On the move in the (post)colonial metropolis: The Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic fiction

Abstract

Literary texts convey the complexities of the urban experience in a tangible way. While there is a wide body of work on literary representations of Paris, the role of public transport as part of the (postcolonial) urban experience has not received much attention. This article sets out to analyse the meanings of the mobile public space comprising the Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts from the mid-20th century to the 2010s. The reading demonstrates how the texts represent the public space of the Metro as a symbol of modernity, a space of disappointment and alienation, an embodiment of social inequalities and as a site of convivial encounters and claims of agency. Through this analysis, the article highlights the role of literature in elucidating the intertwinement of mobility, public space and postcolonial urbanity.

Introduction

Literary urban studies focus on experiences of the city in literature and the citiness of literary texts (Finch et al., 2017: vi). Literary texts are ‘variously engaged, enveloped in, and constitutive of the material world they reflect upon’ (Ameel et al., 2020: 2), and they ‘raise questions about the experiences and imaginaries of our contemporary metropolitan landscapes’ (Hewitt and Graham, 2015: 934). Literature not only ‘represents’ the reality but also reveals its complexity: ‘The social is coded as an articulated capsulation of transformation, processes, and contradictions analogous to what we find in the literary domain’ (Quayson, 2003: xv). Literary texts facilitate insights into the city that move beyond sociological understandings through imagery which allows us to see the reality differently and to understand the texts’ capacity to let the reader to be immersed in the perspective of a fictional character. Fiction produces an intensified and sometimes defamiliarised understanding of the city that rises above the triviality of everyday experiences.

Alongside other ‘“alpha” world cities’ (Ameel et al., 2015: 4), Paris has inspired literary movements ranging from realism and romanticism to modernism (Citron, 1961; Milne, 2013; Stierle, 2001). The ‘postcolonial turn’ in urban studies (Robinson, 2006) also defines literary urban studies: in addition to canonised French literature, research in the field has started to acknowledge authors of African, African American and Maghrebi origin as producers of portrayals of the city of light (e.g. Amine, 2018; Braddock and Eburne, 2013; Kuiche Founkou, 2010). Studies of representations of Paris address a variety of encounters and everyday practices enacted in the urban space, but Paris literature also describes transport as part of the urban experience. While the mobile aspects of urbanity in Paris literature have been mainly discussed through the figure of the flâneur (e.g. Nesci, 2007; van Diepen, 2012; Wagner, 2019), relatively little attention has been paid to urban transport. ¹

This article contributes to the study of literary Paris and to postcolonial urban studies through a mobilities research perspective (see, e.g. Sheller and Urry, 2006) by analysing portrayals of the Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic fiction dating from the mid-20th century to the 2010s. The text corpus includes novels by first-generation authors, namely Socé’s (1937) Mirages de Paris, Dadié’s (1959) Un Nègre à Paris, Loba’s (1960) Kocoumbo, l’étudiant noir and Laye’s (1966) Dramouss. These texts feature African newcomers in Paris and convey both the enthusiasm and alienation that being in the colonial metropolis generates for the protagonists. The corpus also includes more recent texts by (mostly diasporic) authors such as Njami’s (1989) African gigolo, Essomba’s (1996) Le Paradis du nord, Rakotoson’s (1996) Elle, au printemps, Mabanckou (1998), Tchoungui’s (2006) Je vous souhaite la pluie and N’Sondé’s (2010) Le Silence des esprits. While most of these novels concern migrants’ experiences in the metropolis, many of them also describe the protagonists’ first encounters with the Metro. In many of these texts the initial enthusiasm of the earlier narratives gives room to alienation arising from the precarious migrant condition. While certainly not exhaustive, the corpus is a cross-section of early and contemporary Francophone African texts chosen for their suitability for discussion of the Metro as (1) a symbol of modernity and its role in the making of modern metropolitan subjectivity; (2) a space of disappointment, disorientation and alienation; (3) a showcase for social inequalities and experiences thereof and; (4) a space associated with convivial encounters and claims of agency. The order in which the texts are discussed is thematic rather than temporal because similar themes run throughout the corpus but with slightly different perspectives. Despite some overlapping, more recent texts tend to fall within the latter thematic categories and texts by first-generation authors within the two preceding ones. All four of the categories concerned with experiencing the Paris Metro highlight the role of public transport as a public space – one characterised by mobility rather than fixity, as public spaces are commonly seen (see Smith, 2020: 305, 309–310). Seeing the Metro as a mobile public space implies understanding it as a location for ephemeral encounters producing differences (see Bissell, 2016; Koefoed et al., 2017; Purifoye, 2015; Wilson, 2011). In the text corpus, the public space of the Metro not only consists of the space inside the carriage experienced while travelling, but also includes the stations, tunnels and platforms, which form the infrastructural ‘moorings’ as the immobile enablers of mobility (Hannam et al., 2006: 3). The texts attest to the interplay between these different aspects of interior public space since the characters not only travel in the vehicle but also walk among other passengers through the stations and tunnels and on the platforms.

