num_pages: 117
description: “This isn’t a night for theater. All the drama will be outside.” In 1999 the Mauritian seggae musician Joseph Réginald Topize, better known as Kaya, was arrested for smoking weed while performing at a concert. Following his mysterious death in police custody just days later, the island nation surged into riotous violence: a long-overdue demand for justice from the colonized peoples of the East African island nation. In Kaya Days, the spirit of the island and its people is distilled into a young woman’s daylong search through the uproar for her younger brother, who has gone missing. Amidst the burning cars and buildings, opportunists and revolutionaries, Santee witnesses the furious, brilliant birth of another world. An exhilarating journey into night from small Hindu village to the “big city”, Carl de Souza’s surreal English-language debut, artfully translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, is a Book of Revelations-caliber explosion of politics and prose, a humid dream-world of revolutionary fervor where seemingly anything—everything—is possible, if only for the night.
language: English
title: Kaya Days
publisher: Two Lines Press