Four books that put you in Equatorial Guinea. Three are by writers from Equatorial Guinea and set there, starting with By Night the Mountain Burns and Shadows of Your Black Memory. The other is a wider pick, by someone who knows the place well.
Very little writing from Equatorial Guinea has been translated into English. Spain ruled until independence in 1968, and most of the country's writers work in Spanish, while among the Fang, stories have long been told aloud to the accompaniment of the mvet, a stringed instrument.
Start with Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel's By Night the Mountain Burns, a man's memory of boyhood on remote Annobón, where hunger, superstition and a catastrophic fire shook an isolated community. Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo's Shadows of Your Black Memory follows a Fang boy caught between village tradition and the Catholic mission in colonial Spanish Guinea. Trifonia Melibea Obono's La Bastarda tells of an orphaned Fang girl who joins a band of outcast girls as she discovers her sexuality.
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A man remembers his boyhood on a remote, isolated island off Equatorial Guinea, where hunger, superstition and a catastrophic fire shook a cut-off community.
A Fang boy grows up in colonial Spanish Guinea, caught between the traditions of his forest village and the pressures of Spanish rule and mission education.
Follows a young Fang girl raised in a rural village, showing patriarchal clan traditions, taboos around sexuality, and the silencing of lesbian women.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Equatorial Guinea.
Sent to North Korea at seven by her father, Equatorial Guinea's first president, who was overthrown and executed months later, a girl grows up under Kim Il Sung's guardianship, then spends decades searching for her identity.
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