I AM SOMEONE

AMINATA AIDARA

A secret haunts the members of a family scattered between France and Senegal. But one day in June, the silence is broken.

We enter what appears to be a family saga. The starting block is a reflection on family origins, and the study of the ruin of a family now dispersed. From the onset, we are privy to a family secret revealed to Estelle by her father, on her twenty-sixth birthday, in a bar in Paris: the birth of an illegitimate child back when they all lived in Dakar. It is the secret of a whole family. A secret so heavy that it has drowned under the weight of time and of the unspoken.

From there on, a quest for truth begins and different voices unfurl, chiefly the voice of the mother, Penda, who confides in a personal diary, and the voice of her daughter Estelle, opening with a two-part, third-person prologue: the start of their respective journeys from Other, to a freer and empowered I. In turn, each character untangles the threads of time, unveiling the historical injustices that map their intimate lives. We wander through the affluent areas of Dakar where dramas unfold, but never leave the front gates of the villas. We also weave our way through the suburbs of Paris, its estates and squats devoid of faith or laws. Ultimately, we learn that the secret is the family’s redemption.

Published in France: Gallimard, 2018

Aminata Aidara (1984) is an author of Italian and Senegalese origins. She grew up in Italy and now lives in Paris. She studied French literature at the University of Turin and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Her thesis (2016) focused on the writings of young French people with an immigrant background, viewed through literary anthropology. As a result of this, she set up a literary project, Exister à bout de plume, which further led to a literary competition and publishing writings by young people with an immigrant background. Since 2009, she has published short stories written in either French or Italian, and in 2014 won the prize Premio Chiara inedita 2014 for La ragazza dal cuore di carta [The Girl with the Paper Heart]. She works for the magazine Africulture, writing literary critiques and conducting interviews. She often appears on TV5Monde to present her work. Je suis quelqu’un (Gallimard, 2018) is her debut novel, and she is currently working on a sequel. www.aminataaidara.com

For rights information, contact Anne-Solange Noble at Gallimard: Anne-Solange.Noble@gallimard.fr

  • “A beautiful and sensitive story written in a poetic language… an engaged young writer. When reading Je suis quelqu’un we do notice that [the author does not] just talk about this family but that, through it, [she] talk[s] about the history of Senegal, its colonial past, and the domination still practised by former colonial countries on the African Continent.”

    Guillaume Richez, Les imposteurs

  • “The originality of this novel also rests in its fragmented structure. The author has chosen a polyphonic narrative where voices and points of views come together to tell about the world… this plurality of voices makes the anaphora of identity, chanting the narrative, echo with renewed force starting with the title… Aminata Aidara is ‘someone’ whose name we should remember.”

    Tirthankar Chanda,  RFI Afrique

  • “In Senegal, in France, wherever they live, the protagonists in Je suis quelqu’un are looking for roots – and find themselves. A beautiful first novel…[It] is not just a puzzling tale, and even less a family saga. The secret is just a way to set in motion a reflexion on dual identity and the multiple quests which we inherit: looking for origins, a place to return to, a way of living with history’s injustices and silences.”

    Gladys Marivat, Le Monde Livres

  • “Aidara calls upon great post-colonial thinkers to back the existentialist questions of her polyphonic novel…Searching for the Self, stumbling, finding the Self. Maybe. Finally. In Je suis quelqu’un, Aminata Aidara’s beautiful first novel…, the reader is transported to the heart of the internal journey, the quest for a Self and truths, from various members of a Senegalese family settled in France. It all starts with a family secret each member carries, sometimes without even knowing it…Hybridity, dual identity, Africanisation, uprooting… Je suis quelqu’un is skilfully militant without ever being Manichean.”

    Assiya Hamza, France 24

  • “Estelle’s disarray faced with her troubled family, faced with her own existential suffering, is expressed through cathartic deliriums which make up the most beautiful pages of this poetic novel: quasi-Rimbaudian. Estelle’s monologues are read like pieces of urban poetry tempoed by the chorus ‘I am someone’… A poet is born!”

    Tirthankar Chanda, RFI (Radio France internationale)

  • “Through fiction, [Aidara] immerses us in both pleasure and reflection: expanded by knowledge without lesson…The young novelist offers, without writing an essay about it, wise, open-ended reflections… And this is reason enough for this novel to be read.”

    Christiane Chaulet Achour, Diacritik

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