Infrastructure and the Valences of the Literary in Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the relations between physical infrastructure and the politics of literary form in Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 (2014). Although the novel initially seems to suggest that literature is irrelevant to the context of infrastructural dysfunction that it depicts, I argue that Tram 83 articulates a specific (yet highly circumscribed) role for the literary. In order to make this case, the novel’s improvisational form is read as an attempt to represent what the anthropologist Brian Larkin has called the “conceptually unruly” nature of infrastructure. This unruliness expresses itself in a lack of distinction between humans and infrastructure, which in turn causes a severe curtailment of certain kinds of political agency in the novel. Whereas traditional literary forms are shown by Mujila to be inadequate to representing and critiquing this particular infrastructural context, the novel retains a latent commitment to the power of the literary, one that eschews traditional ideas about form in favor of a more broadly construed and intermedial literary practice. This persistence of the literary, I conclude, raises important questions concerning the role of form in contemporary literary cultures.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Matthew Omelsky for his extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For ease of reading, I have elected to use the English translations of these names to refer to them in my text.

2. See; Trefon (2011) 49–53 for a discussion of the colonial history of the railroad in the DRC. Stefaan Marysse and Sara Geenen provide a nuanced and balanced assessment of the China deal in their article, “Win-Win or Unequal Exchange? The Case of the Sino-Congolese Cooperation Agreements” (2009), which concludes that it is ultimately constructed in favor of the Chinese interests (371–372).

3. The concern with questions of extraction and infrastructure is also expressed by other nonliterary artists who hail from the DRC. See, for instance, the work of the photographer Sammy Baloji and that of the choreographer and dancer Faustin Linyekula.

4. Farrant references a number of claims that “we are living in a post-literary age” (144). The critical concern with the “end of critique” is most clearly expressed in Rita Felski’s 2015 book, The Limits of Critique.

5. This is not to say, of course, that countries such as the DRC have not been highly productive of literature, but rather to make the point that this production occurred in a very different infrastructural context from the one that Brouillette identifies in the “core” capitalist countries.

6. In an interview, Mujila has shown a clear interest in the relations between trains and colonialism in Africa: “Trains were part of the colonial landscape and architecture. They symbolized the taming of African nature, deportation, forced labor, exploitation, the transport of minerals, looting, etc.” (Samatar).

7. Although the translation here is Glasser’s, I have changed it into sentence case in order to be in line with the original French (which uses only a different typeface for the chapter headings), rather than the upper-case rendering that his English edition favors.

8. This conflation of the human and the infrastructural is distinct from what AbdouMaliq Simone has, focusing on post-apartheid Johannesburg, called “people as infrastructure,” a “process of conjunction, which is capable of generating social compositions across a range of singular capacities and needs (both enacted and virtual) and which attempts to derive maximal outcomes from a minimal set of elements” (71). Whereas the activities that Simone describes constitute the formation of alternative social and economic connections that support survival outside of formal corporate and state infrastructures, Tram 83 depicts a loss of human specificity in relation to inanimate infrastructure.

9. It is also possible to locate this repurposing of infrastructure in relation to accounts of alternative forms of agency in urban environments. In particular, one might see it as an instance of what Michel de Certeau describes as the “tactics” deployed by individuals moving through the city within and against the “scientific strategies” of dominant power structures (1984, 94–5). One might also read the activity of mining in City-State in terms of Simone’s concept of “people as infrastructure” in so far as it involves collaboration between apparently disparate groups within City-State.

10. When Lucien later reflects on why he left the Back-Country for City-State, the narrator notes: “Il aurait pu rester et arrêter avec ses mésaventures de littérature engagée ou se faire graisser la patte” (146)/“He could have stayed and ceased his misadventures with littérature engagée, or had his palm greased” (113).

11. The gendering of City-State as female in the translation here should be seen primarily as a linguistic feature. In French, compound nouns, when constructed of two nouns (rather than a noun and an adjective), take the gender of the first noun. Here, the first noun is “ville” (city), which is feminine and this means that “Ville-Pays” is a feminine noun.

12. This is made clear when, at the end of the novel, Malingeau arranges for Lucien’s play to be published in Switzerland (248/198).

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Alexander Fyfe

Alexander Fyfe is a teaching fellow in Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His current research focuses on the relations between modern African literatures and the politics of subjectivity. His work has appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Research in African Literatures, and the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.