Henri Lopes [ CD, France ]

Henri Lopes was born in 1937 to mestizo parents in Léopoldville (today Kinshasa) in colonial Congo and grew up in Brazzaville. At the age of eleven he was sent to be educated in France. He attended high school in Nantes and went on to study Literature and History at the Sorbonne. It was during this time, in 1960, when his native country achieved complete independence. In 1965 he returned there and started working as a history teacher at Ecole Normale Supérieure d'Afrique Centrale in Brazzaville before embarking on a career as a politician. He was a founding member of the country's socialist worker's party and held various ministerial positions after the Congo became a people's republic in 1969, including the office of Prime Minister from 1973 to 1976. He moved back to the French capital in the early eighties where he held senior positions as Assistant Director-General, then Deputy Director-General at UNESCO, and since 1988 has served as the Congolese Ambassador to France.
In the eight short stories which constitute his first work »Tribaliques« (1971; t: Tribal stories), Lopes creates a kaleidoscope of Congolese society in the sixties in which he distances himself from the dominant Négritude movement's dogma of a generalised black identity. The description of ethnic antagonisms, social conflicts and cultural differences accompanies a search for national and personal identity, a theme which has influenced all of Lopes's work. After Lopes resigned from working in the government, he set to analysing the country's development following its independence in an epistolary novel entitled »Sans tamtam« (1977; t: Revolution without drums), in which he started turning away from the aesthetic maxims of socialist realism. »Le Pleurer-Rire« (1982; Eng. »The Laughing Cry«, 1987), which was to become a classical work, focuses on the theme of the mechanisms of power in its study of a fictitional African dictator and finally embraces the open form of fragment and collage, combining different prose styles and genres such as letters, documents and newspaper reports with the perspectives of several narrators. Lopes's latest novels, which have been formally compared to the works of Borges and Pessoa, deal – with increasing confidence – with heterogeneity both in a personal sense and within African culture, and celebrate the game of different identities. »Le Lys et le Flamboyant« (1997; t: The lily and the flamboyant tree) tells the story of a Congolese mestizo in search of her identity, depicting her transformation from housewife to diva to impassioned freedom fighter. Lopes's most recent essay, »Ma grand-mère bantoue et mes ancêtres les Gaulois« (2003; t: My Bantu grandmother and my ancestors, the Gauls), is a collection of short reflections in which the author occasionally even warns against the cult of original identity.
Lopes has twice been awarded the Grand Prix de la littérature d'Afrique noire. He has received the Grand Prix de la francophonie de l'Académie française for his complete works and is a member of several orders as well as an honourary doctor from the University of Paris XIII. He is also a leading member of the cultural institution Francophonie, the festival francofffonies, and of the Conseil Supérieur de la Langue française.

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