Category Archives: Africa

Angola: the meaning of life

March 26, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

The names of certain countries seem bound up with the conflicts that shaped them. For many in the West words such as Bosnia, Sudan and Libya will conjure up the images of death and destruction that flickered on our TV screens throughout recent decades.

The magnitude of these events and the time it takes to translate and distribute books mean that many of the most powerful translated novels still coming out of these countries deal directly with war and its legacy. So we find a harrowing portrait of the expulsion of ethnic Russians from Tajikistan in Andrei Volos’s Hurramabad and a startling child’s-eye view of the Bosnian War in Sasa Stanisic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone.

However, as I discovered when I read my Angolan choice for this project, not all literature from recent war zones strikes a mournful note.

Published in 2008 by now sadly defunct Aflame Books, Ondjaki’s The Whistler, the slender first novel from the author who made his name on the world literature stage with Good Morning Comrades, brims with joy and belief in rejuvenation.  It chronicles the arrival of a man with a haunting whistle in a sleepy village. Taking up residence in the church, the mysterious visitor fills the neighbourhood with his tunes, which are so beguiling they even charm the pigeons.

The effect of the music on the village’s human inhabitants is more impressive still. Cutting through the ‘general torpor’, the melodies unsettle and invigorate the largely elderly residents so that each in his or her way breaks free from the predictable patterns of daily life. The narrative culminates in an orgy of sensation, colour and delight, leaving behind a changed community where the inhabitants have a fresh appreciation of their own potency and the rich possibilities of life.

Ondjaki has a great eye for the contrary details that create character. The novel bustles with intriguing individuals who loom from the page: from the town oddball with his penchant for defecation in the open air to the put-upon gravedigger who refuses to leave his post at the cemetery despite no-one having died for years.

Zany and dream-like, the narrative almost takes flight into poetry on several occasions. This creates some extraordinary images, although it can make the throughline of the plot hard to follow.

The novel is so exuberant, however, that this hardly matters. As Ondjaki’s letter to his friend poet Ana Paula Tavares (published at the end of this edition) makes clear, his main concern is with creating a powerful impression rather than a conventional story.

He achieves this. The book is imaginative, passionate and extraordinary. And, when considered in the context of the 500,000 people killed during Angola’s 27-year civil war, it’s peculiarly moving too.

The Whistler by Ondjaki (translated from the Portuguese by Richard Bartlett). Aflame Books, 2008

Mozambique: uncharted territory

March 22, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 19 Comments

I was preparing a post about Mia Couto’s Under the Frangipani when Miguel popped a comment on The List that took the wind out of my sails. He told me that I should read Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche for Mozambique ‘because it’s a cliché to only read Mia Couto and she needs more attention’.

Horrified at the thought that I might be turning into a literary cliché, I swallowed my reluctance to add yet another book to this year’s tally and googled Chiziane.It took quite a bit of digging before I came across a company called Aflame Books that seemed to have published an English language translation of Niketche. Keen to get hold of a copy, I sent them an email.

A few days later a message came back from translator and company founder Richard Bartlett. He was sorry to say that Aflame Books had gone bust before it managed to publish Niketche and only a third of the book had ever been translated. He was a big fan of Mozambican literature, but the only writer he could think of whose work was available in English was… Mia Couto. He did, however, have an unpublished translation of a novel called Ualalapi by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa if I’d be interested to take a look?

A cursory internet search told me that this Khosa fellow was really rather a big cheese in Mozambican literary circles. Not only had Ualalapi won the 1990 Grand Prize of Mozambican Fiction, it was also included on the list of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century drawn up in 2002. This I had to see.

Told in six installments, partly through the eyes of Nguni warrior Ualalapi, the novel portrays the rise and fall of the legendary leader Ngungunhane, who presided over the region now known as Mozambique until the Portuguese  conquered it in the nineteenth century. Graphic and startling, it lays bare the bloody realities of tribal warfare and colonialism, revealing the personal and societal costs of the human desire for power over others.

