The Silence of the Spirits. Wilfried N'Sondé
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profiling, police controls, and ID checks.
From a much longer colonial and postcolonial history—defined by interconnections, neocolonial policies, globalization—two individuals, abandoned, orphaned, unwanted, rejected, and even cursed, somehow find refuge, the courage to risk intimacy. “I was so proud that she’d chosen me,” Nzila shares with the reader. “We were slipping into the craziness of love. Christelle and me, we’d connected. She’d brought me into her universe. Her words gave me hope and enveloped me in an aura of light in the solitary night.” As Karen Lindo has shown, “The physical abandon in which they give themselves over to the pleasures of the body enables the couple to take refuge, however short-lived, from the abuse that has heretofore marked their individual trajectories.”7 However, as Lindo goes on to ask, “Who are the young characters that people N’Sondé’s novels? What are their values and how does this heterogeneous population manifest its sufferings and its aspirations?”8 Nzila has been driven out of his native village, moved up from street urchin to a role in an “army” in which his zealous engagement has provided him for a while with a distorted sense of meaning and even an identity. He may now appear on a Paris commuter train as a frightened, vulnerable migrant, but “I was dragging my disaster along with me like a ball and chain. Impossible for me to turn my back on the past and make that big break and advance toward new possibilities, the hope for a life of stars, happiness.” N’Sondé’s novel therefore provides, through the safe haven Christelle offers, a space in which his story can be recounted, the violent atrocities accounted for and named, such that the process of historical reckoning can begin: “I’d have given anything to forget and for her to never know what I’d really done. Her eyes beseeched me. Couldn’t she simply think about the present and build a future with me? Christelle wanted to know everything, every last detail of that period of my life, the truth. I was asking her to appreciate the new man that she was going to make of me, but the questions were going around in her mouth, in her eyes, kept cascading down!”
N’Sondé demands our presence as readers and listeners, enlists us in the broader process of testimony. How will Christelle react, what is at stake in assuming responsibility, acknowledging transgression, and how will we, as readers, position ourselves? How can a relationship survive confession? What are the limits of empathy, of forgiveness? How does one archive knowledge, restore humanity, and ultimately achieve reconciliation? N’Sondé thus presents us with two societies that continue to struggle with the process of fostering inclusive modes of coexistence, and in which violence and ethnic and identity conflict persist. As Myriam Louviot has argued, N’Sondé’s work confronts the “translinguistic and cultural dimension of postcolonial problems,” and “much could be gained from comparing the writings of authors such as Wilfried N’Sondé with those of other European migrants.”9 Indeed, from his own experiences, N’Sondé has written of how he “realized that the decision to come to Germany had allowed me to finally distance myself from a kind of hexagonal schizophrenia: that of being at once a French citizen whose equal rights were clearly and loudly affirmed but yet whose skin color gave rise to such great rants and ravings that I became increasingly skeptical of what was still being taught at university. Only too accustomed to police checks and the standard disregard for formalities and the patronizing use of the familiar ‘tu’, I quickly had to learn to answer their stupid questions and accept the humiliation if only to avoid a more serious incident. I soon came to realize that this recurrent police harassment was inversely proportionate to the whiteness of one’s complexion.”10 In a country in which the “Frenchness” of non-white individuals has today, once again, become suspect, and the eventuality of stripping “bi-nationals” of their “French” nationality been invoked, Salman Rushdie’s notion of “double unbelonging” has gained additional credence.11
The passage, path, or way to the other requires courage, a sense of adventure, but primarily moral imagination. N’Sondé’s poetic musicality is enchanting but also disquieting, haunting, and unsettling. In the words of the great South African writer Antjie Krog, “To be vulnerable is to be fully human. It’s the only way you can bleed into other people.”12
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baudoin, Charles. Suggestion and Autosuggestion: A Psychological and Pedagogical Study Based on the Investigations Made by the New Nancy School. Translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1921.
Bragard, Véronique. “Parisian Alternative Cartographies: Meandering the Ambivalent Banlieue in Wilfried N’Sondé’s Fiction.” In Metropolitan Mosaics and Melting-Pots: Paris and Montreal in Francophone Literatures, edited by Pascale De Souza and Adlai Murdoch, 135–155. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
Jaucourt, Chevalier Louis de. “Hospitality.” In The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Sophie Bourgault. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0002.761 (accessed April 14, 2016). Originally published as “Hospitalité,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, volume 8, 314 (Paris, 1765).
Lindo, Karen. “N’Sondé Post-2005 Youth Mural: Exploring Afro-Europe in Wilfried N’Sondé’s Literary Landscape.” In Afroeuropean Cartographies, edited by Dominic Thomas, 112–131. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
Louviot, Myriam. “Parcours d’un roman postcolonial francophone en France et en Allemagne: Le Cœur des enfants léopards de Wilfried N’Sondé.” Trajectoires, December 15, 2010, http://trajectoires.revues.org/589.
N’Sondé, Wilfried. “Ethnidentité.” In Je est un autre: Pour une identitémonde, edited by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, 95–100. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.
———. “Francastérix.” Translated by Karen Lindo. In Francophone Afropean Literatures, edited by Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas, 203–210. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014.
Ravi, Srilata. “Toward an Afropean Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Friendship and the African Immigrant.” In Francophone Afropean Literatures, edited by Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas, 138–154. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014.
Rushdie, Salman. East, West. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994.
1. Wilfried N’Sondé, “Ethnidentité,” in Je est un autre: Pour une identitémonde, edited by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 100.
2. Srilata Ravi, “Toward an Afropean Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Friendship and the African Immigrant,” in Francophone Afropean Literatures, edited by Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 140.
3. Myriam Louviot, “Parcours d’un roman postcolonial francophone en France et en Allemagne: Le Cœur des enfants léopards de Wilfried N’Sondé,” Trajectoires, December 15, 2010, http://trajectoires.revues.org/589.
4. Wilfried N’Sondé, “Francastérix,” in Francophone Afropean Literatures, edited by Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas, translated by Karen Lindo (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 209.
5. Charles Baudoin, Suggestion and Autosuggestion: A Psychological and Pedagogical Study Based on the Investigations Made by the New Nancy School, translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1921), 70.