Tram 83

By Fiston Mwanza Mujila

WINNER OF THE 2015 PEN TRANSLATES

WINNER OF THE 2015 ETISALAT PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

A pulsating novel of urban abandonment in the Congo.

In an unnamed African city in secession, profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities mix. They have only one desire: to make a fortune by exploiting the mineral wealth of the land. Two friends — Lucien, a writer with literary ambitions, home from abroad, and his childhood friend Requiem, who dreams of taking over the seedy underworld of their hometown — gather in the most notorious nightclub in town: the Tram 83. Around them gravitate gangsters and young girls, soldiers and stowaways, profit-seeking tourists and federal agents of a nonexistent State.

Tram 83 plunges the reader into a modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colourfully exotic. A daring feat of narrative imagination and linguistic creativity, Tram 83 uses the rhythms of jazz to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village.

PRAISE FOR FISTON MWANZA MUJILA

‘One of the most exciting discoveries of the rentrée … There is some Hieronymus Bosch in this frenetic, flamboyant, closed-door city slicker. An insolent, globe-trotting Hieronymus Bosch, one who would have read Gabriel García Márquez and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.’ Le Monde

‘This ambitious fugue from Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila delves into an African nation riven by civil war, disease, poverty, and endemic corruption … It’s bustling, strange experimental fiction in which the chaos of daily life leaks like blood from the iron fist of violence and profit.’ The Sydney Morning Herald

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Aug 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781925307184

Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Fiston Mwanza Mujila was born in 1981 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, where he went to a Catholic school before studying literature and human sciences at Lubumbashi University. He now lives in Graz, Austria, and is pursuing a PhD in Romance Languages. His writing has been awarded with numerous prizes, including the Gold Medal at the 6th Jeux de la Francophonie in Beirut as well as the Best Text for Theatre (“Preis für das beste Stück,” State Theatre, Mainz) in 2010. His poems, prose works, and plays are reactions to the political turbulence that has come in the wake of the independence of the Congo and its effect on day-to-day life. As he describes in one of his poems, his texts describe a ‘geography of hunger’: hunger for peace, freedom, and bread. Tram 83, written in French and published in August 2014 as a lead title of the entrée littéraire by Éditions Métailié, is his first novel. It has been shortlisted and won numerous literary prizes in France, Austria, England, and the United States.

Reviews for Tram 83

[widsith_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A feverish burst of slam-poetry yelled in your ear over pounding music, so close and so loud you can practically feel the spittle hitting your face. Reading these dispatches from the sharp end of globalisation is like being hit by an undammed river of language – rhythmic, sinuous, dirty, improvisational, perspiring but also weirdly inspiring.The setting is a nameless ‘city-state’ in central Africa which exists in de-facto secession, run by a Kabila-like ‘dissident General’ busy exploiting the region's mineral resources. The rest of the inhabitants live their short lives in a Hobbesian nightmare of near-total lawlessness and lack of infrastructure, fitting into a limited number of social strata: mine workers, students, ‘for-profit tourists’, and the underage prostitutes known in this book's patois as ‘ducklings’ (canetons). It sounds depressing, but despite the very serious realities being described, the primary feeling is one of exuberance and of messy, creative, insuppressible life.The main reason for this is Mwanza Mujila's prose style, which is designed to mimic the author's beloved jazz music – he's said he wanted his novel to be a literary version of Coltrane's Giant Steps (Mwanza Mujila would probably have been a musician himself, were it not for the inconvenience that Lubumbashi has no music school or saxophone). ‘Pour moi, la langue française, c'est comme un orchestre de jazz,’ he told one interviewer, and he's used the instruments available to him incredibly well, stringing together these long, comma-spliced, elegiac, almost Kerouac-esque riffs:les nuits étaient un bonheur pour ceux qui savaient en profiter, les vraies nuits étaient longues et populaires, les vraies nuits étaient toujours événementielles, les vraies nuits n'échappaient plus à la corruption et autres coups bas, les vraies nuits puaient la névralgie, les crachats et traumatismes de ceux qui construisaient ce beau monde cassé…[…the nights were a joy to those who knew how to take advantage of them, the true nights were long and belonged to the people, the true nights were always events, the true nights didn't run from corruption and other below-the-belt activities, the true nights stank of the neuralgia, gobs of spit and injuries of those who were creating this beautiful broken world…]At the centre of it all, the city in microcosm, is the eponymous Tram 83 (which I hear in my head in a heavy accent, tram kat van twa!), a bar-cum-brothel-cum-greasy spoon which goes straight into the top ten of greatest literary drinking halls. A small, shabby stage with a band playing bebop or Congolese rumba; waitresses and busgirls supplying Brazzaville beer and dogmeat kebabs; catatonic miners and Chinese tourists; and, circling, the ‘ducklings’, teen mothers and assorted ‘no-knicker girls’ (filles-sans-calbars) trying to drag men off for a quick, remunerative assignation in the mixed-sex toilets. The girls' patter is forever interrupting the narrative prose, from the standard approach – ‘You got the time?’ – which is crowbarred into the text again and again, to more elaborate comments and flirtations: ‘Foreplay to me is like democracy. If you don't touch me right, I'm calling in the Americans.’Mwanza Mujila took the name of his bar from a late-night Brussels tramline, which immediately makes me want to transpose it in my head to the N3, the bus I got home from London every Saturday night throughout my adolescence. I love the idea of naming a bar after a transport route, and in this case it's especially meaningful because of how central the idea of train lines, in particular, are – remembering always that while in Europe trains often represent progress and development, in Africa they come instead with colonial connotations of forced labour, exploitation and deportation. He tries to incorporate this history, both by referring to it directly (the city's train station ‘brings to mind the railway line built by Stanley’), and also by slipping into a certain trainlike rhythm – among other things, Tram 83 is determinedly ‘locomotive literature’. The novel's setting is somewhat exaggerated, no doubt, but I suspect critics have underestimated the extent to which it faithfully reproduces Lubumbashi, which throughout much of both Congo Wars, and for that matter earlier, too, perfectly fitted the book's description of ‘une ville devenue pays par la force des kalachnikovs’. Certainly it won't do to imply (as some critics have seemed at risk of doing) that this is a flight of fancy – what makes this book important as well as viscerally entertaining is that this world, with all its frenetic violence and grotesque gender polarisation, is real and moreover is the flipside of our own western lifestyle.What Tram 83 is actually showing us is the consequences of producing seventy million iPhones a year: this is what it comes down to, quite literally – the coltan in all these modern gadgets is dug up right here by people who can expect to die in their mid-forties. Mwanza Mujila has taken that basic obscenity and made great literature out of it.

