Jadelin Gangbo’s deeply personal novel, Ground, is a powerful vision of a family split across continents. The book opens in 1982, when our narrator, a little boy named Redesof, and his six siblings wake up to discover that their house is on fire. As they escape from the flames, Redesof explains that their parents have returned to their home in Congo-Brazzaville, leaving their children in the Italian countryside.
Shunted by the Italian state into different institutions, Redesof and his siblings emerge as creative, resilient children, growing up in the ‘temporary machine of care provision’, with minimal contact from their family abroad. But they are haunted by this void of distance, and their father’s delusional promises to provide them a stable home.
Being Italians of Congolese and Beninese heritage, they become ‘victims of a deep internal battle, involving two colliding identities’, as they contend with racism in Italy’s society.
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The narrative slips between scenes of family history and moments from Redesof’s middle-aged life in England. Gangbo unpacks the complex experiences of parents hoping to give their children better futures in Europe, while witnessing the agonies inflicted on migrants ‘crying to the sky to be seen as humans’.
As adults, Redesof and his siblings face continual insecurity, in housing, work, and the state’s resistance to giving them their rightful citizenship.
