"If people accuse me of speaking too much about myself, I blame them for not thinking about themselves at all." This statement by the great moralist Montaigne could be found today in Adeline Dieudonné's monologue "Bonobo Moussaka" , which was finally available in German translation recently. It was written in 2017, but it was not until the success of her debut novel “The Real Life” - fourteen literary prizes, translations into twenty languages - that we got to know the author as a playwright.
And what a playwright she is: In a linguistic tour de force, hard to beat in terms of breathlessness and dryness, wit, lacony and melancholy, her character, a single mother of two children, tells of a Christmas dinner with her cousin - and at the same time of all the virulent topics of our day, in a setting that is reminiscent of the great social satires of Luis Buñuel: “I was born in the early eighties.
And we've been in a crisis since I was born.
I have never seen people pop their champagne corks and cheer: Whew, the crisis is over! "
Packed like in a Tupperware box
Dieudonné's figure touches on the big issues from the refugee crisis to the austerity policy to “Fridays for Future” as well as the apparently small ones that are there: the alpha behavior of the men present, whom she describes as ridiculous Rottweilers, and the neglect of wealthy families who have everything except what is called luck or happiness.
“Why did I just accept this invitation?” She asks herself over and over again in order to discover her Montaigne moment: to discover herself by observing the others and to review her life. This culminates in the memory of her French lessons at school and contains the explanation for the somewhat strange title of the monologue: “Nature is cruel. Especially to teenagers. She floods her nervous system with sex hormones while her intellectual abilities stay at the level of a bonobo ready to mate. You're in class, supposed to be working on integral calculus and the rules of derivation, and your orbitofrontal cortex only thinks about fucking. A woman can of course feel lust, after all, she is not a dried up old maid, but her lust has to be kept under lock and key.Airtight and leak-proof packed like in a Tupperware box. And just as big as a portion of moussaka. "
A one woman show
Sina de Malafosse has translated this monologue in a pointed manner, and in German it finds equivalents for the French lightness of Dieudonné's language.
This alternates between a gesture that is reminiscent of stand-up comedy, but also flashes poetic images that show the great sadness, the isolation, the almost solipsistic perception of the narrator.
Dieudonné, born in 1982 in Brussels, where she lives again today with her two daughters, wrote the text for herself and was successful on tour with it, a one-woman show, so to speak. In the apparently small form, the reduction of the narration of the cruel in everyday life, there is a great power that hits the viewer directly. We only know it today in such quality and wonderful audacity from Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her solo piece “Fleabag”, from which the series of the same name originated.
“Dasreal Leben” was published in 2018 and was a literary sensation: a novel about a ten-year-old girl who rebels against her fascist father and takes refuge in a fantasy world to save herself and her brother, a socially emancipatory fairy tale full of brutality and radicalism . The translation of her new novel “Kérozène”, which was published in France this year, will hopefully follow soon. The German premiere of “Bonobo Moussaka” is to be expected even more eagerly, and then hopefully a new play soon. Because we need the literature of this modern French moralist because, as the monologue says, we all deal with "the designer sofas, the Nutella advertising, the defective cylinder head gaskets, the steel barons of this world, the idiots from the IMF and the ECB,the neo-Nazis and the children who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea ”.