In February, we introduced to Asymptote Book Club subscribers the multifarious, multivocal work of Véronique Tadjo. Her 2017 novel, In the Company of Men, fascinatingly combines document, and oration in a portrait of the West African Ebola epidemic, interrogating in turns how we as humans grapple with illness, as well as how the natural world—with its unseen forces—regards us. A pivotal read during this seemingly unending time of addressing our own pandemic, Tadjo’s unique linguistic style and sensitive artistry has introduced In the Company of Men as a text of both current relevance and long-lasting artistry. In this following interview, Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel speaks with Tadjo on self-translation, personifying the non-human, and the inheritance of literary traditions.
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Lindsay Semel (LS): I’m fascinated by the subject of self-translation. You’ve translated some of your own children’s fiction, but this is your first foray into translating your adult fiction. Even though you’ve lived in so many different places, and you function daily in so many different languages, translating your own work is a separate beast. I’d love to hear about, first and foremost, what the process was like for you.
Véronique Tadjo (VT): Yes, I function in two languages, French and English; I’ve been studying English and living in Anglophone countries quite extensively—the longest was in South Africa for fourteen years. So I’m used to speaking both languages.
This process with In the Company of Men was fairly long, and it was a collaboration. It started with a draft with a friend; we worked quite a lot on the text, but the result was still very close to the French original. Maybe because I’ve done a lot of translation, I could see that myself—that there was something stalling the text. The last stage of the collaboration was with John Cullen from Other Press, a translator with a very good reputation. He looked at the text and finally lifted it up, in the sense that he was able to give it a more oral quality than the first version, which was a little bit wooden. I just didn’t feel that it was flowing the way it should flow, especially because English is a much more direct language [than French]. French tends to go round and round—it takes a bit more time to get there. Whereas English has some sort of efficiency. I think that the original French book was more lyrical, whereas the English translation is more to the point.
LS: Do you happen to have, off the top of your head, an example of a passage that wasn’t quite hitting its mark? Do you remember what changed through those conversations about it?
VT: Very simple things. Like, for example, “He’s a tall man.” You can’t do that in French. You can’t contract. It’s just a small example, but when you look on the page, how the language is written down, it makes a big difference.
LS: There are very clear parallels between the events that you chronicle in this text and what a lot of the globe is experiencing now collectively, and so I wonder if current events contributed to your decision to translate yourself rather than bringing in a translator. What was it like for you to put yourself back into this story?
VT: Yes, I think that because of the pandemic, I had a sense of urgency. I had it in 2017 when I was talking about the Ebola epidemic, but with the translation, it came back. This time, what we had feared was becoming reality, so there was a renewed sense of energy, which compelled me to want to be very involved in the translation—to really put myself fully in it.
There were certain words that came naturally which I sometimes had to resist. For example, there’s a chapter in which a nurse plays an important role. You would be tempted to call her an “essential worker.” But you have to be careful, because “essential worker” is an expression that has taken strength from the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’m not sure we were using it that much before. You see, today you read it differently. I didn’t want to introduce this “foreign language,” which would signal a shift from Ebola to COVID-19. It would not be right. So, although there was temptation to use some of the terms that are being used today, I didn’t want that contamination, in a sense. I had to stay true to the period, the time, and the context.
LS: In a way, staying true to the period, the time, and the context elevates the sense of universality of the text. Ultimately, what you’re calling on your readers to understand are not things that are contained to a particular time or space.
VT: Exactly. I know that some people have been thrown off by the fact that there are no names for the characters. That is what I call the imperialism of the novel—where you have to explain absolutely everything. “So, this is Juliet, and she drank a glass of water, then put it on the table, then turned her head, looked out of the window. . .” I mean, you have to explain absolutely everything. I wasn’t going to do that. My intention was to have that space, which is at the same time recognizable and foreign.
LS: And you’ve mentioned this before in interviews regarding some of your other works. You’ve said, “I have an aversion to telling a story in a linear form. I prefer not to, because that’s not how it happens in our heads.” These characters that don’t necessarily have names, they show a lot of emotion, a lot of themselves, but they don’t have the same sense of interiority that a lot of us have come to expect from characters and novels. You’ve said that they could all be “aspects of the self.” And you’ve resisted this impulse from critics to categorize your work with experimental trends in European writing, because you’ve said that actually your method is closer to the older African traditions.
VT: Yes, exactly. It’s probably a mixture, but I was extremely influenced by oral literature from Africa, because this is something that’s still alive in a lot of parts of Africa, even in the urban environments, where it has the ability to adapt to new situations. It’s a very flexible genre. For example, a very interesting mythical character who I’ve written about, Mamy Wata, is the mother of the water. She’s everywhere; she’s in the Caribbean, she’s in so many parts of Africa where there is water. Instead of being just contained in folklore or ancient oral traditions, she is also an urban figure. She has been able to move. She’s still a mermaid—half woman, half fish—but is now entering the city. She has the ability to continue to live in the imagination of people. As an urban figure, she can take all sorts of different forms and personalities. I find that absolutely fascinating. It’s a good example of what oral tradition can do.
Oral traditions are not dead. They’re very much alive and continue to find new audiences. What I like very much about them is that they carry the baggage of cultural heritage. You have songs, poems, music, history, even political language; all these genres are helping to tell the story. It’s left to the storyteller to find how to put a bit of this, a bit of that, pause here, go there, to capture the attention of the audience.
LS: Absolutely. One of my favorite moments of the book is the telling of the origin story of the bat. That’s such a beautiful passage.
VT: So this story was inspired by Amadou Hampâté Bâ telling the story of the origin of the bat—he says he was inspired by oral traditions. You can see how they travel; first someone who has heard that story writes it down, and now he’s passing it on to contemporary writers.
