1. Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s The Virus, (South Africa)
The titular “virus” in Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s “The Virus” has to do with
cyber warfare, though a cruel joke about the HIV infection is told by a character
to ward off an unwelcome question.
Whether intended or not, this acknowledges the real epidemic in many countries,
South Africa, where this story is set, being one of them. This also allows the
writer to appropriate at will what would, otherwise, have been a distasteful
borrowing.
Speculative fiction is broadly used to describe stories which imagine “what if”
certain events were to have gone a different way from how it has.
In Mahkene’s story, the US has launched a cyberwar on the Apartheid regime, as a
result “a flood ran straight in from a dam enemy malware raped” and “real volk
were dying real deaths”.
The narrator is a young Boer who appears to be in a resistance army and is full of
hate for his oppressors whose atrocities he later recounts in detail “a power grid
blew up, killing thousands of civilians within an hour. The big guns was beginning
to doubt a bunch of ululating beards hiding under the turbans could pull off a
remote control war on the US and her bed fellows from some cave in What-not-
stan”.
To add to his indignation, the young Boer’s commandant has told his unit that
because they’re “natural trackers, natural bush fighters. Our blacks must help us
track the enemy”.The familiar divide here is of course that of
Boers vs the “Blacks” , oppressor vs the oppressed.
Rather than simply swapping the power balance, Mahkene has kept it as it has
largely been, but also cladding it with one more layer of oppression by the
Americans who only seem to be at war with the Boers in power.
Little about what form an American/Boer/Black system will take is said. One
defence could be that our young Boer is too occupied with his own present and
existential crisis to worry about that of others.
Also, to have the young Boer wrestle and nag on about humiliation at the hands of
Americans is a simple case of staring in the mirror – except that he doesn’t
recognise himself in it.
He is in a constant state of indignation “who was us? Who was them?” made even
more so by the syllabic stresses in the South African accent in the audio version
on Soundcloud.
Makhene’s word for these American invaders is “cyvivors”, clearly an amalgam of
“cyber” and “survivors”. But then a survivor is one who has made it out of an
ordeal which in the structure of “The Virus” would be either the Boers or Blacks.
Mahkene is a Black South African woman writing about a Boer man. To do so, his
voice and prejudices becomes hers when she writes and this she has done so well
in one instant, a black tracker is described as a “natural man hunter with a nose
like a dog” in the narrator’s voice of course, making this reader recoil while
reading.
The only hiccup here is the one of limits, and how far a writer is to go in
inhabiting a voice in fiction, that in real life is in opposition, to say the least.This reader’s own indignation aside, what Mahkene has done is to strongly
speculate an alternative world, exposing the great hypocrisies on which some
civilisations are based, in a morality tale posed as a cyber-psychological thriller.
2. Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “Who Will Greet You At Home”
Hat tipped to the reader who grasps, on first reading, what Lesley Nneka Arimah
is doing in her story Who Will Greet You At Home.
In the world which Arimah has conjured, babies are fashioned out of materials—
porcelain, straws—which are then ‘blessed’ by a mother or ‘mother-figure’
turning them into beings with life different from the genetic makeup of humans.
Ogechi is the central character and a young woman who, due to a troubled
relationship with her mother, has run away from home only to be shackled to her
employer and a “mother-figure” addressed in the story as Mama, the dubious
owner of the grandly titled “Mama Said Hair Emporium”.
Mama doesn’t only coerce and intimidate her staff for efficiency, she also coerces
Ogechi into trading some of her “happiness”—a quality she appears to have in
abundance but whose origins is unexplained—to shore up her already debilitating
debt to her:
“All that empathy and joy and who knows what else Mama took from her and the
other desperate girls who visited her back room kept her blessing active long past
when it should have faded. Ogechi tried to think of it as a fair trade, a little bit
of her life for her child’s life. Anything but go back to her own mother and her
practical demands”.
What most impresses is how Arimah has grounded a most absurd idea in everyday
reality so as to seem normal. She doesn’t explain how this world came to be and it
is this confident conjuring of otherworldliness convinces.Absurdist tales are heightened realities that easily confuses some readers, yet
Arimah compounds matters by incorporating other traditional elements of
storytelling by way of folk tales about a young girls and hair, as well as call and
response choruses.
She does so with an admirable economy of language all through. Ogechi is said to
live “in an ‘apartment’ that amounted to a room she could clear in three large
steps” and when working in Mama Said Emporium is said to keep “the store so
clean a rumor started that the building was to be sold”.
There is the occasional flourish, “Ogechi weighed her options till sleep weighed
her lids. Soon, too soon, it was morning”.
This forgives the inelegance of thrice repeating the word “haul” (“hauled” on one
occasion”) – a pedant’s problem, no doubt but one which is made apparent by
Arimah’s otherwise judicious use of words.
Take this sentence “She cradled the child, the scritch of its cries grating her
ears…”. An unattentive writer would use the word “screech” to describe a child’s
loud harsh cry, but if it grates then the precise word is of course “scritch”, a
sound made from scratching.
