Girl Called Eel | 
so-soThis book was for my #readingaroundtheworld challenge, for the country of #Comoros. For me this was a hard book to read, not because of the subject matter but the way it was punctuated.
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so-soThis book was for my #readingaroundtheworld challenge, for the country of #Comoros. For me this was a hard book to read, not because of the subject matter but the way it was punctuated.
Decided the book needed some musical background, and Spotify had a Comoros playlist...
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/597fLLN2IDNyl4zEJheR5Z?si=Zet6RugARqGBGzYKhLs_...
.... the Friday Mosque is huge, it has two storeys and a tall minaret that towers majestically over the whole town, All-Knowing said it was built in the seventeenth century by a brilliant woman called Sayyidat Karima Binti Saidi Akili, daughter of Sharif Bin Abdallay Tuyur Djamalilaili, she was highly educated and she commissioned this enormous structure in 1670, it was more a testament to her artistic taste than a symbol of power...
...you'd see these ladies and young girls with their companions, all dressed in shirts and baseball caps, drooling over the old doors in the heart of the medina, there were doors of all kinds, Indian, eastern, western and the Arabo-Islamic doors and ornamental windows in Ujumbe Palace, which according to All-Knowing was built in Hamoumbou in 1541 by Sultan Idarousse... the first Islamic Arab ruler of the Comoros
Photo: Ujumbe Palace, via UNESCO.
... I washed and dressed and left the house, covered from head to foot in my shiromani, the two-coloured cloth with its six patterned squares that women wear here, they were the cause of many a marital squabble in Mutsamudu, husbands and wives would be at loggerheads the moment a new consignment of shiromanis appeared in Mamadaly's or La Chance...
...the terrace was transforming before our eyes, the concrete floor was turning into a mattress of sweet smelling flowers, the walls were becoming pillows of jasmine, the sun's rays were as dazzling as the gaze of the man standing beside me and then coffee smells began to waft in on the morning breeze, the old ladies were brewing coffee for people to drink on their way back from the mosque after morning prayers, I could smell the madeleines...
.... time began to make its mark on us as it does on everything that crosses its path, that's the way life is, things are constantly made and remade, but it all happens in silence, you go to sleep young and smartly dressed and wake up a broken-down stranger clad in threadbare rags, another unsolved mystery, it's all part of the show...
I think this is the first book I've read with a connection to the Comoros (islands off East Africa).