As Bou (2016: 365) notes,

Many texts about travelling by public transportation focus on the fact that they are short journeys in the company of strangers, thus emphasizing anonymity, combination of bright lights in stations with the darkness of tunnels, monotony of the journey, scrutiny of fellow travellers, reading, sleeping, daydreaming.

These elements also recur in my text corpus, which points to the similarities between African representations of the Metro and their ‘Western’ counterparts. For instance, the figure of the blasé ‘homme du métro’ (Bessora, 1999: 52) recurs frequently in African and Afrodiasporic fiction. That said, the questions of race, colonial history and the global inequalities informing African representations of the Metro cannot be ignored. Allusions to (post)colonial entanglements and experiences of racial othering differentiate African portrayals of the Paris Metro from their French counterparts featured, for example, in Queneau’s (1959) Zazie dans le métro, which presents the adventures of a girl from provincial France in Paris and its Metro, or in Maspero’s (1990) urban travelogue Les Passagers du Roissy-Express, in which the author and the photographer Anaïk Frantz take the Parisian suburban train RER (Réseau Express Régional) to ‘explore’ life as outsider-observers in the marginalised suburbs of Paris (see Ahonen, 2015: 7).

While some French authors have adopted the Paris Metro as a main setting in their work, ² the same cannot be said of Francophone African literatures. ³ In most cases, passages featuring travel by urban transport are short and seemingly marginal from the perspective of the entire narrative, and the narrative transitions that such journeys mark are relatively small in scale. Travel by public transport is everyday mobility par excellence (Jensen, 2009), and it is certainly because of this banality that its representations in literature may easily go unnoticed. In the text corpus, some descriptions of the Metro cover less than a single page. Hence, my reading consists of focusing on literary fragments to draw a bigger picture of the meanings of African experiences of the Metro. Despite their sometimes seemingly marginal nature, descriptions of the Metro capture something essential about the entity of the texts discussed in this article. In Laye’s and Loba’s novels, the Metro passages are illustrative of the newcomers’ (initially) enthusiastic encounters with Paris, while in Dadié’s travelogue, descriptions of the ‘urban jungle’ of the Metro contribute to the text’s general strategy of parodying colonial narratives of exploration. In Rakotoson’s novel, they play a key role in the protagonist’s struggle to ‘manage’ Paris; in N’Sondé’s novel the passage in the suburban train generates a significant narrative turn; and in Mabanckou’s text the underground environment serves as a metonym for the operations of a clandestine community in the margins of the society. Thus, the ‘fragments’ representing the Paris Metro are more important for the entity of the narratives than may at first appear to be the case. By mapping out the meanings of the Metro in Francophone African fiction, this article highlights the role of literature in elucidating the intertwinement of mobility, public space and postcolonial ⁴ urbanity. Through their imagery and strategies of defamiliarisation, African representations of the Metro have the power to distance readers from their trivial experiences of urban transport and to convey the postcolonial urban experience in all its complexity, which may not be rendered as tangibly and intensely in other materials.

A symbol of modernity and a maker of the metropolitan subject

The Paris Metro is an emblematic metropolitan setting in African fiction. In early Francophone African novels from the mid-20th century the Metro is not only the ultimate symbol of modernity but also embodies reverse exoticism and the eventual disillusionment that characterise Africans’ journeys to Paris (Anyinefa, 2003; Dessy, 2011: 74–79) . From this perspective, the name of the Parisian underground network, Métropolitain (and its apocope métro), which stands for chemin de fer métropolitain [Metropolitan railway], is interesting. Through the association of the Metro with the metropolis and the consequent link with centrality and urbanity, the naming of the Parisian system differs from that of the London Underground or the New York Subway, which simply describe the position of the railway in the ground. In many African literary texts, the Metro stands for the metropolis.

Mobility is not just an act of displacement from one place to another but is full of meaning (Cresswell, 2006: 3): for example, everyday urban mobility constructs the identities of places and people (Jensen, 2009: 152). Indeed, ‘mobility systems are actively changing people, rather than just passively transporting them’ (Bissell, 2016: 395). This identity production is manifested in fiction that discusses African characters’ first experience of the Metro. These are typically narratives of educational travel, with the protagonists travelling from Africa to the metropolis to pursue their studies. Narratives of African student mobilities in the mid-20th century displayed a fascination with Paris nourished by colonial education, which created a myth of the superiority of France (Anyinefa, 2003: 83; Dessy, 2011: 72; Ní Loingsigh, 2009: 53). Educational travel from the colonial ‘periphery’ to the metropolitan ‘centre’ is informed by the association of the centre with modernity and the colonies with backwardness. In African narratives of student mobility, the identity of African Metro passenger and their perceptions of Paris are rooted in these unbalanced power relations. Such texts frequently use the Metro as an embodiment of modernity (see Soppelsa, 2009: 29) but, as my analysis suggests, many also criticise this association.

