Perhaps it would have been easier to watch the president deliver that steady stream of benevolent pieties in the State of the Union Address if his vulgar reference to Caribbean and African countries had not still been ringing in my ears.
When I was a student at Brooklyn College in the seventies, one of my favorite professors was Jean-Claude Martin who was married to a beautiful Haitian woman named Mildred, who would become a friend. One afternoon, in the course of a slide show of photos taken in his recent travels, he included a few photos taken in Haiti, where he and Mildred had spent time on their way back from France. I will never forget his simple comment on those images: “Quant à nos amis Haitiens - ils nous apportent beaucoup de joie.” (As for our Haitian friends - they bring us much joy.)
The statement was all the more noteworthy since Prof. Martin and his wife brought great joy to people they befriended, welcoming students into their Manhattan apartment for end-of-year parties and, some years after I had obtained my doctorate and embarked on a teaching career of my own, inviting me to visit them at Jean-Claude’s family home in Normandy. During the time I spent with Mildred that summer, she impressed me as one of the kindest, most hospitable and cultivated people I have ever known. So when I heard our fearless leader’s insulting reference to her troubled native land, it felt like a gut-punch. How could he say such a thing? I was offended, not just for the sake of one particular Haitian friend and the people of her homeland, but also for the African countries Trump included in his blanket slur.
At some point becoming impatient with the Eurocentric focus of my work, I applied for a Fulbright grant to teach in a francophone African country and wound up spending the first five months of 1990 teaching American Literature at Marien Ngouabi University in the Congo. It was a life changing experience.
I would like to tell our president that just because a country is poor does not mean it is worthless.
The Congo, for instance, is rich in natural resources. One of the greatest rivers in the world runs through it. The forest of the Mayombe, dismissively known as “the jungle” by know-nothing Americans, is full of natural wonders. The beaches at Pointe Noir are magnificent. In Brazzaville, I attended memorable theatrical events, among them, a concert by the wonderful singer, Zao, and a fabulous performance by the Congolese National Ballet. There were also convivial evenings hanging out with colleagues at the outdoor café where the specialty was delicious barbecue with beer, and side dishes of French bread or cassava, or sometimes fried plantains. The lively music of the OK Jazz band, the songs of Zao or Simaro Massiya were always in the air. I was invariably treated with kindness and hospitality by the people I met there. A student who volunteered to carry a heavy carton full of my books to my home, or the bus driver who literally left his bus to walk me to a different line when I had lost my way. Yes, the Congolese people are poor, but that’s largely because rich local autocrats, following in the footsteps of brutal colonial exploiters, continue to ravage their land.
It is worth noting that there are two countries called Congo in Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly colonized by Belgium, and the Republic of the Congo, formerly colonized by the French. Brazzaville, the capital of the former French colony, lies directly across the great river from Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Whereas the grim history of the Belgian colony has been splendidly told by Adam Hochschild in "King Leopold’s Ghost" and the ignominious role of the American CIA in the post colonial tale of woe beginning with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and continuing with support for the brutal kleptocracy of Joseph Mobutu is well known, the history of the former French Congo, less familiar to most Americans, is hardly more edifying than that of the former Belgian Congo. In both countries, the essential problem is one with which Americans are increasingly familiar - that of shameful income inequality.
In a country where many people subsist on a diet of bananas and cassava, Denis Sassou-Ngouesso, the president of oil-rich Congo Brazzaville since 1979 except for a five-year period of civil war, is reported to have drawn millions of euros from Swiss bank accounts to pay for shirts, suits and other luxury items from Parisian boutiques for himself and his extended family, also purchasing properties and furniture in France. When this comfy situation has been threatened by tiresome expressions of popular indignation, Sassou-Nguesso has been able to depend on support from international corporations such as Occidental Petroleum and Elf Aquitaine.
Curiously enough, recent studies have demonstrated that poor people are likely to be more generous than the fabulously wealthy. Furthermore, generosity tends to make people happy. Our own master of the mean-spirited tweet may seem to be a good example of the phenomenon. When his lips are not turned down in a grim frowny face, they're posed in one of the humorless grins he produces for photo ops. When was the last time we saw this guy break out in the whole-hearted laughter that so often lit up Barack Obama’s face? When was the last time we saw an exchange of genuine affection between him and Melania, the kind of communion that was routine between Barack and Michelle?
Trump boasts about his great wealth, but makes sure nobody knows the difference between what he had in 2016 and what he has now. He can brag all he likes. He has a stunted soul.
As for the Vichy Republicans who tolerate all manner of assaults on our democratic institutions - disparagement of the free press, of the legal system, of scientific research, of separation of church and state, of the FBI - so long as they get those tax cuts - they remind me of nothing so much as some Germans I met when I was a military dependent in Wiesbaden during the sixties. At any mention of the Holocaust, they would hasten to remind me that Hitler wasn’t all that bad. After all, he ended unemployment and built the autobahns, didn’t he?
Lillian Corti, of Worcester, who holds bachelor's degrees in French and Italian, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, has taught at Tulsa University in Oklahoma. Under a Fulbright grant, she taught at Marien Ngouabi Universtiy in Brazzaville, Congo. She taught World Literature, Continental Literature and Women's Studies at the University of Alaska from 1991 through 2008. Her publications include The Myth of Medea and the Murder of Children, and "The Fire of Origins," a English translation of a novel by Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala.