![]() He’s a displaced Rwandan who feels most himself in Cape Town, South Africa, a place that doesn’t welcome Black immigrants. Ngamije brilliantly explores the irony in Séraphin’s identities. What he knows “for certain, though, was how easy he breathed as soon as his family was behind him, when the adventure and uncertainty of Cape Town lay ahead.” Séraphin feels guilty about his ambivalence toward his family, wondering if “his desire to be distant from marked him as an ungrateful son.” His sense of identity and his place in his family and future are all up in the air. Throughout Séraphin’s story, spanning many years and several countries, Ngamije vividly captures the life of a man for whom the idea of home is “a constant source of stress, a place of conformity, foreign family roots trying to burrow into arid Namibian soil that failed to nourish him.”ĭespite the cultural specificity, many readers will recognize the intergenerational conflicts and warring emotions at the center of this bildungsroman. ![]() ![]() Séraphin Turihamwe’s family fled Rwanda for Kenya in the midst of genocide and eventually landed in Namibia. Rwandan-born Namibian writer and photographer Rémy Ngamije’s sharp-witted and incisive debut, The Eternal Audience of One, paints a revealing portrait of its peripatetic protagonist and the many places he’s called home. ![]()
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