Le Pays Sans Ombre: Nouvelles

One of the first literary works to portray Djiboutians from their own point of view, The Land without Shadows is a collection of seventeen short stories. The author, Abdourahman A. Waberi, one of a handful of francophone writers of fiction to have emerged in the twentieth century from the "confetti-sized state" of Djibouti, has already won international recognition and prizes in African literature for his stories and novel. Because his writing is linked to immigration and exile, his native Djibouti occupies center stage in his work. Drawing on the Somali/Djiboutian oral tradition to weave pieces of legend, proverbs, music, poetry, and history together with references to writers as diverse as Soyinka, Shakespeare, Djebar, Baudelaire, Césaire, Waugh, Senghor, and Beckett, Waberi succeeds in bringing his country into a context that reaches well beyond the Horn of Africa.