Árbol del olvido

Legend has it that, in one of the squares of Ouidah, a port city on the Atlantic coast of Benin, the tree of oblivion stood in the 18th century. Those who would soon embark for America to become slaves circled the tree, nine times the men, seven times the women, in order to abandon their identity and their memories. In 2016, the young African American Shayna arrives in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, a neighboring country of Benin, with her partner Hervé, a Haitian doctor who works for an NGO. Shayna seeks to understand her origins, the forced transfer of her ancestors to the United States, the secular humiliation, slavery. Through Shayna we will meet her parents: Joel, a vegetarian sociologist, defender of animals, son of Czech Jews who fled the Holocaust; and Lili Rose, from a Protestant and middle-class North American family, a student of suicide in women and with a difficult relationship with her sexuality and her body. Shayna is her only child, born from a surrogate mother of a black woman. Through the pages of this magnificently orchestrated novel, we witness the awakening of Shayna's consciousness from her childhood to adulthood, and her questioning of filiation, motherhood, feminism, secularism, religion, sexual violence, environmentalism. But we also know the story of her parents, marked by the trauma of the Holocaust and her by the uncomfortable relationship with a physically different daughter. The unforgettable characters of this ambitious novel, nuanced by a fine sense of humor, allow us to follow the evolution of the problems that dominate our society today and how different generations face them.