No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky

The little boy of Emmanuel Dongala’s lyrical, sly third novel is named Michel but, because of his strange and difficult birth, he is called Matapari, which means “problem child.” ’Little Boys Come From the Stars” is set in contemporary Republic of Congo (Dongala’s homeland), the tiny country with large problems that abuts the other, bigger, more notorious Congo formerly known as Zaire. Both Congos have suffered at the hands of their brutal colonial masters, and at the hands of their brutal postcolonial masters. Theirs is a tragic history, yet Dongala, a chemistry professor and former university dean, has created a whimsical, indeed hilarious satire out of Africa’s decid-edly unfunny post-independence woes.

Matapari lives in a small village that encompasses dizzying contradictions. It is a world of Nikes, music videos, Coca-Cola and palm wine; Rambo, James Bond and Patrice Lumumba are all embraced as heroes. Catholicism, animism and secularism coexist-if not always easily-and the midwife knew “how to prepare potions to drive off evil spirits, just as she knew how to set up an IV drip.” Matapari’s house has a tin roof, brick walls, several rooms and an outdoor latrine; though his family often eats only one meal a day, they own a television and a VCR. This is a country where anything is “an excuse to party,” a fertile land where food is imported, a former French colony where colonialism is hated but “we ... still like to spend our vacations in France, even if these days it is easier to get a visa to the moon.” Matapari, who enters adolescence as he narrates his story, muses, “We kept their language along with ours, as well as their clothing, red wine, Brie, and baguettes. It was as if we were reborn from two roots.”

It is among the men of Matapari’s family that the real fault lines exist. His grandfather was a proud, courteous teacher (he signed letters to the colonial authorities, “Yours bitterly and respectfully’) who is steeped in the values of the Enlightenment; though he bravely opposed the Church and the colonizers, he is now reviled as a reactionary. Matapari’s father is also a schoolteacher, a rationalist, a democrat and a lover of Russian literature; he refers to the country’s rulers as “that nice kabob of dictators” and believes that education is Africa’s only hope. (Papa spends much of his time studying Fermat’s last theorem.) But Matapari’s energetically amoral Uncle Boula Boula, who tells Matapari many of the stories that the boy relates to us, sees every U-turn in the country’s volatile political life as an opportunity for personal enrichment. When the country (which Dongala never directly names) abruptly shifts from “independence” to “revolution,” Boula Boula immediately acquires the most sought-after credential: a doctorate in “agitation and propaganda” from East Germany. He acquires a number of other revolutionary accoutrements, too, including a beautiful (married) girlfriend who lightens her skin and a fleet of Mercedeses that he color-coordinates with his suits. Indeed, Boula Boula adapts to the new order so adroitly that he zips into the No. 2 spot on the Central Committee, despite Matapari’s father’s prescient warning that “in Africa the most dangerous political position is number two.”

Dongala is at his sharpest in depicting the greed, corruption, stupidity and sheer folly of this phony revolution. There is “Operation Knock Out,” in which millions of aid dollars meant to fight a cholera epidemic land in the pockets of the health minister, who huffily invokes “the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of an independent state” to justify his theft. There is the “great revolutionary campaign [to] convert all the Pygmies of the equatorial forest to Marxism-Leninism.” There is the grandiose, exorbitantly expensive stadium that is built-then almost immediately abandoned-outside Matapari’s village, for which the lush, magical forest is destroyed. (‘Come attend the massacre,” Matapari’s father tells his students as the tree-killing begins.) And always, everywhere, there is the suffocating personality cult of the leader: the president as Supreme and Providential Guide, Man of Concrete Action, Peacemaker, Friend of the Youth, Man-Always-Proven-Right-by-History .... “I’m sure I’m forgetting some,” Matapari admits, “but I promise to note them each time they come to mind.”

It would be easy for Dongala to be ironic about this madness; his genius lies in his decision to tell this tale through the eyes of a child, which is to say without irony. When we hear the empty, degraded language of the revolution pour out of Matapari’s mouth with simplicity and without guile, its emptiness and degradation are far more striking than they could ever be if sarcastically mocked. Matapari’s casual description of the grandfather he loves as a dupe of the “lying dog ... government in the service of imperialism” exposes the cruelty and corruption of this revolution with piercing clarity. And because clotted, vapid language always results in (and from) an inability to think clearly, certain basic but vital concepts become literally incomprehensible to this child of the revolution. Thus, Matapari is baffled when he reads an oppositional political manifesto that his father has written, and he asks what the purpose of democracy could possibly be. “To be free, Michel, be free!” his father responds, to which the son replies, “But what is being free, Papa?”

Toward the end of the novel, a “hurricane of democratization” sweeps Matapari’s country, and he witnesses a rather remarkable sea change. “Everyone had always been a democrat and everyone had always fought for freedom, for the multiparty system,” a puzzled Matapari recounts. “No one had been for the one-party state.... No one had ever adored our enlightened Guide.... Apparently, he had ... ruled for close to twenty years all by himself.”

Dongala’s unsparing critique of dictatorship does not, to his credit, lead him to romanticize multi-party elections, with their own absurdities, corruptions and forms of demagoguery. (A multi-party system did briefly emerge in Republic of Congo in the early 1990s.) “Maybe our country was small,” Matapari observes during the campaign, “but it contained a wealth of exceptional political men capable of getting it out of the rut of underdevelopment. Each proposed a solution to turn the country into a prosperous little Western European country.” (These range from creating ski resorts in the jungle to transforming the country into the toothbrush-manufacturing center of the world.) Matapari adds, “The only mystery for me was ... why we were still living in such poverty when so many people obviously had so many miraculous solutions.”

Matapari’s scorned but undefeated grandfather tells him that the most important thing in the universe is to live and die a free man. And the loveliness of this book lies precisely in the fact that it was written by such a person. The barbarities that have been visited on the Congo, and that it has visited on itself, have not crushed Dongala; he has emerged with the robust capacity to see through lies, to root himself in history rather than myth and even, miraculously, to laugh at tyranny. Dongala, who heads the Congolese chapter of PEN, left his country in 1997 when a brief but destructive civil war erupted; he now lives in the United States. This may well be to his advantage, and perhaps to ours. But it is, I suspect, a loss to the battered, deluded but vibrant country he portrays with love and anger in this book.