Launch Day for Our Beautiful Darkness

After a couple of brief delays, today is the launch day of my eighth translation published in the United States. (I also translated a middle grade novel, Amal, that came out in a trilingual edition in Brazil in 2019,) Our Beautiful Darkness is the first book for young readers translated into English from the Angolan author Ondjaki. It’s a graphic novel, an illustrated prose poem with arresting artwork by Portuguese artist António Jorge Gonçalves.

Here’s the book description:

The light goes out suddenly. And in this absence of light, a pair of teenagers bare their souls. Into the warm silence of the night, they share a conversation filled with their stories and dreams… and maybe even a first kiss.

Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country’s history with a teenage boy’s family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away… As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity.

Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.

Our Beautiful Darkness has already received three starred reviews, from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Bookpage and was the featured review on Kirkus editor Laura Simeon’s Fully Booked podcast. It also received this coveted Amazon orange banner:

Granted, there aren’t a lot of new releases of YA books set in places on the African continent. I hope that Ondjaki’s U.S. debut changes that and opens the door to more stories from Africa and a greater variety of stories. After all, Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has warned of the “single story” that skews people’s perceptions of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) experiences. Perhaps the most famous graphic novel for young readers with an African setting is When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed, which portrays a boy growing up in a refugee camp in Kenya. As shown on its cover, it has multiple starred reviews and major awards.

But it’s not the only story of a continent with 54 countries and dozens of languages spoken. Yes, Our Beautiful Darkness is also set during war, but the fighting is far away in the background, perhaps a contributor to the blackout that brings the boy and the girl together. And very little of Ondjaki’s work — including the translation I’m working on now — portrays the war even indirectly. Most of his fiction for young readers is about growing up, relationships with friends and family, and the pranks large and small that kids play on their elders in order to assert their autonomy. Humor is a big feature of Ondjaki’s novels and short stories, including this one.

Note also that I translated Our Beautiful Darkness from Portuguese. Among the many languages spoken on the African continent is Portuguese, the national language of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde (from where a major character in my verse novel Eyes Open comes), and São Tomé and Príncipe. I hope readers young and old enjoy the lyrical story, stunning illustrations, and depiction of daily life in this Angolan city, so we can see more books from this long-neglected (and stereotyped) part of the world.