Kerstin
Schoof: Ada Simon, the protagonist of your novel, travels
to Africa professionally as a photographer. What role did photography
play in your own approach to the continent?
Lena
Blaudez: Although I have never been a professional photographer I have
always taken pictures extensively and also exhibited them
back here in Berlin. The medium is fascinating for me – photographs
can transport you elsewhere, they capture moods and atmospheres
and retrospectively show you aspects of a situation you were in
but couldn’t fully grasp at the time.
Taking
pictures is also a sensitive activity. During my time in Zaire especially,
peasants outside the big cities were convinced
you’d take away their soul by taking their photograph. On
the other hand, when I was once walking around a slum area in the
Sahel zone with the camera, people were delighted: they liked the
idea of someone taking interest in and documenting their lives.
News about my arrival travelled fast, and wherever I showed up,
I was already being welcomed by someone calling: “There she
is!”
While
I was writing I also had a lot of pictures in my head and could remember
many things because of that. Even if I don’t
have the pictures anymore – once, for example, after documenting
a cotton harvest, my bag was stolen including all the films I had
with me – the memories stay because I remember the moment
of taking a photo.
K.S.: During
the course of the book, Ada develops as a character, starting as
a rather detached person and moves towards being more involved
with the people around her. Photography seems to serve ambivalent
ends: seen through the lens, the world can be kept at a distance.
On the other hand, taking pictures functions as an important way
of establishing contact with strangers and also as a means of solving
the case.
L.B.: It
is somehow characteristic for Ada Simon to filter everything through
the
camera and therefore not get close to things. Without
having constructed this effect consciously, the reader actually
looks through the lens with her, sometimes being right in the midst
of events, like in a close-up, at other times looking at a wide-screen
panoramic view. At the beginning of the story, Ada is all observer,
documenting events, while later she recognises that it’s
not always possible to sustain this position – she’s
got to change her role and get immersed. Symbolically speaking,
she needs to realise that photographs aren’t necessarily
true. People’s characters, which she has perceived in a certain
way, are revealed to be just the opposite. Nothing is what it seems:
the photograph can betray its viewer, and Ada has to find out what
lies beneath the surface.
K.S.: Like
most investigators in crime fiction your protagonist is on her
own – she can rely upon a network of connections, but
remains without a stable relationship or close friends. Is loneliness
or at least emotional independence a prerequisite for the detective’s
special kind of self-realisation?
L.B.: No, actually
I think that it develops the other way around starting with the
protagonist’s character: she is a nomad who doesn’t
feel like settling down, who doesn’t really belong anywhere,
neither Africa nor Europe, the place of her origins. The guy she
meets is a similar type who puts his work first. Ada Simon simply
is neither the marrying kind nor someone with a big circle of family
and friends, at least not in this period of her life.
K.S.: The
plot of your novel is not strictly constructed around traces
or suspects
being systematically followed up but develops according
to a dynamics of accidental events and chance meetings between
the book’s characters. Someone shows up somewhere unexpectedly,
voodoo-practices play a role in the plot. Do you believe things
happen this way rather than in terms of causality and logic?
Do voodoo and chance belong together?
L.B.: It would be too easy to say that chance plays no part anyway,
but the narrative strands of the novel are indeed shaped by events
which are accidental but come to happen because the main character
moves in a certain direction and focuses her attention on certain
things. Therefore, events do not appear out of the blue but are
fated to occur in some instances.
Voodoo on the other hand has a lot to do with psychology and
knowledge, with connections between personality, society and
people’s environment, it is not sorcery in the ordinary
sense of the word. During the course of my stay in Africa, I
continously came into contact with voodoo just naturally all
the time, and my respect for it grew. Voodoo is not the same
in all places and therefore it is hard to generalise when talking
about it. It is definitely a pragmatic social system, a structure
maintaining social life and social order, for instance when a
thief getS caught rather quickly by means of voodoo. Voodoo priests
are great psychologists who look at people, see what’s
going on and know how to deal with it. Often they are quite impressive
personalities with great charisma. Of course, there are charlatans
as well, like everywhere…
An interesting mixture of various things merge in voodoo, and
chance plays its part when it comes to making all these elements
work coherently.
K.S.: The
handling of voodoo traditions in your novel does not happen in
a dogmatic
fashion: without really believing passionately in
certain practices, Ada and her friends make use of them when it
seems opportune. One figure expresses the coexistence of religion
and spiritual practices as follows: “In the marketplace,
I’m a muslim, like all merchants. At night I pray to God,
to be on the safe side. If things have to be really quick, there’s
only voodoo to help you.”
L.B.: People in Benin
are ebormously tolerant which I always found quite amazing and
beautiful. Although there can be struggles between
the many different sects and religions, at the same time there
is some kind of fundamental reciprocal acceptance along the lines
of “live and let live”.
