Perhaps the most extraordinary thing that happened during my 2012 quest to read a book from every country (and there were many extraordinary things) involved the small African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe.
Of the 11 or so UN-recognised countries that had no commercially available literature in English translation at the time, this proved by far the trickiest to source a book from. So much so that, as you can read in my original blog post, in the end a team of nine volunteers translated A casa do pastor, a collection of short stories by Santomean-born writer Olinda Beja, especially for me.
Now, 13 years later, that collection of short stories, is finally available to buy in English. Edited by leading Spanish and Portuguese translator Margaret Jull Costa OBE, one of the generous nine volunteers who answered my 2012 appeal, it has just been published by new Canadian indie Arquipélago Press.
The creation of this translation remains one of the most heartwarming and encouraging examples I’ve encountered of how stories can bring us together. It is wonderful to see these beguiling tales finally available in the world’s most published language.
As I say in my foreword to the book: ‘every so often, I receive a message asking if the collection of stories I read for São Tomé and Príncipe back in 2012 is available to buy in English. It is now my great joy to be able to answer: Yes, here it is.’
The Shepherd’s House by Olinda Beja, ed. Margaret Jull Costa, translated from the Portuguese by Yema Ferreira, Ana Fletcher, Tamsin Harrison, Margaret Jull Costa, Clare Keates, Ana Cristina Morais, Robin Patterson, Ana Silva and Sandra Tavares (Arquipélago Press, 2025)
A few months ago, I was contacted by Bridget Farrell, founder of Bullaun Press, an Irish publisher dedicated to translations. Would I be interested in reading an advance copy of The Rarest Fruit, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, the second novel they were publishing by Gaëlle Bélem and also the second novel by a writer from Réunion ever to make it into English? Since then, the first, There’s a Monster Behind the Door, also translated by Fleetwood and Saint-Loubert, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. To my mind, The Rarest Fruit, which comes out in the UK and Ireland later this week, easily maintains this standard.
Based on the true story of Edmond Albius – an orphan slave raised by Ferréol Beaumont, a white botanist on Bourbon Island, as Réunion was known until 1848 – the novel explores appropriation and the injustices embedded in the economic forces that govern international trade to this day. When Edmond unlocks the secret to the pollination of vanilla, the consequences ripple out around the world, changing the Western palate and enriching many of those engaged in the commodity’s exploitation. But for its bright young discoverer, who harbours ambitions ‘to become the first Black botanist in this world of Rich Whites’ but ‘doesn’t have the right colour skin to have callings’, the repercussions are much darker and more painful, bringing him up against the systemic injustices and human cruelty that robbed him of his natural parents in the first place.
Rhetoric and rhythms are at the heart of Bélem’s craft. She wields repetition with a barrister’s flair, driving home the force of what she’s presenting and, by getting the reader to look and look again, forcing us to recognise injustices and assumptions that we might at otherwise choose to ignore, or else be habituated to. Take this early passage obliging us to unpack the significance of the first question Ferréol asks when he lays eyes on baby Edmond: ‘What is it?’
‘It’ – this ebony child that casts him into partial shadow as it comes between the curve of a pale sun and his screwedup eyes. ‘It’ – three kilos and six hundred grams of tender flesh, wrapped up like a black lamb in a woollen cloth. ‘It’ – a living bundle of obvious trouble.
Juxtaposition plays a similar role. As Edmond’s life turns towards ruin and jail, and, in the wake of so-called emancipation, he, like many others, finds himself bound by a ‘freedom that shackles him’, we read of the vanilla-infused delicacies dreamed up by leading chefs to grace the tables of the beau monde.
Structures like these make the injustices at the heart of the story evident without Bélem needing to state them. By writing in this way, she leads us to construct the points for ourselves rather than proclaiming them. We collaborate with her and the book seems to throw its arms around us, bringing all readers into the human story rather than excluding and shaming those who might take criticism of colonialism as a personal attack.
This profound understanding of human motivation soaks the novel in empathy. Instead of two-dimensional actors in a morality play, Bélem gives us human beings in the round. For all his blind spots and hypocrisy, Ferréol is a vulnerable, lonely creature whose world is enriched by the relationship he forms with his adopted son. Likewise, Edmond for all his hopefulness and brilliance, is not immune to exhibiting internalised racism and double standards. We see systemic injustice, but we also see human ingenuity and specificity – the ability to manoeuvre around seemingly immovable obstacles and build bridges against the odds.
All of which makes Edmond’s betrayal and the fallout from it particularly poignant. That these two people should be able to hold themselves aloof from social mores for so long only to collapse beneath the weight of expectations and their own conditioning is a tragedy – a painful revelation of the dangers of failing to recognise the limits on our own thinking when we imagine ourselves to be free.
Bullaun Press’s edition of The Rarest Fruit publishes in the UK and Ireland on 1 May. And for readers in the US, another version, translated by Hildegarde Serle, comes out from Europa in June. It would be very interesting to compare both English versions. The fact of their release only a month apart is surely testament to the power of the original text.
