2023-11-26 19:00:04
It all starts with dazzling. That felt by the literary critic Boniface Mongo-Mboussa the day when, studying in Leningrad in 1987, he discovered a poem in the pages of Humanitythe only French-language newspaper available in the USSR at the time:
“I’m not going to die from the desire to change the world
The passionate games of patricidal wars are a guilty distraction to me, so much so that my salute to the earth that the sun discovers this morning is not as martial as I would like it to be.
I’m getting out of bed
The morning has the sun confused
In the garden the petals fall on cold ashes
And yet no petal is blood (…) ».
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The words are by the Congolese poet, novelist and playwright Tchicaya U Tam’si. The reading hits the foreign student like a thunderbolt, as delicious as it is inexplicable. “I read the poem on the spot. Then took the metro to Nevsky Prospect. From that day on, I never stopped reading Tchicaya U Tam’si.”remembers Boniface Mongo-Mboussa.
After collecting the books of his favorite author, aligning them alongside Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, the former literature student, now literary critic, sets out as an exegete in search of all the articles and archives available concerning his idol. He drew a portrait which restores its place in the pantheon of world literature, published for the first time in 2014 by Vents d’ailleurs under the title Tchicaya U Tam’si, the rape of the moon.
An injured child
Combining biography and literary analysis, the essay resonates the work and trajectory of the writer in the context of the African political and cultural ferment from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s. A story that brings new life to a somewhat forgotten author, yet recognized in his time to the point of having been mentioned in 1986 for the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature – the Swedish Academy awarded it that year to the Nigerian Wole Soyinka.
But who exactly was Tchicaya U Tam’si? First of all, an injured child, the critic explains. Born Gérald-Félix Tchicaya in 1931 in a Congo under French colonial domination, he is the natural son of a peasant woman and Jean-Félix Tchicaya, a ” evolved “ as they said terribly at the time. Trained at the William-Ponty Normal School of AOF, in Senegal, the latter successively pursued a career in teaching then administration. At the age of 4, Gérald-Félix was taken from his mother by his father who wanted to raise him in Pointe-Noire with his legitimate family and give him the opportunity to study. Unfortunately, he disappoints his brilliant father with his academic difficulties.
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Upset by a second family migration to Paris this time, still in the wake of his father who became a deputy of the Fourth Republic, then by a third exile in boarding school in Orléans, Gérald-Félix turns out to be a pitiful high school student, prey to the mixed horrors of distance, loneliness, physical disability and otherness. Aspiring to stand out from the crowd despite everything, he defiantly adopts the romantic posture of the poet before even having written a line: “At the Orléans high school (…), I was disabled, I stayed in my corner. When you are alone, you are either crazy or you are a poet… So I became a poet”, he will say.
His first texts, sparked by the colonial massacres that occurred in 1948 in Bobo-Dioulasso, salute the resistance of the populations which will lead to Ivorian independence. His father read a few lines to his colleague in the Assembly… Aimé Césaire himself. “Your son is a poet”, decrees the latter. What looks like a stroke of luck is undoubtedly a stroke of genius because this encouragement will be followed by a dubbing of the other co-founders of negritude, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas.
Outsider of letters
Gérald-Félix Tchicaya is launched. And too bad for studies, which he stops without having obtained his baccalaureate. To distinguish himself from his father, he becomes “In Tam’s”, “who speaks of the country” or “a little leaf that sings for its country, in the vili language”, a signature in reference to his Congo of origin, which he will never stop celebrating.
Likewise, the writer will voluntarily detach himself from his fathers and literary peers. “Therein lies its originality, explains Boniface Mongo-Mboussa. At a time when most poets of his generation vigorously claim their Negro identity, Tchicaya U Tam’si defines himself as a poet and Congolese, before being Negro. »
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In his own way, he invents a “exploded poetry, with disjointed syntax” and multiplies the collections: The Bad Blood (1955), Bushfire (1957), A cheat heart (1958). On a professional level, attentive to political life, he embraced journalism, becoming in turn a literary presenter on the radio at Sorafom (future RFI), then editor in the newspaper of the politician Patrice Lumumba, The Congo, in Léopoldville (today Kinshasa, capital of the former Belgian Congo which became the Democratic Republic of Congo).
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He signs Arc musicalpreceded by Epitome (1962), echoing the death of the Congolese political leader. His novels, published in the 1980s (Cockroaches, Jellyfish, Moths, These sweet fruits of the breadfruit tree), brought him notoriety in Paris, where he joined UNESCO. Plays also highlight him and compare him to another newcomer to the Congolese literary scene: Sony Labou Tansi.
By taking us along in the wake of this literary outsider, son of a well-known political figure but seemingly out of nowhere, Boniface Mongo-Mboussa offers a broader vision of French-speaking literary history. Written with an erudite and alert pen, very documented and always accessible, Tchicaya U Tam’si, life and work of a cursed man is the essay of a critic, certainly, but above all of a passionate and sincere reader who reads like one follows a suspenseful investigation. Mastery!
Tchicaya U Tam’si, life and work of a cursed man, by Boniface Mongo-Mboussa (col. Pépites, ed. Riveneuve, 10.50 euros).
THE Complete works I, II, III by Tchicaya U Tam’si are available in digital epub and pdf format (col. Black Continents, ed. Gallimard). Texts collected and prefaced by Boniface Mongo-Mboussa.
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