Tram 83 Quotes

“The roads that lead to truth and honesty are cut by flooding, filth, dog turds, lies, and blackouts, but why did he obstinately maintain his belief that a better world was possible? Why did he strive to reduce humanity to the dreams and quotations he gleaned on the pages of his texts? It’s called cowardice, perhaps even amnesia, or indeed a combination of the two. The world is beyond redemption, as Requiem put it. But supposing”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“...and lovers of romance novels and dissident rebels and brothers in Christ and druids and shamans and aphrodisiac vendors and scriveners and purveyors of real fake passports and gun-runners and porters and bric-a-brac trades and mining prospectors short on liquid assets and Siamese twins...”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“Eyes shrivelled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We’re doing this to pay for our studies. Dad’s already gone with the locomotives. He doesn’t write no more. Mom’s sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we’re sorcerers and it’s because of that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from our mom and that we should go to see the preachers who will cut the ,inks by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying round at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town.
They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila , Tram 83

“Baby-chicks are girls aged twelve to fifteen who prostitute themselves in the quarries, walk in single file, and don’t hesitate to band together and alert the soldiers should a customer refuse to pay the agreed rate. The slim-jims are barely adolescent boys who toil as casual laborers: extracting, carrying, and washing the gravel to separate out the diamond crystals.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“Your fate is already sealed, the route marked out in advance. Fate sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying. Death holds no meaning since you’ve never really lived. You cheat life.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“Your”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“Jazz is the only lever used by all the riffraff of Tram 83 to switch social class as one would subway cars.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“Poverty is hereditary just like power, stupidity, and haemorrhoids.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“He hiccupped and continued: "I write therefore I come...But unfortunately, my orgies are never eternal!...”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature , cinema, or contemporary dance. All detained in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryears, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watch-maker.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child-soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got a family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise like a ship you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“So whenever I write, it feels like my age is reduced by half, or even fifteen, seventeen, perhaps thirty-five years. It feels like I am returned to the belly of my mother and therefore have no one to answer to. I forget, in turn, my ragged clothes and my tuberculosis and my setbacks and my old pairs of shoes.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83