In our December Book Club selection, Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss writer Max Lobe paints a vivid psychic landscape of migration, queerness, and class. Centred around an incredibly intimate mother-son relationship that crosses from Cameroon to Switzerland, Lobe addresses the politics of a contemporary, itinerant existence with humour, wisdom, and frankness. In this following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to Lobe and translator Ros Schwartz about the concept of a “national literature,” textual musicality, and what it means to belong somewhere, nowhere—or everywhere.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.
Laurel Taylor (LT): Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? is a novel with an immigrant at its center, and the book has been described as a contemporary story of alienation, that feeling of belonging nowhere catalysed by migrancy. Max and Ros, how do you think the concept of belonging fits in this book? Where does the nature of belonging fit overall in books that speak of migration?
Max Lobe (ML): The fact of belonging nowhere is something that really speaks to me. I was born in Douala, [Cameroon,] and then I moved from Douala to Lugano, which is in the Italian part of Switzerland. Today, I live in Geneva, and most of the time I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.
In Cameroon, back in the day, I couldn’t feel at home because I didn’t fulfill the criteria of being a man. I was very girlish. And you see me with the red lipstick now because I’ve come to terms with who I am. Then, when I moved to Switzerland, there was another problem, because I discovered that I was black in our classroom at Università della Svizzera italiana, the Lugano university.
In those three years, I thought to myself: “Where is my place?” I think that we, or I, can make anywhere our own place, but you need to want it. You need a willingness if you want to belong to a place—with courage, with humour, with lots of passion. Today, I think, “Everywhere I go can be my place.” That is what I wanted to communicate in this book.
Ros Schwartz (RS): I think this idea of belonging both in this book and in other books written by migrants, is that being granted citizenship does not automatically create a sense of belonging. Mwana, the narrator, is constantly reminded that he’s an outsider—through the Black Sheep anti-immigrant campaign. At first, he doesn’t even realize it’s directed against him, and then his lover—Ruedi—goes with his family to the famous Grütli Meadow, which the book describes as: “the very one where the Swiss Oath had been signed at the end of the thirteenth century, while we Bantus were still walking barefoot in the forest among the animals.” So, there is this continual reminder of being other.
I think in books that speak of migration, it’s a thread that runs through generations. The children of migrants are continually looking at both countries through a lens of otherness; they don’t feel completely at home in their parents’ country of origin, or they don’t feel completely at home in the adoptive country. People are expected to come down on one side or the other.
ML: The most important thing about belonging is that it’s something spiritual—something that has to do with the soul. It’s not something physical. We cannot see it. With time—when I come back to Geneva, for example—I feel like I’m back home. It’s a little force inside whispering: “Now you are home. Now nobody can harm you. Nobody can do bad things to you.” You feel secure. But I think most of the time, that comes with experience, with time, with pain, with relationships. I’ve been living in Switzerland now for almost twenty years. That’s not nothing.
The politics in Switzerland are very different, and I talk about that in the book. I know people who’ve been living here for thirty years, and they still don’t understand how things work in this country. But for me, I feel I’m a part of that community, and also because I’ve become used to representing Switzerland abroad. Every time I have to represent Switzerland, I’m like, “Hello, guys, I’m here for Switzerland. Look at me. I’m so sweet.” And they laugh—and then I can start speaking, because I’ve broken the ice.
LT: The idea of representing Switzerland is interesting, because many English-speaking countries have tended toward a mythology of monolingualism. But Switzerland has a unique literary landscape because it has so many national languages, and it’s also a place of major linguistic shifts. You’ve said before, Max, that you write with a “European reader” in mind. Is contributing to a national literature a meaningful concept for you? Swiss literature or Cameroonian literature—as opposed to a broader European literature?
ML: I have different hats. I’m an author, and I’m also Swiss and in service to Swiss literature. I think Swiss literature can be everything. It’s not just Francophone. It’s Germanophone. It’s Italophone. Swiss literature has been put in a little box through authors of the past centuries, and today we see that even in Switzerland, people making literature are coming from abroad.
