Somewhere, a young man wallows in his suffering - his wound so deep he cannot draw a distinction between love and destruction. When he fights, he wou… - Véronique Tadjo

We spoke of conquest. We spoke of destruc-tion. We spoke of boredom. And he told mehow he was finding life painful, of his inter-minable languor, and of his feeling of insatiable emptiness

I'm a trespasser in the Kingdom of Death. This is his private domain, his empire, where he rules with absolute power. I feel like an astronaut floating in space, a thousand miles from earth. The slightest tear in his spacesuit and he’s lost. The slightest tear in mine, just like him, I’m lost too.

I searched for such a long time. At the begin-ning, an image, an ebony-warrior coming fromAzania. Then it was like a three-way mirror re-flecting my past, present and future. I searchedfor you everywhere: in my books, at the cine-ma, within my weaknesses, under the finefolds of my smile