Fortunately, literary life is made up of discoveries! Here is a coming from Equatorial Guinea, a very short novel or long short story, published by the aptly named Passage (s) editions. We are first attracted by its title The Bastard, reminiscent of the famous novel by Violette Leduc, which narrowly missed the Goncourt in 1964, when it was released by Gallimard. One of the members had argued that we “cannot put this sulphurous book on the fireplace of a family”. Violette Leduc replied later: “I do not write for fireplaces, nor basically for families who have beautiful fireplaces. ”
Time has passed, but the novel by Trifonia Melibea Obono, the second of this journalist, political scientist, teacher and researcher born in 1982 in Equatorial Guinea, must shake up many ways of thinking if we judge by the contrast between thirst freedom of her heroine and the noose for women represented by the Fang society in which she makes her evolve. And if the literary quality is in no way comparable with the immense stylist admired by Beauvoir, this book shares at least two themes with that of its predecessor, bastardism, of course, but also homosexuality. Okomo (which means “motherless”) was raised by her grandparents, did not know her mother, who died while giving birth to her, and does not know her father either.
In search of the father
All the starting point is precisely the quest of the teenager who claims at least to know the name of her father. But there is a taboo here. His progenitor is denigrated. He is even forbidden to look any further. Only his uncle Marcelo could perhaps help him in his quest. But the latter is totally ostracized by the family. He is in fact said to be “fam e mina”, because he does not want “to associate with women or to reproduce”. He would have returned “perverted” from the Mitangan, the name given to the Spanish settlers and more generally to the Whites.
Okomo’s gaze is gradually opened up, as if to the rhythm of his steps; from his comings and goings from the village to the forest. She, who takes no pleasure in getting ready, putting on make-up, dressing herself, when she is 16 years old and has a future as a woman in the service of the patriarchate all outlined, will discover other pleasures alongside Marcelo’s friends. “The fang woman is born to reproduce,” says a fang proverb, but Okomo will learn from herself that there are other futures.
Training novel
In an interrogative tone and without frills, this training novel lets hear this young voice which seeks and seeks itself, and which, by its taste for freedom, undoubtedly inherited from its deceased mother, will get rid of the ukases. The subversive power, without appearing to be, of this African bastard is impressive. And alongside this trajectory, as if it were its symbol, the equatorial forest appears as the place of mystery, and of freedom. Quite the opposite of those huts where tradition stifles the indisputable hegemony of the grandfather, and where the grandmother struggles with her co-wife, a rival of 28 years her junior. This landscape of confinement reminds us of a day against violence against women, of the novel Impatientes, by Djaïli Amadouy Amal and to all these women who, through writing, tear down walls.
“The forest in my village was the only refuge for people who, like me, had no place in the Fang tradition: me, the child of a girl-mother. I, the bastard, the fang woman; I, the bastard, the child of a Fang girl-mother; me, the bastard, the lesbian ”.
We owe this translation to Anne-Laure Bonvalot, professor of Hispanic and comparative literature at the University of Nîmes, (read her interview with the author here) who herself has just signed the collection of short stories. Zebra to the same Passage (s) editions. She has not finished making us discover this Spanish-speaking pan of African literature.
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