trying to be everything
by Douglas Messerli
Aimé Césaire Une Saison Au Congo, translated by Ralph Manheim as A Season in the Congo (New York: Grove Press, 1968)
Beginning as a beer salesman for
Polar beer, Césaire’s dynamic Patrice Lumumba, is a simple man who grows more
and more complex with each scene in this Brechtian drama. Through song and
framed scenarios of central events in the last two years of his life, the
author charts what appears to be a single “season,” a first chance to free the
Congo from Belgian rule and to make it a force on the African continent.
Although the former beer salesman
quickly—and in Césaire’s telling, a little too mysteriously—is transformed into
a liberating hero, he is still raw at the edges. As he himself tells it, upon
the transference of rule from King Basilio to Lumumba, his background, like
those of the countrymen is a simple one, having grown up, he insists, as one of
the forgottens:
lumumba: As for me, Sire, my thoughts are for those who
have been forgotten. We are
the people who have
been dispossessed, beaten,
mutilated; the people whom
the conquerors treated as
inferiors, in whose faces
they spat. A people of
kitchen boys, house boys,
laundry boys, in short, a
people of boys, of yes-bwanas,
and anyone who wanted to
prove that a man is not
necessarily a man could take
us as an example.
In what others have warned should a
gracious acceptance speech for the change of power, Lumumba uses the occasion
to create a kind Whitmanian poetic expression of his identification with his
fellow Congolese and with all of repressed Africa. From the very beginning, it
seems Lumumba attempted to align himself with everything but the white
oppression surrounding his homeland. And in this broad association of himself
with everything, his ambition was awe-inspiring—and for the more timid leaders
such as Mokutu, frightening:
Comrades, everything remains to be done, or
done over,
But we shall do it, we will do it over. For Kongo.
We shall remake the laws, one by one, for
Kongo.
We shall revise all the customs, one by one,
for Kongo.
Uprooting injustice, we will rebuild the old
edifice
piece by piece, from cellar to the attic, for Kongo.
That which is bowed shall be raised, and that
which is
raised shall be raised higher—for Kongo!
I demand the union of all.
But it is final statement, “I demand
the devotion of every man,” that is perhaps his undoing. A few scenes later,
Lumumba, is insisting that his leaders give over their entire lives to the new
cause, that they abandon their lives to the recreation of their country. For
him, things cannot happen fast enough.
But that is just the problem. Without
careful consideration, he has raised the salary of all government workers,
while ignoring the army, which momentarily attempts to overthrow him. His
solution, to raise them all in rank, is obviously no solution, weakening the
very forces he will need to defend his government.
Even more internationally disturbing—at least to Western interests—is
Lumumba’s willingness to accept the support of the Soviet Union, a government
he saw no better or worse the European and American structures.
In between these powerful encounters are
numerous songs of the ironic and not always friendly Sanza Player, songs of
mercenaries, and fearful fretting from Lumumba’s wife Pauline and other women
in his life. Although I have not seen a production of this play, it is clearly
a work in which the stage must be in constant motion, as each emblematic frieze
gives way to the next, events occurring so quickly that it appears that Lumumba
had no way to catch his breath. And, in the end, of course, he was trapped in
the vast forces he had let loose. In trying to be everything—
I will be field, I
will be pasture
I will be with the
Wagenia fisherman
I will be with the
Kivu drover
I will be on the
mountain, I will be in the ravine—
Lumumba has rendered himself from a
leader to an emblematic martyr for his own cause. Too late, Hammarskjöld comes to perceive that he,
himself, has been betrayed, painfully realizing that Matthew Cordelier is a man,
in the General Secretary’s perception, who would, like Pilate, have arrested
and put to death Christ, making an obvious parallel between the hero of this
tale and the Christian myth.
Msiri and Mokutu kill Lumumba, with the later now leading the country,
hypocritically calling upon the country to carry forward in the memory of
“Patrice, martyr, athlete, hero.” In reality, the new Congo head, changing the
country’s name to Zaire, continued to economically exploit the country’s
finances, just as had the Belgians. The short “season” of new possibilities did
not allow enough time for Lumumba’s immense dreams to be realized.
Los Angeles, January 18, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment