THE 2020 CAINE PRIZE SHORTLIST reviewed

NOTE THAT THE PRIZE WILL BE AWARDED AND CELEBRATED IN A NEW FILM ON MONDAY, 27 JULY 2020
The 2020 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing published in 2019 will be announced quite soon (see below). I will quote from the website's potted history of the prize, which is now in its twentieth year.

The Caine Prize – often described as Africa’s leading literary award – is granted annually for African creative writing. It is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc and Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years.

The 21 countries represented in this year’s eligible submissions are: Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The Prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English (indicative length 3,000 to 10,000 words). An African writer is taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or has a parent who is African by birth or nationality.

Each writer shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize will be awarded £500, and the winner will receive a £10,000 prize. The twentieth winner of the Caine Prize will be announced at an award dinner on Monday, 8 July 2020, at Senate House, University of London, in partnership with SOAS and with the support of the Centre for African Studies. This date was announced after the COVID-19 lockdown knocked the originally scheduled date out of consideration, and is as of now still the planned event time. (For the curious, I reviewed the 2015 Prize shortlist because Lesley Nneka Arimah's story "What It Means When A Man Falls From the Sky" appeared on it; then later her story collection because it is fiery hot beautiful writing.)

All five writers whose work will be honored are listed here. Links to the Prize-eligible stories are the titles of the reviews below. As is my habit, I've used the Bryce Method to organize the presentation of my individual reviews.

Irenosen Okijie's 2019 collection, Nudibranch, published by Dialogue Books in November 2019, and was listed by The Guardian on its Must Read Books in 2019 list.

Grace Jones introduces Sidra, or what's left of her, a Martinican impersonator whose life is a series of events arranged by enigmatic broker Hassan. Her externally flawless presentation of the Divine Grace on the night Author Okijie writes about is at a film producer's party, a celebration of whatever people like him hire impersonators like Sidra to decorate. Her entrance, escorted by "Marilyn Monroe," causes some stir:

She smiled at this part of what was essentially a ceremony, a performance. This part always felt
good. The bodies leaned in, clutching their wine glasses. The draughtsman appeared behind them holding two yellow-handled screwdrivers. There were tongues in the wine flutes, floating, then curling mid-scream, sinking to the bottom. Sidra closed her eyes momentarily as the humming in her brain
began. She disappeared into her role: Grace Jones.

Nothing perfect is truly flawless, though. The surface shine covers a roiling sea of powerful and impossible memories and dreams. Does Sidra see dead people, or is Miss Grace Jones giving her the grace of externalizing her agony?

Sidra doesn't know. I don't either. But I do know when a door to a different, richer, more intensely alive place opens. It does in these eighteen PDF pages.

Jowhor Ile's 2016 debut novel And After Many Days earned a 4.5-star rating from me. His Prize-eligible story reviewed here appeared first in The Sewanee Review.

Fisherman's Stew joins Nimi and Benji in the midst of their long-rehearsed body ballet, never mind that Benji has, well, died:

If it was a crack in her mind that had let Benji back into the world, she thought, then her intention was to keep the crack open, widen it. Her plan was to visit the evening market, and then make stew. She knew that if you love a person and they love you back, you can cook for them something that ensures they find their way to you, should they be lost.

Beautiful, and true, and the way Nimi constructs her world she spends not one unnecessary second questioning what her gift from beyond the grave will cost her. She will put utazi in her yam stew. She will bring Benji to her with the ineluctable, powerful fact of her love. As I would expect from Author Ile, it is very beautiful.

Chikodili Emelumadu is a UK-born Nigerian writer with a previous Caine Prize nomination, a slew of story publications in Apex Magazine, Luna Station Quarterly, as well as several anthologies, and received the inaugural (2019) Curtis Brown First Novel prize (£3000 and representation by literary legends Curtis Brown is a great prize!) for the as-yet-unreleased Dazzling.

What to do when your child brings home a Mami Wata I really don't think I can explain this bit of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell-esque surreality as well as simply showing you a portion of the text that made me pause, utterly convinced that I was reading an Official Government Document from a different reality:

In the case of a malevolent Mami (MMW) or Papi Wata (MPW), people have been known to simply let them expire. This is a clear breach of ethics. Please administer the prerequisite treatment and dial your local Interspecies Department (ID) for further advice on removing the Mami Wata
from your home, should you so desire.
Be advised that this does not always work and further action might be required. Your ID councillor will be able to provide you with help on this.
If you do not wish them to remain and would like to attempt a forceful ejection of an MMW or MPW from your home, see the section titled ‘Forceful Ejection of a Mami or Papi Wata from Your Home,’ in this booklet.⁹

⁹Be advised that a hypothesis has been posited and is currently undergoing some research as to Mami Watas and a manipulation of elements, and phenomena connected to water, even when such events may not occur in or around any body of water. These include but are not limited to: rain, rainstorms and hurricanes. See Sharknado film research by Levin, Thunder, NY, for further study and possible effects of this psycho-kinetic phenomenon.

