Category: #ReadAfricanWriters

At this point, there could be a whole genre of “memoirs by youth who fled war-torn African countries”: Earlier this year I read The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After — about Clemantine Wamariya’s flight from Rwanda at age five and subsequent time in a range of African countries before landing in the U.S. — and in years past I read Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.

• On education: “My parents deeply valued education. They had big dreams for their kids, and they knew it all started with school.”
• On getting to school in DRC: “The kids at my school all lived within walking distance. That was the only way for any of us to get to school: on our feet.”
• On racism in DRC: “At school, the Congolese kids were not always so supportive. They would tease me, mainly because my nose was thinner than theirs, making me look different. Sometimes they would say I wasn’t truly Congolese. Other times they would call me Rwandan. It was meant to be an insult, making me into a foreigner, but I didn’t know what it meant. ‘I’m not Rwandan,’ I would say. ‘I’ve never been to Rwanda. I was born here.’”
• On twerking: “Where I come from, twerking is not sexualized the way it is in America. The boys sometimes do it better than the girls. Everyone does it. It’s wild and fun and freeing,”
• On camping as a former refugee: “One day, the youth group invited me along for an overnight party that sounded weird to me—a camping trip. I had never heard of camping. I imagined we would go to the woods and hike and swim, then go to sleep in a bed in a house. When I heard that we would be sleeping on the ground for three days, outside, under a tent, I thought that was insane. People did this on purpose? It sounded like a refugee camp. Goodness, I thought. Are these people so bored, so privileged, that they want to sleep outside on the ground instead of in their comfy beds?”
• On images of Africa on American TV: “The images of Africa on American TV were all the same: There were the ads for charity groups showing a white lady holding a starving black child, flies landing all over the kid. Indeed, Africans might be poor, but we know how to swat flies.”
• On the upside of Facebook: “As more survivors of our massacre made their way to America, we began to connect with one another on Facebook, as we were all scattered across the country. And we decided to meet up once a year for a reunion, on the anniversary of the attack in August.

• Elizabeth Bush, Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books: “Sandra’s account of her transition to America is fully as engrossing as her family’s escape from their war-torn homeland, and her memories of trying to navigate American culture as a twelve-year-old alien desperate to fit in will provoke consideration even with readers who look upon immigrant classmates and neighbors with indifference.”
• Didier Gondola, Africa Access Review: “How Dare the Sun Rise is not without its flaws. Although her compelling story does elicit her readers’ sympathy for the plight of refugees, the author never really provides a context to help readers understand the history and events that transformed the Great Lakes Region into a cauldron of war. At times, the narrative verges on the trivial and the melodramatic.”
• Zoe I, TeenReads.com: “HOW DARE THE SUN RISE is a deeply moving and powerful book about strength, resilience and the truth about the American Dream.”
• Kirkus Reviews: “This hard-hitting autobiography will have readers reeling as it shows one young woman’s challenging path to healing.”
• Publishers Weekly: “With compassion and perspicacity, Uwiringiyimana shares the journey through which she became a courageous advocate for her tribe and refugees everywhere.”
• School Library Journal: “The title is a critical piece of literature, contributing to the larger refugee narrative in a way that is complex and nuanced but still accessible for a YA audience.

This is book #31 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

The opening story of Sandra Aikaruwa Mushi’s collection of poetry and short tales, Stains on My Khanga, features a harrowing scene:

• On alcohol and abusive relationships: “The bottle was her solace. The bottle was his ally.”
• On mothers and daughters with abusive men: “When I watched her, I watched her watching him watching me. Like me, she watched in silence.”
• On prostitution: “What’s the point if I make in one night more than you make in a month?” (Spoiler alert: In the story, the retirement plan doesn’t end up being great.)

This is book #30 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

An adult son has committed an unspeakable crime and narrates from his jail cell, “narrow as a tomb, and just as cold.” (The crime is so unspeakable, in fact, that it isn’t revealed until three-quarters of the way through the book.) A mother narrates from beyond the grave. In this dark novel with dual tellers, Tunisian writer Hassouna Mosbahi illustrates — in A Tunisian Tale, published in Tunisia in 2008 and translated to English by Max Weiss — what happens when trust breaks down completely in communities and families. There is a smattering of friendship and love here, set against an avalanche of gossip, backbiting, and betrayal.

