Archive - April 19, 2014

[Tony D’Souza had been a HIV/AIDS Volunteer in a village in northern Ivory Coast when that country’s decade-long civil war erupted in 2002. Evacuated to Ghana, Tony transferred to Madagascar before coming home and writing about his experiences in his 2006 novel Whiteman. Whiteman won most of the major first novel prizes, including from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was excerpted by the New Yorker. In 2007, Tony received an NEA grant, and in 2008, a Guggenheim. Last fall, Tony visited his village for the first time in ten years. In this nonfiction piece for Sarah Lawrence University’s Lumina, he writes of the toll of AIDS on the friends left behind, the ravages of the war, the death of his Ivorian girlfriend, and despite all, the happiness of going back to a place one loves. This essay Les Petites Camionaires (The Guys With the Little Truck) on his . . .