Book: Tram 83
Author: Fiston Mwanza Mujila (translated by Roland Glasser)
Publisher: Jacaranda Books
Price: £8.99
Review by Reshma Ruia
Tram 83, (originally written in French), announces the arrival of a bold new voice in African literature in the shape of Fiston Mwanza Mujila.
Tram 83, Mujila’s debut novel, has already won a string of literary awards in France, Austria, UK and the USA, including the English Pen Award.
Set in an unnamed resource-rich African state, the story operates on several levels. It ostensibly describes the friendship between Lucien, an idealistic writer fleeing censorship, and Requim, a street smart vagrant who survives through theft and cheating.
But the novel is more than a portrayal of a friendship gone sour. It offers a devastating critique of contemporary African society and its politics of corruption, exploitation and greed.
Written in urgent prose, peppered with swear words and frequent references to sex and violence, it mirrors the bleakness and desperation of its protagonists. The Tram 83 of the title refers to a sleazy nightclub which draws the mercenaries and the impoverished, the exploiters and the exploited in equal measure.
Like Dante’s Inferno, Tram 83 – with its heady mixture of jazz, alcohol, drugs and sex on sale – offers a temporary escape from the grim business of survival in a state where all sense of morality and hope have been crushed under a totalitarian regime intent on self-enrichment.
As well as political polemic, Mujila uses subtlety, humour and careful observation to reveal the emotional bankruptcy of his characters. His language captures the desperation of young girls selling their bodies and young men stripped of idealism.
It’s a state where “at 15 you already start scribbling your will” and “you peddle, you abuse, you corrupt, you drink, you shit in the stairwell…”
Tram 83 is very different from the usual genre of sepia-tinted, nostalgic novels about Africa. It’s a satire and a critique of a failed state where relationships and emotions are cynically sacrificed for the price of a loaf of bread.
It’s haunting in its bleakness and yet darkly comic in its evocation of a society’s underbelly. This is a novel you won’t forget in a hurry.