 |
|
|
Item Details
| Title:
|
THE LAND WITHOUT SHADOWS
|
| By: |
Abdourahman A. Waberi, Jeanne Garane (Trans), Nuruddin Farah (Foreword) |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| List price:
|
£42.95 |
|
We currently do not stock this item, please contact the publisher directly for
further information.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ISBN 10: |
081392507X |
| ISBN 13: |
9780813925073 |
| Publisher: |
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS |
| Series: |
CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French |
| Pages: |
128 |
| Translated from: |
French |
| Description: |
Written in a narrative prose, this is a translated collection of seventeen short stories about the precolonial and colonial past of Djibouti alongside those set in the postcolonial era. Here the art of the short story offers illuminated scenes of the Djiboutian urban and rural landscape, its people, and its history. |
| Synopsis: |
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 stories about the precolonial and colonial past of Djibouti alongside those set in the postcolonial era.With irony and humor, these short stories portray madmen, poets, artists, French colonists, pseudointellectuals, young women, aspiring politicians, famished refugees, khat chewers, nomads struggling to survive in Djibouti's ruthless natural environment, or tramps living (and dying) in Balbala, the shantytown that stretches to the south of the capital. Waberi's complex web of allusions locates his tales at an intersection between history and ethnography, politics and literature. While written in a narrative prose, these stories nevertheless call on an indigenous literary tradition that elevates poetry to the highest standing. By juxtaposing the present with the past, the individual with the collective, the colonized with the colonizer, the local with the global, "The Land without Shadows" composes an image of Djibouti that is at times both kaleidoscopic and cinematographic. Here the art of the short story offers partial but brilliantly illuminated scenes of the Djiboutian urban and rural landscape, its people, and its history. |
| Publication: |
US |
| Imprint: |
University of Virginia Press |
| Returns: |
Returnable |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
No Cheese, Please!
A fun picture book for children with food allergies - full of friendship and super-cute characters!Little Mo the mouse is having a birthday party.
|
My Brother Is a Superhero
Luke is massively annoyed about this, but when Zack is kidnapped by his arch-nemesis, Luke and his friends have only five days to find him and save the world...
|
|
|
|
|