His words rush forward in punctuated swells- like the Congo River he so often mentions. "In this raucous, electrifying what-is-it?-memoir, broken novel, poem series? or is it mainly a protest against the way that dreams can vanish like migrating birds?- Fiston Mwanza Mujila opens every stopcock that holds back his lust for life. Now he’s returned with a new collection inspired by the Congo River, giving readers an even greater sense of the range of his work." - Vol. " Tram 83, the first of Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s works to appear in the United States, made for a thrilling read.
"Composed of 101 numbered 'solitudes,' Mwanza Mujila's collection is equal parts hallucination, augury, and crônica, with fragments that appear out of order and are often enigmatically brief, grotesque, and surreally humorous." - Jay G Ying, Harriet Books Mujila, he has laid a claim to its legacy." -S am Sacks, Wall Street Journal "This is, at its source, an expat author's declaration of identity, and just as the river has formed Mr. He is Assistant Professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York. He is a recipient of several awards, including the 2020 Gulf Coast Translation Prize for his translations of Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s poetry and an International Latino Book Award and PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s novel, Manhattan Tropics (Arte Público, 2019), which he also co-edited. Bret Maney is a literary critic and translator from the French and Spanish. His second novel, The Villain’s Dance, was published in France in 2020 and is forthcoming in English translation from Deep Vellum. His writing responds to political turbulence in his native country and frequently foregrounds its debt to jazz. In addition to The River in the Belly, he is the author of the poetry collections Craquelures (2011) and Soleil privé de mazout (2016), and three plays, Et les moustiques sont des fruits à pépins, Te voir dressé sur tes deux pattes ne fait que mettre de l'huile sur le feu (2015) and Zu der Zeit der Königinmutter (2018). His debut novel, Tram 83, published in English in 2015 by Deep Vellum, won the German International Literature Award and was longlisted for the International Man Booker and the Prix du Monde. Through his invention of the “solitude”-a short poetic form lending itself to searing observation and troubled humor, prone to unexpected tonal shifts and lyrical u-turns-the collection celebrates, caresses, and chastises Central Africa’s great river, the world’s second largest by discharge volume.ĭrawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Soviet history, Congolese popular music, international jazz, and everyday life in European exile, Mwanza Mujila has fashioned a work that can speak to the extraordinary hopes and tragedies of post-independence Democratic Republic of the Congo while also mining the generative yet embattled subject position of the African diasporic writer in Europe longing for home.įans of Tram 83 will rediscover in River the incandescent, improvisatory verbal energy that so dazzled them in Mwanza Mujila’s English-language debut.įiston Mwanza Mujila was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1981 and lives today in Austria. With The River in the Belly, award-winning Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila seeks no less than to reinitiate the Congo River in the imaginary of European languages. In his debut collection of poetry in English, the widely acclaimed author of Tram 83 returns to the Deep Vellum catalog with a moving lyric meditation on the Democratic Republic of Congo and its namesake river.Ī moving lyric meditation on the Congo River that explores the identity, chaos, and wonder of the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as race and the detritus of colonialism.
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