A review by morebedsidebooks
An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

slow-paced

2.0

 
Every time G. had been drinking too much, his wife shunned him and the sickening smell of drink and tobacco he gave off. She would go and sleep with her children at the other end of the platform. G. lay on his back with bleary eyes and kept calling out, “N., come here — I’m waiting!” “Leave me alone!” she retorted in a sharp, shrill voice. The next hour witnessed an endless series of appeals followed invariably by refusals. Finally, in his absolute determination for sexual relief, G. would step across his sleepless children to get at his wife. She had her own strange method of putting up greater resistance, which involved hugging one of her sons — always the same eight-year-old boy — tight against herself. Protecting his mother by holding her close in his arms, the howling, weeping child would fight off his drunken father with tremendous kicks in the face which sometimes made his father’s nose bleed. Soon the man would fall back out of breath, but he quickly returned to the attack amid shrieks and tears from all the children. This unbelievable scene would drag on sometimes till morning, with momentary pauses and savage resumptions. The little boy in question had once announced that some day he would kill his father, because he was making life a torture for his mother.

 
Yet Kpomassie, a grown man present, gives no indication, unless being a witness is all of it, of his own course of action faced with such a situation. 

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