Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

Afterword by J. M. G. Le Clézio

The publication of Alain Mabanckou’s novel, Broken Glass, was an important landmark in francophone literature. With certain reservations one might compare its impact on francophone writing to that of Sozaby, by the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, on English literature — the reservations being partly that Mabanckou’s novel was written in standard French, and partly that the relationship of the pidgin English used by Saro-Wiwa to the English language is more ongoing and symbiotic than that of Creole or any of the other hybrid African dialects to French. Like many novels inspired by the reality of the new Africa — Waiting for Wild Beasts to Vote by Ivory coast writer, Ahmadou Kourouma, or the famous Palm-Wine Drinkard by Nigerian, Amos Tutuola — Alain Mabanckou’s novel derives its humour from the convention of the satirical tale, a genre in which the young generation, born during or immediately after Independence, revels. Critics and the general reading public alike gave a rapturous welcome to the oracular pronouncements of Broken Glass from the bar named — as though straight out of Céline — Credit Gone West. Bernard Pivot hailed the work as ‘truculent, exuberant, garrulous, uproarious, no-holds-barred comedy’. The novel showed Mabanckou to be a true writer, with a story, a past, a literary context of his own, all of which were in fact already apparent in his early poetry and in his first published novel. As such it held out the promise of a great future.

Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty is the realisation of that promise. The novel, or rather, first-person narrative, puts us inside the head of a young boy, Michel, born, raised and educated in an Africa which is his exact contemporary (as is the author himself), in which everything is in the throes of being invented, re-invented, reconstructed, amid the apparent chaos of a society caught between nostalgia for its colonial past, and the hope of freedom, or perhaps more accurately, between the illusion of ancestral wisdom and the reality of everyday life. Readers who are interested in this real Africa (worlds away from the exotic tales of twentieth-century explorers, as from the supposed philosophical profundities of the gurus of pan-Africanism), will be put in mind of other masterpieces of post-colonial literature in English, such as Things Fall Apart by Nigerian Chinua Achebe, or Aké by Wole Soyinka, another Nigerian, which also features a small boy, the same age as Michel.

Alain Mabanckou shows us his world through the naive, observant eyes of a child, and what is both captivating and moving is the child’s take on the follies and contradictions of every aspect of post-colonial society, as seen through the prism of the immediate family circle: rampant capitalism dressed in the faded finery of the Marxist struggle, the greed of the moralising rich, absurd nostalgia for the myth of the Wretched of the Earth. And Congo-Brazzaville itself, which appears variously as Vietongo, with its capital Mapapouville, the Trois-Cents district in Broken Glass, Pointe-Noire, as described by the garrulous Moki, or even, in Memoirs of a Porcupine, as a well-watered land, home to the baobab trees so dear to Saint-Exupéry.

This country of domestic tyrants is also one of political tyrants, ministers, presidents, immortals, who for Michel are only slightly exaggerated versions of members of his own family. Everyday life, with its betrayals and vendettas, is the favourite arena of the comic writer. Mabanckou brilliantly conveys the tenor of this world, with all its derision and absurdity: the strength — physical and moral — of the women, the pain of a child betrayed by his mother, his longing for his two sisters who never lived, Sister Star and Sister No-name, his feelings for Caroline, the playmate who becomes his first love. In the hurly-burly of life on the street, every moment, every word spoken, has far-reaching consequences, even while nothing is truly serious — take, for example, the indignation of Uncle René, who removes a portrait of Victor Hugo from the living room on discovering that the illustrious writer once declared roundly: ‘Oh what a land is Africa! Asia has its history, America has its history, even Australia has its history; Africa has no history.’

The story of Michel, the young hero of Mabanckou’s novel, has nothing very unusual about it — just the discovery of life, the upsets and emotions, the tricks and traps which prepare a child to take its place in the adult word. His discoveries are not specifically Congolese, nor even African, though perhaps the hybrid nature of the society he lives in opens his eyes sooner rather than later. He discovers what adults are really like — often selfish and immature, unfailingly pathetic. Like children the world over — remember the fierce look of the small girl watching her parents rip each other apart in a novel by Colette — young Michel must find a place for himself, amid meanness, laughter and despair. Only youth can wipe away the hurt of the past and ward off future danger.

The odds seem very likely that Michel will take his place in the annals of the novel, alongside Holden Caulfield, of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and the unforgettable Miles Miles in Miss Take by Réjean Ducharme.