 Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us for our program in the company of men, a novel by author Varonique Tajo, who's joining us from London, and Bay Area writer Faith Adeel, who's joining us from Oakland. I'm Laura Shepherd, director of events at the Mechanics Institute. Today's program is also co-sponsored by the Museum of the African Diaspora of San Francisco. And I'm very pleased to thank and also acknowledge our colleague Elizabeth Gessel, who's the director of public programs. And we've been collaborating on wonderful events together. And we would look forward to continuing our wonderful relationship and bringing to you programs by both of our organizations and please see our websites to keep in touch with what's going on in each of our wonderful cultural institutions. If you're a first time here to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural institutions in the center of the city. We feature a general interest library, an international chess club, and we have ongoing literary and author programs throughout the year, and also our cinema lit film series on Friday night. Of course our building is closed, but you can still get books to go. So order your book online, and you can pick it up at the front door. Today's program will be followed by Q&A, so if you have questions for our authors, please put them in the chat and Pam Troy, our events assistant, will be reading out the questions to our guests. I'd like to introduce our program. Veronique Tajo's novel and the company of men offers us solace during this time of pandemic. In a village a deadly disease suddenly spreads. The voice of an ancient Baobab tree laments our neglect and pleads us to respect nature and its resources. The stories of a doctor, nurse, volunteers, and grave digger tell of their struggles to care and tend to the sick and dying. Even the voice of Ebola itself is summoned. And to those who suffer the virus in Guinea and Sierra Leone and Liberia, this beautifully written table is an antidote for today. Veronique Tajo is a writer, poet, novelist and artist from Côte d'Ivoire. She earned her doctorate in black American literature and civilization from the Sorbonne, Paris for, and went to the United States as a full bright scholar at Howard University in Washington DC. She headed the French department of the University of Water's Rom in Johannesburg up until 2015 and headed the French department and also translated and her books have been translated into many languages. Her publications include The Blind Kingdom, to the Shadows of Imana, Travels in the Heart of Rwanda, and Queen Poku, Concerto for a Sacrifice, which was awarded the Grand Prix de Literature de Autrique Noir in 2005. And Faith Adiel is associate professor at the California College of Arts, where she teaches contemporary African literature and creative writing. And is the host and co-founder of the African Book Club at the Museum of the African Diaspora. She is also the author of two memoirs, The Nigerian Nordic Girl's Guide to Lady Problems and Meeting Faith and Inward Odyssey, which won the Penn Award. And she's also co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World, a Multicultural Anthology. In the PBS documentary, My Journey Home, chronicles her search to find her father and siblings in Nigeria, and her essays on race, gender, culture and travel appear in many different magazines such as Oprah Magazine Essence, Transition, Brittle Paper, and The Huffington Post. And we're very pleased to bring together these wonderful and beautiful ladies of letters to our program. So please welcome, Veronica Tajo with Faith Adiel. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, unmute, Faith. Thank you so much for that lovely welcome and introduction. It's so great to see you after all this time. Absolutely. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, we're, yeah, so lovely you could be here. I hadn't even realized that you were in London. So thank you for staying up to be with us. And I have a lot of questions, but maybe before we get started, we can hear you read a little bit. Okay, all right. So as I wanted to give the book a very strong environmental atmosphere, I therefore will start with the Baobab, who is the big witness of the story of the epidemic in Guinea, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. His, yes, is an unlikely witness because it's a tree. But I think that everywhere in the world, the Baobab occupies kind of special place. I often think that it is a celebrity, a bit of a celebrity among trees. And it's a tree that can be as old as several centuries. And it's the, so for me, it's the memory of humankind in a sense, because you find this tree in Madagascar, but you also find this tree in Australia, for example. So it has that kind of universal dimension. So it is a witness. So let me start with the first chapter about the tree when the Baobab speaks. We, the trees, our roots run all the way down to the heart of the earth, and we can feel the beat of her pulse. We inhale her breath, we taste her flesh, we lean and die in the exact same spot, never moving from the land we occupy. Both prisoners and conquerors of time, we stand riveted to the ground, yet soaring upward, reaching for the clouds. We adapt to all weathers, rain or shine, hurricanes or the dry, hammered wings. Our crowns merge with the sky's cotton wood wings. We are the link between man and his past, his present, and his unpredictable future. We exhale the fresh breath of mourning. Our step is vital force. Our souls hundreds of years old. We