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  Luc, orphaned when his mother dies from HIV, is in debt to Monsieur Tatagani, a moneylender and crook in Franceville, Gabon, who paid his mother’s medical bills.  For the tips and wages to repay Tatagani, Luc works at a hotel bar in the city, but he is always certain to be “home” before dark, recalling the days when his mother would tell tales of the “mock men,” chimpanzees whose screams foreshadowed violence in depths of the jungle, the “Inside.” These are the conditions and the setting as Eliot Schrefer’s book Threatened opens, and so it goes until Professor Abdul Mohammed arrives.  The Prof, who wishes to be Africa’s Jane Goodall, is anRead More →

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Half Native and half White, seventeen-year-old Trent doesn’t understand his native language, Hitchiti, nor how to play stickball.  He did not go through a naming ceremony and receive an Indian name from his Miccosukee tribe in Florida.  As he tries to figure out where he belongs, he drinks to turn down the volume in his brain and to escape the dark energy that he allows to identify himself.  School has become meaningless to him—more a place for robotic behavior.  Like a metaphor for his life, his skateboard deck is chipped and the bearings caked with dirt.  Even blasting tunes on his Gibson guitar stops workingRead More →