Karimi Hotel & other African equations

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KARIMI HOTEL
& OTHER AFRICAN EQUATIONS [1972]: four short stories and a riff of African impressions shape a life-size puzzle. Propelled by the fervor of their black & white love story, buoyed up by the black-is-beautiful enthusiasm that was the rage in those days, they crash land in Addis Ababa, lose their way in Dar es Salam, do their thing at Bahari Beach, navigate the banabanas on avenue William Ponty in Dakar. Black in the land of his birth, he turns up American in Dakar. Dazzled, she wants with all her heart to connect the exhilarating African beat of their intimacy to the landscapes and street scenes that enchant her from Ethiopia to Tanzania to Senegal. Wary, he navigates by a compass pieced together in his urban ghetto. She cajoles him into a search for authenticity that collides with big disappointments, small hustles, rare moments of grace, and stunning truths—for him, in the house of the slaves on île de Gorée, for her, an unexpected reminder of her understated identity in the market square of a Tanzanian village.
SICAP LIBERTÉ 5 [1982]: novella in five facets of interlocking triangles, written in French and translated to English by the author. Change of voice, language, angle, and style in transit from the baffled travelers of Karimi Hotel to full immersion in Sicap Liberté 5, a Dakar housing project. Constance of love as illumination /blindness. Following the old triangular trade route that links the African continent to the islands via the métropole, love crosses paths and intersects cultures, begetting joy and distress. Emancipation and alienation bounce between the city of harsh lights and a third world that entices and stings. The thirst for authenticity reaches its source; the beloved is a native son, lithe, velvet-dark, endowed with intoxicating grace. She follows his contours, dances his beat, adopts the accent and the gait, swallows the irrational, revels in a sensuality no sooner satisfied than disappointed. Her open-hearted acceptance of the Other is rebuffed by age-old rivalries, troubling religious undercurrents, burgeoning ethnic conflicts, unsettled scores between the motherland and its scattered brood. Was it an idyll? Or an illusion?