“I think he’s looking for bits of hope beyond the ugliness of the world, which he often faces,” observes Edem Awumey about his character as a journalist traveling the globe to tell the horror such that it is experienced by the most tried peoples. But, obviously, looking for bits of hope beyond ugliness is also his business.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
In the heart of the Museum of the Green Revolution, somewhere in Africa, a cotton planter, Toby Kunta, sequesters this journalist living in Berlin in order to denounce how he was cheated, then ruined, by a multinational of transgenic agriculture, La Firm.
Two visions of the world thus clash in cotton wedding, sixth novel by Edem Awumey. On one side, a desperate man, whose last resort is a gesture of brilliance. On the other, an exiled African, who believes he is doing good by testifying in the pages of European media to the distress that afflicts the Sahel or Rajasthan, but who never manages to sow the shame that pursues him, that of always to be able to reconnect with his little Western comfort, once his travels are over.
“He said to himself that he could have stayed longer with his grandparents, in Africa, drinking from the source of their wisdom, being there every day, fighting”, underlines by videoconference the 46-year-old writer. This character of international reporter encapsulates, it will be understood, a heartbreak common to many people who have had to leave their country of origin.
He continues to travel the world to, somewhere, redeem himself. Inevitably, he has a certain remorse, a guilt that inhabits him.
Edem Awumey
Anxiogenic and often hilarious behind closed doors, a wide-angle portrait of the historical exploitation of the black body, a trial against these powers that treat Africa like a land to be plundered; cotton wedding poses at its heart the great question of commitment. What is the best way to influence the fate of the world and transform it?
Because of the sun
Edem Awumey was fifteen years old, at the beginning of the 1990s, when lively demonstrations, at first peaceful, took hold of his native Lomé. The Togolese street then calls for major democratic reforms. “We were pounding the pavement for a just cause, he remembers with emotion. Then people were beaten up, people died. […] It was at this age that I came to an awareness of what was going on around me, in the world. »
PHOTO PATRICK WOODBURY
Author Edem Awumey
A socio-political awakening that catalyzes his reading of the stranger, by Camus. The author of Flood Pink (2011) reminds us that when asked why he killed the Arab, Meursault answers who killed him “because of the sun”. Because of the reflection of the sun on a blade, which dazzled him.
“This sentence marked me a lot, because over there, where I come from, in Togo, in Sudan, or elsewhere, we really die because of the sun, which is not the tourist’s sun, but a strong sun, under which you have to go get your bread. Edem Awumey likes to pepper his answers with quotes from his favorite poets. “This sentence from a Cuban writer comes back to me [Nicolás Guillén] : The sun grills all things here/it grills the brain and grills even the roses. »
After studying in France, the young man set sail in 2005 for Hull, which he chose for the simple reason that a friend who lives there offered to become his roommate. “In France, each time the elections come around, foreigners again become a problem. I love French culture, but it can be stressful going through your days with that anger in your stomach. »
If he found in Quebec a society less quick to instrumentalize those who come from elsewhere on the altar of a ballot, the novelist finds it difficult to explain why Prime Minister Legault does not cease to want to pronounce the words “racism systemic”.
If you want to tackle a problem, you have to recognize that it exists. Recognizing this does not mean that we are a bad society.
Edem Awumey
“There is no such thing as a bad society. We have our battles that we must fight in Quebec, and the fight against racism is part of it. But we must first name, if we then want to have a healthy and sincere dialogue, ”he adds.
The right questions
In the face of violence and exploitation, in the face of the misery caused by the “capitalist hell”, in the face of all these major issues that irrigate the work of Edem Awumey, literature nevertheless sometimes seems very inactive. Does it have a real hold on reality? we ask the writer, who gratifies us with a smile as big as the vast program that this big question supposes. “Literature cannot provide an immediate solution to the troubles that shake our world. Who says literature says questions. We are here to look for the right questions, to challenge. Literature is there to bring back to the table those questions that annoy us, that don’t necessarily put us at ease. »
But literature may also make it possible to touch hope with the fingertips. “We must assume this risk, yes, continue to write hope where things are going badly,” insists this father of two boys. “If I write, it is so as not to forget. Because there is this remorse that torments me, when I ask myself: “And if I had stayed in Togo?” What could I have brought to those street kids who pop up all over my books. Writing is probably a way of settling accounts with myself, of feeling less guilty. To write is to hope for an echo. »
In bookstores on January 25
cotton wedding
Edem Awumey
boreal
256 pages