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A nameless young man lives in the housing projects outside of Paris. When he was a child, his parents moved with him from the Congo to France, hoping in vain to escape poverty and violence. His best friend, Drissa, is in a psychiatric hospital and now Mireille, his girlfriend, the woman with whom he has shared his childhood and hopes, has left him to reconnect with her Jewish roots in Israel. During a night out to drown the pain of his heartache, there is a fight with a policeman, the policeman dies, and the young man is arrested and taken to jail. Between police beatings and abrupt interrogations, his memory becomes his sole ally to escape from the exiguous space in which he is confined. Half-conscious and delirious, he reflects on his journey from the land of his ancestors to his life in the projects with Drissa and Mireille.… (more)
Won this in a Goodreads Giveaway in exchange for a review. This novella is essentially a stream of conscience of a French man that has just been arrested. Poignant style with a good translation. It kept me engaged and I was not expecting the ending. ( )
A lot packed into this slim volume. Displacement of spirit, alienation, racial entrapment in multiple cultural and geographic worlds and spaces are, often excruciatingly, articulated with the whole panoply of emotion that should be expected. I don't believe these experiences are only confined to the Franco-Congolese, but the experiences of those from African cultures living in the midst of their former colonial overseers highlights cultural rifts throughout out current world. Parse this book if you seek to understand this better. ( )
...From this land of which I have been robbed, mother what turmoil my life is! SERGE "MNSA" N'SONDÉ
From hazardous storms, we become more beautiful! WILFRIED PARACLET N'SONDÉ
Dedication
I dedicate this book to my parents Marie-Joséphine and Simone 'Waptiti,' Thank you...
First words
From Vancouver to Brasilia, from the gangsters in New York, Bahia, Lagos, behind the bars at the Fleury-Mérogis prison, on the benches of the amphitheatres at the Sorbonne, for some of the junkies at the central station in Amsterdam, for the AIDS orphans of Mombasa, the commuters pressed and packed into the RER train on line A heading into Paris, for the memories of the deceased watching over Kongo, all the faces of voodoo ceremony participants in Haiti, those buried for centuries below the African continent, beneath the uniforms of ear-cutting Senegalese soldiers, the drug addicts, the fanatics, those stuck in the trenches in the Flanders during the Great War, the bones of those scattered at the bottom fo the Atlantic, the asylum seekers, the EU authorities, for the female vendors in the Brixton market, the jubilation of the sound systems in Jamaica, and especially for those genocided in Rwanda, ...Africa haunts our black skin.
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▾Book descriptions
A nameless young man lives in the housing projects outside of Paris. When he was a child, his parents moved with him from the Congo to France, hoping in vain to escape poverty and violence. His best friend, Drissa, is in a psychiatric hospital and now Mireille, his girlfriend, the woman with whom he has shared his childhood and hopes, has left him to reconnect with her Jewish roots in Israel. During a night out to drown the pain of his heartache, there is a fight with a policeman, the policeman dies, and the young man is arrested and taken to jail. Between police beatings and abrupt interrogations, his memory becomes his sole ally to escape from the exiguous space in which he is confined. Half-conscious and delirious, he reflects on his journey from the land of his ancestors to his life in the projects with Drissa and Mireille.
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