[kidzdoc_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This novel is set in an African city-state which is filled with a mixture of young prostitutes, foreigners seeking fortune and pleasure, older prostitutes, hustlers, drug dealers and con men, teenage prostitutes, university students and bitter young men, prostitutes of undetermined age, and politicians, philosophers and prognosticators. (Did I mention prostitutes?) The favored meeting place of night goers is Tram 83, a club in which jazz is constantly playing, beer and hard liquor are readily available, and any attempt at conversation is interrupted by prostitutes asking for the time of day.The book is centered on two paper thin characters, Requiem, a local hustler, and his old friend Lucien, a failed history professor and writer, who has come from the Back Country to see Requiem and to improve his fortune. Lucien meets a Swiss book publisher in Tram 83, who promises to help him back on his feet, provided that he is willing to adapt his work to fit the public's demand, while Requiem spends his days making deals and availing himself of the baby-chicks and single-mamas who vie for his attention, and his money.The story is almost completely lacking in plot or structure and is mind-numbingly repetitive, and after 60 pages I skimmed through the rest of it to find out what happened to the main characters. Tram 83 has been chosen as a finalist for several literary awards, including the Man Booker International Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, and includes an effusive praise filled foreword from Alain Mabanckou, one of my favorite living African authors. However, I found the book to be incredibly overblown and overhyped, and although it may reflect the reality of a lawless place like the Democratic Republic of the Congo this book doesn't provide any insight into the people that live in cities like this one. Don't waste your time with this one.

[lindoula-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This one was hard to finish. Not my style is putting it mildly. More plot, please. More character development, please.

[pbirch01 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although I found this book really hard to follow, I did find it to be an enjoyable journey though a mythical yet very believable atmosphere. It reminded me of all the bars I ever visited in Africa and did an excellent job of describing and characterizing all the patrons of this particular bar. However, there was little to no character development and although the plot focused on two characters I can't really recall what their story was or why it mattered.

[tanya8dogearedcopy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a sordid, vibrant, and even comical story set at a nightclub in the heart of a mining district in an unnamed town in the DRC. The challenge in reading the novel lies in the translation. [I would have loved to have had a French copy on hand for certain passages that did not come across as clean or as lyrical as I suspect they were in the original.]

[seeword · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Set in a made-up African city-state somewhere in the Congo region. Gritty tale of a mix of locals, ex-pats, and wanderers: the exploiters and the exploited. A great read. Personal copy.