The Benevolent American in the Heart of Darkness

By Albert Russo

"The Benevolent American in the Heart of Darkness" is a trilogy of Albert Russos award-winning African novels set in the former Belgian Congo and Rwanda-Urundi.
In The Black Ancestor, the reader will find, as in the two other novels, Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika and Mixed Blood or your son Lopold, many poignant and delightful passages, especially in the journeys across the magnificent Kivu province, which today, along with bordering Rwanda and Burundi, has been scarred by fratricidal wars. That Leodine, in the opening novel, happens to be an adolescent, as was Leopold in Mixed Blood, isnt fortuitous, for it is at that vulnerable period of ones life that ones personality takes form. In Albert Russos Africa you will find humankinds infinite diversity and, amid such richness, a quest for the deep self. Eric Tessier.



Albert Russo has recreated through a young African boys joys and struggles many of the tensions of modern life, straight and gay, black and white, third world and first ... all of these tensions underlie this story of a biracial child adopted by a benevolent American. Mixed Blood or Your son Leopold is a non-stop, gripping read!" Edmund White.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 13, 2004
• ISBN: 9781465321367

Book preview

Copyright © 2004 by Albert Russo.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

About MIXED BLOOD OR YOUR SON LEOPOLD

About ECLIPSE OVER LAKE TANGANYIKA

About THE

BLACK ANCESTOR

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO ALBERT RUSSO’S WORK BY MARTIN TUCKER:

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

PRINCE RUEGO’S DIARY

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE UNIVERSE OF DALILA

CHAPTER NINE

BACK TO PRINCE RUEGO’S DIARY

CHAPTER TEN

‘THE RETURN OF SALIM’ IN PRINCE RUEGO’S DIARY

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PART ONE

I

INTRODUCTION

II

EARLY SCHOOLING

III

APOTHEOSIS

IV

MONSIEUR LE COMMISSAIRE

V

ISHAYA ENTERS MY LIFE

VI

A DAY OF THE RAINY SEASON

VII

MALARIA

VIII

WAS I EVER A SAINT?

IX

PAPA’S ACCIDENT

X

THE RETURN OF MONSIEUR GIORGIOS

XI

ORIGINAL SIN COMES TO ELISABETHVILLE

XII

WITH ISHAYA AND PIET, THE WHITE CONGOLESE

XIII

A CASE OF CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOR

XIV

THE WHEELS OF FREEDOM

XV

THE LETTER AND MAMA MALKIA’S STORY

PART TWO

I

ELISABETHVILLE, AUGUST 1955

II

BEFORE THE DIARY

III

POSTWAR YEARS IN THE CONGO AND ADOPTION OF LEOPOLD

IV

GETTING USED TO FATHERHOOD

V

FROM JOHN TO THE CONGO

VI

RHODESIAN AND AFRICAN AWARENESSES

VII

THE SEEDS OF M’SIRI

VIII

UNAVOIDABLE INCOMPATIBILITY

IX

AFTER GIORGIOS, ERIC. LEO’S FIRST WOUNDS.

X

SECRETS

PART III

EPILOGUE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

* Eclats de malachite, novel, Editions Pierre Deméyere, Brussels, Belgium, 1971.

* La Pointe du Diable, novel, Editions Pierre Deméyere, Brussels, Belgium, 1973.

* Mosai’que Newyorkaise, novella, Editions de l’Athanor, Paris, France, 1975.

* Albert Russo, Anthology 1, fiction and poetry, Légereté Press, USA, 1987.

* Sang Melé ou ton fils Léopold, novel, Editions du Griot, Paris, France, 1990.

— France Loisirs, Paris, France, 1991.

— Edizioni Librería Croce, Italian translation by Angela Bonavita, Rome, Italy, 2003

— Matica, Serbo-Croatian edition, to be published

* Le Cap des illusions, novel, Editions du Griot, Paris, France, 1991.

— German translation, to be published

* Dans la nuit bleu-fauve / Futureyes, poetry, Le Nouvel Athanor, Paris, France, 1992.

* Kaleidoscope, poetry, The Plowman, Canada, 1993.

* Eclipse sur le lac Tanganyika, novel, Le Nouvel Athanor, Paris, France, 1994.

— Element Uitgevers, Dutch edition, 1996.

* Venitian Thresholds, fiction and poetry, Bone & Flesh Publications, USA, 1995.

* Painting the Tower of Babel, poetry, New Hope International, GB, 1996.

* Zapinette Vidéo, novel, Éditions Hors Commerce, Paris, France, 1996.

* Poetry and Peanuts, poetry, Cherrybite Publications, GB, 1997.

* Zapinette Video, novel, Xlibris, USA, 1998.

* Mixed Blood, novel, Domhan Books, USA/GB, 2000.

* Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika, novel, Domhan Books, USA/GB, 2000.

* L’amant de mon pere, novel, Le Nouvel Athanor, Paris, France, 2000.

—Edizioni Librería Croce, Italian translation by Mario Sigfrido Metalli, Rome, Italy, 2002

* Zapinette a New York, novel, Editions Hors Commerce, Paris, France, 2000.

* Zany, Zapinette New York, novel, Domhan Books, USA/ GB, 2001.

* Beyond the Great Water, Vol.1, Collected stories, Domhan Books, USA/GB, 2001.

* Unmasking Hearts, Vol.2, Collected stories, Domhan Books, USA/GB, 2001.

* The Age of the Pearl, Vol.3, Collected stories, Domhan Books, USA/GB, 2001.

* Prisons of Love / Rage d’éolienne, poetry, Le Nouvel Athanor, Paris, France, 2003.

* Zapinette chez les Belges, Editions Hors Commerce, Paris, France, 2001.

* L’amant de mon pere II: Journal romain, novel, Editions Hors Commerce, 2003.

* L’ancetre noire, novel, Editions Hors Commerce, Paris, France, 2003.

* The benevolent American in the heart of darkness, a trilogy of 3 African novels set in the former Belgian Congo and Rwanda-Urundi, Xlibris, USA, 2005.

* Oh Zaperetta! The hilarious Zapinette series, Xlibris, USA, 2005.

* Memory gap, an anthology of short fiction, essays and poetry, Xlibris, USA, 2005.

* The crowded world of solitude / Ce monde peuplé de solitude, bilingual poetry anthology (English/French), Editions Hors Commerce, Paris, France, 2005.

* La Tour Shalom, Editions Hors Commerce, Paris, France, 2005.

* Zapinette la Zouloue, Editions Hors Commerce, Paris, France, 2005.

Collective works

* All stories, All kinds, TVR, Peninhand Press, USA, 1985.

* Who’s been sleeping in my brain? bilingual English-German anthology, Suhrkamp Verlag, Germany, 1987.

* Snow Summits in the Sun, Poetry Anthology, The Cerulean press, USA, 1988.

* The Cerulean Anthology of Sci-Fi/Outer Space/Fantasy Poetry, USA, 1999.

* Bibliophilos Poetry Anthology, USA, 2001.

* ROMAdiva, photography by Albert Russo, texts by Eric Tessier, Albert Russo, Daniel Michelson and Sébastien Doubinsky, in English, French and Italian, Xlibris, USA, 2004.

* Chinese / puzzle / chinois, photography by Albert Russo, texts by Albert Russo, Daniel Michelson, Eric Tessier and Sébastien Doubinsky, in English and French, Xlibris, USA, 2004.

* Le tour du monde de la poésie gay (an international anthology of gay poetry), edited and partly translated into French by Albert Russo, Editions Hors Commerce, Paris, France, 2004.

* AfricaSoul, photography by Albert Russo and Elena, texts by Albert Russo, Eric Tessier, Elena and Jérémy Fraise, in English, French and German, Xlibris, USA, 2005.

A bilingual author, Albert Russo writes in both English and French, his two ‘mother tongues’; he also speaks five languages fluently. He is the recipient of many awards, such as The American Society of Writers Fiction Award, The British Diversity Short Story Award, several New York Poetry Forum Awards, Amelia Prose and Poetry awards and the Prix Colette, among others. He has also been nominated for the W.B. Yeats and Robert Penn Warren poetry awards. His fiction, which has been praised by James Baldwin, Pierre Emmanuel, Paul Willems, Gilles Perrault and Edmund White, has appeared worldwide in a dozen languages.

Some of the journals and magazines that have published his work: The Literary Review, Confrontation, Cosmopolitan (Dutch edition), The International Herald Tribune, Playboy magazine (French edition), Ambit, The Edinburgh Review, Chapman, The Taj Mahal Review, Africa Prize, New Hope International, Passport, World Wide Writers, The European Journal of Psychology, Prospice, Envoi, The Auschwitz Foundation Bulletin, Fremde Verse, Los Muestros, Plurilingual Europe, etc. The BBC World Service has broadcast his story The Discovery.

His African novels have been favorably compared to V.S. Naipaul’s work, which was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

He is a member of the jury for the Prix Européen (with Ionesco, until his death) and sat in 1996 on the panel of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which often leads to the Nobel Prize.

His most recent novels in English: ZANY, ZAPINETTE NEW YORK, MIXED BLOOD or Your Son Léopold and ECLIPSE OVER LAKE TANGANYIKA, all with Domhan Books (NY); in French: L’AMANT DE MON PERE (Ed. Le Nouvel Athanor), ZAPINETTE A NEW YORK, ZAPINETTE CHEZ LES BELGES, and l’ANCETRE NOIRE, all three with Editions Hors Commerce (Paris).

The author’s literary website: www.albertrusso.com

About MIXED BLOOD OR YOUR SON LEOPOLD

This is what Edmund White, the acclaimed biographer of Jean Genet and author of many bestselling novels wrote concerning Mixed Blood or Your son Leopold.

"Albert Russo has recreated through a young African boy’s joys and struggles many of the tensions of modern life, straight and gay, black and white, third world and first … all of these tensions underlie this story of a biracial African adopted by a gay American. And Mixed Blood or Your son Leopold is a nonstop, gripping read!"

Excerpt from James Baldwin’s letter to the author, penned the year of his death:

I like your work very much indeed. It has a very gentle surface and a savage under-tow. You’re a dangerous man.

Preface to Mixed Blood or Your son Leopold by Martin Tucker, editor-in-chief of Confrontation magazine (LIU, New York), poet and biographer of Joseph Conrad and Sam Shepard: "History is a thread which is not seamless. Its appointments are marked, its fabric is dated. That quality of worn uniqueness, no matter how many similarities one era bears to another, is what distinguishes the many histories of the universe.

