Afterlives (Tanzania) *Kindle

When he was 20 years old, Abdulrazak Gurnah fled to the UK from Zanzibar when the black population overthrew the ruling Arab government (Gurnah's family was of Arab descent) in 1968.* 19 years later he wrote his first novel at the age of 39. He spent the next three decades writing in relative commercial–though not critical–obscurity. That is, until 2021 when he won the Nobel prize for literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” "Afterlives" is his latest novel which showcases his expertise in making macro issues, such as colonialism, personal and piercing. Gurnah’s 10th novel spans the timeline from early 1900s east Africa to Tanzanian independence in the early 60s. In it he tells the multi-generational story of several families struggling in an East Africa caught in the middle of a fight between a waning Germany and a desperate teetering British empire.

Exploring themes of colonialism, racism, independence, emigration and love, Gurnah unravels the lives of an abused orphan named Afiya, her brother Ilyas (gone to fight as an askari for the Germans), and a diminutive dreamer turned German Schuztruppe named Hamza. The author’s prowess is apparent as brings these three lives’ intersection into stark relief–leaving the colonial masters’ struggles as background noise. This is the mark of a great book for me–it shifts the attention of the western reader from a default focus on similar western powers and brings it to the personal level of the men and women who own the country and land–the lives that remain in countless generations.

*This is a VERY simplified explanation of the Zanzibar revolution on an island that was very ethnically diverse and hardly monolithic. 

For further study:

• NYT "Afterlives" Review
• Kruse's Keys: Read "African Kaiser" To Learn an Untold Chapter of WWI History
• Beyond Achebe: Reading the Continent List
• The Zanzibar Chest (one of my favorite novels/memoirs), my complete notes.
• My review of The Gunny Sack, a novel that captures the Indian experience in East Africa.

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

Key Quotes:

• The askari left the land devastated, its people starving and dying in the hundreds of thousands, while they struggled on in their blind and murderous embrace of a cause whose origins they did not know and whose ambitions were vain and ultimately intended for their domination.
• The war crushed those niceties out of him and showed him staggering visions of brutality that taught him humility. These thoughts filled him with sorrow, which he thought was the inescapable fate of man.

"Confines of the Shadow" by Alessandro Spina (Libya)

I came across this book through a post on the Arabist's excellent blog--it was entitled A Libyan Novel You Should Read. The author of the post--Ursula Lindsey--wrote such a great opening hook to describe the books' author that I've included it here:

Alessandro Spina was a Syrian Maronite who grew up in Ben Ghazi, was educated and wrote in Italian, and over the course of 40 years penned an extraordinary cycle of novels about the bloody establishment, brief flourishing and troubled aftermath of the Italian colony in Libya.

So a novel by a Catholic Syrian that grew up in Libya, was educated in Italy and wrote in Italian and his work has only recently been translated into English...awesome.

Lindsey also writes a very thorough and lengthy article on Spina: A Stage Across the Sea: An unjustly-neglected Libyan novelist captured the twisted logic of colonialism, past and present.

Confines of the Shadow is the first of a three volume collection that texturizes the history of Libya. The second two volumes have yet to be translated so you will have to wait for the exciting conclusion. The book's translator, Naffis-Sahely, does a really beautiful job with an introduction that captures the labor of love he completed to bring this collection to the Anglophone readers (read the intro here courtesy of google books). Naffis-Sahely also has a great blog/website that is a testament to his talent and breadth of scholarship. Prior to his superb translation (and really re-working/updating of the book), this gem had been largely forgotten.

Now that Spina's work is once again being read--this tome should easily ascend to the top of the reading list for any budding middle east/maghreb/european history scholar/foreign area officer/foreign service officer (hopefully I caught enough categories there).

Perhaps the most incredible part of Confines is its relevance today. Take for instance the comments by one Italian soldier concerning Italy foray into Libya:

Just as a language is only useful in the area in which it is spoken, and is pointless outside of it, so it goes with Europe’s liberal moral values, which don’t extend anywhere south of the Mediterranean. As soon as one reaches the other coastline, one is ordered to do the exact opposite prescribed by God’s commandments: kill, steal, blaspheme … Once the Turkish garrison was defeated and a few key locations on the coast were occupied, we found a vast, obscure country stretching out before us, into which we were afraid to venture. Thus, we cloistered ourselves in the cities while waiting for daylight. Instead, the night is getting deeper, darker, deadlier and teeming with demons.

This is a novel that should have been mandatory reading for all western countries before we even thought about getting involved in the Qaddafi overthrow. And while, Spina's collection did win literary recognition during its time, his keen analysis into the Italian ethos likely did him no favors in winning widespread popularity:

Italy’s obsession with catching up with Europe’s great powers is impeding its culture from recognising the legitimacy of other civilisations. We employ reason merely as an instrument in our attempt to imitate a superior model. We disdain civilisations to the south of us; in fact, it’s as if they embodied exactly what we wanted to escape. We’re a backward country that always keeps its eyes on the other European capitals: Vienna, Paris or London. If Venice had led the Italian unification effort, things might have turned out otherwise, but instead it was led by Piedmont, a lowly vassal of France, and we are the victims of those provincial beginnings. Italian culture seems to atrophy part of our organs. It’s no use trying to educate oneself, or to read books written elsewhere; whatever we do, a congenital mediocrity clings to us like a bad smell.

The genius of these stories is that much of what Spina writes transcends the particularity of the Italian colonial experience in the specific country of Libya:

Generosity cannot overcome our fundamental problem: is our presence here legitimate? What right do we have to interfere in their destinies? Did anyone ask us to bring order to their world? (location 3268)

On my part this is not meant as a commentary on past US/Western involvement in the middle east and north africa, however, these are important questions that should at least be considered and publicly debated within governments and wider society prior to intervention/invasion somewhere. Finally, Spina displays his gift for capturing what it is to be a foreigner in another country as he notes that presence and weapons will never confer acceptance.

To be a foreigner is a magical condition: this land will never belong to me, no matter how many cannons and rifles I bring here; weapons will only protect me, and I don’t know how long that will last. Alas, you can’t put down roots with cannons. (location 3432)

Finally, I owe it to my former life as an English major, to state that this collection is ripe for commentary and analysis on the nature of 'shadows.' Spina comments that "The native is a living shadow" (location 3457) and he probably uses the word shadow a few hundred times. A properly analysis would delve into:

why/is this true?
Who is the sun causing the shadow?
what are the extremes of the shadows (i.e., when are they longest/shortest)?
How does a character's subjugation to a shadow steal away their humanity?

This is a book I will return to and which anyone traveling to/working in/being station to Libya should read...several times. I look forward to the translation of the following two volumes in the coming years.




