Les pieds sales
October 2009
Since his mentorship year in 2006-2007, things have looked exceedingly bright for Togolese author Edem Awumey. He still lives in Gatineau, in the Canadian province of Quebec, and, at age 34, he is the happy father of a first child and a second novel. Les pieds sales [Dirty Feet], written during the mentorship, was released by the leading French publishing house Le Seuil — whose editorial board approved the manuscript unanimously — in late August and by Le Boréal publishers in Canada on 1 September.
Since Port-Mélo, which was published in 2006 in Gallimard’s Continent Noir imprint, Edem has tightened his writing. Using precise yet powerful language, he tells the story of an African taxi driver who, while pursuing an endless search for his father in Paris, relentlessly tries to escape from what the book hints is a troubled past.
“Edem…has recreated a world that goes beyond mere events, beyond the recent past of his country, Togo, to depict characters who are part of the world’s suffering. Whether in Africa or in Europe, the damned of the earth wander under the complicit eye of the writer. This novel touches us all because it is universal in scope,” writes Tahar Ben Jelloun.
“Writing is a drug” confesses Edem. When not teaching French to civil servants in Ottawa, he devotes every free minute to his writing. He holds a PhD in literature and hopes that he will one day obtain a university position.
Edem has started work on a third novel that plays out in a “plural landscape” on the leitmotif of erosion, both of the earth and of memory. The novel tells the story of another quest, “but not from the point of view of escape”, he explains.
He finds inspiration in encounters with the people he meets and in the places he visits, such as the port of Tangiers and its young people in search of another life, which he discovered with Ben Jelloun.
He also works with Palabres, a specialized journal on francophone literature.