MARC record from Internet Archive

LEADER: 03559pam a22003614a 4500
001 4413259
005 20221102210612.0
008 030910t20042004nju b 000 1 eng
010 $a 2003020024
020 $a0838640206 (alk. paper)
035 $a(OCoLC)ocm53019462
035 $a(NNC)4413259
035 $a4413259
040 $aDLC$cDLC$dYDX$dOrLoB-B
041 1 $aeng$hita
042 $apcc
043 $ae-it---$af------
050 00 $aPQ4911.O55$bN4913 2004
082 00 $a853/.92$222
100 1 $aKomla-Ebri, Kossi.$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nr2002003011
240 10 $aNeyla.$lEnglish
245 10 $aNeyla /$ca novel by Kossi Komla-Ebri ; translated and introduced by Peter N. Pedroni.
260 $aMadison :$bFairleigh Dickinson University Press ;$aCranbury, NJ :$bAssociated University Presses,$c[2004], ©2004.
300 $a108 pages ;$c25 cm
336 $atext$btxt$2rdacontent
337 $aunmediated$bn$2rdamedia
504 $aIncludes bibliographical references (p. 19-22).
520 1 $a"Neyla is a treasure of African experiences recorded through the eyes of an African who is at once a participant and an observer, the latter due to the fact that he has come home on vacation from Europe. The natural story line exposes the reader to a variety of settings in the author's native Togo: middle-class city life, urban slums, an adventurous trip to the hinterland, and life in a village, including the work of a witch doctor. The protagonist's particular status also legitimizes comparisons between African and European cities, medical practices, family relations, reciprocal stereotyping, and prejudices. On another level, Kossi Komla-Ebri expresses lyrically his protagonist's situation as the eternal migrant, living between two cultures. Through the use of various narrative strategies, Komla-Ebri has achieved a lyricism of universal quality that represents the best of migration literature in Italy." "The narrative structure of the novel is a one-voice dialogue between the narrator and Neyla. The narrator addresses himself directly to Neyla as he recalls their experiences together during his trip home from Europe. On one level Neyla is a love story, but as Komla-Ebri himself explains, "it is, above all, the systematic representation of my love for Africa and a vision of the Africa of today. Africa is Neyla and Neyla is Africa." In fact, she embodies the conflict between traditional and modern Africa and as such serves as a means by which the narrator recovers his own adjusted African identity." "Komla-Ebri writes about what he knows best: Togo remembered and revisited, Italy as his country of adoption, cross-cultural diversity and similarity, the challenges of assimilation and retention of cultural identity, and the struggle of the individual within these contexts. Each of these contexts, characteristic of today's migrant writers, are reassumed in the universal theme of nostalgia and return that is the inspiration and theme of Neyla. With this theme and through the use of various narrative strategies, Komla-Ebri has achieved, in Neyla, a universal lyric quality that transcends the categorization of African-Italian and places him in the mainstream of Italian and world literature."--BOOK JACKET.
650 00 $aAfricans$zItaly$vFiction.
650 00 $aBlack people$zItaly$vFiction.
700 1 $aPedroni, Peter N.,$d1938-$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n85027434
856 41 $3Table of contents$uhttp://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip048/2003020024.html
852 00 $bglx$hPQ4911.O55$iN4913 2004