A Fata Morgana is a kind of mirage. An illusion. Like the one that pushed Sisi, a young Nigerian, to leave her country and her parents for Europe, unable to find a job despite her university degree.
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This is how she accepts the only exit door available to her: a one-way ticket to Belgium, where she will have to work in the red light district of Antwerp until she has repaid her debt and is finally free to pursue their dreams. But Sisi will only live there for eight months before being killed. Her murder brings together her three roommates, young women who, like her, had to leave Nigeria under the same conditions. Their hitherto superficial relationship becomes closer, prompting them to each tell their terrible story, which we will discover alternately with that of Sisi.
This second novel by Chika Unigwe (the first translated into French) gives a new voice to these African migrants forced into prostitution in the West – a rare and disturbing portrait of truth and resulting from the author’s encounters with Nigerian sex workers when she lived in Belgium. It is also a window on Lagos, one of the most densely populated cities in Africa, where the desire for modernity and attachment to tradition collide, making the author one of the few female feathers to emerge from the continent with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (although both now reside in the United States). A novel to read to discover the facets of another world through literature, and a name to remember that we hope to be able to read again.
fata morgana
Chika Unigwe (translated from English by Marguerite Capelle)
World
304 pages