By Tirthankar ChandaPosted on 22-08-2019Modified on 22-08-2019 at 17:49
The first titles of the autumn of 2019 began to appear on the shelves of bookstores in France and Navarre. A total of 524 novels are expected by the end of October. Africa is present in this abundant offer, with strong works signed by some of the most remarkable authors of the continent.
There is no literary return without Africa. The small African music that started with the awarding of the Prix Goncourt in 1921 to the Guyanese Rene Maran for his novel Batouala, a true Negro novel (Albin Michel), has gradually imposed the African continent as a major source of inspiration for the French literary imagination, now resolutely multicultural.
The phenomenon is confirmed regularly. We have seen this last year again, with the extraordinary popular success met by the beautiful French -Senegalese novel David Diop on skirmishers. Brother of Soul (Threshold) revealed a great writer who masterfully transformed fiction into an exercise of national catharsis, bringing to the surface the buried and painful secrets of the common Franco-African history.
The literary reentries follow each other and are not alike. The 2019 deadline that starts may not see emerge a new David Diop because the headliners of this African literary year are mainly installed authors, whose main concern is less to renew than to deepen their path. Family secrets, memory, aspiration to freedom, these are the main themes at the heart of the books of the " four powerful women " who dominate the 2019 African literary return.
The family romance of Nathacha Appanah
The French-Mauritian Nathacha Appanah is the author of a singular work composed of a dozen books. The novelist pursues in her new Verlainian novel The sky over the roof her enterprise of destroying the myth of the family as a refuge and space of regeneration. This sixth novel written by this talented author tells the story of a dysfunctional family, consisting of a single mother and anxious, a son who ends up in prison at seventeen and the sister who hates the mother .
With her writing where grace and irony coexist, Nathacha Appanah traces the steep path towards a possible reconciliation of her protagonists overwhelmed by the weight of conflicting emotions and memories of old traumas. The loss of innocence will be the price to pay for the young Loup whose narrative monologue opens this novel that reads in one go.
Fatou Diome and Léonora Miano
The Sangomar Watchmen (Albin Michel) of Franco-Senegalese Fatou Diome and Red Empress (Grasset) under the pen of Franco-Cameroonian Léonora Miano are also highly anticipated novels of this literary season. The journeys of these two authors, who belong to the same generation and published their first opus a few years apart during the first half of the 2000s, illustrate the great diversity of inspiration and sensitivities that characterize Contemporary African letters. Closer to Sembene Ousmane, Ahmadou Kourouma and Mongo Beti, Fatou Diome writes her stories in African social-realism, revealing the lives and misfortunes of people struggling with social injustices and their own inner demons. This gives poignant works such as The Belly of the Atlantic (Anne Carrière, 2003) that made known this Senegalese writer.
The new novel by Fatou Diome tells the initiatory journey of Coumba, a young widow who lost her husband in the sinking of the Joola, in 2000, off Senegal. This one tries to rebuild itself while being revitalized in the traditions of its island, always inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors. Roman in the long course, the Veilleurs de Sangomar is an invitation to travel in the heart of a bright and united Africa.
As for Léonora Miano, she is an atypical novelist in the French-speaking world. The dense and committed work she has built since her first book The Interior of the Night (Plon, 2005) is closer to the literary corpus of the recently deceased American Toni Morrison , where narrative proceeds by deconstructing myths and prejudices. The novels of Léonora Miano, demanding in their narrative construction, question identity, history, memory and its abysses. His new novel is no exception to the rule.
Red Empress imagines a Africa of the future, unified and prosperous, baptized Katiopa, and towards which rush the refugees of old Europe. Reversing the codes of domination, the author has imagined Africa coming as a place of plotting political and sentimental plots to complex issues of identity. The novel also questions the human future. Finally, Empress Red is an Afro-futuristic fable that is inspired, according to its author, the imaginative vitality of series unexpected twists and inventiveness of ... Black Panther .