But for me, the most important thing is to talk about my own experience in this country: my path, how I came here. If it was on purpose—or if even if it was kismet—I came here, and I decided to build my own way in this country. Once, when I was doing an internship, I would say, ”I want to go back to my country. I don’t want to stay in this country.” And the man I was working with said, “Oh, my son. Can you imagine? You’re sitting on a mine, a gold mine, and you can live in this gold mine for Cameroon. Don’t be stupid. They’ve given everything for you to stay here.” I want to thank him, because he was right.
I have a deep connection with this country—with the mountains, with the Alps, with the cows, with the goats, with the bank accounts. My aim is not just to talk about my previous life in Cameroon, but how my life became in Switzerland.
I’m not sure where you read that I have western people in mind when I’m writing—no. The first people I think of when I write is my people, from Africa. But I know the first people that will read me will be white people—western. And this is something you have to play with; you must think about how to address a message to people who are not in your mind when you’re writing the book. If I take the example of Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, this book is addressed to black people from Cameroon, Bantuland, but now that the book is out in London, I know the first people that will read me will be western people. So it’s something I have to deal with.
It’s like a voice that you give to your people, and you know you’re talking about your life, but also, you’re talking about something that’s a lot more universal. Because it’s intimate. I’m talking about my relationship with my mother, something very internal to me, but I know—I hope—that there are lots of people who can recognise themselves in this. So this is my approach, and I wonder sometimes why they don’t ask the same question to Greek authors, or to people from Bangladesh? Why always to African people? Except for the colour of the skin, I think it’s all the same, and I believe we can all understand the suffering of a young man having his mother dying in front of him.
As for Switzerland, can we really talk about a Swiss literature, given that we don’t have bridges between the languages? I’m translated in German, but in Germany. I’m translated in Italian, but in Italy. You always need to go and conquer the world, and then when you come back they applaud you.
One of my aims really is to talk about his little country, and to make it much more normal. I studied here—political science and communication science, so I was supposed to be a political journalist. A queer political journalist—who else can talk to you about this wonderful fucking country, if not me? This is my challenge, and I love it. I laugh everytime I talk about Switzerland. And I think it’s my promised land, definitely.
LT: Ros, you’ve translated several works that engage with the tension between cultures. In your experience, how has this concern evolved or changed in recent years?
RS: I’m not sure I can make generalisations about how much it’s changed, but I suppose that the tension between cultures is never far from the surface in the works of writers who are either immigrants or of an immigrant background. Perhaps we’ll see more of these stories emerge because the gatekeepers—ie. the people who decide what gets published—are being challenged from all sides. There’s a lot more activism and challenging of who decides—who decides what’s good writing? Who decides what the standard should be? So I think we’re seeing more and more diverse voices, simply because there’s more activism around that issue.
ML: I think also that publishers are very important for these kinds of texts or stories talking about migration. The publisher is supposed to be a very curious person. If they’re not, they’ll just put the author in one little window. For me, I discovered—and I’m discovering every single day—that it’s not just an African thing. There are people also coming from Italy, from France, from Albania, from Kosovo, and the one true thing, maybe the only difference, is that color is king. If you are the son of an Italian migrant who came in the fifties or sixties today in Switzerland, you’ll say, “My name is Mario Berlusconi,” and nobody will ask you, “But actually where are you from?” Because we know that we have the Italian part of the country, and you might be from that part of the country. But me, I could come with a very delicious Swiss name like Max Mueller, Max Lobe, Max Schrattenbach, whatever, and they will still ask me, “But actually, where are you from?” Sometimes I just say I’m from the twenty-seventh canton—Switzerland has twenty-six cantons, so I add one and say the twenty-seventh is Cameroon. You know, the President of Cameroon, Paul Biya, spends seventy percent of his time in Switzerland. So I’m just like, “Well, you know. Cameroonian people are supposed to be Swiss people.” Skin color matters a lot with such things.