Representations of African newcomers’ journeys in the Paris Metro show how mobility is constitutive of the modern subject (Cresswell, 2006: 15). African newcomers’ passengering in the Metro represents a process of transformation into a modern mobile subject – in the Western sense of the term. The link between mobility and modernity is loaded because of the colonial implications of the concept of modernity, ⁵ which is why this process of transformation is not unproblematic: despite assimilationist pressures, the colonised are always already excluded from the orbit of (colonial) modernity.

In early African literary texts, travelling in the Metro represents a ritual of initiation (Anyinefa, 2003: 85; Dessy, 2011: 75) . Here, the overwhelming feelings are enthusiasm (Garnier, 2012: 110) and the shock of modernity as framed by Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel (Cassegard, 2015); the banal, everyday aspect of travelling on public transport (see Augé, 2002: 8; Bou, 2016; Jensen, 2009; Wilson, 2011: 634) is absent. Despite taking place in a mobile public space, this experience is less an encounter with fellow passengers than between the colonial subject and the modern mobile technology that embodies the alleged superiority of the centre, as exemplified in Loba’s (1960) Kocoumbo, l’étudiant noir. The description of the public space of the Metro in Loba’s novel attests to the interplay between the interior and (semi-)exterior of the public transport system. Loba’s protagonist ends up in the underground tunnel unintentionally when he exits a railway station. Moving along with the mass of passengers, he finds himself in front of a staircase leading to an underground tunnel. Once he reaches the platform, the third-person narration switches to the first-person as if to better convey his amazement:

This is the Metro, the train that runs underground! Is it possible that I am under the ground? Oh yes, I can no longer see the sky. What a beautiful ceiling! What a beautiful vault! […] Are the lights always on? And these white tiles on the wall, what great work! (Loba, 1960: 89) ⁶

In comparison with the freezing weather outside, the tunnel feels welcomingly warm. When the underground train approaches, the protagonist is surprised that, unlike trains back home, it does not belch smoke. Here, the darkness of the smoke links Africa with a lack of light – progress, that is. The air in the tunnel is easy to breathe, and the protagonist finds it hard to believe that he is ‘in a hole’ (Loba, 1960: 89). He praises European technological achievement: ‘Yes, it’s wonderful, it’s magnificent, it’s magical! The European works, that’s indisputable’ (Loba, 1960: 90). While the protagonist’s journey does not entail substantial encounters with other passengers, he is agreeably surprised by the ‘sophistication’ (Loba, 1960: 90) of the polite Parisian Metro-users. The protagonist takes this as a proof that French people ‘are considerate to people of a different colour’ (Loba, 1960: 90) – words that signal his awareness of his racial difference in the eyes of the colonial centre.

In Laye’s Dramouss (1966) (Dream of Africa [1974]), the newcomer’s first underground journey is narrated in a less enthusiastic tone, although the idea of the Metro as the culmination of modernity is also conveyed here. The protagonist is not familiar with the concept of the underground railway and feels anxious about the instructions he has received from a more experienced African traveller. To make the idea of the Metro more comprehensible, his fellow traveller has alluded to it as a ‘hole’ (Laye, 1974: 40). When the protagonist finally finds his way to ‘the hole’, he sees, to his surprise, ‘a dazzlingly-lighted tunnel’ (Laye, 1974: 41). In many early Francophone African literary texts, the Metro is represented as a place of bright lights, resonating with the image of Paris as a ville lumière (Dessy, 2011: 79) . While the trope of light could be associated with the superiority/modernity of the metropolis, another passage offers an alternative perspective: ‘The electric lights cast their crude illumination on the ground, and were reflected even more clearly on the tiled vaulting of the Metro station’s roof’ (Laye, 1974: 43). Here, the brightness of the light is aggressive, giving the idea of the ville lumière a negative ring. Like Loba’s protagonist, Laye’s newcomer compares the Metro ride to his experience of rail travel back home and is surprised by the shortness of the halt at the station. The haste of the passengers and of the vehicle itself conveys the hurry characteristic of a modern urban environment (see Dennis et al., 2018: 2) and indicates its alienating qualities for the newly arrived traveller from the colonial periphery.

Dadié ’s (1959) Un Nègre à Paris (An African in Paris [1994]) subjects perceptions of enthusiasm over the alleged superiority of the metropolis to mockery. The text is not a student narrative but nevertheless features the figure of the enthusiastic newcomer. In this fictionalised travelogue, an African tourist makes ostensibly ‘naïve’ observations about the colonial capital (Ní Loingsigh, 2009: 76, 81) – it is a parody of colonial travel narratives, reversing the destination from ‘exotic’ Africa to a differently ‘exotic’ Europe. The text’s (self-)ironic attitude is exemplified in a passage in which the narrator claims that the Metro is the most important monument in Paris:

Paris is dazzling, to be sure, but the only thing that’s dazzled me to the point of dizziness has been the metro. I smile when I see the number of tourists climbing up the Eiffel tower or the Arch of Triumph […]. When they leave, every single one of them will leave with a particular image of the city in mind: that of a monument, a cabaret or other nightspot, perhaps, or the persistent memory of some special person. And what will I remember most? The metro. You’ve definitively got to be a bona fide African to remember the metro above all else. (Dadié, 1994: 55–56)

