CURIOUS MEN: Lost in the Congo, memoir without closure is more interesting!

CURIOUS MEN: Lost in the Congo
BOB KUNZINGER
Madville Publishing LLC (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An experienced adventurer partners with an innocent nineteen-year-old to plan a journey on the most dangerous river in the world.

What starts as one man's dream ends up as another man's nightmare. It was a time when pushing our limits knew no boundaries and being nineteen had no restrictions.

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My Review: Nightmares are, after all, dreams by definition.

When Bob, the author and Joe, the traveler, are dreaming up then planning this extreme journey...testing boundaries in that absurd male way, finding limits by crossing them seldom ends happily...they're consciously planning a story. Its plot is set in their minds, the story-logic will unfold as they intend because stories can be controlled.

Anyone who's ever written any fiction will now be laughing hollowly, their chest devoid of air or the ability to draw it in. They believe the world will obey the rules says the inner terrified parent who knows with bitter certainty that is not the case. Their plans leave room for that, the young ones blithely assure themselves and others. And my inner parent says "you can't plan for the unforseeable" while sweating anxiously, absolutely certain tragedy impends.

And befalls.

This novelistic memoir is the survivor's attempt to discover closure in disaster's aftermath. Bob Kunzinger now needs to make this all make sense, when it does not. He does not fall into the trap of excusing himself, or dismissing his vanished friend's responsibility for undertaking this journey. It's an old man's look back at the event that can not do other than bend his own survivor's life into a weird shape. It feels like therapy on the page, starting with several fantasies of how it should have or might have unfolded differently.

No one now an adult hasn't done that same memory dance. "If only..." is a poison when used indiscriminately, a medicine to poultice hurts if used to direct healing onto a survivor's guilt. I'm not Author Kunzinger, I don't know which this story is for him. For me it was the kind of read I look for in a memoir. It presents no fancy-work of "closure." It is, instead, the account of the testosterone-poisoned late (or arrested, in Joe's case) adolescent exceptionalism of male hubris.

Thinking one can plan for, control, the randomness of the world is the source of much grief. Ask Joe's parents. Testing boundaries and exceeding limits is a function of being a person in growth mode. Failure to cross some of these safely and successfully is called "growth." In coping with the aftermath of the fatal failure of Joe to solo-canoe down the Congo, Bob utterly and irrevocably changes the course of his life. No one, not Bob and certainly not the reader, can say what might have been would've been better or preferable or even possible...was this outcome inevitable, merely inescapable for any one of a myriad of reasons, or an unhappy accident?

Yes. Only without the conditional "or."

That's the source of my high rating for this compact, unresolved story, told by a man whose entire life was altered by his participation in a crazy dream of fame for a feat of endurance accomplished. Only when it wasn't accomplished someone was dead, and Bob Kunzinger has had to live on with his own participation in the fatal event unresolved in the absence of a body, a certainty of that death. In many ways it is more painful not to know how, what, when; imagination fills in the gaps as luridly as possible. Author Kunzinger's written multiple stories in his life after Joe vanished. I'd be amazed if any of them end the way this one does, open-ended and unresolved. It's bad storytelling to leave the ending unresolved.

Life couldn't give a fig about storytelling's rules. Author Kunzinger tells this open-ended story with compassion for the young men who did this stunningly stupid thing without excusing them, or exonerating himself, or blaming Joe or any of the other mental gymnastics I'm morally certain he went through over the years since Joe vanished. It's a really adult reckoning with an adolescent's questionable choices. I found it involving, and infuriating about them then, as well as compassionate for the over-sixty man who can never exonerate the youth who was complicit in this, expiate the harm his actions set in motion, or expunge the act itself from Life's unredactable records.

SIDDHARTH KARA'S PAGE: THE ZORG: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery; & COBALT RED: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

COBALT RED: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
SIDDHARTH KARA
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award.

An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation―and the moral implications that affect us all.

Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt.

Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.

