Awu's Story Read online
“Electrifying, striking, and raw, Awu’s Story recounts the realities women face within the family and society in a small village in Gabon. . . . This text incites debate about cultural differences, plunging the reader to the very heart of Gabonese traditions.”
—Lire le Monde
“This novel that invites the reader to rethink the very foundation of inherited customs is still very valid today.”
—Africultures
Awu’s Story
Histoire d’Awu
Awu’s Story
A Novel
Justine Mintsa
Translated and with an introduction by Cheryl Toman
Foreword by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury
University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London
Awu’s Story was first published in French as Histoire d’Awu, © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2000
Translation © 2018 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover art © Georges Mbourou.
All rights reserved
Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from Case Western Reserve University.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mintsa, Justine Elo, author. | Toman, Cheryl, translator, writer of introduction. | Kuoh-Moukoury, Thérèse, writer of foreword.
Title: Awu’s story: a novel / Justine Mintsa; translated and with an introduction by Cheryl Toman; foreword by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury.
Other titles: Histoire d’Awu. English
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017044660
ISBN 9781496206930 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 9781496208064 (epub)
ISBN 9781496208071 (mobi)
ISBN 9781496208088 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Gabonese fiction (French)—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PQ3989.3.M535 H5713 2018 | DDC 843/.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044660
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Contents
Foreword by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury
Translator’s Note
Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Notes
Foreword
Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury
With the symbolic art of embroidery and sewing at her fingertips, Awu is a living portrait of an Africa exuding talent and finesse, forging ahead without hesitation. Through the lives of her characters in a village on the edge of the tropical forest, Justine Mintsa also conveys to her readers, however, the realities of the continent where despite great strides in development, dysfunction within society still exists.
Today’s Gabonese woman is modern and progressive even if she still remains somewhat attached to traditional values. One can easily find her even in this rural area where Awu’s Story takes place, this contemporary African woman whose aim is to actively participate in the evolution and modernization of her country. Her prime objective is evident; she is on an individual and collective quest to attain the best living conditions possible. She seeks wealth, but she also has aspirations of living a moral life in a world that is just.
Steering clear of hostility and theoretical discourse alike, Mintsa’s fictitious heroine, Awu, much like any woman in real life, is concerned with practicalities. She challenges injustice, but more importantly perhaps, she adopts alternative solutions in order to combat the horrifying customs that are incompatible with the realities of today’s world.
In both her private and professional worlds, Awu offers intelligence, sanity, and generosity in opposition to tyranny, cruelty, and corruption. Through her courage and her thoroughly African ingenuity, Awu contributes to the emergence of a new kind of humanism for the twenty-first century. In spite of overwhelming bureaucracy and its consequences that prove even more damaging for those residing outside urban areas on the African continent, Awu’s sense of dignity, morality, and justice remains intact. She condemns social abuses of any kind and abhors the fact that certain sectors of society are unable to move ahead. She denounces tribalism but also the idolatry of politics.
A novel about the realities of rural living, but also a story about daily existence, Awu’s Story is both a cry for justice and the song of a human soul.
Translator’s Note
This project was supported in part through an ACES + Opportunity Grant awarded through Case Western Reserve University.
I wish to extend my thanks to Monique Le Blanche for her insights on various excerpts of the translation, and I am also grateful to Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury, the first woman novelist of sub-Saharan Africa, for her interest in Justine Mintsa’s work and for agreeing to provide the preface. Lastly, I am especially thankful to Justine Mintsa for all of her support; our long conversations in Libreville and Paris will always remain in my memory and have only reinforced my love for this particular work.
Introduction
Cheryl Toman
Although soft-spoken and gentle, Justine Mintsa is also an individual who exudes strength, passion, and vibrancy, much like the protagonist she created for Awu’s Story. By nature Mintsa is humble, but the reality is that she is an author who is larger than life, and the impact she has made on African literature and the attention she has gained internationally throughout the years is unmistakable. In her home country of Gabon, Mintsa is revered as an icon and serves as a mentor and role model for a new and extremely dynamic generation of writers. Mintsa works tirelessly to promote her country’s literature, discussing not only her own works but also supporting the writings of her fellow authors throughout the country. A deep appreciation for Mintsa and her efforts is evident each time she meets with her fellow citizens, young and old, for what has become over the years a multitude of events highlighting literature throughout Gabon. Most notably, Mintsa’s career has produced four well-received novels: Un seul tournant: Makôsu (1994), Premières lectures (1997), Histoire d’Awu (2000), and Larmes de cendre (2010). While each text is beautifully written and unique in its contribution to African literature, it is Histoire d’Awu or Awu’s Story that is considered by many as Mintsa’s masterpiece.