As the narrator continues, ‘It’s when you’re inside those corridors that you become most aware of the enormous love the Parisians have for what their machines have given them: the opportunity to play the king’ (Dadié, 1994: 56). Interestingly, Dadié’s text explicitly inscribes the Metro within the public space: ‘The metro is definitively a part of the Parisians. They’re always saying, “I’ve got to catch my metro”’ (Dadié, 1994: 56). Again, the description of Parisians running in a hurry and their way of ‘mov[ing] automatically towards an exit or a connecting train’ (Dadié, 1994: 34) draws a picture of the metropolis as a place of modern hypermobility.

Disappointment, disorientation, alienation

Many texts convey the disappointment of the African travellers when they first encounter the Metro/metropolis. Their unenthusiastic tones challenge the status of the Metro as a conventional symbol of modernity, investing it with more personal symbolic meanings (see Abrams, 2009: 358) of alienation. Their disappointment with the Metro is metonymical of the newcomers’ disillusionment with the metropolitan centre, as conveyed in the Metro passage in Essomba’s (1996) Le Paradis du nord. Essomba’s main characters are clandestine migrants whose journey to France has been motivated by unrealistic ideas about Paris. The Metro passage shows how these ideas start to crumble. As is typical of disoriented newcomers for whom the very concept of the Metro is unfathomable, the travellers do not even understand that they are near a station; instead of a building of a sort they are expecting to see, a simple sign signals its presence; nor does the Metro itself correspond to their expectations:

Jojo’s heart was racing as he walked down the stairs. He had dreamed so much of seeing the Metro. However, once they were downstairs, he was slightly disappointed. He was not quite sure what he had expected to see, but it was certainly not this scene. All these people running in all directions made him dizzy. They appeared from and disappeared into holes, reminding him of the termite mounds of his childhood. (Essomba, 1996: 69)

The hypermobility of the metropolitan centre has an oppressive effect on the narrator. The trope of the ‘hole’, with its claustrophobic connotations, recurs here. By associating the Metro tunnels with a termite nest, the protagonist tries to understand his new experience by linking it with a more familiar one. Moreover, the fact of not being even able to imagine the Metro points to the level being ‘off map’ (see Rosello, 2016) that the experience of metropolitan public transport generates in the newcomer. Illustrative of his sense of alienation, the protagonist observes the passengers from outside: this form of public transport is not a space for substantial encounters.

Portrayals of the Metro in Socé’s Mirages de Paris (1937/1964) and Laye’s Dramouss articulate feelings of disorientation and alienation but also the idea that encountering strangers on public transport may generate anxiety (see Bodnar, 2015: 2092) and experiences of racial hostility (Purifoye, 2015: 286). In Mirages de Paris, a young Senegalese man participating in the Colonial exposition has a stressful experience of passengering. As in several other texts discussed here, the protagonist enters the Metro as part of a faceless mass of busy Parisians – regularly represented in Francophone African fiction as ‘a giant, adjusted and inhuman mechanism’ (Garnier, 2012: 117) – as if he was deprived of his agency. By portraying the protagonists as part of the masses, the texts point to the dangers of adopting the blasé urban attitude of the metropolitan mobile subject. When it comes to the interior of the vehicle itself, the movement of the carriage feels violent, and the protagonist ‘[is] struggling to keep his balance, breathes with difficulty; his ideas disorganised and unclear’ (Socé, 1964: 34). The feeling of imbalance is here both physical and psychological. The protagonist’s unease increases when a child exclaims, ‘Mum, look at that gentleman! He has forgotten to clean up’ (Socé, 1964: 34) – a passage that evokes a scene in Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs from 1952. The child reaches out to touch the protagonist’s hand to see whether it is dirty. The scene underlines the black passenger’s racial difference, and while both he and the mother try to ignore the awkwardness of the situation, the child’s ‘innocent’ association of the protagonist’s skin colour with dirt is racist and suggests that he is ‘out of place’ in the Metro/metropolis. Here the ‘workings of multicultural intimacies’ (Wilson, 2011: 634) in the confinement and closeness of public transportation are oppressive and reproduce racial difference (see Purifoye, 2015). In this example, the Metro is far from being a space for convivial or transgressive encounters.