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My Review: Remember King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa? More than a quarter-century later, that story of exploitation and abuse of human beings from the vilest era of European colonialism had no effect on the world. Handwringing and smug self-assurance that we would never, it can't happen again, are herewith disproved. We did; it did.

And not many of "us" care, or act like we care, or say or do anything to indicate to our corporate masters that we disapprove. After reading this book, maybe a few will take some time to hunt up contact details for their pad/laptop/cellphone manufacturer and let them know...

...

...well, it's pretty much useless to finish that sentence. Siddharth Kara writes his fingers to the bone, he goes hot miserable places, and he comes and tells us the impassioned truth about how our "clean" energy devices depend on the slave labor of millions...so does every plateful of food you eat...and we go full Joker mode...

...and move on.

After reading Author Kara's interviewee who interrupts him to finish the sentence, "...you work in horrible conditions..." with

"No, we work in our graves."

And you and I sit here and stare at our cobalt-powered screens.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE ZORG: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
SIDDHARTH KARA
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

FINALIST for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction! Winner announced 31 March 2026.

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

The Publisher Says: From Pulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red: A notorious slave ship incident that led to the abolition of slavery in the UK and sparked the US abolitionist movement

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning “care”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.

After reaching Africa, the Zorg was captured by a privateer and came under British command. With a new captain and crew, the ship was crammed with 442 slaves and departed in 1781 for Jamaica. But a series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course and running out of water. So a proposition was put forth: Save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves—by throwing dozens of people, starting with women and children, overboard.

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history—sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States.

Siddharth Kara utilizes primary-source research, gripping storytelling, and painstaking investigation to uncover the Zorg’s journey, the lives and fates of the slaves on board, and the mysterious identity of the abolitionist who finally revealed the truth of what happened on the ship.

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My Review: Whistleblowers are reviled by the greedy capitalists because they interfere with the satiation of the actually evil levels of greed that propel acts like these in the book.

There is a reason y'all's religions, one and all, condemn greed. Not that it ever has the tiniest effect on most "religious" people's behavior, nor the behavior of those who claim they work for the common good, nor really any other human being I've ever known. Yes, before some annoying twidgee says it, I include myself.

Like Cobalt Red (q.v.), Author Kara knows exactly what will give you nightmares, and deploys that thing in search of your conscience. It's history, not current events, I hear you echoing my bleat of self-justification. Back to Cobalt Red you should go.

The relief from guilt is the sheer outrageousness of the court case fought over this murderous event. It's something that I definitely see making a huge splash in the press of the day. It would be a Frontline documentary today. In any event, it is historical record, so there is no escaping the ugly truth:
We have known the facts of slavery for generations and done the bare minimum to end it, more to ameliorate our feelings of greed and guilt than because we see the enslaved as real people.

Sleep tight.

ALAIN MABANCKOU'S PAGE: DEALING WITH THE DEAD: A Novel, return to Pointe-Noire in fantasyland

DEALING WITH THE DEAD: A Novel
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.99 all editions, preorder now for delivery 16 September 2025

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From one of Africa’s greatest living writers, a ghostly reckoning with Congolese history

One day in the Congolese town of Pointe-Noire, Liwa Ekimakingaï wakes to find himself in a cemetery where, three days earlier, he had been buried at the age of twenty-two in a pair of flared purple trousers in which he is now trapped forever. All around him are the other residents of the cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death to share.

Bewildered by his predicament and unwilling to relinquish his tender bond with his devoted grandmother, Liwa makes his way back home to see her one last time, against all spectral advice. As he does, disturbing rumors swirl together with Liwa’s jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to try and solve the mystery of his own untimely demise.

Sure to appeal to readers of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Dealing with the Dead is an exuberant, phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community, and forces beyond human control and a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the most-recognized chroniclers of modern Central Africa.

