The Silence of the Spirits. Wilfried N'Sondé

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СКАЧАТЬ decision to extend a helping hand to Nzila, to provide him with a place to stay, a shelter, serves to address broader societal circumstances. In 2009, and therefore at the time of writing The Silence of the Spirits, the question of providing assistance to sans-papiers and refugees was being reviewed in the French parliament and was a hotly debated and divisive issue. Already back in 2003, several campaigns had been launched against laws that defined the degree to which individuals, associations, or organizations could provide assistance or help to illegal or undocumented foreigners, according to which “anyone who, directly or indirectly, helps, facilitates or tries to facilitate the entry, the circulation or the unlawful residence of a foreigner in France” could be subject to prosecution. Thus, in the face of increased government control and restrictions over immigration and the accompanying debasing and dehumanizing logic shaping such initiatives and measures, a term was adopted to designate those attempts at criminalizing such efforts, namely a délit d’hospitalité, or “offense of solidarity.” N’Sondé’s staging of hospitality, of the precarious position in which such choices place citizens, and the criminalizing of the implied intimacy, therefore shapes much of the narrative.

In the eighteenth century, in the famous Encyclopédie, one could read under the entry for “hospitality” that “I define this virtue as a liberality exercised towards foreigners, especially if one receives them into one’s home: the just measure of this type of beneficence depends on what contributes the most to the great end that men must have as a goal, namely reciprocal help, fidelity, exchange between various states, concord, and the duties of the members of a shared civil society.”⁶ Christelle’s predisposition to care for others professionally may therefore be commendable, “Sentimental by nature, Christelle was always sensitive to those who cried out and asked for help,” but her decision to extend this hospitality into the private realm ends up being very much at odds with the broader inhospitable environment in France. This is especially true when one considers, as the novel does, the prevailing actions of the authorities and their representatives, eager to demonstrate their effectiveness at enforcing and protecting a social order that has grown intolerant and suspicious of outsiders and elected to embrace racial profiling, police controls, and ID checks.

From a much longer colonial and postcolonial history—defined by interconnections, neocolonial policies, globalization—two individuals, abandoned, orphaned, unwanted, rejected, and even cursed, somehow find refuge, the courage to risk intimacy. “I was so proud that she’d chosen me,” Nzila shares with the reader. “We were slipping into the craziness of love. Christelle and me, we’d connected. She’d brought me into her universe. Her words gave me hope and enveloped me in an aura of light in the solitary night.” As Karen Lindo has shown, “The physical abandon in which they give themselves over to the pleasures of the body enables the couple to take refuge, however short-lived, from the abuse that has heretofore marked their individual trajectories.”⁷ However, as Lindo goes on to ask, “Who are the young characters that people N’Sondé’s novels? What are their values and how does this heterogeneous population manifest its sufferings and its aspirations?”⁸ Nzila has been driven out of his native village, moved up from street urchin to a role in an “army” in which his zealous engagement has provided him for a while with a distorted sense of meaning and even an identity. He may now appear on a Paris commuter train as a frightened, vulnerable migrant, but “I was dragging my disaster along with me like a ball and chain. Impossible for me to turn my back on the past and make that big break and advance toward new possibilities, the hope for a life of stars, happiness.” N’Sondé’s novel therefore provides, through the safe haven Christelle offers, a space in which his story can be recounted, the violent atrocities accounted for and named, such that the process of historical reckoning can begin: “I’d have given anything to forget and for her to never know what I’d really done. Her eyes beseeched me. Couldn’t she simply think about the present and build a future with me? Christelle wanted to know everything, every last detail of that period of my life, the truth. I was asking her to appreciate the new man that she was going to make of me, but the questions were going around in her mouth, in her eyes, kept cascading down!”

N’Sondé demands our presence as readers and listeners, enlists us in the broader process of testimony. How will Christelle react, what is at stake in assuming responsibility, acknowledging transgression, and how will we, as readers, position ourselves? How can a relationship survive confession? What are the limits of empathy, of forgiveness? How does one archive knowledge, restore humanity, and ultimately achieve reconciliation? N’Sondé thus presents us with two societies that continue to struggle with the process of fostering inclusive modes of coexistence, and in which violence and ethnic and identity conflict persist. As Myriam Louviot has argued, N’Sondé’s work confronts the “translinguistic and cultural dimension of postcolonial problems,” and “much could be gained from comparing the writings of authors such as Wilfried N’Sondé with those of other European migrants.”⁹ Indeed, from his own experiences, N’Sondé has written of how he “realized that the decision to come to Germany had allowed me to finally distance myself from a kind of hexagonal schizophrenia: that of being at once a French citizen whose equal rights were clearly and loudly affirmed but yet whose skin color gave rise to such great rants and ravings that I became increasingly skeptical of what was still being taught at university. Only too accustomed to police checks and the standard disregard for formalities and the patronizing use of the familiar ‘tu’, I quickly had to learn to answer their stupid questions and accept the humiliation if only to avoid a more serious incident. I soon came to realize that this recurrent police harassment was inversely proportionate to the whiteness of one’s complexion.”¹⁰ In a country in which the “Frenchness” of non-white individuals has today, once again, become suspect, and the eventuality of stripping “bi-nationals” of their “French” nationality been invoked, Salman Rushdie’s notion of “double unbelonging” has gained additional credence.¹¹

The passage, path, or way to the other requires courage, a sense of adventure, but primarily moral imagination. N’Sondé’s poetic musicality is enchanting but also disquieting, haunting, and unsettling. In the words of the great South African writer Antjie Krog, “To be vulnerable is to be fully human. It’s the only way you can bleed into other people.”¹²

      BIBLIOGRAPHY

      Baudoin, Charles. Suggestion and Autosuggestion: A Psychological and Pedagogical Study Based on the Investigations Made by the New Nancy School. Translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1921.

      Bragard, Véronique. “Parisian Alternative Cartographies: Meandering the Ambivalent Banlieue in Wilfried N’Sondé’s Fiction.” In Metropolitan Mosaics and Melting-Pots: Paris and Montreal in Francophone Literatures, edited by Pascale De Souza and Adlai Murdoch, 135–155. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

      Jaucourt, Chevalier Louis de. “Hospitality.” In The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Sophie Bourgault. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0002.761 (accessed April 14, 2016). Originally published as “Hospitalité,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, volume 8, 314 (Paris, 1765).

      Lindo, Karen. “N’Sondé Post-2005 Youth Mural: Exploring Afro-Europe in Wilfried N’Sondé’s Literary Landscape.” In Afroeuropean Cartographies, edited by Dominic Thomas, 112–131. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

      Louviot, Myriam. “Parcours d’un roman postcolonial francophone en France et en Allemagne: Le Cœur des enfants léopards de Wilfried N’Sondé.” Trajectoires, December 15, 2010, http://trajectoires.revues.org/589.

      N’Sondé, СКАЧАТЬ