Letters from Togo (eBook)

Blake Susan Blake (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

1991
203 Seiten
University of Iowa Press (Verlag)
978-1-58729-018-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Blake's adventurous essays-her Letters from Togo-are based on the letters she wrote to her friends from Lome, the West African capital where she spent a Fulbright year teaching American literature from 1983 to 1984. As Blake begins the process of making sense out of a vibrant, seeming anarchy, we are pulled along with her into the heart of Togo-a tiny dry strip of a country no one can even find on a map.With her delightful prose and insight for detail Blake introduces us to Mahouna, her housekeeper, who runs a cold drink business from his refrigerator in a country where electricity is unreliable; to American Lee Ann and her Togolese family, who works at the American school to earn the fees for a private education for her children; and to the suave Ren wearing silk shirts and a most seductive smile, who teeters on the edge of the Togolese and expatriate worlds.Since Lom is both an overgrown village and a cosmopolitan city, Blake's exhilarating, often humorous experiences range from buying a car to attending a traditional tom-tom funeral, from visiting people who hunt with bows and arrows to enduring faculty meetings, from negotiating the politics of buying produce to lecturing on Afro-American literature at the English Club. Together, her enlivening letters trace the pattern of adjusting to a foreign environment and probe the connections between Africa and this curious, energetic American. Not "e;out of Africa"e; but within it, they take advantage of time and perspective to penetrate the universal experience of being a stranger in a strange land.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.11.1991
• Vorwort: Stone Albert E Stone
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Reisen ► Reiseberichte
• Themenwelt: Reisen ► Reiseführer
• ISBN-10: 1-58729-018-9 / 1587290189
• ISBN-13: 978-1-58729-018-3 / 9781587290183