Kindle Highlights

Here is Captain Romanino’s take on Italy’s African venture during a soirée in Milan, where he is on leave: 

• Just as a language is only useful in the area in which it is spoken, and is pointless outside of it, so it goes with Europe’s liberal moral values, which don’t extend anywhere south of the Mediterranean. As soon as one reaches the other coastline, one is ordered to do the exact opposite prescribed by God’s commandments: kill, steal, blaspheme … Once the Turkish garrison was defeated and a few key locations on the coast were occupied, we found a vast, obscure country stretching out before us, into which we were afraid to venture. Thus, we cloistered ourselves in the cities while waiting for daylight. Instead, the night is getting deeper, darker, deadlier and teeming with demons.
• The years following Qaddafi’s coup had seen the despot eliminating foreign influences in Libya, a process he began in 1970 with the expulsion of thousands of Jewish and Italian colonists. Thus, at age fifty, Spina witnessed the Italo-Arab-Ottoman universe he’d been born into vanish completely.
• Twenty-first-century readers might do well to heed Solzhenitsyn’s warning that ‘a people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul."
• Lies were promissory notes he would eventually settle on time. He pretended to take the young man’s words at face value. Cowardly obeisance to reality is the rot that eats away at the mediocre. That young man was ambitious, and lying was simply a form of risk-taking. Hajji Semereth decided to take him under his wing. Read more at location 215
• We don’t need the colony: it’s yet another symptom of that same frenzy for bloating everything out of proportion for the lack of anything better to do. Read more at location 282
• ROMANINO: If the officer stops thinking of the enemy as automaton and instead considers him as guileful. It’s laughable to accord those things such abstract concepts as rights, responsibilities, consciences and souls … it’s an entertaining game, like hunting – and massacres are taken lightly. But if said officer is rash enough to think of those two peoples as living under the same sky and under the same law, lights and shadows begin to assume such a mysterious shape that he’ll start questioning himself while absorbed in the act of killing the enemy; he’ll start to tremble and his anxiety will lead him down any number of paths. If that happens, the connection between the troops and their commanders will be severed. In times of war, isolation is fatal: enemies become supernatural knights, one’s own comrades become demons, comfort and morale vanish and an officer’s heart can rarely weather the ordeal. A hero can become a saint; but if he doesn’t, guilt will crush him and the warrior will begin to fear that he’s no better than a common murderer. Cruelty and suicide become the easiest way out of this dilemma. Just as a language is only useful in the area in which it is spoken, and is pointless outside of it, so it goes with Europe’s liberal moral values, which don’t extend anywhere south of the Mediterranean. As soon as one reaches the other coastline, one is ordered to do the exact opposite prescribed by God’s commandments: kill, steal, blaspheme … Once the Turkish garrison was defeated and a few key locations on the coast were occupied, we found a vast, obscure country stretching out before us, into which we were afraid to venture. Thus, we cloistered ourselves in the cities while waiting for daylight. Instead, the night is getting deeper, darker, deadlier and teeming with demons. Read more at location 331
• Everywhere you look, you can’t help but see the omens of a tragedy hanging over our heads like a Damoclean sword, of which the Libyan enterprise is but the prologue. Read more at location 357
• The outcome of the war would be decided outside the city’s walls, in the immense country that opened up before the aggressors’ eyes like a great abyss, and into which nobody dared set foot. Read more at location 461
• The peace treaty between Italy and the Ottoman Empire concluded at Ouchy hadn’t resolved anything. It stipulated that the Ottomans withdraw all their troops, ratified the Italian occupation, but granted the natives the right to recognise the Sultan’s authority as Caliph. The invaders didn’t know the meaning of these words and didn’t understand that the Caliph was both a spiritual and temporal leader. Thus, from a legal standpoint, sovereignty was split between the Italians and the Ottomans. Not because both parties had agreed to it, but because of a basic misunderstanding. Read more at location 629
• The Italian government insisted on pretending that the road to the Seraglio Point lay open to them, and that Istanbul was ripe for the taking. The Sublime Porte refused to do anything for that province, and some there may well have hoped a European power would rescue it from its abandon and neglect. But it distrusted Italy’s intentions. After all, it was the seat of the Papacy, and it would try to colonise the region with its own citizens; furthermore, the lamentable conditions of Italy’s southern regions didn’t presage anything good. In addition, while a truly great nation only needs to make a show of strength, a second-rate power is forced to actually employ it. The game was far from over: the Treaty of Ouchy didn’t hold much weight on the coast of Africa. Read more at location 639
• It’s a well known fact that an insult inflicted on an individual is an insult to the whole clan. Read more at location 690
• Semereth Effendi was handsomely attired and prolonged the customary greetings longer than he needed to. The strain in Semereth’s soul manifested itself in an accentuation of formalities. Life exhausted itself in rituals during those difficult moments. Read more at location 727
• The young Maronite offered me a cup of tea with mint leaves and peanuts at the bottom. Read more at location 827
• An officer is a man who identifies with an Order and who devotes his life to guarantee its longevity. Read more at location 832
• Eighteenth-century operas excelled at resolving private conflicts with military violence. Read more at location 879
• quoi! La vie içi est à un très grand bon marché!’ was a saying that had been attributed to Anwar Bey, the leader of the Libyan partisans stationed in Derna. Read more at location 913
• Worshipping one’s own slave is the most horrible of traps. Seducing what he already owned – it’s the very essence of hope and the painful prison that encages all powerful men. Opera is the complete repository of all human nadirs. Read more at location 951
• DELLE STELLE: Is the story of Semereth and his wife a metaphor for our role as the unloved conquerors in this splendid African province? Still, the desire to be loved, to seduce – if I am to employ your librettist’s language – is a poison that you have succumbed to. This has nothing to do with us. After all, being loved by people we already control is superfluous. Read more at location 955
• He can only save himself by coming to terms with how provincial he is, by neither playing up to it, nor being ashamed of it, just like nobody should be embarrassed by the language they speak. This is not to refute the concept of cultural exchange, but to say that imitation is only a masquerade of that cultural exchange: because one party immediately declares himself the loser from the outset. Colonialism humiliates and offends, and whenever it shows a more benevolent face, it corrupts. As Christians and foreigners we are treated kindly, and they’ve offered us a chance to assimilate. But we must keep our guards up. Read more at location 1188
• This does not mean that our customs are superior to others, simply that they are the foundations upon which our code of conduct has been built; it is the narrative of our history, the language with which people have expressed themselves, reached an understanding, or even how they respect and come to love one another. Read more at location 1197
• One must measure oneself against perfection, not other people’s mistakes.Read more at location 1208
• PIETRA: What I’m still unsure about is whether I’m more astonished by the differences between us or our similarities. They are different, and this puts our values and beliefs into doubt. But then they are also similar, and this jeopardises our notions of superiority. We’re even in a hurry to destroy this civilisation because we’re so afraid that its mere existence threatens the worthiness of our own. Read more at location 1305
• PIETRA: Italy’s obsession with catching up with Europe’s great powers is impeding its culture from recognising the legitimacy of other civilisations. We employ reason merely as an instrument in our attempt to imitate a superior model. We disdain civilisations to the south of us; in fact, it’s as if they embodied exactly what we wanted to escape. We’re a backward country that always keeps its eyes on the other European capitals: Vienna, Paris or London. If Venice had led the Italian unification effort, things might have turned out otherwise, but instead it was led by Piedmont, a lowly vassal of France, and we are the victims of those provincial beginnings. Italian culture seems to atrophy part of our organs. It’s no use trying to educate oneself, or to read books written elsewhere; whatever we do, a congenital mediocrity clings to us like a bad smell. Read more at location 1320
• In a war like this, merchants must be as brave as soldiers: otherwise they’ll grow poor and vanish. Read more at location 1646
• ‘Family is the community, and it protects its laws and values. Don’t make the mistake of thinking – or believing, or pretending – that you can move freely about in this foreign land as though it belonged to you or your people, or of thinking you can overcome their different religion and customs. They are confines that one should respect. Read more at location 1705
• A melancholy shadow swept through his soul: privilege always entails exclusion, he thought. Taking part in an old, compelling world is always accompanied by a loss. Read more at location 1819
• He took hold of the tambourine and began beating the rhythm of a dabke, a popular dance from the mountains of Lebanon. Read more at location 1855
• Abdelkarim could detect his master’s character from his movements. Relationships are desire and memory.Read more at location 1880
• Shadows make people bigger than they are. Read more at location 1960
• uselessly tried to detect fear in his features, or hatred, or pious resignation. He said: We return from whence we came. Or maybe: Devoted to God, to Him we return. Every translation is a restless shadow.’ Read more at location 2198