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My Review: As Pointe-Noire enters my awareness more and more, I realize why Author Mabanckou focuses his storytelling in this fictionalized hometown. He works inside a head that, like all of us, was intensely of a very specific time and place, now gone; he uses it with delicacy to cast its shadows broadly; and he knows it so well to know how it maps onto the world.

Liwa's journey in a fantasy afterlife is aptly compared to Lincoln in the Bardo above. It resembles that story in that it assumes an afterlife, or a between phase between death and nothingness more precisely, in which a soul may wander to seek answers. I myownself found, for one of the few times ever, the use of second-person narration for Liwa's PoV to be very effective. It truly works because it points up the here-but-not-here nature of a dead narrator. However much I doubt this space exists on some immaterial plane, that is not how it is used in this story. Liwa's self is not dead yet, and is surrounded by other not-dead-yet folk (whose narratives are all presented in third person, blessèdly sidestepping that twee trap) who populate his spectral graveyard. He needs to finish something before he can pass into whatever comes next. The other dead folk discourage him, but he does it anyway.

They are right, of course, because he can't prevent his grandmother from feeling her feelings and, as he begins to process his jumbled, violent last memories to solve for himself why he is dead at only twenty-four, the answers are deeply, well, upsetting and traumatizing...as I expect anyone dead at twenty-four would find them, no matter what the reasons were.

It is in the use of a fantasy world, one magical and tailored to Liwa's exact needs, that the story works its universalizing magic. As Liwa moves through his graveyard peers, he listens to their various tales and discovers his own. "Once you've been laid in the earth, time will start to do its work, and for all their good intentions, the people who knew you will gradually forget, till one dry season comes when not a soul ventures forth to your tomb." The truncated youth is only going to fade from others' lives. It is best to let go sooner rather than later; learning too much about your death won't make Death better.

I was very taken with the way this fantasy world was populated by persons previously alive as well as personifications of cultural great ones, like Black Mamba, the big boss of the dead. I totally got Liwa's inability to let go of the need to know what happened to himself, and his disgusted outrage at the facts around his death. It is Author Mabanckou's writing career to bring to light the consequences of blind superstition, greed, and amoral indifference to others' suffering. In this vivid, intense narrative of those consequences for one young purple-trousered ghost/entity, he shakes a well-informed finger in our readerly faces.

Of my three Mabanckou reads, this one is the standout, and the one I'd encourage you all to read.

ALAIN MABANCKOU'S PAGE: THE LIGHTS OF POINTE-NOIRE, a memoir of home going; & BLACK MOSES, multiple legends remixed

THE LIGHTS OF POINTE-NOIRE
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling meditation on home-coming and belonging from one of "Africa's greatest writers" (The Guardian) and the Man Booker International Prize finalist and Grand Prize Winner at the 2015 French Voices Awards

Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When he finally came back to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on the Congo's southwestern coast, he found a country that in some ways had changed beyond recognition: The cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture had become a Pentecostal church, and his secondary school has been renamed in honor of a previously despised colonial ruler.

But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture that still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Now a decorated writer and an esteemed professor at UCLA, Mabanckou finds he can only look on as an outsider in the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother, and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to the Republic of the Congo, his work recalls the writing of V. S. Naipaul and André Aciman, offering a startlingly fresh perspective on the pain of exile, the ghosts of memory, and the paths we take back home.

"This is a beautiful book, the past hauntingly reentered, the present truthfully faced, and the translation rises gorgeously to the challenge." —Salman Rushdie

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My Review: "You can't go home again," in the truly deathless formulation of justly neglected writer Thomas Wolfe. It is the reason the memoir exists. Humans need frameworks, limits on their sense of their life. Our brains are pattern-making and storytelling machines. It's a survival tactic..."is that weird shadow a tree in the moonlight or a predator?" kept your ancestors alive. Author Mabanckou, not a lot younger than I am, felt the need to reckon with Home in a story. Well, what do you expect from a prolific novelist and poet who makes his living from teaching UCLA students about literature?

