“We Need New Names” by NoViolet Bulawayo

©Joseph Omotayo

“If you are stealing something it’s better if it’s small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with like guavas. That way, people can’t see you with the thing to be reminded that you are a shameless thief and that you stole it from them, so I don’t know what the white people were trying to do in the first place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country.” (pg. 20)

I fell in love with almost everything in this book. Above all, I swooned for its diction. It is simple yet engaging. You would too when you read it. Bulawayo really has an engaging way with language. In this book, the language is not just a means of communication but the stories, the characters even. The language becomes the narrator and the narrator just a character. In literature, this is what is called an indirect characterization. With it, we know the characters not only by how we are told they are but by their personal nuances. In “We Need New Names”, characters are mostly known for their language property. As Darling changes borders, as her life becomes less starved, as she begins living out her dreams, as she battles with adolescence and making meaning of her worlds and making memories of home; her languages are many. She is her words. Words really are character developers. When she speaks here you could tell who she is and her condition:

“We all find places, and me, I squat behind a rock. This is the worst part about guavas; because of all those seeds, you get constipated once you eat too much. Nobody says it, but I know we are constipated again, all of us, because nobody is trying to talk, or get up and leave. We just eat a lot of guavas because it’s the only way to kill hunger, and when it comes to defecating, we get in so much pain it becomes an almost impossible task, like you are trying to give birth to a country” (pg. 16)

And when you encounter her again here, you needn’t be told her world’s changed. Words are that revealing:

“The teasing stopped only when Tom joined our class; I don’t know where he came from but he came with these crooked teeth and long, greasy hair and these large glasses and this sad stutter. Somehow he made them forget about me and I almost felt like thanking him for it. I remember they teased him harder, maybe because he was a boy. I remember they always wanted him to fight and called him freak, which I had to Google since I had never heard the word before…” (pg. 106)

The book could appear grim at the start. As Darling, Chipo Bastard, Godknows, Sbho and Stina shuffle around in hunger, poaching around for food and managing boredom, everything is stark hopelessness. You may wonder who these children meandering around homeless and roving Budapest for guavas are. You may even question Chipo’s pregnancy. It is only when you get to Real Change that answers to those may be provided. The book does have its chain of causes well laid out. Nothing is desperate. Nothing is patronizing. When I first read Hitting Budapest, a section in the book, as a short story on the Caine shortlist, I wondered at the demeaning uncertainty it portrayed. There was just no backlink to the story. The story was just not convincing beyond the desperation to make horrible and enforce weepy characters. Then, I labelled it desperate. However, just as many were soon to discover with the publication of the book, I was in the wrong.  Perhaps, that is a big problem with submitting an excerpt of a longer story, of a book in progress, for a competition. But it worked for Bulawayo anyway. It gave her a winning and a head start for her new book. However, her critics were only done for with their tired sophistry and shoogly views, shrilling about how stereotypes in African stories must stop. SMH.

Bulawayo really pulls it off with How They Left. That part of the book does serve as a good plot divider. How They Left takes the reader into the changed world of Darling. In this world, we begin to see how everything gradually upturns in Darling’s endearing vision of America. And when you come to the next part of the book, titled DestroyedMichygen, subtle presages of what are to come to Darling are not lost on you. I just love this book! I hope somebody who’s read it does too. Do you? However, as the book sets in America, it begins bleeding itself as some parts only whine on and on about immigrant tired troubles. Really, I am already bored to anger reading these commonplace immigrant troubles. When you read a part like How They Lived, its pure bellyaching butt-scratching shrill is ordinarily obvious. Darn! What’s that really? It is just shrilling, squawking, and loud sulking. This here only wants to make you rip out some pages out in the book:

“How hard it was to get to America – harder than crawling through the anus of a needle. For the visas and passports, we begged, despaired, lied, groveled, promised, charmed, bribed – anything to get us out of the country…. And when we got to America we took our dreams, looked at them tenderly as if they were newly born children, and put them away; we would not be pursuing them… Instead of going to school, we worked. Our social Security cards said ‘Valid for work only with INS authorization’, but we gritted our teeth and broke the law and worked….” (pg. 240-242)

“We Need New Names” is filled with many themes evenly knitted with the main story. You will certainly relate with it. Of infantile innocence in terrible situations, of the longing for home and personal reinvention, of numbing oneself to pains and gaining newer experiences, of stitching cures in strange lands, of adolescence and hormonal confusion: there is a story for everyone. Really, you can’t just be bored reading this book. I could relate with Darling and her oyinbo friends. Mind you, don’t get me wrong. I am just one who also has once got teenage rampaging hormone. Hehehehe. *winks*

“I am looking at her purple high-heeled shoes and wondering how anyone can stand on those things. The boy comes up behind her, his thing like a snake in front of him. I reach forward and click on Mute because when the real action starts we always like to be the soundtrack of the flicks. We have learned to do the noises, so when the boy starts working the woman we moan and moan and we groan, our noise growing fiercer with each hard thrust like we have become the woman in the flick and we are feeling the boy’s thing inside us…” (pg. 201-202)

Have you read this book? Let’s talk about it. I want to know what you think.

