Espionage in Ouagadougou

Marie Mitchell is a welcome update to the fictional is spy contingent. She is female, black, and American, all of which give Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel a completely different atmosphere from the classic spy genre dominated by Cold-War British men. To add to the uncommon features of this novel, American Spy is set not around Checkpoint Charlie or Eastern Europe, but in Burkina Faso and Martinique, and is based on actual events.

The novel starts with classic thriller drama:

I unlocked the safe beneath my desk, grabbed my old service automatic, and crept towards my bedroom doorway, stealthy until I was brought to grief by a Lego Duplo that stung the sole of my foot. I hobbled the rest of the way to the door and crouched behind it.

If the central character were male, this would immediately identify the novel as a humorous spoof — imagine Jason Bourne or George Smiley having to deal with such tedious problems as Legos underfoot! Womens’ lives, though, are often driven by the quotidian details, and Marie Mitchell is an honest-to-goodness spy who also has real-life responsibilities. In this novel, these responsibilities are two-fold: a pair of four-year-old twin boys called William and Tommy.

A linear novel is virtually unknown these days, and American Spy too switches between the past and present in alternating chapters (with moderate success, in my opinion. The switching back and forth between multiple timeframes is just too confusing at times with too many tantalizing threads).

Marie Mitchell joined the FBI because her adored older sister, Helene, was an FBI agent. For two black girls growing up in Harlem during the Civil Rights Movement, this was an unusual career choice. Helene was driven by Cold War paranoia and the example of her father’s friend Mr Ali, an undercover cop. (Helene, we are told in the ‘present’ chapter, died almost a decade ago, and there is an immediate suggestion that her somewhat mysterious death will play an important part in this book.)

One of the best angles in the book is the discrimination that Marie faces in the 1980s FBI, from the routine minor insults (her boss sends her to get coffee during meetings) to the unavailable opportunities:

deliberately excluded from operational meetings and told it was because men were better at that kind of planning. I was left off certain surveillance squads because agents “didn’t feel safe” with me backing them up.

And yet, because of her skin colour, she is utilized by the FBI to spy on black American organizations. I was disappointed by her apparent calm acquiescence: she has no apparent moral conflicts. Later, Marie is deputized twice as a “temporary CIA contractor” (bureaucratese for ‘spy’).

Here’s where the novel gets into real-life geopolitics. Marie is assigned to watch Thomas Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso, on his visit to the US. Why Marie? Because she is beautiful, black, and speaks French, and is Sankara’s ‘type’. Sankara was a charismatic revolutionary leader, sometimes called Africa’s Che Guevara, who believed strongly in African self-reliance and refused IMF loans. He cut his own salary and that of other government workers, organized mass vaccination programs, reduced infant mortality from 20% to 14% in 5 years, and started massive programs in literacy, tree-planting, housing and infrastructure. He had an explicit multi-pronged plan to improve the status of women. By 1986, when Marie’s assignment starts, Sankara has started leaning towards authoritarianism. This is not a problem for the CIA, but the fact that Sankara is not pro-America is definitely a concern for them.

Many readers, including myself, may know little of the history of Burkina Faso, and this book is likely to spur some research. The CIA’s modus operandi is quite neatly summarized in a discussion between Marie and the CIA operative.

I said slowly. “The CIA wants to establish a French-style electoral system in Burkina Faso.[…] that’s not a two-round system and therefore not actually French — because you hope to create a free and open election.”

“Yes”.

“– of the candidate that the CIA plans to back. You already have your pro-American candidate picked out, don’t you?”

Marie is sharp but has an ambiguous morality about her work; with some carrot-and-stick, she agrees to the plan, including the implicit expectation that she will seduce Sankara. Then the cynical, practical, Marie falls hard for (the married with children) Sankara, which of course colours the whole nature of her subsequent trip to Burkina Faso and the following events.

Much of the novel is written as a letter? memoir? to her sons, written after the events in the book and in case she does not survive to see them grow. She addresses them directly, and this makes for some awkward sentences.

“Maman, I’m scared,” you said, Tommy, and clung to me.

“Blood,” you said, William, and pointed at my face.

“No, I’m not,” you said in French, WIlliam. “I’m not tired.”

This formulation is unusual (yet another unusual feature!) but not to my taste; I found it both tortured and difficult to read. Some chapters start with lines like

When your grandmother was twelve, her mother died suddenly, and she went to Saint-Pierre to live with her sister, Sido. A year passed before their father, Leon, got it into his head to send her to New York. His own sister, Agathe’s aunt, had married an American.

It takes some thought on the reader’s part to figure out these family relationships, especially as the characters are referred to by different terms in different chapters. Marie’s mother is sometimes ‘your grandmother’, sometimes Agathe, or ‘my mother’, and her grandfather is called ‘Pop’, so that I struggled to remember if some event had happened to her mother or grandmother. This ends up being a confusing distraction from the main plot of the novel. And yet, the family background explains some of Marie’s behaviour and choices, and cannot be ignored. Her mother ‘passes for white’ in America — a traumatic and tense experience — and then abandons her two daughters to return to Martinique. Her father has had limited opportunities as a black immigrant NYPD cop, so she feels she must take all the opportunities she is offered.

Interwoven are lovely sidelights into the black immigrant experience in America. Marie’s paternal grandfather was from Barbados, and “managed to own his own store” at a time when “they wouldn’t even have served him a meal at the Woolworth’s counter”. Marie’s mother married a very dark man as an act of rebellion against the parental pressure to ‘pass’. “My mother liked my father because he was dark, and my father liked my mother because she was light.”

The descriptions of Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, is also very nicely done: not exoticized but written with an appropriate eye to what an American would notice.

Readers who already doubt the morality of American foreign policy will find plentiful supporting evidence here. Others might find themselves startled. And all readers will end the book likely knowing a lot more about Burkina Faso, whatever they think of Marie Mitchell.