see everything. We feel everything. Our memory is intact. Our consciousness dwells beyond space and time. We have listened to stories both happy and heart-rending, and we shall witness new life cycles in the future, for such is the passage of time. We were here to last. We were here to spread our shade over the remotest lands. We were here so that our foliage would murmur the secrets of the four corners of the world. But human beings have destroyed our hopes. No matter where in the world they are, they wage war on the forest. Our trunks crash to the ground with a sound like thunder. Our naked roots mourn the end of our dreams. You cannot destroy the forest without stealing blood. Humans today think they can do whatever they want. They fancy themselves as masters, as architects of nature. They think they alone are the legitimate inhabitants of the planet, whereas millions of other species have populated it since time immemorial. Blind to the suffering they cause, they are mute when faced with their own indifference. And if only they could feel the weight of our suffering. Our energy is running out, our strength is gone. We, the trees, give shelter to the world. A world that is itself its own rainbow. Birds and insects, climbing plants, flowers, mosses and lichens come and seek refuge in our arms, all along the length of our bark, be it smooth or rough. Overliving beings may rest in our branches or hunt there, or eat there, shoots and birds, fruits and tender leaves. With our breath, we replenish the air and slate its first for oxygen. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. I'm so glad you read from that too, because I mean I want to talk about the content and I also want to talk about the structure. There's so much interesting stuff here, but I think the having the recurring voice of the tree and also of the virus itself does something really interesting here, which allows you to both critique man's behavior in the company of man, but also maybe give a long range view since the tree has been there for hundreds of years and see things come and go. Also with the use of the virus, speaking how the virus says, you know, essentially I'm not a villain, I'm just an organism trying to do my thing. Exactly. Yeah, so yeah, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the decision to use the use the voice of the tree use the voice of the virus to do some social critique work here. All right, so I'll tell you how the bomb up came to my mind. What was happening is that when the epidemic started, I began to research on the epidemic intensively. So I was going everywhere, you know, online in the newspapers on the radio on television talking to people going to conferences. So wherever I was, I would be very much involved in knowing more, and I happened to travel to different places. So, although, as I said, I'm from, I mean, I'm from West Africa, I'm from Abidjan. I also was based in Johannesburg, in South Africa. So there were lots of conferences there also and and Ebola was in everybody's mind because it was a terrible epidemic and everybody was worried about the future. It happened also to travel to the United States to Rodriguez University, we have told for several months. And there again, I got more, more information meeting with people discussing the topic. So that's how I gathered information. So when I came back on a visit to, to, to Godiva, I wanted to see what was putting place against the disease because Godiva has two borders, one border, I mean common borders with the three affected countries. In Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea share the same border in the north, and in the west, Côte d'Ivoire shares a border with Liberia. So in fact, we were expecting the disease to come anytime. One day I was there and talked to people who were very concerned and doing all the things that you do in terms of health restrictions and being very cautious. I went to see Ebola Center that had been built just as a preventive measure in case the epidemic came to Godiva. It never happened, thankfully, but the Ebola Center was there. And when I saw this Ebola Center at the end of a very big hospital, you know, in the vicinity of a very big hospital, there was this huge tree that was almost shedding, the big foliage shedding the building. And I suddenly thought, wow, if something had happened, that tree must have been, would have been the witness of what was unfolding. And that's how this majestic tree came to my mind as a witness. Because it was so close to the Ebola treatment center. Wow. Then of course, so many other things came to my mind, because I wanted to give different perspectives on who had been involved in the fight, how people have been impacted in many different ways, and what we could learn from this. And because I'm from West Africa, where oral traditions are very strong, so the storyteller has enormous freedom. That means the storyteller can use music, songs, even political language, historic facts. It's just a lot of freedom in the way of telling the story. So I remember that, and I've always liked that job, because I think that we all have folk tales. Every culture in the world has folk tales. And somehow we grow with them. Yes, we grow with them and we are made by them in a way, constructed by those ancient stories that carried from generation to generation. So this is also a genre that is very universal. Yes. Yeah, that's one of the things I was most excited about. I immediately recognized the griot, the West African storytelling tradition, the fact that you've created this polyphonic text that has songs, poems, prose, different speakers using the I, using the we. There's even a moment where I think one of the characters is reading one of your poems. So we've got this kind of meta thing going on. I was like, ah, yeah. But I just thought that was, it was honoring the, you know, the African oral tradition. And I also think it's something that's really important because there's, you know, genre is very political. And in the US, there's a lot of fighting around it about, you have to be able to know what John something is. And so I love the fact that you're creating this hybridity, which is, I think, realistic for how we live our lives. And it even announces itself the, I think the virus itself says I'm a hybrid and proud of it. We're all. It's the bat. Oh, okay, it's the bat. Yes, which is a mammal and a bird, of course. Right. Oh, right. At the same time. Yeah. Right. And then we have to be versatile. We have to adapt. And so I just like love that the hybridity is, is throughout. That's why I told the story, which I think is really important. And I think this is a moment where we're seeing a kind of an opening and people being willing to read things that are, we think they're new, but in fact, they harken back to traditional stories. Exactly. And I guess we also have to remember that older species have to adapt over time if they want to survive. So in fact, it just raises the question of purity. If you have anything that's, that's like, completely pure or do you, do you not learn from nature that it is important to know how to, to adapt otherwise you cannot, you cannot survive. Because you, we live in different conditions all the time. Right. You have to learn to have that flexibility. Right. Take us to take us further. And yes, concerning the virus. I didn't want the virus to be completely the villain and the only villain of the story for the simple reason that we need viruses. Yes. We do the part of life and the part of the equilibrium in the environment. So they are of course is a question of, of course not falling on a bad virus, but viruses in themselves are not necessarily antagonistic to human life. Right. Right. Particularly if, I mean, I think the book is always reminding us that humans aren't the only species. So just because, you know, we're at war with it, it doesn't necessarily mean that, yes, that it's conscious. And I mean, one of the things that I noticed is that the virus is challenging borders, which is an interesting thing for it to do, you know, metaphorically in our world. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yes. That's why I also thought that if the virus was the only villain of the story in a sense, you would have a tendency to think that, you know, men have nothing to do with all this that we are totally virtuous and it's an act of God that this has happened. But in fact, when you look at the environmental degradation, you have to see that we're pushing boundaries of survival and we are putting many other creatures in danger, putting ourselves in danger as well. Because we, in the case of West Africa, we're talking about deforestation, which has had the impact. But in the case of other places in the world, you could look at industrial farming, for example. Which is this intensive breeding of animals in really terrible conditions and creating a lot of also conditions for diseases to erupt. So we need also to understand that it's not on one side, it's epidemics on the other side, environment, and on the other side, global change. It's all of these together. Right, exactly. Yeah. So that so that we understand it better and can be more prepared for the future. I think that after the pandemic, for example, I am hoping that we will have a more balanced relationship with animals. For example, and that maybe we will look differently at how we have been involved with a lot of animals and the way we consume them. Right. Yeah. Well, this, yeah, this is a moment as, you know, and challenging that idea of like, you know, back, we want things to be back to normal, you know, and the book makes it very clear. I mean, one the Ebola crisis was, you know, basically 2014 to 2016 and this book comes out right when we're in the midst of another one. And that one is saying, you know, yes, we've regained our peace, but let's remain vigilant. I love that after dying several times over, we must learn again how to live the idea that this, you know, this will continue and so we need to have a different sort of way of conceptualizing it. And, you know, taking advantage of the opportunities, it, it, it affords us to rethink the way that we're doing things and not feel that science will solve everything. And then once we've, you know, then it's over. But that was really interesting because like the first time I met you. I mean, I saw you out at WITS in 2008 because I loved your book about the Rwandan genocide it had like really haunted me as a family as you know someone whose family had been impacted by the Nigerian genocide. And so I just like love that text and then, and then now, you know, your text about the Ebola virus comes out right when we're dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Yes. There's something about you being really kind of prescient around these things that are happening. And as I read this I was highlighting I mean so many things just applied to what we're going to right now, you know, having to tell people that the way that they're, their cultural ways need to be a challenge they can't bury their dead they have to disinfect their hands the economies collapse I mean almost everything applied to what we're living through right now and some really interesting how this book is in conversation with what we're living through right now, and what's that absolutely if you take for example the the loneliness and the isolation that that that people who seek fear, and also even over people because how do we do you express love, for example, how do you express tenderness when you're not supposed to touch people. How can you expect a mother, not to be able to, to tend for children or a daughter not being able to touch or embrace her father. So, all these links that we take it we used to take for granted, a kind of destroyed. And we have to just hold on and hope that, you know, the time will come when we can resume this kind of expression of love but in the meantime. If you look at this, what is said about the pandemic. Very often on the radio on TV, they're saying show your love, don't go and meet your mother or your father. You see this is extraordinary you know show your love don't go there. This contrary to everything we've been doing up until now so it's very difficult, but I think that we will be learning a lot. And that's why whatever we are learning, we must then apply. And I always think to progress and to understand a different way of living, living together as well. Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you. I was struck by the fact that this you did so much research, you know it's such an ambitious book and yet it's such a small book it's so slim and so I was wondering about the restraint involved I mean you talk to scientists medical workers and geos journalists, researchers survivors in three and I mean I teach students how to write documentary narrative and I think there are two things that happen that one you yourself can be very overwhelmed as a witness of stories. How do you recover and kind of put a handle on it, and then also how do you find the story in it and hone it down and resist the temptation to just include so much research and testimony. Yes, in fact, because I tell you the truth, I'm more into shorter books. What I prefer to do is just go for the jugular. And so, you know, of course you can you can you can explain things more, and I could have added some more portraits, in a sense, but after a while I thought that look is there is all there. And in fact, if the reader wants to, he or she can go and find their own portraits. Because, because I didn't want to be exhaustive. Right. It would have been impossible anyway, because so many people acted in different ways that you can't say it all. So why pretend you're going to say, oh, just just just condense whatever you have to say and leave it to the readers to then continue the story. Sometimes my hope is that if, if, if I have been able to touch them, the readers in one way or another, they will do their own, their own, they will continue their own research or continue to try and understand a bit more about what has, what has happened. That's very interesting. That's interesting. And then how do you manage like how did you handle the emotional impact of, I mean, you know, years ago you did the research around the Rwandan story and then you did this, you know, then you talk to survivors and people here so how did, how do you, what's your process for witnessing and then keeping yourself sane during all of that. And you know, because it's difficult to, to mix Rwanda with Ebola because it's such different contexts, but in the case of Rwanda, there's this survivor who said, Yolande Mukassagana, who said, don't be afraid to know. Meaning that when you seek information is, is, is always something that's going to normally makes you stronger. Right. It doesn't make you weaker. It makes you stronger, because you have the impression that you kind of regaining control over, over events that are chaotic. are perturbing you. Whereas when you try to make the effort to understand more, to go deeper than the headlines or than the news at 10 or news at 8pm or, you know, that sort of thing. You, you then feel stronger, because you know better. And I think that is about information as well. We need two things, we need information and emotion as well. Because information alone, data, numbers, scientific, pure scientific facts cannot do it for us. Right. We need to be touched somewhere at some point. And so you, in fact, it's about handling both. It's about saying, this is what I learned. And I'm trying to share it because other people have shared it, shared it as well. I remember doing my research, going to the site of MSF, you know, doctors without borders. They were extremely involved in the fight. And you could find on online, a whole graph of an Ebola treatment center, complete with all the details of where the patients coming where they come out where they go here, where they go there. It was absolutely incredible in terms of the research and of the information you could access. So I was, and that's why I, in the acknowledgement section, I thank all those who have been generous enough to share the information. And as you know, it's a classic to say information is employment. The only thing is that when you're talking about literature, how do you kind of process part of this information and make it literature, not anything else. Right, right. Yes. What do you think. Yeah, so is that a process of just kind of taking the stories in and letting them ruminate until some, the structure it wants emerges from you or that you feel that there is some sort of imagining that happens outside