LT: Max, you you’ve said in a past interview that “the world is dirty” and that you wish to “clean it with laughter.” One of the most striking qualities of this text is its humour. How do you balance that levity in tone with the occasional heaviness of the subject? Do you think that humour ever camouflages the more painful social issues—performative activism, homophobia within black communities—that you subtly address in this book?
ML: This book was published in 2016, and there are some things in my literature that I think are basic. I believe that literature is not to be understood internationally. A novel is supposed to be a novel; a novel is not a human rights watch report. Today, the Davos Economic Forum starts in Switzerland, but I’m not going there with my book saying: “Look at this!” Literature, more than a pamphlet, should bring us into a universe, somewhere the reader is invited to think about the topic.
I don’t have a design in mind. I bring up the subject to say: “This is how my culture manages with this. And what about you? How would you have managed this?” I think writing is like a lubricant. You need to make it easier to get in, you know. Just imagine—if you really come out with those topics in a very rough, brutal way, it can be a choice, but I think you’re going to lose a lot of people. I prefer to gather my people with a little something to laugh about, to make it easier to start the conversation—because what is the end? The end is not for me and them to clash again, and decide not to speak. No. It is to bring the other into my world, to tell him: “Just imagine, you and me, just imagine how things would’ve been for you.”
I have to say, this book expresses a typical experience of sadness. A typical African experience of sadness—I have to underline: African experience of sadness. Because I’m not just talking about anxiety or mental health; if you read the story of Mwana, it is about a clever guy, but he cannot get a job. He cannot help the mother who is dying in the hospital. What a big disillusion! To notice, to see that despite all this, you have no place under the sun. It’s so bitter. And there was no way for me to approach the topic directly. I wanted to weave around.
I’m a grown man today: I wear my lipstick, I wear my nail polish, I have enough experience in life, I have been married to a white man, I know their cocks, how they come, how they orgasm, I have been with them, and I can speak out. I can speak out with you, talking like this. But in a book, no.
LT: Mwana’s thinking is so vividly rendered in this novel, and you two have spoken before about you close collaboration—that Max would read a passage aloud, then Ros would translate with that music in mind. With text that puts voice first in this way, music is fundamental. Max, what is the role that musicality and sound play in your writing; Ros, what is the role that musicality and sound play in your translation?
RS: If you were to ask me what is it that I’m aiming at as a translator, I would say that it’s to somehow capture the author’s voice and the music of the text. It’s not just about meaning. When I start a translation, I first try to translate for meaning. I want to make sure that my translation says what the French text says. And then I work on the music. I read the source text aloud, or ideally, I get the author to read the source text aloud, because I want to hear the rhythms, and there are things that emerge when you read aloud that you don’t necessarily see on the page. You might get a lot of assonance, a lot of alliteration, and there’s a certain rhythm. It’s really about trying to capture that rhythm.
It was a great privilege to meet Max at the point where I was finishing the first translation I did of his work, because we spent a couple of days together, and we played a lot with language. He plays a lot with words, which wouldn’t work in English if you just translated for meaning, so we went quite far from the French to get something that worked in English. It’s a bit like doing a Rubik’s cube; you’re always moving things around in this continual balancing act between meaning and music, and if something doesn’t work when you read it out loud, you hear it. I think we’ve all seen translations that are completely accurate, grammatically, in meaning, but are clunky. And the reason they’re clunky is because the translator hasn’t thought about the musicality. So sometimes you have to take liberties, and poetry is an extreme example of that, where that’s absolutely crucial.
