A MAJOR international literary prize will be awarded this evening! Read on for more info!

THE CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING 2016
Link to the main page of the website.

I am, in case you're stumbling across me and my blog for the first time, a major consumer and reviewer of short stories. These bite-sized bits of a writer's consciousness are, ironically, much much more difficult to write well than is, say, a novel. I recognize this in a deeply personal way as I have tried to write short stories and failed miserably at it. I realize that I'm hollering down a well by trying to get the civilians on the street to try reading short stories. From deeply bitter experience, I can assure you people recoil in horror from my urgent shoving of any book at them, pleading eyes and begging tones notwithstanding. But even regular readers seem to shy away from short stories. I've heard every explanation in the world, I think: "it's too hard to change gears that fast," "I can't see why the author doesn't just make this into a novel," "ew! a BOOK!" ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

But a funny thing happens when I trick people into reading my story-by-story reviews of anthologies and collections (the first has many authors, the second only one). Some get intrigued. A few seek out other reviews I've written of collections and anthologies. And, even though I seldom hear about it directly, I notice more reviews for some of the collections I've raved about. That is *the* most gratifying result a reviewer can have. You'll notice a complete lack of advertising here on the blog. I'm only affiliated with one other blog on a regular basis, The Oak Wheel, whose senior blogger, Jeff Martin, lets me push story collections at his way-bigger-than-mine audience the first Thursday of every month...for free. In short, I have no profit motive for doing this, I am rewarded by 1) free books from *most* publishers (frowns and grumbles at the unwilling and/or cheapass holdouts), 2) thank-yous from the occasional grateful author, and 3) the sheer joy of reading, thinking about, and analyzing books, then reporting my findings. I love it. I can't not do it. (Well, there was the time I tried to off myself and ended up in the goofy garage for a while, but I kept notes of the *flood* of books my dear, wonderful, generous, and saintly friends sent to me.) I have a TBR pile that has its own gravity, a wishlist that fills a lot of server space, and not one but two facility libraries composed of 90%-plus my read and donated books. (The goofy garage and the assisted living facility I currently occupy.)

And that means that I am, or think I am, pretty au courant with the world of books. I keep a weather eye on the literary prizes, watch for outsider/indie authors whose work speaks to me and therefore might speak to others, and generally organize my social and material life around books, writing, and readers. Imagine my horror when NOT ONE PERSON I knew had a clue what the Caine Prize was! These are regular readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie! Nnedi Okorafor, Ph.D.! Leila Aboulela! And the prize wasn't familiar...because it honors short fiction. *sigh* I have a lot of work to do. So I'm starting this US Independence Day, the day the Caine Prize winner is announced, to shout and wave my arms and point to more works by African writers as often as I possibly can. While I consider that an announcement, some will see it as a threat...all those hard-to-pronounce names, all that cultural information that's not familiar...but I ask of all of you that you google everything you don't get, spend some time immersed in a world you don't have referents for, and try your damnedest to enjoy the escape from the insanity that is 2016's USA into the largest continent in the world. Please? C'mon, it's no harder than immersing yourself into a fantasy or SF novel! Honest!

I've read all five shortlisted stories for the influential Caine Prize for African Writing 2016, presenting its seventeenth annual award. I've reviewed them all individually because this prize is the starting gun for its nominees and winners, launching their various careers into a more prominent and prestigious orbit in the world's literary firmament.


The Caine Prize Shortlist reviews (titles are links to story PDFs) in the accustomed Bryce Method:

The Lifebloom Gift
Abdul Adan, Somalia/Kenya

Abdul Adan is the second shortlisted author I'm reviewing for the run-up to the 2016 Caine Prize for African Fiction, announced on the 4th of July. He presents us with the life story of Ted Lifebloom, a 30ish mama's boy living in Missouri. Ted is, in some odd way, a carrier of the rarest of qualities: Pure happiness, a green world of love, comes to those susceptible to it merely by Ted's touch. The narrator describes the sensation of Ted's touch as experienced for the first time:

His mum wasn’t gone five minutes before Ted reached over and placed his
hand on my shoulder and pretty much (as I came to learn later) settled. I am not sure how long his hand was there because I got carried into a greenish world I had only seen
in dreams until then. Everything seemed as though I was on some yet-to-be-formulated drug. It was a thing of the heavens. Let me put it this way: I heard the song of birds and
sneezes of horses, smelled the fur of dogs, felt a twitch in one of my nipples which, in turn, transformed into a brown lactating nipple… In short, I understood the meaning of love
– almost. And this was just the shoulder! Suppose he got to my mole! Can you imagine that?