It was only after googling "local Interspecies Department Long Island" that I was truly convinced I hadn't world-walked in my sleep.

Erica Sugo Anyadike is a Kenya-based Tanzanian television and film writer whose outings into short-story writing reflect her very visual sensibility. Her story in this year's prize pool was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

How to Marry An African President explores the power dynamic between African men and their wives. It's never ever good to be a woman, is it? To be forced to use wiles and stratagems to get ahead...never to be powerful except by reflection. To love someone is secondary to advancing your security...an illusion...but a powerful, narcotic, beautiful illusion.

Poison him and as you rightly assumed - a resulting quiet will ensue, no-one will dare criticise you any longer. He’ll survive but you knew he would. Out in the open, you’ll commiserate, calling for the would-be murderer to be brought to justice. But behind closed doors, you’ll claim a victory amongst your confidants. Your adversary will understand war-craft and opt for self-imposed exile.

In the end, it will not be enough.

In the end, what is...is "enough" a valid concept? Is the War Between the Sexes a place that "enough" should even be used?

Rémy Ngamije was born in Rwanda but is based in Namibia, where he is the founding publisher of Doek! (the country's first literary magazine). His first novel, The Eternal Audience of One, is coming soon in English (what with the Plague, we don't expect firm dates just now) from Scout Press/Simon & Schuster. His stories and photographs have appeared in every imaginable stripe of arts venue. This story was first published in The Johannesburg Review of Books, but look at his réumé! Remy The Quill

The Neighbourhood Watch follows Elias and his squad of scavengers as they do the rounds of the Central Business District of Windhoek (Namibia's capital city), its various outlying districts, to locate something—anything—of value and use to them in their reduced-to-nothingness circumstances. Their relationships, their identities, their entire essences are Now, are Today, are stripped of past and future:

The two men regarded each other as equals, both outcast by their former allegiances. Lazarus never volunteered information about his prison stint. Elias never asked. Everyone brought a past to the street and the present was always hungry. The street snacked on those who regretted, those who dreamt of a tomorrow that still required today to be survived.

That was the first thing Elias told Lazarus: the street has no future, there is only today. And today you need food. Today you need shelter. Today you need to take care of today.

This is the ultimate privilege check: Do you think about yesterday? If you can, if you do, you are rich by the world's standards. "Things were better when..." is something that can not be uttered absent the astounding, insufferable luxury of privilege. The people down the ladder who hold onto the idea of yesterday, to the blind unjust world's tomorrow, are the ones to pity as they quest for lost, or misplaced, privilege:

‘They are too proud to be like us,’ Elias says. ‘But they are the ones going home hungry every day.’

‘Pride is poor food,’ Lazarus says.

Pride feeds no mouth, and a well-fed soul in a starving body loses pride quickly. It is all the uglier for being ripped away instead of laid down or tossed aside. But Pride, my friends, is a slithering sneaking bastard, and patient with it. Pride finds the chink, Pride says, "just this once...just today..."

And we all buy the lie in the end.

THE SORCERER OF THE WILDEEPS, a post-apocalyptic African fantasy setting

THE SORCERER OF THE WILDEEPS
KAI ASHANTE WILSON (The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps #1)
Tor.com
$3.99 eBook, $12.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Since leaving his homeland, the earthbound demigod Demane has been labeled a sorcerer. With his ancestors' artifacts in hand, the Sorcerer follows the Captain, a beautiful man with song for a voice and hair that drinks the sunlight.

The two of them are the descendants of the gods who abandoned the Earth for Heaven, and they will need all the gifts those divine ancestors left to them to keep their caravan brothers alive.

The one safe road between the northern oasis and southern kingdom is stalked by a necromantic terror. Demane may have to master his wild powers and trade humanity for godhood if he is to keep his brothers and his beloved captain alive.

My Review: It's tough to know what to say about novellas. I can't abide book reports disguised as reviews anyway, but some indication of the plot's effects on the reader are de rigueur. I don't want to spoil the pleasures of watching Demane's world unfold before a besotted reader's eyes, yet I need to tell you some things. Which things, how many, that's the rough part for review writer me.

