Bozambo's Revenge

by Bertène Juminer, Alexandra B. Warren (Translator)

Bantouville is a small paradise (once called Paris) which African genius has created from a swamp by the banks of the Sekuana (which natives call the Seine)... In this satirical novel, translated from the French by Alexandra B. Warren, blacks are the ruling class. They have colonized the Light Continent, and the black man's burden is the innate laziness of the white natives, who being nothing but overgrown children, frequently have to be carted off to prison in a White Maria.

Genres: Fiction

117 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the subtitle, "Or, Colonialism Inside Out" suggests, this raucous 1968 satire flips the colonial paradigm, examining the plight of a colonized Gallic White in a future Paris civilized from barbarism by superior African powers. Penned by a Guyanese-born doctor who worked and studied throughout the francophone world -- Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean -- the novel suggests power imbalance itself as corrupting: the Black colonial powers here are just as restrictive, authoritarian, and sanctimonious as Europeans were, though this era goes entirely unremembered in the story. Actually, that narrative itself isn't all that notable, interlocking the misadventures of a newly-arrived Gallic with petty in-fighting in the African colonial military leadership, but the telling sparkles playfully as Juminer revises every landmark and cultural touchstone within reach, invents facetious racial slurs, and inverts the very language (there's risk of being white-listed, receiving a white eye, etc). Parts don't date all that well -- an inescapable manifestation of colonial power lies in sex, but like everything else this is played for humor, or perhaps general ribald entertainment of the author -- and the end is implausibly overresolved (perhaps Utopian?), but the tone is brisk and and amusing enough to hold it all together. Colonialism is perhaps not but a stupid joke that deserves to be swallowed lightly by history.

Now evidently lost to time, I found this tucked between accounts of french-speaking north Africans studying in Paris at a university library in Abu Dhabi.

[K's Bognoter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bozambo’s Revenge af fransk-guyanesiske Bertène Juminer er en på flere måder skæg – og litteraturhistorisk heller ikke uinteressant – satire over den europæiske kolonialisme og racisme, som Juminer udstiller ved at vende den på vrangen. Som roman er den dog ikke sluppet helt godt fra tidens tand.

Læs hele anmeldelsen på K’s bognoter: http://bognoter.dk/2018/04/24/bertene...