It Takes a Child’s Heart to Face the End of the World

Since the end of World War II, the world, and Europe in particular, has lived in fear of global collapse: conflict, climate change, nuclear destruction… There is no shortage of challenges. Yet, since then, many populations around the globe say they have already come close to the end of the world.

In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe tells the story of a pre-colonial Igbo society in Nigeria at the turning point of its encounter with ‘white men’, the missionaries. It is a complex society, structured by its traditions and vibrant spiritualities. We meet Okonkwo, the novel’s main character. Initially a respected leader of his community and the guardian of its traditions, Okonkwo is banished from his village following an accidental murder in order to appease the gods. When he returns, his village has almost disappeared. In fact, the presence of European missionaries has gone hand in hand with the disintegration of the social structure of his society.

The first novel in a trilogy, Things Fall Apart bears witness to the loss of the known world. And if Achebe occupies an important place among English-language writers, this novel shows why. He gives a powerful narrative account of a historical passage in a language reminiscent of the codes of so-called African tales, in which the gravity of the moment is combined with comical situations. Through his linguistic choices and the images he evokes, we sense the poet behind the novelist.

The end of the world is less spectacular in The Disoriented by Amin Maalouf, but it is just as dizzying, sharp and delicate. The novel mainly takes place in Lebanon, where a figure named Adam returns to reunite with childhood friends. They were inseparable at first but have been scattered across the globe by the war; now, they have been reunited by the death of one of their own.

By spending time with the people and old walls, it becomes clear that Adam has lost more than a past; with that past has also gone a way of carrying himself and relating to the world that was previously certain to him. More than melancholy, it’s the loss of a big part of himself that afflicts him. He is dis-orientated. The novel was originally written in French, and Maalouf’s play on words here takes on its full meaning, since to be disorientated is to lose one’s East, which in French mostly translates as Orient. Adam and his friends have lost their world. Exile, friendship, love, life, death, everything must take on a completely new meaning.

Sometimes the end of the world takes on the air of a new world. It disguises itself as a present.

In Transparent City, a dilapidated building in Luanda, the capital of Angola, becomes a meeting place for tenants displaced by war from all over the country. These singular lives and destinies have in common the fact that they are invisible in the eyes of a society that is supposed to be offering them a chance of renewal at the end of a war that has lasted far too long. In this city, which can finally reach its full capitalist potential, violence makes people disappear, sometimes literally. In this novel, the marvellous mingles with the harsh reality of everyday life, in a style that is by turns poetic and poignant.

When we are threatened with extinction, poetry can offer a path of resistance. In the poetry collection The River in the Belly, novelist, poet and performer Fiston Mwanza Mujila reimagines the presence of his native Congo and its majestic river. Mujila’s Solitudes evoke themes such as exile or music, as the river flows through the corners of the country, Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, Moanda and beyond — through the poet’s life, body and mind. Here we discover a storyteller of a river that continues to grow and flow despite colonialism, exploitation or war.

Appropriating a world that eludes us is certainly an act of survival; inventing one can then prove to be a radical act; instead of defying death, disappearance or the end of the world itself, it acknowledges and ignores it at the same time.

Before writing his major work Transparent City, Ondjaki wrote novels about childhood, including Good Morning Comrades. In Communist Angola in the 1980s, a group of children live their lives the only they know how. They are cheeky, make up stories and they are sometimes flirty. The civil war is present, it’s the backdrop of the narrative. Everything is there: the Soviet and Cuban presence, the guns and the ration cards. Yet the war remains a rumour, not in the sense that it doesn’t exist, but rather that we hear it; it doesn’t stop the children and teenagers from covering it up with their laughter, their games, their plots and their childhood dramas. This novel offers the delicious illusion that it is possible to come close to the end of the world and live if one has the heart of a child. Sometimes, it only takes a child’s creative and vibrant soul to face the collapse.