The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from the French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun Press, 2025)
This book was given to me by the Cameroonian writer Ernis, who I was lucky to meet in Assam last month. Conscious that I had not read any Cameroonian literature since Peter Green’s translation of Mongo Beti’s 1956 classic Mission to Kala, I asked her what contemporary writing from the country (in addition to her own, of course) I should know about. Her response was to press this novel into my hands.
Days Come and Goby Hemley Boum, translated by Nchanji Njamnsi, is the story of three generations of women navigating a changing and turbulent world. Obliged to accept her daughter Abi’s care as she faces death, the historically aloof Anna reflects back on the events that have led her from Cameroon to Paris, and the education that at once enriched and distanced her from her roots. Abi, meanwhile, must contend with family breakdown and the pressures of caring, while Tina, a friend of her son Max’s back in Cameroon, finds herself caught up in a violent new threat sweeping her home region.
This is a book that disarms with its directness. Boum’s insights and the clarity with which she expresses them through her characters’ voices are startling and winning. Whether it’s the familiar setting of Paris made strange through Abi’s critical gaze or ‘the undeniable, exquisite delight in succumbing to violence and corruption’ that comes through in several of the episodes, there is a frankness to the writing that speaks to the humanity in people everywhere.
Often, this frankness centres on the ruptures caused by colonialism and the imposition of a foreign way of seeing, thinking and learning on a culture that operates by other means. ‘Today, I believe Western knowledge is both simple and despotic,’ states Anna. ‘There is only one God and he is present in church. Education is found only in textbooks. Art is separate from spirituality, confined to specific spaces. The law applies equally to everyone and all values have a price.’
Such thinking jars with the more sensuous, embodied, holistic ways of knowing that used to be common in her home region. ‘Our people never claimed detachment from the world nor dominion over it.[…] We were the world and the world was us: water, wind, sand, the past, the future, the living, the dead… we were all woven into the fabric of the world.’
Falling into the gulf between these two ways of being is a violent experience from which none of the characters in Days Come and Go escape unscathed. Boum makes us feel what this is like, taking us through the stages by which the women are led to conspire in their oppression and suffering so that we seem to live their experiences, from Anna’s grappling with maternal ambivalence and the toll this may have taken on her relationship with her daughter to Abi’s struggle to parent amid marital breakdown.
The most powerful section in the book is Tina’s account of how she and two friends got drawn into the terrorist group Boko Haram. This is an astonishingly insightful and compelling delineation of how people can be made to commit the worst acts, including suicide bombing. ‘Nobody asks a grenade about to explode, “Why?”‘ says Tina. ‘The reason is obvious: it has been unpinned. All they do is pull out our pins and throw us at good people.’
Boum makes us feel how those pins get pulled out. And in so doing, she commits a deeply humane act – making it impossible to ignore the humanity we share with those who do the worst things we can imagine, with all the hope and challenge that comes with this. With this understanding, we can make sense of things that might seem unfathomable to us, such as Tina’s silent appeal to Michelle Obama to stop speaking out against Boko Haram because such well-intentioned, distant activism only makes her tormentors crueller.
Yet an embodied approach to knowing does not mean a reduction in intellectual rigour. This is, in many ways, one of the most erudite novels I’ve read in a long time. It includes critiques of the work of John Steinbeck, Michelangelo and Frantz Fanon – Anna is not a fan of the latter: ‘my disinclination resides in the fact that there are people indeed more invisible than the damned of the earth – their wives.’
This is a novel that walks to a different beat than the sort of writing commonly celebrated in the anglophone literary world. As a result, readers used to mainstream English-language literature may stumble here and there over pacing that will not meet their expectations, and the inclusion or exclusion of certain statements or details. There is also drama-offstage, some declamatory monologuing and various other things traditionally frowned upon on creative writing courses.
And that’s precisely the point. Boum’s storytelling operates by standards other than Western norms, knitting together the emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual, and presenting these things as a glorious, moving, troubling unity. It is a book of extraordinary range and power. ‘What does a life boil down to?’ asks Anna. This, Boum shows us. This.
Days Come and Go by Hemley Boum, translated from the French by Nchanji Njamnsi (Bakwa Books, 2022)
This was a recommendation from Suroor Alikhan, who kindly invited me to be part of the Hyderabad Literature Festival Online series earlier this year and wrote about our event on her blog. Suroor is an extremely widely read person, so I knew when she suggested Gabonese author Angèle Rawiri’s The Fury and Cries of Women, translated into English by Sara Hanaburgh, that it would be worth a look. As the translation came out in 2014, the book fell comfortably before the 2021 cut off I’ve set myself for my year of reading nothing new. I wasted no time in ordering it.
The novel follows Emilienne, a wealthy businesswoman in what we are told is a surprisingly progressive marriage according to the norms of her community. She is the major breadwinner and her husband – who, like her, studied in Paris – was present at the birth of their daughter Rékia and plays an active role in childcare. But all is not well, and when Rékia dies suddenly and violently, the tragedy exposes cracks in the family that threaten Emilienne’s very existence, plunging her into an identity crisis, and forcing her to confront the prejudices, inequalities and values underpinning her life.
