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A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in Our Beautiful Darkness, a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator António Jorge Gonçalves.
The light goes out suddenly. And in this absence of light, a pair of teenagers bare their souls. Into the warm silence of the night, they share a conversation filled with their stories and dreams… and maybe even a first kiss.
Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country's history with a teenage boy's family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away… As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity.
Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.
Excerpted from Our Beautiful Darkness by (na) Ondjaki. Copyright © 2024 by (na) Ondjaki. Excerpted by permission of Unruly. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The slight narrative of the poet Ondjaki's new graphic novel, Our Beautiful Darkness, consists of a single conversation between two unnamed teenagers in 1990s Luanda, the capital of Angola. Plunged into darkness during a neighborhood blackout, the pair—a boy and a girl—feel emboldened to open to each other, bit by bit. There is a familiarity and chemistry between the two, and the excitement of reciprocated feelings:
Her fingers danced quickly, rhythmically across
my hand: a gesture of tenderness to soothe my nerves,
or calm her own.
After all, a person can also say things without using
their voice.
As the promise of a first kiss builds between them, they ask questions of each other and share stories, some real and some imagined, content to simply revel in this moment of quiet intimacy.
As this may suggest, Our Beautiful Darkness is light on plot—it is structured like an extended prose poem, and the focus is far more on creating a distinct atmosphere. It takes place at the tail end of the decadeslong civil war that caused devastation across the author's native Angola. Though this context is thematically important, making the young characters' search for love and human connection even more moving, it isn't explicitly discussed in the text (the translator's note at the end provides the historical context for international readers who may not be aware of it). Within the characters' conversation, this backdrop of civil war is only referenced in passing: the girl mentions the death of her father in the conflict, and the boy alludes to having witnessed scenes of violence.
Ondjaki's choice to have the characters speak around the war, but rarely of it, deepens our understanding of these characters and their world. It is indicative of just how ingrained the conflict has become in people's day-to-day lives, while also hinting at the need for respite from violence and fear. It feels as though the characters are deliberately pushing it from their minds for the night, allowing themselves a moment of calm amidst the storm, as though the blanket of darkness is both literally and metaphorically obscuring the turmoil of the outside world.
Ondjaki's language is simple, with not a word feeling wasted, and it is all the more evocative for it. His poetry feeds into the lilting, dreamlike quality of his fiction, as when the boy describes the blackout:
Suddenly the lights went out.
In this darkness of sweet melody or warm silence,
between the buzz of mosquitoes and the whiff of
a match lighting the first candle inside my house,
I found the courage to speak.
There is a whimsy to his writing that Lyn Miller-Lachmann's translation from the Portuguese has kept intact. That said, even in the context of Ondjaki's delicate verse, the story can err towards the saccharine at times, with dialogue that feels unnatural, such as in the following exchange
"What do you think can fit in a person's heart?"
"A poem, a memory, a smell from childhood, star-wishes," she replied.
If you can suspend your disbelief somewhat in that regard, Our Beautiful Darkness is a singular, heartfelt offering that captures a quiet moment in time and celebrates its beauty.
Though billed as a graphic novel, Our Beautiful Darkness reads more like a short story or novelette that has been fully illustrated. You won't find any of the traditional grids, paneled layouts, or text bubbles of most graphic novels or comics. Instead, António Jorge Gonçalves' energetic illustrations streak their way across each page or double spread in an abstract, expressive way. As with the prose, the art is minimalist in style yet bold in execution. Constructed entirely in white against a black background, the artwork serves as a perfect visual embodiment of the story's core theme of finding light in the dark.
Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin
Our Beautiful Darkness by Ondjaki has been translated into English from the original Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann. The process of translating a graphic novel differs somewhat from that of a more traditional prose novel. This is due to the importance of the interaction between the text and images, with each component needing to work in harmony with and enhance the other to establish a fully-formed narrative.
Hannah Chute, who has translated several graphic novels from French into English, has discussed the challenges and trade-offs of working with a visual form. On the one hand, she explains, "having the graphic on the page can give you a clue of what to use if the meaning is ambiguous" in the original language. A word in French might have eight different meanings in English, but it's easy to figure out the correct meaning, because it's drawn on the page. On the other hand, the formal constraint of the text boxes—having to fit the translated words into the same size space, so as not to disrupt the images—is a challenge, almost like poetry, in which many translators want to retain the form, meter, and structure of the original poem. The translated English might take up more space than the original, but "I have a hard character limit and I have to respect that, so I try to figure out a way to get the meaning across in some other configuration," Chute says.
Alun Ceri Jones, the founder of a Wales-based publishing house that specializes in translating comics and graphic novels into Celtic languages such as Welsh, Scots, Gaelic, and Irish, as well as English, said in an interview that he runs into similar constraints. Additionally, his publishing house tries to adapt graphic novels from one culture, not just language, to another, which presents its own challenges. The combination of text and visuals may make sense to a French audience but not an Irish one, for example. Translating the text means keeping the writing as "natural, as funny, and as consistent [to the visuals] as the original."
Some other examples of international graphic novels that have been translated into English are:
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