Myth-making is a big theme. Delighting in unpacking Ngungunhane’s national significance as a symbol of resistance against imperialism, Khosa plays conflicting accounts of the leader off against one another. Charismatic and ruthless, Ngungunhane remains something of an enigma, driven by the impossible longing to be ‘the first protagonist and the only one that History will record while men will be on the earth’.

This running preoccupation makes his final speech before he boards his captors’ ship, in which he envisages the horrors of the colonial and post-colonial eras and imagines the Portuguese forcing children ‘to speak of my death and call me criminal and cannibal’, all the more striking. He exits the narrative to take up his place alongside Oedipus, King Lear and Okonkwo as one of the world’s towering tragic heroes.

Some fantastical events add to the novel’s mythic quality: from the woman whose menstrual blood floods a village, to the strange prophesies that come to pass. These are expressed with lively and at times wonderfully earthy imagery. So we hear of the gossiping servants leaving a house ‘with bags full of words that they were throwing to the wind’ and the shrugging acceptance that no-one is perfect: ‘who is the man who has not snot in his nose?’

Being one of the few people ever to read this powerful classic in English was a huge privilege. It felt like getting a glimpse through a keyhole into a locked garden full of astonishing plants flourishing out of my reach. It made me sad to think of all we must miss in our little English-language bubble and angry that Mozambican literature in so commonly spoken a language as Portuguese is not more widely translated and read.

I am very grateful to Richard Bartlett for sharing the manuscript and to Miguel for forcing me to raise my game. What other Mozambican literature should be translated into English? Leave a comment and let me know.

Ualalapi by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa (translated from the Portuguese by Isaura de Oliveira and Richard Bartlett). First published by Associacao dos Escritores Mocambicanos (1987)

Algeria: the truth within

March 14, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 10 Comments

As titles go, The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris has to be one of the most controversial out there. In fact, I got quite a few stares when I was reading this book on the Tube (no mean feat when you consider the sights you see on the East London line most days of the week).

One of the most anxious stares came from a young, blonde woman, who, when she saw me looking at her, switched on the radiant smile of the evangelical Christian. This impression was strengthened when the seat next to her became free and I sat down and saw that the title of the chapter she was reading was ‘The Lavish Grace of God’. All through the journey, I thought I could feel her twitching beside me, ready to pounce and tell me the good news.

However, if my neighbour had read the book, she would have found that there is a surprising lack of sex in much of it, albeit not for want of trying on the part of the protagonist. Having reached his fourth decade, Algerian-born banker Basile Tocquard, who ‘Frenchified’ his name as part of his attempts to shrug off North Africa and embrace Western culture, feels it is high time he moved out of his mother’s home and set himself up in a bachelor pad in the centre of town. There, he envisages, he will quickly dispense with his virginity and embark on a sexual odyssey among the city’s Caucasian goddesses.

He has reckoned without two things though: the powerful pull of his Islamic heritage, and the barriers in his own head. In addition, Basile’s story is related by a contemptuous female narrator, who makes fine capital out of the gap between his fantasies and the reality. As the novel progresses and Basile becomes increasingly deluded and paranoid, she strips his ambitions bare, revealing the contradictions and hollowness within.

Leïla Marouane is an exceptional writer, with a gift for making words pay their way. Every detail counts, from Basile’s ‘whitening creams and hair straightening sessions’ to the ‘poetry manuscripts’ he locks away in his desk drawer, building a rich picture that is at once funny, true and sad. This literary economy extends to the way that Marouane insinuates her female narrator into the text: at first sketched in only at the start of chapters and in the occasional footnote, but gradually making her presence felt everywhere.

Although the narrative is rooted in the clash between Islamic and Western culture, it is packed with universal insights about the attempts of younger generations everywhere to break away from what has gone before. As Basile sinks into madness in his efforts to deny his origins, the book excavates the foundations of identity, revealing the uneasy bargains we must all strike, whether between one culture and another or between the present and the past.