I think the book that brought this home to me was when I translated The Little Prince: a children’s book, written in a very simple language. I thought it was going to be a walk in the park, and once I’d done my draft translation, I realised that, where the French is light and airy all the way through, and just trips off the tongue, my draft translation went clunk clunkety clunk. And I worked with my daughter on that translation; she was a young teenager at the time, and she has a musical ear. I would read the translation to her, and she would just close her eyes and listen, and every so often she’d go: no. Or: ugly, ugly, ugly. Or: too many syllables. And she was absolutely spot on. We must have spent hours and hours going over it until we got the rhythm right. That was a real turning point for me, because it made me realise that even in books that aren’t as poetic as The Little Prince, you have to be alert all the time to music.
ML: In terms of musicality, it really controls the movement and the shifts in the text. In this book, when Mwana is crying the hospital and Monga Minga is about to die, I was seeing the drums of my country, when the women would cry on the floor. In the mind of an immigrant, there is a panorama of musicality, of reading, and this is a strength for me. I take from all sorts of places, and this is what makes it a lot larger, and universal for everybody.
When I met Ros and I spent a weekend with her, it was really important—to see how she is physically with me, how we behaved. And now, I know that Ros is getting in on my jobs. She’s my English voice, definitely.
RS: You know, you might say, what is a seventy-year-old white English woman doing translating someone who is the same age as her son, but what’s wonderful is that you can connect across generations and across cultures through humour, and we kind of got each other. So that really helped me with the translation, to nail the Max I could hear in my head.
Carol Khoury (CK): I would like to know more about how you came to the title of the book in English. The French title is a completely different one, and it’s a striking difference.
RS: Well, the title in French is La Trinité Bantoue, which translates to “The Bantu Trinity.” Neither the publisher and I really liked it in English because we felt it didn’t really capture the essence of the book. So we tried various options, and in the end, I suggested we take a resonant line from the book; the title is something that the mother says at one point.
ML: When they suggested this title, I was like: “Yes! Definitely! I want that title!” I think it’s really important, according to the language, to give another aspect of the book. In French, if you say Bantu Trinity, my readers have a reason to think about spirituality—but that’s not the only thing in this book.
When I was writing this, I was twenty-very-young. Today, I am thirty-very-old. And I think this title expresses what I wanted to say then: “Now that I’m in Switzerland, am I becoming white? Have I become white?” My mom was here yesterday, and she told me: “Oh my dear son, you are so white. You have become so white. You call your plants your baby, you don’t want to eat meat. . .”
You know, I come from this kind of family—and it’s not just African families—but people have this concern about outside perceptions. People used to come up to my siblings and ask, “Oh, your bother is a little strange, a bit queer.” And my family used to respond, “Well, he’s an artist.” But now they say, “Oh, come on, he’s a white guy.” I’m a white artist! Come on, don’t you notice it?
Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?—it doesn’t only speak to the young man I was a decade ago, but definitely to the man I am today. There is a harmony in my voice with what I said from my very first novel; I feel like I’m always trying to open the same question. And with the book I’m writing now, it’s somewhat of a big summary of how I got here, to pronouncing my name in a Swiss way. The decisions I make today were prepared long ago—even if I didn’t know it at the time. I’m not surprised at what is happening in my life today, because I worked hard to be at this level. To black, queer migrants, I want them to know that there is no fatality. Just keep who you are in your heart, and when the time comes for you to shine—please shine! Shine all your shine! This is what I’m doing.
Max Lobe was born in Douala, Cameroon. At eighteen, he moved to Switzerland, where he earned a BA in Communication and Journalism and a Master’s in Public Policy and Administration. In 2017, his novel Confidences won the Ahmadou Kourouma Prize. Other books by the author include 39 rue de Berne, A Long Way From Douala (published by HopeRoad in 2021) and Does Snow Turn A Person White Inside? Max lives in Geneva.
Ros Schwartz is an award-winning translator of more than a hundred works of fiction and nonfiction, including the 2010 edition of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Among the francophone authors she has translated are Tahar Ben Jelloun, Aziz Chouaki, Fatou Diome, Dominique Eddé, and Ousmane Sembène. In 2009 she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2017 she was awarded the John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence by the UK-based Institute of Translation and Interpreting.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: