#TTWIB MARCH 2016 READALONG–An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

Our March Readalong selection is a travel memoir, An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie. He tells an amazing tale of his youth in western Africa and his bold decision to travel on his own to the northern reaches of Greenland, a place he had only read about by happenstance.  This cold country, linked by history to Denmark, and its people, the hardy Greenlandic Inuit, fascinated the young man from Togo. Many of us have experienced such a longing and fascination, but this story is amazing for the initiative Kpomassie took, his resourcefulness in traveling north to Europe on his own and then booking passage to Greenland, and his determination to visit the main outposts on the way to Greenland’s northernmost point. Furthermore, he turned out to be a gifted journal keeper and writer, and his frank and perceptive memoir of his time among the Greenlanders is unforgettable. This book won the Prix Littéraire Francophone in 1981.

Here are pictures of Kpomassie, then (in 1959) and more recently (at a reading in 2011).

 

We will have three Twitter chats, tagged #TTWIB :

• Wednesday March 9 @ 9 pm EST.  This one will probably touch on Kpomassie’s early life in Togo and his motivation for making the trip to Greenland.
• Wednesday March 23 @ 9pm EDT. (Daylight Savings Time/US begins March 13.)
• Sunday March 27 @ at 3 pm EDT. These last two chats (evening or afternoon) will focus on the author’s travels and his time in Greenland, and wrap up our book chat.

Questions for the Discussion Boards will be posted around the time of the first Twitter chat at our Travel the World in Books Reading Challenge group page at Goodreads, and you can post your thoughts there anytime!

If you would like more information about the book, or are just curious, my detailed review appears at my other blog, Northern Lights Reading Project.  I’d love to have visitors there too, since I started that blog in conjunction with my first Travel the World in Books Readathon in 2014. Looking forward to savoring Kpomassie’s wonderfully unique travel memoir again and, especially, hearing (or reading) what you all think about it.

*************