1 A Kiss of Death: The Perils of Migration in Donato Ndongo’s El Metro Maurice O’Connor Universidad de Cádiz 1. Unlike Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (Shadows of Your Black Memory English translation) (1987) and Los poderes de la tempestad (1997) Donato Ndongo’s third novel Metro does not centre its attention on the author’s homeland. This shift suggests that Ndongo wishes to speak of the African diasporic experience in more general terms rather than situate it within Equatorial Guinea’s highly volatile political scenario. The unnamed village of the Mbalmayo region in Cameroon’s Central Province becomes the cosmos from where all action either eradicates from or refers back to. However, as the book’s title suggests, migration moreover than the quotidian African experience is the novel’s central concern and the narrative explores this motif through the protagonist’s abandoning of his home. Paradoxically, only a quarter of the novel is actually dedicated to Obama Ondo’s odyssey from Cameroon to Europe’s shores and his subsequent life as illegal immigrant. The novel’s lack of focus to its central motif may, at first, be construed as one of its shortcomings, however, further reflection reveals the prime importance of the African section of the novel. The narrative strategy Ndongo employs in Metro is to weave a rich tapestry of the Mbalmayo region against which the final section of the novel must always be juxtaposed. Without a prior engaging with the complexities of the postcolonial experience, the reader would otherwise fail to grasp the significance of Obama’s tragic destiny. Before centring our analysis on the trope of migrancy, we shall therefore elucidate upon the Cameroonian section of the novel so as to clarify its central importance within the overall thematic structure.