The Dance of the Fathers
French, Éditions Zoé, 2025
“I stretch out my toes, focus on my instep and then seamlessly try out a grand battement, well, it’s not perfect. Once again, it still isn’t flawless. A voice inside me whispers: How are you going to do the splits with these loincloths on your hips? I lower my head and, as I see my top all creased, I think of my father.”
“Despite Estha and Auntie Bwamè’s repeated insistence, I refused to go to the country to bury my father.
Do we kill and come to the funeral? Kiyo had written to me. A big brother’s advice: don’t even try to come here to Cameroon.
On the day of the burial, I had holed up in my room. In my backpack, I had hidden a small bottle of Castel Beer. I drank it in silence, in honour of my father.”
Torn between the duty to follow in the footsteps of the fathers who moulded him and his desire for liberation, the narrator recalls his childhood in Cameroon, a source of fireworks as dazzling as they are overwhelming.
Leaning against the window of his Geneva flat, Benjamin listens to the voices of his past. He is transported back to the living room of his child hood in Douala, listening to his father recount the history of Cameroon — a country with an unsteady stride, ruled by political puppets, yet also home to heroes like his grandfather Wolfgang, a great resis tance fighter. When his gout-ridden knees allow it, the eccentric and portly father rises from his chair to attempt a few steps of funky-makossa. But when his mood sours and turns to anger, Estha Minlah knows how to stand up to her sangôh of a husband, shielding her beloved son from his homophobic outbursts.
Max Lobe makes us swing to the rhythm of his character’s memories, brimming with life and humor, while tackling the weighty question of heritage.
- Title
- La danse des pères
- Publisher
- Éditions Zoé
- Translation rights
- Agence Astier-Pécher, rights@astier-pecher.com, Cc: Éditions Zoé, rights@editionszoe.ch
- Publication date
- 2025
- Pages
- 176
- ISBN
- 978-2-88907-464-8
Author
Max Lobe
Max Lobe was born in 1986 in Douala, Cameroon. At eighteen he moved to Switzerland, where he still lives. In 2017, his novel Confidences won the Ahmadou Kourouma Prize. His other books, including 39 rue de Berne, La Trinité bantoue and Loin de Douala have been translated into many languages.
Photo: © Éditions Zoé, Roman Lusser