Latest Review: In the United States of Africa

Our latest review is of Abdourahman A. Waberi’s In the United States of Africa.

It’s a pretty interesting and strange book. Here’s the opening of my review:

As Percival Everett states in his introduction, Djibouti author Abdourahman Waberi’s first novel to be translated into English is particularly interesting for the way in usurps not just our expectations, but much of what we have come to believe constitutes a novel:

This is where In the United States of Africa Waberi has inverted the globe and has managed as well to turn over the writing. By this act of inversion he has allowed us to see the absurdity of any kind of oriented globe. This novel holds a mirror up to the planet and questions the direction of spin, whether gravity is a pulling or pushing force, whether upside-down writing is even writing at all. (From the Introduction)

Although it gets much more complex as the novel advances, the primary reversal—exchanging the industrial-financial history and prejudices of Africa and the rest of the world—is a simple conceit to cotton onto and one that Waberi has a lot of fun with. In the opening pages we’re introduced to Yacuba, a “flea-ridden Germanic or Alemanic carpenter” who has fled AIDS-ridden, poverty-stricken Europe in hopes of a better life in the much wealthier and cleaner United States of Africa. Through Yacuba we’re introduced to a world where Quebec is at war with the American Midwest, where the “white trash” of Europe speak an undecipherable “white pidgin dialect,” and where the African media fans the flames of intolerance:

“Surely you are aware that our media have been digging up their most scornful, odious stereotypes again, which go back at least as far as Methusuleiman! Like, the new migrants propagate their soaring birth rate, their centuries-old soot, their lack of ambition, their ancestral machismo, their reactionary religions like Protestantism, Judaism, or Catholicism, their endemic diseases. In short, they are introducing the Third World right up the anus of the United States of Africa. The least scrupulous of our newspapers have abandoned all restraint for decades and fan the flames of fear of what has been called—hastily, to be sure—the “White Peril.” Isn’t form, after all, the very flesh of thought, to paraphrase the great Sahelian writer Naguib Wolegorzee? Thus, a popular daily in Ndjamena, Bilad el Sudan, periodically goest back to its favorite headline: “Back Across the Mediterranean, Clodhoppers!” From Tripoli, El Ard, owned by the magnate Hannibal Cabral, shouts “Go Johnny, Go!” Which the Lagos Herald echoes with an ultimatum: “White Trash, Back Home!” More laconic is the Messager des Seychelles in two English words: “Apocalypse Now!” [click here for the rest.]