of the polemic or how do you how do you wrestle with that. When I wanted, I decided that I was going to write on the subject, the Ebola epidemic, I didn't know how I would handle it. In fact, to tell you the truth, the plague by Albert Camus was a very strong influence on me. I've read the book and I also taught it at this university to my students. So, at some point I had this idea maybe I'd do a rewrite of the plague that in the context of Africa, and then I realized that that's not what I wanted to do. So I just continued writing and in the natural process characters started to emerge. Maybe because when I found those characters, I was surprised. Okay. I was surprised. I was surprised that such a person like chlorine sprayer exists. You know, in my mind it was, it was, I never thought about a young man going, you know, in front of the teams and spraying chlorine so that they are safe. Yeah. I think these things also surprised me. I will remember that grave diggers. We don't think about grave diggers, but of course they were running really, they were in big danger, just by burying the dead. So something that surprised me very much was the way it was necessary to do a whole communication campaign with people teams going from villages to, from one village to the other to explain to people, the Ebola virus was exactly because you imagine if you live in a remote place in Liberia or Guinea or Sierra Leone, and you don't have real access to information. You think that this disease is just a curse. So you need, you need to be informed. And what I found also very, very interesting was the fact that after a while medical experts understood that they have to, they had to go through the healers, for example, because healers are very close to people still. Yeah. And you need to talk to them, train them, and let them relay the information to their own patients. So it made a big, big improvement in terms of spreading information and making people more aware of what to do and not do. Yeah, yeah, you know, respecting those, you know, kind of traditional modes of communication and belief patterns I think is kind of is crucial and I think we're, you know, seeing, you know, people who don't believe it, you know, even in societies that are super science based. You know, I think that when we look at what is happening today, it makes us rethink what, how we view people who deny, for example, the disease and who are living far, far, far in some remote places. We thought that we were so much better than them. So much advanced, so much more advanced, so much better. But then you realize what, we're in the middle of a major city and there are people who still don't want to believe this. There's television, there's everything, the whole media is on it. And yet there are people who continue to deny it. So there's something in human nature. Right. That, that, that is what we have to and to try and understand as much as possible. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you even talk about it. Yeah, there's the temptation to lie to ourselves, of course. I thought, yeah, I thought that was really, really interesting. It does make us really rethink how we imagine we would behave because now that moment is here. We're not necessarily behaving that way. I have one last question for you before we open it up to the audience and it's, I'm still kind of trying to formulate it, but, you know, so I've been teaching contemporary African literature ever since this renaissance of literature came out. Like in the last five to 10 years, and we've been running this African book club that recently partnered with Moab, which is our co-sponsor today. We're actually going to be reading your book next month. Thank you for African book club. I'd be interested to know what the reactions are. Yeah, exactly. I as well. So one of the things that comes up whenever we talk about African literature, if we can even say there's an African literature of course, because it's so huge. Is there's this debate, which is, you know, kind of the narratives of Africa that we inherited from the West, which have been problematic and authors have been laboring under that and so of course there are these debates or African writers are always saying like we can't write about a crisis or we can't write about crisis, you know, so there's always this tension and then Absolutely. Recently, a local writer, a local Zambian writer and I'm Molly Surpell, who's a Cain Price winner and lives in the Bay Area has written about, about empathy and kind of the idea that we kind of assume that literature creates empathy. She's trying to critique that and say, in a way, it promotes its own kind of moral callousness that, you know, we become fascinated with stories of pain, or we feel that if we're reading a book that that's equivalent to actually taking social or political action that you know we've worked all of our emotions out in the story. But, you know, so she's been asking like what is, what is the usefulness of literary empathy so I was just wondering if that is that whole debate about writing about problems in Africa. Did that concern you did it shape your approach with kind of doing the more imaginative inventive structure or where do you engage or not engage with that debate. I totally engage with that debate and there's nothing more than I would like to talk about pure love and flowers and which exists and I think that's how I can, I can solve this tension is that by always coming out of a position of love. That means it's a position of empathy because I think I am too attached to life and to human destiny and I have, I still have a lot of faith in what humans are capable of doing, because in fact we're capable of the best. And also, of course, of the worst, but I think that it's the tension in life, but it depends where it's coming from. If it's coming from a place of, yes, I can only say a place of love, then, then you can talk about what is more difficult. That's the difference. I'm not coming from over. I'm not trying to give lessons to anybody. I'm not trying that. And that's why I have many voices, because I'm just trying to understand as much. And sometimes I hope that by interacting with the readers, I will continue to understand. I'm very, very, very interested in human nature, wherever it is. I have a strong belief that it's just a question of context. We are influenced by different contexts, but basically we have more or less the same reactions, especially when confronted with death and life, of course. But yeah, I have confidence in human kind. So that's such a great answer. It's such a beautiful approach. And I remember, I mean, one of the things I found most impactful in the book was the young man who brings his fiancee, and they have to be separated and then he leaves poems to be left at her feet. You know, just the, you know, the using of poetry, the love, you know, in this moment of him recovering, well, him, her having helped him recover emotionally and then her being sick, I just thought it was such an impactful story and those are so key. And that's what's missing in the kind of reporting that happens around crisis is, you know, the human resilience and the beautifulness and the fact that people are larger than their crisis or their victimhood. So thank you for that. Great. So I know that we want to open up some questions from the audience. So, who is doing that. I will, I will read out the questions. The first question I see is from Christian Gorman. I have viruses throughout human history so it isn't unique to today, but I happen to believe that stresses in nature create the opportunity for pandemics. Currently the stress is rapid climate change. Is this a widely held view in the countries where Ebola has wrapped it. The crime, the climate crisis and the Ebola epidemic. Yeah, climate. She's asking if climate crisis is seen as something that might have caused the Ebola epidemic. Absolutely. I think absolutely in the sense that I was talking about the deforestation earlier. It's an important factor, because when you destroy the territory of wild animals, they then come closer to villages and where human beings live and to feed on fruit trees, for example. And this contact is not something that is good for both species. And in the case of Ebola, since it's transmitted by fluids, it's this close contact with wild animals is in part the cause of the epidemic. Because we were talking about the bat. The bat is a healthy host of the virus. That means a bat can carry the virus and be fine. But the moment you kill the bat, start eating the meat or start doing something with that animal and touching the blood or you may be infected. The next question is from Mark Maroudis. Just a simple question. Does Veronique write her books in English or French? French first and then English. Yes, this translation was a big collaboration and it went through several stages and it was a real work of love again and commitment. Clarice Saidis says, I have two questions if I may. One, how did you come to the title? Can you say more about that? And two, given that genres are not real, I think of them as false borders, how did you decide to make this a novel? Was that a category you landed on? Or did the work get you there? Or was that a publishing decision? Being familiar with your poetry, I wonder about the choice to make this tale a prose novelistic one? Yes, yes, yes. In the company of man indicates the fact that we have changed the perspective. It's not man being above nature, but man being within nature. And in fact, in the company, the animals and the creatures and all those who talk in the story are looking at man and their behaviors. So certainly man and the rest of nature are at the same level. They are equal in this sense. The animals are in the company of man. They are together watching what man are doing, what human beings are doing. And in terms of calling it a novel, it's really, look, the novel has evolved a lot. And it's not always the conventional linear narrative that is only accepted. But I tend to call my, what I write, I tend to call them récit in French, récit meaning, you know, we talk about translation. I've got a problem with récit because it's between tales and stories. That's that's how I call what I write, récit, which is a little bit more neutral than a novel. Dorothy Abbott asks, I heard you in a previous interview and you were asked about creating different perspectives. You mentioned you were influenced by your mother being a sculptor. You talked about how with a sculpture, you walk around it and see it in different ways. Would you please talk more about your mother and her art and how she influenced you? She was a big influence because of course we were living together and I could see her working every day in her workshop and she was someone that would not leave you alone. In the sense that if she was doing something, at the beginning it was painting and then it became a sculpture, she would say, come, come, come, come, tell me and you'd have to give your opinion on what she was creating. And she was entering in a conversation with you. And what I remember most about her is the fact that when she was creating something she was, for example, using, when she created a sculpture, she was using all the little bits that had fallen off and that she had to discard when she was doing that sculpture. So from those pieces that she had discarded, she would then try and create something else. And a kind of creative recycling. And I thought that that was very interesting to watch her doing that and trying to connect pieces that had fallen off from a complete sculpture. Interesting. I also had quite a bit of admiration for her from the fact that she came from a small village in France, then went to Paris to study art and then said, yes, when my father said, let's go to Côte d'Ivoire and live there. And in fact, she lived in Côte d'Ivoire until the end of her life. So that was quite an adventure. And interesting to watch her and to see how she was influenced by living in Côte d'Ivoire and how she was trying to kind of find a fusion between these different influences. It's all really evident in your work. You know, it's almost that this Q-list approach as you, you know, create these different perspectives and move around it. So it's great to hear the backstory about that. Yeah. You're muted, I think. All right. Meredith asks, given your research and lived experiences writing this book, is there a message or insight you'd like to share with the public about our current pandemic? What do you wish we knew? I think it's all at the end of the day boils down to solidarity and collaboration, because it was very tight. At some point the Ebola epidemic was going to go to go wide and spread further from the region. And it's only when, in this kind of selfish way, people realize in the West that there was a real danger of the disease spreading further, that there was this massive influx of money and aid and people coming and even the army being deployed in Liberia, for example, to just end that disease. And I think that we have to come back to that sort of mentality, but not as a knee-jerk reaction, but looking at the world in a more stable way, more durable way, more holistic way, and say, okay, let's put the emphasis on prevention. That means not just money where there is a crisis, but being always a step forward, always a step ahead so that we know that primary care that is important for people to have access to health security, for example. I think we just need to see more widely than just own borders. So Clarice also asks, you mentioned Camus plague. Were there other works that helped you access your own or do you know some companion reads we might consider alongside in the company of men? Well, you could also try Les Fables de la Fontaine. I don't know if you know about Les Fables de la Fontaine. Les Fables de la Fontaine is the 17th century poet, French poet, who wrote a lot of fables where animals were talking and were giving all sorts of moral ideas about in fact how human beings should live. It's interesting that he got the inspiration from Greek fables. So you see how storytelling travels. So you have this 17th century French poet who wrote fables, but who was inspired by Greek mythology. And that's how stories travel, stories travel. And so, in fact, I would say companion books would be, yes, Greek tragedy as well. But there's a lot like also, for example, a lot of what has happened during the AIDS period. It's very important to remember how it was handled and how it is still in our lives and how we must deal with it. So there's a lot that can be learned from different places. There's a question from Elizabeth to piggyback on Clarisse's question. Are there other authors, artists who influence you? In this particular book, no, I can't say that. It's difficult because I'm influenced by so many writers. And sometimes it's not necessarily because they're treating the subject you're writing on that they influence you but you have read them and they're still with you. And then they come, somehow they come up in the way you are going to handle the subject you're working on. So it's not, it would be many, many, many writers and I can't say for the moment, I would say for the moment to tell you the truth. Albert Camus was my most, my biggest influence and also because I like him as a writer. It's one of my favorite writers, the stranger. Yes, but the tales also, as I said before, the oral tradition is very important for me. So a writer like Amadou Kourouma who also has written the sons of independencies and waiting for the wild beast to vote or something like that, you know. It's absolutely important because he has this way of drawing on culture and at the same time finding innovative ways of telling very political stories. That's what I liked about him. Vanessa asks, you spent several years living in South Africa teaching it with. Can you speak about how this influenced your writing the shift from West Africa to Southern Africa francophone to Anglophone cultures, and the charge context of a post apartheid society. Big, big, big, big influence. Right. Yes, my time in Johannesburg was like not waste of time. Because it's a country that's always bubbling with something. There's always something happening. We spent 14 years in Johannesburg and I said 14 years. It looks like it was like you would have told me three years, four years, I'd say okay, I agree. But 14 years, it went really very, very fast because there's always something happening. And also the fact that it's a post apartheid society that is still in full transition is absolutely fascinating. And it's also recent history. And so