THE AFRICAN

Author: Jean Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Year: 2005 (2004)
Publisher: Elisabeth Grate Bokförlag

Language: Swedish (translator Ulla Bruncrona)

The father/son dichotomy is among the oldest tropes in literary history going back to pre-antiquity. Zeus dethroning Kronos, Sophocles’ drama Oedipus, which is probably a much older legend simply exploited by him, and much of the Old Testament revolve around the discord between the begetter and his offspring. Many prominent writers over the centuries have furthermore turned to writing as a form of therapy, diving deeply into their fathers’ roles in their lives. Sometimes, the purpose has been to understand. At other times, to forgive. At still others, to deliver vengeance. Peter Härtling’s “Nachgetragene Liebe”, Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”, and Ivan Turgenev’s “Pervaya Lyubov” may serve as a few of many examples from all over Europe of stories written by sons about their fathers. Similarly, Marguerite Duras seems to have written “The Lover” (see my review from 15 March 2020), in an attempt to process her memories of an overbearing mother and to finally, at a mature age, liberate herself from her.

French Nobel Prize-laureate J. M. G Le Clézio makes his mark on this territory with the autobiographical essay “Afrikanen” (“The African”). This is a story about his father, the physician serving in the British colonies in Africa while his wife and sons remain in France, and how the distance in geography, time, and culture laid the foundation to what turned out to be a virtually impenetrable curtain between them.

Curiously enough, the barrier between father and son did not become tangible until 8-years-old Le Clézio and his family were called for by his father to unite with him in Ogoja in south eastern Nigeria. This would be the first time the boy met his father. He had heard his mother and other family members speak about him, of course, and the father had been careful to write letters and remit funds to his wife on a regular basis, but to the young Le Clézio he was just an idea. A concept. Or more accurately; the idea of a concept. The physical encounter with the father, who would become the embodiment of the unknown environment into which the boy was thrust without any agency of his own, rattled the 8-year-old mind and heart. He became an alien in his new home. The curtain, that had previously been nebulous and logical suddenly became real and inexplicable.

The sensation of displacement was further exacerbated by his father´s stern regime, which was a contrast to the loose reins Le Clézio and his brother had enjoyed under the supervision of his aunts and uncles back in France. Discipline, routine, and order suddenly became mercilessly enforced on a level that the young boy was completely unaccustomed to. Not only did he suddenly have a father, but he had one that showed little love and plenty of acerbity.

A child of such a tender age does not have the language or the perspective to process this type of shock and Le Clézio can account merely for his memories of his juvenile self trying to sort out a new reality. It is a gripping endeavour to try to put into words the emotions of a child by the guidance of a grown man’s recollections of emotions that he himself is no longer qualified to reproduce.

“As a child, one doesn’t make use of words. And words are not exhausted. This is a time in which I live far from adjectives and nouns. I cannot say or even think: impressive, colossal, power. But I can experience what these words refer to.”*

Le Clézio’s solution is to approach the memory of his father by integrating him into his memory of the portion of his childhood spent in Africa. Africa made his father and consequently, his father, to Le Clézio, becomes Africa. The opalescent landscape, the pungent odours, the bright smiles on the dark faces of the people whose attitude to nudity and privacy differs vastly from that of the French, are all building blocks that make up the African. So are the squalor, disease, and colonial oppression that he encounters.

As the author digs deeper into memories and tries to navigate his impressions toward the essence of his father, he also reflects upon himself and what his own existence might have posed to his procreator. In Africa, his inevitable whiteness was the main factor connecting him to his family, but it also placed him in the category of the oppressors who instigated such animosity in his father. The aging doctor, by all accounts, seems to have revolted vehemently against the maltreatment of the local population by the British and French governments. He identified with the people among whom he lived, not with those for whom he worked. The son became an inescapable testimony to the African’s own whiteness and a reminder that despite his best efforts and his own choice of identity, he may never become Ogoja to the same degree that Ogoja had become him. He was African; his progeny was French.

And yet, “Afrikanen” turns out to be a love letter; an expression of affection and gratitude to the man who loved the author’s mother and who beyond just giving him life, gave him the opportunity to become the man that he is. It would certainly have been understandable had he resented his father due to his harshness and his lack of interest in his children. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes in “The Brothers Karamazov”.

“Why am I bound to love him simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all life after? Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. /…/ Let the son stand before his father and ask him, ‘Father, tell me, why must I love you?’”**

Despite a thin veneer of bitterness and travail, the totality of Le Clézio’s book is a warm document of tolerance and gratitude. What makes this possible is in the end Africa. Father and son who never got to know each other across a kitchen table, seem to figuratively meet on the plains of Ogoja and connect on the grasslands on Ntumbo. Their minds touch on a dirt road in Kwaja and they unite in their shared experience of Babungo. In a photograph. In a memory. It is a love by proxy, but it is a love that transcends time and space and flows beyond the confined entities of mortals. A love as true as any other.

