Toure. Soul city : a novel, New York : Little, Brown and Co., 2004.When magazine journalist Jackson Cadillac travels to Soul City, a geographically isolated community in the US established by flying slaves, he falls for the girl (and society) of his dreams. Soulfully colourful vignettes abound as Mahogany (Jackson's muse, an in-house DJ working in a neighbourhood biscuit-shop) shows the protagonist a society where people-of-colour are free to be themselves, music seeps from every crack in the pavement, and doses of soulful salvation are doled out as thick as a steamy gumbo at the local church, St Pimp's House of Baptist Rapture. Toure's fable is an artful counter-position of human liberation -as embodied in Soul City, to dystopic decay, embodied by black existence in the rest of modern America. Frequent-flyers on the P-Funk's Mothership Connection will most definitely turn on to this voyage - can you dig it?
