Cheryl Toman

Afropean Cheryl Toman

There are few works of literature that capture the day-to-day life of a black family in France quite like Alice Endamne's Afropean. Published originally in French as C'est demain qu'on s'fait la malle in 2008, Endamne's first novel opens with the start of the school year in fall 1989 and culminates with the end of the summer in 1990. The reader follows the life of its teen protagonist, Laetitia Obame, and those of her friends, family, teachers and acquaintances, with particular attention paid to her skinhead-turned-boyfriend, Stéphane Pellerin. Endamne's fictional characters and their world are affected by very real historical events of the times: the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the release in February 1990 of South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela after 27 years of imprisonment, and the desecration of the Carpentras Jewish cemetery in France in May 1990-all happenings that received worldwide media coverage. Cheryl Toman, Case Western Reserve University