Geneva Book Fair: Hemley Boum winner of the 2020 Kourouma Prize

While health rules are getting tougher all over Europe, Geneva has maintained its Book Fair (October 28-1^is November), an annual event which, for more than ten years, has shed light on African literature in all these expressions. Travel conditions are exceptionally complicated, so the African Book Fair teams have gone to great lengths to not only continue to perpetuate the memory of the great Ivorian writer who died in 2003 through the maintenance of the Ahmadou-Kourouma award, but also by inviting headliners, such as the writer Leïla Slimani.

D-Day

And if you do not yet know the Kourouma Prize, here is what we can say about it: “Awarded each year within the framework of the Geneva Book Fair, the Ahmadou-Kourouma Prize rewards a French, African or French-speaking author. African origin of sub-Saharan Africa, for a work of fiction – novel, story or short story – whose spirit of independence, lucidity and clairvoyance is part of the literary and humanist heritage bequeathed by the Ivorian novelist. ”

It was in 2004, a year after his death that former directors of the Geneva Book Fair decided with Jacques Chevrier to pay a posthumous tribute to the author of Suns of independence, one of the greatest writers of his generation, whose first novel marked a turning point in the history of African literature. “Discovered and crowned by Quebecers in 1968, The Suns of Independence is indeed in more than one way an innovative novel. On the one hand, it is the first postcolonial text which denounces the imposture of independence; on the other hand, it contributes effectively, through its freedom of tone, to revolutionizing African romantic prose and to shaking up the sacrosanct rules of academic French ”, revealed Jacques Chevrier, professor emeritus at the Sorbonne.

Hemley Boum awarded

This year’s jury returned their verdict. The prestigious prize was awarded to the Cameroonian novelist Hemley Boum, during a ceremony broadcast live on several channels.

Alongside Jacques Chevrier, ardent defender of the Kourouma Prize, Romuald Fonkoua, Christine Le Quellec Cottier, Isabelle Rüf, Isabelle Chariatte but also Boniface Mongo-Mboussa and Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry had the difficult task of distinguishing no less than sixteen excellent horizon works various.

And if you don’t know who Hemley Boum is, a Cameroonian author whose first name means “hope” in Bassa, four of these novels have already appeared, including The Clan of Women (Harmattan ed., 2010), If to love (ed. La Cheminante, 2012), in the running in 2013 for the Kourouma prize, without forgetting The Maquisards (ed. La Cheminante, 2015) for which she received the Grand Prix for Black Africa in 2015.

But it’s good for his latest novel, The days come and go, that she was chosen this Friday, October 30 for the prestigious Ahmadou-Kourouma prize.

In this novel with several voices, which the African Book Fair presents on its page, the author has chosen to borrow a sensitive and strong writing to evoke the fate of generations of women, of families torn apart by the violence of history. of their country, Cameroon, but also the France of exile. Cruel topical themes, while just last week, children were the target of a violent attack in their classroom. Aged barely nine to eleven, seven of them were murdered in the English-speaking area of ​​northwestern Cameroon. Closer to home, a knife attack took place in Nice in the south of France causing an immense shock wave.

“The idea of ​​this novel [Les jours viennent et passent, NDLR] came to me after a huge shock. On January 7, 2015, at the time of the attack on the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, I was at home, I watched the images, terrified by the horror of the gesture and by the improbable chase that we were experiencing live on television. A week later, an attack perpetrated by Boko Haram left 150 dead in Kolofata, in the Far North region of Cameroon, without provoking more than meager articles in the press ”, confided to Young Africa the novelist, who applies herself in each of these writings to dissecting long-term stories. To better understand the literary trajectory of Hemley Boum, and a little bit to capture all the richness of his gaze, a meeting is offered on Saturday, October 31 at the salon.

Last year, the Ahmadou-Kourouma Prize crowned David Diop for Soul brother (ed. Seuil), a poignant story that lifts the veil on the too little-known history of the 200,000 African fighters sent on behalf of France to the front lines of the First World War where approximately 30,000 Senegalese infantrymen died in the trenches .