Earlier this spring, Tony D’Souza released one of the finest novels about the South Asian diaspora, The Konkans, and promptly won a Guggenheim Fellowship. I bought him a beer, and he gave me a copy of his first novel.

Whiteman is based on D’Souza’s experiences as an aid worker living in a village in West Africa. The title is simply what Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) residents call Westerners. Jack Diaz / Adama the protagonist isn’t a WASP, but with his relatively light skin he’s close enough to one to the Africans. The title also a play on words, turning inside out white Americans’ conception of themselves as the default race, in a way just as patronizing as ‘Chinaman.’ And there are all kinds of cultural inversions here as Jack assimilates:

Mamadou was the companion the village had given me when I’d first arrived… It was his duty to teach me how to behave politely… Mostly what he did was watch me make horrific mistakes, and then, after weeks of letting me make them, he’d say to me in a small voice, ‘Are you sure you really want to sweep out your hut at night, Adama? The ancestors take it as a great insult… All your neighbors are complaining.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that weeks ago?’

‘Why remind a blind man that he is blind?’ …

He said to me in that small voice of his, ‘Are you sure you want to salute people before they’ve washed their faces? ,,, Talking to people before you’ve washed your face in the morning is like talking to them with shit on it… People have been complaining for a long time that you make them humiliate themselves each and every morning.’

The book is quite good, though D’Souza’s grown as a writer with The Konkans. Because Whiteman is set in a Worodougou village, the story begins with Jack building thatched shelters, growing yams and hunting birds, falling in love and hiring a prostitute before devolving in the brief hell of a civil war. Jack’s skirt-chasing always ends badly. When he hooks up with a fellow aid worker, a relationship of cultural familiarity and convenience, it reminded me of my expat American friends’ self-imposed limitations on dating in Bombay.

Jack spins some fascinating yarns, such as one about a Chinese doctor searching the continent for his half-African grandson:

In her arms she held a small boy… His skin was the color of tea, his eyes were Chinese… He was a handsome boy, delicate and frightened, wearing khaki shorts and a collared shirt as though dressed for an occasion.

D’Souza’s sense of humor is intact:

He heard moans… His wife was giving pleasure to herself! … He shouldered in the door, stripped off his wrap and said, ‘Remove the carrot, wife! I am going to possess you.’ … A male voice yelped: Gaussou was prodding the buttocks of the boy who was fucking his wife… Not only had he been cuckolded, but his mogo had touched another man’s anus…

… the boy began to fight back. He was the blacksmith’s fourth son, and his arms were muscled from endless hours turning the bellows’ crank. The wife, Shwalimar, began to scream at the top of her lungs, because, at times like these, everyone must do something.

Like The Konkans, Whiteman is written in a breezy, show-not-tell style with a very masculine aversion to discussing its characters’ inner lives. It’s an effective, cinematic style, the opposite of The Elephanta Suite’s trite exposition; but it’s almost too elliptical in a couple of spots, not telegraphing well what Jack is feeling. D’Souza conveys his love of Africa, but at times treads close to hyping it mango-sari-style, and the closing lines about little Africa are a bit twee. Jack’s romantic tragedies could have been less predictable if leavened by a bit more true love.

These are minor quibbles in an excellent novel. It’s an easy, flowing read. Côte d’Ivoire villages star, with their flirting, tribal politics and casual religious and tribal prejudice. And the final flight through a war zone is every bit as harrowing as WWII tales like The Sound of Music’s flight from the Nazis.

Salon:

Whiteman is really the story of an addict, a guy who gets hooked on a village, and of how he’s finally forced to kick the habit… It manages to be quirky, seductive and funny, but most of all it has captured a shard of the host country in a way that NGO novels rarely do. The Ivory Coast village that young Jack Diaz lives in for a couple of years feels more real than Jack himself…

Adama gets embroiled in the neighborhood soap opera that unfolds raucously around him… [He is] too African now to fit in back home, but still a “whiteman” and destined to leave. Existing in this in-between state is torture for Adama, but the novel Tony D’Souza has written about him handles it with incomparable grace. [Link]

The NYT:

Whiteman suggests, with force and restraint, why a young American serving abroad, however haplessly, might not relish the prospect of having to return home. “The thought of America,” Jack confesses, “hung before me like a cliff.” [Link]

The Guardian:

… it is Jack’s relationships with women that reflect the truth at the heart of Africa’s own relationship with westerners. The relationship between those who have power and those who do not is the bridge that is rarely crossed. [Link]

Previously: Excerpts from ‘The Konkans’, The Mangalorean’s last sigh, ‘The Konkans’