Oreille rouge

99% of all books written about Africa by non-Africans are about non-Africans. Africa becomes a metaphor for their own problems, a canvas on which they paint their own landscape. (And of course, the same largely applies to non-African readers such as myself.) The difference with Oreille Rouge (Red Ear) is that it's very, very aware of it, and delights in poking fun at it.

A writer (possibly named Eric) gets a chance to stay in Mali for a few months to work on a book. Immediately, he's completely overcome by all the images the simple word "Africa" (never "Mali", he has no idea what Mali is) conjures up; the savage, pure, uncorrupted, oppressed, dark, light, ancient, brand-new land of hippos and elephants and noisy crickets where he, as a show more white man, will submerge himself and show the hipocrisy of white men who think they have the right to that story. Of course, Mali turns out to be a foreign country, no more, no less. But Eric doesn't notice, he's too busy wrestling with the images of Africa he insists on inventing and trapping in his carefully selected and deliberately water-logged little moleskin notebook.

And so, the Africa that can be perceived with one's senses escapes him. He begins to expound. Let us listen to him for a minute. The cars down there were driven in France twenty, thirty years ago. The libraries get the books we would have destroyed ottherwise, old, cheesy, nonsensical entertaining novels. The hospitals get to inherit our expired drugs, their TVs show our worst shows. In this way the rich countries think they support Africa: by pouring their garbage on it.

He's not wrong.

Oreille rouge is a very funny book, saying virtually nothing about Africa and a lot more about westerners' view of it. (Even the local boy who's promised to show Eric a hippo knows everything about hippos from an encyclopaedia.) In the end, I'm not entirely sure that that works for the whole book; after a while, you get pretty annoyed at writer-Eric's puppetry of character-Eric. But still, it's an intriguing book that asks its questions simply with an innocent grin. show less

French writer Éric gets an invitation to spend time in Mali to write. At first he's adamant not to go. "Africa is clearest at a distance", he thinks. "Why go there and risk losing touch with the essence of it?" But then he gets a rush from the reaction he gets when he begins to drop his "Oh february, I might be in Africa then" in conversations. Things spiral a bit, and before he knows it he can't really back out anymore. He has to go.

But Mali, the river Niger and Africa as a whole turns out to be a disappointment. He doesn't get to see any of the wild animals - despite numerous Hippo safaris. The wild and strange soul of the Dark Continent annoyingly eludes him. He takes pathetic pride in every dent and stain on his moleskin notbook show more (what else!) or the fact that he doesn't get an upset stomach ("My body belongs here"), and he looks with contempt at tourists. But the most exciting thing that really happens to him is getting sunburned ears (hence the title, Red ear) and a native nickname fro the tribesmen of a village. What he doesn't know is that "Maïga" means "Where is he?", alluding to the fact that he rarely leaves his room... Even walking across the savannah, he's too occupied with thinking about the fact that he's walking across the savannah (being the kind of traveller that doesn't stick to any touristy hike trail) to really experience anything.

What a humourous little gem of a book this is! It deconstructs the classic travel literature and the vagabond myth in a way that makes me blush, realating to my own backpacker days. But it also, in it's gentle understated way, pokes a hole in the whole western exotisism towards Africa as a continent and a literary landscape. It's clever, witty and full of gentle irony. It had me giggling on almost every page. show less

L'auteur se livre à la critique d'un tourisme occidental égoïste et stupide, tout en s'acharnant d'une haine malsaine, quoique pertinente, à l'endroit d'écrivains voyageurs mal inspirés. A mon gout, ce sujet ne fait pas un roman. Bien écrit mais inutile.