Dark Neighbourhood
By Vanessa Onwuemezi Fitzcarraldo Editions, £10.99 (softcover)
It’s strange to say it when confronted by a bookful of them, but you walk away from this one with the feeling that words are elusive things. Not to say that Vanessa Onwuemezi doesn’t exploit words to their full allusive potential in her debut collection of seven short stories. She does. But in one sense Dark Neighbourhood documents a struggle with words. With what they are. With words as stand-ins, exchanged for physical objects, for sensations, emotions and memories. Indeed, there are times in most of these stories when words are not enough. They’ve gone missing. Leaving behind nothing more than an empty white space. Not so much that sentences lose their meaning – ‘I take this body and I be alone with it’, for example – but enough to make you wonder about that space, in the caesura it causes.
We’re warned in the opening tale (after which the collection is titled), which revolves around a group of people queuing in some sort of postapocalyptic purgatory, waiting to be admitted to someplace else through a gate. Punctuation is occasionally spelled out and placed in parenthesis. An aide-mémoire, or an instruction to take a breath. Whether it is addressed to author or reader is, like much else in this book, ambiguous. ‘Interpretation is anyone’s to make,’ warns the narrator.
In ‘Cuba’ a migrant hotel maid muses over what happens to the words recited in a series of clandestine meetings to unionise the precarious labour force when confronted by the reality they are supposed to improve: ‘The same words are affirmed every time, sisterhood, solidarity, love, freedom, truth bleed into the daily rhythm of work: curtains pulled, sheets stretched…’. In ‘Bright Spaces’, one of several meditations on loss and death, a university education is reduced to another form of exchange – a new, fancy vocabulary replacing the everyday old: ‘divinity, ontology, petrichor…’.
For all that this might make Dark Neighbourhood seem like an attack on language, the collection is illuminated throughout by Onwuemezi’s own precise and lyrical use of words and the rhythms they create. It’s a dangerous game, in which meaning can sometimes battle the author’s love of form, but she pulls it off with some aplomb. Mark Rappolt