Léonora Miano: “I am a tyrannical author”

On the screen, tall trees are swaying in the wind. Airplanes pass, blurring the conversation for a moment. Lomé where Léonora Miano chose to live: “I love Togo. It’s a small quiet country, not aggressive, welcoming. Lomé is a big village that still retains something of old Africa in the new. I like this. And I’m less known than in Abidjan, Dakar or at home in Cameroon. They leave me alone.” She oversees the launch of her new novel, Stardust, and that of its publishing house, The Quilombo Publishing. A few days earlier, she was in Freiburg, as part of a university conference on the theme of weakness. In her lecture, the writer reversed the notion: “It is not a question of rejecting the idea of ​​vulnerability, which is at the heart of the human experience, but of considering it as carrying lessons and new methods of the relationship.”