In Dramouss, the narrator’s disorientation is conveyed through the image of his ‘bags and possessions scattered at random round [his] feet’ (Laye, 1974: 40) at the Metro station. As he slowly walks about in the tunnel, he starts to feel anxious about what now appear to him to be very vague indications about how to use the Metro. Indeed, the tropes of confusing advice, ‘simplified’ hand-drawn maps and lists of itineraries keep recurring in African narratives of newcomers’ journeys on the Metro (see also Rosello, 2016: 88). The uselessness of these pieces of advice is that they make no sense for newcomers who do not understand the overall concept of the Metro. Laye’s protagonist’s movement in the transitory space of the tunnel is characterised by uncertainty, signalling his difference from the accustomed users of the Metro, who are ‘easily recognized by the elegant and natural economy of [their] walking’ (Augé, 2002: 6). As the narrator hesitates, a stranger suddenly speaks to him, offering to help him with the luggage. The stranger’s offer makes the protagonist feel glad, but simultaneously he is suspicious about the man’s motives. ‘You’ll be encountering these men on their own wandering almost everywhere in the big cities; you ought to be aware of them; they’re up to no good’ (Laye, 1974: 42), a colonial officer had warned the protagonist back home. The encounter with the stranger and the protagonist’s inability to navigate Paris generate anxiety in him, but his fear of failing to behave like a metropolitan mobile subject is even stronger: ‘I was suddenly overcome by a fresh wave of fear. Nevertheless, to run was out of the question, without running the risk of appearing ridiculous in the eyes of all those passengers streaming through the tunnel’ (Laye, 1974: 43). The experience of being in the company of a stranger is terrifying: the protagonist feels ‘extremely uncomfortable’ and experiences ‘incommensurable disgust’ (Laye, 1974: 44). The journey itself is described as an experience of proximity and indifference: in the crowded carriage, ‘no-one seemed to bother about anyone else; everyone minded his own business’ (Laye, 1974: 44). This conveys the alienating, blasé aspect associated with rapid urbanisation (see Bodnar, 2015: 2091) that also informs many European/Western literary accounts of travel in the underground. Here, however, the blasé aspect also contributes to a disillusioned image of the metropolis.

In Rakotoson’s (1996) Elle, au printemps a young woman leaves Madagascar to pursue her studies in Paris. As a newcomer with no one to rely on, she is thrown into a challenging, hypermobile environment. Unlike earlier student narratives with initially enthusiastic tones, Rakotoson’s representation of the Metro is alienating from the outset. The protagonist’s arrival in Paris is characterised by her lack of experience of how to navigate the underground system. Her attempts to travel on public transport are challenging because she cannot ‘“read” the Metro’ (see Rosello, 2016: 78), making her experience of urban travel not that of reaching a desired destination but one of disorientating chaos. During an encounter at a ticket sales counter, the protagonist does not understand a word of what the booking clerk is saying:

-A ticket or a book of tickets?

-…

-How many zones?

-…You mean …? (Rakotoson, 1996: 39)

The use of three dots suggests that the protagonist is unable not only to ‘read’ the Metro but also to ‘speak’ it. The transport itself turns out to be a disappointment: ‘The Metro was just a train’ (Rakotoson, 1996: 39). That these words close the chapter conveys the sheer anti-climax of seeing the mythical Metro – and by extension, the metropolis – in reality.

Rakotoson’s disoriented passenger does not find other people’s advice useful: the map that the accustomed urbanite can read is the newcomer’s chaos (Rosello, 2016: 87):

‘Oh, but that’s easy… You just take the shuttle, you ask the driver to

stop at Denfert and you take the Metro from there… It is a direct line,

no need to change… […] From there, you take the Metro in the direction of Nation and you stop at the Porte d’Italie station to change lines … ’

To do what?

Oh Lord, white people are crazier and crazier … Direction Nation to go to the Hell [Enfer] by the Porte d’Italie… (Rakotoson, 1996: 36)

This passage is again illustrative of the protagonist’s inability to ‘speak the Metro’: the names of the stations do not make sense to her, and, significantly enough, she mistakes ‘Denfert’ for ‘Enfer’ (‘Hell’). Her experience of travelling is equally disorienting. Observing the signs of the stations from the moving carriage, she tries to understand her itinerary – and Paris: ‘And then, one must orient oneself there… […] Vavin, Pigalle, Crimée, Saint-Augustin, Barbès, Château Rouge… […] She is going to cry, she is going to cry… A train below the ground… ’ (Rakotoson, 1996: 55). The alienating aspects are rooted not only in the shock of modernity but also in the protagonist’s marginalisation in the Metro/metropolis as a subject from the former colonial periphery.

Observing and living the ugly underground

Public transport is a highly controlled public space (Koefoed et al., 2017: 726) that attests to the diversity of the city and underlines socio-economic differences by enabling ‘interactions between different segments of society’ (Paget-Seekins and Tironi, 2016: 177). The unequal aspects of the metropolis are revealed in the portrayals of the Metro in the text corpus. The type of approach to social inequalities depends on the narrative perspective: while in stories narrated from the perspective of clandestine migrants the unequal aspects are represented as lived experience, the African passenger can also be an ‘external’ observer of metropolitan inequalities.

