They shared the same aspirations: money and sex. They loved money and baby-chicks. They were all drawn to the mines and the Tram. Days, they roamed the mines, whenever they could excavate with the dissident General's authorization, and nights, they celebrated their good fortune at the Tram. They hit on the baby-chicks and the ageless-women, identified with the jazz, and drank beer till they threw up.
The City-State has seceded from the nameless African nation it was once a part of; it's become the site of tensions between rebel factions and the "dissident General." Its economy revolves around "the stone," the minerals that are clawed out from the ground by black laborers at the behest of foreign "tourists." And amid labor and war, entertainment: the ramshackle nightclub known as Tram 83 pulses with life every night. People of every social background gather there to drink and hear music; they gather, too, to engage the services of prostitute "single-mammas" and underage "baby-chicks."
The main characters of Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 are a pair of regulars at this club: Requiem, a criminal and agitator in control of the city's underground, and his old friend Lucien, an anxious writer who has recently returned from the "Back-Country." Requiem is haughty, powerful, and reckless; reasoning that the average lifespan in the City-State is below forty, he's determined to live his remaining years without trepidation. Lucien is an intellectual struggling to write a play in which dozens of great figures from history--Patrice Lumumba, Christopher Columbus, Napoleon--tussle and bicker. Requiem hates Lucien for stealing his wife while he, Requiem, was away in the service of a warlord. Requiem and Lucien are two archetypal African men of the 21st century, a doer and a thinker, one grasping with a semiautomatic and the other with a pen. In truth, as Mujila writes, they are two halves of the same consciousness:
Was Requiem not ultimately Lucien's double? Distanced, thousands of miles from each other, by dramas, fissures, and follies, how did they manage to live under the same roof? Some wagging tongues were abrupt in their appraisal. They are children of the same father, whether they like it or not.
Tram 83 is a comic endeavor, peopled with broad characters and farcical scenarios. Its language is frenetic, disordered, and lively. Tram 83 is a jazz club, and the life lived there by diggers and child-soldiers and warlords and tourists and baby-chicks is a jazz life, as Mujila says pointedly. The prose, too, is jazz, with its staccato rhythms and airs of improvisation. "Jazz," Mujila writes, "is a sign of nobility, it's the music of the rich and the newly rich, those who build this beautiful broken world." The narrative is even broken by the refrain of the baby-chicks, fishing for clients--"Do you have the time?"--like a repeated motif, or perhaps a simple chime.
And while the story itself struck me as circular, even repetitive, I couldn't help but be drawn in by the rhythms of the writing. I liked, too, the powerful duality of Requiem and Lucien, two halves of the same personality, at war with itself, much like the City-State in which they live.
With the addition of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (that's the big one), my "countries read" list is up to 78!
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