Author: Alain Mabanckou
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: February 2007
Gregoire Nakobomayo, a petty criminal, has decided to kill his girlfriend Germaine. He’s planned the crime for some time, but still, the act of murder requires a bit of psychological and logistical preparation. Luckily, he has a mentor to call on, the far more accomplished serial killer Angoualima. The fact that Angoualima is dead doesn’t prevent Gregoire from holding lengthy conversations with him. Little by little, Gregoire interweaves Angoualima’s life and criminal exploits with his own. Continuing with the plan despite a string of botched attempts, Gregoire’s final shot at offing Germaine leads to an abrupt unraveling.
We were called “picked-up children” because at the time, following an unwanted pregnancy, a great number of mothers would wait until they had delivered to skip out of the maternity ward and leave to the State the task of caring for their progeny.
African Psycho is the first English translation by Alain Mabanckou. Its a first person account of Gregoire Nakobomayo, would be killer, that takes as its inspiration Brett Easton Ellison’s novel American Psycho. Where as the protagonist from Ellison’s novel is a success at his chosen vocation its interesting to note that Nakobomayo is ultimately a failure. It’s this fundamental inability to successfully commit any crime that makes him such an intriguing character. He bounces back and forth between tragedy and farce so that he ultimately gains the smallest possible measure of sympathy from the reader. Which in the end leaves us feeling slightly odd because of what we are feeling when he doesn’t kill.
Ideally, I would benefit from as much media coverage as my idol, Angoualima, the most famous of our country’s assassins, used to get. From time to time, to give thanks for his genius, keep him informed of what I am doing, or even just for the pleasure of talking to him, I make my way to the cemetery of the Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-To-Sleep and kneel in front of his grave. And there, as if by magic, I swear, the Great Master of crime appears before me, as charismatic as in his glory days. We converse in the privacy of this sinister locale, the haunt of crows and other birds of bad omen . . .
I still cannot understand why my last deed, which took place only three months ago, wasn’t covered by the national press or the press of the country over there. Only four insignificant lines in >I>The Street Is Dying, a small neighborhood weekly, and the lines devoted to my crime were buried between ads for Monganga soap and No-Confidence shoes. As I have kept the clipping, I can’t help laughing when I read it again.
To Kill – a verb I have worshipped since coming of age. Fundamentally, all the small jobs I carried out were done in the hope of later being able to conjugate this verb in its most immediate and fully realized form.
