Selling (out) on the Black Market: Black Bazar's Literary Sape

Author(s): Katelyn Knox

Source: Research in African Literatures , Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 52-69
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.46.2.52

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Selling (out) on the Black Market:
Black Bazar’s Literary Sape
KATELYN KNOX
University of Central Arkansas
kknox@uca.edu

ABSTRACT

This article develops a framework drawing from Congolese sape fashion

practices to read Alain Mabanckou’s 2009 novel Black bazar. In sape—an acro-
nym for La Société des ambianceurs et des personnes élégantes (the Society
of Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance)—sapeurs “sappers” perform danses
des griffes “dances of designer labels” during which they brandish their
clothing items’ designer brands. In my reading of Black bazar as an example
of “literary sape,” I argue that the narrator-author’s references to cultural
works from a variety of national and historical contexts can productively
be read as a literary danse des griffes—a performance that interrogates the
reading strategies to which the novel itself will be subjected. Ultimately,
through its content and form, Black bazar contests the very notion of authen-
ticity that undergirds how francophone cultural works and their authors
are packaged and circulated within larger global cultural economies.

I
n Alain Mabanckou’s 2009 novel, Black bazar the narrator-author, Fessologue
“Buttologist,” observes how a Central African is pressured into a haircut
through accusations of racial shame: “C’est quoi que tu as sur ta tête, mon frère?
. . . Mon Dieu, c’est vous-là qui nous faites honte dans ce pays!” (204−05) ‘What is
that you’ve got on your head, my brother? . . . My god, it’s people like you who
give us a bad name in this country!’ (202−03).1 Though the middleman outwardly
espouses a rhetoric of racial solidarity and pride, the novel foregrounds how his
real motivation is anything but altruistic. Rather, he has a vested economic inter-
est in first putting forth his own ideas of legitimized ways to perform blackness,
before then convincing the Central African man that he deviates from them. This
comical scene stands as a metaphor for the novel as a whole, which grapples
self-consciously with how identities are circulated as objects bound up in larger
economies. More importantly, it will also take a self-reflexive stance on how it—as

  RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer 2015). © 2015 

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 K ATELYN K NOX    53

a literary work sold within a larger cultural marketplace—also participates in

these same processes.
Outwardly similar in topic to Mabanckou’s 1998 novel Bleu, blanc, rouge [Blue
White Red], which depicts the lives of Congolese sapeurs “sappers” in Paris, Black
bazar nevertheless departs significantly from this earlier work in two principal
ways. First, whereas Bleu, blanc, rouge charts the struggles of a relatively homo-
geneous group of clandestine Congolese migrants who suffer sociopolitical and
economic marginalization in France, Black bazar depicts a much more heteroge-
neous “black French” population. Its characters differ from each other in terms of
socioeconomic and immigration status (many are French citizens), national origin,
and educational background, offering a much more nuanced vision of racial and
ethnic minorities in twenty-first-century France. Second, Bleu, blanc, rouge’s cen-
tral conflict is oriented outward: protagonists find themselves marginalized with
respect to both their “host” and “home” societies—a tension that leads Jacques
Chevrier to classify it as migritude literature (99).2 Though in Black bazar the ques-
tion of identitarian borders is no less central, its inquiry is oriented inward rather
than outward. The novel traces how individuals that might be classified as mem-
bers of the same community (“black France”) espouse fundamentally opposing
ideologies regarding the implications of and basis for such community identities
(race, history, personal experience, etc.).
In my view, these internal debates regarding performances of blackness in
the sociopolitical sphere in Black bazar operate as veiled allusions to the perennial
discussions that underpin cultural criticism about “black,” “African,” and “fran-
cophone” authors and their works. The way the characters read (and misread)
one another’s black bodies parallels the ways critics have read (and misread)
authors and works classified thusly. Ultimately, the protagonists’ ideologies serve
as a pretext to scrutinize both the assumptions on which these taxonomies rest
(particularly the existence of “authentic” identities) and the resulting notions
(of engagement, selloutism, and the individual as spokesperson for his or her
community, among others) they engender.
Black bazar also advances such critiques through its form, using a practice I
term “literary sape.” As I explore in more depth below, sape—La Société des ambi-
anceurs et des personnes élégantes (The Society for Ambiancers and Persons of
Elegance)—originated as a cultural phenomenon that reached its height among
urban, Congolese youth in the 1970s, though its roots extend much earlier into the
colonial period (Thomas, Black France 160–61). Most important for my study is the
relationship sape establishes with notions of authenticity and reading practices:
paradoxically both vestimentary sape, and, as I argue in this essay, Mabanckou’s
literary sape deploy authentic labels to ultimately contest the notion of authentic
identities. Literary sape deftly turns the reader’s gaze back around on the act of
reading itself to interrogate the larger, metaphorical reading strategies through
which francophone authors are “packaged”—to borrow Richard Watts’s useful
concept outlined in Packaging Post/Coloniality—in cultural marketplaces.3
Because my argument depends on establishing connections between reading
literal black bodies and reading literary black bodies, my analysis draws heavily on
the case of Fessologue, whose corporeal and professional transformation bridges
these two realms. Though he begins the novel as a sapeur, he progressively aban-
dons his sartorial style to pursue a literary career. Other characters in Black bazar

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54    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 2

read Fessologue’s transformation as a radical break in his character and take it as

evidence that he is ashamed of his race. Reading the novel through the lens of liter-
ary sape, however, suggests otherwise: Fessologue does not so much abandon sape;
rather, he chooses to express it through literature rather than through clothing. As
an author, he carefully composes the novel-as-outfit, conspicuously brandishing
some literary “designer labels” (references to hundreds of cultural works, art-
ists, and even political speeches) while concealing others. This act parallels how
sapeurs meticulously composed their outfits with an eye to the way they would
perform them, through a practice known as danses des griffes “dances of designer
labels.” As Justin-Daniel Gandoulou underscores, sapeurs choreographed their
danses des griffes to guide their audience through a metaphorical reading of their
outfit by “mettre en lumière . . . les différentes griffes des vêtements portés . . .”
‘drawing attention to . . . the different designer labels of their articles of clothing’
(209). Similarly, Black bazar’s literary danse des griffes guides its reader through
the act of reading the novel, foregrounding not only its own carefully assembled
“griffes,” but also drawing its audience’s attention to the underlying assumptions
that affect how they analyze the work. Through this literary sape, Fessologue
subversively anticipates and preemptively responds to the way other protagonists
read his transformation as a sign of selloutism. In this way, Black bazar weaves its
own metacommentary on the risks and stakes of reading—and, more importantly
misreading—the black body, African authors, and their works into its own textual
fabric. In the end, it urges individual readers and larger critical communities to
interrogate the assumptions on which their own reading strategies depend.

