Olga Stanisławska is a Polish writer and freelance journalist[1] who has studied American literature in Warsaw and Aix-en-Provence.
The book, born from a year-long trip between Casablanca and Kinshasa, attempted to capture local voices, combining political reportage, travel writing and essay.
It addressed the heavy burden of clichés present in Western literature, philosophy and art history (Joseph Conrad, Carl Jung, Julien Green André Gide, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Karen Blixen, André Malraux...), where Africa is nowhere to be seen, replaced with the Western projections of the childhood of humanity and the repressed, dark part of the human psyche.
Since 1999 she has been travelling to the Middle East, following the routes of the Crusades, but investigating mainly present-day collective identities – national, ethnic, religious – from Clermont to Cairo and back to the suburbs of Paris.
Her interest in multi-ethnic environments springs from the feeling of an amputated memory and aims ultimately at a more intimate understanding of mechanisms at work in the heterogeneous society of the pre-war Poland.