Ted's gift for bringing this transcendant joy to those he touches makes him seem like a bodhisattva. Tellingly, the narrator present us with the information about Ted and his mother (loving, but distant), his father (loving, but smothering), and how they combined to produce a fat, strange, useless son whose gifts make them both nervous.

Adan makes the journey the narrator takes while learning about and from Ted both poignant and humorous. As a finalist for the extremely prestigious, career-launching Caine Prize, he's well placed to bring a big load of talent to the publishers who will fight to sign him up if he wins. IMHO, it's a shame they aren't all clamoring for his work now.

What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky
Lesley Nneka Arimah, Nigeria

A shortlisted story for this very prestigious prize in African literature, which is limited to short fiction but has launched numerous of its sixteen previous recipients into the international literary stratoshphere, Arimah's story is post-apocalyptic climate change fiction set in a world where the entirety of North America and Europe are submerged, the remaining planet absorbing the white refugees according to willingness and ability. Arimah's Nigerian background has led her to posit a "Biafran-British Alliance" wherein Nneoma, a Mathematician licensed by the Furcal Center to use her unique grasp of the Furcal Theorem (the Theory of Everything mankind's been seeking for so long) to ease, indeed remove, the experience of grief from the world's many grief-crippled people. She is one of fifty-seven so licensed left in the world, as two others have collapsed and suicided or vanished.

This late-21st-century dystopia still has its upper class, and Nneoma specializes in treating their very real ills. Her ex-lover Kioni specializes in the extremely high-need refugees and war-displaced folks whose teeming masses essentially all need grief treatment. It is this wide disparity in choice of service that leads Kioni to sever their relationship and continue her own, morally superior in her judgment, work in New Kenya (identified but undescribed) without Nneoma the hand-holder to the rich. Then Nneoma's mother dies, her father needs a Mathematician to help, and Kioni angrily refuses. Nneoma tries to help her father, but his grief merely enlarges her own, and now she can't even be in her father's presence for the horror it evokes in her.

At the end of the day, Nneoma's loneliness is magnified many, many times when a bitter and unexpected event confronts her with the limits humans can't escape despite having Furcal's infinite theory of everything to use to manipulate the world. As the title suggests, hubris is still part of human make-up and the myth of Icarus is as relevant now as it was in the past and will be in the future.

The author already has a book deal with Riverhead Books, a tentacle of Penguin Random House, to publish a story collection in 2017. This is great news for story lovers (me!) and proof that even being shortlisted for this powerful prize that most Murrikinz have never heard of confers a star-dust aura to writers. I say that's the best news ever! To paraphrase NoViolet Bulawayo, a previous Caine Prize winner, we need new voices. Now more than ever, in this precarious end stage of the capitalist extraction economy.

Genesis
Tope Folarin, Nigeria

A short story nominated for the Caine Prize in African Literature 2016, this is the first time in the history of the prize that a previous winner (2013) has been re-considered for the Prize. There is a good deal of controversy surrounding this in the African literary community, as the previous 16 awards have never included previous winners even in the longlist.

I haven't read Folarin's previous prize-winning story, but based on this story, I'm amazed and disappointed that he hasn't been widely and eagerly sought after by international book publishers. Perhaps he doesn't have an entire book of stories ready? No novel sitting in a desk drawer? But this work of identity fiction is accomplished, powerful, and it speaks directly to me and my experience of being raised by a mentally ill mother who was emotionally abusive of my father to the extent that he feared her too much to try to get me away from the unhealthy environment my mother created.

As the idea of the Caine Prize to date has been to shine a spotlight on literary lions previously unknown and help them assume their rightful place in the world of international letters, the nomination of a previous winner could mark a sea-change from awarding the deserving but unknown talents that teem in their masses around Africa, a continent of myriad countries and very, very few presses, to a reward prize for the Best African Short Stories {insert date here}.

Like any change in the established literary firmament, this causes disorientation and deep, divisive debate. (Does anyone remember what the Orange Prize is called now? Or the Whitbread Prize? Both still exist but changed sponsors, to much hullabaloo and debate. I for one lost track of them after their name changes.) Good thing or bad, policy shift or happenstance, Folarin's story is one that any story-based contest would have a hard time ignoring.

