During her last visit to Cameroon, where she was born, her uncle nicknamed Issa “coconut”: “Brown on the outside and white on the inside” he explained. An echo of the words of her music teacher, in Germany, where she grew up, who compared her to “a ‘n-head…’” because she did not know how to sing “while black people had the reputation of being good singers”. Too European for Africans, too African for Europeans, Issa, in her thirties, does not feel like she belongs to any land. It is also in the no-man’s land of the sky, on board an Air France flight which takes her to Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, that the reader meets her.
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