No flies or muzzles on Africa’s young storytellers
I’M still working out what it means to be an African writer. For me, collections such as Short Story Day Africa’s Feast, Famine & Potluck are evidence of some kind of consciousness — of heritage, of genetics, of culture and identity. What makes us, us? And how do we write about that without it getting in the way of the story?
SSDA runs annual writing competitions, and 2013’s anthology collects the 19 long-listed entries. Many of the offerings deal with the truth of sorrow and injustice as the existential precondition of the continent, but the stories are also imbued with humour that rises above that existence.
These stories don’t begin with the ordinary: they take the extraordinary for granted. My favourites are saturated with the pathos and mystery associated with the South American writers of magical realism. Nick Mulgrew’s outstanding, Coupland-esque Ponta do Ouro has “a sea pulling azure and mildmannered”.
In Efemia Chela’s marvellous Chicken, the narrator “had left sigh by sigh, breath by breath, over the years. By the time my leaving party came, I was somewhere else entirely.”
Also pleasing is the absence of carefulness that often muzzles our fiction. The writers here spare no one. The characters spew cheerful prejudice, all in their quest for better lives. These social climbers are embarrassed by black parents who still hand out Dickensian names to their children, though Aloysius and Enid get points for “rebranding themselves Loyo and Nida”.
Lauri Kubuitsile, in Black Coffee Without Sugar, has her motivational speaker muse that in Botswana “it was easy to convince people you were some-
The characters spew cheerful prejudice
thing if you said it confidently enough”. The characters blame themselves as much as their circumstances for their predicaments — the collusion of indolence and bad luck.
The more serious trauma narratives in the anthology are less polished — earnest, but deeply clichéd. Such is life, they seem to say — and especially, life in Africa. These narratives are often necessary trajectories for the writers, but my God, they are hard on the reader.
For comparison we can only refer to the other stories in the collection. Luckily, Rachel Zadok and Tiah Beautement, who oversaw the selection processes, have put together a very clever anthology.
The fact that these stories are all first drafts is even more impressive. I’m waiting by the mailbox for more from Chela, Mulgrew and Okwiri Oduor, who took first place in the competition with My Father’s Head. Because there is always something new out of Africa. — Diane Awerbuck.