Landlords and Lodgers analyzes the results of a long-term study of a Ghanaian zongo, or “stranger quarter”—a place of refuge for Hausa migrants from northern Nigeria who have relocated to the city of Accra. Deborah Pellow explores the relationships among community members both in terms of the built structures—rooms, doors, communal structures, and hallways—and of the social networks, institutions, and routine activities that define this unique urban neighborhood. This volume will be useful to students and scholars of the relationships between architecture, migration, and social change.
 
“This richly observed and lovingly constructed portrait of a distinctive community will be of interest to spatially informed scholars of religion, immigration, minority communities, and gender.”—Gender, Place and Culture
 
“This theoretically informed, well-researched, and closely written book should be quite useful. . . . A fine case study of urban sense of place in a unique, yet in some ways emblematic, West African neighborhood.”—Gareth Myers, Professional Geographer

 

 

A comic novel of war from a teenager's point-of-view

Published as the siege of Sarajevo ended, Lodgers is a hilarious, unsentimental report from the front lines of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Detergent mixed with flour, museum relics sold to U.N. peacekeepers, the magic power of laminated accreditation-all of the folly and the horror of that time are revealed in the sarcastic report of the novel's teenage would-be authoress.

Maja lives in the basement of a Sarajevo museum, enduring with equal annoyance Serb artillery and vegetarian meals that taste like fried sponge. Her father, the museum director, zealously guards the treasures upstairs while their aged co-lodger Julio plots to trade them away. Maja's mother copes with yoga while dour stepbrother Davor endures the endless crying and cravings of his pregnant wife. Floating amidst it all is Maja's grandmother, blind and deaf, yet drawn to any conversation involving food.

Need and crisis propel Maja and her companions from one humorous situation to another. Yet her pitch-perfect gallows humor makes it clear that the brutalities of war penetrate these small moments of life-and even the self-centeredness of a teenaged girl. A best seller in the Balkans and widely translated in Europe, Lodgers is an uncompromising novel about a modern tragedy.