From the winner of the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Award, As the Crow Flies is Véronique Tadjo's evocative collection of short stories.

Writing in exquisite, poetic prose, Véronique Tadjo weaves together a rich tapestry of characters - all nameless and faceless - as they tell their stories of parting and return, losing and gaining, suffering and healing.

Like a bird in flight, Tadjo travels across a borderless landscape composed of tales of daily existence, news reports, allegories and ancestral myths, creating a lyrical and moving portrait of the interconnectedness of human life.

This volume deals with the manifold ways in which histories are debated and indeed historicity and historiography themselves are interrogated via the narrative modes of the truth commissions. It traces the various medial responses (memoirs, fiction, poetry, film, art) which have emerged in the wake of the truth commissions. The 1990s and the 2000s saw a spate of so-called truth commissions across the Global South. From the inaugural truth commissions in post-juntas 1980s Latin America, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the incoming post-apartheid government in South Africa and the twinned gacaca courts and National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda and that in indigenous Australia, various truth commissions have sought to lay bare human rights abuses. The chapters in this volume explore how truth commissions crystallized a long tradition of dissenting and resisting cultures of memorialization in the public sphere across the Global South and provided a significant template for contemporary attempts to work through episodes of violence and oppression across the region. Drawing on studies from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book illuminates the modes in which societies remember and negotiate with traumatic pasts. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of human rights, popular culture and art, literature, media, politics and history.

This volume deals with the manifold ways in which histories are debated and indeed historicity and historiography themselves are interrogated via the narrative modes of the truth commissions. It traces the various medial responses (memoirs, fiction, poetry, film, art) which have emerged in the wake of the truth commissions. The 1990s and the 2000s saw a spate of so-called truth commissions across the Global South. From the inaugural truth commissions in post-juntas 1980s Latin America, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the incoming post-apartheid government in South Africa and the twinned gacaca courts and National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda and that in indigenous Australia, various truth commissions have sought to lay bare human rights abuses. The chapters in this volume explore how truth commissions crystallized a long tradition of dissenting and resisting cultures of memorialization in the public sphere across the Global South and provided a significant template for contemporary attempts to work through episodes of violence and oppression across the region. Drawing on studies from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book illuminates the modes in which societies remember and negotiate with traumatic pasts. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of human rights, popular culture and art, literature, media, politics and history.

A wonderful collection of short stories, both traditional and modern, by 12 authors from all across Africa. Old fables that have been passed down through the decades sit alongside contemporary tales, giving a stirring insight into the continent and its storytelling tradition. The book includes maps and is boldly illustrated by Veronique herself, giving it an authentic ethnic feel.

Two boys venture from their village to hunt in a nearby forest, where they shoot down bats with glee, and cook their prey over an open fire. Within a month, they are dead, bodies ravaged by an insidious disease that neither the local healer's potions nor the medical team's treatments could cure. Compounding the family's grief, experts warn against touching the sick. But this caution comes too late: the virus spreads rapidly, and the boys' father is barely able to send his eldest daughter away for a chance at survival.

In a series of moving snapshots, Véronique Tadjo illustrates the terrible extent of the Ebola epidemic, through the eyes of those affected in myriad ways: the doctor who tirelessly treats patients day after day in a sweltering tent, protected from the virus only by a plastic suit; the student who volunteers to work as a gravedigger while universities are closed, helping the teams overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies; the grandmother who agrees to take in an orphaned boy cast out of his village for fear of infection.

And watching over them all is the ancient and wise Baobab tree, mourning the dire state of the earth yet providing a sense of hope for the future.

Drawing on real accounts of the Ebola outbreak that devastated West Africa, this poignant and, given the pandemic, timely fable reflects on both the strength and the fragility of life and humanity’s place in the world.

"To attain some sort of universal value," Veronique Tadjo has said, "a piece of work has to go deep into the particular in order to reveal our shared humanity." In "Far from My Father, " the latest novel from this internationally acclaimed author, a woman returns to the Cote d'Ivoire after her father's death. She confronts not only unresolved family issues that she had left behind but also questions about her own identity that arise amidst the tensions between traditional and modern worlds. The drama that unfolds tells us much about the evolving role of women, the legacy of polygamy, and the economic challenges of daily life in Abidjan. On a more autobiographical level, the author depicts a daughter's efforts to come to terms with what she knew and did not know about her father.

Set against the backdrop of civil strife that has wracked the Cote d'Ivoire since the turn of the century, this story shows Tadjo's remarkable ability to inhabit a character's inner world and emotional landscape while creating a narrative of great historic and cultural dimensions.

CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from the French

The little girl who didn't want to grow up retold by Veronique Tadjo and illustrated by Catherine Groenewald. Little Ayanda loves her father with all her heart. One day he goes away, and doesn't return. She is so sad that she decides she doesn't want to grow up. So she stays small for a long time, even when her friends tease her. One day her mom gets sick and she changes her mind. She grows bigger so that she can help her family. But when trouble strikes her village, is she big and brave enough to save everyone?

Reflections on the Rwandan Genocide

Along with nine other African Writers, Veronique Tadjo was invited to visit Rwanda to bear witness to the genocide that took place in 1994 - wiping out one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus during a hundred days of barbaric violence. A poet and a storyteller, the author consistently achieves the right tone that challenges our preconceptions. From the unexpurgated story of a young woman reliving the horrors of the massacre to dialogues between strangers meeting across the past, and finally to her own reflections. Her prose alternates between raw and poetic, but always remains discreet, respectful and dignified. The one thing that comes through her narrative voice is a ray of hope. The translator Veronique Wakerley lectures in French at the University of Zimbabwe and is particularly interested in the literature of the first part of the twentieth century.