Used book – Madame Bâ, Erik Orsenna

To find her favorite grandson, who has disappeared in France, swallowed by the ogre of football, Madame Bâ Marguerite, born in 1947 in Mali, on the banks of the Senegal River, applies for a visa. One by one, she meticulously answers all the questions posed by official form 13-0021. And she then recounts her enchanted childhood by the river, her father's love for her, learning from the birds..., her magnificent and painful passion for her too-handsome Fulani husband, her eight children, and the strange "compass disease" that afflicts them...

Without embellishment or complacency, it is the Africa of today that emerges through the pages, Africa with its violence, its shattered dreams, its mafias, but also its eternal riches of solidarity and the formidable weaving between people.

Fifteen years after L'Exposition coloniale, Erik Orsenna once again explores France's relationship with its former empire. But this time, it is the South that is watching us.