In short, they are introducing the Third World right up the anus of the United States of Africa. “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. 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: 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. (From the Introduction)Īlthough 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. 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.
By this act of inversion he has allowed us to see the absurdity of any kind of oriented globe. This is where In the United States of Africa Waberi has inverted the globe and has managed as well to turn over the writing. Here’s the opening of my review:Īs 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: It’s a pretty interesting and strange book.
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