Tram 83
by Fiston Mwanza Mujila
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Exceptional debut Congolese novel uses jazz rhythm to evoke the frenzied exploitation of land and people in contemporary Africa.Tags
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I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
Many people have spoken to the poetic nature of this book's text. I agree, in both the good sense...the author's (and crucially the translator's) ear for the heightened meanings of words used in poetry is always adding a bass line to this melody...and the bad, that being the obfuscatory and often obscurantist requirement for the reader to unpack subtexts and discover new senses for familiar words while mid-read.
It's not an impossible task. It's often uncomfortable, and it's always a way of slowing the reader down. That isn't always a bad thing. It can feel sort of like the author is being pedantic, the repetition of variants on "You have the time?" is my favorite example. The time to disport yourself with a prostitute. The time to listen to a song. The time as spending, a transaction, an exchange of money for value or attention for money; the issue at hand isn't that it's hard to do this work but that it's required. Read cold, flat, without investment other than decoding, there is no through-line of story to receive. It is a list of lists, a repetition of phrases and names and all strung on a thin cord of criticism for capitalist society's multi-level destruction of the characters. That isn't a terribly satisfying read; and the fact that it is in itself a sharp critique of the mental laziness of many readers is a bit off-putting.
So much is inside the world of Tram 83 that it can feel as overwhelming as a physical trip to Africa does to many Westerners. For the whitest among us, the experience of being a vanishingly small minority is so unsettling as to be agony. For that reason I want many many US whites to read it; I recognize the futility of that wish but am stubbornly advocating it. It's the end of 2020. The world has changed because of COVID-19. It is long past time people with our First-World privilege, regular garbage pick-up and grocery stores and paved roads, heard about the reality of the rest of the world in their own words.
What I want from white people like me reading this thunderflash of words, this uncappable well of natural story-gas, is that we stop and do the work of being in fellowship with the world that isn't like us. Because that surface difference, as this intense and unmissable read says and shows, means nothing against the deepest human need of all: To connect and commune with Humanity. As cheesy as that sounds, this really is the take-away I hope you'll have when you spend a day immersed in Tram 83. show less
Many people have spoken to the poetic nature of this book's text. I agree, in both the good sense...the author's (and crucially the translator's) ear for the heightened meanings of words used in poetry is always adding a bass line to this melody...and the bad, that being the obfuscatory and often obscurantist requirement for the reader to unpack subtexts and discover new senses for familiar words while mid-read.
The City-State is one of those territories that have already broken through the barrier of internal suffering. You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same trains, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, theshow more
same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise, like a ship, you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed, the route marked out in advance. Fate sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiler merchandise and the dying.
It's not an impossible task. It's often uncomfortable, and it's always a way of slowing the reader down. That isn't always a bad thing. It can feel sort of like the author is being pedantic, the repetition of variants on "You have the time?" is my favorite example. The time to disport yourself with a prostitute. The time to listen to a song. The time as spending, a transaction, an exchange of money for value or attention for money; the issue at hand isn't that it's hard to do this work but that it's required. Read cold, flat, without investment other than decoding, there is no through-line of story to receive. It is a list of lists, a repetition of phrases and names and all strung on a thin cord of criticism for capitalist society's multi-level destruction of the characters. That isn't a terribly satisfying read; and the fact that it is in itself a sharp critique of the mental laziness of many readers is a bit off-putting.
The Northern Station was going to the dogs. It was essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that called to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches, bakeries, and noise engineered by men of all generations and nationalities combined. It was the only place on earth you could hang yourself, defecate, blaspheme, fall into infatuation, and thieve without regard to prying eyes.
So much is inside the world of Tram 83 that it can feel as overwhelming as a physical trip to Africa does to many Westerners. For the whitest among us, the experience of being a vanishingly small minority is so unsettling as to be agony. For that reason I want many many US whites to read it; I recognize the futility of that wish but am stubbornly advocating it. It's the end of 2020. The world has changed because of COVID-19. It is long past time people with our First-World privilege, regular garbage pick-up and grocery stores and paved roads, heard about the reality of the rest of the world in their own words.
Eyes shrivelled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We’re doing this to pay for our studies. Dad’s already gone with the locomotives. He doesn’t write no more. Mom’s sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we’re sorcerers and it’s because of that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from our mom and that we should go to see the preachers who will cut the links by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying round at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town.
They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.
What I want from white people like me reading this thunderflash of words, this uncappable well of natural story-gas, is that we stop and do the work of being in fellowship with the world that isn't like us. Because that surface difference, as this intense and unmissable read says and shows, means nothing against the deepest human need of all: To connect and commune with Humanity. As cheesy as that sounds, this really is the take-away I hope you'll have when you spend a day immersed in Tram 83. show less
A feverish burst of slam-poetry yelled in your ear over pounding music, so close and so loud you can practically feel the spittle hitting your face. Reading these dispatches from the sharp end of globalisation is like being hit by an undammed river of language – rhythmic, sinuous, dirty, improvisational, perspiring but also weirdly inspiring.
