This was my cover for a canonical addition to the list of literary translations from Jadavpur University Press – two plays by Aimé Césaire, Une Saison au Congo, 1966 and Une Tempête, 1969, translated from the French into Bangla by Kanchana Mukhopadhyay and Rita Ray, respectively, as ‘Congote ek ritu’ and ‘Ekti Tufan’.
The first play in this book, Une Saison au Congo, follows the period of imprisonment and subsequent assassination of Patrice Lumumba, who led the resistance party, the Mouvement National Congolais, against the Belgian occupation, and became Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo after the transfer of power in 1960.
Lumumba had begun his career promoting ‘Polar’ beer for the Bracongo brewery. At the time, political assemblies were prohibited by the government in power, although people could gather to drink beer. These congregations on street corners and inside noisy taverns become synonymous with the resistance, and a recurrent motif in the play.
So, for the back cover, I drew beer bottles, overlaid with a monoline portrait of Lumumba on the bottom right corner, as well as a contrasting, orange line drawing of a crouched Caliban from the second play, ‘Une Tempête’, a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, on the background of a ribbed green paper texture.
For the front cover, I imagined a ship, contained in a similar bottle, to give the sense of a controlled universe akin to Prospero’s, and of a tempest imploding within it.
