Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel recounts the narrator’s childhood on a remote island off the West African coast, living with his mysterious grandfather, several mothers and no fathers. We learn of a dark chapter in the island’s history: a bush fire destroys the crops, then hundreds perish in a cholera outbreak

 

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By Night the Mountain Burns. Trans. by Jethro Soutar. And Other Stories, 2014.
                      
excerpt



By Night The Mountain Burns recounts the narrator’s childhood on a remote island off the West African coast, living with his mysterious grandfather, several mothers and no fathers. We learn of a dark chapter in the island’s history: a bush fire destroys the crops, then hundreds perish in a cholera outbreak. Superstition dominates: now the islanders must sacrifice their possessions to the enraged ocean god. What of their lives will they manage to save?
Whitmanesque in its lyrical evocation of the island, Ávila Laurel’s writing builds quietly, through the oral rhythms of traditional storytelling, into gripping drama worthy of an Achebe or a García Márquez.

This novel tells of childhood on a remote island off the west African coast. Superstition dominates in dark times and the hard-pressed islanders sacrifice their possessions to the enraged ocean. What of their lives will they save?
Both lyrical and unsparingly truthful, this novel draws on oral storytelling to illuminate a little-known corner of Africa.



"Ávila Laurel’s novel tells of survival in fierce isolation, a place where the ocean provides the only horizon and is a source of the greatest hopes and the most awful fears." - Alfonso Carnicero Izquierdo



"It has fallen to Ávila Laurel to be the chronicler of Annobón, just as Derek Walcott is for St Lucia, VS Naipaul for Trinidad and Edwidge Danticat is for Haiti. To this list must now be added the name of Annobón, half-evoked and half-dreamed in Ávila Laurel’s unique language." - JM Pedrosa



"The Equatorial Guinean novel that has perhaps captivated me the most is By Night The Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel. It is a story of great mystery, but also a testimonial to life on Annobón Island. This real-life island seems to emerge from the sea like some Atlantic legend, but the harsh conditions to which the islanders have been subjected mean we’re a long way from charming tales of mariners and mermaids. In these large-leaved green forests, the horror stories are all too real" Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón

“I was not old enough to see such a thing, nor will anyone ever be old enough.”
Written in the repetitive and elaborate style of oral storytelling, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s novel By Night the Mountain Burns reminisces about a series of events on a small island in the Atlantic Ocean, presumably recalling the author’s childhood home of Annobón off the coast of Equatorial Guinea. Translated from Spanish by Jethro Soutar, the novel dwells in language itself, musing over words that cannot be translated from the local language into Spanish. This untranslatability is amplified in the English version, as Soutar leaves an intriguing trail of words in the islander’s language and Spanish.
By Night the Mountain Burns reads almost as if it were a transcript of this storytelling, copied down with all of its moments of indecision and belated remembering. It is a melodic text rife with images of hollowed canoes and mist-enveloped mountains that would be almost too mythical were it not for the hilarious commentaries of the speaker. As much time is spent on discussions of bedwetting as of the local hospital, keeping the story more personal than historical. Above all, the narrator warns of eating chilis and not washing one’s hands: “Wham! Blowing on your lips, and ouch if you touched yourself where you shouldn’t.”
Laurel’s novel entrances the reader with its vibrant sense of place. Each of the characters knows every beach and path with such clarity that it feels as if each tree is recognized, when in fact, even the people are given no names by the narrator beyond that of their role in the community.
By Night’s narration loops back on itself, finding new details in its retellings. As the story circles round, certain words and phrases become familiar, even comforting, like the musical call and response used to haul a new canoe down to the shore:

Aaale, toma suguewa,
Alewa!
Aaaalee, toma suguewa,
Alewa!