It took me a while to understand quite how pioneering a book this is. Because the translation came out in 2014 and because the subject matter feels contemporary (involving a lot of reflection on secondary infertility and female sexuality, including a same-sex love affair), I had assumed the novel was relatively recent. It was only when the subject of AIDS came up some way into the narrative that I discovered it was first published in 1989.
Not only that, but Angèle Rawiri is widely credited with being Gabon’s first novelist, leading with Elonga, published in 1986. I’ve featured a number of trailblazing female writers lauded as their nations’ first published women on this blog over the years (among them Kunzang Choden and Paulina Chiziane), but it is rare to see a female writer named as a nation’s first published author.
Rawiri certainly seems to feel a duty to tackle national problems in her writing. Women’s rights take centre stage but many other political and social issues pass through her narrative too, among them corruption, the way workers become jaded in a capitalist system, and the legacy of colonialism. I was particularly struck by a passage in which Emilienne’s husband Joseph extolls the merits of a single-party system:
let’s have the courage to recognize that we are a selfish tribal people. Take a look at what is happening in the ministries and state-owned companies! First they hire a member of the family, regardless of their abilities, and, if they have none, they look among those around them from their own ethnic group. No, believe me, in order to have a real multiparty system, Africans are going to have to manage to place national interests above their own. In the meantime, the single-party system seems to be what we need. Let me explain: when a country is under the aegis of a single party, its nationals, whatever group they’re from, are forced to meet, discuss, and exchange their opinions about issues that concern them all. They don’t have the time to dwell on tribal issues. Collective motivations almost always win against frictions between individuals. Obviously, with such a political alliance, men learn how to tolerate one another, to love one another, and above all to work toward the same ideals. Isn’t that the goal sought by our leaders!
I don’t agree with Joseph (and I suspect Rawiri doesn’t either), but I’ve never seen the arguments for such a system put so persuasively before.
The passages that deal with female agency and reproductive rights are particularly arresting, and sometimes shocking. For all her professional status and qualifications, Emilienne finds herself at the mercy of a value system that judges women’s worth by their ability to bear children. When she struggles to conceive a second child, her social stock plummets and she is judged to be in need of a ‘cure’. (Indeed, at one stage we are told that a woman choosing not to have children would have to be ‘sick’ in the head.)
As with her presentation of the arguments for a single-party system, Rawiri makes the characters who express these views alarmingly persuasive. (Indeed, were it not for the dedication of the novel to a friend who struggled to conceive, it would sometimes be tempting to think the author’s sympathies lie with them.) In this, the work recalls the brilliant One Part Woman, reviewed on this blog last year.
The novel presents numerous challenges for a twenty-first century reader steeped in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Pacing, a perennial sticking point when stories cross borders, works differently: some apparently major issues are presented or resolved abruptly, while the narrative lingers on events that may seem relatively inconsequential to Western eyes. Some of the dialogue feels rather direct or on-the-nose, and the handling of sexual encounters works according to different norms and assumptions. I also found the choice (whether Rawiri’s or translator Hanaburgh’s) to withhold specific cultural terms a little distancing – referring to another community as ‘that ethnic group’ rather than by name or telling us that characters are speaking the ‘local language’ rather than giving us the word for it.
But this is distance worth travelling in order to experience this trailblazing literary work. Rawiri was not only dealing with challenging subject matter but also carving out a path for a new tradition, depicting places and people who had never been seen in novels before. When novelists like me sit down to write, we follow well-trodden paths, lined with countless examples of how the world around us might be depicted on the page. But although Rawiri may have had some exemplars in the work of Francophone African feminist writers like Mariama Bâ, no-one in her nation had put her surroundings into a published print story before. The scale of her ambition and achievement is extraordinary.
The Fury and Cries of Women (Fureurs et cris de femme) by Angèle Rawiri, translated from the French by Sara Hanaburgh (University of Virginia Press, 2014)
Don’t judge a book by its cover, the saying goes. Frankly, though, if I were assessing Fatou Diome’s The Belly of the Atlantic, translated by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz, on its appearance, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. The pictures of the figure in the boat and the foot on the ball feel wearily familiar, if not a little clichéd.
Besides, although I’ve read and enjoyed football novels in the past – and know that a great writer can make any topic absorbing – I usually do so in spite rather than because of such subject matter. Not being a sports fan, I rarely find knowing a book is built around a particular game tempting.
But I did pick up this novel, which came out in French in the early 2000s and in English in 2006, for two reasons: partly because Senegal was one of the nations that had relatively few novels available in translation when I did my original Year of Reading the World, but also because I’m a particular admirer of the work of one of its translators: Ros Schwartz. Seeing her name on the title page suggested to me that this would be worth a try.
In fact, this book subverts the apparently familiar tropes of its cover in powerful ways. Narrated by Salie, who lives in France, the novel crystallises around a series of phone calls from her younger brother, Madické. A football fan with a difference, Madické is obsessed not with the French team beloved of his peers but with the exploits of the Italian player Maldini and needs to hear how every match he plays turns out. The one television on their home island of Niodior is temperamental to say the least, hence his SOS calls to his sister to fill him in. These conversations prove the catalyst for a series of reflections on and memories of Salie’s life, the immigrant experience, and the gulf that travelling from one world to another opens up between those who leave and those who stay behind.
The female perspective is part of what makes the book so striking. The opening descriptions of football mania and boys revelling in the beautiful game invite us to assume a male narrator. It is only gradually, with the repeated presence of strong, female characters, and strikingly direct observations about discrimination and the hypocrisy of patriarchal society, that the narrator’s position becomes clear. Indeed, it is only some pages into the narrative that Salie reveals herself as ‘a moderate feminist’ who ‘wouldn’t want testicles for the world’, and who looks with some disdain on the standards her brother is expected to conform to in order to satisfy her home society’s conception of ‘man’.
This covert disruption of what might be thought of as the default narrative voice for a book like this makes much about it fresh and startling, even twenty years after its publication. Familiar ideas are presented from new angles. And the tales of those who remain on Niodior, trapped in cycles of poverty and prejudice, gleam with troubling brilliance. The story of Sankèle, who pays a terrible price in an effort to escape an arranged marriage, is particularly memorable.
For a reader in the UK, the novel may seem uncannily prescient. In its exploration of the desire that many young people have to leave Niodior and try their luck in Europe, and its presentation of the grim reality and crushing obligations that await those who make the leap, the book seems to anticipate the stories that flooded Western media years later of African migrants braving horrific risks in search of a better life. For example, here’s Salie reflecting on the gap between Madické’s idea of her daily life and the reality:
‘It was no use telling Madické that as a cleaning woman my survival depended on the number of floor cloths I got through. He persisted in imagining I wanted for nothing, living like royalty at the court of Louis XIV. Accustomed to going without in his underdeveloped country, he wasn’t going to feel sorry for a sister living in one of the world’s great powers after all! He couldn’t help his illusions. The third world can’t see Europe’s wounds, it is blinded by its own; it can’t hear Europe’s cry, it is deafened by its own. Having someone to blame lessens your suffering, and if the third world started to see the west’s misery, it would lose the target of its anger.’
Of course, the fact that these words written in the early 2000s read as prescient to someone like me also shows up the selectiveness of the anglophone world’s storytelling: the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ is not a new phenomenon, Diome’s novel reminds us, regardless of what prevailing accounts of it may lead us to assume.
Structured as it is, the book can feel a little static. Salie is relatively passive – partly because she is trapped by her situation and partly because she is trapped by the past. As such, she is perhaps more in the position of one of the oral storytellers of her homeland, recounting rather than participating in events. The writing, however, brims with energy. Like its perspective, the novel’s imagery is fresh and striking, melding Senegalese traditions, nature and computer technology to paint the world in bold colours. If, occasionally, the narrative tips over into polemic, well, who are we to argue?
Reading The Belly of the Atlantic made me reflect on many things. It reminded me of the valuable way stories from elsewhere can disrupt, problematise and reshape the narratives that surround us. It also helped me remember how important older books are in anchoring us and counteracting the kneejerk impressions of the now. If we only ever read new titles – no matter how brilliant they may be – we can easily become detached from the threads of history, and lose sight of the lines and grapnels cast back down the decades that bind us to the world and to one another.
The Belly of the Atlantic by Fatou Diome, translated from the French by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz (Serpent’s Tail, 2006)
A few months ago, I had the privilege of sharing a stage with award-winning translator and International Booker Prize judges chair, Frank Wynne. Before the event started, he mentioned that he had checked out this blog some years ago, aware that a number of the country choices were likely to be translated by him, given that there was very little available in English from much of francophone Africa.
Certainly this chimed with my experience during my 2012 quest, when some 11 UN-recognised nations – many of them French- and Portuguese-speaking African countries – had no literature in commercially available English translation that I could find. I can’t claim to have performed an exhaustive survey of Ivorian literature in English in the years since, but it is true that both my original Ivorian read and this latest Book of the month were translated by Wynne. I have read all the literature I have so far encountered from this West African country through the same person’s eyes.
On the face of it, however, the two books couldn’t be more different; whereas Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is not Obliged follows the fortunes of a foul-mouthed child soldier, Standing Heavy by GauZ’ presents Paris (and by extension, the world) from the perspective of the often undocumented African security personnel, or heavies, hired to guard its shops. Yet below the surface lie many of the same tensions that drive Kourouma’s novel. The legacy of colonialism and slavery inform the power dynamics playing out in the high-class emporia of the Champs-Élysées every bit as much as on the killing fields of West Africa; under the watchful eyes of Ferdinand, Ossiri and their peers, the wealthy and the desperate come to worship the gods of global commerce, moving in the grip of forces perhaps most clearly discernible to those paid to observe.
