The Aquatics: The Trouble With Being a Good Person

There's a moment partway through The Aquatics when it becomes clear that Katmé Abbia has spent most of her life confusing kindness with goodness, which is not quite the same thing.

Katmé gives money away. She helps people. She supports her old friend Samy, an artist whose work criticizes the government in Zambuena, the fictional African country where the novel takes place. She's married to Tashun, a powerful government official, and has enough proximity to power to believe it can occasionally be persuaded to behave decently. That belief turns out to be an expensive misunderstanding.

Osvalde Lewat's debut novel, translated from the French by Maren Baudet-Lackner, arrives with an unusually decorated pedigree: the 2022 Pan-African Prize for Literature, the Kourouma Prize, the French Academy Literature Prize. It would be easy to approach a book with that résumé wearing the solemn expression usually reserved for Important Novels. I'd resist that impulse. Lewat has written something more interesting than a lesson in political morality: a novel about a woman who discovers, rather late, that being close to power isn't the same as being able to control it.

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Tashun is a rising political figure. Samy is Katmé's oldest friend, a gay artist whose exhibition exposes some of the inequality and corruption beneath Zambuena's respectable surface. When Samy's sexuality becomes a political weapon, the arrangements that have let Katmé live comfortably start to collapse. Samy is arrested and brutally abused; Tashun's ambitions suddenly matter more to him than his wife's oldest friendship. Katmé is pushed toward a choice she's spent her adult life avoiding: protect the world that protects her, or protect the person who has always known her.

What makes Katmé interesting is that she isn't a natural rebel, and to its credit the novel doesn't rush her into becoming one. A less confident book would have her stumble onto injustice, have a tidy cinematic awakening, and start speaking the language of resistance with the fluency of someone who just finished a pamphlet. Lewat is more patient than that. Katmé is compromised, vain, frightened, capable of real generosity and real self-deception, often within the same afternoon. Her privilege hasn't made her cruel so much as it's made her accustomed to believing problems can be managed.

That's one of the book's sharper observations: in Katmé's world, money functions like a solvent. Give enough of it away and poverty seems a little less offensive. Know the right person and the police start to seem reasonable. Marry the right politician and politics stays comfortably abstract, something that happens elsewhere.

Samy sees this more clearly than Katmé does. Her gestures of generosity aren't political action, and her money can make certain things easier without ever touching the machinery that produces the problems in the first place. It's one of the sharper tensions in the book, and it lands because Lewat lets us watch Katmé believe her own good intentions even as we can see exactly where they run out.

The novel's title starts to look pointed here. Water runs through The Aquatics, and so does the idea of drowning. People are submerged in political arrangements they didn't create and can't easily escape, while Katmé has spent years staying just far enough above the surface to mistake herself for someone who isn't in danger. Then the water rises.

Lewat is especially good at showing how repression rarely arrives in a uniform. More often it arrives as etiquette: a luncheon, a family conversation, a quiet warning not to make trouble, a politician who says he'll handle it, a wife advised to think of her husband's career before she thinks of her friend's life. This is where the novel gets genuinely uncomfortable, because it suggests authoritarian societies don't survive only because terrible men are in charge. They survive because ordinary people become remarkably inventive about the reasons they shouldn't interfere. Katmé is one of those people, and Lewat doesn't let her off easily.

A second story runs alongside the political plot: the reburial of Katmé's mother, whose grave has to be moved to make way for a new highway. On paper this risks reading as a tidy symbolic subplot about memory and development. In practice it's sharper than that. The dead receive ceremonies, money, speeches, public attention. The living have to negotiate with whoever controls all three, and Katmé's mother's second burial gets entangled with Tashun's political ambitions until grief itself becomes a public performance.

Everyone in this book is performing something. The politician performs respectability. The family performs grief. Katmé performs the good wife. The government performs order. Even Katmé's generosity sometimes plays like a performance she's talked herself into believing is virtue. Samy, by contrast, makes art that refuses to perform properly, which is part of why he matters so much even though he isn't the novel's center of gravity.

That choice is worth pausing on. Samy's suffering is severe, and his persecution supplies much of the book's political urgency, yet The Aquatics stays with Katmé, the person standing near the violence rather than the person absorbing the worst of it. I found that both frustrating and defensible. Frustrating because Samy is, in places, the more immediately compelling moral presence on the page. Defensible because Lewat isn't really writing a novel about the experience of persecution on its own terms. She's writing about the people who watch persecution happen and then spend considerable energy explaining why they couldn't have done anything about it, which is a nastier and less comfortable subject.

It's also where the book occasionally pushes too hard. Lewat's anger is unmistakable, and at its best it gives the novel real force. At weaker moments it flattens certain exchanges, so that characters briefly stop sounding like people and start sounding like they're explaining the book's politics to one another. The novel doesn't always trust its own drama; every so often it tells us something we've already understood.

That's a small complaint against a book built around something much larger: complicity is rarely experienced as complicity while it's happening. People call it patience. They call it prudence. They call it family, or keeping the peace, or being a good person. Katmé's awakening isn't simply the discovery that her husband is worse than she thought. It's the discovery that her own goodness has conditions, which is a much harder thing to learn.

Lewat writes with the eye of a filmmaker, which makes sense given she's also a documentary filmmaker and photographer. There's something visibly composed about how she arranges people in rooms, ceremonies, galleries, political spaces, and her sentences pay close attention to what people do with their bodies while they're carefully not saying what they mean. Baudet-Lackner's translation deserves credit too: the English prose stays direct without flattening the book into generic international literary fiction. The result is short (240 pages) but not slight, which feels appropriate for a novel about people running out of places to hide.

By the end I was less interested in whether Katmé had become courageous than in whether she'd finally become honest. Courage is the more glamorous quality; honesty is considerably less so, because it requires admitting that some of the things we call helplessness were actually choices. That's what gives The Aquatics its sting. It's easy to condemn the politician, the policeman, the mob. Lewat asks the more irritating question: what about the person who knew something was wrong and kept finding reasons to wait? That person is Katmé, and she's also the novel's most uncomfortable achievement.

The Aquatics isn't flawless. Its anger occasionally outruns its subtlety, and some of its dialogue could use less explanation and more trust in the reader. But the central question is strong enough to carry those weaknesses. The book never really asks whether Katmé is a good woman. It asks what her goodness is worth once it costs her something, and that's a much better question to spend 240 pages answering.