WHAT IS ALREADY HERE?

What is already here – translations

 

TEXT 1 (Joseph’s monologue)

My name is Joseph Kwilemba Kasau Wa Mambwe / Son of Mambwe, my father Séverin Lonta Mambwe.
I am a human being who cannot prove that / he is a human being. How and where to begin?
By saying that I am the product / of a counterfeit hybrid culture,
an imposed mix that never really worked,
I try and try again to escape it / often I fail, but I always try again.
It is the poetry in this act of striving / that keeps me moving.
Because I must hack the system / to escape this reality.
I have certainly realised / the bug in my existence
but the code to reset it has been taken from me
By the labyrinthine structure / of a society with normative thinking
in which I have been locked away and moulded since…
since I became what I no longer wish to be.
My human shell and its bodily folds / are a derivative of powerful thoughts.
I reflect on the very place of my oppressor / to escape this self-imposed prison.
The perfect trap! / The sublime act of personal betrayal.
My universe glitches / The poetry of my resistance struggles
The very thought of my regeneration,/ short-circuited. The hack was profound
There is no more space, / no more memory for error and doubt
I have the world in my pocket / and I find no path to reach humanity.
The code was perfect,
I’ve even cast aside my human frailty / to become a Sapiens 2.0
with an algorithm that works a treat.
Today, it will be exactly 30 years and / 10 months since I’ve been stuck here.
I come from a distant world.
When I arrived, things / weren’t as bad as they are now.
People still mingled, looked at / one another and spoke to one another.
But that was long before this / Technogovernment took control of the ration
— sorry, of the nation.
When I realised I wasn’t in the right place / for my humanity, for our humanity,
it was already too late. I could / no longer remember where I came from
or how I ended up here.
And every day, when I wake up, / it’s always this image of myself
trapped in this matrix / that suffocates me and sucks
a little of myself out of me every day.
I feel alone and I don’t know / how to reach out to others,
everyone is oblivious / in their harmful solitude.
Those bastards really got me!
When I arrived here, don’t ask me how, / through some sort of cosmic chiasm
that must have created a hole in the matrix / which sucked me all the way here,
Some would say, DOWNLOAD… / I don’t believe it myself.
But that’s what they told me, / I was downloaded, recorded and stored
in this… Cloud.
They also told me: / We need to carry out a rapid assessment
to see if you have the virus,/ in which case we’ll implant a chip in you,
then check your ability to cope/ with our humanoid digital programme…
blah blah blah, blah blah blah.
As I tested positive, they implanted / a chip in me containing ‘The Software’,
the latest version,/ updated before I entered that laboratory
whose white fabric on the wall / I still remember,
it might have been plastic / I can’t quite remember.
but it looks like a real crime scene
in which the executioner is preparing / to blow his victim’s brains out,
the victim in this case being me.
Don’t worry, standard precautions / to avoid exposing ourselves
and contaminating the global / word population already vaccinated
with the Hm 4.0 molecule / which we’ll probably give you
if you’re good. Be good, / they told me
to the others they said I’d gone mad.
What? Mad? Me, mad? You can’t be serious, / me mad? No, it’s you who are mad
…
I’m not mad,  / I am, I am…
mad?
I’m mad!
Perhaps I have indeed gone mad
I shout alone
and I don’t know how to prove to machines / that I’m not a robot.
You don’t either, do you?
Perhaps we should all accept / that we’ve gone mad
All of us / madmen,
a fine republic of madmen…
Sometimes, forced to ignore / the clatter of servers to which
the entire universe has entrusted its soul,
the deafening clatter / of the keyboard in my ears
the sounds of notifications / arriving in a flurry,
all that technological dust / far from me,
contemplating the time I still have left to swallow,
I have flashes :
Images come back to me,
very blurry in my head
but I can clearly make out
the smell of my mother’s cooking,
of wet earth after a light rain,
the shouts of my friends playing football,
our neighbours’ children running / far away down the street,
All this fleeting poetry destined / to die with the brutality of our bubble…
I remember that we lived in / what was called The Human Territories.
Humans were the third species to have / occupied these territories
after the flora and fauna.
These days, there are few of us left / many are in hiding
for fear of reprisals / or of being arrested like me…
I miss talking to real humans, / don’t you?
It might be a cliché, but / you only realise what you’ve got when it’s gone.
I feel an ever-growing need / to talk to living beings,
far from the screens and barriers / that time has erected between us,
in every mobile phone that / we hold up in front of others
and which, little by little, kill off / all that remains of our relative honesty.
We exist in the same spaces, / yet we cannot even see one another.
I want to go back home,
to the Human Territories.

TEXT 2 (Joseph’s warning message)

So my story begins in this future-present,
at the heart of the world country and in the unknown territory of the techno government.
An activist, who must have been completely mad, had found an unexpected spot in which to set up an underground laboratory using very basic materials gathered here and there. She brought me there by force, without my consent. No, don’t let them take me!