Because fiction, and particularly the novel, has a wondrous quality to sew threads into a reaping different from their initial needlings, it often becomes the scroll to which we turn for an understanding of an event, a particular time and the places within that time-in sum, for the perception of a decade or period that has become historic and thus distinct from contemporary patterns. Again, there are similarities, threads from the past, to remind us of the origins of the present, but history is in itself a finished product of time, an irrefragible sequence within a closed border.

Albert Russo’s work has many distinctive qualities. Mixed Blood is especially distinguished by Russo’s startingly precise grasp of the historic period of mid-twentieth-century Central Africa. In this sense, his work bears twinship to V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. Such a time no longer exists because one history has changed and another has happened, and still another is happening under our ticking hours. Like his predecessor Naipaul, Russo has captured the attitudes of his white colonialists, his black politicians of various hues of moderation and extremity, and painted a seemingless timeless portrait of a naive American Peace Corps volunteer. (Perhaps naivity is the one constant in the history of change.) Again, like Naipaul, Russo is compassionate and satiric, but unlike his British counterpart, Russo holds out hope that messages of goodness and idealism and decency remain within hearing, that they remain to be recorded in a different and deeper key in another time.

Like any serious artist, Russo is subtle and ironic in his presentations. His political and social attitudes to his ever-pertinent material remain, in consequence, beyond familiarity. Yet in carving out a moment of history, in shaping a fountain of abiding conflicts and in stroking broadly the revolutions of personal and social jealousy, anger and explosion, his artistry is triumphant. He has captured in fiction what lies hidden in forgotten documents, and he has given substance and a frame to the baldness of even remembered documents.

Rooted in a past time, Mixed Blood or your son Leopold has an undeniable relevance to contemporary time."

The first part of the novel, entitled Your son Leopold, won the Volvano Review award (California), sponsored by the NEA, for best long fiction in an international contest.

Excerpts of reviews published in France, Belgium and Switzerland:

— Le Figaro Littéraire, Paris: with this novel, in which the author skillfully tackles a subject as delicate as that of racial and sexual differences and their many facets, Albert Russo, who has already been awarded the Prix Colette, makes a successful comeback in French literature.

— Libération, Paris: "Sang Melé is an exception to the rule which implies that any novel set in Black Africa, whether the author is White or Black, is suffused with exoticism. Albert Russo’s sentences are as perfectly aligned as the streets of Elisabethville (now called Lubumbashi), in the former Belgian Congo. The characters of Sang Melé inhabit a convention, an invented town. Fantasy is natural to them. Averting the picturesque, they placidly confront situations which would make Simenon’s protagonists in his ‘African’ novel The Bespectacled White Man quite hysterical. Having read the novel’s original version in English, James Baldwin wrote to the author how much he had liked MIXED BLOOD, adding, ‘it has a very gentle surface and a savage undertow, you’re a dangerous man!’"

— Vers L’Avenir, Belgium: … To tell a story is an art. It is an art which Albert Russo possesses. And the reader’s attention is sustained, unflaggingly, throughout the novel’s 258 pages. The author succeeds in being heeded like those Bantu storytellers who, deep inside the bush, recount tragic or fantastic tales inherited from the old oral tradition.

— La Liberté / Dimanche, Switzerland: … born and raised in Zaire, Albert Russo masterfully depicts a world which is so particular, with its customs and mores, its atmosphere and its passions, a totally different way of life. What he has achieved here is almost a piece of ethnology.

— Le Drapeau Rouge, Belgium: "One does not often encounter a novel told in three voices. In Sang Melé, Albert Russo lets the protagonists, each in turn, express their hopes, expectations and frustrations in their daily lives. And as the story unravels from one version to the other, the themes which the author wishes to tackle are exposed in an intimistic mode: life in colonial times, homosexuality, the relationships between three very different people living under the same roof. The reader is drawn into the pace of this well constructed novel and is able, through the characters’ successive narrations, to settle behind each conscience."

— Gai Pied Hebdo, Paris: "… Sang Melé ou ton fils Léopold is Albert Russo’s invigorating novel. It deals with capital questions and a delicate theme: the adoption of a mulato child by an American homosexual in the Belgian Congo of the 1950’s. The manner in which the novel is structured allows each of the three protagonists to cast a different light upon this unusual love story. It behooves Mama Malkia, the formidable Congolese woman who smothers with tenderness the two marginal men, to recount Léo’s departure for America as well as the death of Harry during the events following the Congo’s Independence. This is the novel of every possible pain and battle caused and fueled by differences, be they of a sexual, social or racial nature. Yet, albeit violent, Sang Melé is never tragic. It is an incitation to courage: to affirm one’s freedom, not to mask the truth, to avoid the traps of guilt. This powerful, very well written novel, is a hymn to optimism."

Other reviews have appeared in:

(France) Le Quotidien de Paris, L’Express, Révolution, l’Humanité, Jeune Afrique Economie, Présence Africaine, Livres-Hebdo, Lu magazine, etc. ;(Belgium) Le Soir, La Cité, la Meuse, Het Laatste Niews, Contact J, Temps Présent,

Quartiers Latins, La Termitiere / Kisugulu, etc.; (Switzerland) Hebdo, etc.

The author was interviewed on national and private radio and television in France, Belgium, Switzerland and the US (New Letters On the Air, broadcast on National Public Radio) and was also invited to give conferences in Brussels, at the Sorbonne, at the University of Trier (Germany) and in Poitiers (France).

The novel was selected by the Libraires Cle—the association of literary bookstores covering France and Switzerland—and featured in the Page des Libraires.