• Solidarity is the true channel of communication between men. Read more at location 2298
• He said the Italians’ biggest mistake had been to set foot in the hinterland, which no one had ever managed to bring under their control. Benghazi, on the other hand, was well equipped to welcome an Italian military administration – relationships had already been forged there, and the city already had a bureaucracy – but the interior was governed by traditions nobody could uproot. Even the Sanussi Brotherhood had asserted its authority by espousing tribal customs that pre-dated its existence, and in fact ended up making these customs even more unassailable. The Italian authorities would never manage to impose their own laws and do away with the customs that had held that society and its individuals in equilibrium. The Sanussis had been welcomed a century earlier as venerated Islamic teachers, whereas the aversion the Italians had encountered could be largely explained by the fact they were infidels. Read more at location 2330
• The ruins always emerged out of the sand alongside the coast, as if even the Greek colonists hadn’t dared to venture into that boundless interior. Read more at location 2459
• General Caneva’s Expeditionary Force invaded the Libyan coast towards the end of September 1911. Having vanquished the Turkish garrison, the Italians concluded a peace treaty with the Sublime Porte in Lausanne in October 1912. However, by 1921 the Italians still hadn’t managed to break the back of the Libyan rebellion in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. After numerous military vicissitudes, colonial power was still confined to urban centres, while sovereignty over the boundless, mostly deserted hinterland was still ambiguous, with power alternating from one side to the other according to how the struggle was going. Read more at location 2618
• But the indigenous people know that we granted them this Basic Charter because we couldn’t win the war. Read more at location 2687
• The tea ceremony, which took so much time, exasperating the colonists – who confused efficiency with purity of heart, or organisational rigour with equilibrium – had never made the Count impatient. Read more at location 2737
• Impatience is a sign of ignorance: first he had to let the cat out of the bag. Read more at location 2747
• Sharafeddin was drinking laghbi, a fermented liquid distilled from palm leaves. Read more at location 2797
• In Tripoli, the Italian governor had summoned the Arab chiefs to the fort – which had once belonged to Charles V, then been passed to the Hospitaller Knights of St John of Jerusalem in 1530, subsequently become the seat of the independent Qaramanli dynasty in the eighteenth century, and finally become the official residence of the Sublime Porte’s representative in the nineteenth century – so they could officially submit to him. Read more at location 2801
• ‘There’s no such thing as friendship unless one is among kinsmen, just like there’s no pity for the defeated. Read more at location 2812
• Venier was enchanted by the city of Benghazi, with its palm groves, whitewashed houses, and a sky that took up nearly the entirety of the boundless plain. Read more at location 2849
• Omar was the shadow that followed Antonino, but he also silently guided him. Read more at location 2915
• Professor Bergonzi had arrived in Africa as though he’d shifted apartments from one floor of a building to another, where he brought the same familiar objects and where the same idols would be waiting for him. The colony had to become just another Italian province, and its different origins wouldn’t be allowed to enrich or influence it, since the military conquest had made it into a legitimate part of Italy’s heritage. Bergonzi never mentioned the Libyans, who didn’t feature in his thoughts because they’d never appeared in the books he’d read, which was the only guarantee of reality besides the confusion of the present: his ignorance of the context in which he was operating was unshadowed by questions and doubts. Read more at location 2940
• ‘Civilisation, the end goal of all the progress you preside over, is not a fixed, timeless paradigm, but is simply the expression of a powerful clique at a given moment in history. It’s the rubble on which others will build another edifice once they’ve reconquered their freedom. There are no universal rules: the fury of nationalism finds its justification in this certainty, and strength is the only guarantee of survival. Read more at location 3004
• The continuity of tradition, the identity of a nation, matter more than peace; neither is it possible to have peace if the continuity of these traditions is compromised. Read more at location 3010
• Your efforts to persuade these people it’s in their best interests to stick with us, that we can teach them many useful things, that business will boom – meaning, in other words, that trading their freedom for economic, medical, and educational advantages is a good deal for them – is haunted by a wretched, demonic shadow: the surfeit of reason produces monsters. Read more at location 3011
• Generosity cannot overcome our fundamental problem: is our presence here legitimate? What right do we have to interfere in their destinies? Did anyone ask us to bring order to their world? Read more at location 3268
• We have granted the natives this Basic Charter because of our inability to pacify the country by means of arms; nevertheless, we’ve painted it as a grand gesture, as though granting these inferior people the right to open the book of civilisation. Read more at location 3403
• To be a foreigner is a magical condition: this land will never belong to me, no matter how many cannons and rifles I bring here; weapons will only protect me, and I don’t know how long that will last. Alas, you can’t put down roots with cannons. Read more at location 3432
• The native is a living shadow, Read more at location 345
• The high functionary smiled: all the new arrivals talked like this. ‘Our presence here,’ he continued, holding forth pedagogically, ‘stirs the opposite reaction in the indigenous people: they will sanctify every aspect of their culture, refuse our help, our physicians, and their fanatics will even refuse the bread we offer them. Religious faith will become the national ethos. Thus, either we forsake continuing our presence here, or we must consider all aspects of indigenous culture a citadel of the enemy – precisely because it has been sanctified – and apply ourselves to dismantling them, one after the other. Strategy is as important when it comes to spirituality as it is on the battlefield. Believe me, it will not take much for the rest to crumble. Read more at location 3585
• long pauses were a sign of respect, not of embarrassment. Read more at location 3609
• BENITO MUSSOLINI, PRIME MINISTER Read more at location 3790
• The seven years of which I speak lie between May 1915 and October 1922. Read more at location 3798
• I am here to defend and give the greatest value to the revolution of the ‘black shirts.Read more at location 3800
• The Count, who was the managing director of a textile company where his father-in-law was the major shareholder, was walking along the Via Santa Margherita in Milan on a clear evening in September 1931. Read more at location 380
• Two days earlier, after a celebrated trial had taken place in the rooms that once housed the dissolved Cyrenaican assembly, the legendary leader of the twentyyear Libyan resistance to the Italian occupation Sidi Omar al-Mukhtar had been hanged at the age of seventy-four. The execution had been carried out in Solluk, a wretched little village to the south of Benghazi. The man had the same name as the young man who’d lived in the Count’s house when he was in Africa. Read more at location 3809
• To read is to travel.Read more at location 3818
• What had prompted Sheikh Hassan to seek this grim vignette in the pages of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah? Read more at location 3835
• ‘History,’ Ibn Khaldun wrote, ‘is a science: it deals with the principles of politics, the nature of things, and the differences between nations, places and historical epochs, ways of life, customs, sects and schools as well as Benghazi, the city on the coast which few loved, Read more at location 3875
• To read was to open a window onto the world. Read more at location 3897
• Ibn Khaldun wrote: ‘The secret of Bedouin society lies in its simplicity and its moderation and reserve.’ Did literature violate these virtues? Ibn Khaldun tells us everything ‘decays, crushed by the superfluous.’ ‘When sophistication reaches its apex, it enslaves us to our desires. Suffering from a surfeit of beauty, the human soul is blinded by a multiplicity of colours that obscures its vision of this world, or the next. Read more at location 3916
• The Italian Expeditionary Force had believed conquering Benghazi would mean they would control the rest of the country, but Benghazi meant nothing to the tribes, who merely saw it as a useful convenience, or a deadly bridge. The city had always been ruled by foreigners: by Tripoli during the time of the Qaramanli family, by Istanbul, and now by Rome. Read more at location 394
• Ibn Khaldun praised the Bedouin way of life because it safeguarded them from the ‘mediocrity of the cities. Read more at location 3958
• He hurled himself from the fort’s highest wall and landed on the rocky hillside. His death brought the sad affair to a close. ‘God does as He wishes. Read more at location 4201
• The travelers' road is neither happy nor lucky, as is their arrival in foreign lands. No arrival is ever as exciting as the return. This was the hope that the exiles carried with them. Read more at location 4218
• There is, however, a tome I would like to single out for attention: Francis McCullagh’s Italy’s War for a Desert, Being Some Experiences of a War-Correspondent with the Italians in Tripoli(London: Herbert and Daniel, 1912). This is by far the most cited book in The Young Maronite, and for good reason; it was perhaps the only contemporary account untainted by the usual pro-colonial jingoism that saturated most Western newspapermen at the time. In an article penned in 1913, McCullagh predicted that the war correspondent was marked for extinction, and that he would soon be replaced by a new breed of armchair journalists, who would talk about the war from the hardships of the front while ensconced in the comfortable safety of conference rooms and hotels. Anyone who watches the news today knows this to be true.