At Your Requiem
Bongani Kona, Zimbabwe

A very, very powerful small story. I was extremely emotionally involved from the first words, and Kona did not let me go. At all. I'm still thinking about this tale. It was hard to read and impossible not to finish. I can't say more because spoilers, but to my friends I can offer this inducement/warning: The narrator and I share a huge life-changing experience.

Memories We Lost
Lidudumalingani, South Africa

Another Caine Prize nominee, this story is about a thing I'd never so much as considered: Mental illness among the isolated rural population of South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. It isn't all that different than anywhere else: Sufferers are isolated, feared, shunned, and if they're lucky, just drugged into submission instead of murdered.

Cheery little bagatelle, no; honest, searing, brave? Most certainly yes.

Another case where anything else I say is guaranteed to be a spoiler.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
From the Caine Prize for African Writing's press release:

The winner of the £10,000 prize will be announced at an award ceremony and dinner at the Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, on Monday 4 July. Each shortlisted writer will also receive £500.

Each of these stories will be published in New Internationalist’s Caine Prize 2016 Anthology in July [as well as by Interlink Publishing in the US-RMD] and through co-publishers across Africa, who receive a print-ready PDF free of charge from New Internationalist.

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.

AND AFTER MANY DAYS, debut Nigerian novelist tells personal/political tale of loss

AND AFTER MANY DAYS
JOWHOR ILE
Tim Duggan Books
$11.99 eBook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: During the rainy season of 1995, in the bustling town of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, one family's life is disrupted by the sudden disappearance of seventeen-year-old Paul Utu, beloved brother and son. As they grapple with the sudden loss of their darling boy, they embark on a painful and moving journey of immense power which changes their lives forever and shatters the fragile ecosystem of their once ordered family. Ajie, the youngest sibling, is burdened with the guilt of having seen Paul last and convinced that his vanished brother was betrayed long ago. But his search for the truth uncovers hidden family secrets and reawakens old, long forgotten ghosts as rumours of police brutality, oil shortages, and frenzied student protests serve as a backdrop to his pursuit.

In a tale that moves seamlessly back and forth through time, Ajie relives a trip to the family's ancestral village where, together, he and his family listen to the myths of how their people settled there, while the villagers argue over the mysterious Company, who found oil on their land and will do anything to guarantee support. As the story builds towards its stunning conclusion, it becomes clear that only once past and present come to a crossroads will Ajie and his family finally find the answers they have been searching for.

And After Many Days introduces Ile's spellbinding ability to tightly weave together personal and political loss until, inevitably, the two threads become nearly indistinguishable. It is a masterful story of childhood, of the delicate, complex balance between the powerful and the powerless, and a searing portrait of a community as the old order gives way to the new.

***TIM DUGGAN BOOKS PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.*** SEE AUTHOR ILE'S 2020 CAINE PRIZE-NOMINATED STORY, FISHERMAN'S STEW!

My Review: This is a beautifully written novel. It is, if other commenters are to be believed, poorly or simply un-structured. I don't agree with this assessment. I see the author's structure as like that of life itself: Free-floating, connected and interconnected and bound tightly and tenuously, resembling nothing so much as a kaleidoscope. Structure and pattern are artifacts of observation. Hey, life is an emergent process of quantum energy. Or some such.

By setting the novel in 1995 Nigeria, the author enables the reader to participate viscerally in the rite of passage that is civil war. It is painful when viewed whole; it is mundane when lived through. Dinner is still cooked, even if it's over an open fire; bedtime still comes for all the young children, even if it's accompanied by gunshots and missing relatives. It was a crisis point for the anti-imperialism trying to stop the economic looting and environmental destruction of international oil companies that persist in Southern Nigeria to this day.

Children see this, like everything else, with pitiless clarity and unsparing judgment:

Things happen in clusters. They would remember it as the year the Mile Three ultramodern market burned down in the middle of the night… It was the year of the poor. Of rumors, radio announcements, student riots and sudden disappearances. It was also the year news reached them of their home village, Ogibah, that five young men had been shot dead by the square in broad daylight.

None of it makes sense or creates a pattern. Yet.

Family is completely unique in the eyes of each member. It's a funny (sense ha-ha, and sense hmmm) truth that the social group that forms each member's similar and different qualities, ideas, opinions is utterly unique and unknowable to each other member:

Before the beginning of his memory, which was to say from the beginning of this life, there had always been the three of them. Paul and Bibi were the first people he saw, the first he touched. Everything he resented and liked, everything he knew, thought and felt, his smile and the angry pounding in his veins were all from them, and now, for the first time, taking notice of this made him feel incredibly lonely. The sort of lonely feeling that Bibi would have been tempted to slap out of him. Just the kind of thing that would have made Paul look at him in his usual bemused way and say, 'My friend, what are you saying? Please be serious'. But he sensed it that night, it hung about the room, the feeling that things may not always be like this, that they would one day grow up and live across town from each other like Ma and her cousin Aunty Julie or even die like all of Bendic's siblings whom he hardly ever spoke of. Paul turned around in his bed, the distant drumming had stopped, and mumbled something in his sleep, and Ajie was sure he could hear Bibi softly breathing from the room next door.

How does a younger sibling explain this sense of the fragile reality of family and life to an older one already interested in bigger things, smaller in importance to you just now, but much more immediate and pressing to their eyes?

Paul is a fine young man. Paul is a good soul. Ajie, locked in mortal combat with his closer sibling Bibi, senses the gulf between himself and Paul as unbridgeable. Of course he sees it that way, childhood and adolescence are by definition this life's perspectiveless passages:

Now, this was what Ajie wanted, this way that Paul had of becoming something after he had read about it; this way he had of claiming things for himself. He had joined himself to a we, an us. A corrupt official had been exposed in the papers for misappropriating pension funds, and Paul was expressing betrayal, even anger, about it.

How do you make yourself do that? How do you learn how to work yourself up over something that's not directly your concern?

Poor Ajie, having a lifetime of living in a big brother's big shadow. And one just enough older to make a big difference in your world! How can he know that one fine day he too will understand and opine upon the matters of a world that, now anyway, is so much wider than your own as to be imperceptible to you?

But a sibling's world isn't the only one that a family has to contain. A mother's, a father's, existence is tied to the permanent creation of this temporary life. Structure exists because we summon it into being, and we do so with the materials we have, the ideas we grab from...anywhere, I suppose...and the living energy of the beings around us:

They have waited many years for an answer, and one has finally arrived, dry and diminished, resting inside the box before them, and not one of them in the room knows how to approach the coffin. Ajie feels it's his place to take the lead; he steps forward to the casket and opens it. When Ma draws close, he holds her hand while Bibi looks in from the other side of the casket. He holds Ma's hand tight but can still feel the tremor running through it. These bones formed inside her, Ajie thinks.

The surprise, for me at least, in the aging process...I'm older than most of the world's people will ever get to be...is how banal agony becomes. It is no less sharp or debilitating. It is simply part of the scenery, an item of furniture that serves no positive purpose but sits in exactly the place it is most likely to bark your shins or stub your toe. Of course Ma is in exquisite agony: She is looking at bones that grew inside her. Mothers...parents...are now in tears, in silent screams, in deepest possible denial. No one should know what their child's death looks like. It is asking too much of a human soul to bear this. But it happens every single minute of every single day that God sends.

Agnosticism is logic. Atheism is visceral certainty that no higher power could demand this of her creation.

This sentence sums up the only way many of us who have lost that deeply keep moving, breathing, functioning at whatever level we are able to summon:

The dead will not be consoled; neither will those who live in the skin of their dead.

WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY, stories from a new Nigerian voice

WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY: Stories
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH
Riverhead Books
$26 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home.

In "Who Will Greet You at Home", a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, a woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In "Wild", a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person"—with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.

Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: There is so much more here than the slenderness of the volume they inhabit would indicate; hence the perfection of my use of the Bryce Method to give you a quick hit of my ideas of a story, and then show individual ratings.

The Future Looks Good if you aren't paying attention, anyway. The fact is that you get yourself into places you really don't want to be because of the past:

...Ezinma, keys fumbling against the lock, doesn't see what came behind her: her mother at age twenty-two, not beautiful, but with the fresh look of a person who has never been hungry.
–and–
He blinds {Ezinma's sister} with a constellation of gifts, things she's never had before, like spending money and orgasms.

And, in the end, it's never really you that they want, Ezinma, it's not the way of the world for a kindly, accepting soul to be given the Keys to the Kingdom. There are locks and doors and living spaces that you are not made for, and going there is fatal. 4 bitter stars

War Stories remembers the tack one's parents take to Educate and Enlighten you...

"Is this about the time {your c.o.} took your gun?"