everything is coming up all the time. The past is coming up but at the same time people are really very much into moving forward and trying to move forward. And as I said, it's a fascinating, fascinating place. And when we were there. I mean, Mandela was still alive. Next on Mandela was still alive. That's one to two big people. And to know that you're in the same area that you're in the same country is absolutely fascinating and also all the young people who are trying to find now a new way to live together. It's also quite something, you know, are you shaped by the past or do you want to forge ahead in your own terms and not be defined by that past, that apartheid past. On the white side as on the black side, you know, I don't want, I'm not a victim anymore. We've gone through beyond that phase. We want to really be able to assert ourselves and not be reminded every day that there was the terrible thing, which, which created so much tension in the country. Now, if you are a young white person, how much do you take of that? What do you say to your parents? What do you say to them? You say, how come you knew about it, but you didn't do anything about it. It's an amazing place. It's totally in full transition and you have really full of big stature and it's fascinating. At the same time, you have the violence as well that erupts regularly and that is a legacy of the apartheid era. So you never quite sitting on your chair, in your chair when you were in South Africa. So we have time for one more question and it is from Eva. What subject are you working on now? Can you tell us a little bit about your next project to emerge? You know, I mean, writers don't do these things. It's bad luck. And it's all those changes all the time, because if I tell you now and then I change in the middle of it and you say, but you said you were writing about, you know, the truth is that we have been secretive about that. Yeah, I'm writing on the novel. Let's say I'm writing on my next, I'm working on my next novel and I'm writing also, I'm working also on an essay. Have you, have you written about South Africa? Yeah, I've written a book on Mandela. Yeah, I've written a book on Mandela and in my next novel it will come up again. And my feeling has been like, I can't write about the place when I'm there and when I'm away from it, I miss it and I write about the place. I'm just wondering, like, you know, because you've lived in so many, you know, places, like, is that then when you look back and think about that? Yeah, 14 years is a long time, so it has been really important and a very strong influence on me, so I'm really so happy and I feel privileged to have been there. And I have to say, we are so privileged to have you, Verinique Tajo, in conversation with Faith Adeel for an incredibly inspiring and moving conversation and I want to encourage everyone to order your books at alexanderbook.com or your local independent bookstore. And I also want to thank Elizabeth Gessel, director of public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora and just remind everyone once again, Faith is going to be moderating a wonderful book club talk on in the company of men on March 28 at five o'clock, so sign up. And we'll continue talking about your incredible work and all of the very deep and powerful messages that lie within the narrative. Also, we have a drawing for a free book, so we do have a winner, we did a digital drawing, and the winner is Dorothy Abbott and Dorothy will be sending you your book and Pam will get your address. On a chat private chat so once again Verinique, it's just so wonderful to meet you from afar on zoom and faith thank you for joining us and thank you. So we'll be collaborating again we look forward to your new publications as they come out in the future, and we'll be in touch and thank you everyone for joining us for this really inspiring conversation. We have a lot of things about and so moving as we are experiencing all of what is in this book right today right now this minute. This is very insightful. Thank you, thank you very much. All right, well and be in good health everyone and join us again. And we'll see very soon on mechanics Institute for our programs. I also want to ask Dorothy Abbott to please type your mailing address in direct message to me and chat so we can get Thank you so much. Thank you very much for having me. Wonderful, wonderful conversation, and everyone else just watch our website for upcoming events. And we've got cinema lit on Friday nights. We also have another program coming up later in in March with Alice Walker's daughter, Rebecca Walker and her writing collaborator Lily diamond for what's your story. That's going to be for women's history month that's on the February sorry it's March 25 at 530. We have a lot of co sponsorships with the Bay Area Book Festival that are coming up in early March so see our website for those programs. And the chess clubs got all kinds of tournaments going on and the writers lunch of course is Friday afternoon at noon time so so much is going on at mechanics and of course there are incredible events at Moab. So please visit both websites. And we look forward to seeing you again. Okay, everyone would like to unmute just to say bye bye. Dorothy, I will be emailing you and hope you can get me your address that way. So everybody. So long. It's good to see all the familiar faces. I'll be closing the doors just a minute. We'll be seeing you soon I hope for me it's great to be back in touch. So long. Okay, it was a great event everybody, and so long. Bye bye.