Transit
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Waiting at the Paris airport, two immigrants from Djibouti reveal parallel stories of war, child soldiers, arms trafficking, drugs, and hunger. Bashir is recently discharged from the army and wounded, finding himself inside the French Embassy. Harbi, whose wife, Alice, has been killed by the police, is there too—arrested earlier as a political suspect. An embassy official mistakes Bashir for Harbi's son, and as Harbi does not deny it, both will be exiled to France, Alice's home country. This brilliantly shrewd and cynical universal chronicle of war and exile, translated into English for the first time, amounts to a lyrical and reflective history of Djibouti and its tortuous politics, crippled economy, and devastated moral landscape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Steeped in both historical lore and the socio-political realities of the small ex-French colony of Djibouti before and during its 1990s civil war, Waberi s new collection tells the alternatively inspiring and somewhat laborious tale of Bashir Binladen, in Paris due to mistaken identity, who provides a crassly sensationalistic window into the soldier s life, replete with graphic rape-and-pillage exploits described in an energetic, illiterate voice: Oh, the army was big mess. Holy Moly! We killed the Wadags, screwed their daughters, poisoned wells.... Standing in stark contrast to Bashir is Abdo-Julien, a child prone to lofty, over-lyrical observations: nomads are Chroniclers of the ephemeral, who shell their sayings like oysters. Two other characters, both engrossing, arrive late in the binary alternations between Bashir s warrior-thug sensationalism and Abdo-Julien s sentimentality: Alice, the Breton student who fled France with Abdo-Julien s father, is a sexualized and pragmatic mom who knows leaving Brittany will have tragic consequences; and Awaleh, Abdo-Julien s nomadic warrior grandfather, is the very incarnation of the enchanted and fierce region known as the Horn of Africa both adventurer and modest seer, he gives Waberi s narrative depth and a touch of magical realism.
