Simone Atangana Bekono Knihy

Salomé was bullied for years and no one did a single thing to help her.One day she finally snapped.Now at just sixteen years old, she's being held in a secure unit for young offendersSalomé's counsellor, the man whose good opinion is key to her release, is best known for his racist gaffes on reality TV. Her father has recently been diagnosed with liver cancer and her elder sister Miriam's main preoccupation is to get out of their small, close-minded village as soon as possible. Both at home and in the unit, things are unbearably tense. Salomé finds it hard to keep her temper and harder still to think about the crime she is charged with committing. But as time passes, she finds new strength to delve into the reasons for her rage and arrive at her own understanding of punishment, penitence and the paradoxical demands made on her existence as a Black woman. Raw and unsentimental, Confrontations is a powerful depiction of racism and resilience from one of the Netherlands' most exciting new literary voices.

Simone Atangana Bekono's poems are vivid and arresting, with the feeling of letters or diary entries. In nine breath-taking streams of consciousness, the poet explore race, gender and sexuality, addressing the social stigmatization of race and gender and invoking empathy and human connection in a voice that is both confident and innovative.

A bold, unsettling, surprisingly tender debut novel for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Nightcrawling.Salomé Atabong is the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Cameroonian father and a Dutch mother, living in the Netherlands. She arrives at a juvenile detention center to start a six-month sentence for a violent crime, which she did commit but does not regret. Expected to visit with a racist psychologist and perform her apologies, Salomé refuses to atone. But even if Salomé could get home, it would be no her father has recently been diagnosed with liver cancer, and her elder sister Miriam's main preoccupation is to get out of the village as soon as possible. After months in the prison system, she realizes she must come to terms with the real reason behind her rage. Raw and unsentimental yet lyrical, Confrontations captures the paradoxical demands society makes on Black women, the way communities, schools, and the prison system perpetuate racism, and the cost of Black female defiance.