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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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

“Tenants of the House” by Wale Okediran

©Joseph Omotayo

@omotayome For Twitter

I won’t lay it on thick for you about this book. This book is watery. I wish I could be less frank about it. But that is just what it is, watery. This book should be taken back to the publisher, hauled at its editors and a quick thorough work done on it. This novel is a big spoiler to my reading taste and (maybe) to many others’ who may have always wanted to read it or had read it. Buy it and read but you most probably will demand a refund as quickly as it can get you through some twenty pages of the book. This book would have done better as nonfiction. Those who probably read this book’s drafts never helped it or Wale Okediran was just unprepared to tell his political account through the nonfiction genre. This is a shoddy novel. It is literarily starved, clichés riddled and uncertain between fiction and nonfiction. There is so little or nothing to look forward to in this book. That’s the simple truth. Don’t be disappointed when you read it because you already know how bad it can get doing so. But read anyway if you want to.

Tenants of the House struggles to narrate the country's political corruption and schemes, much of which still put the nation in a constant ruin. The genre this book is in is a great disservice to the reader. What should have come out as beautiful nonfiction, or simply as parts of Wale’s biography detailing his experiences as a former member of the House, turns out to be a dull published literature. And we are all calling it a novel. This book is a pitiful case on many accounts. It takes no finickiness to note these holes. There are too numerous to escape. Honestly, I did not learn anything new in this book. It is a book filled with numerous errors, ordinariness and clichés. In the few places where you are about getting closure on some past and present political issues, it again stares bland at you. You are entertained though. But that is only when you consider it as a weak stereotypic melodrama. Perhaps if I were a challenged (academically) secondary school student, I might have loved this book. Perhaps not. You never know the rubbish many Nigerian public (and in most cases, private) secondary schools teach pupils until you go through the same crippled education system. The country’s education is that challenged. This is not a book I want to give a friend or leave for my children to read. I would be doing them bad. I don’t recommend this book. And that is it. If my money could be refunded, I wouldn’t mind.

All I got from the book are no different from what news articles would have given me. It reads that shallow. Painfully though, I will be keeping this book on my shelf. I can’t toss it off. I love my money that much.

Tenants of the House is about the politics laced with shameful hypocrisy. You already know your political leaders are thieves. So, that doesn’t sound new. What moves you however is how this act is carried out. And how your future is being held to ransom in the hands of crooked elites passed off as Legislators, Senators, Governors and a President. The characters are vivid portrayal of the reality we have now, they are not just caricatures. You can easily relate with Wale’s fictional character representations of our substandard politicians. They are no different from what we see around. Pains are bitter memories. And those political humps are still giving us more. Every day. With every tenure. Perhaps, this is one thing you will like the book for. It latches on cheap stereotypes and stereotypes sell.

Amidst the many corruption, Honourable Samuel Bakara is our angelic politician. But his sanctity will always be threatened. From the move to unseat the Speaker, the constitution amendment stunt to whom to love, his travails are multiplied. Nobody in this book is as innocent as it is shown. Everybody is muddled in his own secret desires. And that is not only with the politicians. Everything is about politics and its effects and everyone is trapped. Batejo plays it along with Gidado; Honourable Elizabeth lures Honourable Samuel severally; the House of Representative is in an endless chaos and President Ambrose Oneya continues to play his citizens off each other.

However, in the midst of the clichés are some simplistic truths. This is one:

“…the minority will have their say, the majority their way, in this country where democracy is our mainstay.” (pg. 158)

The following are a touch of the dryness the book reeks of. And they pull me off the reading real bad. Cliché nonsense and tired expressions! I struggled to finish this book:

“In one fell swoop…” (pg. 58)

“As expected, the speaker’s press conference caused so much stir as an earthquake in many quarters.” (pg. 72)

“You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs…” (pg. 85)

“To my great annoyance…” (pg. 125)

At many times, you really just want to know the editors of this book and have them questioned over much lopsidedness in the book. Consider this; Hon. Samuel had already met the President before, and he rambles on like he is just doing so for the first time as he again meets the President at the Villa. Read the following:

“He looked completely different from the cartoon caricature of a sleep-eyed and gaunt-looking with oversized ear lobes sticking out like a rabbit’s. President Oneya appeared smart, even handsome…” (pg. 177)

The above contradicts with the below:

“…I recalled my previous encounters with the President. In all four of them, I have found him eager to talk, down-to-earth and, to say to the least, quick-witted.” (pg. 177)

I do not wish to go on. Tenants of the House does not cut it for me. This book had better been done up by the publisher soon. It’s been over three years since it was published. It is not just the type of book I want to ever read again. Not one I want to recommend to anyone.