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ABSTRACT
Alain Mabanckou’s Lumières de Pointe-Noire (2013) is a travelogue in which the celebrated Los Angeles-based author returns to his native Congo-Brazzaville after 23 years of absence. As is typical in postcolonial travel writing, Mabanckou’s text foregrounds the traveller’s identity dilemmas. The “homecoming” is marked by a sense of unease. Firstly, this unease manifests itself thematically in how the text negotiates the traveller’s identity along the native versus tourist axis, and in the oscillation between nostalgia and loss. Secondly, unease marks the representation of the “homecoming” as witnessed by the text’s attempts to destabilise the centrality of the travelling I/eye and the confinement of the white female photographer to the narrative’s margins. These elements betray the author–narrator’s struggle to claim that he belongs to the present tense of his childhood city, the tensions his socio-economic privilege generate, and the complexities relating to the narrator’s centrality and authorship with regard to a literary genre that is marked by its white/colonial roots. In this sense, Lumières de Pointe-Noire addresses issues that are relevant to postcolonial travel writing more generally.
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Notes
1 For key texts on Afropolitanism, see Mbembe (2013, 224–229) and Selasi (Citation2005).
2 The trend of Africans’ travels on the African continent manifests itself in the work of writers such as Noo Saro-Wiwa, Sihle Khumalo, Binyavanga Wainaina and Ivan Vladislavić (Moynagh, 2015 287–288; Loingsigh 2016, 192). Internet publishing is also a growing trend in African travel writing.
3 Many of the uneasy aspects pertaining to “homecoming” are obviously not exclusively postcolonial phenomena per se; nostalgia, for instance, is certainly an impulse common to narratives of return in general. What is typically postcolonial here, however, is the context in which the travel narrative is embedded – a context marked by the complex aftermath of the colonial project both on a local and on a wider global scale (see Quayson Citation2000, 93–94).
4 By mentioning Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound (Citation2000), I do not wish to imply that Mabanckou’s and Phillips’s return narratives would be straightforwardly comparable. Phillips’s diasporic subjectivity involves the historical aspect of the transatlantic slave trade and his mission of “return” is motivated by this history. Mabanckou’s return is historically less charged, and it is marked by a direct personal link to the place of return.
5 The Harlem Renaissance movement in the early 1920s, as well as the Négritude movement between the 1930s and the 1960s, “drew much of [their] strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past” (François Citation2011, ix). The idea of returning to Africa forms the core of the writings by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas, who were the key figures of the Négritude movement (François Citation2011, ix).
6 Contemporary travel texts often leave the physical travel part of the journey unaddressed (Pettinger Citation2012, 127). Mabanckou’s text is an example of this tendency. The omission of travelling in Lumières de Pointe-Noire is a strategy that underpins the narrator’s affiliation to the destination.
7 English quotations from Mabanckou’s book are from The Lights of Pointe-Noire (Citation2015).
8 The idea of Africa’s entwinement with the rest of the world – Europe in particular – is discussed in Mabanckou’s short non-fictional text Europe depuis l’Afrique (Citation2009), which refers to the port of Pointe-Noire and uses the image of the apple as a marker of the presence of the global in the local.
9 On the iconotextual interplay of images and text in travel writing, see Topping (Citation2013).
11 Blache’s photographs illustrating Lumières de Pointe-Noire have been exhibited at Librairie-Galerie Congo in Paris in 2013 (Eduard Citation2013).
12 Joan Phillips and Robert B. Potter (Citation2006, 322) analyse the return migration of second-generation Caribbean migrants, and point out that the returnees occupy socio-economically privileged positions that are also marked by a sense of liminality: “back home” in the Caribbean, the returnees come across as “symbolically white”. Such positioning of the returnee as “symbolically white” informs the “homecoming” of Lumières de Pointe-Noire to a certain extent.