PACKAGING BLACKNESS
Authorship is at the heart of Black bazar. Fessologue, an avid sapeur, works in a
publishing house, but by the end of the novel he has abandoned both his job and
his opulent fashion to write a novel (also entitled Black bazar). Many of these scenes
transpire at Jip’s, an Afro-Cuban bar in Paris’s first arrondissement, whose primarily
black clientele discusses opposing visions of racial identities. Though seemingly
limited to the sociopolitical sphere, the protagonists’ perspectives, I claim, operate
as proxies for views articulated in literary criticism. By highlighting the question-
able logic of its protagonists’ essentialist—and often inflammatory—opinions,
then, Black bazar’s own content anticipates and surreptitiously contests the literary
and cultural readings to which the novel itself will be subjected.
Two seemingly diametrically opposed perspectives, articulated by Hip-
pocrate, Fessologue’s Martinican neighbor, and Yves l’Ivoirien exemplify this
connection between the sociopolitical and cultural realms. Though Hippocrate
denies the pertinence of a black identity in his own life, he nevertheless imposes
a racializing gaze on others to affirm his distinction from other “black” popula-
tions, as Éloïse Brezault points out (150). This racializing gaze is also evident in
how Hippocrate envisions black authorship: as a colonial gift for which the (for-
merly) colonized author should be—but often is not—grateful. In fact, Hippocrate
even suggests that the earliest francophone works (including Ferdinand Oyono’s
Le Vieux nègre et la médaille and Une vie de boy, Mongo Beti’s Ville cruelle and Le
Pauvre Christ de Bomba, and René Maran’s Batouala) owe their very existence to the
colonization they critique. It is “grâce à la colonisation” ‘thanks to colonisation,’

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 K ATELYN K NOX    55

he asserts, that these works were published and that “un Noir a eu pour la pre-
mière fois le prix Goncourt qui n’est réservé, en principe, qu’aux Blancs” (228) ‘a
Black won the Prix Goncourt which is meant to be the reserve of Whites’ (226).
The undercurrent of gifting (evident in the repeated phrase “grâce à” ‘thanks to’
and the symbolism of the literary prize) that permeates Hippocrate’s discussion
of black authorship reaffirms the French literary establishment as the legitimiz-
ing presence for authors from former colonies and places the black author in the
position of gracious recipient.
Though comically exaggerated, Hippocrate’s views nevertheless call to mind
discussions about two contemporary authors writing in French: Léonora Miano
and Marie NDiaye. Cameroonian author Léonora Miano has described how
pressure to demonstrate gratitude toward the French publishing industry has
curtailed her narrative options: “je suis avant tout une femme du tiers-monde à
qui on accorde une faveur, et je suis donc sommée, par divers moyens, de rester
à ma place” ‘I am still above all else regarded as a woman from the third world
for whom one is doing a favor and I’m reminded, through various means, to stay
in my place’ (73). Similarly, after receiving the Goncourt Prize for her novel Trois
femmes puissantes [Three Strong Women] (2009), Marie NDiaye drew public criticism
from politicians—notably Éric Raoult (UMP mayor of Raincy)—for denouncing
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s policies. Ignoring that NDiaye, though “black,” is not
only French, but actively resists the title of a “francophone” writer, Raoult’s state-
ment closely resembles Hippocrate’s in its vocabulary of gifting: “We awarded
her the Goncourt Prize because she has talent. . . . Now that she has received this
prize, she can think as she likes, but as it happens she now has to be a kind of
ambassador for our culture. . . . France has given her the Goncourt Prize” (qtd. in
Thomas, Africa and France 149). As Dominic Thomas has highlighted, from within
the phrases “we awarded her” and “France has given her” in Raoult’s speech
emerge latent assumptions about the place of minority authors in France: though
NDiaye is French, her blackness nevertheless marks her as the internal other (Ibid.
149). Hippocrate’s colonial conception of black authorship is, in other words, alive
and well today.
Furthermore, in citing what could be termed “engaged” or “oppositional”
francophone literature, Hippocrate not only relegates the black francophone
author to the role of spokesperson for his or her community, but he also places
francophone literary production in a reactionary paradigm with respect to met-
ropolitan literature and culture. Such a vision of African authorship has long
pervaded the field of francophone and postcolonial literary criticism; one thinks,
for instance, of how the edited volume The Empire Writes Back (1989) erects a dia-
lectic within which postcolonial literary production can only ever be reactionary
(Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin). Though critics have largely moved away from such
binaries pitting so-called “minor” literatures against “major” ones—Françoise
Lionnet and Shuh-mei Shih’s formulation of “minor transnationalism” stands out
as one exemplary model—iterations of them still nevertheless seep into the literary
marketplace’s structural dynamics (through, for instance, the opposition between
“French” and “francophone” literature I discuss below).
A second perspective regarding performances of racial identities in Black
bazar—that held by Yves l’Ivoirien—seems, on its surface, diametrically opposed
to Hippocrate’s. Whereas Hippocrate actively denies the pertinence of racial

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56    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 2

identities in his own life, Yves insists that all black individuals have a collec-
tive responsibility to act on behalf of a larger black community in France. Yves
proposes, for instance, that black individuals sleep with white women to combat
monoethnic and monocultural (and implicitly monochrome) notions of French
identity. He proclaims, “nous allons carrément bâtardiser la Gaule par tous les
moyens nécessaires” (102−03) ‘well then we’ll go right ahead and bastardise Gaul
by any means necessary!’ (98). Yet closer analysis of Yves’s perspective reveals that
it shares more common ground with Hippocrate’s than initially meets the eye. Like
Hippocrate’s vision of black authorship, Yves’s proposed vengeance strategy both
assumes the existence of legitimized ways of performing blackness and obligates
individuals externally positioned as “black” to conform to them.
Yves’s views in the sociopolitical sphere echo two veins of discussion about
African authorship: engagement and authenticity. Yves’s supposition that the black
individual (regardless of whether he or she identifies him or herself thusly) actively
advocate for a collective black cause parallels wider stances articulated in the
field of francophone literary criticism that African authors must write on behalf
of the communities they purportedly represent. As Odile Cazenave and Patricia
Célérier have posited, such expectations to produce sociopolitically engaged
works effectively constitute a “burden of commitment” placed on African authors
(24). Cameroonian author Mongo Beti’s public criticism of his compatriot Calixthe
Beyala, who, in his view, refused to use her literature to shed light on Cameroonian
sociopolitical realities, epitomizes such a burden (“L’Affaire Calixthe Beyala”). Just
as Yves proposes that other protagonists’ racial identity should dictate their behav-
ior, so too do wider literary and cultural critiques fall back on racial or national
identities to define narrative possibilities open to francophone authors.
In fact, the novel pursues these entangled notions of engagement and authen-
ticity through Yves’s accusations that other characters who fail to perform their
blackness in ways he considers legitimate are “sellouts.” For instance, he contends
that Roger le Franco-Ivoirien (a character who, as his name implies, is of mixed
national and racial heritage) “est un vendu comme tous les autres métis. . . . Moi,
je veux qu’il soit ivoirien vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre, sept jours sur sept”
(104−05) ‘has sold out like all the other half-castes. . . . I want him to be Ivorian
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week’ (100). Yves’s critique of Roger as
a “sellout” here recalls the “burden of commitment” placed on African authors,
demanding that they act on behalf of a larger cause. Moreover, Yves’s wish for
Roger to “be Ivorian” all the time presupposes both the existence of an authen-
tic Ivorian identity and sanctioned ways for Ivorians to demonstrate it. When
extended to the literary realm, this logic has two dangerous implication. Not only
does it forestall African or francophone authors’ creative agency by suggesting
that certain topics are more (or less) valid for their works, but, more worrisome
still (as I explore in greater depth below), it also primes the audience to read their
works through ethnographic and autobiographical, rather than literary, lenses.
Yves’s accusation of racial selloutism leveled against Roger also raises the
larger topic of audience, calling to mind a perennial question posed of franco-
phone authors. For whom should they write? This question has troubled fran-
cophone criticism from its earliest days, especially given that many successful
authors both live and publish in the former métropole. For critics such as Beti and
Boubacar Boris Diop, francophone African authors living abroad risk becoming

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 K ATELYN K NOX    57

bound up in cultural markets designed to exoticize African cultural production

and, in so doing, reinforcing stereotypes about Africa in the West—a claim that
has also been leveled against Mabanckou (see Nkouatchet).4 For but one example,
one need only think of the case of Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir [The Dark Child]
(1953). Both the text’s purportedly idyllic and nostalgic tone for colonial Africa and
its detailed depiction of certain secret Mande practices (specifically the initiation
ceremony) drew scathing criticism and accusations that Laye served as a native
informant who sold out African secrets to a Western audience.5
Yet Black bazar suggests that writing for an African audience is no less prob-
lematic because doing so perpetuates both notions of “authentic” African culture
and autobiographical and ethnographic reading strategies. The novel explores
the first risk through Fessologue’s critique of Lucien Mitori (whom Fessologue
nicknames l’Hybride “the Hybrid”), a professional tam-tam player in a Congolese
music group. Strikingly, Fessologue takes little issue with l’Hybride profiting from
selling a commodified version of African culture to white audiences: “Un Blanc
qui apprend du tam-tam, c’est normal, ça fait chic, ça fait type qui est ouvert aux
cultures du monde et pas du tout raciste pour un sou” (126) ‘I can understand a
White learning to play the tom-toms, it makes him look cool, the kind of guy who
is open to all the cultures of the world and who is not in the least bit racist’ (123).
Rather, for him, the greater danger emerges when performing this culture for an
African audience:

C’est quoi cette histoire de ramener le tam-tam aux pauvres Africains d’Afrique?
Eux les Africains de là-bas ils s’en foutent désormais du tam-tam parce que
c’est un truc qu’ils ont laissé aux Blancs qui vont prendre des cours pour ça,
qui s’habillent en pagne pour faire local et qui sont tout contents parce qu’ils
espèrent contribuer à l’intégration et à l’échange des cultures. Un Noir qui bat
du tam-tam, ça craint, ça fait trop retour aux sources, à la case du départ, à l’état
naturel, à la musique dans la peau. (126)

What is this business of restoring drumming to the poor Africans of Africa?

These days the Africans over there don’t give a monkey’s about traditional
African drumming because it’s something they’ve left to the Whites who take
lessons in it, who dress up in African textile to look the part and who are rather
pleased with themselves because they reckon they’re doing their bit for integra-
tion and cross-cultural exchange. I can understand a White learning to play the
tom-toms, it makes him look cool, the kind of guy who is open to all the cultures
of the world and who is not in the least bit racist. But a Black who plays the tom-
toms is dodgy, it’s too much about returning to his roots, to the beginning, to
his natural state, about having a sense of rhythm. (123)

“Traditional” drumming is now anything but “authentically” African; rather, it

has become a commodity whites can purchase as a sign of their cultural openness.
The novel also exposes how these ways of envisioning African authorship
propagate problematic ethnographic and autobiographical modes of reading—
modes it will ultimately subvert. As Lia Brozgal provocatively asserts, critics
disproportionately deploy such “interpretive lenses” to francophone works and,
as a result, foreclose “textual possibilities such as generic ambiguity, hybridity,
and subterfuge” (xiii). In Black bazar, Fessologue’s description of his own entry
into the world of authorship calls into question the very notion of authenticity in

