The map of the darkness of Yasmina Khadra Review

Dr. Kurt Kraus man is thrown off course. For the second time he has to completely reorient. The real life of the practitioner began, he reflects in retrospect, when he “love met”. When his wife Jessica after ten happy years of marriage, committed suicide without leaving an explanation, he lost his footing for the first time. Was it actually throw away their frustrated career dreams, which drove them to their lives? A trip to Africa, which should bring him distraction and relaxation actually plunges him suddenly in a fundamentally different culture where it shatter human peak experiences and he meets radically different conceptions of life.

Returning to our civilization, he finds himself again not cope, has its previous ratings into question and an uncertain future make.

It was friend Hans Mackroth, industrialist retired and owner of a large yacht, the Kurt talked about a trip to Africa. The old sea dog is to bring for years all over the world traveling, humanitarian to the poorest, mistreated, exploited and oppressed assistance.

This time it’s direction Comoros, where he wants to set up a hospital with the support of charitable organizations. But the voyage ends in disaster.

In the Gulf of Aden, the ship from a small force is armed men hijacked. As they pack Tao, Asian cooking, to make him unceremoniously to throw overboard, Hans, is seriously injured in his attempt to stand up for him with a machete. Then the men tied up and taken away for days and nights on the loading dock of a rotten pickups across rough tracks through boulder fields and drylands to nowhere.

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As a temporary hiding stinking holes in the ground or rock caves serve. The administered food is inedible, there is hardly anything to drink and no medicine. Relentlessly bangs down day after day the sun. How long this misery will last until someone – government, companies or organizations – is prepared to pay the ransom in a maximum pressable height

The Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul (born in 1955, living in exile in France and? “the darkness map” has) writing under the pseudonym Yasmina Khadra all taken in forming strong words in his novel. In addition to the exciting plot to kidnap his book appeals by the confrontation of contrasting characters, lifestyles, concepts and procedure of sessions.

Gives us is what happens through the first-person narrator Kurt. Whose life was not uncommon rather superficial; like most affluent Europeans he was especially busy forging his own happiness. (Presumably) fails as his capable wife at their ambitious self-realization, he sinks no less self-centered in mourning. From this attitude out now he takes his capture and the kidnappers true: an inhuman, ruthless gang of criminal “Monster [and] barbarians” who have developed an industry of it to press unsuspecting from the suffering and innocent traveler million

.

Khadra’s figures confirm this view unadorned. Leader of the pirates is Joma, a colossus whose shape already inspires fear alone. At the very first altercation aboard the yacht he suggests verbally and with the weapon pegs, which unmistakably clear who here in his native Africa is in charge. He ironed out protests against the degrading circumstances of the hostage-taking with primitive lust for power and threatening physical violence, from; he flirts with his charisma of invincibility and omnipotence. In fierce ideological disputes dripping he supports his legitimacy with colonial history and fatalism. Taos death was only “a matter of logistics,” and in any case of death in Africa is normal “.. Every day died This is nothing that the Lord brings to his night sleep”

Later proves in a key scene that even this paragon is characterized in Horror of European culture. Middle of the desert believes Kurt to see a needy; refuses as Joma to stop the pickup, breaking disgust of Kurt out, he insulted and provoked Joma. However, he counters: “No race is superior to the other.” What form a Europeans subjugated all the continents and have led the world wars? Joma is itself in some ways a creation of colonialism: With European literature he knows better than the white sailors; he dominated whole passages by heart – Shakespeare, Goethe, Hölderlin, Lermontov … – and he is himself a poet, even the best of his country, won the “National Literary Prize”. But the frustration of all his hopes and expectations made him become a barbarian. Kurt remains stumped back with the full-bodied, expressive poems of the educated man.

Jomas fate is not alone. We learn from the bitter poverty of the people of darkness: “We did not even have the money for the rope to hang us.” In desperation, many take their chance to extort for themselves what others have in abundance. Are we entitled to condemn the hopeless that they tread no more noble way than crime, kidnapping and murder?

Khadra, has no plans as to differentiate into the question of guilt or awaken even indulgence for the criminals. Not one of his pieces of African provenance provides a glimmer of hope on alternatives or a better, more humane future. A young guard who maintains contact with the prisoners, after all, shows compassion and even dares to suggest to the boss, you can let it run the men yet. But his attempt is already reflected in the approach.

On the other hand, the Europeans are involved primarily rational and strive for civilized living. None of the figures into perspective blame the colonial centuries. (Although I wonder why Khadra has just chosen German as protagonists, as Algerians in France I knew Closer Lying.) The behavior of prisoners in specific crisis situations is not to criticize. The French anthropologist Bruno, some time in the hands of pirates, is indeed a confused character, to the cruel reality not from his idealistic unworldly Africa Transfiguration can dissuade, but it depends on at least no harm.

But the two worlds collide as incompatible. The frightening straight Joma despised Kurt Krausmann as a facade only and hypocritical, and hates the guts megalomaniac monster. Although Joma to its European Core is conscious and afraid Krausmann, his antithesis “to become gradually similar if I even further endure it must” (in fact he is finally a murderer), suspects Krausmann, “that one of us is too much on this earth that the world two beings like us, everything separated and between which no commonality is also conceivable, never can exist in the same place no more. “<

one wonders whether the actually grant author no light at the end of the tunnel, but will only confirm Consistent: brutalized the black and white picture of the desperate, brutal African continent, its culture, chip off a cultural veneer of which even the last traces of even killing his helpers … need it as a message of a novel? Provide not just the everyday news enough material to arrive at such an attitude?

In addition, the narrative remains peculiar to the individual level. It seems like it’ll go Khadra rather to reflect on what “life” means and illustrate a contrast between the highly cultured European individualism and naked African struggle for survival in this regard. throw away your life, like Jessica did, these people would never come to mind. In Europe’s prosperity and civilization there is room for high culture and morality; in Africa there is not even enough to satisfy their hunger and thirst. In short: “Food comes first, then comes ethics!” (Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera”, 1928) But while Macheath exclamation to the “Lord, you teach us how to live good / And can avoid sin and iniquity” inherent class struggle dimensions, grieving on the “map of Darkness” only the physician Krausmann. Lost love brought him to Africa; there he finds a new love, and when he returns at the end to Africa, it is because of them. So are the two subject lines – on the one hand, the policy-relevant abduction issue, on the other hand, the love troubles of a German doctor – strangely unconnected …

The fact that a rediscovered even in adverse circumstances through love life as worth living, is beautiful and unfortunately good, but the political and cultural dimensions of Khadra project remain unused. Especially with an exiled Algerian writer I would have expected a clearer statement and more complex opinion.

All in all, I think “The map of Darkness” in spite of the conceptual weakness for a book worth reading. Important part, of Regina Keil-Sagawe, the ” L’EQUATION Africaine < " Yasmina Khadra:" L'EQUATION Africaine "at "