The compendiums. I often shy away from such collections because, to be blunt, I don’t like them very much. I love reading short story collections, but when I do, I like reading them all from one author, like a big chunk of chocolate rather than an assortment of tiny bits of candy that mixed anthologies always end up feeling to me. But the blurb for Africa39: stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (who I’ve been reading since Purple Hibiscus came out) and Dinaw Mengestu (who writes about Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Diaspora, so you know I love), so I read it and these are my random thoughts regarding that decision:
The first story is Adichie’s and I’m thinking okay, this can work. I can overlook an introduction that makes liberal use of etc. etc. (it’s a pre-release; maybe the intro is still getting polished) and talks about dialectical materialism like I should know what that means more than my vague sense it has something to do with Karl Marx. So we have our amazing first story: heart rendering and true feeling and what you want a short story to be. And the second story is by an author unknown to me, Monica Arac de Nyeko and it’s also amazing, capturing class and religion and childhood and wrapping it all up in a banana leaf like a tamale.
And then the quality becomes variable and I ended up slogging through most of the other thirty-seven stories. It’s just everything I dislike about compendiums like this. The quality of the stories is variable. The style is variable. My mind gets all turned upside down as I go from stories with lazy storytelling:
…check my reflection in the glass door. [this is followed by five lines of what she looks like in the mirrored doors]
Number 9, Nadifa Mohammed
(Don’t have a character look in the mirror and tell me what they look like. I’m pretty sure that’s on page one of Writing Fiction);
to stories of rhythmic, melodic lists ending in tea:
It’s a prison of files arranged alphabetically — Assorted toiletries, Baby Foods, Body Building, Body care, Bulk Items, Confectionary and so on until Teas.
Day and Night, Mehul Gohil;
to descriptions so spot on that I’m angry I didn’t think of them myself:
He seems to have forgotten that she is there with him, and as she watches him in the dim light, she feels like she is watching a man masturbate inside her.
Sometime Before Maulidi, Ndinda Kioko;
to scenes I want to steal:
‘Bury me in the evening, under glittering stars from above and a sea of lit candles from among yourselves.’ … how we in our pyjamas fobbed moths which somehow understood the gravity of our collective mourning.
Rusty Bell, Nthikeng Mohlele;
and sentences I’m going to use myself somewhere, someday:
I used to like my brother’s girlfriend, until …
Echoes of Mirth, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
and then back to overwritten strained metaphors:
…it seemed that the countryside was quietly hysterical.
Hiding in Plain Sight, Mary Watson
until I’m so confused that I have no idea if
They all had penises the size of semicolons … After a while they all had to leave his loft and find another place for their semicolon parade.
No Kissing the Dolls Unless Jimmy Hendrix is Playing, Clifton Gachagua
is good writing or not. Is it clever? Is it overdone. I have no idea. I’m so lost.
Then, too, these aren’t all short stories. Some are, but some are excerpts from novels or, far worse, novels in progress. So I read a fully enclosed story, followed by open ended scenes that need the rest of the novel there, that introduce characters I should have already met, and hint at situations that haven’t been resolved, and thus I feel cheated. Add to this that some of these excerpts are stream-of-consciousness and I have nothing to situate myself in, nothing at all. I am adrift.
I once took a music CD out of the library about music in Africa. It was sixty or so songs, from all over the continent, in many different languages and pretty much all styles: rap, reggae, country, rock and roll, instrumental, traditional, techno, and mash-ups of any of those and more (best song on that album Barra Barra by Rachid Taha). It seemed very much like the music company was saying Look, African music isn’t all Fela Kuti and Miriam Makeba (although both were on the CD). This collection should likely be viewed as a wordy-sampler offering the same thing. Look Africa can do crime novels! Mystery! Literary! Stream of Consciousness! Didactic fables! But, at the end, after what felt like a slog, I don’t know if I needed to be convinced of all that. But it was a diversion to have a book of Africa with minimal Europeans and no lions and a cover without a picture of an acacia tree with the setting sun in the background.
So, should you read this book: Yes? No? It jumps all over the place that I can’t tell you. If you are interested in works by POC, maybe? How do you rank, or recommend, or anti-recommend, a collection of stories where some were worth it and others just made you want to [insert your least favourite chore to do here, like I really hate scrubbing the bathtub or dusting] rather than read another page? I’m new to this reviewing business so I don’t know. You spin the wheel, you take your chances, as my mother says. You’re going to have to make up your own mind.
Africa39 edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey goes on sale October 28, 2014.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.