TEXT 2 (Franck’s monologue)

When Joseph told me about this project, / was like, he’d made some wonderful connections;
together they’re going to tell a dystopian story / that ends on a note of hope:
‘they saved the world’.
Then he told me he wanted me / on stage with him and Majula.
I thought, that’s great, / I’ll get to meet Majula too,
we’re going to tell a dystopian story / that ends on a hopeful note: we saved the world.
Afterwards, I wondered, / why does he really want me on stage ?
I can certainly tinker with sounds / that can play from the tecnic
even though I like people / watching me play with my gadgets.
I could make this soundtrack / and stay at home in Kisangani,
in the heat I never get used to / in my city between the waters,
a city on the bend of the river,/ a city right in the middle
of the equatorial forest / in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But here I am, in the freezing cold,
God and my ancestors know what a journey / it took me to get here.
I’ll tell you : I travelled 1,225 km / from Kisangani to Kinshasa,
where I spent a four-hour stopover, / before travelling another 1,567 km
to reach Lubumbashi, / where Joseph was waiting for me.
But the distance between Lubumbashi / and Kisangani is 1,377 km,
so normally a two-hour flight.
No, there are no direct flights / between these two cities,
and there haven’t been any trains / for nearly two decades
because with the crises, the wars, / the crises, the wars again
things, just like people, break down.
But hey Francky, / that’s a story for another day.
So I’m in Lubumbashi for the visa / in Kisangani, there’s no consular representation,
not even from Africans country / in a city said to be the third largest
after the capital Kinshasa / and the economic hub Lubumbashi.
So I’ve been hanging about in Lubumbashi / for 14 days, and I’ve got the visa
with the help of the director of / the French Institute in Lubumbashi,
which just goes to show you always need / someone from elsewhere to help…
And since 15 March, /I’ve been here in Stockholm
after travelling 2,615 km / from Lubumbashi to Addis Ababa,
spending 10 hours in stopovers, then / travelling another 5,863 km from Addis to here.
But why do Joseph and Majula want me here / to tell with them a science-fiction story
which would end with a hope / I no longer allow myself?
Perhaps I should actually ask them. / Ah, what a brilliant idea!
I should have asked them ages ago!
But anyway, whilst I wait for them / My name is Franck Moka,
F.R.A.N.C.K M.O.K.A,
it’s the same name on Instagram, / Facebook and YouTube.
I’m short on followers. I’m counting on you / to help my pages go viral
even though I only post about / my artistic work and my rants about the Congo.
So Franck Moka, like, comment, / subscribe and share the links.
And let me know what kind of content / you’d like me to cover.
Stories from the Congo?
What don’t people here know about the Congo?
What don’t you know?
That the country is five times / larger than Sweden in area,
or two and a half times the size / of the whole of Scandinavia?
What don’t you know?
That the evangelical community in the Congo / is an invention of
Swedish evangelical missionaries?
What don’t you know?
That the Congo holds within its depths / the essential resources
for technologies that debase / our humanity rather than ennoble it?
What don’t you know,
that more than 6,000,000 people / have died there
over the last three decades /because multinationals want more money?
What don’t you know?
That in 2018 a Congolese doctor / was awarded the Nobel Prize for having
sewn up thousands of women’s torn vaginas
and tried to restore their / shattered humanity because of the same war?
What don’t you know?
That foreign armies come / to wage war on Congolese soil.
What don’t you know?
That for over a year I have been begging / God and my ancestors that
my nephews in Kivu, the areas most heavily / occupied by the rebels,
will not be conscripted into the army, / or go to artisanal mines
to dig for coltan for smartphones, / or lithium for electric car batteries,
niobium, or who knows what else,
and that my nieces will not be / the next ones under the scalpels
of the Nobel Peace Prize winner?
What don’t you know?
That the two atomic bombs used / by the most brutal nation in the world
were loaded with uranium from / the region where Joseph comes from,
the country’s economic heartland, / the other coveted mining region after Kivu ?
What don’t you know?
That at any moment this country / could fall apart just as it did in 1960,
after gaining independence?
What don’t you know?
That since Lumumba’s assassination, / the Congo has never had politicians
who championed the aspirations / of a nation’s advancement?
Just clowns who think champagne for themselves / is better than water for everyone.
What don’t you know about the Congo?
Don’t you know that despite all this / we still know how to dance!
We still know how to sing! / We still know how to party!
We still know how to stand tall!
We even come here and talk about / a supposedly Afro-futurist science fiction story.
Tell me, what stories will you like,
To comment on, to share / so that I can get millions of views?
How did we end up here? / Where we’re now only concerned
with how many have viewed, / how many have liked,
how many have commented, how many / have shared, how many have subscribed…
We don’t look at who, but how many. / Statistics, that’s what feeds us.
But none of this surprises me. / How could it?
Me, Franck Moka Iba. Son of Prospere Moka Lwamba / and Francisca Alua Ramazani,
grandson of Moka Kyuma and Bitondo / and Moza Kanga and Ramazani Kikuni Matenda
great-grandson of Kindukindu. / Me, who come from Kisangani, a city between the waters,
a city at the bend of the river, / a city in the middle of the forest
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Is there anything left that can truly shake me?
Me, who was born in a country called Zaire, / then 10 years later it became
the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This is the second time it has been called that
and before that, / it was called the Republic of Congo,
and before that, / it was called the Belgian Congo,
and before that, / it was called the Independent State of Congo
but it’s the private property of a bearded man, / monarch of a territory 80 times smaller
than these lands and the people he owns, / because he promises everyone
they can help themselves cause before that, / the Congo doesn’t exist,
there’s just a river and the great forest’.
Even today we pay the price for only being / a strip of land conceived as a zone to satisfy
the world’s need for resources.
But hey, Franck,  that’s a story for another day!
What else could possibly shake me?
Maybe waking up to a million views / on my latest YouTube video?
Or a million likes on my latest posts / on Instagram and Facebook?
Joseph and Majula want me here with them / to tell a dystopian story that would end
with a hope I no longer allow myself / because I’m preoccupied with managing
to remember my name, my parent’s names, / my grandparents’, my great-grandparents’
as the poet said, remembering those who / came before us is attempting to rebuild
our relationship with ourselves, / with the earth that sustains us,
with every being that breathes upon it.
Joseph, Majula, why did you / want me here, with you?