Passage of Tears
Passage of Tears cleverly mixes many genres and forms of writing--spy novel, political thriller, diary (replete with childhood memories), travel notebook, legends, parables, incantations, and prayers. Djibril's reminiscences provide a sense of Dji...
In the United States of Africa
In a literary reversal as deadly serious as it is wickedly satiric, this novel by the acclaimed French-speaking African writer Abdourahman A. Waberi turns the fortunes of the world upside down. On this reimagined globe a stream of sorry humanity f...
Divine Song
"Everything starts with a song and everything ends with another song," says the narrator of The Divine Song. Paris is an old Sufi cat who keeps watch over his brilliant yet pathetic master, Sammy Kamau-Williams, the Enchanter. In Sammy, ...
Naming the Dawn
Naming the Dawn
The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper
The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper
Why Do You Dance When You Walk
'Papa, why do you dance when you walk?' When Aden's 8-year-old daughter asks him this one morning in Paris, he is taken aback. The question is innocent, but the answer is not so simple. Unable to resist Bea's inquisitive spirit, he moves silkily b...
The Land without Shadows
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 novels. 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, Cesaire, 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