About ECLIPSE OVER LAKE TANGANYIKA

Essay by Jean-Luc Breton, published in Small Press Review and World Literature Today, in different versions.

Reading one of Albert Russo’s renderings of his works from one of his native languages into the other is always a fascinating experience. If I have used the word renderings, it is because Mr Russo does not translate his novels, but rewrites them in order to adapt them to the other language, i.e. to another culture for other readers. After a most interesting English version of Zapinette Vidéo, Russo’s special gift for bilingual writing is brought to us in his short novel Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika, initially published in French in 1994.

Mr Russo’s bilingualism enables him to intuit that, in some instances, what can be written in one language will never do in another. Each language is inscribed within a lexical and cultural framework which can probably be recreated by radical changes in the writing, even to the extent of eliminating some characters and situations and inventing others. Of course, the process can probably be described and made into linguistic theories, but no one can master it better than a bilingual writer, like Albert Russo, who naturally knows how to transform a French novel into an English novel by remaining absolutely faithful to his original intention. In the same way, his writing is the most efficient when it sticks closely to the reality evoked and is wary of any rhetorical or intellectual effect. Eclipse’s power lies primarily in the scenes when the African reality Russo deals with is set as the background in front of which the narrative unfolds and with which it interacts, without bombast. Take the opening paragraph:

From down the plain a siren whined: six o’clock. Oswald put on his slippers, shuffled across the corridor, pushed open the heavy verandah door, and leaned on the balcony.

The passage is as graphic as you can get: the language is plainly informative, but a whole atmosphere has been created: early evening in a hot country, the heavy languor of a lone character as he is woken up or stirred out of his lethargy by a familiar siren, his longing for the world outside, which has not been evoked yet but is already present in the last phrase. We know that Oswald is going to stay on and to look at the plain below him, and that he will learn something from his gazing down at the scenery.

The scene is set for the main theme of the novel. We do not know yet that Oswald is a young American and that the town below in the valley is Bujumbura, but the information is provided in the first page of Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika, which deals with the young man’s sentimental journey (and ours) through a land virgin as the first dawn of Creation.

Albert Russo does not care about local colour. The strange vegetation, the African words and the many place names in the novel serve the one purpose of setting the scenery for a single man’s confrontation with Creation. Russo’s novel is as interesting and ambiguous as Columbus’s journal: every page demonstrates the writer’s fascination for the pristine luxuriant Eden-like land and his utter sadness at what havoc men have wreaked on such plentiful beauty: a décor of papier maché, which a single spark could incinerate.

Oswald is the Christ of this New African Testament. One scene shows him metaphorically crucified at the hands of his never satisfied lover, who is also, by the way, everyone else’s, Damiana Antoniades, the Great Whore of Bujumbura. As the local medic, Oswald performs a few ‘miracles’, but he fails to convert anyone, and finally vanishes with his plans and ideals, forsaken in the symbolical flood of a tropical storm, from which he is retrieved by the King of Burundi himself, who was just driving by and handed Oswald a towel for him to dry himself with :

AlI of a sudden Oswald fell out-of-place. He had come all the way from America, full of plans and ideaIs, which seemed to have vanished, swept away by the cloudburst and the Mwami’s unexpected appearance.

Once Oswald, the symbolical upholder of ideals, is out of the way, Burundi becomes the realm of crooked politicians, disgruntled white trash and killers, who inscribe on the immaculate landscape an Apocalypse of red and black. The metaphorical eclipse of the title is the change from an immaculate majestic blackness carved in ebony to the blackness of an evil fed and encouraged by the white colonisation of Africa, whose aftermath extends from the Katanga rebellion in the sixties (the time of the novel) to the Rwandan genocide of the nineties. Albert Russo raises then the ultimate question of the effect of colonialism, a political system in which humaneness (love, tolerance and delight in natural beauty) is eventually dissolved into the disheartening racial equality of greed, contempt and murder.

About THE

BLACK ANCESTOR

Africa or the quest for identity: the predicament of a white girl in the Belgian Congo and the terrible legacy of her American father.

Essay by Eric Tessier, published in Francophonie Vivante and in World Literature Today (USA) in different versions.

"For who wants to understand Albert Russo, Africa is the key to his work and to his being. He is African by birth and he was raised in both Belgian-ruled Africa and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), speaking French, English, as well as Kiswahili.

Let’s first start with the story of the novel. Leodine, the daughter of Astrid, a beautiful Fleming, and of Gregory McNeil—a young and buoyant G.I. whom the latter had met in Northern France during WWII—, grows up in the Belgian Congo with her mother, after her father died in a plane crash, flying from America to rejoin his family. After a couple of years, Astrid falls in love with Piet Van den Berg, and the latter will move in with them. Leodine is surrounded by the love of her mother and of Piet, whom she now considers as her surrogate father, as well as by the affection of her maternal grandparents and of her uncle Jeff, who is still an adolescent.

One day her uncle, eavesdropping on his parents, will reveal to her that her deceased American father had a black great-grandmother. This news shatters the young girl and she becomes obsessed with the fact that she is of mixed blood, although she is so fair that no one could ever surmise it. But from this moment on her existence becomes a calvary. This will determine her whole future: she has decided never to marry, nor to bear a child who might be darker than herself.

