Fiction Friday: An Excerpt from Cameroonian Author Inongo-vi-Makome’s English-language Debut, Natives
Phoneme Media, a nonprofit publishing house for literature in translation based in the United States, has shared an excerpt from Natives, Cameroonian author Inongo-vi-Makomè’s English-language debut, translated from the Spanish by Michael Ugarte. Set in Barcelona, Natives is a scathing satire, the story of an illegal African immigrant who is hired for an unusual assignment: he becomes the sexual object of two successful Catalan businesswomen, who take turns hosting and hiding him in their homes, where he fulfills their wildest desires. At turns hilarious and hard hitting, vi-Makomè...
Lee másInongo-vi-Makomè’s Reinvents the African Immigrant Narrative
The buzz around Inongo-vi-Makomé’s Natives is gaining steam. The novel has appeared on a few high profile 2016 must-read lists [here]. Our prediction: if you haven’t read Natives by the year’s end, you’ll appear seriously out-of-the-loop on all things African and literary. Natives is about the unlikely encounter between an African man named Bambara Keita and two women in Barcelona. The novel is a much needed addition to the immigrant story genre popularized by the likes of Chimamanda Adichie, Noviolet Bulawayo, Taiye Selasi, and Teju Cole. Makome rewrites the story of Africans in...
Lee más‘Natives’ Is A Startling Novel About Sex, Migration And Stereotypes Of African Virility
Published last year without a lot of publicity, Inongo vi Makomè’s Natives is one of the very few African novels that have been translated into English from Spanish. It’s an entertaining and very explicit story about an African gigolo and a pair of under-sexed bourgeois ladies; it’s about refugees in Europe, Barcelona, and what it means to be African in the West. There are also some passages that made me uncomfortable and I’ll get to that in a moment. But first we need to pause and reflect on the fact that it was written in Spanish, and how that could happen. After all, there...
Lee másEl autor
Inongo vi Makomè, creador de cuentos, narrador, heredero de la tradición oral africana 