Inner peace, it seems, depends on an honest engagement with who we are and what we have been — sentiments with which I suspect my East London line neighbour would have heartily agreed. But then, who knows what her book was really about anyway?

The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leïla Marouane (translated from the French by Alison Anderson). Publisher: Europa Editions (2010)

Côte d’Ivoire: if you are easily offended, keep reading

March 6, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Apparently, there are people who take books back to bookshops. When I was studying for my Creative Writing MA, a visiting publisher told us that after Vernon God Little won the 2003 Booker Prize there was a rash of returns up and down the country in protest at DBC Pierre’s expletives.

No doubt if Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is not Obliged had enjoyed a similar prominence when it was published in the UK, a similar thing would have happened. Riddled with obscenities and swear words in both Malinké and English (French in the original), many of which are hurled directly at the reader, this story of life as a ‘small-soldier’ in West Africa packs a vicious punch, not least because it is narrated by Birahima, a 10-year-old boy.

Most squirm-inducing of all are Birahima’s repeated descriptions of himself and his community as ‘Black Nigger African Natives’. Seeing this most incendiary of words exploding again and again on the opening pages, I was reminded of what my Togolese author, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, wrote about his first encounter with the term:

‘It was the first time I’d ever been called that, though I’d long ago realized that when someone having a dispute with a black man calls him “rotten nigger” or “filthy nigger” or some such name, it’s always some embittered neurotic trying to work off frustrations that have nothing at all to do with the “nigger”.’

Kpomassie’s observations hold true here. In fact, as the narrative progresses and Birahima unfolds his gut-wrenching story of running away from life with his abused and disabled mother only to be co-opted into one guerrilla group after another in Liberia and Sierra Leone, witnessing torture, massacres, rape and butchery along the way, the reasons for his aggressiveness become clear. His linguistic assaults are as much about a war with himself as they are about a war with the world, and reveal his struggle to assimilate all he has seen, thought and felt.

The shock factor is only one side of it. Pithy and waffle-free, Birahima delivers a refreshingly concise and even wry account of West Africa’s recent political history with some piquant insights along the way: ‘The woman is always wrong. That’s what they call women’s rights’; ‘Refugees had it easier than everyone else in the country because everyone was always giving them food’. He even reveals the unacknowledged glamour that the life of the small-soldier seen from the outside may have for many deprived children, for whom a taste of power, respect and good food contrasts favourably with the destitution and helplessness of everyday existence.

The voice can get a little wearing now and then. In particular, the repeated bracketed definitions from the Larousse and Petit Robert dictionaries, which, Birahima explains at the beginning, he is using ‘to make sure I tell you the life story of my fucked-up life in proper French’ feel like a bit of a missed opportunity. While Kourouma does work the odd observation out of them now and then with Birahima’s alternative definitions of ‘torture’ — ‘corporal punishment enforced by justice’ — and ‘humanitarian peacekeeping’, there are too many straight definitions for this device to pay its way.

Nevertheless, the book is a startling and fresh insight into a situation most of us can thankfully only guess at, as well as a masterclass in characterisation. It deserves to be read widely. Outraged readers should be bombarding the returns desks in their droves.

However if the second-hand copy I bought through Amazon is anything to go by, that is unlikely to happen. Inside the front cover there is a ‘withdrawn’ stamp from the Bournemouth Library Service; since the library bought the book in 2007, not enough people have read it to justify keeping it on the shelves. Now that is something worth getting angry about.

Allah is not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma (translated from the French by Frank Wynne). Vintage (2007)

Togo: the writer I’d most like to meet

March 1, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 9 Comments

I knew I had to read Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s book as soon as I saw his Wikipedia entry.  Being forced to join a snake cult after a childhood run-in with a jungle python would be more than enough of a life story for most people. But then to set yourself the goal of running away to Greenland after you found a book on the place and saw that it had no snakes and no trees in which they might hide? And to succeed? I had to find out more.

I was more than a little apprehensive, though. In my experience, people who have extraordinary tales to tell are often terrible at putting them across, the bravado and impulsiveness required for having adventures not usually sitting well with the diligence and reflection required for good writing.