The only friend she has at school is a pretty mulatto girl, half-Portuguese, half-Angolan, named Yolande, and she finally decides to divulge to her the terrible secret. Later on, Yolande introduces her to her cousin Mario-Tende, a refined and intelligent student who lives at the Cité Indigene (Elisabethville’s segregated black township). One afternoon, Leodine’s uncle Jeff is run over by a truck; she is so devastated, she feels she’s become an orphan for the second time.

Mario-Tende offers to tutor Leodine in the subjects she finds most difficult, especially math and science. A friendship evolves between the two, inasmuch as her uncle has left a huge void in her heart and that she can’t but compare him to Mario-Tende, for the two boys, who didn’t know each other, were about the same age and were both bright and diligent students, albeit with a major difference, the one of course, being white and the other black. Mario-Tende has deep and genuine feelings for the young girl, and one day, very naturally, very gently, the young man makes love to her. Panic-stricken, Leodine opens up to her mother, believing she is pregnant. But she is lucky and gets her periods.

After this grave occurrence, Astrid and her family decide to send the young girl away from the Congo. And it is thus that Leodine will go and study in far away Minnesota, where her paternal grandparents live. After college, she joins an Adventist convent, specialized in missionary work. She learns that Mario-Tende was killed in Angola, fighting for the independence of his country. Three decades after she left the Congo she will return to the continent of her birth and witness the horror wrought in that section of the Great Rift valley, following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Keeping to her promise, she never marries nor bears any child. But she will adopt a little Mozambican boy and name him … Mario-Tende.

One of Albert Russo’s recurring themes is the quest for one own’s identity, from wherever the protagonists of his novels or of his shorter fiction hail. It may be Africa, as in the present case, Europe or America, and the main character could be white, black, or of mixed blood. Born of an Italian father and of a British mother, the author, who fluently speaks five languages, writes in both French and English, which he considers as his two ‘mother-tongues’. Let’s face it, Albert Russo could very well be the hero of one of his novels. The issue here is quite straightfoward: in a binary world, where A must be white and B black, how does one measure the shades of life’s infinitely variegated spectrum? How does one define oneself, when one is both white and black? The purpose here is not to play on words, although we do live in a world where definitions and ideas are increasingly slipping into the dangerous arena of dogmatism. You need not look further than the fondamentalist propagators of radical Islam, and to a lesser degree, of other religions. In contemporary France, it is fashionable for the young folk, especially those living in the suburbs, to use the English word ‘black’, instead of ‘noir’, when designating a person of African descent, ‘rebeu’ in verlan (slang), for ‘arabe’, or ‘feuj’, for ‘juif’. I detect in such affectations a visceral fear of reality, a cowardly distancing between the self and one’s environment, a way of being politically correct in a fashionable manner, with the false pretense of establishing a new standard to which the new generation could identify itself. Calling someone ‘visually-impaired’ will not render him his sight, or a paraplegic ‘a person with reduced mobility’, his ability to walk. It would be much more practical and humane to fit our urban societies with the appropriate facilities, but here we are getting down to the nitty-gritty, and such concrete and urgent decisions scare many a politician. They bask in sparring matches, for it is so much easier to give advice or to counter one’s adversaries.

Returning to our main subject, how does one tackle the predicament of being at once black and white, in other words, of being a mulatto? To say that the mixing of races produces handsome children won’t answer the question. Man is instinctively recalcitrant to anyone who is different from himself. There is a tendency in our multi-ethnic democratic societies of regarding the ‘otherness’ of our fellow citizens, in a positive light, albeit with a sense of guilt. Yet, no matter how well-intentioned we are—and some of us genuinely believe in the cross-pollination of cultures—the mulatto continues to be considered a threat, for he is neither totally of one race, nor of another, and even though he didn’t choose his status, he might also be considered something of a traitor. The boundaries are so easily crossed when things do not turn out to our advantage. And immediately the old prejudices reappear to the surface, with snakish remarks or blatant accusations, such as that’s typical … or what can you expect from them?

I recall a discussion with Albert Russo concerning his novel L’amant de mon pere—-journal romain. How would you define your protagonist? asked a literary critic. He expected the author to stress the main character’s homosexuality and was somewhat disappointed by Russo’s reply: Like anybody else, Eric has sexual urges, but that is not what his life is all about. Even intellectuals who pretend to be open-minded often feel more comfortable when they are able to categorize. And of course, it is Albert Russo who is right, man cannot be reduced to his sexual inclinations.

There is another anecdote which I would like to mention that points to Russo’s status as both a polyglot and a bilingual author. He once approached a well-known Argentinian writer who had settled in France several decades ago and thought it natural to address him in Spanish. Why on earth are you speaking Spanish to me? the man retorted. "So, you write in French and in English? You must be schizophrenic, my friend! he went on. One has to choose, for one can write well in only one idiom. In my case, I have relinquished my native tongue for the language of Moliere."

Whereas some intellectual pedants spend their lives subtracting, Albert Russo adds on, enriched by his experiences. Unlike the little falcons that put on their hoods to please their masters, and flaunt their medals, at every possible occasion, Albert Russo has learned that freedom lies with the sparrow, unencumbered by society’s strictures.

In Eancetre noire, the reader, acquainted with the author’s previous African novels—Le Cap des Illusions, and in both French and English: Mixed Blood and Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika—will find many poignant and delightful passages, especially in the journeys across the magnificent Kivu province, which today, along with bordering Rwanda and Burundi, has been scarred by fratricidal wars.

That Leodine, in this particular novel, happens to be an adolescent, as was Leopold in Mixed Blood, isn’t fortuitous, for it is at that vulnerable period of one’s life that one’s intimate and social traits take form and that the child’s personality gets molded.

