When he lived in Paris, Edem Awumey often went to museums. Wandering from one room to another, he wondered what the painters wanted to say, what the Mona Lisa’s smile meant. In cotton wedding, his sixth novel, each time the narrator, a Berlin journalist, visits Vienna, he loses himself in contemplation in front of a painting by Bruegel the Elder, The dance of the peasants.
“It is the element of mystery that interests me in painting, says the novelist in videoconference. In Bruegel the Elder’s painting, what is mysterious? They are peasants who work in harsh conditions and yet they feast, dance, drink. What are they celebrating? What do their smiles say? Their Sunday clothes? It’s a priori simple and joyful, but what happens behind? »
Fascinated by this painting which reminds him of his grandfather, the journalist obtained permission to visit a photo exhibition entitled The dance of the peasants thanks to the complicity of his friend Ed Kaba, who manages the new Museum of the Green Revolution in an African city that the author does not name. Shocked by this naive representation of peasant life, Toby Kunta, a cotton planter recently hired as a security guard, takes the journalist hostage and demands from the Firm, a multinational that has sold transgenic cotton seeds to several peasants who have ruined them, two hundred million francs.
In the meantime, Toby burns the photos one by one and replaces them with artifacts that once belonged to his peasant brothers and sisters. If the Firm does not respond to his request, the journalist, whom he nicknames Robinson, risks being immolated alive. Soon, the scorching sun and the stopping of the ventilation make the place unbreathable.
Black Sun
Yes Mina through the shadows (Boréal, 2018), her previous novel, shared some similarities with flies of Sartre, cotton wedding rather refers to Behind closed doors, another piece by the philosopher. Even more, to the stranger de Camus with this insolent sun that stuns cotton planters in the southern United States, West Africa, Uzbekistan and Indian Rajasthan. The adopted Gatinois, who reveals that he prefers Camus to Sartre, recalls that these writers and playwrights of the absurd awakened his conscience when he was a teenager in his native Togo.
“There is probably a very Camusian side to this novel. This burning sun that often comes back is an agent, an almost contemptuous character in my novels. Writing is often a look at these readings that have carried us. Camus is the rebellious man. In a somewhat pretentious way, we can say that Toby carries this anger, this revolt. »
In a way, the novelist invites the spirit of Beckett (Waiting for Godot) in this camera whose chapter numbers go down, as in a countdown.
“The absurd somewhere, they won’t escape it. From the start, we are waiting. You cannot stop the mechanism once it is engaged. Will he kill his hostage or will his grievances be answered? It is the novel of a certain expectation. It is a very strong paradigm, that of waiting. There, where I come from, many people waited for something to happen. These peasants were promised the dream with these GMOs. They sowed and then waited for a miracle to come out of the ground. For a tiny part, it worked, but for the others, it was a disaster. Genetically modified cotton has not kept its promises. We have seen it in India and Burkina Faso. »
The invisible hand
Speaking of the fate of Burkinabé peasants, Edem Awumey confides that at the genesis of cotton wedding, there were several readings and the situation in Burkina Faso, a neighboring country of Togo, which tried the adventure of transgenic cotton, which challenged him.
“Reading an article, I came across the testimony of a peasant who compared himself to a serf. In the novel, Toby says we’ve gone back to the Middle Ages, to the early days of slavery. The difference is that today the master remains fierce, but he is invisible. It’s the Firm. Many years and centuries later, a certain exploitation continues. It’s so vicious that people have been forced into making certain choices. Before, we talked about capture; people were transported to America and had no choice. Today, the approach is different, but in the end, we find ourselves faced with the same reality of the exploitation of the weakest by those who have a certain economic power. »
While Toby and Robinson, who has traveled the world, discuss the fate of peasants, that of children working in the mills of Dhaka in Bangladesh is also mentioned. The author denies arousing guilt in the reader by reminding him of these harsh realities. Instead, he wants her to ask questions about her drinking habits.
“The goal is not to say ‘I no longer wear Cerruti or Zadig & Voltaire clothes’, but to initiate an approach that can function as a certain responsibility in relation to what we do so that a certain echo reaches the ears of the big brands, which have clothes made there for not much. »
Having spent the summers of his youth in the coffee and cocoa fields of his grandparents, where he was able to observe that “despite the hard work, these people smiled at life”, Edem Awumey did not wanted to write a novel against the enduring slavery and capitalism, but put the human being at the center of the question in a face-to-face between two solitudes.
“I am thinking of this sentence by Senghor: “We are the men of the dance, whose feet regain vigor by hitting the hard ground”. Finally, cotton men are perhaps happy people, who create happiness with small things before being peasants. Isn’t the first profession that of living? This is what fascinates me in The dance of the peasants. »