Luckily, Kpomassie proved to be an exception: not only is An African in Greenland, his account of his ten-year odyssey to meet and live with ‘the little men of the North’, told with warmth, humour and humanity, it is also exceptionally skilfully written (it won the 1981 Prix Litteraire Francophone).

Having travelled his way up through Africa and Europe, learning languages as he went by correspondence courses and working in whatever jobs he could find, Kpomassie has the talent for looking at any society he finds himself in with an outsider’s eyes. This pays dividends when it comes to describing the customs of his tribe in Togo — where the second-born twin is considered senior because he or she sends the first one out as a scout, where chickens are used in healing rituals, and where teenage boys find extraordinary uses for desiccated lizards — and in Greenland.

At times, Kpomassie’s descriptions of the widespread promiscuity and alcoholism he discovered in southern Greenland and the reactions of the Inuits to the ‘first black man’ to visit them are startlingly frank. Open and ready to think the best of those he encounters, despite his early traumas with the python worshippers, Kpomassie describes the world with enthusiasm and honesty, revealing many of its marvels and flaws.

Yet the book is a testament not only too Kpomassie’s positivity and determination and the wonder of the world but to the warmth of humankind. In fact, his descriptions of the many spontaneous offers of accommodation, help and support he received during his journey remind me of the generosity I’m repeatedly encountering from book lovers around the globe as I pursue this project to read a book from every country in the world this year. The book and the extraordinary story it tells are proof that with energy, hope and a little bit of luck, almost anything is possible.

Tété-Michel, I don’t know where your travels are taking you now, but if you’re ever passing through south London dinner’s on me.

An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie (translated from the French by James Kirkup). Publisher (this edition): New York Review Books (2001)

Nigeria: family matters

February 24, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 9 Comments

I’m not usually a fan of putting family trees at the start of novels. Maybe it’s because I’m not a very visual person, but it seems to me that greeting readers with a complex diagram featuring a load of names of characters they’ve not met yet is a sure-fire way to put people off.

But then, as I’m finding again and again in my quest to read a book from every country this year, there are exceptions to most of my assumptions about literature. And The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin is, er, no exception.

As the title suggests, the 2011 Orange prize-longlisted novel unravels the hidden stories of the four women of the household of Baba Segi, a prosperous, middle-aged businessman in the Nigerian city of Ibadan. The catalyst for the revelations is encapsulated neatly by the diagram on the opening page: a family tree that shows the offspring of three of the wives but only a blank space under the name of Bolanle, the fourth wife. As Baba Segi tries everything he can think of to discover the cause of his nubile, young spouse’s childlessness, one secret after another tumbles out of the shadows to smash open in the heart of his ordered home.

As with Mariama Bâ’s classic So Long a Letter (about a polygamous marriage in Senegal), education is a major theme in the book. At first, university graduate Bolanle seems like the odd one out in Baba Segi’s home, where, faced with the jealousy and vindictiveness of Baba Segi’s poorly educated older wives, she discovers ‘the dark side of illiteracy’. It seems clear that some hidden calamity must have made her abandon the independent career her mother dreamed she would follow in favour of the ‘unspeakable self-flagellation’ of life with the well-meaning but boorish Baba Segi.

But as the narrative unfolds and we hear from each of the wives in turn, it becomes apparent that each of the woman has been forced into their situation by the cruelty and thoughtlessness of others and circumstances beyond their control. In fact, as the final, deft twist in the plot comes into view, we realise that the only person more thwarted and disenfranchised than the women of the household is Baba Segi himself.

Shoneyin has that rare gift of being passionate on her characters’ behalfs while putting their stories over in an engaging and often very funny way. The undercurrents of the subject matter — in particular the frequent inability of mothers to offer daughters a better path in life through no fault of their own — are often deeply sad, yet they are overlaid with a series of sometimes harrowing but often funny set pieces that keep the book from tumbling into worthiness.

