Comrade Papa
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Financial Times Best Book of 2024: Fiction in Translation
International Booker-nominated satirist GauZ’ returns with a panoramic journey into the colonization of the African interior.
Mourning the recent deaths of his parents, a young white man in nineteenth-century France joins a colonial expedition attempting to establish trading routes on the Ivory Coast and finds himself caught between factions who disagree on everything—except their shared loathing of the British.
A century later, a young Black boy born in Amsterdam gives his account, complete with youthful malapropisms, of his own voyage to the Ivory Coast, and his upbringing by his father, Comrade Papa, who teaches him to always fight "the yolk of capitalism."
In exuberant, ingenious prose, GauZ' superimposes their intertwined stories, looking across centuries and continents to reveal the long arc of African colonization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ivorian writer Gauz' (Standing Heavy) offers a wry parallel narrative of a French colonist in Africa and the son of Black working-class Communists in the Netherlands, each of whom visit Africa nearly a century apart. In 1970s Amsterdam, Anouman grows up with a portrait of Comrade Mao in his bedroom and attends a "proletarian primary school." When his mother disappears, the family receives no help from the police—"a reactionary force of lackeys in the pay of the bourgeoisie," according to his father, who sends him to live with extended family in Cote d'Ivoire. After a period of culture shock, Anouman adapts to a new language and school. Gauz' alternates the boy's story with that of Frenchman Maxime Dabilly, who leaves home in 1880 after his parents each die a few weeks apart, ready to fulfill his dream of traveling to Africa. He takes a job with a French trader before leaving Grand-Bassam in what is now Cote d'Ivoire to set up an outpost deeper into the territory. For part of his trek there, his group is followed by Adjo Blé, a Krinjabo princess who chooses Maxime as her partner. The connection between Anouman and Maxime, revealed late in the narrative, is fairly obvious; mainly, the plot is a vehicle for the characters' distinct voices ("He doesn't know he's dealing with a champion of class warfare," Anouman thinks after a bully trips him). The result is a fresh and witty portrait of colonial and postcolonial Africa.
