The River in the Belly

"Those already familiar with Tram 83 will recognize some of its precursor features in The River in the Belly, first published in 2013. The collection is full of cryptic images of sorrow and lamentation drawn from the African landscape but also fully augmented with others from a consciousness shaped by exile. The beauty of Mwanza Mujila's poetry comes from the telescoping of pain and despair into a language of unexpected juxtapositions. The resemblance with Dambudzo Marechera is not accidental, for they both attempt to hurl language into the abyss and to decipher the vague and mangled echoes that return to them in that act. A new and provocative contribution to African Literature." -Ato Quayson, Stanford University

"The poems show the Congo River running through Mwanza Mujila's veins as he contemplates mortality, (in)voluntary exile, the resource curse and the physical grandeur of the river itself.... These translations are a must-read." -Johannesburg Review of Books, Efemia Chela

"Translation is the ultimate tribute, a tributary to the river of beauty and this is so present in The River in the Belly. This is an urgent book that will outlive us all, but we can excavate it now. There is anguish. But for each wound Mwanza Mujila opens and tenderly kneads, he also sutures with a deep love. We must listen!" -Mukoma Wa Ngugi, author of Logotherapy and Black Star Nairobi

"This book ... is a masterpiece of poetic imagination and excellence. It is a melancholic meditation on the Congo River and the huge country named after it, while also expressing from the poet's new home in Austria his homesickness, solitude, and nostalgia for the good things he remembers from his country of origin such as the family home in Lubumbashi, food, beer, local brews, football (soccer) and music, particularly Congolese rumba. Using the mighty river as a metaphor for his own connection to the DRC, known during his first sixteen years as Zaire, Mwanza Mujila depicts a bleak picture of the regimes of Laurent and Joseph Kabila." -Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, author of The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History

"More subtle, mischievous poetics from Fiston Mwanza Mujila, this time mediated by the big river, unexpected materialities and anguish, mediated by solitude with some prose segments and a very fine translation. A book urgently wondering about deprivation, desire, violence, animal-human relations, exile, music, madness, and the diverse pulses of Congolese urbanities. Exquisite and profound, and eminently teachable too." -Nancy Rose Hunt, author of A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo

"Fiston Mwanza Mujila... thinks back not only to his native river, but also to the almost constant multi-agent civil war that has eviscerated the Congo over the past decades: it is both the bloodiest conflict of our time and one of the least noticed. Maney very capably conveys the intonations and registers of the original in this faithful and beautiful rendering." -Eugene Ostashevsky, judge for The 2019 Asymptote Close Approximations International Translation Contest

"A travelogue featuring dyspeptic saints, sophic beasts and, above all, an all-consuming river. Wonderfully subversive." -Jason Stearns, author of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa




Praise for Tram 83:

Winner of the Etisalat Prize for Debut African Fiction 2015

Nominated for the Man Booker International Prize 2016
Winner of a French Voices Award

"An exuberantly dark first novel . . . Evoking everyone from Brueghel to Henry Miller to Celine, Fiston plunges us into a world so anarchic it would leave even Ted Cruz begging for more government." -John Powers, NPR's Fresh Air w/ Terry Gross

"A high-velocity debut . . . The writing has the pulsing, staccato rhythms of Beat poetry and Roland Glasser has exuberantly harnessed that energy in his translation from the French." -Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"At once a grim account of neocolonialism and a comic tale of late-night urban mayhem, this vigorous, hip and brilliant work takes a while to warm up but ends up gripping like a vice." -James Smart, The Guardian

"In this visceral, fast-paced debut novel, acclaimed Congolese poet Mujila examines life in a central African state plagued by instability... Rapid and poetic, Mujila depicts a province where 'every day is a pitched battle'... The central characters fight to change the paths laid before them, desperate to rebel against a fate imposed by life in a consumptive environment. Mujila succeeds in exploring themes of globalization and exploitation in a kinetic, engaging work." -Publishers Weekly