It is difficult, at points while reading it, to remember that "Whiteman" is fiction and not a memoir recounting D'Souza's time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ivory Coast in the first few years of this century



One problem--but only if we make it so--encountering this type of novel is that the fictional blanket will be thickly woven in some spots, and rather threadbare in others. For those who are interested, there is a long interview with D'Souza on the Web site peacecorpswriters.org (click the link for "Current issue") in which he implies that the account of his eventual evacuation from the country, a harrowing journey from north to south, appears in "Whiteman" relatively unadulterated.

It is difficult, at points while reading it, to remember that "Whiteman" is fiction and not a memoir recounting D'Souza's time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ivory Coast in the first few years of this century

A tale of cultural immersion, dissonance

By Art Winslow
Published May 21, 2006

Whiteman

By Tony D'Souza

Harcourt, 279 pages, $22

The remarkable new novel "Whiteman," by Chicago-born Tony D'Souza, begins in a coup and ends in an uprising. And it doesn't trail off in the middle, either.

It is difficult, at points while reading it, to remember that "Whiteman" is fiction and not a memoir recounting D'Souza's time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ivory Coast in the first few years of this century. It was a time of coups and insurrections, and flaring tensions between the Muslim north and Christian south of the country, and D'Souza experienced some of the turbulence of that conflict.

One problem--but only if we make it so--encountering this type of novel is that the fictional blanket will be thickly woven in some spots, and rather threadbare in others. For those who are interested, there is a long interview with D'Souza on the Web site peacecorpswriters.org (click the link for "Current issue") in which he implies that the account of his eventual evacuation from the country, a harrowing journey from north to south, appears in "Whiteman" relatively unadulterated.

But enough about factuality: That D'Souza was posted to a small Muslim village in the north of Ivory Coast and took occasional jaunts to the regional capital of Seguela for R&R and safety, was called "Toubabou," or "Whiteman," by those he met, and conducted AIDS education is irrelevant. In the novel, narrator Jack Diaz, the fictional persona who happens to hail from Chicago, is posted to a small Muslim village in the north of Ivory Coast, where he does his best to acculturate, except for intermittent trips to Seguela; is referred to as "Toubabou" by the people; and eventually starts up an AIDS-education program. Jack doesn't, however, work for the Peace Corps but for a non-governmental humanitarian agency, Potable Water International. "We were the last foreign-aid group still in the field," Jack relates. Only three weeks before he was posted to his village, Tegeso, a Dutch missionary had told him that due to the unrest it looked like it was down to " `you water people and us Bible peo-ple.' " But then the churches were burned and the missionaries headed south, "whites with their Bibles piled around them in their Land Rovers like sandbags."

When Jack arrived in Tegeso, which was to be his home for three years, he was given the Muslim name Adama, a form of Adam, the original man, and it was the name he went by afterward, except when addressed by other extranationals. "No one there ever really learned my Western name, or cared," he notes. "With time, even this wouldn't matter to me."

"Whiteman" is a novel of cultural immersion as much as anything. While conflict is ever in the background and sometimes in the foreground, the book is heavily centered on the groping attempts of those on each side of a racial and technological divide to comprehend each other. "I understood two things immediately," Jack tells us. "I was white and would be no matter what I did, and . . . not one thing I'd learned in training would have a practical application in this place."

Jack has a sidekick throughout "Whiteman," a proverb-spewing, French-speaking young man his own age named Mamadou, designated by the village to teach the foreigner about local customs and taboos. This amusing interlocutor becomes a kind of African alter ego to Jack, who is given to impulse and is understandably ignorant on local matters large and small. Mamadou's gentle habit is to let Jack make mistakes until they become intolerable, whereupon he'll say something like:

" `Are you sure you really want to sweep your hut out at night, Adama? The ancestors take it as a great insult. It means you are sweeping away their welcome as they look for a place to sleep.' "

" `Why didn't you tell me that weeks ago?' " Jack asks.

" `Why remind a blind man that he is blind?' " Mamadou replies.

He also tells Jack that his habit of greeting people before they wash their face for the day ahead had them complaining " `that you make them humiliate themselves each and every morning.' " So much for cultural diplomacy.

"Whiteman" is laced with humor and poignancy, and it relates Jack's experiences more or less chronologically from arrival to evacuation. (The dozen chapters read as freestanding short stories, strung together by Jack's references more than by developmental dependence on each other, so they lend themselves to being read independently as well.) Potable Water's project money dried up after 9/11, and without deep-bore pumps to access clean water, Jack "spent most of my days in Tegeso waiting for the world to right itself and the aid valves to flow again. I didn't have much to do but live among them, and I didn't want to go home."

So Jack is a young man in his mid-20s stuck in the sticks with nothing to do. No wonder, then, that "Whiteman" also traces his romantic steps and missteps, as Jack's encounters include a farcical tease by an Amazon-like girl, multiple meetings with a city prostitute and a months-long affair with a married woman in the village.

