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Research in African Literatures 34.2 (2003) 192-198



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From Togo and Sweden:
Kpomassie and Lindqvist

Nicholas Howe
The Ohio State University


An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie. Translated by James Kirkup. Introduction by A. Alvarez. New York: New York Review of Books, 2001; originally published 1981 in French, 1983 in English. xii + 300 pp. ISBN 0-940322-88-9 paper. $12.95.
Desert Divers, by Sven Lindqvist.Translated by Joan Tate. London: Granta, 2000; originally published 1990 in Swedish. x + 144 pp. ISBN 1-86207-359-7 paper. $12.95.

Brought together through a coincidence of publishing, these two books form a remarkable pair when read together: the limpid narrative of a Togolese who heads north to live in Greenland because of a boyhood encounter with a book about Eskimos; and the edgy fragments of a Swede who heads south to lose himself in the Western Sahara after reading too many desert books by nineteenth-century Europeans. At times, An African in Greenland and Desert Divers become so exactly symmetrical—in the manner of a photographic positive and negative—that it is difficult to see one apart from the other.

Kpomassie is wonderfully generous in his account, Lindqvist is laconically allusive; Kpomassie rarely cites the available scholarship on Greenland, Lindqvist seems to have absorbed every book on the Sahara by a Western writer (especially if an aesthete or decadent); Kpomassie displays his inner psyche through his outward acts and conversations, Lindqvist reveals his interior life by relating the trace memories of his dreams; Kpomassie writes with a youthful pleasure in encountering the Arctic Other so that he can return home to tell stories, Lindqvist seems at times feverishly intent on diving into the African Other so that he can mortify his flesh and exorcise his demons.

These various qualities should, I think, be attributed far more to the personality of each writer than to his own culture. There is, in other words, no essentialist difference of identity between these two writers, even if at times one could twist each to conform to dangerously stupid stereotypes about Africans and Scandinavians. What's far more interesting, as one reads them together, is to see how each stands as a necessary example of why a person might travel and then tell stories of travel. For there is to each of these books a deep seriousness about what happens to people when they dislocate themselves in radical ways as measured by such objective matters as weather and terrain. Both Kpomassie and Lindqvist are intensely aware [End Page 192] of these facts, partly because each desires a place that is physically unlike his home and partly because each learns that there is no margin for error in such a place. Yet even in the knowledge that life is fragile in Greenland and the Sahara there is that same uncanny symmetry: one is dangerous because it is hot and dry, the other because it is cold and wet.

If these two books read together so fruitfully, it is not because one remedies the deficiencies of the other, as sometimes happens in good marriages. No, they read together so well because they set out the range of possibilities available to those who find in travel a necessary form of quest and who also struggle to find an answerable style for writing of that experience. Each of them gives us a form of rough travel, not in the macho sense of doing reckless things in dangerous places, but in the abiding sense of knowing that leaving home is a way of learning to live anew.

Kpomassie's An African in Greenland was originally published in 1981 and became something of a minor cult classic in the following years. Having it back in print is thus reason for gratitude, especially because the NYRB edition includes an appreciative introduction by A. Alvarez and a compelling set of photographs of Kpomassie's stay in Greenland. Though published originally some twenty years ago, Kpomassie's story goes back even further to the mid-1950s when he was a teenager...

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