In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi

If I can drop a few names: Jeanette Winterson, Italo Calvino. It was quickly brought home to me that wasn't what I would be getting. I was excited to see how an African author would imagine an African utopia and how his destitute Europe would accord with the one we know from history. When I ordered it based on the synopsis, I was expecting something like a cross between Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables. I love this book and I feel it's somehow not making it's way to the readers who would appreciate it - which is a shame. But again, that's the concept at work, not the execution. I did have a great Being Confronted With Your Privilege in 90 Seconds Or Less moment when I found myself debating whether or not to shelve this under dystopia.

I honestly feel like I got more out of hearing that this book existed than I did out of reading it. The voice of the book is confusingly inconsistent: the narrator talks to Maya in the second person, serves as a third-person omniscient for much of the book, and is replaced unexpectedly by newspaper reviews or the crumpled poetic manifesto found on a dead refugee's body. The choppy style is grating: as soon as you start to appreciate the topic (fetishization of the exotic white woman in fashion, or Maya's sense of displacement when she interacts with poor white refugees in the capital, or leftist students volunteering in war-torn Ontario) it's over, and not just over but dropped for good.

It seems like he tackled the ideas individually turning each into a chapter anywhere from a paragraph to 10 pages long, and didn't bother to tie most of them together or even flesh out the individual chapters. There's a lot of potential here, but the book reads like Waberi got the idea for this novel, wrote out a list of 40 or so (really good, insightful, sometimes witty) points he'd like to make in the book, and then the follow-through just kind of collapsed.

Not quite a novel, not quite a collection of essays the book is loosely arranged around the life of Malaika / Maya, a white woman adopted as a child by a wealthy African doctor and his wife who live in the capital. Great lens through which to examine racism and xenophobia. The idea is pretty straightforward: set a novel in a parallel reality where the Global South and North are flipped, where Americans and Japanese and Western Europeans rely on handouts from Haitians and Ethiopians and Vietnamese for subsistence.

In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi