Letters from Togo

Author(s)

Susan Blake

Foreword author(s)

Albert E. Stone

Series

Singular Lives: The Iowa Series in North American Autobiography (no longer acquiring)

Season

pre 2002

Subject(s)

Autobiography,

Travel

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Blake's adventurous essays—her Letters from Togo—are based on the letters she wrote to her friends from Lomé, 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 René, wearing silk shirts and a most seductive smile, who teeters on the edge of the Togolese and expatriate worlds.

Since Lomé 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 "out of Africa" but within it, they take advantage of time and perspective to penetrate the universal experience of being a stranger in a strange land.

"Letters from Togo is more than a travel book. From the window of her flat, Blake looks out on bare-breasted women—voodoo novices—gathering palm fronds, while behind her Mahouna brushes her kitchen floor. It is the tension between these two worlds that Blake so painfully and beautifully relates—the African without, the Anglo-American within. We travel with Blake to West Africa. But we also travel to the uncomfortable core of what it means to be an outsider, a yovo, in a land that is not our own."—Dea Birkett

Paperback

ISBN-13

9780877453406

Retail price

$26.00

Publication Details

Publication Date

04/25/2010

Pages, art, trim size

203 pages, 1 map, 6 x 9 inches

Edition

1st