Zoonomia - Bessora

"Vos les ancêtres, m'avait dit Michée en me conduisant à mon arbre le soir de ma Mort, vous êtes des empêcheurs d'avenir."

Zoonomia is the first volume of a proposed tetraology, La Dynastie des boiteux (The Dynasty of the Lame), already followed by Citizen Narcisse, the proposed Black Almanach (which appears to have been renamed as Vos les ancêtres, just published in France) and Le Livre de Michée (The Book of Micah), each a saga of a family line in a different period, inspired by real historical figures. Johann, the main figure of Zoonomia is based on Paul Bellini Du Chaillu, Franco-American explorer, adventurer and naturalist born in Réunion in 1831. The first book at least inhabits in places the same hallucinatory history of the world, race and colonialism as Steve Erickson (Arc d'X) or the Vorrh trilogy of Brian Catling.

Not following any linear line across the tetraology, Zoonomia opens in 1846 with 15-year-old Johann, an illegitimate half-caste young man from Réunion who presents himself to a house in Paris looking for his father, Jean-Marie Duchelieu. Like his father he is lame (boiteux) and walks with a limp. He meets Jean-Marie's Parisian wife Juliette and finds that his father is not there, much as he disappeared from the island back then, looking for fresh adventures and native women to consort with now in Africa. Johann hopes to be an explorer like his father, an adventurer, an Aryan adventurer, a hunter of gorillas.

Adventure he finds almost immediately, Juliette welcoming the young man, not doubting his origin or surprised at her husband's infidelities, introducing him to the wonders of life in Paris society. She also introduces him as a cousin to the museum of the Perrin brothers with its exotic stuffed birds and animals, suggesting that he might take up a post there. Juliette is aware of her husband's predilections and behaviour, she herself has a sense of adventure that extends beyond her fervent reading of Balzac, Hugo and Dumas, but not quite as far as the revolution that she and Johann inadvertently get caught up in.

The first Paris section of Zoonomia has a very sensual character, in the flirtation between Johann and his "stepmother" abandoned by her husband, and it is reflected in the language. Johann sees Juliette as a kind of half-spider and half-cat - une charaignée - Johann bearing a strange scent of narcissus. When the husband/father returns after 8 months, Johann has become a plaything for Juliette, caught in her web, and he refuses his father's offer to return to Gabon on his next excursion, conflicted and unsettled about what he wants. It's a situation that can't endure. Nor can the situation in France with revolution about to depose the monarchy in the February Revolution of 1848.

Cétait écrit dans le ciel ou dans les étoiles. D'un encre sacrée, c'était écrit, c'était un dècret prophétique.

Dealing with a "dynasty", a family line over generations, there is evidently an element of destiny here, relating it to significant historical events but also taking it to another plane, connecting the line through objects - notably a family Bible with a dried narcissus marking Ch. 4 of the Book of Micah - and other sensory and spiritual, mystical elements. It's part of the raison d'être of the book as part of a larger canvas. Key to this is the aforementioned Book of Micah, connecting the dynasty of the limping lame across the centuries, covered in the four books of La Dynastie des boiteux. A political, cultural, social, historical element too of course, not least in how this book deals with French colonies and the treatment of its natives, which in the form of Johann, returns to challenge them.

Although how and in what way he challenges or seeks to rise above the prejudice against the black, the native, the lame and the outcast is not all that clear. In some ways, his desire to hunt and kill a gorilla seems to be a desire to kill his own primitiveness, but it's not that clear or straightforward. The February Revolution in 1848 leads to the Second Republic and abolishment of slavery in Réunion, but Johann, particularly when he follows his father to Gabon, sees no future for the black race other than disappearing with the dominance of the white race. He wants to become white.

While Johann is in Gabon he spends time with a missionary family and learns from a book that Johanna Banneky, a black woman in USA and author of Black Almanach, is a distant but direct relative. He learns of her fame alongside Thomas Jefferson a century earlier and recognises that the family Bible belonged to her. Exposure to Africa, or perhaps the truth behind his own family history, induces a fever, where he is assailed by ghosts and imps, nightmares of a gorilla, all seeming to relate to his conflict with his essential nature of about being half-black and considered white, guilt perhaps over the history of the black race, slavery and colonialism.

Or it seems to. The further Johann ventures into Africa in search for a gorilla, to be the first "white man" to hunt and kill one, the more hallucinatory the book gets. His guide Sancho Panza has a mysterious past, his real name Banneke, and there is a mystical connection established between Johann and three gorillas he finally encounters who are the spirits of his ancestors, daughters of Micah. What it all means is never entirely clear - why boiteux? - but Zoonomia is only the first book in a tetralogy, so there is presumably a lot to tie together yet. Above all of course, must be the idea of ancestry. Johann can't escape his origins, much as he would like to deny it. He tries to create his own legend, but fails. 

Written largely in the second person, from the view of the ancestors or perhaps Micah overseeing the life and adventure of Johann, Zoonomia is a challenging read, but certainly ambitious and unique in conception. With the significance of Ch. 4 of the Book of Micah as an underpinning element ("In that day says the Lord, I will assemble the lame, I will gather the outcast and those whom I have afflicted; I will make the lame a remnant, and the outcast a strong nation"), the meaning may still be elusive and ambiguous but Bessora's writing is excellent, clearly laying out what is happening without giving away just yet what the underlying meaning of it is. It will be interesting to see what the tetralogy reveals as a whole.

Reading notes: Zoonomia by Bessora, Volume 1 of La Dynastie des boiteux is published in France by Le Serpent à Plumes in 2018. It appears to now be out of print and unavailable as an eBook, but I managed to pick up a second hand copy. It is interesting to note that the biographical information for Bessora resembles that of Johann. Born in Belgium in 1968, her mother Swiss, father Gabonese, she grew up in Europe, the USA and Africa.