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Writer in exile

"Dongala is one of the few African intellectuals who can write comfortably aboutthe American black experience."

Congolese novelist Emmanuel Dongala was visiting friends in Litchfield, Connecticut, when he learned that civil war had erupted in the Congo Republic. On that June evening in 1997, his wife, Pauline, got word to him that rival militias had divided the capital city of Brazzaville. Their home was being bombarded, snipers were killing civilians. Their 14-year-old daughter, Nora, was missing. "I didn't believe it could be so bad," says the 58-year-old writer, who still seems stunned by the speed with which his world fell apart. "I thought, `This is a skirmish, a power struggle between political rivals. It will be over before I get home."'

But it wasn't. In the next six months, more than 10,000 Congolese citizens would be murdered. Brazzaville, a charming colonial city, would be reduced to rubble. To escape the fighting, 120,000 civilians would flee into the equatorial forest. "You cannot imagine the terror," says Dongala, who had been dean of students and professor of chemistry at the University of Brazzaville. "A friend was murdered just because he lacked a few coins to bribe soldiers at a roadblock. With no medicine, thousands died of malaria, including my wife's brother."

Since all flights to the Congo Republic had been cancelled after the fighting broke out, Dongala flew to neighboring Gabon, then journeyed five days overland to reach his family in Dolisie, his wife's tribal village. "Despite my wife's pleading, I went immediately to Brazzaville to see my mother," says Dongala, who bribed his way onto the only train still running. "Even as a novelist, I could not have imagined the ruin of the city; our neighborhood was completely destroyed."

Dongala discovered that Nora had been evacuated to Chad by accident in a roundup of French citizens. It would be eight weeks before she was returned to her family. By then, the Dongalas had fled another 150 miles west to the port city of Pointe Noire. There, they lived in a house with 30 friends, sleeping on the floor and scouring the nearby forest for food. Soon, like many in the Congo Republic, the Dongalas disappeared into the chaos that had consumed their nation.

As US diplomats from neighboring Kinshasa Democratic Republic of Congo searched for Dongala, American friends, led by a remarkable cast of movers and shakers, mobilized to pluck the Congolese writer and his family out of Africa. Headed by novelist Philip Roth, the group would eventually include writer William Styron; Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in New York; Senator Edward M. Kennedy; and former Massachusetts first lady Susan Weld.

Five months into the civil war and still in hiding in Pointe Noire, Emmanuel Dongala was handed his escape in a letter smuggled in to him. It was an invitation to join the faculty at Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington Mass. as a visiting professor of chemistry and African literature.

"We have set aside a small cottage for you and your family," wrote U Ba Wincq, the college's Burmese-born provost, in what must have seemed a gift from heaven. "It is called Pond House due to its proximity to a pretty pond with a resident flock of geese. They await your arrival."

The letter contained visas that brought the family out of Pointe Noire away from maurauding militias and, in successive stages, on planes bound for the United States. They left the Congo Republic with only the clothes on their backs.

Now, more than two years later, Emmanuel Dongala sits in his office at Simon's Rock College, just down the road from Pond Cottage. Dressed in blue jeans, a blue-and-white-checked shirt, and running shoes, he could pass for a Berkshire tourist. In heavily accented English, he recounts the tale of his escape. Despite the terrible memories, his manner is upbeat and positive. "It was surreal," he says of Ba Win's timely letter, "the thought that something so peaceful could exist in this madness."

How Emmanuel Dongala made the journey from his war-torn country to this Berkshire campus is a story of long friendships and lucky breaks. It is also the tale of a small college determined to provide a haven for endangered writers, and its ability to the aid of the intellectuals and political figures it needs to pull it off.

At Simon's Rock, Dongala is still a divided man. The chemistry professor has just given an exam - too hard by the vote of one student, who has turned in a blue exam booklet torn in half. (Dongala is amused: "Why so hard? One problem came straight from their homework.") The writer will leave the next day for Amsterdam, where the most recent of his three novels, Les petits garcons naissent aussi des etoiles (Boys Are Also Born From Stars), is to be published in Dutch.

