Bookseller Chat: Tram 83 & Broken Glass
If you dropped in to the bookstore in the beginning of March, you probably saw copies of Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83, translated by Roland Glasser, on the staff picks wall. What you may not know is that our booksellers Danni and Nika have been talking about this book non-stop for all of 2020. To share the love, they recorded a conversation they had about it last month.
The novel is a window into the chaotic world of the eponymous restaurant/bar/nightclub via the reunion of Requiem and Lucien, who has just returned to the City-State. The introduction to the English edition was written by Alain Mabanckou, whose novel Broken Glass, translated by Helen Stevenson, is also set in a bar called Credit Gone West where the owner asks Broken Glass, an ex-school teacher, to write about the bar and its patrons. The two novels share much besides this, including writer-protagonists, critiques of neocolonialism, and rhythms borrowed from jazz. And so: down the rabbit hole.
Recorded by Danni Green and Nika Jonas on March 2nd, 2020.
Danni: Okay, I have to ask this question: which did you like better?
Nika: That’s a hard one. I feel like I have to say Tram 83 because there’s just something about the rhythm of it. And that first chapter! Just the way it starts: “In the beginning was the stone, and the stone prompted ownership, and ownership a rush, and the rush...” and that’s the beginning of the first paragraph. And then it continues: “Northern Station. Friday. Around seven or nine in the evening.” I love that rhythm; it’s just propulsive.
Danni: This is honestly a propulsive novel.
Nika: It’s very much like the beginning of a jazz song. To me, “Northern Station. Friday. Around seven or nine in the evening.” reads like a cymbal on the page. It just sets up the way the text moves so well; I’ve never read a better first chapter.
Danni: It does….oh gosh, all of the feels. I am so glad you liked this book because I read it in February 2018 and now you read it. You probably finished it in, what, February 2020? So it took me forever to find someone who would read the book. And I think it’s fucking brilliant.
It’s so interesting because I read them in the same order you read them–Tram 83 first and then Broken Glass–and I hadn’t realized that the introduction to Tram 83 was written by the author of Broken Glass. So when I read Broken Glass I didn’t like it as much as Tram 83. I thought it was so similar with the bar and the collection of stories, there’s a writer in both of them, so it really wasn’t until the very end that Broken Glass really became its own novel.
Nika: What made Broken Glass its own book for you?
Danni: For me, Broken Glass had elements of fabulism, like the character who wore the diaper, the Printer. I just remember reading that scene thinking this is graphic, disgusting, he’s shitting on himself; he used to have a wife and his whole life just fell apart. And it was so tragic and funny at the same time.
Nika: Literally fell apart.
Danni: It just deteriorated. It combusted; the seams were ripped; and so from then onward I saw how this was its own book. And then especially the very end when it becomes, in my mind, very close to Tram 83.
So Tram 83 is written with these paragraphs that are ongoing sentences that are listing things, and I love that rhythm. And it wasn’t until the very end of Broken Glass that you started to see that. Like:
when I said all this to the Stubborn Snail, he was lost for words, he thought I must be angry with someone in particular, or that I was raving, and he said who I was thinking about, he wanted names, but I didn’t reply,
That was sort of ongoing for...forever. It really separated [from Tram 83] in my mind in the last 20 pages or so when he called out American literature. And I thought, yes, you go for Holden Caulfield and The Great Gatsby! When I got to the end I understood the intellectual project of both of these books as separate and yet a lot of the same.
Nika: That’s really interesting because I feel like the two novels echoed each other, but even though Tram 83 has a lot of that kind of run-on sentence/paragraphs, Broken Glass seemed to inhabit that mindspace. Because even where there’s a paragraph break, there’s not a sentence break–there aren’t even sentence breaks between chapters. So in that way reading it was like falling down a hill; I would try to find a place to stop and there was no place. Tram 83 has those run-ons, but it moves in such a way that you can put it down for a second because it has stops. Broken Glass had none of them, so I had to manufacture them for myself.
Danni: I like the structure of Tram 83 more because I love when a book, as close to the first sentence as possible, announces itself and tells you what it’s going to be. I don’t like novels that unfold. I want to know from page one what it’s all about. Not that it needs to tell me everything that’s going to happen, but I like when it announces itself.
Nika: When it sets the tone.
Danni: Yeah, when it has a very strong opening and I know what I’m going to get. And Tram 83 does that because on the very first page you know the setting, but you also have a little bit of the backstory. He’s going through history, but then it’s also repetition, like: “Northern Station. Friday. Around seven or nine in the evening.” And then later:
The few professors who crash in the suburbs of the City-State slipped their moorings along with their disciples. The survival instinct can’t be learned. It’s innate. Otherwise they’d have introduced instinct classes at university already.
