Dealing with the Dead by Alain Mabanckou
In acclaimed Congolese author Alain Mabanckou's latest book, a new resident of Frère Lachaise cemetery has to reckon with their death
Alain Mabanckou’s Dealing with the Dead effectively pronounces you dead and declares your body, mind, soul, and surroundings more alive than ever. Putting the reader in protagonist Liwa Ekimakingaï’s body as they navigate their recent death and burial in Frère Lachaise cemetery, narratives that were once alien in life come to the forefront in death. This is writing that literally and figuratively reshapes you, revealing spatial and emotional dimensions that are both all too foreign and all too familiar.
Mabanckou infuses his novel with the macabre to move, unnerve, and unexpectedly delight, playing with space, light, sound, and texture to produce a cinematically three-dimensional text. He is dedicated to communicating native Congolese truths of colonial subjugation, religious superstition, and a quintessential love for one’s landscape. His innovative spatial and temporal manipulation is not only experimental but deeply interrogative. It begs the question: to what depths must we fall, and heights must we rise, to recognise the gravity of our actions and our capacity for renewal – without forgetting the past – but by embodying the people and lands that birthed us, and that we wish to die on?
The narrator clarifies early on: “Don’t rub your eyes, it won’t change anything.” In Dealing with the Dead, death is fragmented and reconstructed to expose untold histories and legitimise the imagined world as the real one.