JeffK

These first pages are preceded by an introduction which establishes the setting with relevant history. Job one is to orient the reader, as well as well as introduce the protagonist, antagonist, immediate problem, etc. 

            A fumbo has a surface meaning and a hidden one, and it can be used to either avoid or create conflict. It is a puzzle, a metaphor, and the makeshift of an outspoken people during those accidental moments when discretion is suddenly required. It can be a riddle, an insult in disguise, an indirect accusation, and even something someone says without thinking.

            When should something so frequently silly as a fumbo be taken seriously?

            Only a few days ago, there was the mentioning, by Busiku, the catechist’s wife, of a goat squeezing through a neighbor’s garden fence.

             As is the intention of all fumbos, or at least all intended fumbos, it was only after they parted ways that Sophie Tembo began to grasp what it could mean — after a seemingly unrelated chat about their husbands.

            Only yesterday afternoon, another fumbo was uttered by Emma Tambwa, the village merchant’s second wife, during the village health lesson.

             As the only ongoing event for every woman in the village of Tumbako, the weekly lessons given by Kaya, the village health worker, were a sort of covert women’s forum. They studied each other’s faces more than the abstract illustrations that Kaya used for visual aids.

            A tall woman with a sharply upturned lip, shifty black eyes, and a little bulb on her nose, Emma Tambwa raised her hand, and her voice throbbed like a loose piece of rubber: “Do you do eye tests in case a child will need glasses?”

            Kaya shrugged. “I don’t know if I can get glasses, and, even so, I can’t tell you which ones,” he said. “Maybe I can get an eye chart that will tell me something. Is the child old enough to read letters?”

            “I just wondered,” Emma throbbed almost innocently. “Just in case the daughter is like the father.”

            The one person in Tumbako who wore glasses was Sophie’s husband Tolo, the village school director.

             Only a few hours ago, while she was sleeping, Sophie had a dream about her Grandma Sophie-Aya, for whom she was named.

             “Wake up,” Grandma Sophie-Aya said. Then she made the sign of the Uke.

             Grandma hadn’t spoken to Sophie from the dead before, and, after so many years and prayers, she never thought she would.

            Sophie opened her door and looked, in the growing light, at the village clinic, which was in the next compound. People were already over there, waiting for it to open. She couldn’t tell who they were, at least not yet. With the Sun still low on the horizon, their elongated shadows wagged between the fat mud-brick pillars of the veranda.

            “Are we going?” her daughter Maria asked behind her.

            “Yes. Hurry with the basin.”

            Maria stooped down.

            With plump red-brown hands and a new copper bracelet on her wrist, Sophie arranged a rolled-up piece of cloth on her daughter’s head. On top of the coiled cloth, she placed a plastic basin piled with laundry. Maria stood up, holding the basin on her head with slim fingers, alertly scanning her short, chubby, baby-faced mother. At ten years old, she was an adept apprentice, a strong girl, straight-backed in a blue cotton dress. If only she wasn’t so shy about everything.

            On top of the fuzzy cornrows arching front to back over her broad oval head, Sophie hoisted an empty plastic jerry can. The room around them was gray, but it was growing lighter, and almost everything could now be seen. From under the jerry can, she glanced at the picture on the wall, painted on a piece of canvas sack that was stretched over a frame: a mermaid with a snake wrapped around her tail. Her husband Tolo got it in Kitwanga, the market town. She didn’t like the mermaid’s hypnotic eyes, the pinpoints of white light in her pupils.

            Opening the door, Sophie and Maria stepped off the low, packed-earth foundation of their house into the sunlight, picking their way through the mud and goat shit they’d sweep later, after the ground dried. The morning mist was still on it. They reached the road and scrambled over the glistening ruts, turning their backs to the clinic.

            Sophie’s foot slid on a patch of clay, the empty container bucking on her head. Clutching the jerry can to her shoulder and the kanga around her hips, she danced to keep her balance, skidded to a stop, and gazed down at a red-grey clod of earth on the big toe in her sandal. She scooped up the chunk of clay and rolled it between her fingers.

            “Good?” Maria asked.

            “We’ll come back to it,” Sophie murmured, examining the soft red vein in the road bank. “We’re going somewhere.”

            “Where?”

             “Just hurry.”

            She took Maria’s hand, and they jogged down the firm side of the road. She moved like a chubby piston, and the girl struggled to keep up. The village of Tumbako unfolded alongside them. They jogged past clusters of thatch-roofed buildings: main house, wives’ huts, kitchen hut and latrine. Smoke was rising from kitchen huts where the morning tea was brewing. It was almost the end of the rainy season, and the air was cool, but the light beyond them was growing stronger. A skinny man crouching over a peeling enamel washbowl paused, a piece of green soap bobbing in the water. “What news?” he called.

             Sophie shook her head, and they kept moving.