"How Beautiful We Were" (Cameroon) *Audible

 The problem with America is that it makes you dream. 

This may well have been the last unspoken dying sigh of Thula–the protagonist in Pen/Faulkner Award-winning author Mbolo Mbue’s second novel How Beautiful We Were (see my review of her terrific debut novel Behold the Dreamers here). The novel brings the macro story of America’s violent clash with the African continent down to the micro, local level as the reader witnesses the village of Kosawa’s multi-generational struggle with the fictional American oil company Pexton. As the story unfolds, however, it’s clear that the outcome is a foregone conclusion.  If only Ta-Nehisi Coates were present at Kosawa to echo the same warning he gave to his own son in Between the World and Me (see my review here):

“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”

Unfortunately for Kosawa, there is no governmental escape valve to protect it from the unquenchable hunger for natural resources. They have a government which neither represents nor protects them. In its place there is only a brutal self-interested dictatorship focused on wealth and power consolidation.  Thus what begins as a violent assault on their land–the violent splitting of ground, the ebullient soiling of rivers becomes a harbinger for the inevitable destruction that is coming for the village and its people. 

Kosawa holds out hope they can resist though, and with the help of a well-meaning NGO are able to send one of their own–Thula–to be educated in the United States.  As Thula’s years in the U.S. pass by, the village tries to resist successive encroachments from Pexton, pinning all of their hope on Thula’s eventual return believing she will return with the knowledge and connections to defeat the hated oil company.  Having studied America’s civil rights movement, Thula eventually returns as a fiery activist who believes she can replicate the same success in her own country.  

But in the end, there is no amount of western education, peaceful protesting, or violent revolution that can stop the hunger for more (it’s notable that only violent attacks provoked any level of progress against Pexton and the corrupt government). The 400 years following Africa’s “discovery” already illustrated the destructive effects of this development (i.e., hunger for more) at the local level, of things falling apart for the Kosawa’s and Thula’s of the continent..  How Beautiful We Were’s power comes in its naked sadness–Mbue is restrained as she refuses to offer a hopeful note about the plight of this fictional country–instead she offers a cold and despairing eulogy: 

“Someday, when you're old, you'll see the the ones who came to kill us and the ones who'll run to save us are the same. No matter their pretenses, they all arrive here believing they have the power to take from us or give to us whatever will satisfy their endless wants.”

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

For further reading and study:

Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope

My Grad School Notes on Achebe's Things Fall Apart

"Transcendent Kingdom" by Yaa Gyasi (Ghana)

I first encountered Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi’s writing in 2019 when I read her multiple awards winning debut novel Homegoing (I reviewed it here).  Her latest novel Transcendent Kingdom may not rise to the same level of jaw-dropping narrative arc and grandiose themes but it’s still powerful in its attention to the personal.  

Whereas Homegoing covered multiple generations across the Atlantic (from the slave trade to the present), in Transcendent Kingdom, the author chooses to focus on the life of one brilliant young scientist and her life as a daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who struggles with her identity as a black woman and as the daughter of a mother struggling with depression and sister of a brother battling addiction. Her identity quest is all filtered through her charismatic religious upbringing–which she left behind following her brother’s tragic overdose. To her credit, Gyasi refrains from both Christian and anti-religious stereotypes and treats both sides with a compassionate eye for detail and nuance.  

Key Quotes:

• she chided us for becoming too American, by which she meant we didn’t believe in anything.
• My father’s heart was a lightbulb, dimming with age
• I mean progress in the sense of the natural way in which learning something new requires getting rid of something old

For another excellent Ghanaian writer, check out Taiye Selasi’s 2013 novel Ghana Must Go. She writes beautifully and similarly crafts a tale focused on a mother--in her case, a mother's love--I reviewed it here six years ago. 

Lastly, one of my favorite poems is from Ghanaian poet Atukwei Okai–in “Kperterkple Serenade” he brilliantly captures the spectrum of mixed feelings and longing concerning emmigration to the United States–the last line has stayed with me since I first read it 12 years ago: “America, you’re a funny girl, everybody dreams of kissing you.”

This is of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

Quotes:

Location: 246

My father’s heart was a lightbulb, dimming with age. Nana was pure light.

                

Location: 455

somewhere, just below the surface of me, I blamed her. I blamed myself too. Guilt and doubt and fear had already settled into my young body like ghosts haunting a house. I trembled, and in the one second it took for the tremble to move through my body, I stopped believing in God. It happened that quickly, a tremble-length reckoning. One minute there was a God with the whole world in his hands; the next minute the world was plummeting, ceaselessly, toward an ever-shifting bottom.

                

Location: 514

Ama Ata Aidoo’s book Changes, in which the character Esi says, “you cannot go around claiming that an idea or an item was imported into a given society unless you could also conclude that to the best of your knowledge, there is not, and never was any word or phrase in that society’s indigenous language which describes that idea or item.            

Location: 844

the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.            

Location: 1,013

am looking for new names for old feelings. My soul is still my soul, even if I rarely call it that.

                

Location: 1,231

but the more I do this work the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.

                

Location: 1,528

He said, “Do you want a hug?” My eyes were still adjusting to that patch of dark. I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t tell if he was serious or just making fun of me, but I considered the question carefully anyway. “No, not really,” I said. Nana started laughing. He walked those last couple of blocks unhurriedly, at my pace so that I could walk beside him.

                

Location: 1,595

she chided us for becoming too American, by which she meant we didn’t believe in anything.

                

Location: 1,676

I mean progress in the sense of the natural way in which learning something new requires getting rid of something old,

                

Location: 1,895

Nana sighed and said, “It feels amazing, like everything inside my head just empties out and then there’s nothing left—in a good way.”

                

Location: 1,918

ask myself, “What came over you?” I say, “Be specific.” I had never felt anything like it before, and I have never felt anything like it since. Sometimes I tell myself that I made it all up, the feeling of my heart full to bursting, the desire to know God and be known by him, but that is not true either. What I felt that night was real. It was as real as anything a person can feel, and insofar as we know anything at all, I knew what I needed to do.

                

Location: 2,074

wish it was cancer, not for his sake but for mine. Not because the nature of his suffering would change significantly but because the nature of my suffering would.

                

Location: 2,468

On Ambien, her words were always slow, slurred, like each one was dipped in the shocked sleep of that drug before it escaped her lips.

                

Location: 2,580

but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.

               

Location: 2,741

“Anhedonia” is the psychiatric term for the inability to derive pleasure from things that are normally pleasurable. It’s the characterizing symptom in major depressive disorder, but it can also be a symptom of substance abuse, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease. I learned the term in a university lecture hall and immediately felt a shock of recognition. Anhedonia was the feeling of “nothing,” the thing that kept my mother in her bed.

                

Location: 2,762

What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead see him as he was in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.

                

Location: 2,860

She spent more of her days with Mrs. Palmer than she had ever spent with us. And so I recognized, for perhaps the first time, that my mother wasn’t mine.

                

Location: 3,295

When I watched the limping mouse refuse the lever, I was reminded yet again of what it means to be reborn, made new, saved, which is just another way of saying, of needing those outstretched hands of your fellows and the grace of God. That saving grace, amazing grace, is a hand and a touch, a fiber-optic implant and a lever and a refusal, and how sweet, how sweet it is.

                

Location: 3,398

“Mama, I beg you,” I said in Twi, but I didn’t know enough Twi to finish the sentence. I wasn’t sure how I would have finished it, anyway: I beg you to stop. I beg you to wake up. I beg you to live.

"The Promise" by Damon Galgut (South Africa)

The title of Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise refers to the Afrikaaner matriarch’s dying wish to leave a small plot of land to their long-suffering black housekeeper Salome. The narrative then revolves around the numerous decades that it actually takes for the family to keep that promise.

Of course one isn’t awarded the Booker prize for penning a surface-level story about a white family in South Africa. Rather Galgut has written a soaring multi-decade exposition on the promise of a post-Apartheid South Africa writ large. It’s a story that encompasses South Africa’s promises to its black and coloured people (click here for further background on the use of the word "coloured" in South Africa), the ANC’s promises to its constituency (one take on those promises here), as well as the psychic overstep of whites deigning to keep promises that never should have been had to be made in the first place. In the latter case, the promise (even when well-intentioned) can become more about the giver than the recipient.

This last idea is less obvious–particularly to a western outsider–but Salome’s son Lukas offers a scathing rebuttal when the Swart family finally makes good on its promise (after three decades):

It is nothing, Lukas says. Smiling again, in that cold, furious way. It’s what you don’t need any more, it’s what you don’t mind throwing away. Your leftovers. That’s what you’re giving my mother, thirty years too late. As good as nothing…It is like that. And still you don’t understand, it’s not yours to give. It already belongs to us. This house, but also the house where you live, and the land it’s standing on. Ours! Not yours to give out as a favour when you’re finished with it. Everything you have, white lady, is already mine. I don’t have to ask.

This is the counterpoint to well-intentioned (sometimes), (mainly white) liberalism, in its classical sense. Lukas has stripped bare the “feel-good” aspects of restorative justice and offered the equivalent of a “thanks for nothing”! His one comment cuts to the heart of why creating a true rainbow nation has proved such a daunting task–with every stripe of the rainbow having differing notions of equality, equity, justice, and staggering levels of economic deprivation–it requires certain stripes to cast aside tightly-held oppressive notions and to embrace the humanity of people they had long ignored. As the late Desmond Tutu once said: “If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”  Of course, closing that psychic space is easier said than done.  America has had (and continues to have) its own struggles with "they" groups--you can read about America's "buffer solution" in my review of Homeland Elegies here.

This is of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

Related Reads:

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. An American story of a messed up family.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah.  My short review is here.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela.  My kindle highlights from it are here.

“I Want You to Know” by Jack Kruse.  A poem I wrote about Nelson Mandela for my daughters.

"Behold the Dreamers" by Imbolo Mbue (Cameroon)

No Room at the Inn

Ghanaian poet Atukwei Okai has a lengthy poem entitled “Kperterkple Serenade” that perfectly captures much of the sentiment in Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers. The third section concludes its opening admonition of “make room in your inn for me –” with the following wry observation:

america

you are a funny girl…

everybody dreams of kissing you.


Early in the novel, Cameroonian immigrant Jende Jonga takes his newly arrived wife Neni on a walk in New York and as they sit on a bench, he gushes to her: “Columbus Circle is the center of Manhattan. Manhattan is the center of New York. New York is the center of America, and America is the center of the world. So we are sitting in the center of the world, right?”

It’s this tension between the idealized and the realized that the author masterfully explores in the novel as he begins with Jende and Neni on opposite ends of this spectrum. Neni pushes back against her husband’s doe-eyed admiration for a country which she claims undeservedly expects everyone to believe it has the best of everything. Jende’s enthusiasm appears unflappable, though, as he revels in his good fortune as a driver for a Lehman Brothers’ executive named Clark. During an early conversation with his boss, he explains that “Everyone wants to come to America, sir. Everyone. To be in this country, sir. To live in this country. Ah! It is the greatest thing in the world.” In Cameroon, Jende notes, there is no chance for upward mobility--if you are born poor, you will stay poor. He goes on, citing the rising star of Barack Obama as proof of his assertion.

The novel’s power comes in Imbue’s ability to capture both the strengths and the hollowness of the promise of America. The reader sees the rise and good fortune of Jende as his chauffeur position gives him relative wealth and burgeoning opportunities for his family. As his wife enjoys the fruit of this labor her attitude toward America slowly shifts as does her resolve to stay in the country. But her relationship with America is a more nuanced one as she becomes privy to the inner world of the rich when she works for Clark’s wife Cindy during the family’s holiday vacation. 

Imbue expertly illustrates the tension and the distance between the intimacy and the hierarchy that exists between household help and the family to which they serve. Neni finds herself psychologically balancing a wide range of interactions: caring for Cindy after a near overdose, playing with her young son, receiving incredible gifts of designer clothing--all against a careful line which she must walk in order to keep Cindy “happy” so she keeps this well paying job. As Neni and her friend Betty discuss Cindy’s closet laden with designer shoes and clothing, Betty observes: “And she’s still so unhappy. Money truly is nothing.” While money may be nothing when it comes to finding happiness, the novel makes clear that the immigrant experience is not one centered on finding personal happiness--instead it is one bent on survival for the present life and sacrifice for the future generations--money may be nothing but it’s also the only thing.

When Lehman Brothers collapses, Betty’s glancing observation on money ends up a ringing indictment for an American economic system built on...nothing. The collateral damage from Lehman brothers is catastrophic for Jende as he struggles with job loss and a diminished immigrant status that means likely deportation is on the horizon. The weight of it all eventually mentally and physically shatters the soul and body of his dream as he laments to his wife: “This country no longer has room for people like us...I won’t live my life in the hope that someday I will magically become happy.”

It is here that the psychic paths of Jende and Neni cross as she becomes desperate for a way to remain in the United States while he becomes more resolute in his drive to return to Cameroon where his savings will place him in the society’s upper strata. Faced with crushing stress-related bodily ailments, Jende gives up and chooses for his family to return to Cameroon.

With Neni lamenting that their children (Americans by birth) will lose the “opportunity to grow up in a magnificent land of uninhibited dreamers.”

Unfortunately, it is a land in which there is no room at the inn for them.

This is of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

For more Cameroonian fiction see my review of Miano's lyrical Season of the Shadow here or check out Oyono's tragic 1956 novel Houseboy here. 