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58    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 2

any writing, instead positioning it as an imitative act forcing the African author—
regardless of his or her residence in Africa—to adopt foreign realities. He recalls,
“Et nous on envoyait nos lettres sans même tropicaliser les choses. . . . On évoquait
l’hiver, on décrivait la neige, on alignait des sapins à chaque paragraphe. . . . [O]n
avait fini par croire que rien n’était plus poétique que d’appeler une fille très noire
‘Ma Blonde de neige’ . . .” (63) ‘And we sent our letters without even tropicalising
them. . . . We wrote about winter, we described the snow, we stuck pine trees into
every paragraph. . . . [W]e ended up thinking that nothing could be more poetic
than to call a particularly black girl “My Snowy White” . . .’ (58−59). For the young
Congolese men, writing—particularly the supposedly intimate love letter genre—
becomes an act of literary “passing” and of reproducing foreign realities. What is
more, this passage implicates the African reader in driving the young men’s autho-
rial choices, interrogating Beti’s and Diop’s critique regarding audience discussed
above. In the eyes of young Fessologue’s readers, his love letters’ authenticity
paradoxically stems from their conformity to conventions deemed inauthentically
African. This reflection on writing ultimately collapses all notions of authenticity.
Yet the novel later baits its reader into deploying the very lenses it suggests
are problematic. First, Fessologue claims to be the son of Mabanckou’s own mother,
Pauline Kengué: “[J]’étais son petit-fils, le fils de sa fille Pauline Kengué” (101) ‘I
was her grandson, the son of her daughter Pauline Kengué’ (96), lending an auto-
biographical dimension to the novel. Readers of Mabanckou will recognize this
autobiographical connection not only from the many works he has dedicated to her,
but also from his 2013 autobiographical novel, Lumières de Pointe-Noire, in which
Mabanckou reflects on his mother’s death during his twenty-three-year absence
and chronicles her central role in his upbringing. What is more, Fessologue’s
authorial process—writing a novel based on the journals in which he records his
interactions at Jip’s—also positions him as a “native informant” charged with
translating his native culture for a foreign audience. Here, one again hears echoes
of Laye’s novel L’Enfant noir. As Abiola Irele has illustrated, much literary criticism
devoted to L’Enfant noir, particularly Adele King’s Rereading Camara Laye, has been
devoted to contesting both its author’s and its content’s “authenticity.”6 For Irele,
these accusations of inauthenticity reveal problematic assumptions regarding
African literature: “should an African novel be no more than an ethnographic
document that is required to be true to life in every detail? And was Laye thus
constrained to an exclusive reproduction of his indigenous culture?” (118). In a
cunning move, Black bazar outwardly presents itself both in an autobiographi-
cal light and as an “ethnographic document” precisely to foreground the larger
ideological questions Irele raises.
Ultimately, through its literary sape, the novel will turn its gaze back around
on these reading strategies and the logic on which they depend. As I have illus-
trated above, the novel’s content foregrounds particular modes of reading (and
misreading) the black body; these gazes closely parallel the scrutiny and assump-
tions to which black authors and their works are subjected. As I now explore
below, through its literary sape—a formal strategy that brings together allusions to
hundreds of works from a variety of canons—the novel illustrates how all cultural
works (not just those produced by black authors) become commodities that circu-
late within wider economies. Further, it exposes and interrogates the prevailing
paradigms through which black bodies are read in the cultural marketplace.

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 K ATELYN K NOX    59

FROM VESTIMENTARY TO LITERARY SAPE

The novel itself invites its reader to apply a performative, vestimentary framework
to this literary text through Fessologue’s transformation from sapeur to author.
Before analyzing the novel’s literary sape, I first turn my attention to Fessologue’s
fashion practices (and the sape movement more generally) to illustrate the relation-
ship it establishes to authenticity and the type of readings it invites. In analyzing
Fessologue’s sape, my goal is not to rehash the many excellent studies that have
taken this movement as their focus.7 Rather, I explore this phenomenon through the
twin lenses of authoring and reading to situate the force of the novel’s literary sape.
Sapeurs both literally and figuratively authored the self with the act of read-
ing in mind. Those considered most successful traveled to France to obtain their
designer clothing items directly from Parisian couturiers and during their time in
Paris, they were expected to communicate with their home communities through
letters, phone calls, and photographs (Gandoulou 65). As many scholars have high-
lighted, however, the narratives sapeurs advanced in these communications hardly
resembled the lives they lived as clandestine immigrants. In fact, as Massala-
Massala, the central protagonist of Mabanckou’s Bleu, blanc, rouge, discovers, the
African audience’s expectations drive the letters’ content (recalling Fessologue’s
love letters in Black bazar). He, like the other sapeurs, dutifully copies verbatim the
form letter others before him have drafted in order to reaffirm the narrative of
opulence his Congolese community associates with life in Paris. To denounce the
letters as inauthentic, as Thomas underscores, meant to risk being seen as a paysan,
or economic migrant (Black France 158).
Of equal significance is the way sapeurs authored themselves through their
clothing. Sapeurs’ success depended on acquiring and subsequently publicly dis-
playing clothing items bearing recognizable designer labels, or griffes (Gandoulou
63; Friedman 179). As Gandoulou outlines, like the sapeurs’ written and oral narra-
tives, their outfits, too, deploy a veneer of authenticity: “La Sape, pour ces jeunes,
c’est . . . la façade de tout un système de valeurs. Tout se situe au niveau des apparences.
. . . [L]es Sapeurs s’évertuent à imiter l’aspect extérieur des gens arrivés au sommet de
l’échelle sociale à Brazzaville, sans bien sûr détenir les instruments de la réussite objec-
tive. D’où le contraste . . . entre l’apparence du Sapeur et la réalité de son existence” ‘Sape,
for these young men, is . . . the façade of a whole value system. Everything resides
at the level of appearances. It’s about deploying signs of success. . . . [S]appers strive to
imitate the way those at the top of the social ladder in Brazzaville present themselves
outwardly, without, of course, having the means to succeed in an objective sense.
Hence, the contrast . . . between the Sapper’s appearance and his lived reality’ (18–19,
emphasis added). Paradoxically, then, sapeurs rely on authentic designer labels and
vetted narratives to undermine the very notion of authenticity itself. As Jonathan
Friedman puts it, for sapeurs, “clothing is more than property or the expression of
one’s already existent self, or the fulfillment of an imagined self. It is the constitu-
tion of self, a self that is entirely social. There is no ‘real me’ under the surface and
no roles are being played that might contrast with an underlying true subject” (181).
Sapeurs’ self-authoring, then, not only depends on but also deftly manipulates their
audience’s reading strategies. As I suggest below, the novel’s literary sape similarly
anticipates and subverts the reading strategies to which it will be subjected and
undermines the notion of the “real me” often imputed onto francophone authors.

