How can one write about the Sahara? What story can traverse the vast blank spaces without trampling its nuances of colour and life? Can it be interpreted by a European sensibility? What does it mean?
To writers escaping the flabby fin-de-siecle Europe, Saharan Africa was a revelation of the physical life, through the heat and harshness of the desert, and the sexual delight they took in the local people. Sven Lindqvist grew up reading these adventure stories of Saint-Exupery, Fromentin, Gide. Taking as a metaphor the divers who cleaned out desert wells, Lindqvist drags to the surface the story of colonial slaughter and sexual exploitation which contaminate his boyhood idols. 'Desert Divers' is a beautiful combination of travel book, confession and revisionist literary history.
