2022 literary season: Africa-Caribbean-Black America (1)

Among the many authors published for the literary season, some are doing well. © RFI/Julien Leng, Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint, Fanny Renard, Dangelo Néard/Olivier Dion/Getty Images/Montage RFI

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

9 mins

Less rich than in previous years, this year's literary season offers 490 new titles, including 345 French novels for 135 foreigners.

The black world occupies a privileged place in this autumn literary delivery.

A two-part overview of the essentials and the first novels.

Good discovery, while waiting for the second part which will be put online next Sunday.

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The Cocoaland novel

Gauz

doesn't like theories.

This Ivorian novelist and director calls on writers to reimagine reality: "

", declared a few years ago to a journalist who came to interview him.

This is what he did with his first novel,

(2014), which revealed the underside of consumer society.

This novel that made him famous has sold more than 50,000 copies.

After two other novels –

(2018) and

(2020), of a rather classic style – Gauz returns in his new novel

with the protest and satirical vein, which had made him successful.

Who are the Cocoaians?

They are the inhabitants of the cocoa-producing African countries, who want to emancipate their country from the process of capitalist exploitation and manufacture and sell their own chocolate.

To fight against the Western chocolate industries, these revolutionary citizens propose to form a cartel, "

".

An entire program !

Halfway between scenario, drama and historical account of cocoa production,

reads like a deliciously subversive Voltairian pamphlet.

First sentence:

"

"

►

, by Gauz.

Published by L'Arche, “Writings for Speech” collection, 106 pages, 14 euros.

The living dead of Pointe-Noire

After having celebrated the kingdom of the living for a long time, the Congolese

leads his readers with his new novel

, in the universe of the dead.

However, for the author of

and

, talking about the dead is a pretext to talk about the living, their corruption, their inequalities, their loves and hatreds.

The main protagonist of the novel is living proof of this: immediately buried, does not the young and extravagant Liwa Ekimakingaï come out of his grave to unravel the mystery of his sudden disappearance?

This constant back and forth between the world of the living and that of the “reclining” is the recipe for the story that is both earthy and satirical offered by Alain Mabanckou.

His new novel is in the vein of Latin American magic realism, with the background of the rumor of Pointe-Noire, the birthplace of the author whose creative energy animates his work.

First sentence:

"

»

►The elongated trade

, by Alain Mabanckou.

Threshold, 289 p., 19.50 euros.

Portraits of women

An old woman is dying in a retirement home somewhere in southwestern France.

Affected by a neurodegenerative disease, she lost the use of French and began to speak in a foreign language that no one around her seems to understand.

Only a therapist, herself of foreign origin, takes a close interest in the linguistic drift of Consolée/Astrida, and tries to exhume her secret.

By consulting the biographical file, Ramata succeeds in going back to the African origins of the old lady.

She grew up in the Belgian colony of Ruanda-Urundi, present-day Rwanda, before being taken away from her mother and placed in an institution for “mulatto children”.

The discovery of Consolée's past traumas allows Ramata to confront the ghosts of her own African past.

After a first novel dedicated to the Tutsi genocide,

delivers with this new novel two dazzling portraits of women trying to overcome somehow the psychic and spiritual consequences of their colonial history.

First sentence:

“

»

►Comforted

, by Beata Umubyeyi Mayoress.

Otherwise, 367 pages, 21 euros.

A punchy first novel

A powerful, poignant and poetic novel,

by American Leïla Mottley is based on real events involving police officers from Oakland, the city where the author is from.

The novel tells the story of Kiara, a black teenager left to fend for herself after the disappearance of her parents.

To be able to pay the rent for her apartment, which she shares with her unemployed older brother, Kiara walks the sidewalks of her city, offering her body to anyone who comes along.

Arrested by the police, she becomes the sexual slave of a gang of rogue police officers who impose violent sexual games and various abuses on her.

"

“, sometimes hums the young prostitute to give herself courage.

It is this subterranean narrative of inner resistance that is the strength of

, as in Toni Morrison's best novels.

First sentence:

"

»

►Surrounding the Night

, by Leila Mottley.

