Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A remarkable book giving a stark and often painful illustration of the hopes and dreams of a young girl in a restless country.
Harmattan
What you need to know before your trail
Harmattan is an Arabic word meaning destructive wind Haoua, a young girl growing up in a remote village in the Republic of Niger. She is one of the lucky ones -her home life is stable and she has a happy and loving family.
She worships her older brother Abdelkrim who has returned home to visit the family from his time away as a soldier. Haoua is happy and proud doing her homework as she dreams of being a teacher. She has a host family in Ireland who she writes to as they help sponsor her education. Soon, with civil unrest in Niger, Haoua is worried, not only for her future but for her brother. And how ill is her mother and what really is her father planning?
Travel Guide
Set in Niger, this is the heartbreaking and heartwarming story of a young girl called Haoua who dreams of becoming a teacher and who is excited by what she learns at school.
The book trail reading of this book takes you to the heart of Niger and its harsh landscape:
‘It was early September. The sun continued to beat down relentlessly and the air was humid and alive with mosquitoes at dusk and dawn. The rains had been good and the hard, baked ground around Wadata was covered in a thin fuzz of greenery.’
‘……a fierce and unexpected harmattan blew in from the north, whipping up the desert and coating everything in a thick blanket of red dust.’
But the real story of ‘Harmattan’ is not its landscape but the experiences of the people who live in Niger – especially the young women such as Haoua who have to survive off the land at the same time as battling against the men in their lives. And sometime even the women – for as the book opens we are subjected to a beating in both the literary and physical sense as we feel Haoua’s pain:
‘The floor feels cool against my hands. It is how I want my face to feel. Instead, my cheeks burn and my hot tears, splattering on the ground, form tiny craters and are sucked into the dust; lost forever.’
Haoua is telling us of a beating she has just been subjected to. She tells us she no longer believes her father. She tells us that she has been told that she must no longer think of her school or education as she is a woman now. Then the prologue ends with the one of the saddest phrases in the book:
‘That was before my twelfth birthday.’
Issues of child marriage, poverty and the slavery of women are explored in the ideal setting – as dusty, dry and destructive as the plight of these women. Powerful reading and humbling too.
Booktrailer Review
This is the huge story of a very small girl with an extra large spirit – a daring and shocking raw story told from the viewpoint of a little innocent girl. Haoua suffers like no other 12 year old girl should have to – controlled and expected to do what is right for her sex and status, she is buffeted around her own life like the wind of the title – there is no control, no direction and even when she thinks life is going ok, that she is on a upward flight (her sponsorship by a foreign family), wind has a way of cutting out with no warning or changing direction dramatically.
I felt for this poor girl who must be so representative of others like her and that’s where the book is at its most powerful – it shows just one girl, surviving and clinging on to hope but we only see the ghosts of the many like her who do not or cannot hold on to that string of hope.
This is a remarkable book for the voice that it gives a young girl in a desperate situation. A girl who wants to educate herself and who has hopes of being able to be herself one day. Quite remarkable and you really get a sense not only of the country but of the despair that these youngsters must feel each and every day.
Where Next?
