Book Review #2
Yeama reads 'Weiße Wolken'

© Josiane A.-H.
Yandé Seck’s debut novel Weiße Wolken [White Clouds] draws the reader right into the center of the action: Zazie’s afro heaves in my mind’s eye “into a dome of golden-brown cotton candy.” In the background, I hear a linguistic mélange of German, French, and Wolof. And then suddenly, I’m right back in Frankfurt.

Seck provides a successful literary debut in pop-culture’s clothing, carrying us from one snapshot of cultural references to the next and shifting between the perspectives of Dieo, Zazie, and Simon. Dieo, a mother of three, strives to realize the middle-class family ideal—juggling her training as a psychoanalyst, the enormous mental load, and her marriage to Simon as best she can. Her younger sister Zazie understands her Blackness as a political category. Zazie has just completed her MA and would like to dedicate herself to the fight against any and every -ism in the world. Simon, Dieo’s white husband, works in finance for a start-up and would like to do many things, anything, that is, except appear too square. But the sudden death of the two sisters’ father shakes this fragile family structure to its core.
 
Seck depicts the ambiguities of identity with both savvy and humor, sketching out a complex image of reality with room for many shades of nuance. We come to recognize white clouds in every figure, “those traces our so-called identities leave behind.” Zazie shares this lovely metaphor with both reader and Simon alike in an amusing café scene, while simultaneously providing the title for this acutely present novel. The work raises questions of belonging and family dynamics, the answers to which are mostly provided in microcosm and through that which remains unsaid. Seck’s writing is marked above all by one thing: an ability to command the full score of all-but imperceptible feelings that permits us readers to perceive the distance or proximity between characters without the need for her to call them explicitly by name.