An Algerian fable by Kaouther Adimi
The list of powerful women of the African literary return will remain incomplete without the Franco-Algerian Kaouther Adimi , who, in four books, has established herself as a key author of contemporary African letters. His new novel, Les Petits de Décembre (Threshold), named in reference to the city of 11-December located not far from the capital of Algeria, where the action of the story takes place.
The book features a suburban population struggling with the almighty and corrupt military power. The stake is local. It revolves around a football field coveted by generals looking for terrain for their dream villas, but the scope of the underlying fable surpasses news to embrace the history of independent Algeria. Through a narrative constructed as a joke in the foreground, the novelist develops with skill a criticism of the Algerian political regime. Subversive and enjoyable.
The autofiction of Abdourahman Waberi
If women occupy the field, men are not completely absent from this festival of the imagination that is the return to literature. There is the great Abdurahman Waberi , author of the Country without shadow (The Feathered Serpent), nomadic Notebook (The Feathered Serpent) and Balbala (The Feathered Serpent), who made the reputation of this unparalleled storyteller of African drift. The Franco-Djibouti sign with Why you dance when you walk , an intimate story, which is self-fiction. A thousand places of Waberi's usual writings, but it is a very successful book.
The novelist said that the title of his new book was blown to him by his granddaughter. Worried that her dad did not walk like the other dads, she one day took her courage in both hands and asked her the fateful question. Why are you cans, my dad? Dad will not shirk and the book, structured as an address to his daughter, will be his answer.
An honest and touching answer that goes back to the origins of evil, to childhood, to Djibouti, to colonization, to the desert, to the Red Sea, to Siesta beach. Finally, of course, polio, which weakened his leg at the age of seven. Since then, Dad can no longer ride a bike, nor can he venture on a skateboard, to the despair of his child. Why dance when you walk is a wonderful story about the resilience, the will and love of our loved ones that gives us the strength to climb mountains despite our disabilities.
Jean-François Samlong, first-novelists and translated novels
Other heavyweight of this year, the Reunionese Jean-François Samlong . The Sun in Exile is the thirteenth novel of this mastodon of African letters, entered literature for more than thirty years. Poet and novelist, Samlong has built a powerful and committed work, drawing inspiration from the dramas and violence that regularly shake his island. His new novel tells the tragedy that the Reunionese lived in their flesh by discovering a few years ago the scandal of the miners of the island sent into forced exile to the metropolis, between 1964 and 1982. Exiles of the sun, but also of life because some of these young people have committed suicide to forget their trauma, while others are still locked up in psychiatric hospitals. It is in the form of testimony of the victims that the novelist undertook to tell the drama of those who are called in Réunion " the children of the Creuse ".
Finally, among the other novels expected this fall, let us mention all the children are scattered (Otherwise) of Beati Umbuyé-Mayor or Boy Diola de Youcouba Diémé. Both are first novelists. They took up the theme of the Rwandan genocide and African migration respectively. Both are talented writers. Bet that their novels will not go unnoticed.
Last but not least , English-speaking Africa from which come the two novels in translation of this 2019 African literary return. The first is titled Kintu (Métailié), written by Ugandan Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. It is an epic saga that tells the story of precolonial Uganda and its entry into modernity. As for Ayesha Harruna Attah, the author of the second title translated from English is Ghanaian. His novel The One Wells of Salaga (Gaia) takes readers to 18th-century Ghana, specifically to Salaga, the city of one hundred wells and the center of the slave trade. The protagonists are called warrior queens. Their story of resistance against slavery and domination is read as a lesson in courage and freedom. Aminah and Wurche were powerful women before the letter, at war with their patriarchal society.
On the same subject
Toni Morrison, Nobel of Afro-American Literature, has passed away
Oubangui Publishing brings life back to Central African literature
French-speaking African literature: the good years
Sweden: the "alternative" Nobel of literature to Guadeloupean Maryse Condé
comments