‘A series of photographs titled, The Aquatics, featured terrified faces emerging from wastewater and flooding, ID cards floating, women hoisting babies, lamps or suitcases overhead, the swollen face of a drowned man. The images weren’t new. Every year during the rainy season, the same ones, more or less, appeared on television screens and newspaper pages, but Samy’s frame – rusted corrugate sheet metal, scrap metal, papier-mâché – and his juxtaposition of these cataclysmic images with pictures of carefree couples lying in a field of ripening corn with their children, amplified the radical despair that was bursting from every scene.’ p.10
Visual artist, Samy, illuminates government corruption and human rights abuses in his work. He is also gay: an identity criminalised by the state apparatus of Zambuena, the fictional West African nation where this novel is set. Conflict erupts after Samy’s exhibition opens, showcasing The Aquatics photo series. The gallery is vandalised by a group of vigilantes, The Defenders of Morality. Samy is arrested under anti-homosexuality laws. Facing twenty-five years in prison and a ruinous fine, he suffers severe physical abuse at the hands of fellow inmates.
Enter Katmé: a privileged woman and Samy’s childhood friend. She is a ‘woman with a degree, a teacher who could make her own living and was still young,’ who leads a comfortable life. Dominated by her husband, Tashun, a powerful, misogynistic prefect whose drive for political power governs their lives, her marriage lacks fulfilment. Samy is her emotional anchor. When political rivals discover that Katmé and Tashun financially sponsored the gallery hosting the controversial exhibition, they seize the opportunity to sabotage Tashun’s political rise. Driven by her deep affection for Samy, Katmé risks everything to support him and his art.
Running parallel to Samy’s plight is the story of Katmé’s late mother, whose rushed and botched burial twenty years earlier is undone after an allegedly progressive government initiative decrees that her body (or rather skeleton) must be exhumed and reburied elsewhere to clear the way for a modern highway project.
Both storylines illuminate how the state encroaches upon private lives, stripping away any illusion of security, even for Katmé, despite her privileged status as ‘Mama Prefect‘. Revisiting the relationship with her mother becomes the stimulus behind her emotional and personal transformation. Will she stay married to her husband, or will she choose self-determination over conformity to the patriarchy? Will Samy stay stuck behind bars, crushed by state-sanctioned violence against his being LGBT? The elites’ performative morality and progressivism are underpinned by exploitation of marginalised citizens and abandoning allies when self-interest is threatened. To what extent does passive compliance with unjust systems make one complicit in them?
Translated by Maren Baudet-Lackner, The Aquatics is beautifully written. Lewat strikes a balance between direct prose, poetic lyricism and viscerally stark descriptions, driven by a rich and nuanced vocabulary, and strong visual imagery.
‘Fiction is truth inside the lie,’ Stephen King
‘For several weeks, students and a handful of politicians had been demanding that the Father of the Nation and President of the Republic end the single party system, declare the country a democracy, call free elections, increase wages, put a stop to arbitrary arrests, and make university free for all. Some shrewd observers described their host of demands as naïve. The Old Man, the Father of the Nation, had turned a deaf ear, provoking economic paralysis throughout the country.’
This political strategy is as old as the hills yet terrifyingly real as we live through it today. It mirrors the demagoguery of Donald Trump in the US, Nigel Farage in the UK and right-wing extremists across Europe, all of whom posture as paternalistic saviours while turning a deaf ear to popular grievances, smearing basic demands for living wages, education and human rights as ‘woke’ or ‘Leftist’. Lewat’s subliminal subtext shatters the racist, hypocritical myth that frames Black and Brown nations as inherently inferior, given how the West itself is the most barbaric of all as it is built on a history of imperial violence and sustained by modern state repression.
This double standard is brutally illustrated by the recent death of Black academic Jason Arday who was relentlessly hounded and targeted by a hostile, right-wing white press. The public shaming he endured to the point of death is something White elites rarely face. From fictional dystopias such as Kafka’s The Trial, to actual scandals like the Dreyfus Affair or modern whistle blowers, the machinery of power operates identically across the board to destroy anyone who dares to challenge the status quo, be it through rituals of public humiliation, institutional abandonment or being silenced through incarceration.
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