Liwa Ekimakingaï sits atop his grave, having been hurled there by a cyclone that sucked him out of the earth. At only 24-years-old, and wearing an orange crepe jacket, fluorescent-green shirt and purple flared trousers, Liwa realises he has died, and has been dreaming of his death. Whether he still dreams, we do not know. Alain Mabanckou, who brings him into life, does not tell us. There is much he leaves us to surmise as we accompany Liwa on his struggles to master a changed world which is fittingly surreal.
In giving life to the dead in a world with which they, and we, are familiar, Mabanckou’s new novel(published in French in 2022 with the English translation published this year) Dealing with the Dead brings to mind Sven Axelrad’s Buried Treasure (2023), which also has a graveyard as the central setting, and in which the dead walk and speak and act among the living. Both novels are thus phantasmagoric and have a surreal sense of time and space, but unlike Buried Treasure, wherein the dead are animated due to a mistake on the part of the living, and wish to subside into non-existence, Mabanckou accepts the continuation of existence after death as an eternal part of life and death. The world of the grave also has its hierarchy, its class, and its taboos. One of these taboos is that the dead shall not seek revenge upon the living for their death, even if they were murdered, which we come to find was the case with Liwa. How and why this happened to Liwa is the leading suspense of this novel by a writer who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and who in due course comes to enlighten us as to why his protagonist is dressed in such alarming colours.
The meandering narration, that at times, like good jazz, makes you wonder if the plot has been altogether lost even though the woods you find yourself in are most wonderfully interesting, before leading you into a glade where the original logic is reasserted, is shot through with wry humour and social observation that throws new light on old assumptions. These assumptions may have to do with the way we tend to view the Congo (Republic of) and the coastal city of Pointe-Noire where this novel is set, which is more urbane and sophisticated than we might imagine. Or they may relate to the cultural and religious aspects of the Francophone country. Or, they may relate to plot, where Mabanckou, possibly owing to his experience of oral storytelling, is a master. The page-turner, so prevalent and praised in American and English fiction, is overvalued and lacking in substance. It is the McDonald’s meal to Mabanckou’s feast of tastes and textures that provide, for all the overarching surreality of the experience, insight into the reality of a place most of us know very little of, although much of it is very similar to what is familiar; for people are people everywhere, with their grief, their joy, their fears, and their triumphs. The vagaries are in expression, rather than in feeling.
While there is an orality in the storytelling, in which ambition and corruption are excoriated, Mabanckou subtly changes pace in the last quarter of the novel, and the tale starts to resemble a thriller with twists peculiar to the place and culture Liwa inhabits. But beyond the depth and breadth of the author’s observation, he avoids prescription and leaves us with questions only we can answer for ourselves, the central one being: if justice requires a murderer be killed, does the killer, even if victim, not also become murderer? Certainly, blood stains all who spill it. Whether justice washes us clean is not a certainty.