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"J'habite toujours, comme d'autres à Lauralité-sur-Lécry."(1)
-- Abdourahamn Waberi, Le Nouvel Observateur
Abdourahman Waberi was born in 1965 in Djibouti,(2) and now lives in France. In 1994, he published his first short story collection, Le Pays sans ombre, followed in 1996 by a second short story collection, Cahier nomade. In 1997 he published his first novel, Balbala, named after Djibouti's "great shantytown of stones and corrugated metal" (Balbala 14).(3) Although Waberi is only one of a hand full of Francophone writers of fiction(4) to have emerged from the tiny ex-French colony (it did not obtain independence until 1977) in the Horn of Africa, through allusion to a vast oral and written literary corpus, his work engages in intertextual dialogue with writing in French and English from Africa and the Caribbean by the likes of such writers as Aimé Césaire, L.S. Senghor, Assia Djebar, Tierno Monénembo, Tchikaya U Tam'si, Rachid Mimouni, Cyprian Ekwensi, Wolé Soyinka, Kateb Yacine and Ahmadou Kourouma, to name a few. References to Somali literature include the Anglophone novelist Nuruddin Farah, the poet and Somali nationalist leader Mohamed Abdille Hassan, legends and proverbs from the Somali oral tradition, Somali/Djiboutian music and poetry, reports from the Djiboutian journalist, Ali Moussa Iyé, and references to the Koran. Somali/Djiboutian historical and political facts are entwined with allusions to exotic travelogues about Djibouti by the likes of the British colonial explorer Sir Richard Burton, Pierre Loti, Henri de Montfreid, Paul Nizan, Romain Gary, and even the Cameroonian activist/economist, Célestin Monga. These in turn accompany citations from Dante, Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, "le poète maudit" who made a living as a merchant in Aden and a gun dealer in the Horn from 1880-1891.
Waberi's complex tissue of allusions institutes an intertextual dialogue that locates his texts at an intersection between history and ethnography, politics and literature. Situated as it is between Suez and the Far East, where the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean meet, Djibouti has often been described as "a `cross-roads' country at the intersection of Africa, the Middle East and Asia" (Schraeder 227). As Célestin Monga puts it, albeit with some exoticism, "its proximity to the fabulous riches of Abyssinia has made it, from time immemorial, a site of prime strategic importance. With...