2024-03-16 10:06:53
Raphaëlle Red is a brand new voice in African letters, a promising voice. With Adikou, her first novel, she delivers a poignant and poetic meditation on identity and crossbreeding. Told like an initiatory road trip, the story of the eponymous heroine of the novel takes the reader along the steep paths of Alabama and the Ewe country divided between Ghana and Togo. Interview.
RFI: Raphaëlle Red, can we say that crossbreeding is the central theme of your novel, Adikou ?
Raphaëlle Red: Oui, Adikou is a reflection on crossbreeding, in the same way as it is a reflection on the question of the myth of a single origin. I think that crossbreeding allows for a particular sensitivity to the fact that we have several beings within ourselves, as the narrator in the novel says at one point. But at the same time, the fact of having several beings within oneself, the fact of being double, of being multiple, concerns many more men and women than just mixed-race people. I think it’s important to recognize that we all perhaps have several identities within us. And it’s always interesting to get them to talk and go on a trip together.
But the quest of your heroine Adikou is also a revolt.
I think what’s interesting about Adikou’s quest is that as she progresses, the object of her quest becomes more and more vague, because the parameters themselves prove to be false. Adikou sets out to look for some kind of origin, a place where she was told she would feel at home. But the more she advances, the more she realizes that she doesn’t really believe in the idea that she would be sitting between two chairs and that that would be her problem. She was told that she would have to know where she came from and then everything would be fine, etc. But her awareness leads her to revolt against this idea of a fixed origin and identity.
You yourself are mixed race. Is this an autobiographical novel? Adikou is a bit like you, right?
The emotion and the questions are autobiographical, because they are very personal to me. But the term autobiography is a term with which I am not very comfortable. I’m not sure I understand what this term means. Already, the distinction between certain autobiographical and non-autobiographical writings does not hold water. I tell myself that it would be a very, very complicated mental exercise to write in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with yourself. For example, even if I wrote a science fiction featuring a love story that takes place in the 27th century, it would necessarily be autobiographical to the extent that this love story would be imbued with the idea that I make love. I think a lot about this notion of autobiography.
We are struck from the first pages by your use of a narration in two voices, undoubtedly to signify this consciousness of being double that mixed-race people sometimes have. This adequacy between content and form is a prodigious discovery.
In fact, this book has gone through a lot of changes, a lot of rewriting. One constant, however: there have always been several narrative instances. In one of the many versions, I even had a collective, more ancestral voice that told a large part of the story. For me, having several voices meant asking the question who has the floor, who owns the story, who has the right to tell it. I was also interested in going through the text to really question this notion of authority over history.
Why, Raphaëlle Red, did it take you six years to write this novel?
It took me six years, because I had to find out what this story was about as I wrote it, or rather I accepted that it wasn’t exactly the novel I wanted to write, which ended up being written and it all takes time.
Is writing a painful experience for you?
In fact, what is painful is rather the impulse, the writing of the first draft. This is the moment when things are happening, without me understanding what is actually happening. I think that afterwards, reworking the text, refining, trimming the sentences is less painful. This step certainly requires more work, but emotionally, I feel more alone because there is now a potential reader. All my work is to better communicate my thoughts to that reader who is on the horizon. Loneliness is less existential. The writer’s pain is in solitude.
How did you get into writing?
First of all, through the story, through the desire to tell it, the desire to invent it too. For a very long time, I have been working to invent stories for myself, to imagine them, to visualize them. I am fascinated by the ability we have to imagine worlds, to dream, to daydream. This is the first impulse. Then, when I was a teenager, I started listening to a lot of rap, a lot of rap, which I still listen to today. For me, this music is art. I’m thinking in particular of rap from the 2000s and even that of the 2010s. I’m inspired by rappers, because they master the art of storytelling and have the ability to take us on a journey through an album. Their music reveals a real narrative construction, with intros, outros, interludes, changes of register, while remaining within a certain coherence. To summarize, imagination, reading and rap shaped my desire to write.
Adikou, by Raphaëlle Red. Editions Grasset, 220 pages, 19.50 euros.
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