In just about two hundred pages, he tells us the story of his two-week return to Pointe-Noire, left twenty-five years ago so of course much changed. In the course of returning, the emigrant/exile/fugitive from home will notice the many changes time has wrought. I expect almost all of us, whether we left our hometowns or home countries or not, can relate to the "OMG the old {thing} is now {opposite thing}!" internal conversation. Not that many of us use that near-universal experience to relive and explain our upbringing to others. Author Mabanckou tells us of his family, how they moved to the city of Pointe-Noire on the Congolese coast from a small village in pursuit of safety and opportuunity. The manner of family order is something US families could definitely learn from. No child is more attended to, more broadly exposed to the worldviews of others, than those raised as he was in his mother's extended family. The family moved, not just his mother and stepfather, so she was not stranded in a new city, left to her own devices to raise and support her child.

Compare and contrast, y'all.

Thinking back to my childhood, when we hid in the lantana fields near the Agostinho Neto airport and hunted iridescent beetles or fished for minnows from the banks of the River Tchinouka, I replied to my friend, with his "Parisian Negro" arrogance:

"These children aren’t in a paradise of poverty. Here, look at the photo: that tire, those flip-flops…that’s what makes them happy…flip-flops to walk in, the tire they can all climb aboard like a motorbike big enough to carry all their wildest dreams. Every day my nephews and nieces walk out in a long line down the rue du Louboulou. Their childhood knits them together, they wouldn’t swap it for all the world. They drink from a small glass, but it’s their own. Your glass is big, but it’s not yours, and each time you want to drink from it, you have to ask for permission."

Growing up in a time and place where your assumptions are formed in a conversation with the assumptions of others, all of whom possess a stake in your life, is a beginning to be envied, to be emulated; it results in a less monadic, less greedy, less needy life as an adult. Author Mabanckou has lived in Europe and the US for decades, he knows the issues and differences that monadic living brings because he was raised outside them.

Thinking of home as he returns to the place where it was allows him to give us twenty-five separate récits we'll agree to call chapters. In his head with him, we look into his past with a fond eye, seeing ghosts of places and of lives we once fully filled but now can't do more than tell stories to an audience about. It's part of getting old. It's part of defining yourself for yourself. it's part of accepting what some simply can not: Some of us are outsiders by nature. Author Mabanckou, in leaving Pointe-Noire then returning after a life away from it, embraced the outsider role. Many of the best storytellers do.

What struck me forcibly was the absence of any explanation, or hint of a reason, why he did not go home for a quarter-century. I thought it might have to do with the familial expectations that this "rich" relative would be able to (and willing to) give them a lot of material security. The way he navigated expectations and demands is the matter of the second half of the book. It was perhaps more important to Author Mabanckou than to me, but it was not a very involving way to end a very short tale in my opinion.

Hence the lack of a fifth star for this very well-written, very interesting story.

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BLACK MOSES
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017

It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But over at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of terror of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, the institution's corrupt director.

So Moses escapes to Pointe-Noire, where he finds a home with a larcenous band of Congolese Merry Men and among the Zairian prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. But the authorities won't leave Moses in peace, and intervene to chase both the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls out of town. All this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. Could he really be the Robin Hood of the Congo? Or is he just losing his marbles?

Black Moses is a larger-than-life comic tale of a young man obsessed with helping the helpless in an unjust world. It is also a vital new extension of Mabanckou's extraordinary, interlinked body of work dedicated to his native Congo, and confirms his status as one of our great storytellers.

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My Review: Congolese Oliver Twist-cum-Count of Monte Cristo tale of life's many injustices, prejudices, and petty grudges.

It all began when I was a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I' d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. A long name, which in Lingala means: "Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors" as it still inscribed on my birth certificate today.

Moses begins his tale in the truly out-Dickensing Dickens orphanage where tribal violence has landed him. Growing weary of life under the ever-more-crushing thumb of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako (whose first name is the bitterly ironic French for "God's Gift") he makes his escape to the big city of Pointe-Noire (see memoir above for its first appearance here). The reasons Moses, who hates his name, runs away is to escape Dieudonné's revolutionary Marxist-Leninist insistence that people are machines to be programmed, not souls to be nurtured; and thus need no kindness or guidance but just rote training. Where better to demonstrate the effectiveness of this than an orphanage?

Shedding his awful life and assuming a new name, "Black Pepper," does not stop Moses' apparent destiny from hounding him. Throughout this short...under two hundred pages...novel (maybe a novella, but a fairly borderline case if so), he is hounded by Dieudonné and his cadres. It cannot be allowed for someone to resist the Revolution! Isn't it funny how very much the high-control cultures of religion and revolution resemble each other? Almost like they're really the same thing, only in different suits.

The major issue in reading about Moses is that he spends at least half the book in Dieudonné's clutches being tormented, then after escaping (with his twin tormentors, having survived their hazing and gained their respect thereby), we get less of his Pointe-Noire exploits than necessary for us to invest in him as a full character before he unravels psychologically (surprise! not) and we get a cursory account of that causal event. His healing journey takes him through folk medicine to Western psychiatry, both getting deeply disrespectful narrative treatment.

Animal harm is done. Be warned.

The parable in all this appears to me to be the Dickensian nature of the revolution against the horrors of colonialism. We follow the hapless chaff that is Moses/Pepper as the forces of Control use their notable supply of zeal to oppress and destroy what resists their efforts finally succeeds. It is short, so perhaps there was too much story for too few pages...? I'll read Author Mabanckou's writing as translated by Helen Stevenson for a lot longer than this took.

A story that resonates in times gone fascist more than when I first read it in 2017.

TRAM 83, a Congolese poet's grenade of a debut novel & THE RIVER IN THE BELLY, collection of his translated poetry

TRAM 83
FISTON MWANZA MUJILA (tr. Roland Glasser)
Deep Vellum
$10.00 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Two friends, one a budding writer home from Europe, the other an ambitious racketeer, meet in the only nightclub, the Tram 83, in a war-torn city-state in secession, surrounded by profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities. Tram 83 plunges the reader into the modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic, using jazz rhythms to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village.

Fiston Mwanza Mujila (b. 1981, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo) is a poet, dramatist, and scholar. Tram 83 is his award-winning and raved-about debut novel that caused a literary sensation when published in France in August 2014.


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My Review: Many people have spoken to the poetic nature of this book's text. I agree, in both the good sense...the author's (and crucially the translator's) ear for the heightened meanings of words used in poetry is always adding a bass line to this melody...and the bad, that being the obfuscatory and often obscurantist requirement for the reader to unpack subtexts and discover new senses for familiar words while mid-read.

The City-State is one of those territories that have already broken through the barrier of internal suffering. You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same trains, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise, like a ship, you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed, the route marked out in advance. Fate sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiler merchandise and the dying.

It's not an impossible task. It's often uncomfortable, and it's always a way of slowing the reader down. That isn't always a bad thing. It can feel sort of like the author is being pedantic, the repetition of variants on "You have the time?" is my favorite example. The time to disport yourself with a prostitute. The time to listen to a song. The time as spending, a transaction, an exchange of money for value or attention for money; the issue at hand isn't that it's hard to do this work but that it's required. Read cold, flat, without investment other than decoding, there is no through-line of story to receive. It is a list of lists, a repetition of phrases and names and all strung on a thin cord of criticism for capitalist society's multi-level destruction of the characters. That isn't a terribly satisfying read; and the fact that it is in itself a sharp critique of the mental laziness of many readers is a bit off-putting.

The Northern Station was going to the dogs. It was essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that called to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches, bakeries, and noise engineered by men of all generations and nationalities combined. It was the only place on earth you could hang yourself, defecate, blaspheme, fall into infatuation, and thieve without regard to prying eyes.