The setting is a nameless ‘city-state’ in central Africa which exists in de-facto secession, run by a Kabila-like ‘dissident General’ busy exploiting the region's mineral resources. The rest of the inhabitants live their short lives in a Hobbesian nightmare of near-total lawlessness and lack of infrastructure, fitting into a limited number of social strata: mine workers, students, show more ‘for-profit tourists’, and the underage prostitutes known in this book's patois as ‘ducklings’ (canetons). It sounds depressing, but despite the very serious realities being described, the primary feeling is one of exuberance and of messy, creative, insuppressible life.
The main reason for this is Mwanza Mujila's prose style, which is designed to mimic the author's beloved jazz music – he's said he wanted his novel to be a literary version of Coltrane's Giant Steps (Mwanza Mujila would probably have been a musician himself, were it not for the inconvenience that Lubumbashi has no music school or saxophone). ‘Pour moi, la langue française, c'est comme un orchestre de jazz,’ he told one interviewer, and he's used the instruments available to him incredibly well, stringing together these long, comma-spliced, elegiac, almost Kerouac-esque riffs:
les nuits étaient un bonheur pour ceux qui savaient en profiter, les vraies nuits étaient longues et populaires, les vraies nuits étaient toujours événementielles, les vraies nuits n'échappaient plus à la corruption et autres coups bas, les vraies nuits puaient la névralgie, les crachats et traumatismes de ceux qui construisaient ce beau monde cassé…
[…the nights were a joy to those who knew how to take advantage of them, the true nights were long and belonged to the people, the true nights were always events, the true nights didn't run from corruption and other below-the-belt activities, the true nights stank of the neuralgia, gobs of spit and injuries of those who were creating this beautiful broken world…]
At the centre of it all, the city in microcosm, is the eponymous Tram 83 (which I hear in my head in a heavy accent, tram kat van twa!), a bar-cum-brothel-cum-greasy spoon which goes straight into the top ten of greatest literary drinking halls. A small, shabby stage with a band playing bebop or Congolese rumba; waitresses and busgirls supplying Brazzaville beer and dogmeat kebabs; catatonic miners and Chinese tourists; and, circling, the ‘ducklings’, teen mothers and assorted ‘no-knicker girls’ (filles-sans-calbars) trying to drag men off for a quick, remunerative assignation in the mixed-sex toilets. The girls' patter is forever interrupting the narrative prose, from the standard approach – ‘You got the time?’ – which is crowbarred into the text again and again, to more elaborate comments and flirtations: ‘Foreplay to me is like democracy. If you don't touch me right, I'm calling in the Americans.’
Mwanza Mujila took the name of his bar from a late-night Brussels tramline, which immediately makes me want to transpose it in my head to the N3, the bus I got home from London every Saturday night throughout my adolescence. I love the idea of naming a bar after a transport route, and in this case it's especially meaningful because of how central the idea of train lines, in particular, are – remembering always that while in Europe trains often represent progress and development, in Africa they come instead with colonial connotations of forced labour, exploitation and deportation. He tries to incorporate this history, both by referring to it directly (the city's train station ‘brings to mind the railway line built by Stanley’), and also by slipping into a certain trainlike rhythm – among other things, Tram 83 is determinedly ‘locomotive literature’.
The novel's setting is somewhat exaggerated, no doubt, but I suspect critics have underestimated the extent to which it faithfully reproduces Lubumbashi, which throughout much of both Congo Wars, and for that matter earlier, too, perfectly fitted the book's description of ‘une ville devenue pays par la force des kalachnikovs’. Certainly it won't do to imply (as some critics have seemed at risk of doing) that this is a flight of fancy – what makes this book important as well as viscerally entertaining is that this world, with all its frenetic violence and grotesque gender polarisation, is real and moreover is the flipside of our own western lifestyle.
What Tram 83 is actually showing us is the consequences of producing seventy million iPhones a year: this is what it comes down to, quite literally – the coltan in all these modern gadgets is dug up right here by people who can expect to die in their mid-forties. Mwanza Mujila has taken that basic obscenity and made great literature out of it. show less
The setting is a nameless ‘city-state’ in central Africa which exists in de-facto secession, run by a Kabila-like ‘dissident General’ busy exploiting the region's mineral resources. The rest of the inhabitants live their short lives in a Hobbesian nightmare of near-total lawlessness and lack of infrastructure, fitting into a limited number of social strata: mine workers, students, show more ‘for-profit tourists’, and the underage prostitutes known in this book's patois as ‘ducklings’ (canetons). It sounds depressing, but despite the very serious realities being described, the primary feeling is one of exuberance and of messy, creative, insuppressible life.
