Tony
D’Souza

Tony D’Souza is the author of Whiteman, a novel that chronicles the daily struggles of an African village during a time of war, as well as the increasing psychic and cultural isolation
of the lone foreign relief worker who lives in it. Born and raised in Chicago, Tony served three years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, where he was a rural aids educator, before earning Master’s degrees in writing from Hollins University and the University of Notre Dame. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and McSweeney’s. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, and many others. His second novel, The Konkans, is forthcoming this spring.

Whiteman
Working for Potable Water International, narrator Jack Diaz—known to the locals by the Islamicized name Diomondé Adama as well as the wryly derisive Whiteman— captures the pulsing three-year quotidian of Tégéso, an Ivory Coast village in the neglected Muslim north. With a civil war between Christians and Muslims looming, PWI pulls its people, but Jack stays on without funding or affiliation, working the fields and teaching about preventing AIDS. Though he knows his stay in the volatile region is temporary, he dreams of being black and proving himself amongst the people of his village. When the war finally forces Jack to flee, D’Souza skillfully counterpoints the young man’s sojourn with his stateside existence, yielding unexpected motivations for Jack’s work and his liaisons. This book has been praised for its humor and honesty, garnering attention and awards from The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire and many others.

At nine a.m., the doorbell rang. I couldn’t see who it was because of the high wall surrounding the house, but after a moment’s debate whether I shouldn’t just ignore it, I picked up the crowbar we’d been keeping handy and started across the courtyard to the security door. I’d talked with the girls about getting a gun in the black market, but we hadn’t gone that far yet. “Jack’s a man. He’ll protect us,” Samantha had winked and said, and I’d shaken my head and told them, “Then consider yourselves dead already.” Because while I didn’t like to think of myself as a coward, my first impulse on hearing gunfire was to hit the floor and crawl under something. At the door, I raised the crowbar like a baseball bat. I’d never swung a weapon at anyone, didn’t know if I could now, but I held it like that anyway. “C’est qui?” I shouted, trying to sound larger and more menacing than I really ­was.

" This seductive debut from a former Peace Corps worker transcends the 'earnest young man' novel and announces the arrival of a master storyteller."

— Salon

“It’s the quality of vision that makes D’Souza’s novel notable and, for a first book, unusual.”

— New York Times