For more Cameroonian poetry, see Dipoko's A Poem of Villeneuve St. Georges here. 

Key Quotes

96 “Columbus Circle is the center of Manhattan. Manhattan is the center of New York. New York is the center of America, and America is the center of the world.” Jende Jonga to his wife Neni as they sit on a bench there early on when she first came to the U.S.

140 “And she’s still so unhappy. Money truly is nothing.” Betty’s comment to Neni on Cindy’s unhappiness despite her closet full of designer shoes and clothing in the Hamptons.

280 “I’m tired of people wanting me to care about them more than I care about myself and my family.” Neni finally stands up for herself and realizes her own self-worth after she extorts Cindy Edwards for a sizable sum.


Key Takeaways

39-40 Convo between Clark and Jende where Jende comments: “Everyone wants to come to America, sir. Everyone. To be in this country, sir. To live in this country. Ah! It is the greatest thing in the world.” He goes on the comment on the opportunity for upward mobility that doesn’t exist in his country. He further notes the case of Obama, man without a father or mother becoming President.


44 Jende argues that paying a “bride-price” is what makes a marriage legit because its a way to bestow honor upon the bride’s family.


74 Jende’s immigrant lawyer cautions him to stay away from police in this country since he’s black. “The police is for the protection of white people...maybe black women and black children sometimes, but not black men.”

89 Neni comments on the assumed idea by many that everything is better in America.

93 prevailing notion that successful Cameroonian men in the USA may date plenty of non-africans but that they always marry a Cameroonian woman in the end.

185 For a long time Jende lives in a kind of blind ignorance as to the riches and goodness of America even when the 2008 Lehman brothers scandal/collapse occurs

272 idea of people with money believe they are entitled to power over everyone else’s life to the point where they don’t value others

332-4 The stress of his diminished immigrant status and likely deportation physically breaks Jende first and then mentally shatters his love affairs with the United States--he comes to believe that “This country no longer has room for people like us...I won’t live my life in the hope that someday I will magically become happy.”

358 The children of Neni’s friend Fatou are reluctant to even acknowledge their African identity since they are american citizens by birth. Fatou wonders if they think less of their own mother since she is not American.

361 Neni laments the things about America here children will lose when they return to Cameroon namely the loss of “the opportunity to grow up in a magnificent land of uninhibited dreamers.”




http://fuuo.blogspot.com/2010/10/poet-of-week-from-ghana-atukwei-okai.html

Kperterkple Serenade



III

make room in your inn for me –

I know:

when karl marx grabbed his bibliography

and ballpen and pocketed his toothbrush

and his shaving stick

he went and bought a ticket to london

when ghandi girded his loin cloth, it

was london he had in mind.

when lenin fled his beloved motherland

his final haven-crashpad was london.

but america

your address book too has memories that yield

the names

of von braun and charles dickens and

marcus garvey and amerigo vespucci and

christopher columbus who boarded the wrong bus

and maxim gorky and mayakovsky and uncle

einstein and mr. carnegie and rockefeller

even your ports

recalling

report how

the mayflower moved in to deflower at night

the virgin land

of the red indians –

jesus christ it seems and judas did not make it

america

you are a funny girl…

everybody dreams of kissing you


Key Quotes

96 “Columbus Circle is the center of Manhattan. Manhattan is the center of New York. New York is the center of America, and America is the center of the world.” Jende Jonga to his wife Neni as they sit on a bench there early on when she first came to the U.S.

140 “And she’s still so unhappy. Money truly is nothing.” Betty’s comment to Neni on Cindy’s unhappiness despite her closet full of designer shoes and clothing in the Hamptons.

280 “I’m tired of people wanting me to care about them more than I care about myself and my family.” Neni finally stands up for herself and realizes her own self-worth after she extorts Cindy Edwards for a sizable sum.


Key Takeaways

39-40 Convo between Clark and Jende where Jende comments: “Everyone wants to come to America, sir. Everyone. To be in this country, sir. To live in this country. Ah! It is the greatest thing in the world.” He goes on the comment on the opportunity for upward mobility that doesn’t exist in his country. He further notes the case of Obama, man without a father or mother becoming President.


44 Jende argues that paying a “bride-price” is what makes a marriage legit because its a way to bestow honor upon the bride’s family.


74 Jende’s immigrant lawyer cautions him to stay away from police in this country since he’s black. “The police is for the protection of white people...maybe black women and black children sometimes, but not black men.”

89 Neni comments on the assumed idea by many that everything is better in America.

93 prevailing notion that successful Cameroonian men in the USA may date plenty of non-africans but that they always marry a Cameroonian woman in the end.

185 For a long time Jende lives in a kind of blind ignorance as to the riches and goodness of America even when the 2008 Lehman brothers scandal/collapse occurs

272 idea of people with money believe they are entitled to power over everyone else’s life to the point where they don’t value others

332-4 The stress of his diminished immigrant status and likely deportation physically breaks Jende first and then mentally shatters his love affairs with the United States--he comes to believe that “This country no longer has room for people like us...I won’t live my life in the hope that someday I will magically become happy.”

358 The children of Neni’s friend Fatou are reluctant to even acknowledge their African identity since they are american citizens by birth. Fatou wonders if they think less of their own mother since she is not American.

361 Neni laments the things about America here children will lose when they return to Cameroon namely the loss of “the opportunity to grow up in a magnificent land of uninhibited dreamers.”

"What the Day Owes the Night" by Yasmina Khadra (Algeria)

This book is a perfect example of why reading fiction is important. Reading fiction like this forces the reader to internalize and grapple with historical events in a way that a straightforward history never could. In this case, by personalizing something like the Algerian independence struggle, the reader must reevaluate the dry numbers, facts and statistics littering the historical record and connect them to the actual people and struggles behind them.

"Horseshoes and Hand Grenades" History:
This review might not make a lot of sense if you don’t know some basics of Algerian history so here some “accurate enough” background: over the years, waves of settlers from Europe (Spain, France, Italy, etc.) came to Algeria and stole wide swaths of land from the Arabs and Berbers that lived there. For the purposes of this story (which takes place from 1900 to present day), many of these settlers came in the early 19th century and never returned to Europe. That meant successive generations settled and lived in Algeria and knew nothing else. They built farms, vineyards, lives, and communities as the minority ruling class. These people came to be referred to as pieds-noirs (i.e., black feet). There is some controversy as to the etymological background of the term and you can click the hyperlink in the previous sentence if you want to go down that rabbit-hole.

Eventually, the rising discontent of the Arab and Berber populace (you can read more about the Berber role in all this in my graduate school thesis) at the economic/social/political disparity grew to the point where a War for Independence erupted. There were lots of factors to this tipping point: the end of WWII in which many Algerian Arabs fought, bled and died for France and returned to their lives as third-class citizens; the French loss at Dien Bien Phu, the rising tide of independence spreading across the globe post-WWII, etc. In the end, the FLN (National Liberation Front) waged an 8-year guerilla war for independence that was notable for atrocities on both sides (but with some very brutal tactics by the French overlords--particularly when compared with the France’s far less vehement response to Morocco’s independence ‘struggle’) and which resulted in a free Algeria in 1962. This freedom led to the wholesale de facto expulsion of some 800,000 pieds-noirs to an unprepared France. Most of the 100,000 or so who would remain left in the ensuing decades. There you have it--down and dirty history lesson.

Have you ever dared?

