Amina
SIDI SECK

Published in December 2006 in Spanish

Original title: "Amina"

This is the story of Amina, a young Senegalese woman from a well-off family. Moved by the fresh energy of her youth, driven by her romantic mood and confused by the stories of her books’ characters she is taken to a journey without assuming that its destiny will not depend on her but on the rules and values of the society she lives in. Betrayed by the man she loves and rejected by her own sister, Amina will experience the painful course of giving up one’s ideals to end dragged along by desperation and totally alone.

The novel sounds with two different beats: The first chapters, very descriptive, bring the reader, in a nearly didactic style, nearer to the reality of a culture afar from the occidental one. In the second part the reader, turned into a silent witness, assists the moving and exciting outcome of the work guided by the thread of an extremely fast rhythm.

The Senegalese writer and poet Sidi Seck makes us discover a representative of the new African generations sometimes falling victim to puzzlement, confusion and rootlessness because of living between two different cultures, their own and the western. The assimilation the book’s main character tries to perform will take her to an unjustly personal failure. And it is exactly this failure that makes the book more than worth reading.

Sidi Seck was born in Kaolack, Senegal. He spent some years living in Granada and collaborated with the local university covering cultural and linguistic subjects linked to Africa. Seck writes in Spanish and French. He has published two collections of poems: "Voces de Kora" and "Las sombras en pos del Tamarindo", the latter one yielding him the renowned "Premio Villa de Martorell" in 2000. Currently he lives in Barcelona.