Here goes.

I'm utterly ensorcelled by Demane and his post-apocalyptic Africa, peopled as it is by demigods, by descendents of FTL-traveling "gods," by the many-generations-removed descendants of these gods and the mere humans left behind by them. I am fascinated by the way Demane manipulates the spacetime continuum as he discovers the scope and the limitations of his powers as a demigod. I think Author Wilson deserves a Hugo and a Nebula and a Mythopoetic award for his delicate, acute balancing act in creating a magic system that's Clarke's Law writ small: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic:

“Exigencies of FTL,” Demane answered. Distracted by a glimpse from the corners of his eyes, he lapsed into liturgical dialect. “Superluminal travel is noncorporeal: a body must become light.” A tall, thin man passed by: some stranger, not the captain. “The gods could only carry away Homo celestialis with them, you see, because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. But most sapiens—even those of us with fully expressed theogenetica—haven’t yet attained the psionic phylogeny necessary to sublimnify the organism.”

I'm also delighted that Demane loves Isa, the Captain, and is loved in return. I'm sadly convinced that the homophobia the men face in their future world is accurately portrayed. I don't get it. I don't like it. But I've come to believe that, for reasons buried somewhere in a human culture-generating gene, straight men are always going to be fearful of gay men. I've always agreed with the assertion that the reason is they fear other men treating them the way they treat women. It makes me sigh impatiently while sneering contemptuously. Get over yourself. If some deluded guy offers you sex, say no and move on with your life. It's an activity, is sex; gay is an identity, and a recently coined one like heterosexuality. Used to be it was just a private matter. I'd prefer to go back to that system myownself.

But here we are, an untold number of generations in the future, and the divide still exists. C'est la vie. And since that accords with my lack of faith in human nature's ability to change for the better, I respond to it as a heliotropic plant does to the sun.

When Demane listens, early on, to the Captain's voice, Wilson describes it poetically:

Captain lacked the power of speech, was capable only of song. He could stand dumb, gesturing, or else make incomparable music. Even in a monosyllable, it was possible to hear him struggling to tarnish his pure tones, hoarsen their rich clarity; trying to turn his vox seraphica into a thing befitting the vulgar, violent world of a caravan guardsman. But calliphony was as inseparable from the captain’s voice as blood from a living heart, and he could do nothing, try as he might, to make any utterance of his less than the loveliest you’d heard, or would ever hear, so long as you lived.

That's both gorgeous and evocative. I love the sound of the words in my mouth as I read this passage aloud. It makes me wish I could hear the vox seraphica with my mortal ears. I also find myself eumoirous at Wilson's unabashed use of ten-dollar words. It's all too rare to find such vocabulary deployed in service of evoking emotions, not merely creating distance between reader and writer as a means of making the fantasy world more remote from reality. Kudos for that act of bravery on top of making your main character gay, Author Wilson.

And what gay love is made of!

His hand still lightly cupped the captain’s mouth. When he slid it away Captain turned vague, astonished eyes on him. They were the last shade of brown before black, color of coffee, and just now neither grim nor sad but wonderstruck. He was all soft-side-up for a change. And unplucked there on his mouth were kisses like lowhanging fruit, ripe and deeply pink.

If that doesn't feel completely real to you, without reference to your or the partner's gender, your lover has my sympathy. For me that passage encapsulates the sensation and the perception of being in love with someone. The touch, the emotion, the perception of physical reality melded with emotional resonance, that's exactly how I respond to the man I fall in love with. It's glorious to experience, of course, but to read it is an experience as glorious still: Others travel this road. I'm not the trailblazer or rear guard, I'm traveling in company. There's peace in that sensation, and there's a sense of hopefulness. Navigation can bring me into contact with other men who feel this way hip hip hooray! And that's a gift from Author Wilson to an old fart...imagine what this sensation will do for a closeted young sufferer of homophobia's vicious rage.

All in all, I highlighted 17 passages in this novella. Seventeen. That's more than most entire long novels get from me! I highlighted them because they were exquisite, because I needed them to be part of the group mind that is Goodreads (where Kindle notes and highlights are posted). I want anyone who so much as scratches the surface of this book to feel the enfolding warmth and gentle, cool stroke of the hair from your forehead, the delight of being understood and valued as you smile your way through passages of deeply and beautifully crafted prose.

Though a mind twists and turns, most complicated of all things, the body is a simple creature, and prefers love and comfort, to be where it feels safe.

I hope you, like me, will feel safe while in the Wildeeps with Demane.