Transit

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Transit is as fresh and relevant today as when it first appeared in France in 2003. This is a terrible — and wonderful — thing to say.

Terrible, because its picture of an impoverished country ravaged by war and repression is still the reality of life in Djibouti, that little country squeezed between Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea at the edge of the Horn of Africa. The drought that devastated these countries was not the only cause of the famine that reached catastrophic proportions in 2011; it merely aggravated the conditions we see through the eyes of the characters of Transit, even if those characters were created nearly a decade ago. Terrible, too, because its portrayal of their desperate attempt to flee the country is still relevant today — and not only in Djibouti.

But the freshness and relevance of Transit is also wonderful, as Waberi's creations live in our minds the way characters in real works of literature do. The chapters in Transit are a succession of monologues by each of the characters in the novel: Bashir, a very young veteran of Djibouti's civil war; Harbi, a Djiboutian intellectual and an opponent of the regime; Harbi's French wife, Alice, and their son, Abdo-Julien; and Abdo-Julien's grandfather Awaleh. Their interlocking voices, by turns poetic and critical, tell their stories and the story of their country, giving us Djibouti's history, politics, and physical, economic, and moral landscape in their own language, their own style. All of them propel the action toward its end — an end fraught with political meaning.

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