Dongala became a chemist, he explains, because a free Africa needed men of science. Writing came later, when he saw so much of the continent being destroyed by greed and political corruption. "It is my job as a writer to tell this story." Sometimes the truth comes dressed in humor, but always, he says, "there is sadness, anger, and shame that so much wealth and opportunity has been wasted."

In Les petits garcons, first published in 1998, Dongala looks at life in post-colonial Africa through the eyes of a 15-year-old boy. This is not the Africa of village huts and tribal rituals. Rather, young Matapari is a modern African who wears Reeboks, reads Japanese comic books, and looks at the stars with a keen knowledge of astronomy. Through his eyes, one sees the history of the Congo Republic from independence to its first free elections. Using humor to skewer a changing cast of corrupt politicians, the author describes a country where coup d'etat means only that someone new is robbing the people.

"Dongala is popular with Africans because he writes about what their lives are like now, today," says Sylvie Kande, a professor of French and francophone literature at New York University. "Often, you can read his books on two levels: as quick, witty satire or, especially for Africans who have lived through these regimes, as sad commentary."

Because he is from the French-speaking part of Africa, Dongala's work is little known in the United States, although his books have been published in seven languages. In France, his novels and short stories have received numerous awards, and he has been appointed a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. (This did not help when he was seeking asylum for his family; the French government refused his application for a visa. As one of Dongala's characters says, "It is easier to get a visa for the moon.")

Not surprisingly, the author's American rescue has opened new literary doors. Farrar Strauss & Giroux will publish the English-language translation of Les petits garcons in the fall, its message all the more poignant because of Dongala's own forced exile. Last spring, Dongala was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to begin work on his fourth novel, and he is in great demand on the American college lecture circuit.

Dongala's children also have thrived. His eldest daughter, Assita, 20, is now a full-scholarship student at Simon's Rock; her visa was issued with the help of President Bill Clinton after William Styron pled her case at a White House dinner. (Because Assita was already 18 when her family fled, she could not be included on her parents' visas.) His two younger daughters, Nefertiti, 18, and Nora, 16, who arrived in the United States speaking no English, are now honor students at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington.

But the family's success is shadowed by the conflict that still rages at home. The Dongalas listen nightly to Radio France reports of continuing atrocities. Intellectuals have been targeted. Every week brings a phone call telling them someone has been murdered. "The militias distrust anyone who is independent-minded," says Dongala. "They only want people who will obey them."

Most painfully, the Dongalas see their country's civil war as a forgotten tragedy. When fighting later erupted in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo - formerly Zaire - it grabbed what few headlines are spent on African conflicts.

"The UN high commissioner for refugees reported recently that for every $1.30 spent on a Kosovo refugee, 11 cents is spent on an African refugee," says the writer. Even in war, there is fashion, and Dongala's small country of 2.5 million people is obviously last year's model.

Dongala's first bit of good fortune was to be born in French Equatorial Africa (now the Congo Republic) and not across the Congo River in the notoriously repressive Belgian Congo (it later became Zaire, then the Democratic Republic of Congo).

The Belgians had little use for the native population, Dongala explains over lunch at a Great Barrington restaurant. "They educated them poorly in the local dialect. But the French were different. They believed every man's greatest dream was to become French." Putting down his fork, Dongala pauses to savor the irony of the statement. "Their gift to us was a classical French education."

The son of a missionary-trained schoolteacher, Dongala attended school in Brazzaville, reciting the names of French kings alongside the children of French colonial officials. When independence came in 1960, the French Congo, like much of West Africa, adopted what Dongala calls "Che Guevara's grand vision of Marxism: Our poor nations would rise up and change the world."