Although Angèle Rawiri preceded her as Gabon’s first woman novelist, Mintsa nonetheless enjoys a “first” of her very own; she became the first African woman writer ever to publish a novel with the prestigious publisher, Gallimard, in Paris.1 Histoire d’Awu was just one of five works chosen to inaugurate the press’s Continents Noirs series in 2000. Among the over one hundred works and nearly fifty authors featured throughout the years, the novel is still among the five best-selling titles of all time for the series.2
It was during a visit to Francophone Africa in January 1999 that Gallimard’s Antoine Gallimard and Jean-Noël Schifano were inspired to create the Continents Noirs series with a mission to highlight the richness and diversity of Francophone literature of the African continent and its diaspora. With its exceptional literary merit and originality, Mintsa’s novel was chosen to inaugurate the series, although Mintsa still recalls the day when she nervously sent the manuscript to Gallimard from the bustling Central Post Office in Libreville. Upon receiving Gallimard’s letter indicating the acceptance of her manuscript for publication, Mintsa did not open the envelope immediately out of fear of rejection.3 Quite to the contrary, Histoire d’Awu was embraced not only by its publisher, but also quickly received international acclaim and was later adapted for theater by Michel Ndaot and performed to a packed house at the Centre Culturel Français in Li
breville on November 9, 2006.4 Eighteen years after it was first published in the original French, the novel continues to collect accolades, and it is most appropriate that the first translation of the novel into English—Awu’s Story—is now becoming part of the long-standing French Voices collection featuring prominent African literature in translation published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Mintsa’s Own Story and Journey as a Writer
Justine Mintsa was born on September 8, 1949, in Oyem, a town in the north of Gabon that is heavily populated by the Fang ethnic group. She is the third child of twelve siblings. At the time of her birth, Mintsa’s father was an elementary school teacher and her mother had received her education at the école ménagère in home economics, as was popular in the United States at the time as well for women of that generation. Mintsa’s Protestant upbringing served not only as a source of spiritual inspiration, but also guided her education and cultivated her passion for writing and reading. The first years of her schooling were spent at the Mission Protestante de Mfoul in Oyem.
After serving as a chief administrator of national education in his country, Mintsa’s father eventually became Gabon’s second ambassador to France, enrolling his daughter at the Lycée Molière in Paris once she had finished middle school in Gabon. She completed half of her secondary school studies in Paris but returned to Gabon to pass her baccalauréat, the culminating competitive examination marking the end of high school in the French education system that Gabon had inherited. She spent her first two years of post-secondary study at Gabon’s only university at the time, Université Nationale du Gabon (now known as Omar Bongo University), where she majored in Spanish and British literature. She was eventually awarded a scholarship to continue her studies in London and then was admitted to universities in Great Britain and France before eventually earning her doctorate in English literature at the Université de Rouen at the end of 1977.
After her graduate studies, Mintsa married. Her husband, a professor of physics and chemistry, was appointed to oversee the opening in Franceville of Gabon’s second national university, the Masuku campus for science and technology. Mintsa accompanied her husband in that venture as they raised their family there while pursuing their respective academic careers. Having already developed an avid interest in writing as a child, Mintsa continued to write but merely for pleasure; she explains that it was never her intention early on to publish her work. However, it was the loss of her son in a car accident—a traumatic event which for her is still impossible to talk about to this day—that pushed her to publish her first novel, Un seul tournant: Makôsu. The novel became a way of recounting the tragedy to others without having to talk about it herself, a means through which others could learn what she and her family had lived that would release her from the overwhelming burden of recalling the event again and again. Writing Makôsu was more than therapeutic for Mintsa. She stated in a 2015 interview in Libreville: “If I hadn’t [written it], I wouldn’t have survived.”5
Mintsa and her family eventually returned to Libreville, and she continued in her position at Omar Bongo University as an English professor at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences. She became a dynamic member of the English department, directing an English language scholarly journal entitled WAVES and creating a theater troupe known as Wolespeare Company, a hybrid name paying tribute to both the Nobel Prize laureate from Nigeria, Wole Soyinka, and to William Shakespeare. Mintsa wrote several plays in English for the theater troupe but they were never published. The troupe was successful for six years, and Mintsa was proud of the Anglophone element that the project brought to the Faculty of Arts. However, nonending strikes plaguing the entire educational system in Gabon were taxing; general unrest, impossible working conditions, and a lack of infrastructure in the country at that time were the ultimate causes of the troupe’s demise.
Mintsa had begun her academic career in 1978 as a teaching assistant in English, and one year later she was named chair of the department. She remained at the university until her retirement from academia in 2014.
