Book 63: Niger (French) – Camisole de paille = The Straw Camisole (Amadou IDÉ)

              

   ‘Mother, I’ve come to find out what’s happening. For a few days now, people have been coming and going here. Especially Old Gôro whose shadow hovers over all the marriages in the village. Have you been charged with preparing a marriage without telling me?’

                ’It’s because of you, my daughter. Only because of you’ answered the mother after a long silence.

                ’Because of me, mother? What’s it got to do with me? No one has spoken to me of marriage here, not even my friends.’

                ’That doesn’t surprise me, my daughter. That’s because it’s a matter of your own marriage’, her mother sighed.

[my translation]

 

Fatou and Karimou are lovers and want to get married, but Fatou’s mother doesn’t like him and forbids her only child from wedding him. Her parents force her to marry the ‘Koumandaw’ (the regional authority) against her will – her weak husband Old Mazou having been bribed by giving him his dream of a hajj to Mecca – but she quickly escapes him and her drought-desiccated village for the city, where she is taken under the wing by a house of kindly prostitutes and grows into an independent young woman. When Fatou and Karimou meet back in the village, they find they have grown apart. Fatou, like everyone, has to find a way of accommodating the pressures of family and of changing ways of life, and she does.

It is a slim novel, but I loved it! It’s such a shame that it (or any other of Amadou Idé’s novels) hasn’t been translated into English.

 

IDÉ, Amadou (1951 – ), Misères et grandeurs ordinaires, Ciboure, Le Cheminante, 2014, ISBN 978-2-37127-016-9