Out of Africa: Alain Mabanckou’s Lumières
By all accounts, Alain Mabanckou’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in March 2016
was thoroughly engaging and intellectually stimulating. The Reading Group on Mabanckou’s
Lumières de Pointe-Noire, held at the Institut français in London, was similarly thought-
provoking.
In his own Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Mabanckou describes his impressions
and meetings with family members in the Congo as he returns to the country, 23 years after
he left it. During his absence, his mother and adopted father have both passed away, but
also many of the sites he was familiar with have changed (notably the cinema, which has
been converted into a church), as have the people he was once friendly with. Mabanckou –
or the narrative persona in Lumières – is thus a Stranger in the town and country of his birth.
As Mabanckou wanders the streets of Pointe-Noire, he reflects on the troubled colonial
history and murky postcolonial present of the Congo. He intersperses political commentary
with details of his own life journey that has seen him become a global citizen tied to the
Congo, certainly, but also France and the United States. As such, Mabanckou was one of the
signatories of the 2007 manifesto ‘Pour une littérature-monde en français’, and has argued
on more than one occasion that literary invention is at its best in a globalised French
literature.
The Reading Group was thus able to grapple with a number of complex issues. The
discussion was passionate and fascinating, with very different interpretative readings
developed and explored. I am disappointed to be missing the next one on Lola Lafon’s
extraordinary Nous sommes les oiseaux de la tempête qui s’annonce. But I’m sure the group
will have lots to say in what will be the last session for this year.
Dominic Glynn is Lecturer in French at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR).