Nétonon Noël N’Djékéry: Writing between languages, histories, and worlds

In recent decades, Francophone African literature has produced a number of voices shaped by displacement, multilingualism, and the long shadows of colonial history. Among these voices is Nétonon Noël N’Djékéry, a Chadian writer whose work has gradually secured a distinctive place within the Swiss and wider European literary landscape. Writing from the intersection of Africa and Europe, oral tradition and the modern novel, memory and historical inquiry, N’Djékéry’s prose resists easy classification.

Born on December 25, 1956, in the city of Moundou in southern Chad, N’Djékéry grew up in circumstances that exposed him early to cultural plurality. His father’s service in the French army meant that his childhood unfolded within a military barracks, an environment that brought him into contact with both African social worlds and Western institutional culture. This dual exposure would later surface in his writing, not as a simple synthesis, but as a sustained tension between inherited oral imaginaries and the written forms he encountered through formal schooling.

Trained in computer science, N’Djékéry spent many years working as an IT specialist for several Swiss companies. Only in April 2021 did he opt for early retirement, allowing himself, at last, to devote his time entirely to writing. His literary style is marked by a conscious dialogue between contemporary narrative techniques and the practices of traditional African storytellers, known in southern Chad as gosstars, whose oral epics and inherited narratives left a deep impression on him. At the same time, his discovery of Western literature through schooling opened for him the world of books, to which he turned with lasting passion. From this double lineage emerged a singular voice.

N’Djékéry has achieved significant literary recognition in Switzerland. His novel There Is No Rainbow in Paradise received several awards, including the Grand Prize for Sub-Saharan African Literature in 2022.

In this interview for Geeska, the author speaks about writing, translation, and the unfinished work of African literature.

Moatasem Alshaer: One of the greatest rewards for a writer is their impact on other writers, and the translation of their work into other languages. Speaking of translation, I’m reminded of Octavio Paz’s statement: “All writing is a translation of experience.” As if translation were the origin and writing merely its branch. How do you see this idea? And did you feel something similar when writing about your country for readers from different cultural backgrounds?

Nétonon Noël N’Djékéry: For me, writing is a turning inward in order to open oneself more fully to the world, to others. It necessarily assumes that the writer has already gathered the material they will later commit to paper or screen before withdrawing into solitude. Every writer draws this material from a single the yet multidimensional source we call the “human condition.” It is woven from what the writer has lived personally, what others have lived on their behalf, and what springs from their own imagination.

From this perspective, I fully agree with Octavio Paz. Borrowing from his formulation, I would put it this way: all writing is the embodiment of a lived or imagined experience.

This truth has long been rooted in me, and I feel it at the start of every new literary project. Before writing, I conduct extensive research and documentation on the subject, while simultaneously summoning everything in my personal experience that intersects with it. In my view, the beating heart of art lies in choosing words capable of transmitting that experience to others, words accessible to the widest possible readership.

MA: The division of languages into “global” and “local” ones has shaped how we think about translation. Many African writers dream of being translated into Western languages, considered global, while few pause to consider the importance of being read in their mother tongues or in other African languages. How do you view the African readership, and how strong is your desire to see your work translated into languages such as Swahili, Zulu, Hausa, Kikuyu, and others?

NN: The African reader seems to me fragmented, divided along the lines of colonial geography. Depending on which former colonial power a country belonged to, access to literature written in African languages has taken very different paths.

To simplify, I will limit myself to the two major European powers that colonized much of our continent. The British, through their system of “indirect rule,” taught colonized populations to read and write first in their mother tongues before introducing English. This approach compelled them to develop written forms for those languages. The French, however, pursued an entirely different path. In the name of their so-called sacred policy of assimilation, they imposed the language of Molière from the outset in all the territories they occupied. Local languages were banned even from schoolyards and were effectively condemned to extinction.

They survived only thanks to Protestant churches, which breathed life back into them by using them for evangelization and the translation of biblical texts, thus granting them the right to be written. Unfortunately, post-colonial states did not abandon the linguistic policies inherited from the colonial era. The result is clear: in English-speaking African countries, literatures in local languages flourish, whereas they are almost absent in Francophone countries, including Chad.

MA: How can African languages become languages of knowledge, culture, and literature, given that they are closest to our emotional worlds and most capable of containing our imagination and philosophy of life? And can we reach a stage where translation from one African language to another becomes something we celebrate?

NN: The African Union must place the question of languages at the very core of its priorities. Without internally rooted tools of communication, the cultural, political, and economic integration of our continent will remain little more than patchwork, stitched together with foreign concepts and terminology that may be alien or even contradictory to our realities.

Naturally, I hope my works will be translated into as many African languages as possible. Although I am today more widely read in the Western world, the primary reader my books address remains an African reader.

MA: In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues that writing in the colonizer’s language reinforces domination, which led him to return to writing in his mother tongue. Do you ever share this feeling, or have you made peace with the language of de Gaulle?