Many of his friends were sent to universities in Havana or Moscow. But Dongala - in another bit of luck - was one of the first in his country to be awarded a Ford Foundation scholarship for study at Oberlin College in Ohio. The 18-year-old student quickly embraced an entirely new civilization. "I knew the Western world only through French literature and history," says Dongala. "Suddenly, I'm reading Shakespeare, Hemingway, Faulkner. All of it was new to me. I also discovered James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Malcolm X. For a young African, it was an extraordinary time to discover America."

"Emmanuel's assimilation into our culture was extremely graceful," recalls C.H. Huvelle, a physician whose Litchfield, Connecticut, family volunteered to host the young African when he arrived in the United States in 1961. Dongala spent all of his holidays with the Huvelles and their four children. "He was so delightful, so curious," says Huvelle, "that over the years, we simply adopted him into our family."

"I took it as my job to teach him all my idiosyncratic, pre-teen language," says Nora Huvelle, who was 11 years old when Dongala joined her family. Now a human resources consultant living in Watertown - and a good friend of Susan Weld, who lobbied Senator Kennedy's office for help on the Dongala family's visas - she and the writer remain close. "Emmanuel has always been fascinated with language, with the colloquial," she says. "Just last week, as we drove around Boston, he wanted to practice using `on the whole' in a sentence."

The Huvelles thought of their new son not as a writer but as a chemist. Over the next 15 years, he earned science degrees at Oberlin College and Rutgers University, as well as PhDs in chemistry at two French universities. But Nora Huvelle, who has saved all his letters, saw the writer emerging early on. "Emmanuel is a born storyteller," she says. "Even his very first letters were carefully composed, with sentences scratched out and rewritten. He was always writing for effect."

As his continuing good luck would have it, Dongala found himself, during the 1960s, with a front-row seat at America's social revolution. Like an African Zelig, he was never far from the social movements that defined the decade.

At Oberlin, Dongala joined the freedom marches of the civil rights movement. He watched the funeral of President John F. Kennedy on television with his classmates. He heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at his college commencement, and he met Malcolm X in Harlem. During a summer in Greenwich Village, the young African spent his days with the Black Panthers and his nights listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane at jazz clubs around the city.

Because of this exposure, says NYU's Kande, "Dongala is one of the few African intellectuals who can write comfortably about the American black experience. He understands it; he is not afraid to confront it."

The author writes most fetchingly about these two worlds in his prize-winning collection, Jazz et vin de palme (Jazz and Palm Wine). Half the book's stories are set in 1960s America with African-American protagonists, half are set in Africa. "Perhaps because I came to this country fresh from the African independence movement and right away found myself in the middle of America's civil rights movement," says Dongala, "I felt our struggles had much in common."

Dongala met American discrimination face to face in the summer of 1962, while teaching French at the University of Illinois in Carbondale. He walked into a local restaurant for lunch, he says, and "I saw a black cook in the kitchen waving at me frantically and shaking his head. I had no idea what he was getting at until a waiter walked up to me and asked me to leave. They didn't serve people of color."

Sitting in his Simon's Rock office, its only decoration a collection of black-and-white postcards of jazz greats Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and the young Billie Holiday, Dongala is amused by his own naivete. Because of the discrimination he experienced, Dongala feels he understood black America's anger in ways some of his African friends could not: "They were wary of the militancy of American blacks. It scared them more than it did me."

Dongala returned to the Congo Republic in 1979 and began teaching chemistry at Brazzaville University. He met his wife, Pauline, the next year when, as an employee of the American Cultural Center, she helped him organize a Charlie Chaplin film festival. It was the heyday of socialist regimes in Africa, and Dongala's 10 years in America - "in the belly of the beast," as he says with colloquial pride - always made him suspect in the government's eyes.

"I never wanted to be part of politics," he explains. "In Africa, so many intellectuals join these regimes, thinking they can change them from the inside. Inevitably, they are the ones who are changed, corrupted by money and power."

Increasingly, Dongala used his writing to criticize government policy. "How can a nation with the fourth largest oil reserves in Africa be so poor?" he asks, then answers his own question. "These leaders take the money and line their own pockets." When Jazz et vin de palme was published in 1982, many of its stories poked fun at the politicians in power, which made the author even less popular with the regime. The book was banned in the Congo Republic.