“Who Will Greet You When You Get Home” was published by the New Yorker late
2015.
In an interview for the journal she said of her story that “there are many reasons
why one would imagine a world without men, but, in this case, it wasn’t
something I intentionally set out to do. Men simply never came up in my vision of
this world. Perhaps there exists an alternate universe of men who insure their
survival in equally fraught ways. Someone (else?) will have to write that”.
Arimah’s debut collection of stories “When A Man Falls From The Sky” was
published in the US in April this year and is out in the UK this August. The book is
a promised delight, going by the strength of her Caine Prize entry this year.3. “The Story of the Girl Whose Bird Flew Away” Bushra al-Fadil (Sudan)
What exactly is magic realism and how exactly does it differ from absurdism, or
tales of dystopia for that matter?
These are some of the questions which Bushra el-Fadil hasn’t asked but is implicit
in his story “The Story of the Girl Whose Bird Flew Away”.
The story is primarily about a male character’s fascination with two female
characters, one of whom he recognises as “the girl whose birds flew away”.
How he’s come about this information and its specific significance are not
explained. If origin stories need not be made explicit in “realist” fiction, “magic
realism” doesn’t give a hoot either way. This gives the author unfettered freedom
to invent at will.
In a story just over 3000 words, pausing the narration to spend about 200 on
describing a character would seem like a squander – even when evocatively
written as al-Fadil’s has.
But then in a story where abstract and absurd images – “her nose was like a fresh
vegetable” – are beaded closely, the momentary focus on one image becomes a
focal point of easy comprehension.
Based in Saudi Arabia, Bushra al-Fadil poet and short story writer who holds a
PHD in Russian language and literature.
As a result, Russian masters like Bulgakov could easily be called as influences. But
then so could later greatly regarded works mentioned in the same bracket like
Salman Rushie’s Midnight’s Children and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.
One major influence could well be Sudanese mythology. The narrator describes a
love interest as an “afreet” helpfully defined in the adjoining notes as “a sufimystic, frequently known for their ascetic lifestyle and ecstatic expressions of
faith”.
By the narrator’s own admission, he indulges in “distracted daydreaming” which
would have been a great understatement had he not explained further, “I sat
down and released my strong-hooved stallions from their stables to gallivant
through the fields of my imagination and fantasy”. Even the imaginative process
(separate from the narration it begat) is nestled in the muscular and fantastic.
On one occasion, al-Fadil flouts what isn’t a rule of fiction as he does the basic
contract the writer enters with a reader when he strongly invokes thoughts but
fails to describe it in any detail or give an example “several interpretations came
to me, each independent of the next, pulling together certain details and
disregarding others”.
4. “Bush Baby” by Chikodili Emelumadu (Nigeria)
Chikodili Emelumadu’s “Bush Baby”
The wellspring that is Wikipedia has it that bush babies, also known as galagos,
are “nocturnal primates native to continental primates”.
If cats, also nocturnal, are used as cyphers and actual stand-ins for things to do
with the dark, otherworldly or evil, the lesser understood bush babies would be
the cause of even more fear. It is this fear that pervades much of Chikodili
Emelumadu’s “Bush Baby”.
Okwy, abbreviated from Okwuchukwu, has just arrived at his sister Ihuoma’s
home, banging on her gate. Okwy is let into the house and “instantly becomes
unconscious. A terrible odour wafts up from his body; a combination of the
rotten-eggs smell of dye pits and the rich moistness of loam”.Over successive pages, helpful and heavy doses of back stories – narrated by
Ihuoma, sussed from their dialogues – inform us that Okwy has gambled away
“three properties by the age of twenty-eight, one a fourstorey building packed
with tenants and he still manages to blow it all. Our father will be turning in his
grave”.
To recoup his loses, and also for plot reasons, Okwy has agreed to steal a bush
baby’s mat for his creditors, in return for his properties.
This mat is real yet possesses the powers of myths, and would be a rare
collector’s item even if it was devoid of these qualities, “the mat is a thing of
beauty; it is crimson and black and gold, stiff like asoke straight from the loom.
Its tassels are fine threads of gold and white thread. My brother strokes it as if it
is the hair of his beloved”.
Okwy agreeing to such an undertaking for the sake of his inheritance is a strong
enough motive, but the main condition needed for “Bush Baby” to succeed as a
story, is for the fear of Bush Babies to succeed in the story.
Noticeably, Emelumadu’s narrative slows down just as the horror intensifies.
Okwy is being tormented by what must be a spirit for his theft and his telling of it
is part-ominus, part-incoherent “everything in me is rattling, shaking, as if the
nuts and bolts that hold me together are going to come apart. My teeth chatters.
Okwy sits up, dragging himself painfully with one arm, to lean against the wall.
‘Three more days,’ he says. ‘Three more days.’”
Emelumadu has done a good job of demonstrating Ihuoma’s fear with a steady
gaze in this and less tensioned scenes. One option is to zip through a scene like
this relaying the character’s reaction with little scene descriptions.
