Mema

#437
Title: Mema
Author: Daniel M. Mengara
Publisher: Heinemann
Year: 2003
Country: Gabon
126 pages

Superficially, Mema is a story of a boy's relationship with his mother, from whom he is removed by relatives following the death of his father and two sisters. However, it's also the story of the colonial experience of being taken away from mother, home, and community; brought up as a lower status person and educated in a new environment far away; adapting and thriving; returning home and, in this case, being sent away again. (In some colonial narratives, the protagonist returns only to discover that he cannot reintegrate and that his education does not help, but just makes him alien.) As this narrator is in fact sent away again by his mother to learn the white man's ways, the analogy of the colonial experience is collapsed into the literal experience of a young boy thrust into the incomprehensible world, adjured to remember his mother and origins. To be protected from malevolent spirits, he must be separated from his community, and, though understated, this is rendered poignantly. Mengara draws village life more deftly and in greater richness than town/city life, which may reflect the emotions associated with each.