What the Day Owes the Night is one of the saddest love stories you will ever read--in it you’ll witness the stillbirth of a romantic love and the lasting depth of a filial one. Khadra’s novel brings to mind the beautiful writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the melancholy sorrow of Neruda’s “Poem 20”, and the powerful narrative arc of Mahfouz’ The Cairo Trilogy. The height of the story’s narrative comes as the woman who should be the love of Younes’ life indicts him with the damning charge: Have you ever dared? And indeed, Younes’ sorry story is one of impotence as he never has dared and we bear witness to the slow disintegration of his life. In contrast, after centuries of subjugation, Algeria the country awakens and dares wildly, breaking its colonial chains, bloody link by bloody link. It’s in his ability to craft a story through these simultaneously ascending/descending narratives that Khadra displays true literary mastery.

Before going on, the author/pen name “issue” must addressed. Yasmina Khadra is the name you will find on the book cover but the author’s actual name is Mohammed Moulessehoul and he’s a former Algerian army officer. In an effort to circumvent scrutiny and censorship by the Army, he used his wife’s first two names beginning in 1997 (4 years later, he went public with his true identity after resigning from the Algerian military). In interviews he’s noted that he used his wife’s names with her permission and as a way to honor her. The crux of why this is an “issue” is because some in the public can’t imagine that someone who served in the Algerian military could not have helped but to partake in civilian massacres. Or at a minimum, many French critics just can’t accept any literary or cultural contributions from someone who participated in violence--even against terrorist groups. The author is fairly open about the horror and violence he has witnessed in his life and denies any wrongdoing and I haven’t found any credible evidence to support the allegations so for me there is no “issue.” Writing this as an American, I’d say “this is a free country, let people use whatever name they want” but we are talking about an Algerian quasi-exile living in France. You can scroll down to my “Key References” section and find several articles/interviews to learn more about this “controversy.” Now back to the actual book.

There’s a plaintive song that an old destitute barber sings early on in the novel while the young child Younes is still living in the slum of Jeane Jato:

I miss your eyes

And I go blind

Every time you look away

I die a little every day

Searching for you

In vain among the living

What does it mean to live this love

When all the world proclaims

That you are gone?

What will I do now with my hands

Now your body is not here… (53)

These lyrics serve in many ways as a soundtrack for this story. One its face, the lyrics describe Emilie and Younes at different points during their relationship. Emilie consistently searches for Younes “among the living”--searches for his love--to no avail throughout her time in Rio Salado. And in the end it is Younes who is tortured with a life of “dying every day” as the world proclaims that she is indeed gone--vanished, expelled with the pieds-noirs exodus from Algeria.

But on a deeper level the lyrics speak to the larger plight of the pieds-noirs community who find themselves living in a foreign country (i.e., France) following Algerian independence. This is the conundrum Younes’ lifelong pieds-noirs amis wrestle with in the novel’s closing pages: what do they do now with their hands, with their lives, now that her “body”--that is, the Algeria of their youth, is not there. The author’s treatment of the pieds-noirs in addressing these questions is surprisingly empathetic (particularly for an Algerian Arab) and even-handed as he creates complex characters who display a deep primordial love for the birthplace of their great-grandfathers--the land of Algeria. But it’s this very love that blinds them to “how” of the manner by which the countryside of Algeria became the land of their grandfathers. There’s a telling exchange (pgs. 284-7) between Younes and the overbearing quasi-feudal lord cum pieds-noir Jaime Sosa that begins with Sosa lecturing on the mission civilisatrice of his ancestors, “men who came here to a dead place and breathed life into it.” Sosa’s blindness to the blood and tears of the Arabs who did the bulk of the actual work as quasi serfs/slaves (and whose land was stolen) in “breathing life” into the land provokes Younes to perhaps his one act of courage as he responds with a poetic soliloquy that charges “this land does not belong to you. It belongs to that ancient shepherd whose ghost is standing next to you, though you refuse to see it.” It notable that Jaime is wholly unmoved by this and doesn’t bother to even respond to Younes.

Following this conversation we see the acceleration of the Algerian fight for independence, as the Front Liberation Nationale (FLN) steps up its violent campaign against pieds-noirs and equivocating muslims alike--notably Younes tries to straddle the line and finds himself saved from summary execution only by his one-time act of kindness to an arab servant turned rebel. As the FLN victory becomes assured we witness the implementation of le saison de la valise ou le cercueil (i.e., the suitcase or the coffin) with the wholesale exodus of pieds-noirs from Younes’ hometown of Rio Salado--to include Emilie.

Following Algerian independence, the narrative skips forward some thirty years to “present day” as Younes travels to Aix-en-Provence to visit Michel (Emilie’s son) and his old pieds-noirs friends. That the author gaps these thirty years is a profound statement on Younes’ life. This time period, in which Younes marries, has children, and grandchildren is covered in a few throwaway sentences, almost as an afterthought. Because of his inability to act, Younes’ entire outlook has become focused on his mispent past. Younes’ sentimental longing for his los is contrasted with the wider pieds-noirs communities’ own nostalgia--during their reunion his childhood friend Andre points out that “round here we don’t talk about nostalgia, we say nost-Algeria...Algeria still clings to me.” This leads to a discussion on the heavy toll of losing one’s country versus losing one’s friends, and love.

While the author Moulessehoul makes it clear that that there’s no easy answer to this, he does end the novel with a stark statement on the power of filial love, leaving the reader with Younes’ final farewell to his childhood friend Jean-Christophe: “We hug each other hard as once we used to hug our dreams to us, convinced that if we were to relax our grip, even a fraction, they would slip away.”

While this is a powerful sentiment, it stands as a distant second to what Younes gave up in committing the grave offense of not pursuing Emilie when he had the chance(s). In her own final attempt to coax him into action, Emilie implored him that “there is no crime, or shame, in love, except to sacrifice it, even for the best of reasons.” In this statement, the author offers the reader a call to action to pursue love at any cost. Indeed as the story comes to close, we are left to ponder what could have been had Younes followed his Uncle’s admonition: “Only love can make good the misfortunes and evils of the world. And remember this: if a woman loves you, no star is beyond your grasp, no god can touch you. Some of the last words from Younes’ uncle to him before dying...If you want your life to be a small part of eternity...love with all your strength, love as though it is all you know how to do, love enough to make the gods themselves jealous...for it is in love that all ugliness reveals its beauty.”

This is of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

Key Quotes:

