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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Land without Shadowsdi Abdourahman A. Waberi
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Poetic, fragmentary pieces that are sometimes stories, sometimes more like essays. I didn't know much about Djbouti before I read this, but I really got a sense from this not only about Djbouti, but about the view from inside a "third world" country, how people deal with the confusion of everyday corruption and incompetence and from lives that make sense. ( ) Waberi's short story collection is less episodic and more descriptive--that is, the focus often is not on events or action but on creating a portrait of Djibouti. The effect is of a poetic mosaic and creates an emotional impression rather than a plot or story arc. The tone seemed to be affectionate or indulgent, even when Waberi was sarcastically describing horrible circumstances and acts. Waberi's disjointed and poetic rambling melange of Djibouti life achieves some measure of describing this dysfunctional society. The book meanders starting from a traditional 'village life' scenic look at urban Djibouti and ends with a contemporary political look at a starving, disenfranchised populace interwoven with aid organizations. Each chapter in the book is unconnected to the next in setting, characters, and plot. An example of the prose is this start of another chapter: "One paints the sea as a vocation, the other drinks the wind out of dereliction; both of them are unemployed. Badar and Dabar have as their friend a sculptor of dreams who is just as ragged as they are. The more they see each other, the less they see of the rest of society. Others are mobilized to defend the country. The uncivil war rages around them." This is the most descriptive information of these two friends one finds in this chapter, and it remains unclear if these 'two' are actual, symbolic, dream figures, or even connected to the rambling chapter. Waberi has written a unique book that certainly conveys feelings of what it must be like to live in Djibouti and is fiction, but seems to be nothing more. Waberi’s ‘Land Without Shadows’ is a collection of prose poems, mostly only a few pages long, in which he tries to take snapshots of Djibouti society and history. His pieces comment on the people, their khat chewing, the arrival of their railway, the loss of languages, the wars in Djibouti and its neighbouring Somalia, their relationship to their French occupiers and the parched land. Waberi is a self-appointed spokesman for Djibouti, being one of its few francophone writer and living in France, but he is not a eulogiser. Instead he draws a picture of his home country that is both fond and scolding, drawing beautiful little pictures of what he believes defines his country. His words sound like those of a poet (which he is) and there were points at which my understanding of what he was trying to say got lost in the poetic prose. In general, though I like the prose poem approach to telling the story of a place (Camus and Solzhenitsyn have both done similar things for Algeria and Russia respectively), and Waberi does it very well, seamlessly blending grandiose history with personal stories. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Premi e riconoscimenti
One of the first literary works to portray Djiboutians from their own point of view, The Land without Shadows is a collection of seventeen short stories. The author, Abdourahman A. Waberi, one of a handful of francophone writers of fiction to have emerged in the twentieth century from the "confetti-sized state" of Djibouti, has already won international recognition and prizes in African literature for his stories and novel. Because his writing is linked to immigration and exile, his native Djibouti occupies center stage in his work. Drawing on the Somali/Djiboutian oral tradition to weave pieces of legend, proverbs, music, poetry, and history together with references to writers as diverse as Soyinka, Shakespeare, Djebar, Baudelaire, Césaire, Waugh, Senghor, and Beckett, Waberi succeeds in bringing his country into a context that reaches well beyond the Horn of Africa. Originally published in France in 1994 as Le Pays sans ombre, this newly translated collection presents stories about the precolonial and colonial past of Djibouti alongside those set in the postcolonial era. With irony and humor, these short stories portray madmen, poets, artists, French colonists, pseudointellectuals, young women, aspiring politicians, famished refugees, khat chewers, nomads struggling to survive in Djibouti’s ruthless natural environment, or tramps living (and dying) in Balbala, the shantytown that stretches to the south of the capital. Waberi’s complex web of allusions locates his tales at an intersection between history and ethnography, politics and literature. While written in a narrative prose, these stories nevertheless call on an indigenous literary tradition that elevates poetry to the highest standing. By juxtaposing the present with the past, the individual with the collective, the colonized with the colonizer, the local with the global, The Land without Shadows composes an image of Djibouti that is at times both kaleidoscopic and cinematographic. Here the art of the short story offers partial but brilliantly illuminated scenes of the Djiboutian urban and rural landscape, its people, and its history. For sale in the U.S. and its territories only Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)843.914Literature French and related languages French fiction Modern Period 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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