In the quest to find books from the Democratic Republic of the Congo for my reading journey around the world, I stumbled across The Laughing Cry by Henri Lopes, translated into English by Gerald Moore. The author was born in Kinshasa but ended up living in the Republic of the Congo, so the book might not count for my project.
It's a relevant, skeptical look – written in a post-modern, self-reflexive style narrated by a fictional maitre-d'-turned-butler at the dictator's palace ... but the butler's narrative is interrupted by the dictator's musings, as well as a former high-level government secretary's feedback on the butlers fictional script – at postcolonial African government leaders.
The archvillain of the novel is perhaps the dictator, Bwakamabé Na Sakkadé. He deposes the last leader, Polépolé. Afterward he wallows in the luxuries of an (arguably unearned) leadership role in a manner like that of the current US president, although it's clear that in comparison to the rich history of authoritarianism the Trump administration is still leaving unexplored a time-honoured spectrum of possible gruesome excesses.
I say that 'perhaps the dictator' is the arch villain, because the self-aggrandizing Sakkadé seems a foolish figure as much as a villainous one. Besides it is not clear that there is a hero. The whole cast of characters, including the philandering narrator, French diplomats, and the young intellectual dissidents who are clear-eyed about the regime but less clear-eyed about the alternatives, is morally ambiguous.
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| Front cover of The Laughing Cry (1982) From the English edition's publisher: Readers International |
As Lopes was writing in the early 1980s, the diplomatic challenges of heads of state are those of the late Cold War: the dictator and his opposition appeal alternately to their former Western colonizers (the "Uncles"), or to the Soviet Union. Flashbacks scattered amongst the plot and character intrigues recall French colonial history, in particular. For example, Algeria's war of independence is not long past. The dictator is of the generation that fought for France in World War II, and the war in then-French Indochina.
Lopes himself was Prime Minister of then-Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s. So the milieu he is picking apart in The Laughing Cry (in the original French: Le Pleurer-Rire) is, surprisingly, the milieu in which he once played the leading role.
The Laughing Cry is thematically similar to NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory – which is still on my currently-reading list.
