The Truth and the Story in ‘The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga’
The novel is a caper with a serious bent, an ecocritical story from a context where life was never anthropocentric enough to need “posthumanism.”
July Blalack
Friday Finds: The Words Without Borders Mauritania Issue
“There are seven different authors featured in the special section, translated from Arabic and from French, writing in widely different genres and styles; their work provides visions of Mauritania both future and past, future fiction, ironic time-travel fiction, historical fiction set in the seventeenth century, and tersely expressive poetry.”
‘Outside Servitude’: A Novel Exploring Enslavement in Mauritania
“‘Outside Servitude’ is undoubtedly worth reading, especially as Bamba remains one of the Anglophone reader’s only windows on Mauritania.”
‘The Desert and the Drum’: Ethnography and the Mauritanian Novel
When there are no Mauritanian novels translated into English, which should be the first?
Love in a Time of Artificial Wombs
“Moussa Ould Ibno originally wrote Al-hubb Al-mustaheel as L’amour impossible and, along with another one of his novels, he re-wrote the story in Arabic a few years later.”