While "Whiteman" lacks the political subtlety of the far-flung novels of, say, Graham Greene or the post-colonial novels of V.S. Naipaul, D'Souza infuses it with great warmth. The ground-level accounts of daily life he offers aren't often found outside the works of Africans, writers like Chinua Achebe, Nuruddin Farah and Wole Soyinka.

D'Souza cleverly plays up the sense of cultural dissonance, which throws off sparks throughout "Whiteman." In a short span as the novel opens, and in no particular order, street thugs ask Jack if he knows Michael Jordan and Jean-Claude Van Damme; an old man dressed in rags and of questionable mental stability tells him, " `You whites. You walk on the moon before you walk on the ground"; and a weathered woman with a steel tub on her head advises him to buy a gun.

" `We're a humanitarian organization, Ama,' " Jack replies, " `We don't believe in guns.' "

" `In all the films from America, all is guns. So don't tell me!' " she responds.

As Jack marks his time, "Whiteman" becomes social reporting of a kind. For something to do, he treks to a school that is three miles into the forest and stays on a few days as a substitute teacher. "To visit the school was to glimpse the decay of Ivorian society," he says. Long rows of students sat on the floor, "whole villages of [them] shared a handful of textbooks," the classrooms had to be swept of droppings every morning because goats bedded down there at night, and the students had no latrines, making the nearby land a fecal minefield.

The north-south, Muslim-Christian tension is a societal volcano in "Whiteman," always venting steam and occasionally erupting, and D'Souza's writing on it has the immediacy of news bulletins: "Then there was gunfire, automatic and small-arms, staccato, right here, far away, patterned layers of jarring sound," Jack reports; that and the curls of smoke rising into the sky "filled me with a stunned dumbness, a weight, a dread, a fatigue that spread through my body like exhaustion."

Jack knew one clear-minded night that he was "as African as I would ever become, not African at all." And he concedes that despite his later wanderings around the continent, "Whatever I was looking for, I didn't find it." A colleague had warned, " `If you want it to mean something, don't ever [go] home.' "

During his last months in country, "That war was inevitable was like moisture gathering in the air." As a surprise, Jack buys cans of paint, and the young men who had once taunted him help vivify the hut doors throughout the village. But as the rebellion begins, they break out the witch doctor's small cache of AK-47s and paw them "like women's bodies," with eager faces. "All around them in the night, the doors of the village were painted in many and beautiful hues," Jack recalls. "They didn't notice this anymore, though they had been the ones who'd painted them."

----------

Art Winslow is a frequent contributor to the Tribune.

When this story was posted in May 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:




Peace Corps Online The Independent News Forum serving Returned Peace Corps Volunteers

---

Help Peace Corps get its full Appropriation Senators DeWine, Feinstein, Santorum, and Durbin are asking their colleagues to join them in signing a letter to Senate Appropriations leaders to fully fund the President's FY07 request for the International Affairs Budget, including a full appropriation for the Peace Corps. Forty-five Senators have already signed on. Here's how you can help. Please make your call by May 16.

---

---

The Peace Corps Library The Peace Corps Library is now available online with over 40,000 index entries in 500 categories. Looking for a Returned Volunteer? Check our RPCV Directory. New: Sign up to receive PCOL Magazine, our free Monthly Magazine by email. Like to keep up with Peace Corps news as it happens? Sign up to recieve a daily summary of Peace Corps stories from around the world.

---

PC evacuates East Timor, hopes to return Volunteers serving in East Timor have safely left the country as a result of the recent civil unrest and government instability. Latest: The Peace Corps has informed us that they are monitoring the security situation on a daily basis and that it is the intention of the Peace Corps to return to East Timor if the security situation improves.

---

First Amendment Watch Maine Web Report hit with Federal Lawsuit Website wins trademark suit against Jerry Falwell

---

It's Official: Vasquez nominated to FAO Exactly one week ago we predicted that Director Vasquez would soon be receiving a major ambassadorship. Today the White House confirmed that Vasquez will be the new Representative to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture replacing Tony Hall. PCOL Comment: Director Vasquez, let us be the first to thank you for your service to the Peace Corps, congratulate you on your new appointment, and wish you good luck in your future endeavors. Although we have had our differences over the years and we opposed your nomination in 2001, we think you are leaving a solid legacy of accomplishment and have served the Peace Corps well. Initiatives and Accomplishments: Vasquez's major initiatives and accomplishments since becoming Peace Corps Director include: an agreement with Mexico in 2003 to host volunteers, sending RPCVs to work domestically in Hurricane relief after Katrina, emphasis on recruitment of minorities and of community college graduates, upgrading Peace Corps' infrastructure especially IT upgrades in the online application tracking process and the Volunteer Delivery System, an emphasis on safety and security of volunteers including the creation of a Situation Room at Peace Corps Headquarters, modifying Peace Corps' "Five Year Rule" for employment, and the expansion of the Peace Corps to its highest level in 30 years. He is the third longest serving Peace Corps Director after Loret Ruppe Miller and Sargent Shriver.

---

Interview with a Hit Man RPCV John Perkins says that for many years he was an "economic hit man" in the world of international finance whose primary job was to convince less developed countries to accept multibillion dollar loans for infrastructure projects that left the recipient countries wallowing in debt and highly vulnerable to outside political and commercial interests. In this exclusive interview for "Peace Corps Online," Colombia RPCV Joanne Roll, author of Remember with Honor, talks to Perkins about his Peace Corps service, his relation with the NSA, "colonization" in Ecuador, the consequences of his work, why he decided to speak out, and what his hopes are for change.

---

PC Program in Chad temporarily suspended Director Vasquez announced the temporary suspension of the Peace Corps program in Chad on April 14 and that all 29 Peace Corps volunteers have left the country. With a program dating back forty years (See Page 4 of the April 1966 "Peace Corps Volunteer"), RPCVs hope that volunteers can return to Chad as soon as the situation has stabilized. Congratulations to the Peace Corps for handling the suspension quickly and professionally.

---

Peace Corps stonewalls on FOIA request The Ashland Daily Tidings reports that Peace Corps has blocked their request for information on the Volkart case. "After the Tidings requested information pertaining to why Volkart was denied the position — on March 2 — the newspaper received a letter from the Peace Corps FOIA officer stating the requested information was protected under an exemption of the act." The Dayton Daily News had similar problems with FOIA requests for their award winning series on Volunteer Safety and Security.

---

PCOL readership increases 100% Monthly readership on "Peace Corps Online" has increased in the past twelve months to 350,000 visitors - over eleven thousand every day - a 100% increase since this time last year. Thanks again, RPCVs and Friends of the Peace Corps, for making PCOL your source of information for the Peace Corps community. And thanks for supporting the Peace Corps Library and History of the Peace Corps. Stay tuned, the best is yet to come.

---

History of the Peace Corps PCOL is proud to announce that Phase One of the "History of the Peace Corps" is now available online. This installment includes over 5,000 pages of primary source documents from the archives of the Peace Corps including every issue of "Peace Corps News," "Peace Corps Times," "Peace Corps Volunteer," "Action Update," and every annual report of the Peace Corps to Congress since 1961. "Ask Not" is an ongoing project. Read how you can help.

---

PC announces new program in Cambodia Director Vasquez and Cambodia's Deputy Chief of Mission Meng Eang Nay announced a historic new partnership between the Peace Corps and the Kingdom of Cambodia that will bring volunteers to this Southeast Asian country for the first time. Under King Norodom Sihamoni and Prime Minister Hun Sen, Cambodia has welcomed new partnerships with the U.S. government and other U.S. organizations.

---

Peace Corps suspends program in Bangladesh Peace Corps Director Gaddi H. Vasquez announced the suspension of the Peace Corps program in Bangladesh on March 15. The safety and security of volunteers is the number one priority of the Peace Corps. Therefore, all Peace Corps volunteers serving in Bangladesh have safely left the country. More than 280 Peace Corps volunteers have served in Bangladesh since the program opened in November 1998. Latest: What other newspapers say.

---

Invitee re-assigned after inflammatory remarks The Peace Corps has pulled the invitation to Derek Volkart to join the Morocco Training Program and offered him a position in the Pacific instead after officials read an article in which he stated that his decision to join the Peace Corps was in "response to our current fascist government." RPCV Lew Nash says that "If Derek Volkart spoke his mind as freely in Morocco about the Moroccan monarchy it could cause major problems for himself and other Peace Corps volunteers." Latest: Volkart reverses stance, takes new assignment in Paraguay.

---

RPCV admits to abuse while in Peace Corps Timothy Ronald Obert has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a minor in Costa Rica while serving there as a Peace Corps volunteer. "The Peace Corps has a zero tolerance policy for misconduct that violates the law or standards of conduct established by the Peace Corps," said Peace Corps Director Gaddi H. Vasquez. Could inadequate screening have been partly to blame? Mr. Obert's resume, which he had submitted to the Peace Corps in support of his application to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, showed that he had repeatedly sought and obtained positions working with underprivileged children. Read what RPCVs have to say about this case.

---

Military Option sparks concerns The U.S. military, struggling to fill its voluntary ranks, is allowing recruits to meet part of their reserve military obligations after active duty by serving in the Peace Corps. Read why there is opposition to the program among RPCVs. Director Vasquez says the agency has a long history of accepting qualified applicants who are in inactive military status. John Coyne says "Not only no, but hell no!" and RPCV Chris Matthews leads the debate on "Hardball." Avi Spiegel says Peace Corps is not the place for soldiers while Coleman McCarthy says to Welcome Soldiers to the Peace Corps. Read our poll results. Latest: Congress passed a bill on December 22 including language to remove Peace Corps from the National Call to Service (NCS) military recruitment program

---

Why blurring the lines puts PCVs in danger When the National Call to Service legislation was amended to include Peace Corps in December of 2002, this country had not yet invaded Iraq and was not in prolonged military engagement in the Middle East, as it is now. Read the story of how one volunteer spent three years in captivity from 1976 to 1980 as the hostage of a insurrection group in Colombia in Joanne Marie Roll's op-ed on why this legislation may put soldier/PCVs in the same kind of danger. Latest: Read the ongoing dialog on the subject.

Read the stories and leave your comments.