so distant from my life

by monique ilboudo / translated from french by yarri kamara

Shortlisted, 2023 ALTA National Translation Award

One of the Observer’s fiction picks for 2022

Winner, PEN Heim award

To deter me, my uncle spoke to me about roots. A line of argument that I found absurd. Even plants are intelligent enough to grow around stones, seeking the best soil for their roots underground.

Jeanphi, a young man from the fictional West African city Ouabany, has one obsession that will determine the fate of his life – migration. He scrapes together money to take the illegal route across the Sahara, making it as far as Morocco before being repatriated. Increasingly desperate, Jeanphi meets an elegant French widower who for his part is despairing at the insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles for his charitable endeavour in Jeanphi’s country. A window opens to opportunity – but it will also bring tragedy.

Burkinabé author Monique Ilboudo’s novel offers a compelling and complex portrait of migration, one of the defining global concerns of the twenty-first century, and a sharp critique of both the NGO-isation of African countries and the currents of shame that divide communities and families. Yarri Kamara has rendered Ilboudo’s text in an idiom that conveys the sharp humour, lucid descriptions and urgency of the original.

Contributors’ details

Monique Ilboudo is an author and human rights activist from Burkina Faso, the first woman to publish a novel in her country, and a major figure in Francophone African literature.

Yarri Kamara is an emerging translator from Sierra Leone and Uganda who now lives in Burkina Faso. This will be her first book-length translation into English.

praise

“Ilboudo offers an illuminating take on the many reasons why people leave their home lands. Jeanphi’s frequent digressions and non-sequential narrative add to the sense of an oral testimony. This powerful account is a timely reminder of how wealth can open doors.” – Lucy Popescu, The Observer

“Beautifully translated by Yarri Kamara…the best book about the hope and despair of the migrant experience that I’ve read.” – The Observer 

“The narrator delivers his story in a straightforward streetsmart style that cuts through all pretence and hypocrisy, and is immensely readable.” - West Africa Reads 

“Full of urgency, lucid descriptions, and phenomenal sharp humour, this book explores desires + desperations of the migrant experiences in such a clear, straightforward way that I couldn’t put the book down at all! It is as readable as it is important – also refreshingly queer and so honest! Without any pretence it offers such a refreshing and complex portrait of migration + explores all kind of shames that divide and connect at that, that I can’t recommend it enough. Kamara’s translation makes it a very enjoyable and engaging read too.” — Lea Deppe, Bookhaus Bristol

“The poet is evident in Ilboudo as well as in translator Yarri Kamara. The novel is lyric in its language and structure, not only what and how Jeanphi attends to the world but in how Ilboudo structures Jeanphi’s movement through it. “ — Rick Henry, World Literature Today

MORE INFORMATION

• Publication date: 27 October 2022

• Extent: 127pp

• Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 129mm)

• ISBNs: 978-1-911284-80-2 (paperback) / 978-1-911284-79-6 (ebook)

• Rights held: United Kingdom; Australia; Canada; Ireland; New Zealand; United States