Ebb, flow and clash

If you have never witnessed the almighty waves that surge onto the shores of Côte d’Ivoire, relish instead the opening paragraphs of Comrade Papa:

Ebb and flow shatter as they clash and retreat towards the deep. As four waves push from behind, and two beat a retreat into its belly, the third wave swells, billows, bellows louder than the last. The tip of the crest – they call it the “mother” – soars high above the others.

Only a fool or an exceptionally strong and skilled swimmer would enter these waters: the rip tide would suck you down and swallow you up. The same could be said for the subject of this novel, which rises up from, and dives deep into, the African history and European colonization of these lands. Only a bold writer in command of their talent could take on such a perilous and vast subject and come out, with laughter and love, on top.

This is the second novel by the Ivorian author, screenwriter and satirical newspaper editor GauZ’. His first, Debout-Payé (2014; Standing Heavy, 2022), examined France through the steady gaze of a group of security guards – all of them West African migrants. Its humour and audacious style delighted critics and the judges of the International Booker prize, for which, in Frank Wynne’s translation, it was shortlisted. Comrade Papa is a more ambitious novel and, one imagines, posed some significant challenges of translation, again by the indefatigable Wynne. Expanding his reach, GauZ’ tells the tale of two individuals, separated by a century but connected in curious and, ultimately, rather beautiful ways.

It is 1977, the year after the death of “Comrade” Mao. The adorable Dutch schoolboy Anouman is leaving Amsterdam, where he has lived his entire life with his Ivorian parents, the committed Marxists Comrade Papa and Maman. The decision has been made to send Anouman to Côte d’Ivoire to live with his maternal grandmother. His father, who doesn’t say much, “unless it’s about the struggle for the emancipation of the working masses”, informs his son on the day of his departure that Maman “has left to go to the socialist paradise of Comrade Hodja” (Enver Hoxha). Anouman flies out from Paris.

Now step back a century, a few years before the imperialist European powers agreed to divvy up the African continent at the Conference of Berlin. The Frenchman Maxime Dabilly, who was born “in a state of sin”, has lost both his parents. First goes his mother: “A candle snuffed, a wisp of blue smoke, then nothing but a mass of wax”. Shortly after, in the same bed, goes his father. Now an orphan, who learned at catechism class that “redemption of the soul comes through departure”, and that “people leave in order to be free”, Dabilly heads to Africa, to the French Côte d’Ivoire.

As far apart as they are, these two effectively parentless protagonists are both journeying into the unknown. For Dabilly ignorance is bliss. No matter the horrors he is warned of – “Wild beasts, ravenous insects, brutal diseases, suffocating heat, gruelling marches, loneliness” – he feels no fear. “Africa is unimaginable. It cannot terrify.” Anouman, who has been raised on his father’s tales of the horrors of Belgium’s Leopold II, as well as of the assassinated Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba and of the Martinican psychiatrist and radical philosopher Frantz Fanon, observes that “I’m starting to think that in Africa there’s only lunatics and devils”.

A third strand in Comrade Papa is the italicized historical vignettes. GauZ’ has said he is “obsessed with structure” – and this book’s structure, with these mini chapters coming as interludes between the first-person narrations of Dabilly and Anouman, echoes the ebb and flow, the “clash and retreat”, of the “seven rolling breakers” at the start. These waves provide the perfect metaphor, and perfect rhythm, for a novel that examines the complex relationship between two continents, two centuries and two lives.

If you are foolish enough to open this book with a set of assumptions about where it will go, prepare to be wrong-footed. In reference to his first novel GauZ’ said that Africans never abandon laughter, “no matter how serious the situation”. This holds true for Comrade Papa, principally through Anouman, whose Marxist indoctrination allows him to understand the toilet as “a re-education camp” and the contents of the fridge as “extra surplus-value”. His childish malapropisms are “cat-and-gorically” an enduring source of pleasure on the page, for which we must also salute Wynne’s creativity. Yet, it is the riveting soliloquies of the surprisingly thoughtful young French colonialist that will linger longest in the mind. Expect to see GauZ’ back on the shortlists with this superlative work of fiction.

Lara Pawson’s most recent book is Spent Light, 2024

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