• On welfare smoothing over time: “People in my country say that it’s better for a person to live as a rooster for just one day than to be a chicken for an entire year.”
• On education and child marriage: “What else could I do after getting kicked out of school for failing the elementary certificate exam twice in a row? What else could I do? I was past the age of maturity and on the verge of getting married. In our tiny dirt-poor village a young girl in a situation such as mine had no other choice but to consent to the way things are. If she tried to escape, to rebel against those stern rules, narrow-minded people would turn her into an ugly tale that they would talk about in private and in public. By that point it would be likely for one of her male relatives to lose his head and shoot her or stab her, washing away the shame, defending the impugned honor, as people used to say in such circumstances.“
• More on child marriage: “I won’t hide from you that when I was that age I was untouched, fresh, like a flower that had started to open up, but living in permanent horror. That horror becomes even sharper and fiercer the more I thought about how, one day, one of those men I hated and who I’d sooner die than let his flesh touch mine was going to come and, amid the ululations and the songs, the beating of drums and the sounds of flutes, and the firing of the horsemen’s rifles, bring me back to his house, close all the doors and take me as he got all puffed up like the winter wind and his family stood outside on the doorstep, ready to open fire in celebration of his masculinity’s victory.“
• On one character’s obsession with the film Cool Hand Luke: “Listen, Alaa al-Din, movies aren’t real life and life isn’t a movie.” (This line reminded me of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend song The End of the Movie.)
• On urbanization: “Dreaming of a better life, they quickly found themselves having lost everything, and they remained lost creatures without origins or roots. Under the pressures of everyday life, its twists and turns and its raging storms, these creatures gave up all their human feelings and values. In those ugly neighborhoods where they piled up, they resorted to every way and every means, including crime and deception, lying and hypocrisy, and vice of every type and kind, in order to secure their daily bread.”
• On external validation: “What mattered to me most of all wasn’t men, but the feeling that I was still beautiful and attractive.”
• On jobs and women’s empowerment: “But what should I do, then?” “Find yourself a job!” “A job?” “That’s right. Only a job will let you laugh at your life, as you must.”
• On talking to oneself: “The number of people who had started talking to themselves in our country had increased in a shocking manner over the last few years… My friend Aziz told me that this phenomenon could be traced to the fact that the people had lost faith in all forms of media, and even in their nearest and dearest relatives. Therefore they no longer trust anyone but themselves, which is whom they turn to whenever they have to deal with a private or a public problem, so it became normal for us to see people talking to themselves as they walked down the street or strolled through public gardens, as they rode the light rail and other public transportation or sat in front of the piles of folders stacking up on their desks.

• Ghada Alatrash, Al Jadid: A Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts: “A succinct and skillfully written novel that takes its readers into the darkest corners of Tunis and of the human mind.”
• William Armstrong, Hurriyet Daily News: “a raw, claustrophobic book about frustrated ambitions, urban desperation and hopelessness. The narrative is brilliantly paced, with an almost Shakespearean sense of characters embroiled in tragic situations where fate beats towards an inescapable conclusion.”
• Michele Levy, World Literature Today: “A Tunisian Tale crosses genres. Its clipped, bleak tone evokes a noir, while realism inheres in its portrait of Tunisia and allusions to contemporary political movements… Yet it most resembles parable, showing how socially constructed cultural codes can transform society into a Kafkaesque penal colony.”
• Susannah Tarbush, Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature: “Mosbahi’s highly readable novel has potentially wide appeal for readers of English. It can be seen as a psychological thriller, a sample of ‘North African Noir’. It also shows the sense of alienation and hopelessness and the perceived inequalities in Tunisia on the brink of the revolution that began in 2010.”

