"Les Aquatiques", a novel about edification by a woman in Central Africa
Detail of the cover of the novel "Les Aquatiques", by Osvalde Lewat, published by Les Escales editions.
© Les Escales
Text by: Sabine Cessou Follow
6 mins
With her first novel, Osvalde Lewat, Cameroonian director and photographer, sets foot in the dish: she observes an elite where opportunism serves as a value, where being accused of being homosexual represents a social death sentence, and where being oneself is not obvious when one is a woman.
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From the first pages, a description of the funeral, the tone is set.
“
Honor, dignity, if we added peace, we had the Zambuena motto.
Grotesque.
Totally grotesque.
Elsewhere, we fought to push back death, here we spent our lives preparing for it.
Celebrating the dead was more imperative than caring for the living.
In the light of the agreed waste, we were respected, admired or despised
”.
Osvalde Lewat slips into the skin of the wife of the prefect of the capital of an imaginary country, the Zambuena.
With Katmé, her heroine, she plunges into the small arrangements of an elite who think only of herself, and the unwavering friendship that binds her to a high school friend, Samy, an artist.
Radioscopy of Central Africa
At first, the plot seems to serve as a pretext: a woman who has abandoned her teaching career is caught between the political ambitions of her prefect husband and the freedom of her friend Samy, whose works are critical of the to be able to. In hollow, it is a radioscopy of Cameroon which is offered to the reader, with the fine decryption, all in nuances and slices of life, of a system of presidency for life which ankyloses other societies of Central Africa.
The novel, from which pierces the strong personality of a woman corseted in spite of herself by the career of her husband, is filled with observations on the relationship with oneself and with one's environment. Katmé can not help handing out banknotes, wrapping them in the palm of her hand. She describes all the boredom felt in the face of the mannered futilities of a club of powerful ladies who are nothing but "
their husbands
'
growths
."
The political backdrop, which underlies the story, is both omnipresent and conveyed in a few lines, as obvious: “
At the start of the political protest (…), my father had graciously moved the premises of his company to the disposal of student protest movements and leaders of non-legalized parties.
A severe tax adjustment called him to order.
He took his card from the MPA and, with a party pin hanging from the lapel of his jacket, he fought with the zeal of the last converts the opponents of the Regime
”.
The diktat of social conveniences
Faced with the fate of her friend thrown in prison, accused of being homosexual, it is the dark side of the heroine, rather than of the country, that emerges: she has the courage to disguise herself to go see him as a prison - as the Cameroonian journalist Pius Njawé, patron of the
Messenger
, had done during his lifetime to visit an imprisoned opponent. But it is to urge him not to claim his homosexuality during his trial, so as not to tarnish his own reputation.
Over the course of the story, which gradually gains in intensity, the secondary characters gain depth. A half-breed dressed in an abacost from another age represents a large French public works company, and at first glance displays its coldness and arrogance. "
An asshole,
" says Katmé, before over the pages, he takes a completely different place.
How to be a free woman in a society that is not? The questioning does not stop there, and the central character reveals many of the questions that plague the author. Starting with the piles of compromises that await married women, conditioned to make marriage a “
support
”. From the first pages, the narrator indicates that she has no illusions about the double life of her husband, hoping in a more or less resigned way that he puts “
condoms with the others
”.
In this novel of female emancipation with tragic overtones, Osvalde Lewat explains delivering a look "
without concessions, but also a look of love and lucidity
" on the African societies she knows.
"
A slap in the face,
" said Jean-Marie Teno, Cameroonian filmmaker.
We come out indeed KO and edified, of this fiction which sounds like a true story.
► To read also:
Osvalde Lewat, Congolese night photographer
► To read also:
Mongo Béti: a great capacity for indignation
► To read also:
Going back to the birth of the desire to write, with the philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne
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