The way Gauz’ plays with structure is one of the novel’s greatest triumphs. Reflecting the fact that this is a book about people who stay still for hours on end, he dispenses with the sort of chronology often seen in Anglo-European novels and instead presents a narrative stitched together largely from pensées and observations. These are as wide-ranging as they are witty and rich, taking in everything from the correlation between someone’s salary and the distance their coccyx typically spends from a seat, to the sales-shopping habits of babies and the historical inequities encoded into white-linen trousers. They also offer opportunities for virtuosic flourishes from the translator, my favourite being ‘the bland leading the bland’.
Another striking example proposes a genetic theory of the Antilles:
‘When slavery existed, it was vanishingly rare, and almost impossible, for a Black male slave to procreate with a White mistress. It was therefore White masters who, with Black women, created the ethnic diversity of the Antillais. And, since it is the male who assigns the sex of the male child with his Y chromosome, we can therefore affirm that all mixed-race men in the Antilles definitely carry a Caucasian Y chromosome. Abstract for the theory: in the Antilles, man is White, woman is Black.’
The cumulative effect of these reflections is powerful. Essentially, the narrative schools the reader in the coping mechanisms of those paid to stand and watch. ‘In order to survive in this job, to keep things in perspective, to avoid lapsing into cosy idleness or, on the contrary, fatuous zeal and bitter aggressiveness, requires either knowing how to empty your mind of every thought higher than instinct and spinal reflex or having a very engrossing inner life.’ The latter is what the narrative models. Reading it, we learn in real time the rhythms of a life on the margins.
The tightrope that Gauz’ walks is presenting collective experience without allowing his characters to collapse into facelessness. The individual impressions from the shop floor help with this, but would probably be too flimsy on their own. As a result, he weights them with accounts of historical and political shifts in the latter half of the twentieth century that had a bearing on the experiences of West African immigrants to France.
At times, the result is a little diffuse and perhaps hard for those more used to plot-driven novels to follow, yet an inner logic is at work. For those who stick with it, interconnectedness is the prevailing impression – a web of ties, obligations and loyalties that extends across the globe. One that encompasses not only the standing heavies and those they watch, but also the reader.
Standing Heavy (Debout-payé) by GauZ’, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press, 2022)
Picture: ‘Avenue des Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe, Place Charles de Gaulle, Paris’ by David McKelvey on flickr.com
A few months ago, Delina posted the following comment on this blog:
I’m from Eritrea. First of all, I LOVED your project, it’s brilliant! And second, I noticed that for Eritrea you read books written by Eritrean diaspora. While that’s interesting too, I want to suggest some books that may provide the perspective of someone who lived most of their lives here. I don’t think you can find them easily in London so I would like to send you copies through some relatives who live in London. I hope that’s ok. The books I have in mind are:
Two weeks in the trenches by Alemseged Tesfai The Nurenebi File by Tesfaye Gebreab (translated into English by Alemseged Tesfai)
Let me know what you think!
I was intrigued for several reasons: Delina’s kindness and enthusiasm; the idea of reading books rarely available to readers like me; and the fact that, as Delina rightly pointed out, I had found it impossible to find anything I could read by a writer based inside Eritrea back when I read the world in 2012.
There’s a good reason for this: Eritrea has long been one of the globe’s most isolated and restricted countries. Two years before my quest, it was judged by Index on Censorhip to be the country with the least press freedom in the world; even journalists inside North Korea had marginally more leeway than those based in this east African nation. Even now, Reporters Without Borders ranks it second to last in the World Press Freedom Index.
As a result, when Delina’s package arrived, containing copies of the titles she had recommended with personal dedications to me by their authors, along with a postcard from Delina bearing an Eritrean stamp, I lost no time in exploring what I quickly knew would be my next book of the month.
Billed as a novel, The Nurenebi File by Tesfaye Gebreab translated by Alemseged Tesfai is an ambitious work. After a brief prologue describing an encounter that sparked the aim of telling ‘the history of one hundred years spread out […] like the camel caravans of Denkalia, Semhar, Barka, Halhal, Mensa’e, Habab, Senhit…’ the main narrative begins in the famine of 1888, when its title character is a small child. It then follows his fortunes and those of his descendants as they grapple with the many traumas and outrages visited on their region in the following century.
In his foreword, translator and fellow novelist Alemseged Tesfai (author of the other book Delina sent me) describes the hesitation he felt at taking on this project, which required him to work between this third language, Amharic, and his second language, English. His concerns were also echoed by Delina in an email she sent to me after the books arrived, in which she warned me that there may be errors and typos because of the difficulties surrounding publishing in Eritrea and said she hoped I wouldn’t be put off by these.
In actual fact, the text is largely sound. Although there are odd slips and a few word choices that feel questionable (but may of course be accurate reflections of the sense in the original), the narrative is in much better shape than many books I’ve encountered by first-language English speakers.
The challenges The Nurenebi File presents to readers raised on mainstream anglophone literature are of a different order (and say as much about the limited circulation of the world’s stories as they do about this work).
