A family history between Aargau, Trinidad and India

Rügen, London, Menziken in Aargau, Trinidad, India and a little bit of Scotland. It is these names, these places, along which the life of Martin R. Dean and that of his ancestors was lived, suffered and endured. It is these places that Dean visits in his autobiographical novel "Tobacco and Chocolate". In his memories, in stories told by his relatives, in photos in an old album belonging to his deceased mother.

Dean's search and journey begins with his mother's death. The journey to his own past and childhood on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, where his father came from. His biological father, whom his mother left with his young son after he beat her in a drunken stupor. The biological father whose existence the entire Swiss side of the family has suppressed, denied and ultimately erased from their lives for a good 50 years.

A composition in a minor key

Dean writes about his memories of his mother and grandparents in dense, precise and vivid language. Especially about his grandmother, with whom he had an intimate relationship. Every word is a note, every sentence a melody, which come together to form a grandiose symphony about colonialism and racism. The music is performed on a multicultural and multiethnic Caribbean island as well as in a small Swiss village.

A composition in a minor key. For as beautiful and elegantly interwoven as the language may be, the narrator's emotional world sounds bitter, even embittered. Apart from his grandparents, he doesn't seem to have been accepted, let alone wanted, at school, in the village or in his family. This could not be expressed more brutally than in the laconic words of the executor after the mother's death: "You were probably never adopted", which is why he is not included in the community of heirs.

British colonialism meets Schwarzenbach Switzerland

So he leaves the house of his mother and long-dead stepfather, the "concrete villa" in the small Aargau village of Menziken, with only an old photo album of his mother. This album forms the starting point for Dean's journey into his own past. A journey that he first begins in his head using the photos and then continues in Trinidad. He meets relatives of his biological father and listens to the multi-layered story of his family, who originally came from India. A story of colonialism, slavery, humiliation, advancement, rape, power and powerlessness.

The journey also takes us to rural Switzerland in the 1960s and 70s. The years of the seasonal workers, mainly from Italy. The years surrounding the xenophobic Schwarzenbach Initiative and the efforts of the grandmother, who immigrated from Rügen, and the mother, who had a son and a husband from the Caribbean, to live more Swiss than the Swiss. And therefore to eradicate everything foreign, everything foreign.

The view of the outsider

Dean shows this life, this society, from the perspective of the outsider, both in Trinidad and in Switzerland. And as bitter as the undertone of this story may be, it leaves no doubt as to how close he always was to his mother. Even though he may have seen her less and less towards the end of her life. Even if he describes her as a woman with two faces, his accomplice and his betrayer. Even if she has suppressed and denied her Caribbean past.

At the end, Dean leaves us with his own conflicting feelings towards his mother: Outrage that she had effectively erased him from the family and sadness that she is dead - and with her, a part of himself.

As ambivalent as the author feels, readers are left feeling just as ambivalent after reading the book. Somewhere between pity for this bitterly tragic life story - as it often seems - and admiration for the expressive and well-composed language with which Martin R. Dean tells this life story.