Vortrag von Susanne Gehrmann
The debate that Helon Habila instigated on behalf of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, a novel qualified as ‘poverty porn’ by the Nigerian writer, can easily be transferred to contemporary Congolese fiction. In particular, Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 (2013), in spite of or maybe just because of being an indisputable international success translated into numerous languages and crowned by literary awards, has led to heated discussions on social media. Dismissed as a sexist sellout of the RDC’s miseries for some, lauded as a genuine critical deconstruction of global late-capitalist structures by others, the novel speaks loudly to the African writer’s dilemma of ‘How to write about Africa?’ (to quote Wainaina 2006) without reifying ‘the dark continent’. The novels by further diasporic Congolese writers such as In Koli Jean Bofane, Blaise Ndala or Joëlle Sambi can be questioned in the same way: they all conceive the Congo as a chaotic space, a battlefield of survival more often than not centered on women’s bodies as both targets and ammunition. In this paper, thus, I will try to analytically outweigh the part of ‘poverty porn’ and the part of the critical potential to deconstruct stereotyped images of the Congo/Africa inherent in the same texts.
Susanne Gehrmann is a professor of African literatures and cultures at the Department of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin.