Customer Reviews

Whiteman

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read Whiteman and couldn't put it down. I'm not much of a reader of fiction but this novel opened my eyes to Western Africa like nothing I've read before. Tony D'Souza is a rising star and this, his first novel, is a book that will live with you for weeks after. I was fortunate enough to hear Tony read portions of the book at the college where I work. My students sat for 45 minutes quiet and enthralled. I wish my words had that kind of magic. One faculty member,in fact, has decided on adopting it as one of her required readings for next semester.
You will enjoy it and it will move you.

This book presents a segment of war-torn, third-world Africa and all its contradictions. Africa and its peoples are seen at their best and their worst - ignorant yet wise, ruthless yet compassionate, impoverished yet resourceful, war-scarred but hopeful. The tales told through the eyes of an outsider, American relief worker Jack Diaz, are compelling and thought-provoking on many different levels - this is the book's strength. To me, the book's weakness is Diaz as a main character. He is aimless, incredibly and shamelessly irresponsible, without his own moral compass, and has absolutely no idea what he is doing in Africa. A "perfect" or saintly main character would have been unbelievable and annoyingly patronizing, but Diaz's flaws overshadowed and distracted from what I believe to have been the strength of the insight into the lives of this war-torn region.

I don't know how much of this book is fictionalized and how much is based on reality, but it makes Tony D'Souza out to either be the best or worst Peace Corps volunteer ever. As an RPCV myself (Cameroon, 2005-2007), I read this book with a heavy sense of recognition of themes from my own service in francophone Africa - fufu and peanut sauce outside your neighbor's hut, for example, or the constant juxtaposition between the expansive grandeur of the African sky and the monotony and grinding pettiness of daily life on the ground. D'Souza made me remember much of that.

For someone with no experience living in Africa, this is an entertaining and, at times, bewildering book. For those that do, it's still very funny, but sometimes also has a poignancy that stems from the emotional honesty of its author. Tu as bien fait, Adama.

Adama Diomande (Jack Diaz is his real name, Adama Diomande is the name bestowed on him by his village) is the first person narrator of the book is in Worodougou, a small Muslim village in the north of the Ivory Coast, to educate villagers about AIDS. He finds himself coming to terms with life in a different culture, sans basic necessities, sans even sex. The loneliness and the desperation leads Adama to make some questionable choices - he takes up with a prostitute and his neighbor's wife, and in the biggest irony of all, doesn't use condoms with them. And manages to stay HIV free. If the ostensible message of the book was safe sex, then by those standards this book is a failure. But interesting read overall.

A young, idealistic American makes his way to the Ivory Coast of Africa, a relief worker intent on making a difference by providing clean drinking water to a small, remote village. Instead, funding runs out, and Jack Diaz spends three years befriending the villagers, learning their Worodougou language, and becoming an integral part of their daily life. He violates taboos, at first out of ignorance and later out of errors in judgment. He falls in love, more than once. He questions the good he is really doing, and then creates an AIDS awareness campaign with his best village friend, Mamadou. Finally, he gets caught in the violence between Christians and Muslims as the Ivory Coast erupts in war, and ultimately he must leave the people and country he has come to love.

Tony D'Souza's debut novel is a stunning immersion into the details of what happens when one man finds himself falling in love with people and a place remote to his own experiences. "Whiteman" reads much like a book of intimately linked short stories, each adding layers of detail and emotional complexity, forming finally a cohesive novel of awakening and loss.

Internationally award-winning D'Souza was himself a Peace Corps volunteer in the Ivory Coast, and one wonders how much of Jack Diaz's experiences are autobiographical. Mamadou and the other villagers among whom Jack lives and works are painted vividly and empathetically. And Jack Diaz, who begins the book as an idealistic cliche of himself, soon emerges as a complex, conflicted man whose actions and perspectives call into question the effectiveness of intention and the idea that Western aid to Africa is always entirely beneficent.

D'Souza's prose is never pretentious, and though in the beginning of the book it reads as somewhat simplistic, as the story progresses and Jack Diaz becomes increasingly absorbed into his Ivory Coast life, you fall more and more deeply into a created world that feels truer and truer.

Armchair Interviews says: An excellent and very intimate glimpse into the day-to-day joys and struggles of a people not usually visible to those of us living comfortably in the West.

The author presents a story of living in Africa, where he learns to hunt, have sex with AIDS infected prostitutes, give lectures about AIDS safety and just go about every day business. It is a book that shows how a person adapts, survives, is pretty much accepted by the loclas and then is pulled from the environment when the cival war erupts. A good book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I read it because I too have been an expatriate and wondered other people's experiences (even though this was fiction). The protagonist struggled with the same elements that the protagonist did in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. When one steps so deeply into another culture, there is an oppotunity to either become a part of the fabric (although you never really can) or be an obsever. This is the page turner tension in this book. Great read.

4+ On one of the literary blogs I check once a week or so this novel showed up on someone's Must Read list. OK, I'll give it a try, I thought--looks interesting. Jack Diaz is a relief worker with no relief to offer in an Ivory Coast village post 9/11 as no money is forthcoming to bore for wells, his original purpose. So he settles in, gradually learns the villagers' language, becomes accustomed to his 'place' in the village as a white man who acc. to the villagers knows nothing. The villagers begin by calling him Sergei because Sergei is a character's name on a Mexican telenova that plays on TV in the village and Jack faintly resembles him, i.e., white skin, black hair. Later, he is renamed Adama which is the Muslim name for Adam. He gives up everything western, meager as his possession are, and his life is now identical to that of the villagers.

The novel really takes off about 60-70 pages in, when Adama begins to understand all the unfathomable elements skirting the edge of his African life. Genies in the forest, soul catchers, shape shifters at one end, and at the other end, aid food stolen from children and eaten by the director and teachers of a school where beatings are de rigueur for a wrong answer, the ongoing Christian/Muslim political and religious antagonisms (and fast mention is made of the fact that the US backs the Christians as did the French before).

Particularly sad read in light of the very recent event whereby a decrepit tanker off the coast of Abidjan released toxic sludge and thousands of people have been affected.

Many interesting African/white privileged young man side stories combine: Jack's goings to town and his relationship with a prostitute is one. Since there is no money for the water project and Jack sees other relief workers (the less than half who made it an entire year) who managed to accomplish worthwhile projects other than what they came to do, he and his village helper begin AIDS information and travel to other villages. And Adama speaks the local language which is of enormous help. I keep going back and forth between Jack and Adama--they are the same person but also not.

Really liked this a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. A few other books (from the 1980s) with a similar backstory--white aid/teacher person in Africa: Ellen Drew's Blue Taxis; the 2 African novels by Maria Thomas who died so young in an airplane crash. And July's People by Nadine Gordimer in a class by itself.

"Whiteman" is a captivating and enchanting read from start to finish. D'Souza magically changed my reading space into an Ivorian landscape. He has a unique ability to engage the reader with the characters and scenes in the book. Tony D'Souza has gone to the head of my "writers to watch for" list.

IEM (New York)

Tony D'Souza is probably the most "successful" writer with whom I have ever been associated at my school--whether among faculty and writers-in-residence or students (Tony is a relatively recent graduate). To see his first novel, "Whiteman," climbing a list of Amazon best sellers that includes Phillip Roth's "Everyman" not to mention all the books about training your dog or obtaining instant wealth is a heartening counterargument to the cautionaries we habitually issue to students set on careers as "creative writers." It's testimony to writing hopefuls that their dreams, when combined with a genuine talent and willingness to work tirelessly at it, a consuming passion for books, an adventurous and frequently subversive spirit, plus dogged determination and Job-like patience along with courage, resilience of character, and a few serendipitous circumstances, can get you that coveted commission reserved for the fittest knights.

D'Souza writes close to the world he knows, his first-person narrator being difficult to separate from his own voracious appetites for new experiences--whether in Africa or in the traditions to be found within the world's great literary texts. Selecting from two texts on the author's list of favorites, he's more Marlowe--arguing that the best one can hope for is some knowledge of one's self--than Kurtz or Thomas Sutpen, both of whom aspire to construct dominions responsive to their needs for empowerment and autonomy. It is in the latter text that Faulkner ultimately leads the reader to a realization of the essentially "theological" idea that underscores practically all of his fiction: blackness is humanness.

D'Souza's narrator in "Whiteman" has to deal with the problem that his perceived whiteness makes him other--more if not less--than human in the eyes of the people he has come to serve. His struggle to accept, even claim, his identity as a white man while still living the blackness of his authentic self is what drives this narrative, making it one of the most compelling and important first novels by a young writer in this reader's long memory.