Book

Black with People

A young Fleming studies agricultural engineering in Louvain, gains his doctorate in soil science and at the age of twenty-eight leaves for Nigeria to carry out research, leaving behind his mother, with whom he has lived in the countryside until then. Ten years later he receives news of his mother’s death. Her funeral has already taken place by the time his sister finally reaches him on the phone. Sand, clay, mud and slime: these days he knew every last detail about them. But he still understood far less about that noise and hubbub down below.’

The novel records the return journey of Wim, by now married and the father of two, to his home in Ibadan. In this way Leo Pleysier has created a perfect situation of extremes: a soil specialist flying through the clouds, separated from the earth, his specialist field, and travelling away from his homeland, despite everything the place of his roots. Never before in his work has Leo Pleysier strayed so far from the Kempen farmland where he was born. He previously wrote a trilogy about his place as a taciturn writer whose work both detaches him from and binds him to his surroundings, following this with loving portraits in three novels of his mother, a sister and an aunt respectively.

This book makes it dramatically clear what Pleysier’s main theme has been all along: the distance that grows up over the years between one’s origin and the present, which can be circumscribed but not bridged by language. The soil scientist who discovers in the hubbub of Nigeria that the local soil is unsuitable for fertilisation, returns to visit the grave in the quiet village where he is viewed as a stranger. His brother and sister-in-law have little to say for themselves either, feeling that he has stayed away too long.

Pleysier blends two worlds with his particularly impressive sober style. In Africa things will improve if ‘people return to their villages’, and work the land. ‘Some hope,’ thinks Wim before he lands in Lagos and the clamour and din wash over him. The noises in his head which he has been listening to for the preceding hours are wonderfully conveyed by Pleysier.

Pleysier shows us that a writer must be able to use not only his eyes, but most especially his ears. As long as he is able to gear his own language register to the polyphony of all the speakers in his immediate circle, I can see him writing many more splendid novels.

Jaap Goedegebuure, HP/De Tijd

Pleysier orchestrates the reflections, memories, observations and experiences of his soil specialist up in the clouds with great subtlety.

Willem Kuipers, de Volkskrant

Soil examination is the same as self-examination. This novel brilliantly illustrates the necessity of the latter.

T. van Deel, Trouw

Translations

Details

Zwart van het volk (1996). Fiction, 141 pages.

Publisher

De Bezige Bij

Van Miereveldstraat 1
NL - 1071 DW Amsterdam
Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 305 98 10
Fax: +31 20 305 98 24

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Website:
http://www.debezigebij.nl

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