“By day, Pierre Claes was cutting through the jungles. At night, by the glow of a small oil lamp, destroyed by opium, he offered his body to the art of Xi Xiao. The latter tattooed a marvellous drawing on it, following the secret balance of the body and the limits of death. Bent over the young man’s golden skin, which exhaled his last childhood smells, the Chinese executioner drew the plans for a cut-out that would end his career, his love and his world.”
One morning in September 1890, a Belgian surveyor, commissioned by his King to dismantle Africa, left Leopoldville for the North. With the authority of the stars and a few scholarly instruments, Pierre Claes’ mission was to materialize, in the wilderness, the exact course of what Europe then called “progress”. On board the Fleur de Bruges, gliding down the Congo River, he is accompanied by Bantu workers and Xi Xiao, a Chinese master tattooist, an executioner specialising in the art of human cutting. He sees the future in everything: Xi Xiao knows what a work of abomination colonization is, and he knows that he will love the surveyor of love. Darkness is the story of a mutilation. Kawczak presents an incredible adventure novel full of eroticism, an opera of desire and pain with magical realism, which from Northern Europe to the heart of Africa flows like a tear of blood on the face of History.