NN: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o expresses here an indisputable truth. I greatly admire his radical choice to return to his mother tongue, and his example constantly provokes my own questioning. Yet each time, I am forced to rein in that ambition because of the linguistic legacy left to me by the colonial period.

My mother tongue is Ngambay, one of the dialects of the Sara language. It was never taught in Chadian schools, and only a small number of speakers can read or write it, most of whom received religious education through Protestant churches. I did not have that opportunity, and therefore I am unable to write in my mother tongue.

This is the dilemma I live with: either devote the rest of my life to writing in French, or begin learning to write in Ngambay in an attempt to follow Ngũgĩ’s path. But if I were to choose the latter, I would immediately confront a question resembling the classic chicken-and-egg paradox: does literature written in a given language create its readers, or do readers create that literature? Faced with this uncertainty, I have chosen to wager on the future and continue writing in the language of Charles de Gaulle, hoping that one day my texts will be translated into Ngambay or other Chadian or African languages when the conditions make that possible.

MA: You are deeply engaged with history and have written a novel about slavery, a subject others have also explored. When we watch films like Django Unchained or 12 Years a Slave, or read novels such as There Is No Rainbow in Paradise or Echoes of Memory by your compatriot Rosie Djidi, we feel profound sorrow for human lives that suffered in that era. After decades of abolition, what is the importance of addressing slavery artistically and literarily, especially in an age of global citizenship?

NN: Academic, source-based history, as it is taught in schools and universities, often presents itself as a narrative weighed down by numbers, dates, statistics, and the like. In its dryness, it neglects human detail in favor of anonymous masses and so-called “great figures” such as heads of state, military leaders, or religious authorities, without truly engaging with their emotions or lingering on them.

History acquires flesh and blood, emotional charge, and a far greater capacity to move us and leave a lasting mark when it is embodied through individual destinies in art, particularly in the novel, visual arts, or cinema.

I think, for example, of Picasso’s Guernica, which left a far deeper impression on me than everything I have read about the Spanish Civil War. This shows that when history feeds the arts and literature, it radiates emotion and elevates it at the same time, embedding itself in collective memory through an acknowledged subjectivity and through characters in whom each person can recognize or project themselves.

In an era of global citizenship, it becomes essential to remind ourselves, artistically and literarily, that slavery is one of the most widespread and practiced anti-values in human history, and that the enslaved person was the first “commodity” to be globalized. The maps of human trafficking, whether across the Atlantic or the Sahara, clearly show how a person enslaved deep in Africa could, through successive sales, end up in the far reaches of Europe, Asia, or the Americas. Chinese imperial courts, for instance, recorded the presence of Black slaves arriving via caravans as early as the eighth century. The great-grandfather of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was abducted from the area around Logone-Birni in the Lake Chad basin and transported to Constantinople, where he was secretly purchased on behalf of Tsar Peter the Great.

MA: I’ve noticed that a number of Chadian novels have recently begun to excavate history. Is this an attempt to redefine the self, or a way of understanding the present?

NN: That observation is accurate. Several recent Chadian novels revisit the troubled history of our country. Chad is a mosaic of peoples, religions, climates, and regions, and as a unified geographic and political entity, it is scarcely more than a century old. It is therefore a nation still in the process of becoming, searching for itself, and unfortunately often doing so through pain.

From this arises a widespread desire among Chadians in general, and writers in particular, to summon the past in order to understand the present and attempt to cleanse it of its ghosts. This engagement also contributes to shaping a national identity, or something close to one, from a fragmented collective memory.

MA: Your novel There Is No Rainbow in Paradise has won several awards. In the West, when a novel gains wide recognition, it is often adapted into cinema. Have you received any offers to turn it into a film? And how do you view the dialogue between literature and cinema in the Swiss context?

NN: To date, I have not received any proposal to adapt There Is No Rainbow in Paradise for the screen. As far as I know, it is rare for novels published in Switzerland to be adapted into films. Still, I would be deeply grateful and proud if this privilege were one day bestowed upon the book. The dream remains legitimate, supported by compliments I have received from more than one person who has told me that my style is highly visual and that my texts lend themselves to the big screen.

Perhaps the novel’s forthcoming English translation will catch the attention of a benevolent spirit in Nollywood, Bollywood, or, why not, Hollywood. More broadly, the dialogue between pen and camera allows literature and cinema to elevate one another, and the novel, in particular, finds a new breath when it reaches a different audience.

MA: Lastly, tell us about your new novel and your upcoming project?

NN: My new novel, The Factory of Wonders, is published by Éditions Hélice Hélas. It is a work with a dreamlike, philosophical ambition and will be available in bookstores from the second half of January 2026. As for my next project, it is already underway and progressing well. However, owing to my inclination toward superstitious pessimism, I will be happy to speak about it in due time.