^{Broken Glass
Alain Mabanckou
Soft Skull Press
176 pages
$13.95}

     Racism and colonialism may be our most public concerns and most jealously guarded political commodities, but the greatest difficulty facing black writers is actually a prohibition on self-loathing, a certain inability to hate oneself or “our people” with impunity.  The impulse to extreme and sometimes satirical self-criticism tends to be shunned by many of us and attacked by many others in favor of outward gestures: the critique of power, oppression, and almost inevitably, racism.  Sure, there are great misanthropes and bitter self-obsessed bastards in global black literary traditions.  Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man comes immediately to mind, as does the work of George Schuyler, Jamaica Kincaid and the staggeringly under-rated Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera.  There are others too but the tendency towards nobility and grace almost always wins out in our writing, as does the affirmation of oneself or one’s “people.”  As a result the critique of external structures bends ever towards an assertion of black historical if not political innocence.  The joys of disaffection and the creative possibilities of nihilism are left largely untapped due to a crippling obsession with pride and an almost totalitarian insistence on solidarity.
     Now there are those who’ve been using the term “black nihilism” since the 1990s, by which they have meant that tendency in African-American popular culture since hip hop to eschew the glories of the outward gesture in favor of a seeming exultation in decadence and compromise.  And in Africa, the term “Afro-pessimism” has emerged in the last ten years to describe literary and cultural responses to a social world where political independence has turned out to be far more dangerous than colonial oppression.  To the radical imagination, these negative sensibilities are either a sign of political capitulation or of just how powerful those aforementioned structures remain in the wake of a generation that sharpened its teeth and its pens in the struggles against colonialism and racism.  Neither of these are the self-loathing I mean, though Alain Mabanckou from the Democratic Republic of the Congo does make the kind of generational claims in his most recent novel Broken Glass that place him on the other side of that same historical divide; and capitulation, decadence and the joys of self-abasement are his themes.  There is no innocence here: not in his work and not in his Africa.
      Where hip hop’s nihilism and the literature that it has birthed tends towards grandiose performances of potency, what  marks Mabanckou’s work is its interest in the internal gestures possible when cultural and political impotence are fruitfully acknowledged.  He is a writer whose work is set in the central vortex of an Africa where both colonization and liberation have failed, and where cultural affirmation and political resistance have often turned to genocide.  His world features the kind of violence that is enough to make any “hardcore” rapper blanch or become envious of material.  In such a world, his is the kind of self-loathing that matters (and his most dubious distinction may be that he is the first to incorporate Rwandan genocide jokes into his fiction).  Without this kind of brutal self-criticism and the will to render one’s own “people” complicit and less than noble, all outward critique rings false.  Without this healthy skepticism of the self, it is impossible to mount any serious critique of society, history or their various structures without the easy and dangerous obfuscations of ideology or religious orthodoxy.