Alain Mabanckou revisite en profondeur un certain nombre de lieux fondateurs de la littérature et de la culture africaines, avec amour, humour et dérision. Parodiant librement une légende populaire selon laquelle chaque être humain possède son double animal, il nous livre dans ce récit l'histoire...
She realises I’ve seen them, that I’m thinking she’s older than Maman Pauline, who is probably her younger sister, but really much younger, her daughter maybe. But I’m thinking something else: would she possibly agree to have a seed from my mother’s insides and keep it in her insides, so that Mam...
He knocked on my door to invite me to the Roi du Café. He had, he added, something very important to tell me. I followed him because I could still hear Louis-Philippe advising me to reach out to him. Not that I could see what we had to say to each other. So I let Mr Hippocratic do the talking jus...
I am not sure I ever really knew him. We were both intimate and distant. Intimate, because I had always felt his eyes watching me, accompanying me every step of the way, anxious I might stumble or fall, concerned I should choose the path he had opened up for me. He seemed distant, too, not becaus...
Memoirs of a Porcupine there’s a certain kind of person I really don’t like, like the educated young man called Amédée, whom we ate, he was only about thirty, he was the one who had read the book in which the ethnologists or social anthropologists wrote about the practice of the corpse denouncing...
Such a search proves to be more complicated than you imagined. The experience of migration places you face to face with other cultures, other people, and leads you to reconsider your ideas. Leeming writes that, ironically, once settled in Europe, you are forced to admit that the “old” continent h...
though nobody gave a shit about what they’d found, let them keep their discoveries to themselves, sometimes I’ve happened to take a dip in the river Tchinouka, which carried off my poor mother, and I never found anything worth talking about there, not every body submerged in that dirty water auto...