Carol Spindel

COMING SOON: I Give You Half the Road

Writer Carol Spindel recounts the recent history of Ivory Coast by interweaving the lives of five people she has known since they were children -- a schoolteacher in a crowded, fast-growing city; an HIV-positive widow trying to hide her illness and support her sons; a diviner who speaks with spirits and sells bulletproof shirts; a scrap iron dealer who is successful despite being illiterate, and a young man who joins an armed rebellion and learns that war is a business. 

Children of subsistence farmers, all five migrate to cities just as politicians promote a fear-mongering nationalist politics that targets immigrants and Northerners like them. As they struggle with urban poverty, they also have to cope with police harassment and discrimination against Northerners, the AIDS epidemic, changing household dynamics, and more than a decade of political turbulence. Sensitively drawn, their portraits provide an unusually intimate view of rural-to-urban migration inside one West African country.

This is also an American writer's memoir of a long-term relationship between her family and the Ivorian community she loves and learns from. Even in the most difficult of times, as politicians urge division, the ordinary people in this book hold fast to Ivorian cultural values such as tolerance for religious and ethnic difference, forgiveness, and a deep commitment to hospitality.