Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou

bless my quills, how time flies, my voice is raw, night has fallen over Sekepembe already, I weep and weep, I don't know why, for once my solitude is a burden to me, I feel so guilty, I did nothing to save my master, was there anything I could have done to stop those two kids who tormented him so in the few weeks before his death, I don't know, I really don't, at first I just wanted to save my skin even though I was sure that if Kibandi died I must die also, and under conditions like that, it's true what they say, better a live coward than a dead hero, well I'm not exactly overcome with grief at Kibandi's absence, nor embarrassed to have been lucky enough to survive till now, to have you as my confidant, but I'm ashamed of all the things I've been telling you since this morning, I wouldn't want you to judge me without taking into account the fact that I was just an underling, a shadow in Kibandi's life...

Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou's Memoirs of a Porcupine is what the title promises: a story narrated by a porcupine. In this case, the porcupine is a "harmful double," a creature bound by dark magic to a young man named Kibandi by his father. When the novel begins, Kibandi has died, and the porcupine narrator is certain that he must perish also, as is the way with harmful doubles, but the death never comes. As he frets, he tells his story to a sheltering baobab tree: though he was once a willing participant in the magic, leaving his porcupine community behind in order to be Kibandi's double, he has since come to regret the cruelty of his master, who uses him and his poisonous quills to commit many murderers without being caught. Perhaps it's this independent spirit, developed over a lifetime of subservience to evil, that saves the porcupine's life when Kibandi dies.

One thing I find interesting about Memoirs of a Porcupine is the image of the double. Kibandi has not just one double, but two: double doubles. Besides the porcupine, he has a literal double that has no nose or mouth. Kibandi's cruelty is what "feeds" his faceless self. If this horrible thing is Kibandi's true double, what is the porcupine? Something bound to Kibandi's self but not quite coequal to it, something that kills but is not nourished or fed. He is called on to commit acts of increasing violence--murdering a young girl who rejects Kibandi's advances, and then the infant child of a rival--but it is the faceless double who is fd. The porcupine, too, ends up being extremely creeped out by the faceless Kibandi, a kind of true double self he can never supplant or become.

Memoirs of the Porcupine is pretty fun, a modernist jaunt that draws heavily (I presume) from traditional Congolese stories and legends. I enjoyed the voice of the porcupine, and the breathless and unlettered style of the sections, which move hastily without periods, only commas. Maybe that's the way a porcupine would talk, if it could. It reminded me a little of Mia Couto's terrific stories in Voice Made Night, which do something similar with stories from Mozambique. 

This is the first book I've read from the Republic of the Congo (that's the small one), which brings my "countries read" list up to 77!