Writer of the invisible | In conversation with Ivorian author GauZ’

Changing his identify to GauZ’ at the age of 15 was Armand Patrick Gbaka-Brédé’s first actual political act. “You know, in France, Armand is a very sexy name,” says the Ivorian author with fun. But, for him, additionally it is a reputation intrinsically linked to France’s cultural imperialism that had eroded the customs, traditions, languages and societies of the individuals it colonised. “Colonisation was not [just] about physical violence, about exploitation of resources. It is [also] about cultural invasion,” says the 54-year-old author, journalist and screenwriter, a speaker at the latest Kerala Literature Festival. “The colonisation victory was to transform our culture.”

Culture is a phrase GauZ’ regularly makes use of, whether or not it’s in relation to the richness of his personal nation or the violence wreaked by colonialism and now its surrogate, capitalism, which he thinks of as a sneaky system with no boundaries. “For me, it is more brutal now. You don’t know the frontiers of your opposition with the system,” says the author of a number of novels, which discover colonisation, immigration and id — together with Standing Heavy, Black Manoo, Portes (Doors) and Comrade Papa, mentioning that in a world formed by a persistent need for an increasing number of, “we are in permanent contradiction. And living in contradiction is a great violence because you don’t know who you are.”

What counts is energy

Standing Heavy, his debut novel, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, is a pointy, scathing satire of France’s colonial legacy, race politics and the interrelatedness of colonialism and capitalism. “We are always being colonised by something or some people. They call it soft power, but in the expressions of power, there is power. Soft doesn’t count; what counts is power,” says GauZ’.

2023 International Booker Prize shortlisted Standing Heavy

The novel, initially revealed in French in 2014 earlier than being translated into English by Frank Wynne after which republished in 2022, is instructed from the perspective of undocumented African safety guards working in a Parisian shopping center — people who find themselves “doubly invisible,” he says. “Someone told me that you are the writer of the invisible, and I am OK with that. Is it not crazy to ignore a human being in a place you enter?” The ebook’s title refers to each the safety guard job that calls for individuals to face for his or her supper, so to talk, in addition to to the heft of France’s colonial legacy. “People thanked me for writing it, telling me that now they actually saw the security; I think that is the greatest success of this book,” he says.

Standing Heavy, crammed with perspicacious commentary and wry observations, takes an anthropological strategy in direction of customers in retail areas, thus subverting the conventional white gaze. According to him, for the final 400 years, the western world, which has consistently exerted energy over different individuals, typically sees itself as a paragon of civilisation. “They are sure that things cannot change because they don’t have the memory of lost civilisation.” But, in his opinion, for colonised individuals, colonialism was merely a brand new layer of their already culturally wealthy lives. “We have their languages, and we know their classics. But we still have our storytelling: of the bush, of the Savannah. We still have our own cosmogony, our own anthropology, our own way of seeing the world.”

Storytelling, due to this fact, generally is a highly effective instrument in the struggle in opposition to a dominant Eurocentric world imaginative and prescient. “You cannot fight against this vision with ideology and politics. To change things and fight this system, you have to propose new imaginations, new science, new ways of thinking, new fictions,” he says. “This was my first step towards inventing this new fiction: by describing them how they used to describe us.”

GauZ’ at the eighth version of the Kerala Literature Festival

The ‘fiction’ of immigration

While Standing Heavy was first written practically a decade in the past, many of the questions it raises will at all times be related to people, particularly these round immigration insurance policies, extra pertinent now than ever earlier than in the face of the ongoing crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the United States.

“The question of immigrants is a fiction served to western people because they are losing their stature and are afraid,” he says. “I want to say to them, welcome to the real world. You did that to other people, and they didn’t have a choice. So, you don’t have a choice, too.”

Also, as GauZ’ reminds us, all people initially come from Africa. “We are big animals with long legs, high respiratory capacity, thermo-regulation and a brain. We are built to move, and nobody can stop that.”