Donkey Heart, Monkey Mind
Djaffur Chetouane and Rachel Jackson
Chetouane Publishing Company
Nonfiction?, Autobiography
***+
Description
In 1980's Alegeria, surviving amid corruption and scarcity takes strength and wits, not to mention choosing friends and enemies with care. For the Berbers, native North Africans suppressed and marginalized by centuries of invaders, life is even more precarious - even their native language is outlawed. Like many young men, Djaffur chafes under these restrictions. He joins fellow Berbers at his university in speaking out against their oppression, and finds himself on the wrong end of a deeply corrupt political machine that thinks nothing of torturing or even murdering its own citizens. Seeing nothing for himself but a future of dirt- poor living and prejudice in his native Algeria, Djaffur determines to flee the country... an escape fraught with false starts, close calls, setbacks, and missteps that nearly cost him his life.
Review
I grabbed this during a freebie Kindle download window; it seemed like a change of pace, and North Africa is one of the many parts of the world I hear mentioned in the news but don't really know that much about. Chetouane paints a grim picture of a world sunk so far into its own corruption that true liberty and reform seem impossible, with habits and attitudes too deeply ingrained in their society to ever be rooted out. Even here, though, one can find glimmers of kindness and even hope if one looks hard enough. His own journey from oppression to freedom sees him on the wrong side of the law more often than not, mostly as a matter of raw survival. I wound up clipping it a half-point because of occasionally thick politics (integral to understanding the full extent of the forces aligned against the Berbers, and the majority of North Africans in general, but still dense enough to trip up the narrative), plus some irritating formatting issues in the Kindle edition. Overall, Chetouane's tale reads like something out of a movie, a story of desperation and depravation and even personal enlightenment, made all the more incredible by the fact that it allegedly actually happened. (There is some question as to the veracity of Chetouane's account.)