Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Editors’ Welcome

navigates between several languages. In her book of memory fragments, A Wider Sea , Rakusa remembers the people, places, music, and books that have shaped her. Rakusa spent her childhood and youth in Central Europe in a period of great political and cultural change. She uses recollections of thesetimes toretraceheréducationsentimentale, geographique, intellectuelle, et politique. The gleaming shards of memory in A Wider Sea recall her early years without sentimentality and capture, with great accuracy and nuance, the elusive atmosphere of the past and of foreign places – a testament to her at once lyrical and precise style. Born in Cameroon, Max Lobe came to Switzerland at the age of eighteen and he plays on the gaps and overlaps between languages and cultures even more overtly than Rakusa. The French linguistic texture of his novel, Trinité bantoue (Bantu Trinity) includes words from a Bantu language, Swiss German, and Italian and shifts between oral and literary rhythms. Mwána, the narrator, has come to Switzerland from the imaginary African country of Bantuland to find that familiar expressions like his father’s favorite term ‘black sheep’ take on a

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