“I remember the first stories in elementary school. Those where we talked about ocean liners leaving for France (…). It was in the second class that this dream of Europe was strengthened, nourished by my incessant and numerous readings (…). I have traveled a long time in these books. I hovered on the wings of their words which brought me flavors, showed me landscapes, customs. (…) Yaya is Provence, the one little Marcel told me about, which spoke to me the most, which spoke to my imagination. Yaya, his landscapes were similar to those of Mouila and he also hunted like me, he too had a father who was a good teacher and a poor Sunday hunter. »
Having reached the age of higher education, a young Gabonese who loves literature wonders: should he leave or stay? Go to Europe and discover this elsewhere that books tell him or, on the contrary, stifle his desire to stay with his family? The answer will come to him from his beloved mother, who kindly allows him to free himself from all filial guilt in order to pursue his dreams: “Go my child, go as far as possible. Stay there, the main thing is to succeed in living. It doesn’t matter where you live. »
Fifteen years later, the son in turn speaks to his mother and recounts his experience to her in a halftone interior monologue, blurred by the contained tears of the adult in exile that he has become. This story entitled You made me the one who spans the world is signed by the first-time novelist of Gabonese origin Stève Wilifrid Mounguengui.
“Books for daily life”
It all begins with a recollection of the narrator’s years of training and carelessness, spent enjoying the playful pleasures of a daily life close to nature. “Journey to the land of my childhood. The Ngounié River, its banks and the eternal song of the washerwomen. Journey to you. It’s a time jump. From here, from this land of France, I hear the water beating in rhythm. I can see the women lined up on the banks and the children running around. »
If the boy then prefers the path of official instruction to the hidden paths of truant school, he nevertheless begins to appreciate the flavor of words and texts: “I see myself in class again. I get bored in all the classes, even in French for that matter. I escape through writing when I decide to stay in class. Otherwise I skip class to go read on the beach or take a walk. »
The enchantment of literature will never leave him. He uses it when, a student in Gabon, he goes from elementary school in his small town of Mouila to high school in the capital, Libreville. Hosted among other children with a distant uncle, he then experienced loneliness, precariousness and hunger. “I only have these books and my dreams to cope with on a daily basis. It was Mme Aguey, my French teacher, who lent them to me (…). She never imagined that she gave me the world. My neither, I admit. Later, I will understand, it was she who saved me from my little prison in Libreville. »
Literature, again, will serve as a resource for him when, as a young man, he becomes a student in France, discovering a way of life for which his marvelous reading had not prepared him. Here again, he calls on poetry to enchant his daily life. “Always grasping the world around me. Nothing amazes me like this field of lampposts in Créteil Pompadour. However, every day, I pass by this place. And always the same image, Yaya. I am thinking of Port-Gentil, seen from Azingo. »
deep nostalgia
Finally, it is essentially in the power of letters that the young adult will find consolation when, overwhelmed by the death of his mother – which occurred without his having been able to see her again – he realizes that the strength of writing alone will be able to bring calm. “Every morning I write to get closer to you. My writing is mourning. She connects with you. Through it, you become alive. »
An intimate, sensitive and collected story, You made me the one who spans the world can be read as an ultimate offering to the author’s mother, a solar and central figure in his life. But this very beautiful story finds even more breadth in the way Stève Wilifrid Mounguengui mixes his mourning with this other equally impossible wound that is exile.
Thus, to the experience of the narrator’s departure and actual journey from Gabon to France, is added the inner trajectory of the one who left and who, all his life, oscillated between the satisfaction of having accomplished his project and the regret not being able to really share what he experienced with his family. You made me the one who spans the world attempts to transcend the deep nostalgia of the one who, at a distance from the space of his first country as from his mother’s womb, must stifle within himself his new ideal: that of return . ” I am far. I crossed the sea, its eddies, its winds. I don’t live a dream life. I still live. There is this lack. I learned to live with it. I tame it. »
