Fighting with the colonizers in the Congo is presented to us in more than one way in Tram 83. From the opening scene you can get a sense of struggle and hard times. The way the infrastructure is in ruins and hanging on by a thread. From the train not being reliable for the students to go to and from school to the train station “gutted by artillery” (page 1). The scars of the country are on display for us to see around the characters.
Even with the people of the Congo being free form the country that ruled them in the past. They are still living in the aftermath. Because of those battels, they cannot have basic things. Without the reliability of the train how can people of the Congo better themselves with education. It is a vicious cycle that is hard to break out of. Without proper education, the economy will continue to be about prostitution and hard labor at the mines.
The way the author explains how the artillery shells gutted the metal structure sounds more like how it actually gutted the citizens of their humanity. I feel the way that there are so many young girls selling their bodies and that there is nothing wrong with that that you can see how they are gutted. They have no support to be kids and no other way to live and make money. It is such a different way of life from the way we live here it’s hard to wrap our heads around the concept of middle schoolers being prostitutes.
All these issues go back to gutted metal stricter that is called the train station. Transportation of not only people but also basic goods. If you think back to our history here, we boomed once we had the train stations here in the US. If you look all over the world we can see that trains are arteries for civilizations. As long as the trains are unreliable and the stations are gutted by the artillery shells, the people cannot recover from their gruesome history.
Literary Genres in Translation 