By the way,
the statement quoted above is taken from real life, it’s what a young guy once said to me. Ada deals with voodoo
in the same way as is common in the country. At some point, I also
went to see a voodoo priest, I actually just wanted to talk to
him to get to know more about voodoo. He insisted, however, that
I needed to have a palpable request for him to be able to talk
to me. So I asked him to make me quit smoking. It did even last
for a few years! And of course he realised: this woman is white
and therefore must have some money. The price he set was rather
high… You see he was acting with quite a sense for reality.
In voodoo, there is some sense of humour and rogueishness, apart
from pragmatism: what goes around comes around, basically. A bottle
of gin for spirits and ancestors, and the new job will be just
fine. Deals like in real life, little briberies of the Gods here
and there.
Then again,
there are certain cults which are extremely misogynist, manifestations
of a patriarchal society where women are excluded
and put down through secret leagues and threatening rituals. Although
it is clearly the women who secure everyone’s survival, in
terms of outward appearance and representation the domination of
men has to be kept up – and voodoo is used for these ends
as well.
K.S.: The rigid categories of Western or European thinking and their
demarcation lines - between human and animal, for example - seem
to be more flexible in the worldview associated with voodoo...
L.B.: Their fundamental thoughts concerning the universe around us are
rather different from ours. The borders between all living creatures
are indeed more permeable and everything has got a soul, every
tree and every stone. I was always amazed that belief in voodoo
really transcends all social strata. A person leading a simple
life in the country never leaving their village as well as an intellectual
who returns to Africa after having studied in Paris: both share
the conviction that voodoo obviously exists and can be found in
all life on the earth. This attitude is self-evident, it goes without
saying.
K.S.: Why did you choose the genre of crime fiction to express your
impressions of Africa?
L.B.: The subject chooses its form, after all. And the genre really
is many-sided: you can represent sober reality while still entertaining
readers with by means of fiction - especially in generating suspense
- and there is always the thrill of the case that makes you hang
on.
It is also just fun writing, when you’re in a bad mood you
can kill the right people straight away: short investigations,
simple solutions…
I really liked
the statement Thomas Wörtche (editor of the
Metro series in the Unionsverlag) made in an interview, saying
that what was important for him was the combination of a crime
story plus exploring a country’s culture and social matters.
That is exactly what I am interested in as well. Me, ending up
with exactly this publisher, that was obviously chance again…
K.S.: Is writing crime fiction doing politics by another name?
L.B.: In my crime
stories, I talk about the criminal things that happen all the
time: on a large scale concerning the illegal worldwide
trade in resources for example, especially in Africa with resources
like tropical rainforests – in these areas, there is not
legal recourse to be had. Crime is not the exception but the norm,
and we are all involved through our economic interests. So in a
way, I am definitely writing to resist the make-believe of developmental
aid or those widespread media representations that claim that the
continent’s poverty is caused by tribal wars, for example.
In spite of all the good will, the dominant and deeply rooted European
attitudes have not changed for the last 500 years – a mixture
of egoism, ignorance and latent racism.
On my kids’ school curriculum, the subject comes up as “Aid
for Africa” – I can’t bear it anymore. Justice:
fine; fair conditions of trade, the cancellation of debt, these
are important aspects, but it’s not only about money, it’s
about equality: and that’s what is missing.
So I’d say, crime fiction as politics by other means – yes,
why not.
Over and above
that, crime fiction opens up the possibility of approaching subjects
like death and cruelty in a different way
to documentary reports. Literature makes visible very different
aspects of experience. There is also a connection to photography
for me here: before the genocide in Zaire and Rwanda, I took
lots of pictures of people and I don’t know if they survived
or not. It took me years to be able to look at those photos again,
but now I have incorporated some of those people into my next
novel.
I wanted to create some kind of memorial for them, to prevent
them from being forgotten.
K.S.: Would you like German crime fiction to be more politically outspoken,
resembling more closely the explicitly political traditions to
be found in France or Sweden?
L.B.: In my opinion,
crime fiction is always political in some way. After all, it
takes up important and current issues, never mind
if it deals primarily with psychological, social, economic or cultural
questions. Murder is always socially relevant. In that sense, crime
fiction can never be an apolitical genre, in any place or country.
The novels of let’s say Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and Ross
Thomas highlight this fact in a particularly pronounced way. I
consider the connections between fiction and political and social
foundations to be crucial. Of course, you can play around with
both, but in my novel there is a non-fictional core which is 100%
true: everything concerning the economic situation of Benin, its
culture, and voodoo – that was always very important for
me. All the rest is a matter of fantasy.
Lena
Blaudez’s first novel “Spiegelreflex – Ada
Simon in Cotonou” revolves around the main character’s
trip to Africa. Ada Simon, travelling through Benin on a mission as
a photographer, witnesses her friend Patrick being shot in a bar just
after her arrival in the country. When his cousin disappears without
a trace - just like the film that she completed before Patrick’s
death – Ada is drawn into the rapidly unfolding events somehow
related to Patrick’s work for the ministry, some tropical rainforests
up North and the shadowy circles of diverse voodoo-sects… Apart
from being a gripping piece of crime fiction, this novel brings
to life a vivid picture of the culture, politics and landscapes
of Benin.