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60    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 2

Even before he begins his authorial career, Fessologue is keenly attuned to

the act of reading. He both reads others’ bodies and also carefully prepares his
own to be read. His very name, which he has earned thanks to his infamy among
his friends for “reading” their potential girlfriends’ “Face-B” (behinds) testifies
to his prowess in this domain. Fessologue also boasts that this analytical capacity
extends beyond the realm of “buttology”—he can, he asserts, decipher TV debate
participants’ personalities based solely on their necktie. He explains that “les
timides ont des nœuds bien serrés et dans notre milieu nous les appelons les sui-
cidés” (44) ‘shy men wear their ties tightly knotted, and in our crowd we call them
suicidals’ (39) or “les égoïstes, . . . autrement dit les fourmis, eux ils ne changent
pas de nœud jusqu’à l’usure de la cravate” (45) ‘the egoists, . . . otherwise known
as the ants, don’t change the knot until the tie has worn out’ (40). In providing
translations such as how “les timides” become “les suicidés” and “les égoïstes”
are known as “fourmis,” Fessologue rereads these bodies in terms of his own cul-
tural milieu. This act reverses colonial taxonomical impulses evidenced in venues
such as exhibitions and museums, which organized colonized subjects and their
artifacts into frameworks reinforcing emergent scientific narratives about human
civilization’s progression from savage to civilized states.8
Like real-life sapeurs, Fessologue also carefully constructs his outfits with his
audience (and their gaze) in mind. Yet the novel subversively uses Fessologue’s
sape to turn its attention back around on this act of reading, setting the stage for
how literary sape will do the same. First, just as the novel invites its reader to deploy
those very autobiographical and ethnographic lenses it depicts as problematic, it
similarly baits its reader into adopting the rhetoric of authenticity to decode Fes-
sologue’s fashion—the same rhetoric it ultimately denounces as suspect. Specifi-
cally, the novel intimates that despite his claims to the contrary, Fessologue might
be a bad sapeur. As I discussed above, sapeurs’ success depended on assembling
wardrobes whose constituent parts bear authentic, designer labels; it is, thus,
surprising that Fessologue states on two separate occasions that his clothes are
from “Cerruti 1884,” (28, 44; 22, 39), when the authentic couturier is Cerruti 1881.
The uninitiated reader will likely miss this detail and take Fessologue’s word that
he is a good sapeur. Those with the requisite cultural background will likely read
this detail as evidence that, in attempting to participate in a market he does not
fully understand, Fessologue is duped into adorning his body with counterfeit
goods. This logic calls to mind those criticisms outlined above that African authors
metaphorically pass off counterfeit symbols as markers of African identity to gain
entry into larger literary marketplaces—a venue in which they have little control.
To conclude thusly, however, denies Fessologue (and, in a larger sense, African
authors) agency. Given Fessologue’s careful attention to his outfits’ composition,
I propose to read this detail differently: as intentional rather than as inadvertent.
Seen in this light, Fessologue’s choice to wear “offbrand” garments becomes an
act of strategic inauthenticity that repositions him with respect to the market’s
larger forces. Far from a naïve victim, by conspicuously adopting these symbols in
a realm where authenticity is valued above all else, Fessologue becomes an active
agent who contests these forces from within. Refusing to offer conclusive evidence
to support either reading, Black bazar leaves open the possibility that what critics
might interpret as signs of authors’ “inauthenticity” are, instead, calculated moves
that undermine this notion’s most basic tenets.

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 K ATELYN K NOX    61

The novel also slyly underscores the connection between Fessologue’s fash-
ion performance and his authorial one through a scene in which misreading is
central. Unlike other protagonists who refuse the position of “exotic” object of the
French gaze (such as Hippocrate), Fessologue actively seeks out opportunities to
spectacularize himself. Far from objectifying, Fessologue instead views this act
as agenceful precisely because he has painstakingly crafted his outfits to control
how his audience will read them. In fact, Fessologue literally and figuratively goes
out of his way to draw the gaze, evidenced when he walks, rather than taking a
taxi: “j’aurais pu prendre un taxi, mais pourquoi me priver des regards des pas-
sants?” (47) ‘I could have caught a cab, but why miss out on the looks of passers-
by?’ (43). One day, upon arriving at Paris’s north train station, Fessologue succeeds
all too well in attracting the gaze. He observes that “Les gens n’arrêtaient pas de
me regarder. Je me disais que c’était l’effet de mon costard, de mes chaussures et
de mon parfum. . . . J’ai ouvert les trois boutons de la veste, une technique pour
mettre en valeur ma ceinture Christian Dior” (48) ‘People wouldn’t stop looking at
me. Naturally, I assumed it was my suit, my shoes and my aftershave. . . . I undid
three of my jacket buttons, which is a special technique I have for showing off my
Christian Dior belt to its best advantage’ (43−44). Through this choreographed
movement—a danse des griffes in the absence of music—Fessologue reveals that
even his concealed accessories bear authentic labels.
His audience, however, responds not with awe and applause but with insults:
“Ah oui, il faut tous les virer, ces connards!” (49) ‘Too right, let’s get rid of the
bastards!’ (45) and “Bande de fainéants!” (49) ‘Slackers, the lot of them!’ (45). Con-
fused and alarmed, Fessologue silently waits on the platform for his train; it is
not until later that he realizes that his suit was of the same color as the uniforms
of the RATP agents, who were on strike (50). For Fessologue, being mistaken for a
striking laborer constitutes the ultimate trauma: “C’était une humiliation, je n’en
suis toujours pas revenu” (45) ‘I felt so humiliated, I still haven’t got over it’ (40).
Though it might at first seem like Fessologue overreacts, closer analysis reveals
that the stakes could not be higher in this scene. Fessologue and his audience nego-
tiate for control over how the black body is read. Despite his best efforts to guide
his audience through the act of reading his outfit, without the requisite cultural
background, they can only draw from their own interpretive grid—one in which
the black body is a source of labor.
While the onlookers at the train station will never understand their error, the
novel makes this misreading a focal point for its own reader. In so doing, it exposes
the latent assumptions influencing how Fessologue’s audience understands his
performance. Whereas Fessologue the sapeur cannot draw his audience’s atten-
tion to (or, by extension, contest) this error, Fessologue the literary sapeur does
both. This scene, then, becomes a cautionary tale warning Black bazar’s readers to
avoid making the same mistake with reading the novel itself and its literary danse
des griffes. Those who miss it—like the train station onlookers—risk returning
the black author (and his or her works) to dominant (literary) frameworks. In a
deft move, the novel preemptively anticipates and interrogates the reading (and
packaging) strategies to which it will be subjected.
Just as sapeurs conspicuously display recognizable designer labels, the liter-
ary sapeur exhibits references to cultural works, artists, and even political speeches.
As is already apparent in my analysis above, in Black bazar, such griffes are at times