So he gives you a rundown of the people in very few lines, but you get the chaos and you can hear it. That’s something I really loved about the novel; I felt like I was in a city. And I feel like this is the best description of a city I’ve read on paper; of an urban setting where it’s loud, it’s chaotic, and there are all of these lives pushing up against each other and everybody is vying for the same thing, but also going about it in very different ways. It becomes really hard to pass a judgement on people. So for example there’s lots of sex work, lots of prostitution, and it took me until the fourth or fifth chapter to understand that it was the sex workers on the street who were saying “do you have the time?” as a proposition. Because it’s so subtle; everyone needs to know the time and it’s something you can ask a billion times a day.
Nika: Yeah, I love that as a proposition. I feel like it’s such a nuanced thing because it is subtle, but if everyone’s hearing it from sex workers then they always know what it means. Also, it’s like they’re not even asking–the question is not are you interested in this; that is assumed.
Danni: So you took “do you have the time?” to mean two things; I took it to mean what is the time. I took it as a way to broach a conversation to sort of have an in, but you were also thinking do you have the literal time for this thing, okay.
Nika: I understood it on a few levels, because on the base level I took it that way as well–as a way to broach the conversation. But then it also had a second level where if everybody has an agenda, who has the time to satisfy yours? And the prostitutes and the waitresses in this book were so pushy, do you remember? Every time they weren’t tipped they would stop serving, and it was so insane!
Danni: And Requiem did not give a fuck, he was like I’m not going to fucking pay you!
Nika: And they’d just stand there and demand it. But I think that’s so interesting because from a Western perspective and from a European perspective, because Fiston Mwanza Mujila is doing a PhD in Austria, if you are in service–if you are a waiter, if you’re a prostitute–anything anybody gives you as a tip is at their discretion. The customer has the power, and the servers don’t have any power. Whereas in Tram 83 these are the people who have the power. If the waitress doesn’t like you, she will not serve you again. She’ll take your drink.
Danni: I thought about that too: the dignity of the people in the City-State. People had so much dignity even though they were in such undesirable conditions and living under precarious circumstances. Everybody had a role and everybody was doing something. So:
Entry indivisible for the poor, the wretched, the uncircumcised, historians, archaeologists, cowards, psychologists, cheapscapes, morons, the insolvent, and all of you unlucky enough to be under 14, not forgetting the elected members of the twelfth house, penniless diggers, sadistic students, politicians of the second republic, historians, know-it-alls, and snitches.
I love the way that in Mujila’s book so many people are named. And he’ll call out the tourists: the European tourists, the American tourists, the people from Germany, or the people from Italy. But everybody has a certain dignity to them. There’s no judgement on how people are living their lives, there is no elite gaze.
Nika: One of the things I found so interesting about Requiem and Lucien throughout the book was that even though they didn’t necessarily change as people, in the sense of the traditional novel where there’s character development, my understanding of both of them changed so much throughout the book. In the beginning Lucien was not necessarily a likeable character, but it seemed like he was maybe trying to do something with his writing.
Danni: It’s funny that you bring that up because there isn’t any character development. They are always who they are, but even though they don’t go anywhere we learn where they have been because we see that, for example, as kids Lucien and Requiem were really close. And then Lucien left the City-State and he was raised in the Back-Country, and then he was educated, presumably, in Europe somewhere, though I don’t know if it was ever explicitly said. When he comes back to the City-State and he comes back to Tram 83, he contacts Requiem; and Requiem, you can tell, sort of tolerates him and you can see the tension.
Also, you learn that it sort of had to do with a woman that was married to Requiem, which I was not interested in. I thought it was stupid for it to come down to a woman, but I did find it interesting that they started to have very real political differences and I felt like they were both right. Requiem, who stayed in the City-State, had to make a life for himself. He couldn’t afford to view the country idealistically which, for me–somebody born and raised in the city–I definitely related to. Home is a tricky thing, and growing up in a city that you’ve seen change in so many different ways and yet you still remain there, and learning how to build a relationship to a place that is not the place you have always known it to be.
Nika: I think I agree that Broken Glass is more of a critique of literature and Tram 83 is focused on the level of everyday life. At the same time, the way that both of them engage with legacies of colonialism kind of flipped that because, in Tram 83, you have that European guy Malingeau who says he’s from the City-State. He says he’s lived there so long so of course he’s from there, and then the first moment something bad happens he takes his Swiss passport and he’s out, which is just what Requiem has been saying all along. That feels very much like a larger-scale critique, whereas in Broken Glass the way that Alain Mabanckou deals with that legacy is with the character of the Printer, who went to France.
One of the first things he says to Broken Glass is “I did France”. So, for me, his critique has to do with how, despite the fact that the town Credit Gone West is in, Trois-Cents, is decolonized or independent, France is still the center in a way. Because for that character, going to France was the best you could do.
Danni: And to marry a white woman who’s native French.
Nika: Right, and I think that is very much in conversation with the name of the bar, Credit Gone West. the Printer did well...in France. All of that creativity and work–
Danni: And capital.
Nika: Yeah–all of that energy was put there. He worked there, and then he came back and he’s drinking in a bar which is named what he already did. That feels like a very microscopic (and cynical) vision of what post-independence or postcolonialism looks like.
