Writing paths
Descent into hell at Camp Boiro, with Tierno Monénembo
Audio 03:50
The writer Tierno Monénembo, winner of the Renaudot prize for his book "Le roi de Kahel", in December 2008. © AFP/MYCHELE DANIAU
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
8 mins
The Guinean Tierno Monenembo is one of the great African novelists.
Writer committed against the dictatorship and political mismanagement in his country, he lived in exile for a long time, before returning home in 2012. He is the author of fourteen novels, the last of which entitled
Saharienne indigo
, which tells the story of the living and the dead. in the Sékou Touré concentration camp.
It was published in January, by Editions du Seuil.
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“
I wrote to say 'shit' to this shitty life, need for revolt…
”.
This need for revolt evoked by the Guinean writer Tierno Monénembo at the microphone of RFI, is at the origin of his new novel
Saharienne Indigo
, published at the beginning of the year.
This fourteenth novel from the pen of this great "master of speech" from Conakry opens with a poignant cover page highlighting the names of some twenty victims of the Sékou Touré dictatorship.
Say "
shit
" to a dictator who has led the country down the "
road to hell
".
The novel more particularly resurrects the hell that was Camp Boiro, the concentration camp erected by the Sékou Touré regime and where nearly 50,000 opponents were interrogated, tortured and exterminated during twenty years of the reign of the sinister dictator. memory.
B like Boiro
The story of Camp Boiro is as much a part of the turbulent history of Guinean independence as September 28, 1958, the day Guinea said no to the referendum organized by De Gaulle's France, Monénembo argues.
Politically very committed, the writer recently denounced in unequivocal terms the decision of the new Guinean regime to rehabilitate Sékou Touré by giving the name of the dictator to Conakry airport.
The novelist said that the idea of returning through the imagination to the barbarism of the Sékou Touré years had been in his head since 2012, when he returned to settle in his native country, after forty long years of exile.
But very quickly the question arose of knowing how to tell about torture and repression because barbarism "
does not show off, it hides
", in the words of the author.
More precisely, what role should the novelist play in the face of the tragedies of history, asks the author.
To be satisfied with recording the facts and the testimonies, in the same way as the historian?
For Tierno Monénembo, “
the role of the novelist is to reinvent history.
You know, I wrote a novel about the Rwandan genocide.
I didn't recount the machete blows, the haemoglobins… I talked about before and after the genocide rather than during the genocide.
You don't have to tell the story, you have to tell the story.
You have to tell.
You have to make history into a beautiful legend, even when it's rotten.
No hate.
Anger, beauty.
Beauty is called to turn the world upside down, said Dostoyevsky
.
Unforgettable female figures
In the novel in question, this beauty destined to turn the world upside down is embodied by two unforgettable female figures, traumatized by life, but at the same time inhabited by a breathtaking vitality which enables them to sustain and announce new dawns.
The first, Véronique Bangoura, is a Guinean in her forties, and the second Madame Corre, a Frenchwoman, older, eccentric as one might wish.
Both Parisians, they meet in front of a pastry shop on rue Monge in incredible conditions.
They get to know each other, before discovering, along the way, that they have a lot in common.
Above all, they have in common the Guinea of Sékou Touré, the origin of the misfortunes and tragedies that they carefully hide behind their appearances, that of an immigrant nurse, for the Guinean, pushing a wheelchair through the 5th arrondissement of Paris, and that of a so-called fortune teller, half hippie, half upper class woman, for Madame Corre.
In her carefree youth, she had known Guinea well, where she left a husband put to death before her eyes and a half-breed child requisitioned by the regime.
Indigo safari jacket © Seuil
Saharienne indigo
opens with the crazy night when the fate of the heroine of the story, Véronique Bangoura, changes when she flees her parents' house by jumping from the balcony.
She had just killed her policeman father who had raped her.
It was from the mouth of the secret agent, dressed in an indigo safari jacket, who had shadowed her following the murder, that the young girl, then aged 15, learned the secret of her origins.
She was born in Camp Boiro where her real parents had been interned and then murdered.
The man she had just stabbed to death was not her real father, but a guard at Camp Boiro who had adopted her to death from her parents.
These revelations will not be unrelated to the headlong rush of the young Véronique Bangoura, whose journey strewn with pitfalls which takes her from Guinea to Europe, is told here with a lively sense of drama and twists and turns.
We are in a tale where the protagonist must tame monsters in order to reconnect with his destiny.
At the same time, as revelations about the true identity of the two protagonists emerge, a whole little-known part of post-independence Guinean history emerges.
It is with a masterful hand that Tierno Monenembo leads the plot, leading his readers between Paris and Conakry, between past and present.
The novel is also characterized by its choice to give voice to women, who here embody the tragic history of the Guinean people.
“
Since my debut, the woman has been an essential voice in my novels.
This time, I chose to make a strong female voice heard again, that of Véronique Bangoura, a Guinean.
The word "Guinea" means woman in the Soussou language.
Our country is a woman.
For all these reasons, I wanted to change the title of the book.
Saharienne indigo
was imposed on me by the publisher.
Me, I had proposed
Life and death of Véronique Bangoura
, or at the limit
Véronique Bangoura
all alone, like
Thérèse Desqueyroux, Anna Karénine
or
Madame Bovary.
I was a lot, not inspired, but I referred to Madame Bovary as a body, as a thought, as a desire, as a frustration.
»
Tierno Monénembo could no doubt also have cited the Algerian Kateb Yacine whose very lyrical
Nedmja
was, according to the author's own words, the real model for his novel
Saharienne indigo
.
Like Nedjma, who is the symbol of Algeria, Véronique Bangoura here represents the metaphor of Guinean destiny.
A man sewn with white threads
This Guinean destiny, Tierno Monenembo has long contemplated it from a distance, having fled his country in 1969, at the age of 23.
It was in exile that he began to write and published his first novel
Les Crapauds-brousse
in 1979. A particularly prolific writer, he now has to his credit a rich body of work in fourteen novels, several of which have won prizes prestigious prizes: Grand Prix of Black Africa, Renaudot.
His novels give a large place to nostalgia, to exile, but also to social criticism and history.
Torn between the untraceable house and the world, the fiction of the Guinean takes its readers on a journey through countries, ideas and obsessions, loudly claiming the values of plurality and the creative chaos of renewal.
It is undoubtedly this attachment to plurality which leads the novelist to qualify himself as a "
man of ruptures
" "
I was born in Guinea
, he continues,
I lived in Senegal, in Côte d'Ivoire, in France , in Algeria, in Morocco, in the United States, in Canada.
I am a man sewn with white thread.
My life has no coherence, my work has no coherence either.
The writer is a lost man, necessarily.
We write when we are completely lost.
It's when you haven't understood anything about life that you write.
He who has understood something about life, he lives it as it is stupidly defined.
The writer asks questions.
Because the question is intoxication.
The question is a danger, it is the open door to the abyss…
”
Readers of Tierno Monénembo willingly follow him in his intoxication and his abysses.
Because how not to let oneself be carried away by the grace and the power of this writing which consoles us for the disorder of existence and the fury of the world that the Guinean deploys throughout his epic stories of a bruised and defeated humanity?
Indigo safari jacket
, by Tierno Monénembo.
Editions du Seuil, 331 pages, 2O euros.
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Tierno Monenembo, Guinean writer, Renaudot Prize 2008