nouhouaï, born in 1973, still resorts to fiction with La Mort du matin to point out a social problem: that of today’s African youth, whose dreams and desires for the future remain muzzled by an omnipotent state system. A subject that is more relevant than ever on a continent where half of the population is under 30 years old. Standard-bearer of this youth, the hero hopes for a final fight… which will be singular to say the least.
