Repatriation by Ève Guerra

Repatriation by Ève Guerra

French fiction

Original title –  Rapatriement

Translator – Clodagh Kinsella

Source – Subscription book

If you have been around the blog the last year or so, you will know. I am a huge fan of the books that Foundry Press have been bringing out; well, this is one of their recent books.  This book is a debut novel by Eve Guerra, a writer of Italian Congolese origin who had to flee Congo when the civil war happened when she was nine and grew up in France after she got her degree. She has taught Latin, Ancient Greek, and French.  She also has a regular column in Lire.  She has also written poetry.  This is her debut novel. It won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, which is the prize from the Goncourt for the best debut novel in a given year. It is fair to say Eve seems to have drawn from her own life a little in this book, as the main character has a similar Congolese, Franco-Italian background to the writer herself, who also lives in Lyon.

Even as a child I dreamed about leaving. I made up my

mind when I was eight, one afternoon in April 1998.

It was the dry season. We lived in Congo-Brazzaville, somewhere in the bush where the light no longer enters.

When people ask me what village I’m from, I say the bush. A house, a birthplace, the bush again, the bush full of sapele trees on the banks of the river where snakes slither.

I’m not scared of them: I am one.

They say the Congo River is a giant python turned to water. It was Dieudieu, the village pygmy, who told me this. He said there was no need to fear those snakes, that they only attacked to defend themselves or feed, and I was already too big for those little things that drag themselves along the ground.

Thinking of her childhood and even then escaping

The book starts when Annabella, a 23-year-old woman trying to get by as a poet in Lyon, struggles to get by; actually, her world is shattered when she gets a letter saying her father has died in Cameroon.  Her father, a man she hadn’t spoken to in two years.  Had brought Annabella up after she was seven. Her father’s violent temper and wanting to have total control over his wife led to her mother running away, and Annabella spending the rest of her childhood growing up with her misogynistic father, a white man in Africa with money and all that brought him.  Annabella heads to Cameroon and is faced with the task iof finding 20000 francs to bring her father’s body home.  The book sees her wrestling with this as she also confronts the ghost of her own past and how she had fallen into books and learning, but this event also makes her think of one of the books she had read, Molloy, and she finally sees what the book is about.  We see how her father has tainted her relationship with her mother, where she treats her mother in the same violent way her father did.  Will she be able to sort it all out?

We divided up the tasks that evening. My aunt Alda had to call back one of my father’s colleagues, jot down numbers in her notebook, and make an appointment with the undertakers, ask for a quote. I had to contact the embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find a repatriation solution.

I spent the morning transcribing a list of phone num-bers, first the French embassy in Douala, who knew where the body was being kept. I waited for Clémence and Antoni to leave before I rang.

“I’m calling because my father is dead. The death took place on Monday, 29 April. And I was asked to get in touch with you. My name is Annabella Morelli.”

“Mademoiselle Morelli, I’ll put you through to the colleague handling the file.”

“Mademoiselle Morelli… Mademoiselle?”

Trying to find out how to bring her father’s body back home

Now it seems, after seeing an interview with the writer online, that the kernel of the book is an actual event that happened to her.  Her father too had died in Africa, and she was left with the same problem Annabella had, and that was finding the money to bring the body home.  Like Annabella, Eve is also someone who loves her literature; there are various books and allusions to classical texts in the book. She also, like Annabella, is closer to her literature than she is to her own family at times.  The book also looks at a father who used his ability to financially control the women around him, a colonial male, a violent man who wants his wife to toe the line he made completely.  The book is fragmented; it is like the past and present are blending at times as we see Annabella facing the ghost of her past and the effect her parents’ actions had on her as a person.  If you are a fan of post-colonial fiction with its effect on one family,  this is a book for you 1 Have you a favourite book about a father-daughter relationship?