I wanted to add, in terms of the characters having no names, that I wanted them to be defined by their actions—not by their descriptions, but by their actions. What did they do during the epidemic? For me, that was much more important than any qualification that I could give them. For example, the doctor, in the end—maybe the readers will mind—but does it matter if he has a name? He is the doctor, and we can see what he’s doing, and what he’s doing connects him with any other doctor anywhere.
LS: What he’s doing and what he’s feeling, because the emotions also are extremely vivid. The tricky balance, which I think you’ve really mastered, is how to allow this voice, this teller, to speak through each of the characters, and at the same time, to make the characters so relatable individually. So there’s a collectivity and an individuality at the same time. That must involve such a careful selection of the information that you choose to share about them, which actions to show and what to express.
VT: Yes, in fact, it was a challenge. If I had made each character too strong, then it would have jarred, because the reader would have constantly been going up and down—and it was already very complicated, because the structure contains many voices, including non-human voices. There was only so much I could ask the reader to accept. At the at the end of the day, I concentrated on the actions or what the characters were saying so that there was some kind of homogeneity. And the homogeneity, for me, was the fact that they were all doing the same thing. Although they’re different, they’re all involved in the epidemic in one way or another, for better or worse, at the same time, in the same kind of spaceless space.
LS: Let’s talk more about the non-human characters and how you crafted those voices to be on par with the human voices—to be just as real and vibrant. The voice of the virus itself was one of the most evocative speakers. He really goes on a proper rampage. I’d love to hear more about how you crafted those voices, how they spoke to you.
VT: I suppose that once you’ve accepted that the Baobab is the teller of the story—he is the witness, the one who calls in the characters to speak—once you’ve accepted that, it’s only one step to accepting that the bat will talk, or the virus.
Of course, the virus was going to be the villain, but I didn’t want to make him a complete villain for the simple reason that, in fact, we need viruses to survive. They do a lot of work when we’re not watching to keep balance in nature. They are also necessary to the balance of life. He is also the one who, at the end of the day, gives the strongest piece of advice to human beings. He says, “Look, you’ve done all sorts of things, and I could almost destroy you. But there’s one thing that can stop me: when you get together, when you find solidarity, when you work together and collaborate. Then I have to step back, because I can’t fight against that.” He’s the villain, but he tells the humans, “I have one weakness. If you are united, that’s the only way you can defeat me.” It is an extraordinary message to give.
With COVID-19, I think this is replaying itself; until we find a way to collaborate, a way to work together, a way to trust each other, we’re not going to survive. And this time it is at a global level. It’s even harder. Nobody is safe if anybody else is sick.
Giving animals the power of speech has been done. This is centuries old. For example, Jean de La Fontaine, who is a seventeenth-century French poet, wrote Le Fable de La Fontaine. And the interesting thing about Jean de La Fontaine is that he got his inspiration from Greek mythology, so here again, storytelling travels through time and influences different generations. There’s nothing new about what I’ve done, I’ve just inherited from different traditions.
LS: Yeah, I think contemporary trends have tried to relegate this practice to a thing that happens over there—only in the past, or in fantasy, or in children’s literature. And that’s not the case. It doesn’t have to be and it shouldn’t be.
VT: It’s a way also of saying, “Look, you’ve forgotten that, at some point, we were closer to nature.” There were more connections before, and there are still those ancient tales about when human beings were able to talk to animals and to nature. I think it was a way of saying, “Look, our break with nature has to be revisited. We have to think about it. We have to see how far we’ve gone.” We must somehow find reconciliation, find a way of speaking to each other again, find a language and a sort of meta-language that will help us communicate with our surroundings. Right? I mean, people do that all the time. Look at the people who speak to their dogs, their cats, their cows. When you go to the park to have a stroll and take a bit of sun, you should see the way people want to feed the ducks. Why? Because they want to be with the ducks, in the sense that they want that bit of communication. The humans need it much more than the duck.
LS: The last, related, point that I’d like to bring up has to do with this tension between contemporary and ancient ways of being and thinking that’s constantly causing trouble in the novel. The tension between rural and urban life, between old and new ways of expressing solidarity, understanding health and whose wisdom can be trusted, and feeding ourselves. People just can’t trust what they’ve always trusted. Could you share your thoughts about what the role of literature and art is in helping us resolve these tensions?
VT: Look, in this modern world, we are absolutely bombarded by news. Bombarded, constantly. You open your TV, or you switch on your radio, or you look at the newspaper or social media. . . You get information, information, information at a very high dosage. Information from the TV has become more entertainment than anything. You have the war in Syria one second, and the next second is about the results of a soccer match. Your head is very confused. You cannot put the information in perspective, because it proceeds so rapidly. So, I think that what literature brings is time to reflect and take in information at a human pace. Something that you can digest, go back to, think about something, and go beyond the headlines. I mean, you’re not looking for headlines when you go to literature. You’re looking for a way to understand what’s happening around you in a different light. I think that’s what literature can bring. It can help you more to identify with what is happening, to break the cycle of indifference.
Véronique Tadjo, a writer, poet, novelist, and artist from Côte d’Ivoire, is the author of In the Company of Men, recently published by Other Press. She earned a doctorate in Black American Literature and Civilization from the Sorbonne, Paris IV, and went to the United States as a Fulbright scholar at Howard University in Washington, DC. She headed the French Department of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg up until 2015. Her books have been translated into several languages, from The Blind Kingdom (1991) to The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda (2001) and Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice (2005), which was awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature d’Afrique noire 2005.
Lindsay Semel is an Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote. She daylights as a farmer in North-Western Galicia and moonlights as a freelance writer and editor.
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