In particular, the encounters of Baba Segi with Western medicine, to which he turns as a last resort (and the way the doctors modulate their bedside manner to incorporate ‘the traditional shit [that] always worked on the older farts’) are very entertaining.

So much so, that I read the whole book in pretty much one sitting. And that family tree is still etched on my mind even now.

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin (Serpent’s Tail 2010, 2011)

Senegal: the other woman

February 15, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Discovering that your middle-aged husband has fallen for one of your teenage daughter’s school friends has got to be pretty high in the nightmare stakes for most married women. In British novels, such a scenario usually has one of two outcomes:

  1. aggrieved woman ditches the bastard, reconnects with the vibrant, inner self her marriage has stifled all these years and realises she’s better off without him
  2. aggrieved woman thinks about ditching the bastard and reconnecting with her vibrant, inner self, but, after much soul-searching, and after her husband has realised the folly of his ways, finds a complex, unconventional peace with what has happened and moves forward as a beautiful, seasoned character.

But what about countries where your husband is not only expected to fall for another, younger girl but also legally entitled to bring her into your home and family as his second wife?

Mariama Bâ’s partly autobiographical 1980 novel explores just such a predicament. Written in the form of a letter from schoolteacher Ratamalouye to her old friend Assiatou, the novel’s series of reminiscences sets out the ‘slender liberty granted to women’ and in particular the plight of first wives who are ‘despised, relegated or exchanged… like a worn-out boubou [robe]’ under Islamic polygamy.

Ratamalouye’s husband of 25 years, Modou, has just died. As the rituals of the 40-day mourning period throw her together with his extended family, she relives the hurt and indignity of losing his affections and support to one of her daughter’s friends three years previously. She rehearses these thoughts in her letters to Assiatou, who took the unconventional step of leaving her own husband when he married a second wife, and her descriptions become a prism through which Bâ is able to illuminate the frustrations of many Senegalese women.

Bâ’s work might easily tip into a rant if she weren’t so for aware of the complexity of living through the issues she describes. Though clearly a passionate believer in the importance of education for all, she tempers this with reflections on the toll academic aspirations have taken on rural life with ‘the disappearance of an elite class of traditional manual workers’ because ‘The dream is to become a clerk. The trowel is spurned’. Similarly, though full of admiration for Assiatou’s hard-worn career and independence and though she rejoices ‘every time a woman emerges from the shadows’, Ratamalouye is prevented by her love for her husband and sense of duty from following her friend’s path.

Interestingly, So Long a Letter is the first book I’ve read so far this year where Western influence is presented as a largely positive thing. Ratamalouye writes with unqualified affection of the French headmistress who strove ‘to lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own’. Given the choice of novel endings facing women in western Europe and women in West Africa, perhaps that’s not such a surprise.

So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ (translated from the French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas). Heinemann International Literature & Textbooks (1989)

Cape Verde: where there’s a will…

January 27, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

There can be few more fertile topics for a story than the reading of a will. For writers such as George Eliot and Henry James — to name but two — revealing how a deceased character has distributed his or her belongings is fraught with possibilities for drama, intrigue and dastardliness.

Often such scenes form the foundation for satire on the hypocrisy of families and the hollowness of human relationships, as professions of love and loyalties are stripped away to reveal naked greed. But it’s rare that these lampoons once rigged up are then dismantled to reveal the depth and subtlety that Cape Verdian writer and lawyer Germano Almeida achieves in this slender book.

Teetering on the grotesque at points, the narrative begins with the shock revelation that Senhor Napumoceno da Silva Araújo, a staid and respectable businessman in São Vicente, has left his warehouse empire to his previously unheard of lovechild rather than the nephew whose hard work and innovation helped him build it up. The discovery comes at the end of the reading of the 387-page will the tycoon has left to explain himself, and upon which the rest of the book is largely based.

What follows is a riotous, witty and at times anarchic account of da Silva Araújo’s life, which straddles the archipelago’s break from Portuguese rule in 1975. Told in a lively voice that roams in and out of characters’ thoughts, dipping between registers as it goes, the novel reads like a good gossip with the town’s best storyteller — one who has an eye for the ridiculous and makes no bones about dishing the dirt on his contemporaries’ ‘hanky-panky’ and hollow airs and graces.