The main reason for this is Mwanza Mujila's prose style, which is designed to mimic the author's beloved jazz music – he's said he wanted his novel to be a literary version of Coltrane's Giant Steps (Mwanza Mujila would probably have been a musician himself, were it not for the inconvenience that Lubumbashi has no music school or saxophone). ‘Pour moi, la langue française, c'est comme un orchestre de jazz,’ he told one interviewer, and he's used the instruments available to him incredibly well, stringing together these long, comma-spliced, elegiac, almost Kerouac-esque riffs:
les nuits étaient un bonheur pour ceux qui savaient en profiter, les vraies nuits étaient longues et populaires, les vraies nuits étaient toujours événementielles, les vraies nuits n'échappaient plus à la corruption et autres coups bas, les vraies nuits puaient la névralgie, les crachats et traumatismes de ceux qui construisaient ce beau monde cassé…
[…the nights were a joy to those who knew how to take advantage of them, the true nights were long and belonged to the people, the true nights were always events, the true nights didn't run from corruption and other below-the-belt activities, the true nights stank of the neuralgia, gobs of spit and injuries of those who were creating this beautiful broken world…]
At the centre of it all, the city in microcosm, is the eponymous Tram 83 (which I hear in my head in a heavy accent, tram kat van twa!), a bar-cum-brothel-cum-greasy spoon which goes straight into the top ten of greatest literary drinking halls. A small, shabby stage with a band playing bebop or Congolese rumba; waitresses and busgirls supplying Brazzaville beer and dogmeat kebabs; catatonic miners and Chinese tourists; and, circling, the ‘ducklings’, teen mothers and assorted ‘no-knicker girls’ (filles-sans-calbars) trying to drag men off for a quick, remunerative assignation in the mixed-sex toilets. The girls' patter is forever interrupting the narrative prose, from the standard approach – ‘You got the time?’ – which is crowbarred into the text again and again, to more elaborate comments and flirtations: ‘Foreplay to me is like democracy. If you don't touch me right, I'm calling in the Americans.’
Mwanza Mujila took the name of his bar from a late-night Brussels tramline, which immediately makes me want to transpose it in my head to the N3, the bus I got home from London every Saturday night throughout my adolescence. I love the idea of naming a bar after a transport route, and in this case it's especially meaningful because of how central the idea of train lines, in particular, are – remembering always that while in Europe trains often represent progress and development, in Africa they come instead with colonial connotations of forced labour, exploitation and deportation. He tries to incorporate this history, both by referring to it directly (the city's train station ‘brings to mind the railway line built by Stanley’), and also by slipping into a certain trainlike rhythm – among other things, Tram 83 is determinedly ‘locomotive literature’.
The novel's setting is somewhat exaggerated, no doubt, but I suspect critics have underestimated the extent to which it faithfully reproduces Lubumbashi, which throughout much of both Congo Wars, and for that matter earlier, too, perfectly fitted the book's description of ‘une ville devenue pays par la force des kalachnikovs’. Certainly it won't do to imply (as some critics have seemed at risk of doing) that this is a flight of fancy – what makes this book important as well as viscerally entertaining is that this world, with all its frenetic violence and grotesque gender polarisation, is real and moreover is the flipside of our own western lifestyle.
What Tram 83 is actually showing us is the consequences of producing seventy million iPhones a year: this is what it comes down to, quite literally – the coltan in all these modern gadgets is dug up right here by people who can expect to die in their mid-forties. Mwanza Mujila has taken that basic obscenity and made great literature out of it. show less
Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 is a very raw portrait of a post-Colonial state tucked into south central Africa. Tram 83 itself seems to be a bar or whorehouse near a railway station anchoring the urban wasteland between miners and soldiers and tourists, although not the class of tourist one would expect in Miami Beach or Disneyworld,
The dialogue between Lucien, a writer, and Requiem, his pal/agent, is flinty.
Jazz blasts from the stage. Scantily-clad waitresses deliver cold beer and liquor to the tables. Prostitutes and their clientele rotate endlessly in the washrooms.
I am reminded of the super-realism of Bulgakov, or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or Daniel Dafoe’s London. A funny but nightmarish landscape of broken down institutions, show more violence, and crooked cops.
It seems only to come alive at night.
I almost expect Anthony Bourdain to pop up with a voice-over “I just happened to meet an old friend along the way to the charming neighbourhood bordellos...” show less
The dialogue between Lucien, a writer, and Requiem, his pal/agent, is flinty.
Jazz blasts from the stage. Scantily-clad waitresses deliver cold beer and liquor to the tables. Prostitutes and their clientele rotate endlessly in the washrooms.
I am reminded of the super-realism of Bulgakov, or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or Daniel Dafoe’s London. A funny but nightmarish landscape of broken down institutions, show more violence, and crooked cops.