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62    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 2

conspicuous (such as in Hippocrate’s tirade about colonized black authorship)

and clearly indicate authors and titles. Similar conspicuous references can be
found elsewhere, such as when the novel reproduces the lyrics to Franco Luambo
Makiadi’s “Liberté” ‘Liberty’ (154) and Claude Nourago’s “Armstrong” (182) or
when it references Dany Laferrière’s novels Pays sans chapeau [Down among the Dead
Men] (164) and Le Goût des jeunes filles [Dining with the Dictator] (165). In addition
to signaling the novel’s participation in larger cultural networks, these allusions
prime the reader to search for other, less conspicuous ones. As De Souza points
out, these references are so numerous and diverse that no one reader will likely
recognize them all—a fact that she concludes forces the reader to recognize his
or her own shortcomings (114). What I would like to suggest, however, is that this
literary form also turns the gaze back on the very act of reading itself. It is through
its literary sape that the novel interrogates authenticity as a reading strategy as well
as the literary taxonomies, critical discussions, and even paratextual materials that
both depend on and perpetuate it.
Two examples illustrate this point. First, the novel’s opening conversation
between Fessologue and Roger le Franco-Ivoirien exemplifies how Black bazar’s
content and form intervene in discussions regarding francophone authors’ packag-
ing. In terms of content, Roger positions authorship as a white, Western endeavor,
asserting that Fessologue should abandon his literary aspirations and instead
leave this task to whites, who are more qualified: “y a des gens plus calés pour ça,
et ces gens-là, on les voit à la télé, ils parlent bien . . . nous autres les nègres, c’est
pas notre dada, l’écriture. Nous, c’est l’oralité des ancêtres” (13−14) ‘there are much
smarter people for that, and you can see them on the telly, they know how to talk
. . . but when it comes to us negroes, well then writing is not our thing. With us it is
the oral traditions of our ancestors’ (7). Later in the same conversation, Roger poses
a series of seemingly banal questions about the content of Fessologue’s novel that
reveal Roger’s latent association between black authors and foreignness. He asks,
for instance, whether the novel has “une mer et un vieil homme qui va à la pêche
avec un petit garçon” (15) ‘a sea and an old man who goes fishing with a young
boy’ (8), “un ivrogne qui va dans les pays des morts pour retrouver son tireur
de vin de palme décédé accidentellement au pied d’un palmier” (18) ‘a drunkard
who goes to the land of the dead to find his palm wine supplier who accidentally
died at the foot of a palm tree’ (11), or even “un grand amour au temps du choléra
entre un pauvre télégraphiste et une jeune écolière qui finira plutôt par épouser
un médecin plus tard” (18) ‘a great love that takes place in the time of cholera
between a poor telegrapher and a young schoolgirl who will end up marrying a
doctor later on’ (12).
Closer analysis of these questions illuminates how the novel’s literary sape
interrogates one way in which authors are packaged: taxonomies such as “fran-
cophone” literature. In posing these questions Roger cites the plots, but not the
names or authors, of a wide range of texts, including Ernest Hemingway’s The
Old Man and the Sea (1952), Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952), Gabriel
García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), Luis Sepúlveda’s The Old Man
Who Read Love Stories (1989), Yukio Mishima’s The Music (1964), Ernesto Sábato’s
The Tunnel (1988), and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959). Though, as De Souza
rightly points out, when Fessologue refuses each of these existing plots he sug-
gests that such stories would be foreign to his Congolese background (113−14),

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 K ATELYN K NOX    63

she misses the larger way in which, by asking these questions, Roger implicitly
classifies any work Fessologue would produce alongside those of “foreign” writers.
In fact, upon examining the list more closely, one notes it lacks “French” (or even
“francophone”) authors; the only other African voice of the group—Amos Tutuola,
a Nigerian author—is anglophone. In Roger’s mind, Fessologue’s works would
occupy shelf space with those originally published in other languages (English,
Spanish, Japanese, and German) and not with those originally published in French.
Roger’s inclination to classify Fessologue alongside other “foreign” writers
speaks to a wider criticism that Mabanckou and other “francophone” authors
voiced against the very taxonomy “Francophonie.” Articulated in a manifesto
published in Le Monde in 2007 and a subsequent edited volume Pour une littéra-
ture-monde en français [For a World-Literature in French] (2007), for the manifesto’s
signatories, the term “Francophonie”—often opposed to metropolitan “French”
literature—marginalizes authors classified thusly (Barbery et al.; Le Bris, Rouaud,
and Almassy). Mabanckou’s own contribution to the edited volume substantiates
this claim by contesting a widespread bookstore practice: shelving “francophone”
works with “foreign” ones translated into French. He points out that “these authors
of ‘foreign literature’ do not share the French language with me. What I admire in
their work is their particular universe, imaginary, imagination, creative genius—
and when I find myself jubilant before the beauty and power of language in a book
by Gabriel García Marquez it is, ‘unfortunately,’ as a result of reading a French
translation” (“ ‘The Song of the Migrating Bird’ ” 147). For Mabanckou, as for the
other signatories of the Le Monde manifesto, taxonomies such as “francophone”—
still as central as ever—not only reaffirm a metropolitan “purity,” but, because
they depend on biographical information about the authors, they also impose
reading strategies on non-metropolitan authors.
Another prominent example of literary sape comes during Fessologue’s inter-
actions with l’Arabe du coin “The Arab on the Corner,” who, on five separate
occasions, asks Fessologue if he knows of the “poète noir” ‘black poet’ who wrote
the lines “L’Occident nous a trop longtemps gavés de mensonges et gonflés de
pestilences . . .” (24, 112, 114, 147, 246) ‘For too long the West has force-fed us with
lies and bloated us with pestilence . . .’ (18, 109, 110, 144, 244). Just like the novel’s
other semi-concealed references, this interrogative format, which censors both
the author’s name and the work’s title, encourages the uncertain reader to pursue
the reference—one that readers unfamiliar with Aimé Césaire can uncover with
minimal research. Without deeper knowledge of francophone literary criticism,
however, such a reader will likely miss the way in which this instance of literary
sape reflects on processes of black authors’ packaging in literary marketplaces.
Specifically in referring to Césaire, l’Arabe du coin adopts part of the now famous
phrase André Breton used to title his preface to Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays
natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land]: “Un grand poète noir” ‘A Great Black
Poet.’ For critics, this preface raises some of the most central questions regarding
black authorship and packaging, including why Breton’s voice was needed to
preface the work, what relationship this preface establishes with respect to the
work itself, and what role, specifically, Breton envisions race playing in Césaire’s
authorship.9 That L’Arabe du coin refers to Césaire as a “poète noir,” then, draws
its reader’s attention to the larger frameworks to which francophone authors are
subjected, as well as their ideological implications.