Occasionally the fluid structure can make the narrative tricky to follow. Zooming between the near and distant past, with dialogue represented in the midst of the description as a kind of half-digested reported speech, and paragraphs that often stretch over several pages, the text has a breathless, chaotic feel.

Almeida knows what he’s doing though: pulling together the threads like a craftsman erecting a ship in a bottle, he reveals da Silva Araújo’s character in all its wistful complexity. The ending is extraordinarily poignant. Vulnerable, pathetic and yet somehow noble, Senhor da Silva Araújo quietly assumes the stature of the tragic hero — drawing on a legacy that stretches back to Miller, Shakespeare, Sophocles and Aeschylus, and yet is all his own.

The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida (translated from the Portuguese by Sheila Faria Glaser). Publisher (this edition): New Directions

Libya: desert life

January 19, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Few countries can have been written about more than Libya over the past year. In the wake of the collapse of the Gaddafi regime and the shockingly public demise of its leader, it seemed an obvious choice to go for a writer who tackled the oppression and terror that gripped the country during the decades of totalitarian rule.

Among the excellent suggestions of titles made to me by Libyan Dr Fuzi El Mallah and Cairo-based blogger M Lynx Qualey were two such books by 2006 Man Booker Prize nominee Hisham Matar, and I was very tempted to go with them.

But then it struck me that the side of Libya we have all seen splashed across the headlines is probably only part of the story. I wondered what else there was to this country that I felt I knew so much about.

Further down El Mallah and Qualey’s list, the answer presented itself in the form of Ibrahim Al-Koni‘s lyrical and mysterious The Bleeding of the Stone. Set in the 1930s in the deserts of southern Libya, the novel follows the ‘lone bedouin’ Asouf, who is instructed to keep watch over a series of ancient caves and wallpaintings that he has known all his life after archaeologists discover them. Charged with giving tours to Westerners and other visitors, Asouf witnesses the encroachment of the modern world on the fragile and beautiful, yet fierce, landscape that he has grown up in, until at last he himself falls victim to the unthinking rapaciousness of those who intrude upon his homeland.

Al-Koni’s sense of the connection between man and nature, his painstaking evocation of the practices and rituals of the desert dwellers, and his poetic descriptions of the landscape, where the sun clothes the desert ‘in the red mantle of its rays’, reminded me of some of the works of Thomas Hardy. The description of the decimation of the gazelles by the cruel tourist Cain, for example, whose greed for fresh meat drives him to take a Land Rover out the better to shoot down whole herds, could have come from one Hardy’s more vehement denouncements of the inroads of the industrial revolution into traditional rural life:

‘Poor gazelle! He doesn’t see how this devilish machine is a betrayal of nature, breaching the rules of noble conflict and seeking to win the day through the ugliest trickery.’

Like Hardy, Al-Koni evokes a spiritual relationship between man and his natural environment, a relationship that requires respect, reverence and balance for its continuance. Asouf, much in the same vein as Hardy’s Tess, is part animist, part pantheist, with a sprinkling of local myths and formal religious rituals thrown in. To him, both Christian and Muslim visitors to the site appear identical, all pausing before the majestic cave paintings with the same wonder. The text, too, is eclectic in its frame of reference, something that Al-Koni takes care to establish from the start with a quote from both the Quran and the Bible at the beginning of the first chapter and extracts from Greek tragedies and ancient Chinese philosophers throughout.

In contrast to Hardy, however, Al-Koni pushes the spiritual aspect of the natural world into the realm of magical realism, introducing a series of strange interludes in which gazelles speak and waddan (the ancient desert sheep that roam the mountain ranges) assume mystical powers. How many of these happen in reality and how many proceed from Asouf’s own lonely imaginings and delusions is never clear, yet they all work to further the sense of wonder and wistfulness for a shrinking way of life that pervades the text.

