Between i-phones and excrement: a review of the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing shortlist (I)

This week the Caine Prize for African Writing released its 2014 shortlist. There are no Nigerians represented this year, but despite all the moaning on Nigerian social media, I can’t feel too bad about it, seeing as last year Nigerians dominated the list with four out of the five chosen stories. Moreover, this year’s shortlist […]

This week the Caine Prize for African Writing released its 2014 shortlist. There are no Nigerians represented this year, but despite all the moaning on Nigerian social media, I can’t feel too bad about it, seeing as last year Nigerians dominated the list with four out of the five chosen stories. Moreover, this year’s shortlist is stellar, filled with really strong writing and distinctive voices. The short list includes South African Diane Awerbuck’s “Phosphorescence” originally published in Cabin Fever; “Chicken” by Ghanaian-Zambian writer Efemia Chela and “My Father’s Head” by Kenyan writer Okwiri Oduor both published in the Short Story Day Africa anthology Feast, Famine, and Potluck; Zimbabwean Tendai Huchu’s “The Intervention” published in Open Road Review; and Kenyan Billy Kahora’s “The Gorilla’s Apprentice” published in Granta. In striking contrast to previous Caine Prize shortlists, only Billy Kahora’s Granta piece was published by a Western publisher: Awerbuck, Chela, and Oduor’s stories were published in South Africa and Huchu’s story was published in India. This growing influence of publishers in the Global South parallels the growing accessibility of literature written by Africans to African audiences online.
Last week, several readers emailed me asking me how they could get a copy of Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel on the Rwandan genocide Murambi: The Book of Bones, which I reviewed last week. Unfortunately I doubt that the book, published in French by L’Harmattan in Paris and in English translation by Indiana University Press in the U.S., is stocked anywhere in Nigeria. One of the great things about the Caine Prize every year, on the other hand, is that it makes stories written by Africans available on cainprize.com to anyone with an internet connection.
As I worked my way through the stories, the majority struck me as representing the middle class experience. I imagine 2012 Caine Prize judge Bernadine Evaristo, who banned stories of suffering children during her tenure, would be pleased by this list, which includes tales of a South-African grandmother and granddaughter skinny dipping in “Phosphorescence”; a young woman trying to make a life apart from her wealthy pan-African family in “Chicken”; a gathering of U.K.-resident Zimbabwean expats in “The Intervention”; a teenager’s obsession with trips to a Nairobi zoo in “The Gorilla’s Apprentice”; to finally the story that perhaps deals with the least privileged character, the daughter of a plumber who works to bring back her father’s ghost in “My Father’s Head.” I was struck by how many of the stories mentioned “i-phones” or other Apple devices. In “Phosphorescence” the protagonist Alice’s granddaughter Brittany drowns out her grandmother’s advice with the “the earphone of her iPod”; In “Chicken,” the “glow of a MacBook illuminated” the protagonist’s brothers face as he DJs for a party; and in “The Intervention” the young woman Sarah complains that her boyfriend whose trip to the U.K. she sponsored “can afford to buy himself iPhones and videogames, but he says he can’t afford a wedding.” The two Kenyan stories are the only ones that skip this tribute to Steve Jobs. On the other side of the shiny Africa Rising narratives the Apple products represent, there is also a reoccurring motif of “shit,” echoing symbolism of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, that reoccurs throughout these stories: the sewage that pollutes the seashore in “Phosphorescence” and that the plumber in “My Father’s Head” wades through; the “skid marks” the drunken Simba is afraid he is leaving in the toilet of his friend Z’s girlfriend in “The Intervention”; the “piles of shit” left by pet rabbits that overwhelm Jimmy in “The Gorilla’s Apprentice”; and the “pigeon shit” Kaba walks on in “Chicken” when she thinks of all she has given away. The oppositional symbols of iphones and excrement that fill these stories speak to truly complex portraits of life on the continent. This week I will discuss two of the stories that speak to this contrast.
A sense of impending doom hangs over South African author Diane Awerbuck’s “Phosphorescence”: the white South African Alice’s granddaughter Brittany has attempted suicide and bulldozers “squat” on lawns outside her home for nearly a month “leaving stretches of dead yellow grass under their bellies” threatening to destroy Alice’s favourite swimming spot. The beauty of the spot, where swimmers trail “phosphorescence from every fingertip,” is ironically created by the raw sewage that spills into the water. “Shit” is the byproduct of the privileged lifestyles of Alice and her neighbours. “The smell of decay” wafts “onshore with the wind to all the travelers who sat sipping lattes, a reminder of the contents of their expensive insides.” Yet Alice seems to resent the municipality sanitation workers, the men with “SOLID WASTE emblazoned on their backs,” the woman who rakes the sand, for “always obstructing the promenade.” She dreads the day when workers will destroy her polluted little pool. Although the story is ostensibly about the relationship between Alice and her granddaughter, I was struck by the class distinctions in the story. The presumably black workers, who both make possible and threaten Alice’s way of life, resemble lower class versions of her son, a plastic surgeon who can do surface-level “boob jobs, tummy tucks, facelifts” but cannot change the skeleton or stop his own daughter’s attempt to kill herself. The workers beautify Alice’s surroundings but they do not seem to be able to escape the skeleton of class on which society is structured—that is until they challenge the contaminated place she holds dear.
Kenyan author Okwiri Oduor’s “My Father’s Head” provides a striking complement to “Phosphorescence.” In both stories sewage and “shit” are important metaphors, yet “My Father’s Head” provides the other side of the story. While the narrator Alice in “Phosphorescence” resents the service workers who make her privileged life possible, this story is told from the perspective of a plumber’s daughter. Simbi remembers “the way each Saturday morning men knocked on our front door and said things like, ‘Johnson, you have to come now, the water pipe has burst and we are filling our glasses with shit,’ and ‘Johnson, there is no time to put on clothes even, just come the way you are. The maid gave birth in the night and flushed the baby down the toilet.” The poor are essential to those they serve, yet their lives are disposable. Before he dies in an accident with a tractor, Simbi’s father is obsessed with death, listening “to narrations of famine undulating deeper into the Horn of Africa, and when the clock chimed eight o’clock, he turned the knob and listened to the death news.” He heard of his friends’ deaths this way “He tells her, ‘Did you hear that? Sospeter has gone! Sospeter, the son of Milkah, who taught Agriculture in Mirere Secondary. My God, I am telling you, everyone is going. Even me, you shall hear me on the death news very soon.’” After her father dies, Simbi tries to sketch him from memory, but she can only manage to draw his body and his clothes, she cannot remember his head. Simbi’s desire to see her father’s head again melds with her experiences working in a home for old people, where the cook claims she can bring her father back. Yet, Simbi realizes that her desire to see her father again does not necessarily translate to a desire to live with his ghost. Like the old people in the institution that she cares for, an unidentified voice says “You think that your people belong to you, that they will always have a place for you in their minds and their hearts. You think that your people will always look forward to your return,” but the truth is that people would rather forget.
Both Awerbuck and Oduor, in narratives about characters from two different classes, capture the contradictions of human beings caught between life and death, youth and old age. I will discuss the other Caine Prize stories next week.
(to be concluded next week)