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64    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 2

In addition to these conspicuous and semi-concealed references, the novel

also contains hundreds of hidden ones, which, like those analyzed above, also
point out the possibility of misreading. In the conversation between Roger and
Fessologue I analyzed above, for instance, Roger comically apes the civilizing
mission’s rhetoric, extolling the French imperial project: “Y avait tous ces maux
sur nos terres d’ébène, notre Afrique fantôme au point que même Tintin était con-
traint de faire le déplacement en personne pour notre bien!” (16, emphasis added)
‘There were all these ills over our ebony lands, our ghostly Africa, to the point that
even Tintin ended up having to come over in person on our behalf’ (10, emphasis
added). This account of African history contains unsignaled references to Michel
Leiris’s autobiographical and ethnographic book L’Afrique fantôme [Phantom Africa]
(1934), written during his participation in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti; Hergé’s
comic strip Tintin au Congo [Tintin in the Congo] (1931); and Albert Londres’s Terre
d’ébène [Ebony Land] (1929), a travel narrative that denounces the effects of colonial
rule. The content of both Leiris’s and Londres’s texts work at cross purposes with
Roger’s stereotypical image of Africa as an uncivilized land: Terre d’Ébène depicts
colonization—not precolonial Africa—as “savage” and L’Afrique fantôme reveals
more about the ideologies and epistemologies central to the burgeoning scientific
disciplines that took Africa as their object of inquiry than it does about Africa
itself. Reading this passage as an example of a literary danse des griffes reveals its
subversive commentary on Roger’s uncritically examined received ideas about
Africa. By inconspicuously citing works that directly counter the content of Roger’s
speech, Fessologue the literary sapeur advances a critique resembling that offered
by Achille Mbembe: that “narrative about Africa is always pretext for a comment
about something else, some other place, some other people. More precisely, Africa
is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give
a public account of its subjectivity” (3).
One final example of literary sape illustrates how Black bazar’s form intervenes
in its own protagonists’ discussions of “passing” and “selling out” highlighted
above. After Fessologue abandons vestimentary sape and begins straightening his
hair, a Gabonese man approaches him and critiques his physical appearance: “Le
Gabonais a rajouté que je n’étais qu’un pauvre Noir qui n’aimait pas le manioc et
que je me défrisais les cheveux pour ressembler aux Blancs” (245) ‘The Gabonese
man added that I was just a poor Black who didn’t like cassava and that I straight-
ened my hair to look like Whites’ (243). This interaction harkens back to both
Yves’s expectations that black and mixed-race individuals perform their racial
identity in certain prescribed ways and the scene with which I opened this paper,
when the Central African man’s hairstyle is taken as a sign of his racial shame.
This passage, too, contains an unsignaled allusion to Gaston Kelman’s novel Je
suis noir et je n’aime pas le manioc [I am Black and I Don’t like Cassava] (2003)—that
readers unfamiliar with contemporary francophone literature are likely to miss.
Referencing a work that has been termed a “non-threatening, apologist narrative”
draws attention to how these accusations of racial shame remapped onto literary
landscapes (Thomas, Africa and France 78−79). Fessologue, now an author, discovers
that his individual, corporeal choices are taken as representative of a community
much in the same way individual francophone authors are often shouldered with
expectations of serving as a spokesperson for their community.