Emelumadu has chosen to go into some detail surely to show the horror rather
than to tell it. But the beats this has taken her to do – adding more words,
sentences and thoughts – in a high pressured scene chafes against the pace of
ratcheting up of fear.The story starts strong “somebody is knocking on my gate” followed by two
discursive paragraphs about what it could be, the time, unwelcomed visits, her
savings spent on a funeral, poorer relatives, unreliable power supply and
dependence on generators, hiked diesel prices and fuel hoarders. All this before
the next connecting word to the first which is “bang. Bang”.
Emelunadu knows what materials will have the most impact for the reader,
knowing just how and when to deploy them most effectively would have made for
a fuller read.
5. Arinze Ifeakandu’s God Children Are Little Things, (Nigeria)
Coming of ages stories are ready-fodder for fiction. Where the writer will have to
succeed is in the execution, and in this Arinze Ifeakandu has excelled to a large
extent.
“God’s Children Are Little Things” is mainly about two young men, Lotanna and
Kamsi, who are in a tertiary institution in Kano in northern Nigeria. The would-be
lovers keep their mutual attraction under wraps, understandably, for fear of
rejection from friends and family, and possibly violent homophobia.
Also complicating the pair’s relationship is Rachael, Lotanna’s girlfriend who is
also in the dark about his sexuality and to whom Lotanna feels indebted, “every
evening you called Rachael and told her you loved her so much”.
This triangle of potent (and potted) feelings could be sufficient for many short or
long stories, but Ifeakandu has also given Lotanna more problems to grapple with.
Back in Nsukka (southeast Nigeria) where his family is, his mother has suffered
abuse from his father, one she may not survive, deteriorating his relationship with
his father.
Ifeakandu’s narrator ‘speaks’ in the third person “you met in your second year. At
the stadium one cloudy evening when you played against his department”, butany dislocation this at first brings on, soon fades as the story progresses. But then
‘progress’ in this story needs a little definition.
It is not by a succession of pages, 20 in total, as one reads, and not even strictly
by the accretion of details – backstories, character’s thought processes – which
most signal a forward momentum.
Progress, and plot resolutions, are arrived at by shifts in perspectives that
instantly changes perceptions of prior events.
Rarely is there a rupture when the story’s lead charges – homosexuality, tradition,
religion, domestic abuse – suggests an impending explosion. An implosion would
do, but Ifeakandu hasn’t bothered much with that either.
Lotanna’s first sexual experience was always going to be crucial, perhaps more so
in a Nigeria where as recently as 2014, then president Goodluck Jonathan signed
into law a anti-homosexuality bill with a 14-year prison sentence, all with the
overwhelming support of the country’s legislative houses.
Attenuating this is the fact that these same sex laws were first introduced by the
British penal code, draconian especially in the early 1900s, into it’s protectorate
that became Nigeria.
The 2014 bill was just as retrogressive, repulsive and plain daft. Even dafter were
the public shamings and killings of people “suspected” to be gay, sometimes in
the presence of policemen.
Using a few deft touches, Ifeakandu renders Lotanna’s first big experience in vivid
and tactile ways. Lotanna works his way around Kamsi’s body only to discover
that his nipples were “two tiny hard grains” and when they kissed “he tasted
almost of nothing”.
The general tenor of narration here is that of melancholy, full-on sadness a dial
away.Occasionally, Ifeakandu hits deeper notes of melancholy. Lotanna, jealous of
Kent, a possible rival for Kamsi, habours ill-feelings towards him “as you sat on
the veranda, waiting for him to be done, you shocked yourself by how hard you
wanted to punch Kent. It was in the days that followed that you learned the
definition of the word gentleness”, and Ifeakandu goes on to give reasons why.
Where Ifeakandu stumbles is in his depiction of the northern Nigeria city of Kano.
Features of the city deserving of clear details are sometimes slapdash and in one
scene damn right offensive.
In one chunky paragraph on page 13, Lotanna walks through Kano streets where
he hears “the sound of Hausa music” but Ifeakandu doesn’t say what exactly this
is. A cursory Wikipedia entry offers quite a number of options, if a phone call to a
Hausa-speaker is impossible to arrange.
In the same sentence, Lotanna is stopped by “a dirty-looking lady” who spoke
“florid Hausa” and who he then “gaped” at as she asked:
• “you wan’ poke? You wan’ poke?”
• I no wan’ fuck, you had said to her, dragged your hands away, and ran.
This is the kind of problematic writing that could easily be attributed to tribal
differences (worse when racial), but the real problem might be the naivety of the
budding writer who poorly handles sensitive material.
On the whole, “God’s Children Are Little Broken Things” satisfies as an
exploration of male sexuality, youthful angst and the messiness of adulthood by
way of infidelity, domestic and emotional abuse.
What most surprises is that despite these factors promising a downer of a story,
the resultant feeling, while not quite an uplift, is one of relief for this reader.
Other opinions may vary.