Fiston
Mwanza Mujila

Fiston Mwanza Mujila has been cited as the most widely translated writer from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet he’d be the last to assent to statistical praise of this sort. Indeed, one of the traits that define his offbeat, often unsettling humor as a poet, playwright, and novelist is the lampooning of numbers: a grandmother might be 200 years old, a suicidal poet may arrive at his flat at 1:83 a.m. and thereafter spiral into desperation and manic song as other improbable numbers tick away on the clock.

For Mwanza Mujila such devices aren’t gimmicks: they undermine the imposition of Western temporalities bequeathed together with the violence of Belgian colonialism. Time transfigured yields imaginative space for a profusion of voices and identities. Mwanza Mujila’s art is one of syncopating time, of making it swing. A musicien manqué who has collaborated with everyone from jazz instrumentalists to the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, he frequently describes his writing by reaching for musical metaphors.

Mwanza Mujila’s writing, primarily in French, although increasingly in German, exults in tender noise, joyfully obtuse aesthetic experiments, Dadaist effusions, ambiguous politics, starkly unsentimental depictions of violence and hardship, breakneck verbal energy and languorous pools of sound, as well as in genealogies, diasporic routes, the Congo River and the unwritten, intimate histories of the peoples enfolded in its basin. In a 2016 poem, he writes, “I put into perspective the painful images the earth sends back to us, I put into perspective the sun.” In another ars poetica poem, he states, “I must be happy to write. Even when the text itself is a cartography of violence.”

This flexible, undefinable, serpentine, yet clear-headed joy that powers Mwanza Mujila’s vision and style and makes him dear to his many admirers is also a mark of the uniqueness of his reception in the West, the vitality of his literary project that has resulted in so many translations, readers, and today the burgeoning attention of scholars.  Mwanza Mujila’s art has never fit comfortably into the human rights discourses in which Western publishers and readers wish to package African writers. His works have also sometimes dismayed African critics who decry its willingness to court the abject. All of this is to his credit as a risk-taker and artist.

The German translation of his first novel, Tram 83, won the 2017 Internationaler Literaturpreis. In its original French, itgarnered the Etisalat Prize for Literature and the Grand Prix SGDL du Premier Roman. In Austria, he is the recipient of the Peter-Rosegger-Literaturpreis and serves as literary coordinator at Graz’s contemporary art space Forum Stadtpark. He edited the 2021 anthology of Black European poetry Kontinentaldrift: Das Schwarze Europa (Continental Drift: Black Europe). Recent works include the novel La Danse du villain (The Villain’s Dance), winner of the 2021 Prix Les Afriques, the play Der Garten der Lüste (The Garden of Lust, 2023), and the libretto for Hèctor Parra’s opera, Justice (2024), about the aftermath of a deadly acid spill in the DRC.

To plunder, in closing, one of Mwanza Mujila’s favorite verbs, “defenestrate”yourself into his pages and performances.

Text: J. Bret Maney