So much is inside the world of Tram 83 that it can feel as overwhelming as a physical trip to Africa does to many Westerners. For the whitest among us, the experience of being a vanishingly small minority is so unsettling as to be agony. For that reason I want many many US whites to read it; I recognize the futility of that wish but am stubbornly advocating it. It's the end of 2020. The world has changed because of COVID-19. It is long past time people with our First-World privilege, regular garbage pick-up and grocery stores and paved roads, heard about the reality of the rest of the world in their own words.

Eyes shrivelled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We’re doing this to pay for our studies. Dad’s already gone with the locomotives. He doesn’t write no more. Mom’s sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we’re sorcerers and it’s because of that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from our mom and that we should go to see the preachers who will cut the links by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying round at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town.

They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.

What I want from white people like me reading this thunderflash of words, this uncappable well of natural story-gas, is that we stop and do the work of being in fellowship with the world that isn't like us. Because that surface difference, as this intense and unmissable read says and shows, means nothing against the deepest human need of all: To connect and commune with Humanity. As cheesy as that sounds, this really is the take-away I hope you'll have when you spend a day immersed in Tram 83.

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THE RIVER IN THE BELLY
FISTON MWANZA MUJILA (tr. J. Bret Maney)
Deep Vellum Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A moving lyric meditation on the Congo River that explores the identity, chaos, and wonder of the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as race and the detritus of colonialism.

With The River in the Belly, award-winning Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila seeks no less than to reinitiate the Congo River in the imaginary of European languages. Through his invention of the “solitude”—a short poetic form lending itself to searing observation and troubled humor, prone to unexpected tonal shifts and lyrical u-turns—the collection celebrates, caresses, and chastises Central Africa’s great river, the world’s second largest by discharge volume.

Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Soviet history, Congolese popular music, international jazz, and everyday life in European exile, Mwanza Mujila has fashioned a work that can speak to the extraordinary hopes and tragedies of post-independence Democratic Republic of the Congo while also mining the generative yet embattled subject position of the African diasporic writer in Europe longing for home.

Fans of Tram 83 will rediscover in River the incandescent, improvisatory verbal energy that so dazzled them in Mwanza Mujila’s English-language debut.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I enjoyed Tram 83 a good deal more than most of my friends (see my almost-4-star review above); it's a successful read for me because it has an energy that makes me want to keep reading the words. That was also what I got out of this collection of poems. I think the overall likelihood of my agreeing with most anyone on matters poetical isn't high. What I will say is that I read the collection here without dramatic snorts or theatrical eyerolls. The one time I found myself thinking "oh, really?" was in the description above...the author's "invented solitudes"...when I thought, "someone hasn't met Henry Dumas's "Kef 24" and its fellow kefs. This is one frequent problem I experience with poetry. People either think I'm a know-it-all or an ignoramus because I make connections like this and, being poetry types, are not in the least reluctant to say something insulting or scathing either way. Tiresome sorts.

Anyway, this collection. I don't think it will hit right with formalists, who overlap pretty far with monoglot English speakers among my own acquaintances. There are, in Author Mujila's work, words and ideas that can't be translated into an English word; there are times when those words and phrases aren't obvious to the not-Congolese reader. Some patient Googling, a bit of contemplative cogitation, or simply moving on will solve most of these problems. I encourage the reader whose eyes just rolled to give the read a try...it's a shame not to become a more informed, better equipped reader for lack of mere exposure.

Author Mujila also isn't reluctant to use sexual imagery or crudely physical imagery. If you flinch at describing male fowl as "cocks," you really need not pick this book up. The idea of a river as entrails, with dysentery, gives you the primmylip purseymouths? Horseman, pass by. One of the greater pleasures, to my mind, of reading translated work from other cultures is the opportunity to learn what *their* boundaries are, what sets a word or idea apart as transgressive in their world-view. I got a very great deal out of reading this collection; I am not an eager seeker of experiences poetical; and I think that means many, if not most, of y'all could get a lot out of the read as well.