The River in the Belly

Anglophone readers might be familiar with Fiston Mwanza Mujila as the acclaimed author of Tram 83 (2014), a rhapsodic debut novel that dizzyingly centered on the sole nightclub of a nameless Central African city-state. The poems of The River in the Belly, translated from the French by J. Bret Maney, offer a similarly riotous and incandescent exploration of violent cartographies and colonial imaginaries. Composed of 101 numbered "solitudes," Mwanza Mujila’s collection is equal parts hallucination, augury, and crônica, with fragments that appear out of order and are often enigmatically brief, grotesque, and surreally humorous. For example, "Solitude 21" reads:

and yes, but no, my australopithecine gullet
and yes, but neither, my protozoan mug
and yes, but no, my skeletal body
and yes, but neither, my amphibian belly
am I a toad?
the toaderino (?) 

At the heart of this experimental collection is the Congo River, and the poet’s relationship to it as an African diasporic writer living in Europe, a relationship marked by anxiety/nausea, where the river becomes a "confounded malingerer," a "restless, twitchy dog," a "wound, fresh and suppurant" that "dies / of solitude." The viscerally energetic voices of those who are connected to the Congo River accumulate through the solitudes as dismembered body parts, gutted, cannibalized, chewed, spat back out as idiosyncratic or ballistic words.

Mwanza Mujila’s poems are often polyphonic—sampling Lingala, Swahili, German—as well as internationalist in vibe, juggling football alongside child soldiers, conflict minerals with world jazz, the Soviet space dog Laika with verses from the Book of Revelations. Through its reverberations, as well as its disquieting tonal shifts, this collection casts doubt on "Cartesian certainty." Mwanza Mujila’s project tries to decolonize the imaginary of a post- independence DRC, to emphasize the ways in which epistemic disobedience must occur in order to, as Maney notes, "reinitiate the Congo River in the imaginary of European languages," to explore the complex realities and fantasies of a "Congo without Conrad."