Firstly, this book does not obey the conventions that underpin the majority of novels in the English-speaking world. It veers between registers, plunging into political discussion, picking fights with other accounts and commenting on prevailing assumptions about Eritrean history. Passages that would not be out of place in an academic textbook sit alongside sections that ring with bombastic praise for Eritrea’s resistance fighters. There are photographs of many of the individuals and groups mentioned.
What’s more, although Nurenebi’s disappearance, and the efforts of his descendants to find out what happened to him and carry on his legacy form a guide rope that helps lead the reader through the pages, there is an uncertainty to the status of the narrative that makes it difficult for those unfamiliar with its context to know how to take it. It is unclear whether the prologue is written in Gebreab’s voice, describing a real-world encounter, or from the perspective of an unnamed fictional narrator who takes it upon themself to tell this story.
There are extremely powerful passages that will speaker to any reader. Many of these concern Nurenebi’s personal story, but that is not always the case. The account of the brutal amputation of the right hands and left feet of 461 Medri Bahri (Eritrean) men who fought on the Italian side against Emperor Menelik is extraordinarily harrowing and vivid. What’s more, there are many telling reflections on the effects of colonialism and the way oppressed people can sometimes become conditioned to further their own persecution, welcoming enemies as liberators. Inconsistent though the storytelling style may be, the whole work is charged with an urgency to communicate that bursts through at these key moments, sweeping the reader along.
But perhaps the biggest challenge Anglo-American readers face with this book is something that the story itself exists to challenge: the sheer unfamiliarity of these events to the majority of people around the world. This book, as translator Tesfai states, ‘has brought forward forgotten or shelved chapters from Eritrean history’. If that is true for Eritreans it applies tenfold to readers from other traditions.
Reading it, I was struck anew by how cumulative our sense of history is. We don’t encounter stories about the past in isolation but in the context of thousands of other narratives that have informed our cultural compasses and references throughout our lives. Consequently, when we come across a fact-based account in which none of the figures are familiar, few of the place names call associations to mind, and hardly any of the events connect to episodes we have heard of before, we struggle.
This is precisely why books like this and translations like Tesfai’s are important – and why I am so grateful to Delina for going to such trouble to get this story to me. In a world in which certain narratives are amplified and broadcast ubiquitously while many others are sidelined, silenced or erased, it is vital that accounts such as this expand, challenge and reshape our awareness of events.
This book does not obey the conventions of the European novel form, but then why should it? As the narrative makes clear, European influences have served the community it stems from appallingly. It is surely fitting, then, that in Tesfaye Gebreab’s hands this venerable export from the global north should be twisted, broken and refashioned into something that serves the Eritrean community. If readers like me struggle to keep up, then that is our problem.
The Nurenebi File by Tesfaye Gebreab, translated from the Amharic by Alemseged Tesfai (Books and Media Center, Asmara, 2021)
One of the great privileges of my 2012 Year of Reading the World was the chance it gave me to read a number of stories not usually available to English-language speakers. Whether these came in the form of pre-existing unpublished manuscripts (as in the case of the books I read for countries such as the Comoros and Turkmenistan) or translations created specially for me by generous volunteers (as with my pick for São Tomé and Príncipe), reading these works was an extraordinary experience, like being granted glimpses of a world those around me couldn’t see.
My latest Book of the month is another such marvel currently off-limits to the English-speaking world. Although it was published by the now-defunct Aflame Books in 2008, it has long been out of print, with only the occasional rare second-hand copy popping up now and then.
I received mine in the armful of books that Aflame’s founder Richard Bartlett generously handed to me in 2012, when he shared with me the manuscript of the astonishing Ualalapi, my pick for Mozambique. Not surprisingly, I didn’t have time to read the extra novels that year, having only 1.87 days for each of the titles I featured in my original quest. And, as so often happens, I shoved the others onto a shelf, with the intention that I would get to them eventually.
They might have stayed there for another ten years had a discussion I am due to take part in next month at the Cheltenham Literature Festival with a little-known author (cough, Booker prize-winner Damon Galgut) not prompted me to go through my collections to remind myself of my other South African reads. There it was, translated from the Zulu by Sandile Ngidi, a novel selected by an international jury as one of Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th century: The Rich Man of Pietermaritzburg by Sibusiso Nyembezi.
In many ways, the novel, which was published in its original language in 1961, is a classic stranger-comes-to-town tale. In the remote village of Nyanyadu, Mr Zeph Mkhwanazi receives a letter from a rich man he has never met, who tells him that he plans to visit and asks Mkhwanazi to convene a meeting of his fellow farmers so that the rich man can set out his plans to use his wealth and influence to improve their lives. Consternation, amusement and upheaval ensue: the arrival of the visitor exposes fault lines in the community, throwing Mkhwanazi and his family into crisis, until at last the village bands together to restore equilibrium.
Yet, though the arc of the story may sound familiar to anglophone readers, the way it is told is anything but. For one thing, the pacing is entirely different to that of most English-language novels: the opening pages, for example, focus mostly on the logistical challenges of reaching Nyanyadu and the complicated arrangements for the collection of the post.