From the ‘Emerging Voices’ banner under which my edition was published, I assumed that Al-Koni must be a relatively new writer still earning his spurs. It was only that later that I discovered to my shame that he is one of the leading authors writing in Arabic today. From what I’ve read, he is a master of his art, easily equal to the best English language writers. He deserves to be much more widely read in the West.

The Bleeding of the Stone by Ibrahim Al-Koni (translated from the Arabic by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley). Publisher (this edition): Interlink Books (2002)

Djibouti: states of mind

January 17, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 8 Comments

Alright, hands up. Who read the title as In the United States of America first time round? I know I did. It’s only a few letters’ difference, but, as I discovered with this book, that’s all a talented writer needs to turn the world on its head.

Djiboutian-French author Abdourahman A. Waberi reverses reality in this French Voices Award-winning novel. Africa is the world superpower, and while its Silicon valley and cultural hubs boom it must find a solution to the ills of the ‘coconut-skinned’ Caucasians, ‘who are not people like you and me’ and who immigrate to the continent in their droves escaping war, famine and disease in holocaust-ravaged Europe and the badlands of North America.

Switching between the experience of one such refugee and the story of an adopted white girl, Malaika, who, having grown up in the first-world Eritrean capital Asmara, sets out to salve her conscience and ‘desire to conjugate near and far’ by travelling to look for her birth-mother in the Paris slums, the novel challenges you to look at the world afresh, highlighting the flaws and inconsistencies in even the most innocent-seeming preconceptions.

There’s a lot of scope for comedy. I couldn’t stop laughing as I read about ‘the pagans of the Baltic islands (who practised cannibalism)’ , ‘the clownsuit called Switzerland… subjected to ethnic and linguistic warfare for centuries’ and the ‘Arafat Peace Prize’. The extract from the phrasebook that Malaika takes with her to France, with its footnotes lamenting the illogic and inelegance of the French language, is priceless. Even the introduction of the unfortunate Swiss refugee on the first page made me smile at its cultural arrogance – all too familiar the other way around:

‘Let’s call him Yacuba, first to protect his identity and second because he has an impossible family name’.

The humour is of course only the outriding breeze of a gale of indignation and righteous anger about the skewed perspective that the ‘developed’ world has on its neighbours. Rehearsing commonplace arguments and platitudes in reverse, the narrative voice highlights the cruelty hidden in complacency and self-satisfaction, mining government speak, journalese and interior monologues to reveal the hypocrisy that runs through our dealings with the world.

Often, Waberi achieves his effects by tweaking existing texts and using facts in reverse. His description of the United States of Africa as ‘so insular and so intoxicated with itself [that] hardly 14 per cent of its citizens have a passport’, for example, echoes familiar statements about another USA and packs extra punch by being close to the truth – although for quite other reasons.

This mingling of fact and fiction made me glad that I had not stuck to my intention of reading French texts in their original language. I would definitely have struggled with this one.

As it was, I found my lack of knowledge of African geography and culture meant that there were plenty of references (alongside the hundreds of nods to European and North American culture and politics) that passed me by. I’m not generally a fan of reading extraneous information in footnotes, believing that books should be accessible on some level to anyone who picks them up as they are, but I did feel that I would have benefited from more world knowledge with this one.

What I did get, though, was fascinating and challenging. And I felt somewhat vindicated in my efforts by the ‘solution’ that blinkered, partial Malaika fumbles her way towards at the end, while recognising the patronising, Afrocentric terms in which it is couched (and in which such statements are commonly framed the other way about):

‘translate… all the great literature of the world into French, English, German, Flemish or Italian. And you must insist that the children of Europe discover not only the Bible and the Torah, but the jewels of all civilizations, near as well as far. If narratives can bloom again, if languages, words, and stories can circulate again, if people can learn to identify with characters from beyond their borders, it will assuredly be a first step towards peace.’

I can’t argue with that.

In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi (translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball). Publisher (this edition): University of Nebraska Press (2009)