It seems only to come alive at night.
I almost expect Anthony Bourdain to pop up with a voice-over “I just happened to meet an old friend along the way to the charming neighbourhood bordellos...” show less
An overwhelming tumult of language, something like being pulled under by a big ocean wave and sent tumbling. The story itself was secondary to the feeling. It's a very male book. Also overwhelming was the endless stream of women's commodified bodies being described by their parts--women were defined in the story by what men see, what men touch. I was in turn riveted, repulsed, bored, amazed, wrenched around.
This novel is set in an African city-state which is filled with a mixture of young prostitutes, foreigners seeking fortune and pleasure, older prostitutes, hustlers, drug dealers and con men, teenage prostitutes, university students and bitter young men, prostitutes of undetermined age, and politicians, philosophers and prognosticators. (Did I mention prostitutes?) The favored meeting place of night goers is Tram 83, a club in which jazz is constantly playing, beer and hard liquor are readily available, and any attempt at conversation is interrupted by prostitutes asking for the time of day.
The book is centered on two paper thin characters, Requiem, a local hustler, and his old friend Lucien, a failed history professor and writer, who show more has come from the Back Country to see Requiem and to improve his fortune. Lucien meets a Swiss book publisher in Tram 83, who promises to help him back on his feet, provided that he is willing to adapt his work to fit the public's demand, while Requiem spends his days making deals and availing himself of the baby-chicks and single-mamas who vie for his attention, and his money.
The story is almost completely lacking in plot or structure and is mind-numbingly repetitive, and after 60 pages I skimmed through the rest of it to find out what happened to the main characters. Tram 83 has been chosen as a finalist for several literary awards, including the Man Booker International Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, and includes an effusive praise filled foreword from Alain Mabanckou, one of my favorite living African authors. However, I found the book to be incredibly overblown and overhyped, and although it may reflect the reality of a lawless place like the Democratic Republic of the Congo this book doesn't provide any insight into the people that live in cities like this one. Don't waste your time reading this dreadful book. show less
The book is centered on two paper thin characters, Requiem, a local hustler, and his old friend Lucien, a failed history professor and writer, who show more has come from the Back Country to see Requiem and to improve his fortune. Lucien meets a Swiss book publisher in Tram 83, who promises to help him back on his feet, provided that he is willing to adapt his work to fit the public's demand, while Requiem spends his days making deals and availing himself of the baby-chicks and single-mamas who vie for his attention, and his money.
The story is almost completely lacking in plot or structure and is mind-numbingly repetitive, and after 60 pages I skimmed through the rest of it to find out what happened to the main characters. Tram 83 has been chosen as a finalist for several literary awards, including the Man Booker International Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, and includes an effusive praise filled foreword from Alain Mabanckou, one of my favorite living African authors. However, I found the book to be incredibly overblown and overhyped, and although it may reflect the reality of a lawless place like the Democratic Republic of the Congo this book doesn't provide any insight into the people that live in cities like this one. Don't waste your time reading this dreadful book. show less
Although I found this book really hard to follow, I did find it to be an enjoyable journey though a mythical yet very believable atmosphere. It reminded me of all the bars I ever visited in Africa and did an excellent job of describing and characterizing all the patrons of this particular bar. However, there was little to no character development and although the plot focused on two characters I can't really recall what their story was or why it mattered.
Something somewhere compared this novel directly to jazz, which works for me because occasionally I lost the thread and didn't know what was happening, but overall found it immersive and compelling and surprising. I'm walking away understanding the feeling of a place, and how rare is that.
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Fiston Mwanza Mujila was born in 1981 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo. He studied Literature and Human Services at Lubumbashi University. He writes poems, prose works, and Plays. His debut novel was Tram 83 for which he recieved a French Voices 2014 grant recipient. And it won the Grand Prix du Premier Roman des SGDL. His writing show more also received the Gold Medal at the 6th Jeux de la Francophonie in Beirut as well as the Best Text for Theater (State Theater, Mainz) in 2010. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Awards
Notable Lists
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Tram 83
- Original title
- Tram 83
- Original publication date
- 2014-08-21 (1e édition originale française) (1e édition originale française)
- People/Characters
- Lucien; Requiem (The Negus); Ferdinand Malingeau; Émilienne; Christelle; Mortal Combat
- Important places
- Tram 83 Bar; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Lubumbashi, Katanga, Congo; Vampiretown
- Epigraph
- You will eat by the sweat of your breasts
- First words
- In the beginning was the stone, and the stone prompted ownership, and ownership a rush, and the rush brought an influx of men of diverse appearance who built railroads through the rock, forged a life of palm wine, and devised... (show all) a system, a mixture of mining and trading.
- Quotations
- "Do you have the time?" "Go check your Papa's watch!"
- Original language
- French
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- Reviews
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- Rating
- (3.26)
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- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 20
- ASINs
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