The tale, intended to impart some inscrutable lesson, was a stale one my father had trotted out at various infractions over my short life. I heard it when I stole lipstick from my aunt's dresser. I heard it when my mother discovered me gathering ants in a plastic bag to put in a schoolmate's hair. I heard it after I got into a fight with the children who said my father was strange, and again when I wanted to know why {father's best friend} couldn't come to our house anymore, and later, why he'd done what he'd done. My father never shared stories from before or after the war, as though he'd been born in the barracks and died the night of the final volley.

We're on to your tricks, Parents! Why do you use this creaky, crappy, ineffectual technique...that I still remember...oh.

The truth of stories has power. The telling of truths through stories is an act of creation and annihilation, a bright flash of the Universe's unfiltered energy come to Earth for the merest moment. And no one near leaves unchanged. 4.5 stars

Wild

Light

Second Chances

Windfalls

Who Will Greet You at Home

Buchi's Girls

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is the first of these stories I read, back when it was a finalist for the 2016 Caine Prize. My review is here.

Glory

What is a Volcano?

Redemption

THE ETERNAL AUDIENCE OF ONE, Rémy Ngamije's debut novel of identity and cultural visibility

THE ETERNAL AUDIENCE OF ONE
RÉMY NGAMIJE
Scout Press
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Reminiscent of Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon, this “gorgeous, wildly funny and, above all, profoundly moving and humane” (Peter Orner, author of Am I Alone Here ) coming-of-age tale follows a young man who is forced to flee his homeland of Rwanda during the Civil War and make sense of his reality.

Nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, not even the people in it. The most one can do is make some sort of start and then work toward some kind of ending.

One might as well start with Séraphin: playlist-maker, nerd-jock hybrid, self-appointed merchant of cool, Rwandan, stifled and living in Windhoek, Namibia. Soon he will leave the confines of his family life for the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town, in South Africa, where loyal friends, hormone-saturated parties, adventurous conquests, and race controversies await. More than that, his long-awaited final year in law school promises to deliver a crucial puzzle piece of the Great Plan immigrant: a degree from a prestigious university.

But a year is more than the sum of its parts, and en route to the future, the present must be lived through and even the past must be survived.

From one of Africa’s emerging literary voices comes a lyrical and piquant tale of family, migration, friendship, war, identity, and race following the intersecting lives of Séraphin and a host of eclectic characters from pre- and post-1994 Rwanda, colonial and post-independence Windhoek, Paris and Brussels in the 70s, Nairobi public schools, and the racially charged streets of Cape Town.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

READ THIS MEMOIR ARTICLE IN LIT HUB!

My Review: What do you get from a wisecracking young African novelist when you turn him loose with a contract? A novel of the prices exacted by immigration on the emigrated persons, be that emigration voluntary or enforced, cannot help but run into the problem of "why am I here again?" for its fat, complacent first-world-native readers. The usual answer is, "where else would you like to be?" Author Ngamije writes sentences like this:

The only certainty is this: everything that is not the end must be the start of something else.

Séra says that his mother said it first; I believe him. I believe whatever Author Ngamije says, actually. I have already said nice things about Author Ngamije's writing when I discussed The Neighbourhood for last year's Caine Prize reviews. He's deployed a lot more of his snappy humor here (a bed so narrow it should have a singles-site profile, East African parents outdoing the Spanish Inquisition in the barbarity of their interrogation, "FOMO, the acronym of doom," a vile w-bomb at 47% being self-described as a "salacious nictation"...though that didn't prevent him from using it three more times), having so much more room to make the case for laughs. Laughs you'll get, for absolute sure and certain. When Therése and Séra meet at a less-than-opportune moment, for example. If you fail to fall about screaming with laughter at how Author Ngamije structures that scene, then you are deficient.

And there is a great deal of uncertainty in the happiness of the parents in this story. There are no swift and sure answers to the eternal eyeroll of the offspring. A stern reminder, however, that your parents didn't become parents without having some kinda past together is fully served in several chapters. The set-up for them being together, a party attended in Paris, is...incomplete at first telling. It seems there was a lot more to being young in that day and time...well. Usually there was some, um, carnal dimension to their partnering up for parenthood:

His torso occupied every inch of his shirt, and his maroon bell-bottom jeans accentuated a prim pair of buttocks and strong thighs.