Examples of such ‘outsiders’ observations feature in Un Nègre à Paris. The narrator notes that Parisians share the reduced space of the carriage with others but detects no expression of community. While one can easily imagine that a black African stood out as a Metro passenger in the Paris of the late 1950s, Dadié ’s narrator also states, observing of (white) urbanites’ behaviour while using public transport that ‘Not even their colour brings them together’ (Dadié, 1994: 56). The narrator goes on to underline the gap between the modes of transport used by the different social classes; the underground universe of the mobile public space of the Metro seems disconnected from the above-ground world of private vehicles:

There seems to be no meeting ground here between those who use the metro and those who own Cadillacs. They might as well be completely separate classes; the former live in relatively poor areas, the latter in expensive ones. […] How can you possibly live together without bumping into your neighbours? (Dadié, 1994: 56–57)

The association of the Metro with the lower socio-economic classes is similarly noticeable in Njami’s (1989) African gigolo. The protagonist is a Cameroonian man whose life in Paris is financed by his parents in his home country. In order to maintain his standard of living, the protagonist pretends to be still pursuing his studies, while in reality he spends most of his time loitering and looking for sexual adventures. The novel features several passages describing the protagonist’s aimless walks in Paris like a flâneur. Allusions to the Metro are much less frequent, suggesting that public transport is not his primary mode of mobility. The protagonist ends up in the Metro during one of his walks because it starts to rain. In the eyes of the protagonist, the underground reveals the ugly underside of the Parisian high life that he is more used to:

Homeless individuals were already preparing their places for the night, eating from a can of sardines and drinking some cheap red wine. Solitary women, startled by this unhealthy fauna from around midnight, paced around the quay, clutching their handbags to their bodies. A punk with dyed red hair screamed his hatred of the world and of the bourgeoisie. (Njami, 1989: 66).

The protagonist has no destination; like his walking, taking the Metro is an act of aimless wandering to observe urban life. His attitude of ‘letting the line take him somewhere randomly’ (Njami, 1989: 66) differentiates him from the other passengers, who hurry ‘to reach a specific point, part of their scrupulous itinerary’ (Njami, 1989: 66–67). The protagonist’s way of using the Metro as part of his flâneuring is telling of his privileged position just as the other passengers’ everyday use of the Metro is telling of their working-class status, and just as the use made of it by the homeless is as a place where they can sleep their exclusion from society. In Njami’s treatment of the Metro journey it is less an encounter with fellow passengers than an opportunity to observe inequalities.

In Tchoungui’s (2006) Je vous souhaite la pluie the protagonist has just arrived in Paris from Cameroon, and the second half of the novel reads as her initiation into Parisian life. The humorous narrative tone does not loosen its grip even when it is describing the darker aspects of the metropolis as seen in the Metro:

She rushed into the Metro, which already reeked of rotten eggs despite the early hour. During the half-hour journey, her generosity was put to the test by an accordionist, who fiercely tortured his instrument, insulting with his wobbly playing all other musicians, dead, alive, or still to come; a sturdy fellow who could easily have unloaded boxes at Rungis [a food market outside Paris] if he had not had his brain smoked with the artificial paradises he offered himself with the meagre fruit of his metropolitan tour; a withered lady who flayed Édith Piaf with her voice hoarsened by the vagaries of life; an all-smiles African reciting poems; and, finally, a ventriloquist who had hung a black curtain between two bars, trying to bring a smile to the passengers’ dull faces with funny knitted puppets. (Tchoungui, 2006: 194)

This scene represents ‘the shameful fringe of France, the dark side of the land of the Enlightenment’ (Tchoungui, 2006: 194). The contrast between the ugly underground railway and well-off Paris is underlined as the protagonist gets off at Saint-Germain-des-Prés – a fashionable, bourgeois district. Disillusionment with the postcolonial metropolis entails realising the existence of social inequalities in this alleged Eldorado: the Metro functions as a space that showcases them.

In texts featuring clandestine migrants, the ‘ugly underside’ of the metropolis becomes a lived experience. The urban mobilities of undocumented migrants are characterised by vulnerability: they are obliged to be constantly alert and to acquire specific skills for moving in the public space to minimise the risk of deportation (Filipo, 2020: 237). This dynamics of avoidance is articulated in Mabanckou’s (1998) Bleu-blanc-rouge (Blue White Red [2013]) and N’Sondé ’s (2010) Le Silence des esprits (The Silence of the Spirits [2017]). Mabanckou’s Congolese protagonist travels to Paris on a tourist visa. When his visa expires, he stays in Paris as part of a clandestine community, earning his livelihood in the shadows of society. The protagonist is involved in fraud when the leader of the community compels him to sell season tickets (Carte Orange) on the black market that have been purchased with stolen checks and a falsified identity document. The Metro is a world detached from the city since ‘to travel on the grade-separated transit system is to leave the plane of the actual city and enter the alternate universe of the system with rules […] unique to itself’ (Schwetman, 2014: 96, 97). Mabanckou’s novel echoes this idea by portraying the Metro as a parallel world where an unofficial economy thrives: it is an underground/underworld both literally and symbolically. Given the regulated nature of public transport, the fact that the characters are undocumented migrants and petty criminals operating in this environment adds an anxious twist to the representation of the Metro. The protagonist is referred to as débarqué (‘disembarked’), which signals his inexperience as someone who has recently landed in Paris. The planned fraud is an initiation rite for the debarqué to gain the trust of the community. The narrative captures the anxious aspects of this rite by describing the protagonist at a Metro service counter, suspiciously buying several season tickets covering the maximum number of zones. Much like Rakotoson’s protagonist, Mabanckou’s narrator seems unable to ‘speak the Metro’, albeit not because he is an inexperienced Metro user but above all because of the stress caused by his clandestine status and involvement in criminal activity:

‘Umm… yes, five… five… five-zone coupons… ’

I bit my tongue. What I had said rang false. […] All of a sudden, I was scared stiff. The impetus to flee. […]

‘You said five coupons?’ the window clerk asked.