Translated from English by Pauline Loquin.

402 pages, 21.90 euros.

Memories from beyond the grave

Undoubtedly,

of the Haitian Makenzy Orcel is one of the great novels of this literary season.

This novel is intended as an "autobiography" of a young suicide who has made her unique voice heard from beyond the grave.

She recounts her childhood, her loves, her wanderings between the provinces and Paris, against a backdrop of socio-political developments in contemporary France.

It is the sum of a life, certainly failed, but teeming with intuitions and truths about French modernity, made up of struggles, threats and a few bright spots.

These new "memories from beyond the grave" combine, with great writing pleasure, the Balzacian ambition to capture all the dimensions of human comedy and the Joycean flow of consciousness.

is the second part of a trilogy whose first volume took place in Haiti and whose sequel will be American.

Dizzy !

First sentence:

"

"

►A human sum

, by Makenzy Orcel.

Shores, 624 pages, 22 euros.

A classic, snatched from oblivion

Published in 1957,

is one of the great classics of modern African literature.

Its author, the Senegalese Ousmane Sembène, is known both as a novelist and a filmmaker.

A committed artist, the man devoted most of his cinematographic and literary work to the burning sociopolitical issues of his time: colonization, conflict between tradition and modernity, defense of African vernacular languages.

The novel tells the story of Oumar Faye who returns to his village after a long stay in Europe.

Anxious to participate in the modernization of his village and mentalities, the character finds himself struggling with the ambient conservatism and the domination of the settlers.

Opposed to powerful interests, he is condemned to a tragic end, having failed to allay the doubts and fears within his own family.

This is a work of protest, emblematic of the struggles that animated the author himself.

The reissue of this classic is a happy initiative that allows us to save from oblivion a talented “

” who influenced generations of African writers.

First sentence:

“

»

►

, by Ousmane Sembene.

The Contemporary Book, 187 pages.

In the abyss of feminine becoming

Novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, the Haitian Évelyne Trouillot has built a rich body of work around an ever-deeper reflection on the status of women.

This question is at the heart of her new novel,

.

The author explores the abysses of female becoming through the destinies of two sisters, Lorette and Claudette, born on the same day, from the same father, but from two different mothers.

They try to get out of family authority and the straitjacket imposed by religion in a society where poverty is omnipresent.

The identity quest of the two half-sisters also passes through the affirmation of their twinness explained in the last pages of the novel.

This novel will also be read for the beauty of its language.

A poet at heart, Évelyne Trouillot writes in a powerful language that mixes violence and modesty, an evocative language that plunges the reader into an interiority nourished by images, questions and meaning.

First sentence:

“

 »

►The twins of rue Nicolas

, by Évelyne Trouillot.

Editions project'îles, 275 pages, 17 euros.

“Our embrace will last forever”

The title of the new novel by Djiboutian Abdourahman Waberi is reminiscent of a love song.

This book where fiction mixes with autofiction is indeed a declaration of love from the narrator/author to his 6-year-old daughter Béa.

We had met little Bea, bright and mischievous, in Waberi's previous novel.

In the pages of the new opus of the author of

, we find her diminished, suffering from a serious illness and bedridden in a Parisian hospital.

At his bedside watch: his mother, his grandmother and his father, a professor in the United States, present in thought.

He telephones his little girl every day, writes to her to share with her his anxieties and the memories of his own sickly childhood in Djibouti.

The daily dialogue between father and daughter leads to their joint decision to keep a diary to “ 

 ” the pains and sufferings of the patient.

Saying the disease, can it help to evacuate the evil?

Can imagining stories of remission be a healing factor, as Dr. de Béa suggested?

“ 

,” the father whispers in his daughter's ear.

Still, hope returns.

Tell me who I exist for

, a title inspired by a song by Joe Dassin, is a magnificent tribute to writing and poetry, from which we draw courage in order to triumph over adversity.

Moving and poetic.

First sentence:

“…

.

»

►Tell me for whom I exist

 , by Abdourahman Waberi.

JC Lattes, 267 pages, 20.90 euros.

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