He was dressed to pull, for sure! And Therése was very much there to be pulled...well, that is half the story, and the other half was told, so you'll find it when you get to it. But the parenting years came next. A thankless task, that, and made more difficult by the implosion of their country. Several flashbacks to that time are all from Séra's child-vision. It's very effective, and still manages to evoke from the adult reader the fear and the determination of the parents to protect their kids. And then they spent the entire rest of their lives ensuring you'd have it better than they do, Séra. So what does he do with his uni life in Cape Town? What all of us did! Party! Make a group of like-minded friends, find something to rag on the world about...the usual twentysomething life. Author Ngamije says smart, funny things in a smartass way, just like Séraphin himself. He's got a helluva mouth on him, does Séra, and he's not afraid to use it.

...{I}f nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, and if everyone is in the same boat just bailing and steering as best they can, then I guess the whole point of life is to make some sort of a start and then work towards some kind of ending, whenever and wherever it might be. Part plagiarism will permit to agree with Shakespeare: "All the world's a staage..." upon which we perform for the eternal audience of one. ... I guess, then, that the point of life is to dive in, hold on, and hope that a flop...is worth the laugh at the very end.

–and–

"She actually likes black people," Séraphin said. "And it isn't because she's traveled a lot. Slavers traveled too and look where that got us."

–and–

"I have a better chance of being Pablo Escobar than being Pablo Neruda."

"You and drug dealers." {She} laughed. "Not a fan of poetry, then?"

"I approach poetry like other people's dogs. With great caution."

The entire group of friends stay hooked in to their affection for each other, such as it is, and they overlook the usual tensions in any group setting...the odd man out, the tolerated-but-unloved, the group boss with the plans everyone goes along with because it's easier than fighting and better than anyone else's ideas anyway. The flirting, the hookups...the breakups and dumpings...it's all there, exactly where it should be, told in texts instead of long calls and short meetings.

There is, of course, the requisite older woman in Séraphin's résumé, and she speaks a truth to him: "There is a point when actions become promises," that I truly wish I knew how to embroider so I could make a pillow-cover out of. I am also moved by immigrant Séra meditating on forgiveness being meaningless without remembering the thing being forgiven. It is a truth I learned much later in my life than he was forced to, but a severely underrated one in the general conversation we as a society should be having with more seriousness than we seem to be doing.

The lighthearted moments, let me hasten to say now, are quite prevalent in the book. More time laughing is spent than Other Things. Don't mistake this for some gloomy, first-novel-MFA-program navel-gazing! You'll know for sure that you're in good, capable hands, that this is a cocktail party you can't quite imagine how you got invited to and not Thanksgiving with your in-laws.

That is also, of course, apparent in some less joy-giving ways. The function of Séraphin's Great Council of Séraphins is clearly to make you aware that you've shifted to the inner workings of the lad's head; the problem is, for this seasoned reader, it was overused. Two or three times would've been effective...many more and it becomes Ben Stiller's 2013 remake of Danny Kaye's 1947 comedic classic The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As much fun as recalling the original was for the first twenty minutes, seeing the shots recreated...well...it got old.

The fragmented construction of the story will put some readers off. The flashbacks aren't slowing the story down, I will protest, they are givning it traction! But many will disagree with me, I fear. Structuring a story in an anti-chronological way does indeed allow us to feel, instead of see, the action as the characters do. It does also require of us that we pay attention to what's underlying the surface story of an immigrant leaving home to leave home to learn how to return home to make a home. It's really just that simple...Thomas Wolfe did it, y'all all lapped it up. Ride the waves, don't shove your feet into them. (Have I ever mentioned that my Young Gentleman Caller is a surfer?)

There is a time in a character's arc that the wise mentor offers a personal story that illuminates a Greater Truth that Our Hero needs to hear. That time came, it lingered a bit too long for comfort, and then it was over. That was, actually, a good thing, because the purpose of it was a deeper one than was expected. The way it happens, the moment it comes, are a little bit deceptive, so kudos to Author Ngamije for that misdirection. I like not knowing everything!

But the classic misdirection, well. Remember how you found out your parent was a person before you were born? Remember the moment you learned what they least wanted you to know but you needed to hear? That moment is a beaut in this book, one of those "...I didn't know you had it in you..." times that come to all adult children. I loved it, and if you're the reader I hope you are for reading my reviews, you'll carry on to the very end for the reward you're offered.

"All arguments can be fixed. Circumstances, not so much."

Formerly tall father stood next to tall son.

"You have to decide whether you want to be right or whether you want to be happy. It is a simple choice."

It may be simple...it is simple...but it is never easy.