To conclude, I shall sum up what Albert Russo’s Africa represents in my eyes: humankind’s infinite diversity and, amid such richness, a quest for the deep self, with, concomittantly, the search for fraternal love. That is his message. Heed it!

Comments on a variety of Albert Russo’s work:

JAMES BALDWIN: on Mixed Blood and other works. l’ve read everything you sent me and l like your writing very much indeed. It has a very gentle surface and a savage undertow. You are saying something which no one particularly wants to hear and saying it, furthermore from a particularly intimidating point of view. You’re a dangerous man.

JOSEPH KESSEL (Académie Frangaise): … l was very touched by the tone of your two books.

PIERRE EMMANUEL (Académie Frangaise):. … l want to tell you the pleasure l had upon reading those difficult, sensuous pages … yet full of humor.

DOUGLAS PARMEE (Queens’College, Cambridge, GB): … l was particularly impressed by the remarkable range shown in such a small space, and the extraordinary command of the language.

MICHEL DROIT (Académie Frangaise): … Much imagination, sensitivity and quality of style … one really feels your Africa.

PAUL WILLEMS (Curator of the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts and Author): From the onset l felt a new tone to which one cannot remain indifferent.

About Eclats de malachite (Splinters of malachite):

GEORGES SION, in Le Soir:The author is endowed with rich experiences, a vast knowledge of languages and strong emotions which influence his style …

Jeune Afrique: … Largely autobiographical, this work is written in the manner of an exorcism, it is engrossing and reveals a very real talent. Vie etSucces: Nostalgia of childhood depicted by a great writer.

Mwanga (Zaire) : … a work of universal appeal … the human message is the ‘fetish’ which vibrates in the author’s book.

About La pointe du Diable (Devil’s Peak):

ROBERT CORNEVIN in Culture frangaise. the author’s sensitivity matches the quality of the descriptions.

Vie Ouvriere, Paris: … His prose is that of a poet wounded by the claws of a ferocious society.

Tribune juive: In a very personal style, Russo denounces the shame of apartheid. He speaks as a poet when describing the beauty of Africa.

Concerning his apartheid novel Le Cap des illusions, (Editions du Griot, 1991):

— Mensuel littéraire et poétique, Brussels: … his discreet lyrical style in this novel has the quality of certain classics, yet at times, the author is closer to poets like Dos Passos or Aimé Césaire. From this eminent polyglot such forays are not surprising. But above all, this is South Africa depicted by someone who knows it intimately well. And Albert Russo succeeds in giving us a lesson in ethnology with a verve few masters could possibly match.

— La Cité, Brussels: "… Prudence is raised as a poor white Afrikaner, but one day, the apartheid witch sneaks into her new school under the guise of a freckled classmate, then, brutally, the little girl will be wrenched from her roots and thrust amid the Colored community of District Six, compelled to share henceforth the fate of the underdog. Here, the absurdity of apartheid is scanned by a writer whose style is the reflection of his soul, in which language and culture constantly crossfertilize. And, ultimately, he leads us to believe in a Cape of hope.

Concerning Futureyes / Dans la nuit bleu-fauve, his bilingual poetry anthology (Ed.Le Nouvel Athanor, 1992):

— The French Review, USA: … this esthetically superb bilingual volume reveals the poet’s shadowy and wild inner climate in carefully incized subtle gradations. Within these inner confines, Russo invites us to penetrate his densely imaged cosmic verse. Russo is an unforgettable poet who, time and time again, compels the reader to that ever fertile, elusive, and mysterious land of the creative artist.

this review was signed by Bettina Knapp who has authored more than 45 books on literary criticism.

—Mensuel littéaire at poétique, Brussels: "… this whole volume is an ‘Emergency call’ (title of one of the poems) to lost brother / & sisterhood.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO ALBERT RUSSO’S WORK BY MARTIN TUCKER:

Albert Russo’s art and life are all of a unique piece, and that piece is a plurality of cultures. Born in what was then the Belgian Congo and now is Congo/Zaire, he grew up in Central and Southern Africa and writes in both English and French, his two ‘mother tongues’. With his intense interest in African life, the young Russo also engaged with knowledge beyond narrow stratifications of colonial custom. As a youth he left Africa for college in New York (where he attended New York University). For many years he has been resident in Paris. Wherever he has lived, Russo has concerned himself with one hard-burning commitment: to achieve an illumination of vision in his writing that suggests by the force of its light some direction for understanding of human behavior and action. He draws on the many cultures he has been privileged to know, and he is always respectul of diversity. But Russo is no mere reporter. While he works with words, and while his work is concerned with place and the spirit of place, he is more interested in visitation than visits. Almost every fiction Russo has written involves a visitation, a hearing from another world that reverberates into a dénouement and revolution of the protagonist’s present condition. These visitations are of course a form of fabulism—that is, utilizing the fable as a subtext of the animal nature of man. Russo’s fabulism however is not in the line of traditional mythology (perhaps mythologies is a better term, since Russo draws from a variety of folklore and consummate literary executions). In one of his recent fictions, for example, he writes of a man who falls in love with a tree—his love is so ardent he wills himself into a tree in order to root out any foreignness in his love affair. Thus, Russo’s family tree", the mating of woodland Adam and Eve, becomes in his creation not only a multicultural act but a cross-fertilization of the cultures he has drawn from. In this personal fable Russo suggests the Greek myth of Pan love and even the Adamastor legend, that Titan who has turned cruelly into a rock out of unbridled passion for a goddess. Russo suggests other legends as well, and certainly the crossing of boundaries, psychological, emotional as well as physical and territorial—hybrid phenomena now sweeping into the attention of all of Africa and the Middle East—is to be found within the feelingful contours of his tale.

