Mid-March, Professor Brezault presented a paper at the American Comparative Literature Association in Montreal. She talked about the metaphors/representations of mining in 3 recent African novels. The title of her talk was: “Suturing the city”: Poetic of extraction in the novels of Aanza and Mujila, writers from the DRC.
Protagonists in the novels resist objectification of their own bodies and fight extractivist greed that destroys the cities and creates holes, rumbles and ruins. De Boeck and Baloji argue in Suturing the City, that the hole, despite the chaos it creates, sutures the city: the hole is what refuses stabilization, allows people to work creatively together and repair. Prof. Brezault discussed the ways Mujila and Aanza redesign a map of current Congolese towns to delve into the past and extract a difficult history of suffering. Can we look at those tropes of extraction as a new way to rethink environmental issues in postcolonial African cities and reimagine creative ways to inhabit the present, that calls for reparations?
