Sidik Fofana – “Thin Walls”: Do you come to the everyday morality?

Actually, the old Mister Murray only wants to sit in his traditional place in front of the Banneker settlement and observe the hustle and bustle on the 129th street, as he has been doing for decades. But opened as a new restaurant, he is sold by the police for letting around. But he finds the support of numerous neighbors even worse who want to fight for his right. He just wants to have his peace and sit there – as always!

Sidik Fofana’s debut band “Thin Walls” tells in eight wonderfully linked stories of a good two dozen tenants from a residential building in Harlem that gets into the focus of real estate recyclers. »The Banneker settlement on the 129th corner of Fred Doug is not nice, but it is your home. (…) A long gray base building, 25 floors, three hundred noises. Four elevators who do what they want. ”When the building is sold, instead of the previous black social tenants, more and more wealthy white medium -sized companies are moving into the house. But “thin walls” is far more than just an expected socially critical narrative on the subject of gentrification.

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Sidik Fofana tells very directly about the life of the black residents, how they talk, keep going through, fighting together; About what everyday morality in this social block prevails, what the young people do and how the economic pressure for all neighbors is slowly increasing and finally threatening to exist. Some of these stories also play in a nearby high school that is visited by young people from the Banneker settlement. When a school inspection is due, Verona Dallas, also a tenant in the Banneker building, threatens to lose her job as a school social worker. Because the school with many kids from socially precarious circumstances is the focus of the school supervision, which is supposed to shorten the funds and measures the success of the school as to whether the young people behave disciplined, which is hardly the case here.

Together with Mister Broderick, a young white teacher who works in this socially marginal school despite his Harvard degree, Verona Dallas tries to get a grip on the teenagers who constantly disturb the lessons and sometimes cannot read properly. This can hardly be done and then the socially committed Mister Broderick also wants to read Shakespeare’s »Midsummer Night’s Dream« in class. Until a student throws condoms through the classroom and breaks out general jobles. But when the school inspection appears, the students suddenly tear themselves together and the teachers are just flabbergasted. Until then of course everything goes wrong again.

Sidik Fofana works full -time as an inclusion teacher and English teacher in a school in Brooklyn. This is why the scenes from everyday school life should be so great. His narrative band, which can also go through as a novel, was extremely praised by American criticism. His stories go close. His characters are not social antiheroes or mere victims of the circumstances. They are very skeptical of some municipal activists who represent the interests of tenants. There is always arguments, often the violence escalates.

Regardless of whether the young Kandese sells sweets stolen with her friends or the young Swan together with his buddy, who has just been released from prison, ordered Essen and the supplier of the China restaurant writes the inadequacies of his figures, but without it. As a result, an intimate insight into the black everyday life in Harlem, as it has hardly existed in literarily so far.

This also works so well because Fofana reproduces the language of his characters immediately and thus literally makes life in Harlem sound. The story of Najee, one of the wildest students from the Verona Dallas class, who performs the popular “Lite Feet” dance in the subway to earn a few dollars, is told in the form of a letter that he wrote himself. It is so full of spelling and grammatical errors that it is not so easy to get involved with this almost 30-page narrative. But it’s worth it. Sidik Fofana develops a unique sound – as if really standing on the 129th street in Harlem and experiencing these stories up close.

Sidik Fofana: thin walls. Ad America. Engl. V. Jens Friebe, Claasen-Verlag, Berlin, 256 pages, born € 23