*****

Follow me on Twitter @omotayome

 

·         Next on CLR: Molara Wood’s Indigo, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, Igoni Barret’s Love is Power or Something Like That.

African Roar 2013 (An anthology of 13 short stories)

©Joseph Omotayo

Sometime this week, I was at a carpenter’s shop. I was to give him a description of what I wanted him to do for me. I thought of sketching or showing him a snapshot of what I wanted. Anyway, I relied on words. Awfully, my words failed at description, at successfully substituting the sketch or the snapshot. I struggled with descriptive words as I resorted to gestures and voice modulation. Maybe he understood me. Maybe he didn’t. I wouldn’t know. However, I left there feeling unfulfilled. I didn’t used words well. I could have done better. Some of the books I have been reading lately are seriously starved, lifeless and unable to communicate. Just like my encounter with the carpenter. It is Updike who says “but one can’t give more than he has received…” (see “Burn This Book” edited by Toni Morrison). So who says the many books I have been reading recently didn’t affect my carpenter’s experience? And who says they have? *winks*

My recent readings failed to draw me into their worlds. Talking about them, lukewarmness would be a compliment. And that’s the simple reason I have been shying away from reviewing them. I may bellyache if I do, which is as bad as just ranting. I want to review objectively. Anything totally rubbish is not just worth my time, my words, this space, the awareness, the readership. So, I have been mute for some time until now. Perhaps because African Roar 2013 is an anthology of short stories. And not all stories in an anthology can be as all bad, some will still be well worth talking about. 

I have been following African Roar since its inception in 2010. Read my previous comments here, here and here. I have always found the short story genre interesting. Like living, it’s in mixes of its interesting own. It could sometimes be misshapen but not entirely shapeless. I believe the short story is the proper depiction of life in its multi narratives. That is also the reason why I see more tangibility in Alice’s short stories than Morrison’s novels (or sometimes novellas). They both are feministic though and true to their engagements but one moves me closer to life than the other. I love short narratives, they cannot afford pretense. The space is little. They come to tell life better without as much dithering. When they dither, they fail. When they do, it’s clear to all. I think the allure of the short story influences what Oyebanji Ayodele has attributed to its fleeting nature.

In 2010 I reviewed African Roar as speaking with the synergy that tells of the past, present and continuing-present. In 2011, it guides you through the labyrinth of issues its writers are concerned with. Last year, it portrays bleak situations but moving all the same. So, this year, when I say it is as good as some parts are also lost on you, know I am frank. No word minced. African Roar 2013 is better enjoyed at its half. That is the way I see it. In African Roar 2013, the themes are of the dire needs for companionship, of social battles for a better living, of tortuous fates, of insensitive paternity and of evil catching up with the doer. These mixes are interesting. You should read this year’s anthology, there are a lot going on in it.

Of Companionship:

Alison Bwalya's “Home” connects identity with pains, with death, with reinvention; the reinvention that makes us half human and half un-human. Being un-human is worse than being a beast. We are memories. We collect them and they define us. We slip on them and we become the un-us, the new 'us' opposite to what our loved ones know, the ones they can't relate with. We slowly kill ourselves and others because we have lost some memories to gain more. We think of home and know not where it is; here or there. Fungisai is reinvented. Katherine is memory. Neville is killed; he is un-him, he is un-past and Katherine is gone. Forever. And Fungisai is reinvented. Immediately.

Just how far will you bear it before you yank his penis off? In Lydia Matata’s “Cut it Off” we see the different abuses that could push a woman to such end. The abuses that could make a woman suddenly turn to what makes her lover male and slices it off. This story stages a montage of a phone-in show as listeners call in to comment on a woman who has recently cut her husband’s off. It is a story of the abused gaining public confidence from a woman’s bold step. This is one of the stories that you may have to read twice to get. You are half into the story before you know how one conversation is different from the other. So many are talking and the paragraphing is poor. The writer fails at dialogue separation. And that muddles the characters together. It is so noisy in there.

Of Social Battles for a Better Living:

There could be only one main reason why Khaled is leaving Bunkpurugu, Hassan and Grandmamma behind. Khaled’s journey to Accra is not only of his own salvation. It is of others’ too. For one reason though, it is of Hassan’s salvation from the many Khaled-esque troubles. Read Aba Amissah Asiboni’s “Salvation in Odd Places”.

Ola Nubi’s “Green Eyes and an Old Photo” graces my reading. Oyedeji wants a better life abroad. He goes to England studying and working. As his family’s burdens weigh on him, he also struggles with racism. There is black hatred everywhere. He seeks a better life and finds Sandra. He later has Sarah and his trauma becomes a loveable memory.

Of Insensitive Paternity and Tortuous Fates:

Bryan Bwesigye’s “Through the Same Gate” interests me. His is of a good story telling and one of the reasons you should read this anthology.  The flashback is well laid and you are not lost. The narrator is called all sorts. His great tribulation is his stepmother, Annette. He bears it well and gets inured to it. That he lives with his father does not bring reprieve. With his tears also comes the relief he needs from his bottled up emotion.

It is fate that separates Samira from Njeri and Atenio, her childhood friends. In their infantile convenience, they had built colourful future together. Abdiqani Hassan’s “The Faces of Fates” explores the irony of their separation. But more ironical is the way they meet later again. Life could be that funny.

****

African Roar keeps coming every year to showcase our writings. We should appreciate this. It isn’t everywhere you come across a medium as this which is committed to giving voices to relatively unknown writers. African Roar promotes us, our stories.

  

•  Follow me on Twitter @omotayome

"The Thing Around Your Neck" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Thing Around Your Neck has been around for a while now. However, Oyebanji Ayodele’s thoughts on it are refreshing. Reading this review, and if you had read this book before now, you will really want to go into it once more. Oyebanji Ayodele engages one that well in this.

Read this guest review by Oyebanji Ayodele. Enjoy.

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The short story is renowned for its fleeting nature. Like life. That is probably the singular reason readers like myself find themselves immersed in its charm. The reader is saved from the long, winding and grand narratives of the novel. Hence, the wit exhibited by proficient short story writers. They manipulate form with such compressed intensity as to make every word matter, creatively injecting ‘that moment when everything changes’. This is a fact I often remember the BBC Open Book podcast on short stories for. An interviewee in that particular edition posits that “…the best short stories are about the moment everything changes…”  R.K. Narayan’s A Horse and Two Goats, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, V.S. Naipaul’s My Aunt Gold Teeth and Rotimi Babatunde’s Bombay’s Republic exhibit this, and to my satisfaction.

I love short story collections. They afford the writer a kind of productive dynamism as s/he negotiates his or her themes, each story with its own. This - courtesy of the fact that the stories exist with quite a lot of issues lurking behind the porch - leaves me with enough cud to chew.

The short story sub-genre has thrived well in this dispensation. Thanks to the internet. You could read as much as you like and wherever: an attestation to the impending end of paperbacks. Paperbacks were once like permits into the literary world. You are no writer if you haven’t published the traditional way. However, things have changed that even when short story collections make it into print, some stories therein would have enjoyed enough readership on cyberspace. This is the case with Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Whispering Trees and Chimamanda’s The Thing Around Your Neck.

THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK: A RUNDOWN OF SOME STORIES

Cell One

Cell One is the name that arouses fear in the minds of the Enugu Police Station inmates. The reckless son of a Mathematics professor, Nnamabia would find his way to prison, and from there, to Cell One. He entertains no trait of cowardice as he risks his life for a fellow inmate.

The beauty of this story consists in the suspense that brands its end.

Imitation

When the original begins to lack its value or is nowhere to be found, it is no sin to make do with an imitation. Imitation tells the tale of how pertinent identity is to humans, irrespective of location. Nkem, though in America has to compromise her identity in terms of looks just to claim her straying husband.

What fascinates me in this story is how the motifs of immigration and imitation are made to anchor on the hair motif.  Moreover, the story affords Adichie an opportunity to tacitly mention her new book, Americanah:

“I hope you understand the big-big English they speak; they are Americanah now, oh!”

On Monday of Last Week

On Monday of Last Week relates Kamara’s journey to self-realization. That lesbian part of her that is probably squelched by reason of her conservative culture finds expression in America. It resurges with the appearance of Tracy, the painter and mother of Josh, the boy she babysits.

The Thing Around Your Neck

The occasional thing that ties itself around Akunna’s neck is not a pendant. Neither is it physical. It is a sign. When the conduit through which she gets to the New World disenchants her, she settles for an independent life that is intermittently paused by something tying itself around her neck. Akunna will have to trace the significance of the sign.

