Kaya Days

"Nearly impossible to put down." --NPR

In 1999, the Mauritian musician Joseph Réginald Topize, better known as Kaya, was arrested for smoking weed while performing at a concert. Following his death in police custody just days later, the island nation surged with violence in a long-overdue demand for justice from the marginalized populations of the African island off the coast of Madagascar.

In Kaya Days, the spirit of the island and its many people--Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, Franco-Mauritian, and Creole--is distilled into a young woman's daylong search through the uproar for her younger brother, who has gone missing. Amid burning cars and buildings, opportunists and revolutionaries, Santee rises into another world, a furious, brilliant one. An exhilarating journey into night from a small Hindu village to the big city, and from innocence into womanhood, Carl de Souza's surreal English-language debut, artfully translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, is an explosion of politics and poetry, a humid dream-world of revolutionary fervor where seemingly anything--everything--is possible.

Author: Carl de Souza
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Published: 09/14/2021
Pages: 178
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 6.90h x 4.40w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781949641196

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2021
Publishers Weekly 08/23/2021
Foreword 08/26/2021