Page 32 - Trillium Book Awards 2021, ONTARIO CREATES

Trillium Book Award
Finalist
Melchior Mbonimpa
Au sommet du Nanzerwé il s’est assis et il a pleuré
Prise de parole
Haunted by a terrible secret, the young Mupagassi and his brother Gassongati go into exile, fleeing their country, which is about to be ravaged by ethnic violence. In a refugee camp somewhere in the African Great Lakes region, each of them will have to make a crucial choice: one brother takes up armed struggle to reconquer their homeland, while the other brother, convinced there is no possible way to return, decides to settle in Canada, where he can continue his education and start a family. For him, exile is final.
But reality trumps that prognosis, and the two brothers are reunited due to negotiations on re- establishing peace in their tormented country.
In this contemporary and universal story, friendship, love and loyalty turn out to be the last bulwark of a world in which good and evil can be everywhere and nowhere.
After nearly 20 years, Melchior Mbonimpa has revealed his talents as a storyteller and his extensive knowledge of the peoples of the African Great Lakes region. In this, his seventh novel, he explores one of his favourite themes, the blending of cultures, while erecting a conduit over the Atlantic Ocean to reconcile memory of African origins and contemporary Canadian reality.
A Burundian-Canadian, Melchior Mbonimpa is a novelist and Full Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sudbury.
His seven novels explore an imaginary African world and the cultural blending that openness and globalism have created. He has won awards for several of his works, notably, Le totem des Baranda (Prix Jacqueline-Déry-Mochon), Les morts ne sont pas morts (Prix Christine-Dimitriu-van-Saanen) and Le dernier roi faiseur de pluie (Northern Lit Award).
Jury Comment: With one foot in Canada and another in the African Great Lakes, the novelist tells of exile with nuance and sensitivity while avoiding the pitfall of cliché. Melchior Mbonimpa has smoothly created appealing characters who are transformed in his narrative by literal and interior voyages. He adroitly addresses the flow of human relationships affected by time and distance and poignantly portrays the eternal uprooting of the immigrant, who is not there anymore but never completely here. Mbonimpa illuminates a wide variety of themes, and Au sommet du Nanzwerwé is also an ode to peace and the collective efforts that have to be made to keep it.
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