Mintsa often took on simultaneous duties, including five years (1997–2001) as president of the Union des Écrivains Gabonais, also known as UDEG, an organization that was made up of over fifty published authors in Gabon at that time. UDEG is and always has been extremely active in promoting and distributing the publications of Gabonese authors in spite of the unique challenges publishing on the African continent entails. Similar to her father’s career path, Mintsa was appointed director of culture in Gabon’s Ministry of Culture and Arts from 2000 until 2009.6 From 2012 until her general retirement in 2016, she was the advisor to Gabon’s prime minister as head of the Department of Culture, Education, Youth and Sports.7 While assuming these concurrent positions may have seemed impossible and even incompatible to some, Mintsa had always viewed them to be roles that were complementary. Indeed, she coordinated them remarkably well, and they enabled her to become an advocate and an ambassador of sorts for the promotion of Gabonese literature and women’s writing. Her work within the Ministry of Culture and Education allowed her to direct projects that enhanced museums and theaters throughout the country in addition to pursuing initiatives in Gabonese art and culture in general. Through these and other professional activities, Mintsa continued to write and publish. Histoire d’Awu was preceded by a novel for children entitled Premières lectures (1997), a text still widely read and discussed today in schools across Gabon.
In 1999 Gallimard discovered Mintsa and her manuscript, which she had originally entitled La pension, a direct reference to the elusive retirement that is ultimately responsible for taking the life of Obame Afane at the end of the novel. Mintsa had written the work as a tribute to her father’s friend who had been killed in a road accident traveling from Oyem to Libreville, where he was headed to file documents for his retirement. In writing her narrative Mintsa reasoned that her father’s friend must have been married, and so she created his wife, the character known as Awu. According to Mintsa, Gallimard questioned the title, La pension, indicating that they thought it was not about the retirement pension at all: “C’est l’histoire d’Awu” (“This is Awu’s story”). So the title was then determined in a most definitive way and Awu became its star. This was eye-opening for Mintsa, who had not initially realized the impact that Awu would have on her readers. She claimed her first reaction to Gallimard’s suggestion of a change in title was: “Oh no, Obame has been killed a second time.” However, Mintsa is far from displeased at the thought that Awu may inspire her readers a bit more than her husband, Obame Afane.
After Histoire d’Awu was published in 2000, Mintsa was invited across the globe to promote the novel, and she received numerous honors at home and abroad while continuing her many responsibilities in Gabon. She also produced works of scholarly writing, the most significant being a work in cultural studies on traditional marriages entitled Protocole du mariage au Gabon (2003) that she coauthored with Grégory Ngbwa Mintsa. Admittedly, her professional duties limited the time she had available for creative writing, which explains the three-year hiatus from the ministry that she took in order to finish her fourth novel, Larmes de cendre, that appeared at the end of 2010. Mintsa originally published Larmes with Éditions Tira in Béjaïa, Algeria, although its second printing in 2012 is with L’Harmattan in Paris. Mintsa was impressed with Tira and its editor, whom she had met during a visit to Algeria to promote Histoire d’Awu. She then decided to publish the first edition of Larmes with Tira as a gesture of support for publishers on the African continent and also as a means of diversifying her audience. Ironically, Mintsa has been criticized for such showings of support after her success at Gallimard,8 but such efforts to promote culture and reading at all levels of society have always been essential to Mintsa.
Despite her fame and numerous honors, it is not at all uncommon for Mintsa to accept invitations to elementary and secondary schools in Gabon to discuss her works with children and adolescents. In 1997 Mintsa initia
ted a project known as the caravane littéraire (literary caravan) where she and other writers of UDEG embarked on a remarkable 4 × 4 journey to the most remote corners of the country to ensure for themselves not only the distribution of Gabonese literature in schools but also the inclusion of these works in the national education program. The caravan project attracted the attention of Paulette Missambo, who was then Gabon’s minister of national education at the time. Missambo asked the caravan to make a stop at the Institut Pédagogique National (National Pedagogical Institute) in order to drop off titles that should be included on the nationwide reading list for students. Thanks to the caravan, these suggested works officially became part of the education system the following year in 1998—the first time in the history of Gabon that its own literary works were to be officially taught in schools across the country. Mintsa considers this moment to be a victory of a lifetime. If today we witness several young writers in Gabon such as Edna Merey-Apinda, who continue to initiate similar projects with Gabonese schoolchildren across the country, it is in part thanks to Mintsa’s original caravan that has served as inspiration.9
Now in the early years of retirement from her professional life, Justine Mintsa is looking forward to completing several writing projects already in progress, although her four novels have already left an indelible mark on African literature; she is an author who undeniably is an important figure in Gabonese literary history. As Gabon is a country whose literature is already enjoying unique distinctions and whose women writers have far surpassed the overall productivity of their peers in other African nations, Mintsa’s accomplishments are no small feat. Her illustrious career thus far suggests that we have not heard the last from Justine Mintsa, and it is expected that she will continue to enrich the literary scene.