"I am very proud that I published that book without pseudonym at a time when there was no freedom of the press or freedom of association," says the author, who watched Jazz et vin de palme become an underground classic in French-speaking Africa.

Even as state security called in his family and close friends for questioning, Dongala continued to teach and publish. He also formed a Congolese chapter of PEN, the international writers' union.

Government disfavor did not keep the writer from traveling, though his visits to the United States were more often related to chemistry than to creative writing. It was during one of those trips that Dongala met two powerhouses of American letters - Philip Roth and William Styron - at a 1980 post-election party at Styron's Connecticut home.

"Jimmy Carter had just lost to Ronald Reagan," recalls C.H. Huvelle, who counts Roth and Styron as friends and former patients. "I brought Emmanuel along because I knew he was interested in American politics. Of course, none of us had ever read his books - they were all in French - but he's such a charming guy that they hit it off."

Roth, especially, grew fond of Dongala, later asking him to accept the Karel Capek literary prize on his behalf when it was presented by Czech President Vaclav Havel at a PEN conference in Prague. Dongala's own literary reputation, meanwhile, flourished with the 1987 publication of his second novel, Le feu des origines (The Fire of Origins), which won major French and African prizes.

Dongala's literary ascent coincided with the decline of communism worldwide. As the Berlin Wall crumbled, many in Africa saw an opportunity for democracy. Africa's socialist regimes, long propped up by Russia and China's Cold War concerns, found themselves underfinanced and vulnerable. In the Congo Republic, Dongala and many of his countrymen applauded the call for free elections.

In those 1992 elections, Pascal Lissouba, an academic and former geneticist, triumphed over former strongman Denis Sassou-Nguesso. "We thought he was enlightened, a new African," Dongala says of Lissouba. But the honeymoon was brief. Lissouba proved as corrupt as his predecessor, and a less artful politician. Unable to secure support from the military, the new president used government funds to create his own militia. Over time, the country fractured across tribal lines, and civil war erupted.

"I am not a political exile," Dongala stresses, leaning forward in his chair. "I did not suffer because I was a writer. I suffered like everybody because the bombs and mortars spare no one."

Leon Botstein has been president of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, for 24 years. He is respected as a scholar, a musician, and a well-known critic of education in America. But first and foremost, he defines himself as an exile and political refugee. Botstein was 2 years old when his Jewish parents fled Poland for the United States after World War II. "And we were the lucky ones," he says.

Which is why Bard's president did not hesitate when Philip Roth called him in the summer of 1997 looking for a way to bring Emmanuel Dongala out of Africa. Botstein had never heard of Dongala, never read any of his books, but immediately suggested that he join the faculty of Simon's Rock, which has been affiliated with Bard since 1979. "Philip said to me, `This man is a great writer. He and his family are at risk.' There was never any question that we would make room for him."

Roth and Botstein had become friends in the 1980s, when both grew concerned at the plight of dissident writers in Eastern Europe. With financing from the Ford Foundation, in 1988 Botstein established The International Academy for Scholarship and the Arts, which was based at Bard and counted Roth - as well as Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, and Joseph Brodsky - as members of its advisory board. The academy's goal was to find teaching positions at America's small liberal arts colleges for Iron Curtain intellectuals who had been jailed or censored in their own countries.

"We have a long history of ambivalence to foreign-born scholars in this country," Botstein says. "You hear these wonderful stories about how Einstein went to Princeton during World War II. But what about those scholars who weren't Einstein? Who helped them?"

Bard's academy was designed for younger, less visible intellectuals - dissidents like Romanian writer Norman Manea or Hungarian social critic Miklos Haraszti, who, after the fall of communism, returned to Hungary and served in its Parliament. In all, about 20 scholars found respite in the academy, which ceased operations with the fall of communism. But Botstein has continued to collect outcast intellectuals.

