The Heart of the Leopard Children

THE

HEART

OF THE

LEOPARD CHILDREN

Global African Voices

DOMINIC THOMAS, EDITOR

I Was an Elephant Salesman: Adventures
between Dakar, Paris, and Milan

Pap Khouma, Edited by Oreste Pivetta

Translated by Rebecca Hopkins

Introduction by Graziella Parati

Little Mother: A Novel

Cristina Ali Farah

Translated by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi
and Victoria Offredi Poletto

Introduction by Alessandra Di Maio

Life and a Half: A Novel

Sony Labou Tansi

Translated by Alison Dundy

Introduction by Dominic Thomas

Transit: A Novel

Abdourahman A. Waberi

Translated by David Ball and
Nicole Ball

Cruel City: A Novel

Mongo Beti

Translated by Pim Higginson

Blue White Red: A Novel

Alain Mabanckou

Translated by Alison Dundy

The Past Ahead: A Novel

Gilbert Gatore

Translated by Marjolijn de Jager

Queen of Flowers and Pearls: A Novel

Gabriella Ghermandi

Translated by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi
and Victoria Offredi Poletto

The Shameful State: A Novel

Sony Labou Tansi

Translated by Dominic Thomas

Foreword by Alain Mabanckou

Kaveena

Boubacar Boris Diop

Translated by Bhakti Shringarpure
and Sara C. Hanaburgh

Foreword by Ayo A. Coly

WILFRIED N'SONDÉ

Translated by

Karen Lindo

Foreword by Dominic Thomas

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405
USA

iupress.indiana.edu

Original publication in French

© 2007 Actes Sud

© 2016 by Indiana University Press

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z
39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: N'Sondé, Wilfried, author. | Lindo, Karen, translator.

Title: The heart of the leopard children / Wilfried N'Sond?e ; translated by Karen Lindo ; foreword by Dominic Thomas.

Other titles: Coeur des enfants léopards. English

Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Series: Global African voices

Identifiers:
LCCN
2015047348 |
ISBN
9780253021908 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects:
LCSH
: Africans – France – Fiction. | Immigrants – France – Fiction. | Youth – France – Fiction.

Classification:
LCC PQ
3989.3.
N
76
C
7413 2016 |
DDC
843/.92 – dc23

LC
record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047348

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I dedicate this book

to my parents

Marie-Joséphine and

Simone ‘Wapiti,'

Thank you
 . . .

. . . 
From this land of which I have been robbed,
mother what turmoil my life is!

SERGE
“
MNSA
”
N
'
SONDÉ

From hazardous storms, we become more beautiful!

WILFRIED PARACLET N
'
SONDÉ

FOREWORD
/
Dominic Thomas

The Heart of the Leopard Children

The Heart of the Leopard Children:
Ancestral Memory and the Creative Imagination

Born in 1968 in the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), Wilfried N'Sondé moved to France in 1973 and grew up there in an outlying urban area of Paris. The author of four novels published by Actes Sud, one of France's most prestigious publishers,
Le cœur des enfants léopards
(The Heart of the Leopard Children, 2007),
Le Silence des esprits
(The Silence of the Spirits, 2010),
Fleur de Béton
(Flower in Concrete, 2012), and
Berlinoise
(2014), he has received considerable critical attention and been recognized with important literary awards, most notably the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Senghor de la création littéraire. N'Sondé also publishes short stories and essays, his work has been adapted for the stage, and he has established a reputation in Berlin, where he moved in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and shortly before German reunification, as a pioneering musician and performer of afro-punk, rock trash, slam, and spoken-word.

N'Sondé is considered one of the shining lights of African, Afropean, and French writing. However, he is a writer who both exceeds and resists categorization, questioning the pertinence and even the validity of such mechanisms and in so doing, complicating attempts at circumscribing his work. As he contends, “The ethno-identitarian
machine has become a deadly poison. . . . It has a tendency to regionalize and to persist in confining art and people to the arbitrariness of geography, to use questionable criteria in order to divide and categorize, driving us gradually further away from the essence of being and magic of words.”
¹
These questions are central in his first novel,
The Heart of the Leopard Children
, a work that “deals with the question of origin; human beings are not sites. Those are purely mental constructs. What am I supposed to answer when asked ‘Where do you come from?' Congo, France, Berlin, Seine-et-Marne, Brazzaville? No. I come from my mother's womb. We don't have roots, we are not plants.”
²

Yet, these, and related questions – postcolonial African society, diasporic identity, race relations, immigration policy,
banlieues
housing projects, and so forth – feature prominently in his work and provide readers with demanding and thought-provoking examples of how the literary imagination is able to appraise these and analogous issues. N'Sondé exhibits a concerted engagement with identity and belonging and close scrutiny of the ways in which geographic uprooting impacts those who have grown in French housing projects, on the “ambivalent”
³
physical boundaries of society and emotional margins of “Frenchness.”
⁴
A process of introspection defines the unnamed central protagonist's quest to seek answers to life's existential challenges. “Where do you come from?” (
p. 2
), are you “Black on the outside, white on the inside!” (
p. 23
), and “What are you anyway, French or African?” (
p. 76
). These are the questions with which he is confronted on a quotidian basis, and as N'Sondé has claimed, “In writing the novel I realized that the other characters, who did not come from the Congo, were nevertheless, in their quest for life, also leopard children, to the extent they shared in the ferocity and rage they brought to bear on life, but also in the same nobility of heart.”
⁵
Writing thus provides the occasion to “insert some humanity into everyday news stories and to give a face, a heart, and feelings to a segment of French society, namely poor immigrants.”
⁶

In
The Heart of the Leopard Children
, the central protagonist delivers, from a prison cell where he is being held in conjunction with the death of a police officer, an internal monologue that reckons with his childhood, adolescence, and young adult life, in a universe composed of interactions with the two other key figures in his life, namely his girlfriend Mireille (a Jewish
pied-noir
of Algerian descent) and his best friend Drissa (like him, of African descent). Reviewing his past provides the opportunity to question the ideals and values of the French Republic, to place these concepts and principles under pressure, in other words to test other forms of cultural, political, and social confinement, “the conviction in a color-blind ideology that has for a longtime sustained segregation in housing, discrimination in hiring practices, the reiteration of protracted historical amnesia in-school curricula and quelled the brimming buried rage by executing the long arm of the law” and “the physical isolation and alienation of
banlieues
communities from active participation within the Republican institutions that oversee the daily practices of citizenry remains startling.”
⁷