There is also a striking approach to dialogue. Conversations stretch for pages, with many of the same facts and opinions rehearsed multiple times.
These things might sound off-putting or even dull, but in Nyembezi’s hands they are a joy. The narrative is sharp and witty, using a roving close third-person voice (not a million miles from the writing style in Galgut’s The Promise) to expose the inconsistencies and absurdities of the characters. What’s more, the repetition of certain details only makes them more amusing – the fact, for example, that the unknown stranger is ‘an esquire’ and the bewilderment caused by his strange name, Ndebenkulu, which, we are told, means ‘the one endowed with long lips.’
All this provides a wonderful build up to the arrival of the rich man himself. His advent is a masterclass in comic writing. Pompous, ridiculous, eager to tell anyone who will listen about his regular correspondence with prominent white people, and appalled by the prospect of having to travel to his host’s house in a ‘makeshift cart’, Ndebenkulu bursts onto the page. Many of his interactions are laugh-out-loud funny.
Yet Nyembezi is too subtle a writer to satisfy himself with merely amusing his reader. The ground is constantly shifting in this story, showing us how self-doubt, pride and half-forgotten grudges fuel suspicion, break and forge allegiances, and open old wounds. As Mkhwanazi’s neighbours and family members pitch in their opinions on the newcomer, Nyembezi traces the threads that bind the community and stress tests them with the application of the kind of financial, political and social pressures that govern all our lives, making this story of the arrival of an oddball in a remote community a universal reflection of humanity.
The book is, in short, a classic: funny, engrossing, wise and timeless. It ought to be available in English and celebrated alongside the works of its author’s more internationally renowned compatriots. Publishers, please, make it so!
The Rich Man of Pietermaritzburg (Inkinsela yase Mungungundlovu) by Sibusiso Nyembezi, translated from the Zulu by Sandile Ngidi (Aflame Books, 2008)
Firsts can be tricky propositions. Whenever I hear about the first translation into English of a work of literature from a particular country, I am pulled in two directions. On one hand, I’m glad that another nation’s stories are now represented in the world’s most-published language (there were around 11 UN-recognised states with no commercially available literature in English at the time of my 2012 quest).
On the other hand, I feel wary. Making a book the global ambassador for a country’s written works is a lot of weight to place on a single story (a dangerous concept as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has explained). It can also be very unhelpful – a nation, after all, is the sum of numerous, often contradictory narratives. We need a supply of multiple tales told in a range of voices, not a single example that we can showcase like an artefact in a museum.
But publishers love a marketing hook and billing something as the first example of a certain kind of literature seems a good way to attract sales. So it’s hardly surprising that houses big and small make much of such claims.
My latest featured read is not strictly the first book in English translation from its home nation. There was a long-out-of-print children’s book – a sort of Enid Blyton with crocodiles – that I managed to get my hands on from this country during my original quest. But, to my knowledge, publisher Dedalus is correct in describing Rachael McGill’s translation of Adrienne Yabouza’s Co-wives, Co-widows as the first book for adults by a writer from the Central African Republic to come into English.
As the title suggests, the novel follows two women, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou, married to the same man, Lidou, who dies during the course of the story. Faced with an event that spells disaster in their strongly patriarchal society, where women are routinely turfed out of their homes by their husbands’ families on the death of their spouses, the widows have little option but to rely on each other to secure a future for themselves and their children.
The major challenge for an author writing protagonists in a relatively powerless position is not to make them seem like victims. Yabouza’s solution to this is humour. Her narrative is threaded through with a range of kinds of comedy, revealing everything from the surreality of death to the hypocrisy that underpins the women’s daily reality.
Often, wit glimmers in a single word (credit to McGill here). We learn, for example, that the sun ‘beat down mercilessly and democratically on all citizens’ waiting in the interminable queue to vote. Similarly, Yabouza makes rich capital of free indirect speech to reveal the ways her characters lie to themselves. Here’s Lidou in the run-up to his heart attack: ‘He’d practically given up smoking, he only accepted every other beer these days and he only ever touched kangoya or bili-bili on Sundays, or mostly only then.’
This lightness of touch does not prevent Yabouza from revealing the depths of the injustices that surround Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou. Whether it’s the self-regard of the EU officials monitoring the electoral process or the naked corruption in the legal and political systems, she pulls no punches in laying society’s ills bare – sometimes literally. The widows, for example, receive a brutal beating from their husbands’ relatives when they attempt to attend his funeral.
There is a beautiful directness in the writing, too, particularly when it comes to scene-setting. Take ‘the big eyelid of night closed over Bangui’ or the description of the sky ‘slashed from side to side by the machete strokes of lightning’. This directness adds weight to moments of emotional intensity in the narrative, where Yabouza often excels at capturing deep feelings in simple words.
That said, not every image works smoothly. I found myself tripped up by the phrase ‘deeper in his thoughts than a relative trying to draft an insincere eulogy for a bigwig’s funeral’. It felt as though the writing was trying too hard here – although this may also be a function of cultural difference, which presents some intriguing challenges. For example, the depiction of a new suitor wooing Ndongo Passy by inviting her to cook a meal for him and his friends (much to her delight) will pull many of those raised in the Western tradition up short, as will the proliferation of descriptions comparing her to one of his cows.