‘Five, for five zones… ’

Silence. (Mabanckou, 2013: 119)

This encounter at the service counter is one of the two parallel (underground) worlds: the controlled world of the public transport and the precarious world of clandestine migrants involved in criminal activity. The anxiety of this encounter is conveyed in the imagery of corporeal unease: ‘My stomach was tied in knots. I wanted to go to the toilet. Cold sweat trickled from my armpits and ran down my ribs’ (Mabanckou, 2013: 120). This corporeal anxiety resonates with the Metro journeys in Dramouss and Mirages de Paris but also adds a new meaning to them: in contemporary Afrodiasporic fiction, feelings of physical unease in the mobile public space of the Metro are less related to travellers’ position as newcomers and the shock of modernity they experience than to their clandestine status.

Unlike Mabanckou’s protagonist who is attached to a diasporic community, the urban experience of the main character in Le Silence des esprits is marked by isolation. Passages featuring urban travel are not set in the Metro, but in the regional RER rail network, which serves the Parisian suburbs (banlieues) in particular. The suburbs with which the RER is associated are often represented as socially deprived environments inhabited by migrants of North- and Sub-Saharan origin (Horvath, 2018: 1). It is noteworthy that the Paris Metro and the city centre were not connected to the suburbs before the opening of the RER in 1977, which, together with the demography of the banlieues, attests to ‘Paris’s segregated urban form’ (Andersson, 2013: 698). This segregation is embodied in the ring road, Périphérique, which stretches around Paris’s old fortifications marking the former borders of the city and which continues to separate the centre from the suburbs. That the protagonist travels in the RER rather than the Metro reflects his exclusion from ‘intra-mural’ Paris.

The protagonist’s strategy of urban mobility is dictated by the need to avoid the authorities. He is near the Gare de Lyon, one of the stations where the Metro and RER lines intersect, planning to catch a suburban train to go to a shelter for the homeless. He is aware of the possible presence at the station of guards and police officers – the actors of a potentially risky encounter. As in the case of the protagonist in Mabanckou’s narrative, his anxiety takes a corporeal form: ‘I was so anxious, my stomach was knotted up and my jaw was clenched’ (N’Sondé, 2017: 10). Inside the station he notices a police check taking place, and a physical anxiety capable of betraying his fear of encountering the authorities overwhelms him. He starts to reverse, moving against the flow of people entering the station – a movement that signals his exclusion from the public space of the Metro:

My brain was bubbling over with anxiety, to take off, disappear into the racket of the early evening rush hour. My stomach and throat were seized with cramps. Butt in gear. Do not get caught. My knees wobbled beneath the weight of my fear, and my legs were trembling. (N’Sondé, 2017: 10)

The protagonist manages to escape the police check by boarding a random RER train. As the train leaves the station, his anxiety relinquishes its grip – but only until he sees police officers again approaching. The sight makes him feel as if he is in ‘[his] skin as the absent one, illegal, the monster who frightens, the villainous beast no one wants to resemble’ (N’Sondé, 2017: 13) – words that convey the abjection of his clandestine condition. N’Sondé’s and Mabanckou’s use of intestine-related imagery in representing Parisian public transport is interesting because in many literary texts the underground is portrayed as the bowels of the city (Bou, 2016: 363): Un Nègre à Paris also sets up this comparison. The intestinal unease of Mabanckou’s and N’Sondé’s clandestine migrants is a symptom of the dysfunctions of the ‘body’ of the postcolonial metropolis; the distressing aspects of the public space implicit in public transport become corporealised.

Convivial encounters, claims of agency

Scholarship has regarded mobile public spaces as settings for transcultural encounters (Koefoed et al., 2017; Wilson, 2011) and underlined the ephemeral characteristics of travel on public transport, including its intense closeness between individuals (Koefoed et al., 2017: 729). Here, I discuss passages in which public transport is represented as a space for convivial encounters and claims of agency, starting with an example from Je vous souhaite la pluie. The passage is not set in the Metro but on a bus on which the protagonist travels after having taken the Metro. The protagonist is immersed in reading a novel, when an elderly white woman reproaches her for having occupied a seat reserved for the elderly: ‘In her home country, this darkie would die of hunger and stop trying to be so clever!’ (Tchoungui, 2006: 175). Shocked by the woman’s words, the protagonist replies with a comment about how her black skin annoys the woman but that white skin changes from red to grey to green and blue in the course of life. While this encounter is obviously not a pleasant one, and while most of the passengers ignore the racist incident, the protagonist’s reaction is welcomed by a group of young passengers who are probably black: ‘Respect, sister! You really dried up the old crone!’ (Tchoungui, 2006: 176). Thus, public transport changes from a racist space of exclusion into a space of community and belonging.

