Before the World Cup this summer, the Ivory Coast appeared in the news only when there was killing – of which there has been a lot. Between 2000 and 2003, power bounced from junta leader Robert Guei to Laurent Gbagbo, with so many failed coup attempts in between that the aid workers of Tony D’Souza’s debut novel, “Whiteman” lose track of them.
“You had bloody coups and bloodless coups,” says Jack Diaz, the book’s American narrator, “and the coups that happen that nobody knows about except you go to the post office one day to mail a letter to your retired mother in Florida to say everything’s getting all blown out of proportion in the Western media and there’s a new general-president smiling at you from the stamp like somebody who’s gotten away with something big.”
“Whiteman” gets behind these headlines, addressing the country with an old-fashioned sociological vision and a very American sense that it is a problem to be fixed. D’Souza gently satirizes this notion, making his hero an aid worker for Potable Water International, a group that is most effective at pulling its volunteers out of the country when the going gets rough.
When funding for their project dries up, Jack stays on in Tegeso, a Muslim village in the north, thinking he can still be of some help. Without an obvious purpose, he becomes a walking information kiosk for facts about white people. “Do white men drink water too?” he overhears women whispering. “Don’t know but that’s what it looks like he’s doing.”
Gradually, Jack wins the villagers’ trust and forms strong relationships, the warmth of which takes the reportorial edge off this novel, lending it depth and feeling. Jack respects the traditions of the Worodougou people, and they respect – but often ridicule – his own. In fact, they like him well enough to give him a new name: Diomandé Adama, or Whiteman.
Some of the most amusing scenes involve Jack’s belief that he can fit in – that he can become black. He learns the language, but knows just enough to hear he is being ridiculed. He buys a gun to shoot and kill birds for their meat, only highlighting his dependence on the weapon. He beds several African women, all of whom reward his anxious sense of moral superiority by using him.
D’Souza is a beautiful prose stylist whose ability to drape a sentence across several commas and half-a-dozen “ands” clearly owes something to Hemingway. His aid-working characters evoke Hemingway’s as well. They strike up affairs, knowing they will end, keep their cool when pistols are pointed at their temples at military checkpoints. AIDS does not scare Jack away from sleeping with prostitutes. Clearly, this country is something to be conquered for Jack. After he beds a friend’s wife, he visits the couple and discovers her, stone-faced, “spreading shea butter on her chest; unconquerable, as beautiful and resolute as always.”
Only on a handful of occasions does D’Souza push this note too hard into the murky territory of cultural generalization. The rest of the book is taut and nervy, so natural and alarming in its telling that it is tempting to wonder how many experiences Jack and his creator – who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ivory Coast – share. For his sake, let’s hope they are not many.
John Freeman lives in New York.
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Whiteman
By Tony D’Souza
Harcourt, 288 pages, $22
