Valérie Bah (Rafael Alexandre)

Representation in the arts isn’t simply a matter of augmenting narratives that have been neglected. Within any identity category, there are bound to be fractures – nuances and contradictions that defy easy categorization. Must efforts at representation then encompass all the diffuse, pluralistic elements of race, class, and sexuality in order to satisfy a mandate of inclusion?

In Subterrane, interdisciplinary artist Valérie Bah’s polyvocal novel about how Black queer communities create meaning for themselves, this representational dilemma is tackled from a host of perspectives. Zeynab Abdi is an established documentary filmmaker adored by arts grant bodies and audiences alike, but some members of her community believe she is an unfit representative of the Black experience; all the same, Zeynab is trying to interview Doudou Laguerre, a renegade activist who uses civil disobedience to protest a real estate development company, Defense Construction Incorporated (DCI), and their unrelenting construction projects.

DCI is primarily active in Cipher Falls, an industrial borough of New Stockholm (a fictional      city originally created by playwright Deniz Başar) that is becoming gentrified. The impact of DCI’s activities reverberate widely, but residents remain unsure about whether highway building and condo developments will benefit the community, or compound its many difficulties.

Frantz is a drug dealer who wants to work for DCI despite his personal connection to Doudou. He welcomes gentrification to the extent that it can provide him the better life he desires for himself. Frantz’s freewheeling  bead artist  girlfriend Phyllida, on the other hand, does not want the headaches that social advancement can bring. Then there is Maya, an ambitious cinematographer whose fascination with Zeynab is diminished once she realizes the director might be exploiting the suffering of cinematic subjects. All of these representations are valid, Bah suggests, even if they do not cohere into a monolithic understanding of Blackness.

This experiential diversity is made more vivid by Subterrane’s chapters, which are written in distinct styles and voices, displaying Bah’s commitment to the full-blooded individuality of the characters. The high-wire act that dignifies each individual’s motivations and inner conflicts, and creates the illusion that their thoughts are not the product of mere writerly artifice, is the most compelling achievement of the novel.

“My silk stockings are bunching up where my bouboun meets my inner thigh, producing an intolerable itch,” Mattie, an aging Cipher Falls resident forced to relocate due to a DCI overpass project, muses while sitting in church. “For now, I’ll have to be content with a discreet patdown, using a dissimulated hand underneath the hymnbook. I thought that no one was looking, but trust that the whole row of youths on the other side of me swivelled their heads toward me and started snickering. Let them wait another 20 years and see what kind of heartaches life grants them.”

Because the vignettes emerge from a certain stratum of society, there is an elegiac quality to the novel that suggests these voices may be some of the last recordings of a disappearing populace – that years hence, the youths ridiculing Mattie will have to reckon with an evil hiding in plain sight, masquerading as progress and the luxury of convenience.

Through the overlapping narratives that converge on Doudou’s mysterious death – his body is found mangled in a tree early in the novel, the activist seemingly having fallen off a cliffside – Bah links the social dysfunction of Cipher Falls to the late-capitalist excess that the crusader gave his life to fight.

The question of why representation matters finds its answer in Bah’s contention that imagined slights, bitter animosities, and radical gestures of collaboration within the Cipher Falls community are the result of economic conditions that exert ungovernable pressures on social relationships. All the events of the novel are mere symptoms of an unchecked political disease – one that is slowly winning out against the res publica. And despite Doudou’s meaningful life of resistance, Subterrane gestures at the possibility that the strivings of old Cipher Falls may have been for nought.

“They built this system on the empty spiritual foundation of earth, its extraction,” Doudou explains to Zeynab, uncertain if she has been corrupted by institutions she purports not to serve. “A hole that constantly needs to be filled, always generating other holes, tearing at the fabric of organic life. Perceiving things, only with the aim to destroy them. Creating an ‘up’ so there can be a ‘down.’ Fabricating a heaven so that they can send people to hell.”