The red earth of Fulladou, the cold winds of Scandinavia, and the echoes of history collide in a powerful new memoir by Amat Tidjaann Jeng, a Gambian scholar at Howard University. His debut book, Between Two Horizons, is a deeply Gambian story — an intimate and political exploration of childhood, exile, and belonging that expands the nation’s literary landscape beyond oral tradition and postcolonial reflection into global diasporic narrative. This helps situates Gambian Literature firmly within the global canon.
Childhood & memory: A world of red earth and ritual
The memoir opens in the red earth and cattle-grazing fields of rural Gambia — a world where history is spoken in proverbs, where spiritual elders guide the living, and where identity is stitched together by rituals and ancestral memory. The narrator recalls a childhood spent among mud huts and grass-thatched roofs, where life unfolded according to the seasons and stories were passed from mouth to ear under moonlit skies.
“The village of my childhood was little more than a scattered constellation of mud huts, grass-thatched roofs, and winding cattle trails. Mornings carried the scent of smoke and fresh milk; nights pulsed with the hum of crickets, the lowing of cows, the sharp bark of dogs, and the stubborn wail of donkeys.”
Through such vivid passages, the book captures the pulse of a country too often excluded from world literature — not merely as a backdrop, but as a living, breathing protagonist.
Exile & identity: From village paths to foreign streets
From the beginning, Between Two Horizons follows a journey that stretches across cities and seas and eventually into the heart of Scandinavia, where the narrator confronts racial prejudice, displacement, and the challenge of remaking oneself in unfamiliar lands. Along the way, the book becomes a meditation on colonial legacies, the resilience of diasporic identity, and the ways in which “home” is carried not in geography but in memory.
The narrative is at once intimate and political, weaving personal experience with broader histories — from the weight of colonial education and class divisions to Cold War displacements and contemporary diaspora politics. One of the book’s most visceral passages captures a deeply formative rite of passage:
“When the blade cut into my flesh, I did not cry out. Not because I was brave, but because I feared shame more than pain. I stared into the horizon, beyond the pain, into a future I could not name.”
Return & transformation: Memory and change
One of the book’s most striking themes is the tension between memory and transformation. After thirty years in the diaspora, the narrator returns to the village of his childhood in The Gambia and finds that much of what once defined his world has changed. Even the mighty mango tree that once anchored the community’s gatherings has fallen, leaving behind only memory:
“Even the mighty mango tree, the heart of our village nights, had fallen. It had been there forever—or so we had believed, back when we were young and thought trees were eternal. Now its trunk lay like a corpse in the clearing, its branches long since cut for firewood. Yet children still gathered there on moonlit nights, their laughter echoing ours, as if the tree’s spirit still kept vigil.
“I often stood at the edge of that clearing, watching them. Kumba and her friends played the same games we once played: hide-and-seek in the tall grass, daring sprints across shadowed paths, whispered stories beneath a fat, glowing moon. In the dry season, the harmattan used to sweep the clouds away, polishing the sky into a cold, metallic blue. The land was as it had always been, and yet I was a foreigner here, carrying the scent of snow and concrete, listening for echoes of voices that were no longer alive.”
Such passages capture the bittersweet paradox of exile: the places that once shaped us often evolve beyond recognition, and the selves we become abroad are no longer fully at home where we began.
Globalisation & poverty: A nation’s story in Jarra Soma
While Between Two Horizons is partly fiction, it is also a portrait of a nation navigating the complexities of globalization and post-colonial reality. One of the most powerful chapters captures a stop in Jarra Soma, in the early 1990s, on the narrator’s journey home. Soma becomes a metaphor for The Gambia itself:
“We arrived at Jarra Soma after about five hours. Here we had managed to come halfway. Soma was not only a town; it was a symptom. A rib pulled from the body of the nation, beating faintly at the edge of exhaustion. At first sight, it appeared like a simple junction: traders yelling, goats bleating, buses exhaling smoke, women hawking bananas that were bitten by the fierce sun and had turned brown. But Soma was more than dust and stalls—it was a ledger where the country’s debts were written in plain sight.
“Here Senegal pressed in from north and south, as if trying to smother its smaller neighbor. Here Gambians learned early that movement was both necessity and punishment. Everyone was in transit, from one hardship to another. No one ever seemed to arrive in Soma.”
“The marketplace carried the air of survival, not prosperity. Aid trucks had long since passed through with their slogans— ‘Partnership”, “Development,’ ‘Progress’—their paint peeling, their promises expired. What lingered were the crumbs: sugar resold in plastic bags, powdered milk in unmarked tins, rice too yellow or too broken to be first quality. At every corner, the leftovers of globalization were repackaged and traded in the sun.”
“But it was the children who told Soma’s real story. With their tomato cans clanging around their necks, they moved like tiny ghosts between the legs of travelers, hunting for scraps. Each pot was an archive of poverty: a fish head, a chicken bone, some broken rice—all heaped together as if hunger itself had no preference.”
Although this scene is set in the early 1990s, just after the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs swept through Africa, its imagery still resonates today. It captures the enduring contradictions of development and survival in a country struggling to define itself amid global inequalities.
Between mMemory and invention: Fact meets fiction
Between Two Horizons deliberately blurs the line between memoir and fiction, and that is precisely its strength. As the author explains, the book “draws inspiration from real places, people, and fragments of lived experience,” but ultimately “it remains a work of fiction.”
“[The book] is less about recreating facts than about capturing the emotional landscapes of exile, belonging, and transformation.”
This approach allows the story to transcend autobiography and speak to universal experiences of displacement, memory, and the human need to belong.
Scholar and storyteller
Best known for his scholarship on African politics, democracy, and transnational activism, Jeng brings the analytical depth of a political scientist to the lyricism of a storyteller. His academic voice is evident throughout the book — not in jargon, but in the clarity with which he connects personal memory to historical forces. In Between Two Horizons, he turns the lens inward, exploring the emotional and spiritual costs of migration and the enduring weight of memory. His intellectual grounding allows the book to move effortlessly from intimate recollections to historical commentary— from a village naming ceremony to the independence struggles of African nations, from childhood games to the ideological battles of the Cold War.
A milestone for Gambian literature
For Gambians at home and abroad, Between Two Horizons speaks to shared experiences — leaving, longing, and learning to live between worlds. For global readers, it offers a rare and authentic portrait of the human consequences of migration and the enduring search for identity.
The author’s journey — from humble beginnings to a scholar at Howard University — is both deeply Gambian and profoundly universal. His memoir is a testament to resilience and reinvention, to the stories that shape us, and to the homes we continue to build long after we leave.
Published by Owl Publishers in San Francisco, the book can be ordered from Amazon in both print and digital editions. Efforts are on the way to get it resold at Timbooktoo, Bakau.
The author can be reached at [email protected].