By Jeff Keller

First Assignment: Story Statement

In a remote Congolese village 45 years ago, Sophie Tembo, the vulnerable but impetuous wife of the village school director, is framed for murder by witchcraft and demands a traditional trial by poison as a last resort to prove her innocence. Drinking the poison, she falls into a coma and travels to the land of the dead, where her ancestors give her a warning about the Congo’s impending future (based on subsequent events but open-ended). The Good News is that people have the God-given ability to change. Sophie’s task is to deliver this message to Mobutu Sese Sesko, a dictator who has renamed the country Zaire and is busy looting its natural resources.

Second Assignment: Antagonists

            The antagonistic force is represented by the Acquirers (historically a popular name for Mobutu’s cronies) who strive to enrich themselves no matter what. The leader of Sophie’s clan ancestors who were/are Acquirers is the spirit of Sadiki, who, when she was alive, acquired wealth by collaborating with an Arab slaver. When accused by an ancestor of betraying him, she blames him for oversleeping when the rest of his village fled the slave raid. She is a champion of the elite, who she says is in possession of a superior survival strategy. She is the one who insists that Sophie must go to Mobutu. She also crashes meetings with other ancestors to harass them. When Sophie rejects her, she sabotages the mission.

Sadiki’s living counterpart is Assistant Commissar of Politics Lemba, a soulless, philandering, perpetually distracted, kleptocratic clan member who has access to Mobutu. He is Sophie’s initial target.

As a group, the ancestors act like a nonprofit board of directors from hell. As for Sophie’s fellow Congolese, she’s not the one who’s deluded, but it doesn’t matter. No one wants to hear what she has to say, which boils down to "We got it all wrong; we must make it right." A major foil is her deadbeat brother, whom she meets on her journey to the Assistant Commissar. The main foil is, of course, Sophie herself, who wants to go back to her children as much as she wants to succeed and chafes at the burden put upon her to give others a choice.

Third Assignment: Title

The Good News of Sophie Tembo. It’s positive, intriguingly alien (African), and biblical sounding, and it reflects the story.

Fourth Assignment: Genre and Comparables

The market for The Good News of Sophie Tembo is the same as for The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Twenty-four years after it was published, people still ask her about that book in particular. Add to that such stories as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, and you have a tradition of high-quality literary novels about the Congo.

 Within that tradition, The Good News of Sophie Tembo’s genre is an upmarket quest novel, which goes back to Don Quixote. Unlike other quest novels, it is about the difficulty of sharing, not obtaining, the McGuffin (the ancestors’ message).

The time is right for another steppingstone in the Congo novel, in this case, an accessible narrative companion to The Power of Women by Denis Mukwege, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason Stearns, or Congo Inc. by Koli Jean Bofane, a portrait of the generation who endured the Congo wars at the turn of this century.

Fifth Assignment: Logline

            The vulnerable but impetuous wife of the school director in a remote Congolese village drinks poison to prove she is not a witch, falls into a coma, and is given a warning by her ancestors. She must deliver this warning to her country’s kleptocratic dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.

Sixth Assignment: Core Wound and the Primary Conflict

            Sophie’s primary conflict is with circumstances beyond her control, beginning with a traumatic event during a raid of her village by Melele rebels when she was a girl. Her grandmother is killed by a blow on the head while trying to protect her. Then, while being forced to commit a shameful act in order to protect her grandmother, whom she doesn’t know is dying, she is rescued by her father, uncle, and male cousins. The resulting wound resurfaces in the plot and plays a role. (Sophie’s grandmother also plays a role in the story once Sophie visits the land of the dead.)

Sophie's ultimate core wound is her knowledge of the future, culminating in a vision of herself as a baby whose mother is forced by invading soldiers to crush her in a mortar.

At the story’s first plot point, she has no choice but to endure a trial by poison. Then she is given a message that she has no choice but deliver.

            As an ordinary person given an extraordinary task, Sophie has to cope with being possessed and then prematurely dispossessed by the Holy Spirit, the demands of her ancestors, the very gravity of her task, and the sabotage of ancestors known as Acquirers, as well as with those who don’t want to hear her message. Her desire is to be herself and do things her own way, for she is led down the wrong path. In the end, she must pay the price to do what she believes she has to, and a new era begins for her.

Seventh Assignment: Setting

                Prophets are pretty common in the Congo. When I was in the Peace Corps, in a small Congolese village, my neighbor announced one day that she was a prophet possessed by the Holy Spirit. That experience was my initial inspiration. It has been augmented by more than 30 years of experience with my wife’s extended Congolese family.

 The heart of the story is Sophie’s 400-mile journey through eastern Congo, from a remote village in the province of Kivu to Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga, where Assistant Commissar Lemba is temporarily residing. The goal is to put the reader in that world, crawling on a flimsy, single-plank bridge over a river at night, for example, or passing through the annual burning of the savannah on a train.

 In that world, many things can happen that would be difficult to attempt elsewhere. The protagonist’s ancestors can vie to possess her neighbor’s baby, in order to give her conflicting advice, for example. She can heal a dozen gravely ill people, visit the land of the dead, and react to dozens of uniquely Congolese situations. The story becomes a collage of interactions that compounds as it goes.

 I want to immerse the reader in the world of the Congo, explore the nature of prophecy, and develop Zaire as a metaphor, a possible future for all of us. Those are three major reasons why I chose the Congo for my setting.