Mujila, Fiston Mwanza: The River in My Belly & Other Poems

Translated from the French by J. Bret Maney (Deep Vellum Publishing, paperback)

Publication Date: August 31, 2021

Publisher Marketing: Award-winning Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila returns to the Deep Vellum catalog with a poetry book both intimate and universal, seeking through metaphor and lyric to reckon with the contested subjecthood of Mujila's native country.

The River in My Belly is the collection only Mujila could write, blending musical lyricism, legend, and theology from Africa and Europe; from the widely-acclaimed author of the novel Tram 83.

Created originally as part of a multi-disciplinary work of poetry, music, video, and dance performed in Europe in 2019, The River in My Belly shows the Congo River as it runs in real life and through Mujila's body and mind; he contemplates his native river and the decades of upheaval the Democratic Republic of Congo has gone through, in turns berating and serenading a homeland from exile in Austria. This bittersweet, ambitious collection, in the words of translator J. Bret Maney, "does no less than seek to reinitiate the Congo River in the imaginary of European languages."