On Dealing with the Dead

I picked up Alain Mabanckou’s Dealing with the Dead on a whim. I was browsing the “new” stack at my public library, and—reading the description—saw that it takes place in Pointe-Noire, where Mabanckou is from.

This wouldn’t have meant much to me had I not had a good friend, Franck, who is also from Pointe-Noire. I met him in Tunis, where he once worked with my fiancée; to this day, he is her best friend. He studied there and worked in marketing for a small consulting firm that advised Francophone Sub-Saharan states on management. The largest contracts came from Niger, though there were others in Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, and elsewhere.

What struck me about Franck is how thoughtful he is: considerate toward everyone, and fundamentally “humanist” in an ethical sense. He also works like nobody I’ve ever met, and it is to my discredit that I have not seen him since he returned to Pointe-Noire during a period of racial tensions in Tunisia.

Had I never met Franck, I likely would not have picked this up. But I wanted a sense of where he is from, as literature renders it—and Mabanckou gives precisely that.

What stands out first is how Mabanckou tells a story. He introduces characters in passing, then unspools their backstories in extensive detail, one thing jumping to the next. The signifiers of Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa are here in full force: the diasporic executive based in France who returns to Brazzaville for a high civil-service post, only to be outrun by political events; the possibly-real cases of black magic infecting the larger society, up to the level of ministerial decision-making; the nostalgia and contention over Cabinda, the Angolan exclave wedged between Congo-Brazza and Congo-Kinshasa; an evangelical minister with a cult of personality who becomes a black nationalist after witnessing racial violence in the United States.

All of this is carried, of all things, by a narrator who is himself dead and has fallen in love with a dead woman. Most of the lives we take in, in fact, are recounted by people who are themselves dead.

It amounts to a full cross-section of a society, and Mabanckou is relentless in critiquing it. He takes no hostages: the one figure spared is the protagonist’s grandmother—and even that likely says more about Mabanckou than about the society he builds for us.

I read this slowly, stopping and continuing as I needed to, and Dealing with the Dead is better for it than read straight through.

My only real question is about translation. Helen Stevenson’s is superb, and yet I wonder whether a work like this can be translated at all. The style and structure seem to live almost exclusively in the French spoken in Pointe-Noire: the spelling errors on the tombstone, the run-ons and words blending together into a new whole.