stay@home program
Book: Descent into Night
Right at the beginning of the book, he wants to kill himself to finally put to rest the flashbacks from the murderous days of the crushing of the student protests in Lomé. But the memory of the friend from the prison camp who chose him as the future great poet dissuades him. Between torture and forced labour, this former teacher, now blinded, has demanded that he read aloud the greatest novels of the time in their miserable shared cell in the evenings - shared journeys into humanity that give the two of them space and a bond. Escaping his own execution and the penal camp by chance, Ito Baraka tries to comply with the ordination by his campmate and actually wins a talent contest that allows him a scholarship to Canada. Everything seems to lead to a respected middle-class life, literary success, a marriage, a son, a job as a teacher. But the sense of guilt of the man who got away eats away at the meaning of this life, Ito burrows deeper and deeper into the absurdity of the violence he experienced - until the well-integrated appearance gradually crumbles. In a cellar hole, between drunkenness and love affairs with a drug-addicted native of Canada, he finally finds the strength to dictate his story to his girlfriend and transfigure his final decline with a vision.
[This review was written in German by Susy Greuter for the current Africa Bulletin.]