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2021, African literary season? There are the highly anticipated titles, like The Gate of the No Return Journey by David Diop (ed. du Seuil). Three years after the success of Soul brother (his third novel) is the story of the quest for glory of a French botanist who left for Senegal in the 18th century.e century, of his discovery of colonization and his mad love for a Senegalese who escaped slavery. He is in the running for the Goncourt Prize.
Let us also quote the phenomenon Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Senegalese author born in 1990, who sees his new opus, The Most Secret Memory of Men (ed. Philippe Rey / Jimsaan), retained in almost all the first selections of the literary prizes. His labyrinthine novel which questions the power of literature and the place of the African writer has won the juries of the Goncourt, Renaudot, Medici, Femina and Wepler prizes.
Even without these headliners, this season’s vintage gives pride of place to African literature. Yamen Manaï, Isabela Figuereido, Antonio Dikele Distefano… Our selection of novels and stories published or to be published.
- Confession of a fiery gunman
Four years after the success of Burning Amas (ed. Elyzad), a way of political and ecological tale awarded with eight literary prizes, Yamen Manaï, born in Tunis in 1980 and engineer in Paris, returns with a short novel with a radical tone. Beautiful Abyss is the monologue of a teenager from the southern suburbs of Tunis thrown in prison after shooting his father, a mayor and a minister. Disillusioned, however, he never ceases to cry out in his rage in the face of his court-appointed lawyer and a psychiatrist, denouncing the misery and inequalities of a country which similarly despises the poor, the young and the dogs. Gradually, the narrator’s anger subsides as he recounts his love for Bella, a puppy he has taken in.
Through their relationship and their incongruous solidarity, the writer finds the path of questioning that has been working on him since his first novel, The March of Uncertainty (ed. Elyzad, 2009): how to reconcile the irreconcilable and repair Tunisia.
Beautiful Abyss, by Yamen Manaï, ed. Elyzad (112 pages, 14.50 euros).
On June 10, 2020, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lost her 88-year-old father, James Nwoye Adichie. He was in Nigeria, in the ancestral village of Aba. She was in the United States, blocked by containment due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Nothing announced this death, so sudden. The writer collapsed.
Notes on grief originally appeared in the American weekly The New Yorker. The author ofAmericanah relates the different states that follow the loss of a loved one, while portraying a deeply cherished man through his memories of a child, adolescent and adult. Each short chapter traces a stage of mourning, reveals the variety of feelings: anger, physical pain, the inability to find the words. “We learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the attempt to cling to it. ” Hence, no doubt, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s need to share her emotions and feelings without shame.
Notes on grief (Notes On Grief), by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, translated from English (Nigeria) by Mona de Pracontal, ed. Gallimard (112 pages, 9.90 euros, digital 6.99 euros). Release September 30.
Born of Angolan parents in Italy, Zéro grew up in a city where he soon experienced his difference. There is this Italian nationality that he is denied, the astonished air of the teacher who discovers his place of birth (“You are more Italian than me!” “), or the warnings of his mother who hits him, to protect him: “Whites always see nastiness in blacks. “
Become in the Peninsula the hero of a successful eponymous series produced by Netflix, Zero was first the narrator ofInvisible, first novel by Antonio Dikele Distefano. Screenwriter, founder of a rap label and an online music magazine, the writer was born in Lombardy in 1992 to Angolan parents. He was inspired by a news item to tell the story of his hero, from 7 to 17 years old, between withdrawal and self-assertion. Will his friendship with other young people of African origin, his taste for books or his love for Anna be enough to bring Zero out of a destiny that seems all mapped out? Why is he not entitled to innocence? Racism, police violence, homophobia and the cycle of petty crime in the cities are the themes addressed by this fiction that we read in one go.
Invisible (No ho mai avuto la mia età), by Antonio Dikele Distefano, translated from Italian by Marianne Faurobert, ed. Liana Levi (224 pages, 16 euros, digital 11.99 euros). Release October 7.
- Growing up in the days of colonialism
1975, Lourenço Marques (current Maputo, capital of Mozambique). A young girl is about to fly away, alone, to Portugal, like hundreds of thousands of “retornadas”. She goes to her parents’ country where she herself was not born, to find grandparents she does not know. Around her, her relatives make her promise to tell their story. How they built everything and then lost everything during the Mozambique War of Independence (1964-1974). How some of them were massacred by revolutionaries. Isabela Figueiredo is only 12 years old, but she already knows that one day she will write her truth.
All her childhood, she listened to and observed his. With special attention to his father, a racist and macho electrician, by turns sensual and angry, generous and cruel with his black workers and local women. She loves him and hates him at the same time. This biographical account is the first book by this journalist who tells with lucidity and in a beautiful and brutal language the heartbreaks of a childhood in the days of colonialism.
Colonial Memories Notebook (Caderno de memórias coloniais), by Isabelle Figueiredo, preface by Léonora Miano, translated from Portuguese by Myriam Benarroch and Nathalie Meyroune, ed. Chandeigne (352 pages, 20 euros, digital 13.99 euros).
- Itinerary of a provocateur
World-renowned artist, painter Bill Kouélany was the first creator of sub-Saharan Africa to be exhibited at Documenta in Kassel. We know in particular her torn and stitched canvases, echoing the wars and untreated wounds of her country, the Congo, where she was born in Brazzaville in 1965, and the poetry of the great Tchicaya U Tam’si.
On the other hand, we know less that, since a young age, his relatives said it “Kipiala” : “Provocative”, out of frame. “ When I was 13, my parents sent me to France in the hope that I would come back carefully washed, smoothed, polished ”, she remembers in Kipiala or the rage to be oneself, his first autobiographical story. In it, she explains with laughing detachment how she never succeeded in being the right way – a “Real niece”, “A real Congolese” –, refusing standards and assignments much to the despair of his family… and to the great benefit of his art.
Kipiala or the rage to be oneself, by Bill Kouélany, ed. Les Avrils (352 pages, 22 euros). Release October 6.
Aquatic is the novel of the disillusionment of Katmé Abbia, 33, a teacher who stopped working to become the wife of Tashun, the prefect of the capital. The latter is eyeing a post of governor in Zambuena, a fictitious African country experienced as a dictatorship or an “authoritarian” democracy depending on the point of view. Thanks to his status, Katmé is rich and integrates the circles of the elite. In exchange, she closes her eyes on her husband’s infidelities, picks up the clothes he leaves lying around on the floor, smiles at the ceremonies. However, she believes herself free when she distributes money to the inhabitants of a modest neighborhood which is flooded each rainy season. Or when she visits her artist friend, Sammy, who lives among them and whose next exhibition violently denounces the fate of these “Aquatics”.
The first novel by Cameroonian director and photographer Osvalde Lewat is based on this narrator steeped in contradictions whom we follow as she crosses the Zambuena and falls into the trap she herself has dug. The very visual narration places us at the level of what the heroine sees, creating a parallel between the desire for freedom and the feeling of confinement of the woman and the country. In Zambuena, Tashun’s political ambitions and Sammy’s creations – soon thrown in prison on charges of homosexuality – are not compatible. Katmé wants to fight for her friend. Corn “We are not making a revolution when we eat with four place settings on each side”, a friend told him. Unless you agree to fall.
Aquatic, by Oswalde Lewat, ed. Les Escales (304 pages, 20 euros).
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