Cotton Blues

Translated from French by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott.

In an African town somewhere between the Sahel and the Atlantic coast, cotton planter Toby Kunta takes a Berlin journalist hostage in a museum showroom. Kunta asks for monetary compensation for himself and a group of peasants ruined by the production of genetically modified cotton. As the tension rises inside the museum and a standoff begins with the chief of police, Kunta begins to burn the exhibited works one by one and threatens to do the same with his prisoner.

With this standoff behind closed doors, where words and gestures get exchanged with anger and hope, Edem Awumey takes us on a contemporary journey on the cotton road, from the African Savannah to the American South, from the luxurious salons of Berlin to the fields of Indian Rajasthan sprayed with glyphosate, from the valleys of Uzbekistan covered with white fibre to the spinning mills of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Cotton Blues is a novel of the crossing of worlds in a struggle against the global domination of the multinationals. It is the great lamentation of the African people enslaved by the Western world's thirst for wealth. It is a cry for freedom too long held back that finally bursts out with thunderous violence.