The same can be said for the plot. Those looking for a staunchly feminist account of two women breaking free of patriarchal control, will no doubt find the resolution, which relies on the women gaining male support and permission for their plans, frustrating. Unlike the protagonist of Paulina Chiziane’s The First Wife, tr. David Brookshaw, who bands together with other women to transcend the system that has oppressed her, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou choose to operate within the mechanisms they know. Although the narrative presents strong female agents, such as the lawyer Catherine, it falls short of imagining an upending of the status quo.
But perhaps this is ultimately a more emotionally satisfying, realistic-seeming ending for many of the original readers of this novel. A mirror rather than a beacon, it is a trailblazer in another respect: a translation of a story from the Central African Republic written without regard for European sensibilities (unlike the children’s book published decades before). That alone makes it worth the price of admission. And judging by its wit, insightfulness and passion, it ought to be the first of many more such publications.
Co-wives, Co-widows (Co-épouses, co-veuves) translated from the French by Rachael McGill (Dedalus, 2021)
Picture: ‘Central African women inspecting building for microfinance project’ by hdptcar on flickr.com
The author of my latest book of the month has been on my radar for a number of years. She was the winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and her debut novel, Kintu, has been widely praised. The fact that it has taken me so long to get her is probably due to fact that her novels are often talked about as sagas that deal with national history. Having read such a book as my original choice for Uganda back in 2012, I suppose I felt no hurry to read another novel in a similar vein.
I was wrong. From the moment, I started The First Woman, I was hooked into the coming-of-age story of Kirabo, a girl struggling to find a sense of self in the turbulent years during and following Idi Amin’s dictatorship.
Nansubuga Makumbi is an exceptional writer. Drawing on Ganda oral storytelling traditions and myths, her prose shimmers with energy, urgency and fun. There is an extraordinary directness to her descriptions that at times had me gnawing my fists with envy at her talent. From the scornful teenagers whose ‘eyes were slaughter’ and the wealthy student ‘driven everywhere as if he had no legs’ to the neighbour so forbidding that ‘if you saw her coming while you peed by the roadside, you sat down in your pee and smiled’, the characters in this novel leap off the page by virtue of its author’s vibrant writing.
Funny but never caricatured, they reveal multiple sides as the plot plays out. Indeed, one of Nansubuga Makumbi’s many strengths is the way she plays with psychic distance (a concept neatly explained on writer Emma Darwin’s brilliant blog) to reveal the inconsistencies and hypocrisy threaded through human thought.
Culture clashes are a central theme. As Kirabo navigates her way between rural and urban worlds, European and Ganda traditions, and past and present, the narrative sparks off myriad insights. For British readers, the reflections on the ‘disruption of Ganda time’ by colonial rule – which, among many other things, reduced the three-day weekend to two days and imposed the 24-hour clock – may be particularly interesting. Take this description of the protagonist’s efforts to reconcile the two systems:
‘Kirabo had even learnt to balance her mind at that precarious edge where she saw time in its natural, Ugandan mode but articulated it in the upside-down English mode. At first, it had felt schizophrenic as her mind computed ten hours of day but she said four in the afternoon.’
The novel’s discussion of the mechanics and power of storytelling is similarly thought-provoking. Indeed, the book contains some of the most memorable explanations I’ve read of how narratives can be used to acquire wealth and influence, and to subjugate others. ‘Stories are critical,’ as family friend Nsuuta tells Kirabo towards the end of the novel. ‘The minute we fall silent, someone will fill the silence for us.’
Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the novel’s exploration of feminism, or mwenkanonkano in Kirabo’s mother tongue, Luganda. Although many of the issues and struggles portrayed will be familiar to readers in the global North, Nansubuga Makumbi presents a much more holistic, embodied consideration of women’s attempts to assert themselves than many will be used to. Women’s physicality is frankly discussed and menstruation even has a hand in shaping the plot – an approach that feels quite different to that of the more familiar, often rather dry and cerebral, Anglo-American feminist manifestos. The book also throws up some fascinating thoughts on intersectionality and the ways different kinds of privilege and history divide us.
As with all ambitious stories, the book presents some challenges. Perhaps the biggest for Anglo-American readers will be the cultural differences that may make a few of Kirabo’s decisions hard to understand. Chief among them is the fact that, having never met her mother, she resists the temptation to ask her family about her, preferring instead to try witchcraft and put posters up around her school appealing for information. Nansubuga Makumbi does an excellent job of elucidating the power dynamics of the clan system (using the ingenious ploy of having older members explain many of the intricacies to children), but there are moments where this reticence and respect for elders risks feeling a little too much like a plot device. (Although this may be more of a insight into the limitations of this reader’s imagination than any failing of the novel.)
Good writers offer insights into other places and situations. Great writers offer insights into other minds. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a great writer. I’m just sorry it took me so long to read her.
The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Oneworld, 2020)