The American Embassy

Unlike every other America-bound character in the collection, the anonymous protagonist of this story is on her way to the United States of America for a different purpose. A partaker of the high-handedness of the rule of Nigerian despot, General Sanni Abacha towards the press, she helps her journalist-husband sneak out of the country and loses her only child. Her story details the frustration inherent in the pursuit of the American dream.

There is a creative shuttling between the actual narration and reminiscences.

The Shivering

What could send ripples down one’s spine? The Shivering. It transcends spiritual exercises of praying and speaking in incomprehensible tongues. The shivering comes when one tries to reminisce and unveil a doleful past. For Chinedu, the devout Christian who is also conflicted, the past is Abidemi,; for Ukamaka, Udenna. The Shivering climaxes with Ukamaka and Chinedu discovering themselves and seeing where their lives dovetail. They seem optimistic, that they will overcome.

The Arrangers of Marriage

The culture of arranging marriages between parties not known to each other is peculiar to the African society. Such relationships brim with imperative voids and uncertainties which have to be sorted out. Agatha finds out later that the arrangers of her marriage to Dave Bell (‘my new husband’ as she refers to him) have withheld more than enough from her. They probably consider them trivial. She does puzzle the inconsequential realities out later.

***

TALKING HONESTY

Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie with The Thing Around Your Neck asserts her honesty as a writer. I find that she fits into Emmanuel Iduma’s description in a recent article - On Writing Now (1) - of what writing must be:

Writing always demands honesty to place, honesty to time, and honesty to self.

Adichie’s writing appeals to the temporal and all that surrounds it. The importance of nursing an American dream for a Nigerian in the twenty-first century is given considerable space in the collection. To nurse the American dream is to be a party to the stereotyping of Nigeria; an expression of its binary oppositeness to America, but I often ponder on the possibility of excusing our writings from the fangs of stereotypes. The truth is this: stereotypes continue to be turned out when certain realities remain tied to the everyday lives of a people. That justifies the existence of the many America-working schemes – the Christian ones especially - that smear Adichie’s work. 

For documenting how America has Nigerians by the short hairs, Adichie becomes what Ayodele Morocco-Clarke, in her Gambit interview, calls ‘the gatekeeper of what is the sepulchre of her era’. 

Hair. The issue of hair is not just an Americanah phenomenon. It is an Adichie thing. I have not read Americanah and I’m glad about it. I have a lot to carry into it. Having read reviews of the book as well as a couple of the author’s interviews, all talking about the germane-ness of hair to her narration, I went into The Thing Around Your Neck with the mind of finding some other recurring motif. Something different from the Biafra tale. Not even hair. Lo, I found hair! Adichie takes a woman’s hair as a veritable tool for starting critical discourses on identity. In Imitation, she does explore hair in its entirety. The pubic hair is not exempted. It foreshadows the relatedness of the work to sexuality.

Sexuality does deserve a mention. The collection does not privilege heterosexuality; it has a fair amount of queer characters. This turns out to be remarkable because of the hostile treatment Africans have always meted out to homosexuals. I am gripped by the homophobia of Africans in this:

“…Tracy appeared, curvy in leggings and a tight sweater, smiling, squinting, pushing away long dreadlocks from her face with paint-stained fingers. It was a strange moment. Their eyes held and suddenly Kamara wanted to lose weight and wear makeup again. A fellow woman who has the same thing you have? her friend Chinwe would say if she ever told her. Tufia! What kind of foolishness is that?”

(On Monday of Last Week, Pg 81)

Adichie’s collection presents the reverse of Daniel Vignal’s position as it is expressed in Chris Dunton’s Wheytin be Dat? The Treatment of Homosexuality in African Literature:

"For the majority of [African writers], homophilia is exclusively a deviation introduced by colonialists or their descendants; by outsiders of all kinds: Arabs, French, English, metis, and so on. It is difficult for them to conceive that homophilia might be the act of a black Africa"

She uses the like of Kamara (in On Monday of Last Week), the Senegalese (in Jumping Monkey Hill) and Chinedu (in The Shivering) accentuate her position. This queer trio does not attribute its sexual orientation to western influences.

***

“THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK” AND ME

I dislike The Thing Around Your Neck for the parallels that abound in its stories, the immigrant stories especially. The reader keeps encountering almost the same thing, time and again. What’s more? The personification of most of her male characters is one-sided. I feel for the poor things, but that is simply Adichie.

That Adichie is a gifted storyteller needs no more proof. Her stories teem with depth and originality. However, whenever she is mentioned, I often demand that she is saved the hype that comes off. She is a good writer. That’s all.

***

• Oyebanji Ayodele blogs at ayoyebanji.blogspot.com and tweets @ayoyebanji. He could be reached via ayoyebanji@gmail.com