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 K ATELYN K NOX    65

Black bazar is not the first novel in which Mabanckou has used such an autho-
rial strategy; the most illustrative example is his 2005 novel Verre cassé [Broken
Glass], which, like Black bazar, references hundreds of literary works from a variety
of national and historical contexts.10 In fact, Verre cassé begins with an intertexual
reference to Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s oft-cited adage, “en Afrique quand un vieillard
meurt c’est une bibliothèque qui brûle” (12) ‘in Africa when an old person dies, a library
burns’ (1). Yet the novel subsequently announces its skepticism with respect to liter-
ary packaging and images of African authorship when the bar owner, l’Escargot
entêté “Stubborn Snail,” responds, “ça depend de quel vieillard” (12) ‘depends which
old person’ (1). For John Walsh, Verre cassé’s allusions interrogate processes of can-
onization that reinforce the binary often established between francophone and
French works (132−36).
Similar critiques are at work in Black bazar. The historical and geographical
range of the works it references are equally vast and include (in addition to the
literary works from francophone, postcolonial, and African canons I have already
cited) literary works from the French canon such as Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and
Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes [Persian Letters] (1721); those from American popular
culture such as the film Jaws (1975), the television series MacGyver, or Phil Collins’s
song “Another Day in Paradise” (1989); those from French popular culture such
as Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Aux armes et cætera” ‘To Arms, et cetera’ (1979); and
even theoretical texts such as Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). The sheer quantity and
variety of these references collapses all interpretive categories such as “popular”
and “canonical,” or “African” and “French,” often used to classify them. Moreover,
this diversity contests the notion that there exist sets of cultural references shared
by those of the same national or racial background. Finally, these references are
often reduced to easily digestible and deployable sound bites, such as “cultiver son
jardin” (29, 35) ‘cultivate his own garden’ (23, 29)—a slightly altered reference to
Candide’s concluding line—or “il prétend qu’il y a des bruits et des odeurs quand mes
amis et moi préparons de la nourriture et écoutons de la musique” (36, emphasis
added) ‘the noises and smells he claims get produced by me and my friends’ (30,
emphasis added), an allusion to the now infamous speech Jacques Chirac gave
during a RPR dinner debate on 19 June 1991. This act, then, suggests that all cul-
tural works—not just African ones—are subject to processes of commodification
in cultural marketplaces.
Deploying these literary and cultural references allows Fessologue, the liter-
ary sapeur, to rebrand himself as a world scholar and to put forth an alternative
library where “French,” “francophone,” and “foreign” works share shelf space.
Though the uninitiated reader might seek to return him to the comfortable frame-
works of “francophone” or “African,” the novel’s griffes interrogate the salience of
such categories and the very premises on which they rest. The allusions function
as authentic designer labels, yet, ironically, brandishing them through its literary
danse des griffes calls into question the very notion of authenticity. The novel’s liter-
ary sape turns the gaze back around on the act of reading itself to illustrate how
the dominant frameworks (which also shape francophone works’ packaging) rely
on fundamentally flawed assumptions.

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66    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 2

CONCLUSIONS
In the end, the novel’s title neatly captures its intervention. Its hundreds of cultural
allusions all share space within the novel as a marketplace—the black bazaar. Yet
as the novel suggests, questions of commodification, authenticity, and selloutism
disproportionately affect francophone authors, and “black,” “francophone,” and
“African” identities themselves have become commodities sold within wider socio-
political and literary bazaars. Through its literary sape, however, the novel inter-
venes into these larger debates in francophone literary criticism, particularly how
works and their authors are packaged in larger cultural marketplaces. Through
this formal strategy, the novel preemptively responds to those same forces to
which it will be subjected (including literary prizes, taxonomies, paratextual
materials, literary criticism, etc.).
In fact, this mise-en-abyme of contesting its own interpretation does not end
with the novel; rather, it also pervades the much larger cultural project (also
entitled Black bazar) of which the novel represents the first constituent part. Since
its publication, Black bazar has been translated into theatrical and musical forms:
Modeste Nzapassara’s one-man play performed in 2011 and two soukous albums
entitled Black bazar (2012) and Black bazar: Round 2 (2013). The title track to Black
bazar, “Black bazar: Face A,” which sets Congolese artist Soulemayne Diamanka’s
slam poetry to soukous music, illustrates how the project’s musical iteration extends
the novel’s broad reflection on contemporary images of blackness into the musical
realm. In the song’s second verse, Diamanka’s lyrics meditate on common phrases
containing the word “black”: “Justice blanche, misère noire / La bête noire, c’est
toi / C’est écrit noir sur blanc / Et ta peau restera noire malgré ton masque blanc”
‘White justice, black misery / You’re the black sheep / It’s written black on white /
Long will be your Way of the Cross / And your skin will remain black despite your
white mask’ (Abarambwa and Tshintu). The anaphora of “black” (in both French
and English) underscores how images of blackness in everyday parlance are heav-
ily steeped in notions of violence, exclusion, marginalization, and struggle. The
song’s lyrics, too, even engage in literary sape, referencing Frantz Fanon’s Black
Skin, White Masks—a work in which Fanon contests how skin color becomes a lens
through which the actions and accomplishments of all individuals positioned as
“black” are filtered (96−97).
Taking a step back, however, reveals this larger project to be one final sub-
versive act. Namely, while the works’ content interrogates the commodification of
black identities, Black bazar as a larger project endlessly commodifies itself. In so
doing, it preemptively responds to—and, more importantly, profits from—those
same forces to which it will be subjected in the cultural marketplace.

NOTES
1. All translations from Mabanckou’s corpus come from officially published
translations. Translations of all other works are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
2. For Chevrier, migritude authors distanced themselves from the previous gen-
eration of francophone authors who produced “engaged” literature. In his view, migri-
tude authors situated themselves “dans un nouvel espace identitaire dont les frontières
font éclater les cadres ordinaires” ‘in a new identitarian space whose borders explode
traditional classificatory schema’ (99).

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 K ATELYN K NOX    67

3. For Watts, francophone authors were (and continue to be) “packaged” by para-
textual images, promotional materials, and, of course, writings. His analysis posits
francophone paratexts as the site where the underlying “struggle over who has the right
to mediate and who maintains the authority to present and interpret this literature is
fought” (3).
4. It is worth pointing out that such anxieties are not limited to the literary or cul-
tural realm; for instance, Paulin Hountondji asserts that funding networks and the high
level of consumption of scholarly works in the West means that African social scientists
regularly exoticize their own culture in order to succeed in the scholarly community.
If, he argues, African researchers begin to examine their society with “African” eyes,
they would no longer feel the need to “exalt their own cultural particularities” that
are different from the West (68).
5. For the most well-known example, see Mongo Beti’s article “Afrique noire, lit-
térature rose.” Both Adele King and Christopher Miller offer useful and comprehensive
overviews of the critical landscape surrounding L’Enfant noir (see King 48−53; Miller
121−26). Miller’s analysis also offers a much more nuanced reading of Laye’s novel.
6. Irele also points specifically to Christopher Miller’s Theories of Africans (1990)
and Kenneth Harrow’s The Marabout and the Muse (1996).
7. For the most pertinent examples, see Thomas, Black France; Martin; Gandoulou;
and Gondola.
8. For several examples, see the essays in the volume edited by Blanchard et al.
9. For just two examples addressing these very questions, see Irele’s preface to the
2000 edition of Cahier and Watts.
10. Literary allusions to Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris (1937), Camara Laye’s
L’Enfant noir, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë (1961), novels in which
the central male protagonist’s colonial education and departure for Europe distances
him from his culture, also pepper Mabanckou’s first novel, Bleu, blanc, rouge.

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