Ivorian author GauZ’, the writer of the invisible

Changing his name to GauZ’ at the age of 15 was Armand Patrick Gbaka-Brédé’s first real political act. “You know, in France, Armand is a very sexy name,” says the Ivorian writer with a laugh. But, for him, it is also a name intrinsically linked to France’s cultural imperialism that had eroded the customs, traditions, languages and societies of the people it colonised. “Colonisation was not [just] about physical violence, about exploitation of resources. It is [also] about cultural invasion,” says the 54-year-old author, journalist and screenwriter, a speaker at the recent Kerala Literature Festival. “The colonisation victory was to transform our culture.”

Culture is a word GauZ’ frequently uses, whether it is in relation to the richness of his own country or the violence wreaked by colonialism and now its surrogate, capitalism, which he thinks of as a sneaky system with no boundaries. “For me, it is more brutal now. You don’t know the frontiers of your opposition with the system,” says the author of several novels, which explore colonisation, immigration and identity — including Standing Heavy, Black Manoo, Portes (Doors) and Comrade Papa, pointing out that in a world shaped by a persistent want for more and more, “we are in permanent contradiction. And living in contradiction is a great violence because you don’t know who you are.”

What counts is power

Standing Heavy, his debut novel, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, is a sharp, scathing satire of France’s colonial legacy, race politics and the interrelatedness of colonialism and capitalism. “We are always being colonised by something or some people. They call it soft power, but in the expressions of power, there is power. Soft doesn’t count; what counts is power,” says GauZ’.

The novel, initially published in French in 2014 before being translated into English by Frank Wynne and then republished in 2022, is told from the perspective of undocumented African security guards working in a Parisian shopping mall — people who are “doubly invisible,” he says. “Someone told me that you are the writer of the invisible, and I am OK with that. Is it not crazy to ignore a human being in a place you enter?” The book’s title refers to both the security guard job that demands people to stand for their supper, so to speak, as well as to the heft of France’s colonial legacy. “People thanked me for writing it, telling me that now they actually saw the security; I think that is the greatest success of this book,” he says.

Standing Heavy, crammed with perspicacious commentary and wry observations, takes an anthropological approach towards shoppers in retail spaces, thus subverting the traditional white gaze. According to him, for the last 400 years, the western world, which has constantly exerted power over other people, often sees itself as a paragon of civilisation. “They are sure that things cannot change because they don’t have the memory of lost civilisation.” But, in his opinion, for colonised people, colonialism was simply a new layer in their already culturally rich lives. “We have their languages, and we know their classics. But we still have our storytelling: of the bush, of the Savannah. We still have our own cosmogony, our own anthropology, our own way of seeing the world.”

Storytelling, therefore, can be a powerful tool in the fight against a dominant Eurocentric world vision. “You cannot fight against this vision with ideology and politics. To change things and fight this system, you have to propose new imaginations, new science, new ways of thinking, new fictions,” he says. “This was my first step towards inventing this new fiction: by describing them how they used to describe us.”

The ‘fiction’ of immigration

While Standing Heavy was first written nearly a decade ago, many of the questions it raises will always be relevant to humans, especially those around immigration policies, more pertinent now than ever before in the face of the ongoing crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the United States.

“The question of immigrants is a fiction served to western people because they are losing their stature and are afraid,” he says. “I want to say to them, welcome to the real world. You did that to other people, and they didn’t have a choice. So, you don’t have a choice, too.”

Also, as GauZ’ reminds us, all humans originally come from Africa. “We are big animals with long legs, high respiratory capacity, thermo-regulation and a brain. We are built to move, and nobody can stop that.”