Fabulism is now a recognized presence in our literary lives. It goes by other names: magic realism is one of them. Underneath all the manifestations of this phenomenon is the artistic credo that creation is larger than life, and that the progeny created enhances the life that gave being to it. In sum, the artist is saying that life is larger than life if given the opportunity to be lived magnificently. Russo’s is certainly a part of this willingness to experiment beyond the observable. His fiction represents, in essence, a belief, in the endless perceivable possibilities of mind. Its humor is at times dark, however, and perhaps this color of mood is a reflection of Russo’s background and biography. For his art, while enlarging, is not showered with sun. His dark hues are those of ironic vision.

Russo may be said to be very much a part of the beginning of this century. His concentration is on the inevitabilities of unknowingness; thus his resort is to the superrational as a way of steadying himself in the darkness. At the same time his work cannot be said to be tragic, for the unending endings of his fictions suggest a chance of progress, if not completion of one’s appointed task, worlds meet and become larger worlds in Russo’s work; people change within his hands.

It is a pleasure to pay homage to Russo’s achievement."

CRITIC AND PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT C. W. POST OF LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY, MARTIN TUCKER HAS PUBLISHED OVER TWENTY VOLUMES OF LITERARY CRITICISM, AMONG THEM THE CRITICAL TEMPER, MODERN COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE, AND MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE (IN CONTINUUM’S LIBRARY OF LITERARY CRITICISM SERIES). HE IS THE EDITOR OF THE PRIZE-WINNING LITERARY JOURNAL CONFRONTATION, AND THE AUTHOR OF AFRICA IN MODERN LITERATURE AND OTHER WORKS. HIS POETRY HAS BEEN COLLECTED IN HOMES OT LOCKS AND MYSTERIES, AND APPEARS IN LEADING PERIODICALS. HE IS A MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD OF PEN AMERICAN CENTER AND HAS SERVED ON THE GOVERNING BOARD OF POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA. HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN A BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD AND OF SAM SHEPARD, BOTH CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED.

THE BLACK ANCESTOR

a novel set in the Belgian Congo

original English version by

Albert Russo

L’ancetre noire

published in Paris by

Editions Hors Commerce, 2003

in the author’s own French translation

CHAPTER ONE

I was born in a once lovely town called Elisabethville, now Lubumbashi, known as the Pearl of Katanga, Katanga or Shaba, which was and still remains the Congo’s richest province. The whole country is, alas, today in a pitiful state, after forty years of corruption and mismanagement.

Of my father, Gregory McNeil, I have very few memories, except for the faded black and white pictures which are scattered over two family albums. Father, who was enlisted in the US army, met mother soon after he landed in Normandy to repel the Nazis. It is an irony of History that mother, her two sisters and one brother, had fled with my grandmother from their comfortable and spacious thatched-roofed mansion in the suburbs of Antwerp to take refuge in the so-called Free Section of France, while my grandfather had stayed in the Belgian Congo, throughout the war, serving there as a high functionary in the colonial administration.

Unlike her husband, Granny who came from a wealthy Flemish family never liked the colony. She couldn’t stand its tropical strangeness nor its people, whether they be Africans or Whites, deeming the latter too gruff, and whenever she could take the boat back to Belgium, she did it, bringing along the children with her.

So it happened that she left with the S.S. Thysville, just a few days before the Germans invaded Belgium and took over the Port of Antwerp. I don’t know if my grandmother regretted her impulsive move or if she then changed her mind concerning the Belgian Congo, but what I do know is that she and her children suffered a great deal during the war and that, because of her brother Karel who fought in the Resistance, she had to escape to France with her family. Months that became years of penury and humiliation followed, till the Allied Forces landed in Normandy.

Grandmother and her family were living in a small village not far from Avranches, she, for the first time of her life having to do chores, scrub floors and sew for other people in order to feed her children and maintain a modicum of human decency.

It was at an outdoorsbal musette, at the sound of the accordion, that mother, who had just only turned 17, met the man who was going to be my father. He fell head over heels in love with her and asked her to marry him at once. This sudden proposition scared her, for she had been raised in a very secluded bourgeois environment and had never gone out with boys before, since she had only frequented the convent school until the war broke out. But the young G.I. was very stubborn and told her he would go to her mother and ask for her hand. Which, to mother’s dismay, he did. Granny told him off; in spite of it he was persistent and went so far as to say: If you’re afraid that she will have to accompany me and live in America, I will come to settle wherever you wish me to. That’s no problem at all. I can even go back to school and brush up my French, which, right now, I’m afraid to admit is quite rusty.

He didn’t know, at that time, that it was Flemish he would have had to learn.

In front of such ebullience and naiveté, Granny remained nonplussed. She had never come across a young man so driven and so sure of his sentiments. She tried to talk him away, saying that in any case, her daughter was much too young to get married and that she had to resume her studies first, but my father kept coming back, answering that he respected her point of view and that he could wait. Granny, in fact, though she only voiced it afterwards, began to like the boy, finding a purity and an enthusiasm in him that were so refreshing after those five horrid years where all the values had crumbled like so many of the razed buildings around her.

