A People Without Shame

Description

by Patrick Colm Hogan

Somota is society divided by change, and by memories. When A. arrives in the protectorate shortly after the first world war, he is unsure of what to expect. Employed by the government as a linguistic anthropologist, he is tasked with documenting the benefits of the new order and reporting them to the Reverend G. But what are these benefits? In his travels throughout the region, A. finds only the physical and emotional scars of conquest, and of routine colonial administration. Yet, even as the indigenous culture is being reduced to mere fragments, he also learns of a sublime literature responding to those historical traumas. One storyteller in particular, Kehinta, begins to reveal to A. just how much has been lost. A profoundly beautiful novel commenting on the horrors of colonial oppression, trauma, love, and the power of story.

Read the Q&A with the author here.

• • Selected for SPD Handpicked
  • Prof. Hogan On His Novel, “A People Without Shame”

Advance praise

Imaginative and gripping.
– Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A People Without Shame is an artistic triumph composed by a master craftsman whose courageous eye makes all too vivid the abundant horrors suffered by beautiful people and their culture at the hands of soul-dead colonizers eager to extinguish them. Patrick Hogan is – as Kurosawa says an artist must be – one who does not look away. Inside this grand and ambitious novel beats an urgent and epic dirge written with magic enough to awaken our collective humanity to the poetry preserved in the raging hearts of people whose stories refuse to die.
– Matt Cashion, author of Last Words of the Holy Ghost

Hogan’s absorbing and stylistically inventive novel offers a stirring meditation on the cost of colonial appropriation. Told with visceral prose and cinematic sweep, it’s also a unique tale of unrequited love. Kehinta, the guardian of her people’s epic poem, is Hogan’s great achievement, magnetic yet always just beyond our grasp, and A’s quest to understand her – to wrest the meaning of a poem from her – brings all the twisted moralities of the colonial enterprise into razor-sharp relief.
– Ken Kwapis, director of He’s Just Not That Into You and The Office

Reviews and mentions

I was finally able to give A People Without Shame the careful reading it deserves. It was an experience filled with wonder and beauty.Matt Cashion was right of course in praising the book’s artistry. It reminded me of my second year of college, when I read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury for the first time. It showed me what the novel is capable of artistically. Reading Hogan’s book was the second such experience.Hogan’s ability to weave mythological material into his narrative and to create new myths when need, is truly stunning.Of course, the fate of Somota is a synecdoche for the whole bloody history of colonialism, but Hogan does much more. He manages to give us a detailed treatment of that history in all its complexity and richness.
– Robert Treu, Professor, Emeritus of EnglishUniversity of Wisconsin, La Crosse

• University of Connecticut