• Every day these women would gather around the well and spend most of their time turning over the past as you might turn a knife in an old wound. (28) 
• In describing a reknowned musician named Slimane, Younes admires his embodiment of “the greatest of virtues: discernment, a quality that is all but lost today.” (45) 
• I miss your eyes /And I go blind/ Every time you look away/I die a little every day/Searching for you/ In vain among the living/ What does it mean to live this love/ When all the world proclaims/ That you are gone?/ What will I do now with my hands/ Now your body is not here… (53) 
• Her smile was like a benediction, Younes visits his mother after his uncle adopts him. (80) 
• Younes, seeing his failed, stumbling drunk father one last time: A look of such despair that it choked the life out of a noble father’s promises to his son. It was a look such as a man can give only once in his lifetime, since after it there is nothing. (88) 
• For one searing instant, I mistook her for my destiny, Younes’ keen observation as he is seduced by Madame Cazenave--perhaps the great mistake of his life. (163) 
• Younes observing the reaction to the FLN mobilization within the country: We knew Algeria was at war, that a seething anger festered among the people, but the villagers in Rio Salado seemed to care little about this. They built high walls around their happiness; walls with no windows to the outside world. (206) 
• There is no crime, or shame, in love, except to sacrifice it, even for the best of reasons, Emilie to Younes as she makes a final fruitless effort to explain her love to him after Jean-Christophe’s disappearance (242) 
• For a man to think he can fulfill his destiny without a woman is a misunderstanding, a miscalculation; it is recklessness and folly. Certainly a woman is not everything, but everything depends on her. Look around you, look at history, think about the whole world and tell me what man is without woman; what are his promises, his prayers when it is not her praise he sings? A man may be as rich as Croesus, as poor as Job, he may be a slave or a tyrant, but there is no horizon wide enough is woman turns her back...sunset, springtime, the blue of the sea, the stars in the sky...the rest, all the rest, exists simply to adorn her. Younes uncle counsels him to no avail. (249) 
• Only love can make good the misfortunes and evils of the world. And remember this: if a woman loves you, no star is beyond your grasp, no god can touch you. Some of the last words from Younes’ uncle to him before dying. (273) If you want your life to be a small part of eternity...love with all your strength, love as though it is all you know how to do, love enough to make the gods themselves jealous...for it is in love that all ugliness reveals its beauty. The last words of Younes’ uncle. (355) 
• The love of Younes’ life, Emilie, sentences him: Have you ever dared Younes, even once in your life? (308) 
• You took my love for you and strangled it before it could take flight. Just like that...my love for you was dead before it even hit the ground. Emilie after an impotent, much too late attempt by Younes to profess his love. Also hearkens back to his days as a boy catching and selling finches. (309) 
• Pieds-noirs--as though we’ve spent our whole lives trudging through mud, Dede in a letter to Younes from France as he comes to grip with his new reality. (357) 
• The pieds-noirs in France were easily recognized as they “rolled their Rs with relish like stirring couscous.” (358) 
• Pieds-noir Emilie utlimately ends up embracing a fatalistic view on her life as she says in her final words to Younes: Nobody is to blame, Younes, you don’t owe me anything. It’s just the way the world is, and I don’t want that anymore.” And with those last words, my heart broke for these characters, these people who were at once imagined and at the same time echoes of real lives captures by the author in this book. (362) 
• Every generations has its own drugs, Younes comments to Emilie’s son Michel who has just lamented the booming consumerism prevalent in France. (366) 
• Round here we don’t talk about nostalgia, we say nost-Algeria...Algeria still clings to me, childhood pieds-noir friend Andre shares with Younes as they discuss (as old men) the heavy toll of losing one’s country vs. losing one’s friends. (377-8) 
• We hug each other hard as once we used to hug our dreams to us, convinced that if we were to relax our grip, even a fraction, they would slip away. Younes bidding a final farewell to his childhood friend Jean-Christophe. (389) 

Key Takeaways

• Importance of land to farmers: Younes’ father had eyes “only for his land” (4) 
• The pride of Younes’ father (his inability to accept Younes’ money) warps his own conception of everything: “I no longer understood anything. I was no longer certain of anything.” (49) 
• The idea that poverty is noted fated but a state of mind. The poverty of Jenane Jato is that they did not dream. What then is the idea of a people who’s ability to dream has been crushed or stolen? (81) 
• To the Europeans, time is money but to the Arab time has no price. This is similar to the adage about the US having all the watches but the Taliban having all the time. In the story’s case, Arabs find happiness apart from money--from simple shared experiences (85) 
• 4th generation greeks in Oran (107) 
• Oran referred to the “la ville americaine” because of its sophistication and grace and the idea of possibility that existed there. (141)
• With the end of WWII, independence movements mobilized but were brutally suppressed. Younes’ uncle observes that the children of these movement died fighting for France in world war II only to have their family killed protesting back in Algeria (172) 
• Poetry has always been the soul of Algeria (180). Here’s a link to the Algerian national anthem, We Pledge,: http://fuuo.blogspot.com/2010/07/poet-of-week-from-algeria-moufdi-zakaria.html
• Again and again, Younes decides to do nothing in the face of a decision or conflict. He refuses to be the master of his own destiny. In this novel he represents a distinct part of colonial Algeria (280) 
• There’s a great exchange that brings to live the terrible tension between the colonizers who viewed themselves as great men in the mission civilisatrice, men who “came here to a dead place and breathed life into it.” It’s telling that Younes’ one moment of bravery or courage comes in a poetic response to the Jaime Sosa’s solilquoy in which Younes charges that “this land does not belong to you. It belongs to that that ancient shepherd who ghost is standing next to you, though you refuse to see it. Jaime is unmoved. (284-287) 
• Younes eventually loses his own sense of self to the point when he turns his own mother into a stranger as he questions her following his release from prison due to Isabelle’s intervention. (332) 
• Younes’ uncle still dreams of an enlightened nation for Algeria (335) 
• French talk of ‘self-determination’--De Gaulle June 1958 speech: I have understood you. En francais: je vous ai compris. But the pied-noirs likely don’t believe him and consider it an empty speech (337) 
• December 1960, the non-Algerian villagers of Rio Salado come to the realization that Algeria will be Algerian. (338) 
• Warfare between the OAS and FLN. The OAS was a secret paramilitary group formed by recalcitrant pied-noirs and the french military that ended up killing both muslims and French in terrorist attacks. The Front Liberation Nationale was the military arm of the Algeria’s independence fight and is estimated to have killed far more Algerians (i.e., muslim arabs) than French/pied-noirs. The FLN made this season of killing one of “the suitcase or the coffin” ("La valise ou le cercueil") as they strove to drive out remaining pied-noirs. (342) 
• The book is also an examination of what is home? What is a nation? The pied-noirs settlers may have been there for generations and not know any home other than the countryside of Algeria but there were also only there for generations because there ancestors had stolen or appropriated the lands in the 19th century. (344) 
• When the mass exodus of pied-noirs began, it brought with it a startling realization that is really was all over for them--but this gets to the idea that it never really began because it began in thievery, brutality and illegality (350). 
• Pieds-noir Emilie utlimately ends up embracing a fatalistic view on her life as she says in her final words to Younes: Nobody is to blame, Younes, you don’t owe me anything. It’s just the way the world is, and I don’t want that anymore.” And with those last words, my heart broke for these characters, these people who were at once imagined and at the same time echoes of real lives captures by the author in this book. (362) 
• Pieds-noire Gustave wonders during the discussion of the old men why they were all treated as one mass? He hits on one of the great political questions of the ages, the human tendency and political necessity to lump groups of people together. In this case, Gustave can’t come to grips to how he lost the country where his great-grandfather was born, that his family built with their own sweat and blood. Of course in these comments he displays his blindness to the sweat and blood of all the arabs who did most of the actual sweating and bleeding. (379) 

Key References (for further study):

Cities: Rio Salado (current day El Malah), Oran

Messali Hadj , who meets with Younes’ Uncle early on in the story(98)

Operation Catapult (122)

Max-Pol Fouchet presents Younes’ friend Fabrice with national poetry prize (179)

2013 CRS Report "Algeria: Current Issues"

North Africa Berber Language Map

My Grad School Thesis: Amazigh-State Relations in Morocco and Algeria

(78 and 79 footnote from thesis)

2005 Guardian arrticle on Khadra

2002 Guardian article on Khadra coming out as Moulessehoul

Article of Moulessehoul bid for Algerian Presidency

2006 New York review of "The Attack"

The Atlantic Chronology on Algerian War of Independence

Article on Jean-Senac: Poet of Algerian Revolution