“While I write this, I realise that this is more than my own memory. This is also the memory of the years before I was born, when my mother and father trekked together along the footpaths of the Cameroonian highlands. The memory of my father’s angst and hope, of his loneliness and misery in Ogoja. The memory of moments of happiness where my father and mother are united in a love that they think will last forever.”*

In this way, the African becomes the father not in spite of, but thanks to, Africa.

 

*My own translation from the Swedish copy.
** Translation by Constance Garnett, The Lowell Press, New York, 2009

 

SOLDIER WITH A BROKEN GUN

Author: Vilhelm Moberg
Year: 1998 (1944)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish

Vilhelm Moberg without a doubt counts among the most important figures in Swedish literature. Few writers either before or after him have described the hardships of the regular rural Swede in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and the dream of a better life in America as detailed as he has. His magnum opus, The Emigrants-tetralogy, has become an integral part of Swedish national identity and an urgent reminder that Swedes were also refugees from poverty and famine at one point in time not too long ago. To the Swedish population, this period is known as “Fattigsverige”; i.e. “Sweden, the impoverished”. His careful research, based to a large extent on the many years he spent in the US living among descendants of the Swedish diaspora, sets him apart from other writers concerning themselves with this era in Swedish-American history.

His interest in poverty and migration was surely triggered by the fate of his own family. Like so many other Scandinavians from the poorest segments of society, much of Moberg’s family also migrated to the New World at the turn of the century, including several of his siblings.

At the same time, a growing and increasingly assertive socialist movement was sweeping across Europe. Sweden was no exception and Moberg soon signed up as a party member for the Social Democrats. He spent a considerable portion of his adult years debating for the rights of the under-privileged classes, and from the 1920s and onwards against Nazism and Communism.

All these things; poverty, inequality, the dream about America, writing, socialism, and the fight for a better and fairer tomorrow, come together in what is possibly the closest Moberg ever came to an autobiography: “Soldat med brutet gevär” (not available in English but the title could be translated as “The Soldier With a Broken Gun”). Moberg himself said of it “this is not an autobiography, but this novel, more than any other, is based on material from my own experience.”

The protagonist and Moberg’s alter ego, Valter Sträng, is born as the youngest son to a soldier. Growing up in a society where militarism, alcoholism, want, and political abuse were ubiquitous, at an early age he recognises that the main framework of the Swedish community, based on Lutheranism, allegiance to the King, work ethics, and alcohol are all chains applied to the under-privileged classes by the ruling elite in order to keep the former docile and useful. This puts him at odds with his father (the soldier) and many of his friends, classmates, and colleagues. Much of the storyline is aligned with what we know about Moberg’s own life and even though Valter Sträng finds himself in some situations which may not have been precise representations of Moberg’s specific experiences, the truth is in the message Moberg tries to convey. The writer lets us know how he would have acted had he been faced with some of the challenges he puts before Valter Sträng. And on a whole it is credible.

In many respects, “Soldat med brutet gevär” is a Bildungsroman that captures the transition of a peasant boy from the childhood years in the soldier’s cabin to the threshold of literary fame and the ascension into the cultural and political elites. Bit by bit, Valter Sträng explores the complexity of a society in upheaval and tries to legitimise his path through life. Moberg links his political maturity to his biological aging as if to say that becoming an adult is tantamount to taking a stand. A young Valter Sträng repeatedly laments the fact that his family, friends, neighbours, and co-workers remain oblivious to the social injustice around them and the structural prison created for them by the affluent classes. And yet, a watershed moment for him is when one of his political adversaries calls out his own ignorance. Knowledge, honesty, equality, and activism define Valter Sträng in a way I do not doubt Vilhelm Moberg wanted to be defined himself.    

Besides the biographical virtues of this novel, as always with Moberg, his deep understanding of the class struggle in the 19^th and 20^th centuries as well as his proficient and precise way of putting it into words in a way that almost a century later we can still relate to, makes him the timeless novelist and essayist that he is. His use of the Swedish language, in particular when he twists it to capture the full flavour of various Smolandian dialects and sociolects, provides a peephole into how southern Swedish dialects may have sounded in the past and a study of what role language has as a social class indicator. Valter Sträng’s dialogue as a child and adolescent is written in the Smolandian dialect. As he grows up and discovers socialism, his language changes and Moberg gives him a voice that rivals that of the rich and educated. When he enrols at a formal education institution and begins to socialise with scholars, the transition of his speech is completed. The effect is exacerbated whenever Valter Sträng meets his mother or other characters from his past, whose language remains provincial, something which Valter Sträng never comments or ponders upon.

An element in the novel that I could do without is the superfluous accounts of Valter Sträng’s sex life. His love interests are usually of little consequence for his development and although explaining the main character’s rather detached and unemotional relationship to the opposite sex may serve an autobiographical purpose, the sequences dedicated to his endeavours and ensuing doubt are at times almost cringe-worthy.

The novel is at its best when it focuses on the political awakening of the young boy and his political maturation process. This is where Vilhelm Moberg rightly becomes a giant among giants.