General introduction to Albert Russo’s work by Martin Tucker:

“Albert Russo’s art and life are all of a unique piece, and that piece is a plurality of cultures. Born in what was then the Belgian Congo and now is Congo/Zaire, he grew up in Central and Southern Africa and writes in both English and French, his two ‘mother tongues’. With his intense interest in African life, the young Russo also engaged with knowledge beyond narrow stratifications of colonial custom. As a youth he left Africa for college in New York (where he attended New York University). For many years he has been resident in Paris.

Wherever he has lived, Russo has concerned himself with one hard-burning commitment: to achieve an illumination of vision in his writing that suggests by the force of its light some direction for understanding of human behavior and action. He draws on the many cultures he has been privileged to know, and he is always respectul of diversity. But Russo is no mere reporter. While he works with words, and while his work is concerned with place and the spirit of place, he is more interested in visitation than visits. Almost every fiction Russo has written involves a visitation, a hearing from another world that reverberates into a dénouement and revolution of the protagonist’s present condition. These visitations are of course a form of fabulism--that is, utilizing the fable as a subtext of the animal nature of man. Russo’s fabulism however is not in the line of traditional mythology (perhaps mythologies is a better term, since Russo draws from a variety of folklore and consummate literary executions). In one of his recent fictions, for example, he writes of a man who falls in love with a tree--his love is so ardent he wills himself into a tree in order to root out any foreignness in his love affair. Thus, Russo’s “family tree”, the mating of woodland Adam and Eve, becomes in his creation not only a multicultural act but a cross-fertilization of the cultures he has drawn from. In this personal fable Russo suggests the Greek myth of Pan love and even the Adamastor legend, that Titan who has turned cruelly into a rock out of unbridled passion for a goddess. Russo suggests other legends as well, and certainly the crossing of boundaries, psychological, emotional as well as physical and territorial--hybrid phenomena now sweeping into the attention of all of Africa and the Middle East--is to be found within the feelingful contours of his tale.

Fabulism is now a recognized presence in our literary lives. It goes by other names: magic realism is one of them. Underneath all the manifestations of this phenomenon is the artistic credo that creation is larger than life, and that the progeny created enhances the life that gave being to it. In sum, the artist is saying that life is larger than life if given the opportunity to be lived magnificently. Russo’s is certainly a part of this willingness to experiment beyond the observable. His fiction represents, in essence, a belief, in the endless perceivable possibilities of mind. Its humor is at times dark, however, and perhaps this color of mood is a reflection of Russo’s background and biography. For his art, while enlarging, is not showered with sun. His dark hues are those of ironic vision.

Russo may be said to be very much a part of the beginning of this century. His concentration is on the inevitabilities of unknowingness; thus his resort is to the superrational as a way of steadying himself in the darkness. At the same time his work cannot be said to be tragic, for the unending endings of his fictions suggest a chance of progress, if not completion of one’s appointed task, worlds meet and become larger worlds in Russo’s work; people change within his hands.

It is a pleasure to pay homage to Russo’s achievement.”

Critic and professor of English at C. W. Post of Long Island University, MARTIN TUCKER has published over twenty volumes of literary criticism, among them The Critical Temper, Modern Commonwealth Literature, and Modern British Literature (in Continuum's Library of Literary Criticism series). He is the editor of the prize-winning literary journal Confrontation, and the author of Africa in Modern Literature and other works. His poetry has been collected in Homes ot Locks and mysteries, and appears in leading periodicals. He is a member of the Executive Board of PEN American Center and has served on the Governing Board of Poetry Society of America. He has also written a biography of Joseph Conrad and of Sam Shepard, both critically acclaimed.