Novel · A way to begin
Shadows of Your Black Memory
Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra
Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo · 1987
Synopsis
A young man with no name looks back on his childhood in Río Muni, in the last years of the Spanish colony. Among the extended family, the villagers, the merchants, the sorcerers and the Catholic priests who teach him, he is torn between the cult of the ancestors and the faith he is taught, between tradition and modernity. His child's gaze, which the adult takes up with irony, brings out the contradictions of the colonial regime.
Context
The novel, a finalist for the Sésamo prize in 1984, appeared in 1987 from Fundamentos in Madrid and was reissued in 2000. Its author sees it less as his autobiography than as that of his generation. Gallimard published the French translation in the Continents noirs series, and Michael Ugarte translated it into English in 2007. Ndongo also wrote a history of his country and in 1984 brought together the first anthology of its literature, a work regarded as foundational.
Who it is for
A coming-of-age novel in Spanish, sensual and ironic, for readers who want to see the end of the colony through the eyes of a Fang child.
Prizes and reception
Translated into French and English, it is often regarded as its author's best novel; American critics praised its translation.
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