In a plot that meanders unpredictably, such repetition grounds the text for its readers just as the song helps guide the characters within the story. These sounds resonate through the island where everyone is connected to everyone in some way.
Stories as momentous as the making of a new canoe, as brutal as a murderous riot, as horrific as a cholera outbreak perpetually resurface in the novel. The narrator returns to these moments of rupture in his community, perhaps trying to process them through repetition. If these moments can be difficult to read, it is because they mean so much.
Himself a political activist, Laurel thoughtfully portrays of a community deeply influenced by imperial powers. Scarcity dominates island life; too few men means too few fish and items such as cloth, kerosene, and coveted tobacco arrive only on unpredictable, “friendly” foreign ships that leave more behind than cigarettes. Although the trade ships carrying rum and fishing line come all too rarely, the resident white Padre, the western-educated doctor, and the Spanish-obsessed schoolmaster, perpetuate colonial ideologies between shipments. The novel’s real interest, however, lies in its sensitive representation of these roles, their powers (and lack there of), and the fusion of cultures.
When cholera rips through the village, Laurel marks a cross on the page for every person buried and lists the name of each dead adult (children don’t have fixed names). This poignant page of names remembers each of these people in his or her particularity, rather than as some easily skimmed-over statistic, illustrating the greatest strength of the novel: its care for each individual within the community. Remembered in Laurel’s novel by a child too young to attend funerals, this tragedy is a space of confusion as much as it is one of sadness. “With so many of our adults crying, we lost the will to eat,” the narrator explains, “and when we did eat the food tasted bitter, because of all the crying, the bitter taste of tears.”
Reading By Night the Mountain Burns is like listening to an old man tell a story that is so clear to him that his eyes look out through his child self onto a world he no longer inhabits. The novel’s multi-faceted narrator drives the novel; he is an adult, yet one still pondering questions that infused his childhood. At the end, the narrator expresses the hope that this story might be found by someone else who inhabited this small island with him. It is not a text of voyeurism or tourism; it is a text for remembering together. - Emma Schneider






Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trans. by Jethro Soutar, & Other Stories, 2017.


On Mount Gurugu, overlooking the Spanish enclave of Melilla on the North African coast, desperate migrants gather before attempting to scale the city’s walls and gain asylum on European soil. Inspired by first-hand accounts, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel has written an urgent novel, by turns funny and sad, bringing a distinctly African perspective to a major issue of our time.


‘As a person, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel is gentle, open and funny. As a voice, he is brave, angry, uncompromising. Here is the voice of someone who has courted and suffered persecution for the sake of a better world. How will he be remembered in the end – as revolutionary or martyr? Juan Tomás is not likely to disappear quietly.’ - William T. Vollmann


A group of refugees in North Africa share their stories and bide their time, agonizingly close to freedom.
Mount Gurugu in Morocco is near Melilla, a sliver of Spanish territory on the North African coast. Crossing to Melilla would allow the African refugees on the mountain to continue to Europe, but law enforcement on both sides are loath to have them. So the characters in this loosely plotted novel by Ávila Laurel (By Night the Mountain Burns, 2014) are stuck, left to philosophize and tell stories that alternate from comic to bleak. One man recalls a little girl who could morph into an old woman and back again; another recalls a provocative poem his father wrote; another recalls the gluttonous appetites of an aide to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Spinning yarns can be dispiriting, though (“Why do African stories always have to have unhappy endings?” one asks), so the men take modest balm in an ongoing soccer tournament. But politics and struggle are rarely far from their collective mind, and the novel intensifies in its latter pages, with stories of beatings by the Moroccan forestry police and abuse of women by men within the camp and a push to climb the fence into Melilla. Though there’s not a strong arc to the novel, Ávila Laurel’s layering of anecdotes makes it clear how dehumanizing the refugee experience is, with authorities looking for any excuse to expel them from the camp. “Police would have liked nothing better than to raze the camp and clear the mountain of black people,” he writes. And though Ávila Laurel’s prose (via Soutar’s translation) isn’t very stylish, it has the benefit of plainspoken, documentary force and breadth of vision, his narrative eye exploring a variety of elements of life in the camp but concluding with a unified struggle for optimism and liberation.
An understated, somber, and highly observant sketchbook of lives on the margins. - Kirkus Reviews