When outspoken Nigerian writer Chinua Acebe was paralyzed in a suspicious automobile accident in his homeland, Botstein offered the author a position at Bard and a handicapped-accessible house on campus. In 1991, the college sponsored 15 Burmese students, exiled for their political activities, and helped place them at several US colleges. Bard has also instituted a one-year program for undergraduates from emerging democracies to study at the college on full scholarships.

"This is what American colleges and universities should be doing as a matter of course," says Botstein. "But they don't. Instead, they hide their provincialism behind procedure and bureaucracy. They prefer to hire their own." Botstein continues, his voice rising with indignation:

"We, as academics, cannot feed the poor. But in this arena we can do something. We must do something."

On a recent evening, Pauline Dongala sits in the dining room of Blodgett Hall, the Berkshire mansion whose property was donated to create Simon's Rock College 35 years ago. She is a beautiful woman, elegant in a floor-length dress the color of sea water. But her eyes seem haunted.

A convivial dinner has ended; a candle has been lit to keep the mood. Pauline Dongala sits forward in her chair and recalls the day, two years ago, when her world exploded.

"I was at work at the American Consulate in Brazzaville," she says, putting a hand to her chin, as if to support the memory. "It was lunch time, noon. As usual, I took my car and drove home. I had a lot of money in my purse and decided it was safer to leave it in my desk. How was I to know I would never return?"

By the time Pauline Dongala reached her home at Brazzaville University, bombs were falling.

"You have to understand," she says. "It's as if here - bang! - there goes K Mart. Pow, the supermarket is rubble. We had heard some gunfire before, but nothing like this."

The neighbors who gathered kept hoping that the fighting would be brief, that there would be some compromise between the rival militias. A call from her brother-in-law, who knew someone in the government, told Pauline Dongala it would not end soon. With her husband in the United States, she collected her children and fled 200 miles to her family's village.

"Pauline is particularly traumatized," says U Ba Win, who, together with Simon's Rock vice president and dean Bernard F. Rodgers Jr., worked with the US State Department to bring the Dongala family to America. "Emmanuel has his writing through which to express his anger," Ba Win says. "But Pauline lost three of her brothers to the militias. She has survivor's guilt."

Still, the Dongalas have settled comfortably into this Berkshire town, thanks in large measure to Ba Win. Like Leon Botstein, the college provost's urge to help comes from his own refugee experience. When he was a young boy, his family was forced to leave Burma under similar circumstances. He is a warm, generous man who at least once a year prepares a Burmese feast - like the rice and shrimp curry he had just cooked for the Dongalas - for the entire Simon's Rock population of 350 students. It was his idea that the college cultivate a bit of land for the Dongalas so they could grow mannioc, a root vegetable, and greens that they were used to eating in the Congo.

"I am happy to work for men who really live their values," says Ba Win. "When there is a need that is pressing and obvious, we act."

Emmanuel Dongala likes to tell the story of his wife's first day in the United States. After arriving in the Berkshires on a cold April evening, Pauline Dongala rose early the next morning, looked out the window, and said to her husband, "I had no idea there was so much sand in America." Her husband laughs affectionately at the memory. "She had never seen snow before!"

Today, Pauline Dongala works at the Simon's Rock College library and studies English while her younger daughters attend high school. For the two years the family had no car, they could be seen bicycling the two miles between Simon's Rock and the town of Great Barrington. They have made many friends in the community and even hosted a dinner to raise money for Congolese refugees.

For all their pleasure at these new connections, the Dongalas have no intention of remaining in the United States. "You have to understand that mine was the generation of African independence," Dongala says. "We planned to get our educations, return home, and build a free country. When this fighting is over, I will go back."

But first the author plans to use his Guggenheim to write his most ambitious novel yet. This month, he will travel around Africa to find the heart of that story. "In Africa, everything about this century is intensified - famines, the civil wars, AIDS," says Dongala. "So much of this has touched the children. They have become orphans, been forced to be soldiers, suffered through hunger. I want to write about this through the eyes of two young Africans. It is my job to tell their story."