In Dramouss the scene that has initially been a frightening encounter with a stranger suddenly changes its meaning. The protagonist admits to the man carrying his luggage that he was afraid of him because of the words of a colonial officer. Hearing this, the man exclaims: ‘Yes, I’ve got it! The colons look upon your lot as cannibalistic Negroes. At least, that’s what they say over here. To those same men, we Frenchmen are nothing but brigands, isn’t that it?’ (Laye, 1974: 45). The man recalls that his best friend during the war was a Senegalese soldier, and he asks the narrator why Africans do not throw the colonisers out of their countries. This short encounter with the initially frightening stranger turns into an expression of anticolonial solidarity. As the protagonist and the man go their separate ways, the former says to himself, ‘man is a brother to all men’, asking whether ‘the rest of the French people [will] be as brotherly’ (Laye, 1974: 46).

In N’Sondé’s novel, the protagonist’s anxious experience of travelling in the RER initiates an unexpected encounter that grows into an intimate relationship. As the policemen approach the protagonist, a white woman sitting opposite him suddenly places her hand on the panicky protagonist’s knee. This gesture changes the course of events: the policemen walk past without checking the protagonist’s identity papers, assuming that he and the woman are a couple. The public space of the public transport turns into a space for an ethical encounter between strangers (see also Ravi, 2014: 143–144), ⁷ probably saving the protagonist from deportation: ‘Surprised, we found ourselves alone, sitting very close to each other, face-to-face, strangers to each other. Something unsettling took over the carriage space’ (N’Sondé, 2017: 20).

Elle, au printemps conveys the protagonist’s desperation and determination to ‘handle’ Paris – the key to which is her handling of the Metro (Toivanen, 2019). At first even the simplest journeys take her several hours, but despite the setbacks she learns to understand the city. The narrative celebrates her agency: ‘Bravo, Sahondra, you won… She has come out of the Metro safe and sound’ (Rakotoson, 1996: 55). Travelling in the Metro is a struggle, but as the protagonist overcomes her problem, ‘Paris has almost no other secrets for her’ (Rakotoson, 1996: 56). Thus, it is through a mobility-enhanced ‘urban apprenticeship’ (Buhr, 2018: 339) that the protagonist acquires an understanding of the metropolis:

She no longer knew if she was moving forward or backward in her journey, she was establishing her milestones, her landmarks: Véro’s apartment, the little shop, the Metro, the route that one changes a little from time to time so as to better understand the city. (Rakotoson, 1996: 61)

By taming her fear and getting used to the Metro, the protagonist embarks on the process of becoming a mobile metropolitan subject – on her own terms. The mobile, public space of the Metro becomes a space for her claims of agency, identity and a fragile sense of belonging.

Conclusion: Reading (post)colonial Paris through the Metro

Francophone African and Afrodiasporic fiction invests the mobile public space of the Paris Metro with various meanings: ranging from being a symbol of modernity and a space of disillusionment, alienation and social inequality to a site of convivial encounters and claims of agency. Recurring imagery includes the claustrophobic idea of the Metro as a ‘hole’; the (harsh) brightness of the lights; the useless advice offered by experienced Metro users; the inability to ‘speak’ the Metro; and the physical unease that travelling as a newcomer or a clandestine migrant generates. The narratives also convey the idea of faceless masses moving in underground tunnels and how African travellers end up becoming part of these indifferent masses. It is through such tropes and by enabling the reader to share the intimate perspective of a disoriented or marginalised fictional character that literary texts invest public transport with meanings that move beyond sociological understandings. Literary texts highlight the complexity of the city and distance the reader from their own trivial experiences of passengering on public transport.

The public transport itself is portrayed as a space of encounter – albeit not necessarily with fellow passengers. On a metaphorical level, the Metro provides a setting for the encounter between the colonised subject and colonial modernity; an encounter between unrealistic expectations and the reality of the metropolis; and a feared encounter between authorities and the racialised outcasts of society. Fictional African users of the Metro may be excluded from the public space of public transport, and many of them remain detached from the potential conviviality which the mobile public space might ideally engender. While a sense of alienation defines literary portrayals of the Paris Metro more generally (see Ahonen, 2015), in African fiction this alienation is grounded in the (post)colonial entanglements between Africa and Europe. In first-generation narratives the feelings of alienation also spring from the shock of modernity typical of urbanisation, and the Metro is far from being an everyday element of urban life. Feelings of alienation in narratives of clandestine migration are less related to the shock of modernity than to the precarious condition of irregular migrants in the regulated environment of public transport.