Category: #ReadAfricanWriters

In The Purple Violet of Oshaantu, Neshani Andreas of Namibia gives a fictional and evocative portrayal of women heading households as their husbands migrate to work for months at a time. The main character, Mee Ali, is a happily married mother who does her best to look out for her neighbor and friend, a younger mother named Kauna. But it’s not easy: Kauna’s husband cheats on her and physically abuses her. Early in the novel, he returns from a night with his mistress and dies suddenly. As the husband’s relatives gather to decide what will become of Kauna, her children, and their property, Mee Ali tells a series of anecdotes from the past — when Kauna sought advice from her mother after being abused, when an elder in the village boldly reprimanded Kauna’s husband, when Mee Ali accidentally uncovered a secret about Kauna’s husband’s work, and more. The andecdotes slow the momentum of the book, but the portrait of life for women in a society that is simultaneously patriarchal and managed day-to-day by women is multifaceted and insightful. Kauna’s refusal to show remorse for the late husband who abused her is bold and risky. Over the course of the narrative, we encounter a fifteen-year-old girl impregnated by her teacher (“Her own teacher!”), the social hierarchy that the church reveals (“church attire contrasts the haves and the have-nots”), dangerously overcrowded minibuses (“our people don’t care about us… All they care about is making money. A sixteen-seat minibus had twenty-eight people on board”), and disrespected teachers (“To think our own government could do this to me!”) and nurses (“I thought all nurses were witches and b****es until I met Sustera”).

• On English: “People said that it was the English language that had made him crazy.”
• Early in the book, a character uses the idiom “okwa tulwa mo” which a footnote tells us means “under her thumb” (as in, a man is under his wife’s thumb), but which literally translates to “he is stuffed in her anus.”

Do you ever read a book that’s so good that you want everyone you know to read it? These are those books! Marguerite Abouet grew up in Côte d’Ivoire, then moved to France at the age of 12. In Akissi: Tales of Mischief and its sequel Akissi: More Tales of Mischief, Abouet shows — as she explains in her introduction — “a different view of Africa than the one we are usually shown. An Africa that is full of life, rather than sorrow.” In these graphic novels, illustrated by Mathieu Sapin, Akissi is a little girl who lives with her family in Abidjan and gets into constant trouble. She encounters dangerous minibus drivers, tapeworms, and mean teachers. The stories are hilarious: I laughed out loud reading them. My brother laughed out loud reading them. My kids read and enjoyed them. These are appropriate for all ages: I think the most adult element is the word “hell” at some point in the second book. Run, don’t walk, and pick up the adventures of Akissi.

• • Marjorie Ingall, New York Times: “Utterly unputdownable. Based on Abouet’s childhood memories of growing up in the port town of Abidjan (which also formed the basis of her award-winning “Aya of Yop City” books for older readers, which have been translated into 15 languages), the rapid-fire, action-packed tales are wild and antic.”
  • Publishers Weekly: “Sapin’s richly colored artwork complements Abouet’s tales, which bring to life universal aspects of childhood, illustrating the silliness, resourcefulness, and mishaps that are experienced all over the world.”
  • School Library Journal: “Realistic moments are not softened, such as when Akissi eats rotten fruit off the ground and contracts tapeworms that crawl out of her nose. But with its gross-out humor and plucky heroine, the collection reads like Dennis the Menace meets Pearls Before Swine, set in West Africa—and may appeal to fans of both.”

• • Kirkus Reviews on More Tales of Mischief: “Outrageously fun—this indomitable little girl is simply incomparable.”

Early in his memoir of his time as a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Mohamedou Ould Slahi of Mauritania tells the story of a man who goes to a psychiatrist, complaining about a rooster: The man says, “’The rooster thinks I’m corn.’ ‘You’re not corn. You are a very big man. Nobody can mistake you for a tiny ear of corn,’ the psychiatrist said. ‘I know that, Doctor. But the rooster doesn’t. Your job is to go to him and convince him that I am not corn.’ By Slahi’s account, his 15 years of detentions were one long process of convincing the rooster (the U.S. government) that he wasn’t corn (involved in terrorism).

• From the editor, Larry Siems: “I still struggle to fathom the scope and intensity of that ordeal, and what it says about my country’s commitment to the core human rights values of due process and freedom of expression.”
• From Slahi, on The Catcher in the Rye: “made me laugh until my stomach hurt”
• On identifying whether you’re going #1 or #2 in the bathroom: “In the countries I’ve been in, it isn’t customary to ask people about their intention in the bathroom, nor do they have a code.” (For the record, I’ve been in several countries that do ask and do have a shorthand.)
• On tea: “Tea is the only thing that keeps the Mauritanian person alive, with God’s help. It had been a long time since any of us had eaten or drunk anything, but the first thing that came to mind was tea.”
• On the anticipation of torture: “I hate waiting on torture; an Arabic proverb says, ‘Waiting on torture is worse than torture.’”
• On video games: “One of the punishments of their civilization is that Americans are addicted to video games.”
• On the secret police: “The funny thing about ‘Secret Police’ in Arab countries is that they are more known to the commoners than the regular police forces. I think the authorities in Arabic countries should think about a new nomenclature, something like ‘The Most Obvious Police.’”
• On how Americans in Guantanamo speak English: “I learned that there was no way to speak colloquial English without F—ing this and F—ing that.”

