Clandestine Tours of Europe: Fabienne Kanor’s Faire l’aventure (2014) and Pap Khouma’s I Was an Elephant Salesman (1990)

Mobility is a recurrent theme in contemporary African literatures. Because of the entangled histories and presents of the two continents, mobilities between the Africa and Europe continue to inspire African authors in their works. With their representations of Afroeuropean mobilities, contemporary African and African diasporic authors not only contribute to the re-writing of Europe from an African perspective, but also draw attention to the diversity of forms that Afroeuropean mobilities currently take.

In this paper, I focus on two African diasporic literary texts addressing the question of Afroeuropean mobilities from a popular/grass root perspective of cosmopolitanism to which I will refer as “débrouillardise cosmopolitanism” in order to highlight its resourceful, unorthodoxically creative character. The works in question are Fabienne Kanor’s novel Faire l’aventure (2014) and Pap Khouma’s fictionalised autobiographical account I Was an Elephant Salesman (first published in Italian in 1990). Both texts represent the clandestine travels of their Senegalese protagonists from Africa to different destinations in and across Europe, including locations that seem somewhat marginal from the continental perspective such as the Canary Islands, or such currently widely mediatised “gateways” to continental Europe as the isle of Lampedusa. Kanor’s and Khouma’s protagonists are represented as resourceful clandestine African adventurers, trying to gain their livelihood in the shadows of globalisation as sellers of diverse “African” knick-knacks or working on Southern European vegetable plantations. In my reading, I am particularly interested in the texts’ ways of constructing certain locations as marginal and outside “real” Europe, and others as destinations “worth” pursuing. Another focus is on how the texts redefine and revise the concept of cosmopolitanism in the context of clandestine Afroeuropean mobility.