Afropean
SynopsisPlot
The reader follows the life of its teen protagonist, Laetitia Obame, and those of her friends, family, teachers and acquaintances, with particular attention paid to her skinhead-turned-boyfriend, Stéphane Pellerin. Endamne’s fictional characters and their world are affected by very real historical events of the times: the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the release in February 1990 of South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela after 27 years of imprisonment, and the desecration of the Carpentras Jewish cemetery in France in May 1990—all happenings that received worldwide media coverage.
Story
About this book
Afropean follows Laetitia Obame, a teenager growing up as part of a black family in France during a period of rapid global change. The novel tracks her everyday life alongside the people closest to her: friends, relatives, teachers, and a boyfriend named Stéphane Pellerin, a former skinhead. Through these relationships, Alice Endamne builds a portrait of ordinary routines shaped by tensions around race, identity, and belonging in French society.
The story unfolds against a sequence of real historical events between late 1989 and mid-1990. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison, and the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras each filter into the characters' conversations and choices. Endamne uses these widely covered moments not as background decoration but as forces that press on her fictional world, shifting how Laetitia and those around her understand their own position in a changing Europe.
Endamne is from Gabon, and her novel is one of relatively few works of fiction that center the daily experience of a black family living in France. The pairing of Laetitia with Stéphane, given his skinhead past, places questions of proximity and difference at the heart of the narrative.
