The Eternal Audience of One - Rémy Ngamije
This book is kind of my everything. It’s my type of summer read: smart, deep, layered, funny, different, interesting, beautiful, and full of important themes that must be read, acknowledged, and understood. It’s funny, in the US we watch the news, read a few books, watch a few documentaries and think that we have a good idea about life in different African countries, but we know next to nothing, apart from our prejudices. In 2018 I made it a point to read books from African writers from every country on the continent, and it has been such a beneficial, and ongoing journey. I would recommend this book to everyone - it’s lyrical and beautiful, relatable, and so funny at times that you laugh out loud (but keep your tissue box handy too because you will cry).
Séraphin is in his last year of law school at Remms, a prestigious university in Cape Town. He didn’t really want to study law, and has a penchant for the written word rather than law itself, but did it because it was one of his parents wishes. His family live in Windhoek, Namibia, refugees from Rwanda where they fled for their lives in 1994. He has a tight group of friends, who call themselves the High Lords of Empireland, and they spend a lot of time going out, drinking, dancing, and having fun, just like any students do. Séraphin isn’t ready to graduate, and definitely not ready to move back to Windhoek, a place he finds boring and predictable. But he also doesn’t really know what he wants to do either, not sure whether Cape Town is where he wants to set his roots.
The narrative doesn't follow a straight line, and I am someone who really enjoys that type of sequence. I loved how we follow Séraphin’s thought process and life, but how we also jump backwards and forwards, discovering how his parents met and fell in love in Paris, or how Séraphin met his first love; learning how his family left a very comfortable life in Rwanda with nothing, and learned to live as “foreigners” in Namibia, never to be treated as citizens despite their hard work and ability to integrate into their new lives seamlessly, despite the trauma and horror left behind and in their hearts.
Rémy Ngamije weaves the everyday microaggressions and full-on aggressions into the story: the remnants of Apartheid still deeply embedded in South African culture, but also the racial and class tensions in Namibia, and in other countries such as Uganda and Kenya. Séraphin’s friends come from different countries in Africa and are brought together for different reasons. Some of the writing is so perfectly balanced, there are times when you laugh and then cry within the same sentence. Some of it is so subtle that it only dawns on you pages later what the author’s intentions are, and some of it is so in your face that you can’t help laughing and relating to it. Séraphin is young, a little self-centered, smart, hilarious, and searching for something more, like most of us (at least I was) at his age. This is a coming of age novel, but also a story of migration, of growing up not knowing where home is, of friendship, of love, happiness, race, identity, and learning. And make sure you read the epilogue properly, because if you blink you will miss the ending that you are looking for.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.