Category: Reading

Alain Mabanckou was born in the Republic of the Congo — not the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the other one, sometimes referred to as Congo-Brazzaville. In his early 20s, he left to study in Paris. Later he moved to the teach in the United States. Then, after more than two decades away, he returned to his hometown, Pointe-Noire, for a visit. In his memoir of the visit — The Lights of Pointe-Noire (translated into English by Helen Stevenson), he artfully alternates between stories from his past and his experience of re-encountering family members, friends, mentors, and others. I’ve read many memoirs of growing up in Africa, some of them very good, but Mabanckou offers a lyricism that is mesmerizing and exceptional. I could have spent much longer with him on this visit.

• On shoes: “You know, Uncle, if you don’t have new sandals, you can’t get to school on time, you have to spend two hours in the street mending them and when you tell the teacher he won’t listen, he just says ‘little liar’, but it’s not true, I’m not a liar!”
• On writing: “I don’t have that tapeworm in my gut that writers have, that eats away at their insides every day.”
• On fertility in wartime: “Between you and me, babies still get born even when there’s oil and war in a country. The worst of it was, people went on making love even when people were falling like flies in the war. I expect you’ll be wondering: why didn’t they wait for the end of the war, to make love? Oh no, if you waited for the end of the war, people would forget how to make love, by the time the whole dirty war ended we’d be making love with animals!”
• On American English: “We told the Americans they could do what they liked with our oil, we weren’t going to learn their weird English, where you talk through your nose, like you’ve got flu.”
• On self-publishing: “I also packed the self-published books which had been given me by various local authors. I promised myself I would read them in Europe or America. There is always something enriching in the suffering of a creator who hopes his bottle thrown into the sea will one day reach its destination.”

Over the course of my project this year to read a book by an author from each of Africa’s 54 countries, I’m struck by how many countries have just one novel available in translation. The Ultimate Tragedy, by Abdulai Silá from Guinea-Bissau, is one example. As Efemia Chela writes, that’s “a lot of weight to bear.” The novel also has an extended history—written in 1984, published in 1995, and published in English — translated by Jethro Soutar — only in 2017.

• Efemia Chela, Johannesburg Review of Books: “The Ultimate Tragedyleaves a lot to be desired. The book overall is unmemorable, despite its interesting wordplay; the characters are not constructed with much depth; the plot feels familiar, its story fairly typical of many African works of fiction, but less inventive than the continent’s great novels.”
• Jessie Stoolman, Asymptote: “The novel reads like an uninterrupted conversation about what the future holds for this nation, seemingly on the verge of liberation… The Ultimate Tragedy serves in many ways as a sort of literary privilege-check, introducing histories as well as literary/linguistic styles rarely given space on an international platform.”
• Ann Morgan, A Year of Reading the World: “Translator Southar has done deft work to encourage the learning process that this text demands. By choosing to leave numerous words in their original language and trusting to the context to elucidate them, he encourages readers to let go of the guide rope of the narrative and become comfortable with the unfamiliar.”

This is book #43 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

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.”