FISTON MWANZA MUJILA, TRAM 83: Jazz Variations and Postcolonial Critique

This week’s episode of Critic.Reading.Writing will be focused on Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83, which won the Etisalat Prize for African Literature in 2016 and the Rosegger Literary Prize in Austria in 2018. Tram 83 revolves around the fraught relationship between Requiem, an all-round hustler with a predilection for the oracular, and Lucien, a down-and-out historian and writer struggling to find his métier. Lucien is dependent on the largesse and support of his erstwhile friend and now reluctant benefactor. The story of the two friends is interwoven between two settings, one more prominently situated in the foreground and repeatedly returned to as the privileged confluence for all the major characters - the Tram 83 of the title -- and the other the political and social setting of the City-State. The City-State is a misshapen republic that has broken away from the equally allegorically named Back-Country. Both are barely concealed references to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the City-State being the province of Katanga famous for its rich deposits of minerals including diamonds and cobalt, and the Back-Country being the rest of the DRC. The designation of the City-State is highly suggestive, as it points to the fact that it is neither a fully-fledged city nor is it an operational nation-state. Rather, its in-between status allows Mujila to paint an unsettling picture of brutal political self-interest placed at the mercy of a marauding capitalism. And yet the characters in the novel are far from morose and despondent. Rather, they are full of zest and exuberance for life. This includes the many sex workers depicted in the novel, who, we are told "arrange the whole shebang, from Genesis to the First Letter to the Corinthians". We will see how Mujila deploys the chronotope of the bar to situate an entirely different form of political allegory through features of carnivalesque exuberance.
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Suggested Readings
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
Alain Mabanckou, Broken Glass (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010)
Roger Casement, “The Congo Report,” in Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodas, The Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement’s Life and Times with a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings (1959) - Adam Hoschsild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998).
David Van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People, trans. Sam Garret (2014)

[@ndishang]

I have characterise such texts as Mwanza's in a recent article as Le Roman Coltan, In Koli Jean Bofane fall under the same categorisation.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Good to know, Gilbert. Tram83 incites completely new modes of interpretation. Glad you enjoyed the episode.

[@whatchachattin]

Should I watch this before or after reading the book?

[@samfernley3925]

after!