Narrative · A way to begin
An African in Greenland
L'Africain du Groenland
Tété-Michel Kpomassie · 1980
Synopsis
Having fallen from a coconut palm where a python had surprised him, a Togolese teenager is healed by a priestess of the python cult, and his father decides to dedicate him to that cult. A book about the Eskimos, found in the Jesuits' bookshop, makes him dream of a land without snakes: he runs away at sixteen and, from odd job to odd job, passes through Abidjan, Accra, Dakar, Paris, Bonn and Copenhagen before reaching Greenland in 1965, where the inhabitants house him, feed him and let him share their lives as far as Upernavik, far north of the Arctic Circle.
Context
The narrative appeared in Paris from Flammarion, with a preface by Jean Malaurie, who saw in its author the second Black man, after the American Matthew Henson, to stay in Greenland. Almost ignored by francophone critics, it enjoyed a second life in English: James Kirkup translated it in 1983, the New York Times counted it among the notable books of the year, and the New York Review of Books reissued it in 2001. It reverses the gaze of the exploration narrative: an African describes without condescension the food, customs and climate of a people of the North. The BBC broadcast a radio adaptation in 2023.
Who it is for
A first-person travel narrative, easy to read, driven by its author's curiosity about a distant people.
Prizes and reception
Prix littéraire francophone international in 1981; a finalist for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, it was republished in English in 2001, then under the title Michel the Giant.
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