Mother’s eyes twinkled and her bosom hurt, she felt so blissful, for now, aware of Granny’s feelings, she secretly returned his love.

Father was six years older than she and by contrast to mother’s almost angelic, Memlinc-like fairness, he had the swarthy good looks of a swashbuckler, but a gentle one at that—which were her very words, as she compared him to an American Robin Hood, especially since he’d befriended two black G.Is. in his company who had opened his eyes to the racial inequities which were still so flagrant in the United States, even so many years after the abolition of slavery. And he vowed to defend as strongly as he could the cause of his country’s minorities, including that of its original inhabitants, the Indians, about whom, he felt ashamed to say, he knew only what he had seen in the Westerns.

After the war, Granny and the children rejoined grandfather in Elisabethville, where he had just bought a house surrounded by a garden full of dahlias, her favorite flowers. She began to appreciate her life there, insasmuch as the city had a nice climate and was booming thanks to its copper mines. Then too, there was little left from her family fortune since the grand old Antwerp mansion had to be sold, to pay for the bare necessities.

Mother went to the nuns’ school at the Institut Marie-Jose, working very hard to catch up with her classmates, who were several years younger, since they had remained in the colony and therefore didn’t have to interrupt their studies.

Her fiancé came every summer all the way from Minnesota to spend a month with her. My grandparents, who had now both taken a liking to the young American, finally accepted the idea that he was going to become their stepson, and he was permitted to lodge in the guestroom—in those days, a young couple, even though they were engaged to be married, had to keep their distances.

Thus it was that on a bright July morning, the two turtledoves got married in Elisabethville’s cathedral, surrounded by my grandparents and their children, as well as by the young man’s folks who had flown in from the States, via Brussels. They spent their honeymoon in the magnificent Great Lakes region, the so-called Rift Valley, driving around the eastern province of Kivu, Rwanda-Urundi and visiting the Albert National Park, home to some of the world’s rarest orchids and to the famous gorillas.

The young couple settled in Minnesota the following summer. Mother felt very homesick there and she didn’t find the people too affable, but what depressed her most were the long winters, especially when there were snow storms. So she flew back to the Congo at least twice a year. After my birth, my father had planned to rejoin us in Elisabethville for a few weeks, but his plane crashed in Northern Sudan, which made my mother a widow at the still tender age of twenty.

We lived with my grandparents, my uncle and two aunts who, at that time, were still going to school. Mother, terribly distressed at the loss of her husband, became claustrophobic, with so many people around her, and every day that passed was a real torture, to the point that she couldn’t stand her family anymore. That’s when she started suffering from nervous fits. I remember her screams and how she would yell at her brother and sisters who were just playing in the garden: Stop that racket, all of you, my head is going to split.

Once she even eloped with a married man, leaving me behind with my grandparents. Such a scandal had never occurred in the family, but when she came back three weeks later, feverish and having lost more than ten pounds, my grandparents didn’t reprimand her and never asked her anything about the man—obviously the affair had ended badly.

She now started going out and accepted dates twice a week, or even more often. Granny would scold her, whispering things like: You ought to be ashamed of yourself, acting like that. What example are you setting to your brother and sisters, let alone to your own daughter?

One night she teetered back home, probably tipsy—it must have been well after 2 am—for I was awoken by the click-clack of stiletto heels, followed by hissing sounds and a loud smack. I then heard my grandfather use the word ‘prostitute’ and while I didn’t understand its meaning, the way he pronounced it made me shudder. It sounded like a horrendous tropical disease.

From that time on or thereabout, I started having nightmares which fanned out into savage daydreams, to the point where I was terrified to be in my room alone when falling asleep. There is one that recurred every so often. Horresco referens—I shiver as I retell it. It was an elegant toffee-colored tarantula, feet laced with black glossy stripes, ambling sideways from one corner of the ceiling to the other with, in the place of its dome, mother’s face in day-glo, leering at me. To draw my attention, it would skitter a few inches at a time, but strangely enough, never downwards, then halting at a strategic point, in a manner that I didn’t have to turn around, it would stare at me and project another of mother’s mocking grimaces. What always unnerved me was how eerie and at once eloquent these expressions appeared, because of their muteness. I even saw myself scream in silence like that painting of Edvard Munch. No, it was even worse than that, I felt as if this was happening in the water and that my tarantula of a mother kept sneering at me all the while I was drowning. Then, all of a sudden, through the ripples, I saw a crow materialize, traversing the ceiling, like a black angel of doom. It glided along the electric cord of the bedroom pendant then wrapped its wings around the lamp, and to my horror, amid the dark plumage and the crow’s strong beak, I recognized father’s traits. The bird then darted towards the tarantula and emitted an awful raucous cry before it started pecking at mother’s now imploring face. It pierced one eye and gouged it out. The crow seemed to relish it while it kept croaking: That’ll serve you right, you bitch! And it then aimed at the other eye, doing the same thing, leaving my mother in tears with blood gushing out of her two cavities where the orbs had been. That is when I would jump out of my nightmare to enter, in cold sweat, the not less ominous darkness and solitude of my room. In the beginning I would call mother, screaming, to make sure nothing had really happened to her and would stutter as she came in, bleary-eyed, hair disheveled, wearing her satin nightdress, followed moments later by Granny and sometimes also Grandpa, for they too would hear my shrieks:

"Your eyes, mommy,