Ethiopian-born writer Maaza Mengiste fled her country as a young girl around a period called the Ethiopian Red Terror, when between tens and hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians were killed by a communist military government called the Derg. In her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, Mengiste uses one family to recount the end of Emperor Haile Selassie’s rule and the intimate horror of the Derg. The family’s patriarch, a surgeon, faces a terrible choice when the military brings him a victim of torture — at the brink of death — to revive, presumably for further interrogation. The surgeon’s two sons, his daughter-in-law, and their friends each confront the terror in their own way. Mengiste’s novel isn’t for the faint of heart: There is one scene of child torture and many other difficult images. But as Mengiste told NPR, “I am hoping that if we can understand the humanity of those who suffered through this, that we start to investigate beyond the pages of this book.”

I listened to the audiobook, well narrated by Steven Crossley. I had to jot down a few character names to keep track of everyone at the beginning, but it was well worth it.

Here are a few other reviews:

• Lorraine Adams, the New York Times: “For all its beginner’s flaws, ‘Beneath the Lion’s Gaze’ is an important novel, rich in compassion for its anguished characters.”
• Aida Edemariam, The Guardian: “Mengiste has clear metaphorical points to make: that this revolution was a family affair, turning children against parents, and against each other; that a country steeped in authoritarianism and religious fatalism … can suffer a terrible moral passivity at times of crisis… She is good on the resulting lostness, and on how everyone is compromised… Mengiste is good, too, on the pervading fear that anyone who lived there then remembers.”
• Kirkus Reviews: “An arresting, powerful novel that works on both personal and political levels.”
• The New Yorker: “The real marvel of this tender novel is its coiled plotting, in which coincidence manages to evoke the colossal emotional toll of the revolution: on a crowded street, soldiers force the doctor’s elder son to drag away a prisoner whom they shot, and who turns out to be a family servant’s long-lost child; the younger son becomes a legendary resistance fighter, killing soldiers and collecting civilian bodies for burial, while his fumbling childhood best friend thrives under a senior officer of the junta.”

This is book #27 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019. I’m halfway there!

Léopold Sédar Senghor was the first president of a post-colonial, independent Senegal, from 1960 until 1980. But long before he was president, Senghor was an intellectual and a poet. After the first year of his presidency, in 1961, he published a collection entitled Nocturnes. An English translation from the original French — by Wake and Reed — was published some years later. In the author’s note at the end of his poetry collection, Senghor writes, “I write primarily for my own people,” and this comes through clearly, with a host of references to specific places that may have been familiar to Senegalese readers in the 1960s but are lost on this U.S. reader in the 2010s. He includes a glossary in the back which only partially mitigates the challenge, so I admit that much of this collection passed above my head. But not all of it! Even to an unfamiliar reader, his poetry contains powerful images.

Some of the images are of fickle, potentially unrequited love:

I have woven you a song and you did not hear me…
I have offered you my wild flowers. Will you let them wither,
Finding distraction in the mayflies dancing?

Another plays with the concept of Western versus African religious beliefs in the context of insomnia:

Roads of insomnia, roads at noon, these long nightlong roads!
How long is it now since I entered civilisation and still I have not succeeded in appeasing the white God of Sleep.
O I speak his language yes, but listen to my accent.

Or the power of music and dance:

Rhythm drives out the fear that has us by the throat.

At other times I felt mystified, as when Senghor speaks of

And your lips are bread filling my breast that hisses like a black snake.

All in all, a worthy read from a great intellectual.

This is book #26 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

The Old Drift, by Zambian-born writer Namwali Serpell, is hot right now. The New York Times calls it “a dazzling debut,” NPR talks about “exquisite acts of literary ventriloquism, the Washington Post calls it “a brilliant literary response to generations of bad politics.” It’s mostly set in Zambia, but it spans four generations (extending into the near future), a long list of characters — as Michael Silverblatt says, “you have a pencil and a piece of paper” — and multiple continents. At 576 pages (or 25 hours of audiobook), there’s a lot there. I enjoyed it, but I’ll admit that I occasional missed some of the intergenerational character connections (I should have wielded that pencil), perhaps because I was listening to the audiobook. Occasionally a “Greek chorus” enters in the form of a swarm of mosquitos: “We’re your oldest friend, your ancient enemy … We’re perfectly matched … We’re both useless, ubiquitous species. But while you all rule the earth and destroy it for kicks, we linger and loaf, unsung heroes. We’ve been around here as long as you have — for eons before, say the fossils.”

• “History, in short, was the annals of the bully on the playground.”
• “The first time a Shiwa audience saw John Wayne die, the women started up a fanfare of mourning like he was a long lost relative. When Wayne came back to life in the very next film, the audience erupted again. ‘But why?’ asked Agnes. ‘Were they happy?’ ‘No!’ Ronald laughed. ‘They said it was cheating!’
• “To have nothing to do was like having your fingernails pulled out, one by one.”
• “In truth, Sylvia was relieved to have failed out of school for good. She had never understood why the teachers taught why they taught. Sediment, tectonic, archipelago. Hypotenuse, equilateral, isosceles. What was any of it good for? No. She did not miss those useless lessons.”
• “Progress is just the word we use to disguise power doing its thing.”
• “The flight attendants…were done with coddling. They snatched Naila’s blankets and demanded her headset, they claimed her rubbish and chastised her tilted seat.”

“The reading of the last will and testament of Sr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo ate up a whole afternoon. When he reached the one-hundred-and-fiftieth page, the notary admitted he was already tired and actually broke off to ask that someone bring him a glass of water.” So begins The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo, Cape Verdean writer Germano Almeida‘s novel about the life of the titular character, translated to English by Sheila Faria Glaser. The book wanders through Almeida’s life and loves, and Almeida’s “refreshing voice and playful irony” (as Publisher’s Weekly put it) reminded me of the feel of Brazilian literature I’ve encountered, like Jorge Amado’s The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray. Araújo works his way up from poverty and becomes a successful businessman, then an eccentric technophile, then an isolated writer. One of his initial business successes demonstrates the feel of the novel: Araújo accidentally orders 10,000 umbrellas rather than his intended 1,000 (and even that was “almost as a joke,” as there was little rain), writes an angry note to his supplier, but then an unprecedented, extended rainstorm allows him to sell all for great profit. The novel is filled with little anecdotes like this one. Araújo has some quirky ideas — for example on goodness and on intellectual property.

• On purpose: “By nature and social position a humble man, he, Napumoceno, could not aspire to ending the turmoil of the planet. But here on this bit of earth, poor but beloved, he would like to contribute with all his strength to bringing a reign of harmony and peace, and, who knows, maybe even well-being, to the forsaken.”
• On priorities: “No fortune is enough to make up for the loss of our peace and quiet.”
• On sex: “Life is a naked woman lying on a bed, he’d read that, he no longer remembered where, and he had accepted this assertion as the unquestionable truth and for that reason he had a morbid fear of being impotent with a woman.”
• On education and jobs:
  • “Only productive work linked to a basic education can free a man from darkness and misery.”
  • “He said that I had to be a man and that only books, only school, made men.”
• On guidance: “Crickets sing to guide people, but poor things, more often than not they disorient us because they all sing at the same time, each one pulling you toward it, no one can find his way in the midst of that cacophony of calls.”
• On reading: “He couldn’t quite determine when he’d acquired the vice of reading, because a bona fide vice it was, a sort of sedative opium that he took to recoup from both physical and spiritual exhaustion, and also from the annoyances of the day or the excitement of a deal.”
• On lump sums versus annuities: One characters wishes her inheritance as a lump sum in order to start a chicken farm (p147), consistent with some thinking around cash transfer programs and less frequent, larger transfers being associated with investment rather than consumption.

This is book #24 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

Norbert Zongo, an investigative journalist from Burkina Faso, published his novel The Parachute Drop in 1988. He was assassinated ten years later for his journalism. Here’s a passage from the preface to his novel.

• Damien, Travel Readings blog: “The book written in 1988 is almost prescient.”
• Ann Morgan, A Year of Reading the World: “This capacity to evoke empathy and celebrate the humanity of his enemies demonstrates Norbert Zongo’s outstanding qualities as a writer, journalist and human being.”

• “Virtual beggars on the international scene, these leaders spent enormous sums of money so they could travel about the world to vilify our people and barter our dignity for the sake of gaining foreign aid. This so-called aid has often been more of a nuisance than a help for our people.”
• “It takes far more than a beret and a pistol to turn a fool into a wise man.”
• “There is no real happiness for anyone unless there is happiness for everyone, for all of the people.”

This is book #22 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.