Towards the beginning of his novel, Kossi Efoui tells a joke: “It’s the story of three men together in the prison cell. The first says, ‘I got twenty years for telling a joke.’ The second says, ‘I got fifteen for laughing.’ The third says, ‘I got ten years for doing nothing.’ ‘You’re lying,’ say the other two, ‘doing nothing–that’s only a five-year stretch.'” In an unnamed African country — Efoui was born and raised in Togo — the narrator of The Shadow of Things to Come (translated from French by Chris Turner), a boy’s father is taken away to a re-education camp from reasons unknown, and his mother is whisked away to a mental hospital. Mama Maize — a woman who cares for lost children — provides shelter and Axis Kemal — a bookseller — provide guidance to our narrator, until he receives the call to the “Frontier Challenge,” likely a border war. But we’re never certain, for Efoui’s narrative is filled with more doublespeak than George Orwell’s 1984. Efoui mimics the way that the government maintains uncertainty with euphemisms upon euphemisms. Nothing is clear until the government comes banging on your door, that is. “Don’t wait for them to capture you.” The Shadow of Things to Come is ominous, circular, and effective.

• Matt Hartman, Bookslut: “This novel is a powerful reflection on the world we live in, a vision that goes beyond truisms about tyranny and control and freedom and returns our gaze to the humans at the center of it all.”
• Gautam Bhatia, The Wire: “The bleak, almost nightmarish world conjured up in The Shadow of Things to Come, where everything but words have “so little existence”, is a disturbingly familiar one.”

Dawit Gebremichael Habte grew up in rural Eritrea, then Asmara (Eritrea’s capital). As a teenager he traveled through Ethiopia and entered Kenya as a refugee from the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict. Ultimately he migrated to the United States, studied at Johns Hopkins University, and went to work for Michael Bloomberg’s company. But he didn’t do it alone! Early in his memoir, Habte quotes an Eritrean proverb: “To those who have done you favors, either return the favor or tell others about their good deeds.” Habte’s memoir — Gratitude in Low Voices — is focused on gratitude to all those who helped him on his path. Along the way, he shares his experience of both rural and urban life in Eritrea, a short history of Eritrea and of the long-term conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea: “Out of the fifty-three former European colonies in Africa, Eritrea was the only country to be denied independence after its European masters departed.” His escape to Kenya is harrowing, and when he arrives in the U.S. — like many other refugees — the challenges are far from over. But I enjoyed Habte’s story. He gives brief bios of many of the people who helped him along the way as a way of honoring, which interrupts his narrative, but I respect his objective.

• Emeka Aniagolu, TesfaNews: “An excellent autobiographical work which will prove a powerful voice…for not only his family’s experience, but for his country, Eritrea.”
• Robin Edmunds, Foreword Reviews: “This book is a reaffirmation of the good that people can do and how one young man succeeded despite the odds against him.”
• Ann Morgan: A Year of Reading the World: “Those looking for masterful writing won’t find it here. But those looking for passion and a fresh perspective undoubtedly will.”
• Mary Okeke, Mary Okeke Reviews: “Gratitude in Low Voices is an interesting and an uplifting narrative, simple and comprehensible, it is just Dawit telling his story.”
• Sofia Tesfamariam, Eritrea Ministry of Information: “Dawit Ghebremichael Habte has managed to organize the memories of his journey and present a story that finds rare authenticity and validation of not just his own life but also that of others who have crossed his path… Despite beginning with an Eritrean adage, what was missing in the book was more of them.”
• Vivian Wagner, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction: “This is, at times, a rambling and disjointed narrative… This book is a story about storytelling, about the process of creating a narrative out of disorder, and about all the people that help shape that narrative along the way.”

This is book #35 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

Forbidden love! Murder for profit! Gorgeous landscapes! Shipwrecks! Passion! War! Woodworking! Nursing! Witchcraft! If this sounds like your cup of tea, then A.R. Tirant’s historical romance — Echoes from the Oasis — might be the book for you. Tirant lived in the Seychelles for the first 37 years of her life, before migrating to the UK. In her book, she draws a rich picture of her childhood home, the island of Mahé, with her story of a nature-loving nurse, Anna, who falls in love with a wealthy merchant’s son, Louis, on the eve of World War I.

Tirant’s deep love for the natural beauty of her home shines through. This is her first novel, and the prose isn’t elegant, but she gets the job done. Occasionally I wished for more context: When a white man is sentenced to death for the murder of a black man, the narrator notes that “it was not every day that a white man would hang for the murder of a black man on the island.” I wanted to understand more of those dynamics. And sometimes I wished for more character development: one character advocates for a return to slavery with little context, and Anna’s mother reacts violently to a choice made by her daughter towards the end of the book with little precedent.

But those points aside, the book ends on a cliffhanger and I’ll admit that Tirant left me longing to know how things turn out. (The next book in the series is not yet out.)

This is book #33 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.