The Aquatics
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
An extraordinary novel of loyalty, strife, and empowerment from Peabody Award-winning Cameroonian filmmaker Osvalde Lewat.
In the fictional African country of Zambuena, Katmé Abbia enjoys a life of privilege and influence married to Tashun, the powerful prefect of Zambuena's capital. Yet after years spent playing the obedient, demure wife to a husband who has ceased to notice her, Katmé grows increasingly restless. Her one source of connection is Samy, a childhood friend, struggling artist, and gay man—an offense punishable by law in Zambuena. When Katmé discovers that Samy’s new exhibition, funded by herself and Tashun, boldly critiques Zambuena's inequities, her public, married life is set on a collision course with her one true friendship. Political rivals descend and threaten Samy with incarceration, forcing Katmé into an agonizing choice: abandon her friend or destroy her family.
Mixing compassion with clear-eyed fury and a keen sense of the absurd, The Aquatics confronts one of contemporary Africa’s most entrenched societal issues in a story as immersive and inevitable as a quickly rising tide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cameroonian filmmaker and photographer Lewat makes her English-language debut with a shocking morality tale about an African woman torn between her bureaucrat husband and her artist friend, whose homosexuality is a high crime in their fictional country of Zambuena. Katmé Abbia and her husband, Tashun, are patrons of her old friend Samuel "Samy" Pankeu. After Samy finds success with a pointedly political art exhibit, a newspaper outs him as gay, which is punishable by a life sentence. Samy is arrested, jailed, sodomized by his fellow inmates, and tortured by the police. Hoodlums sack the gallery where his art is displayed and deface his work. Katmé is soon forced to choose between supporting her friend and standing by her husband, who is distancing himself from the scandal amid a looming election campaign. Lewat pulls no punches in her depiction of virulent hatred toward queer people, and she illustrates Katmé's inner turmoil with vivid flashbacks, such as the death of Katmé's mother from internal injuries sustained in a car accident. This one hits hard.