The Gurugu Pledge is set on Mount Gurugu, in northern Morocco, at the foot of which is a speck of Europe, the Spanish autonomous city of Melilla -- making it a draw for Africans eager to flee or emigrate to Europe, which here is just a fence (rather than the whole Mediterranean) away. The novel describes the lives of some five hundred souls living on Mount Gurugu, "black Africans all", in the most basic conditions -- in caves, with barely any protection, and limited access to food.
       Ávila Laurel points to the rise of Idi Amin and his ilk -- so also Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the (mis)ruler of the Equatorial Guinea the author has left -- as ushering in an era: "in which African civilians were obliged to leave their homelands and go and live elsewhere", and The Gurugu Pledge presents a variety of stories of those who have fled, for different reasons, their native countries, hoping for a future in Europe. Those on Mount Gurugu share some of their stories -- though they are careful about many of the specifics. Indeed, Ávila Laurel does speak of national groups, but leaves most of his individuals of indistinct nationality: even if their origins and backgrounds are, in many ways, very different, their fates are similar. It makes for an interesting tension between a larger 'African' identity (as also how the Europeans see them, unable or oblivious to differentiating between cultural and national backgrounds) and their very different individual ones -- as also throughout The Gurugu Pledge various individuals come to the fore, but it remains, until near the end, very much a group-story. So also: The fewer clues you offered the Moroccan forestry police the better, or any police force for that matter, and so the rule of thumb was that the closer you got to the gates of Europe, the more you disposed of anything linking you to a concrete African country. On Gurugu you revealed your origins only to those you truly trusted, and yet the origin of one African is hardly an unknown quantity to another. 
       The Gurugu Pledge shifts through several overlapping storylines of sorts, effectively presenting the life of those at the European portals: early on it is a round of shared stories that dominates, then the importance of football (soccer), including an important match that is then postponed because two of the women are ill, then a focus on two men who unsettle the atmosphere there, "responsible for the unrest on the mountain"; meanwhile, one of the life-stories recounted involves a schoolboy poem that determined its author's fate and is repeatedly returned to. It can seem that Ávila Laurel was unsure of how to shape the novel, moving from one focus to another rather than sticking to one formula -- simply having the characters share their different stories, for example, or building the story around the football matches, and weaving life on the mountain into these -- but the looser, shifting approach does offer a much broader and ultimately likely more effective picture.
       For a while, football dominates: Ávila Laurel notes it is one of the few things that bridge Africa and Europe, with Africans rarely seen on television except on the pitch -- so also:
It's football that teaches children that black people get to go on TV, get to be admired and applauded. Perhaps they don't all end up saying they want to be footballers, but they see a brother up there on the screen, someone from their tribe who has triumphed, and he speaks for them all.  
       Inescapable here, too, is how circumstances are determinative, Ávila Laurel observing: 
     People played football on Gurugu to keep warm and busy, for the hours were long and football enabled them to lose track of time, but in a different set of circumstances, they'd have read all day and into the night. And in a different reality, a team of African scholars would have come to Gurugu mountain to talk to the inhabitants and to ask them to comment on Peter's father's poem 
       A final section -- titled ('The Beginning and the End') after a series of numbered chapters -- turns the story more intimately inwards, the narrative voice switching to the first person, the individual story now standing out from the larger collective one. Here too different aspects of life on Mount Gurugu -- and life leading up to it -- are explored. A journalist's visit to the site adds a rare outside figure, and glimpse of the beyond.
       The Gurugu Pledge has something of a patchwork feel, but offers appealing variety. Ávila Laurel's effective use of different approaches makes for a revealing portrait of this strangely isolated community -- physically disconnected from their pasts and futures, after all, even as these remain so significant to them while they bide their time in this hellish, uncertain limbo. - M.A.Orthofer



‘[In By Night the Mountain Burns] a delightfully candid, deceptively sober narrative voice weaves brief histories of a collective existence shaped by living on the shores of a sea that does not (or will not?) provide sufficient sustenance.’ Helen Oyeyemi


‘The volcanic island of Annobón, off the west African coast, provides the setting for this novel about a poor community facing a series of natural disasters. Survival, hope and despair wrestle in this surprising work by Equatorial Guinea’s leading author.’ Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times (Books of the Year 2014)


‘A leading light of the Equatorial Guinean literature movement.’ The Guardian


‘Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel offers [a] plain style, grown out of the native oral tradition of storytelling. By Night the Mountain Burns is a collection of childhood memories, a working through of hardship and superstition.’ The Independent


‘Ávila Laurel is a brave opponent of the corrupt Obiang regime in his native land. His dark, troubled narrative of “our Atlantic Ocean island” [By Night the Mountain Burns] is remarkable, original and poetic.’ Tom Moriarty, Irish Times


‘Linguistic play and rhythm are clearly important to Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel . . . they are effectively conveyed in Jethro Soutar’s eloquent translation. Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: a recognition it richly deserves.’ Times Literary Supplement


‘Poignant . . . This fascinating story emerges from the speaker’s inquiries into the identities and social laws of his community, and from his attempts to make sense of the calamities of his homeland.’ Publishers Weekly


‘This translation by Jethro Soutar offers a glimpse into the joy and struggle of [the Annobón islanders’] isolation.’ Minneapolis Star Tribune


‘[The novel’s] strength lies in the complexity of the social commentary that runs beneath the plot . . . incisively exposing the difficulties with cultural transmission, interpretation and ownership.’ Mona Moraru, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Read an interview with Ávila Laurel in the Irish Times.