Between iphones and excrement: a review of the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing shortlist (II)

I have woken up early every morning this week. I don’t get out of bed. I just lie there, praying for hours. I don’t know if it is doing any good. Tuesday, I read the news that Boko Haram monsters have “married” some the girls they abducted in Chibok. Girls who had gone back to […]

I have woken up early every morning this week. I don’t get out of bed. I just lie there, praying for hours. I don’t know if it is doing any good. Tuesday, I read the news that Boko Haram monsters have “married” some the girls they abducted in Chibok. Girls who had gone back to school to take a physics exam. Girls who might have been scientists or doctors in the future, who might still be if we can get them back. I am angry. I am sick. I can hardly think of anything else.
But part two of last week’s column on the 2014 Caine Prize stories is waiting to be printed. The stories, accessible at caineprize.com, are compelling this year, but sometimes fiction just can’t quite compete with life. Nevertheless, the stories this year do speak to the powerful contradictions between the continent’s wealthy elite and masses of ordinary people struggling to get by. Last week I wrote about the connections between the privileged protagonist of South African author Diane Awerbuck’s story “Phosphorescence,” who resents sanitation workers with “Solid Waste” inscribed on their uniforms for blocking the promenade, and the protagonist of Kenyan author Okwiri Oduor’s “My Father’s Head,” who just wants to remember the look of her plumber father’s head before he died. This week, I look at three stories of characters, who have fallen from privilege.
In Zambian-Ghanaian author Efemia Chela’s story “Chicken,” we are privy to the condescending thoughts of the narrator Kaba, a wealthy daughter of Zambian and Ghanaian parentage, about her country relatives who have come to help prepare a party in her honour, as she leaves, presumably, for school abroad. She taunts little cousins with meat she won’t give them and “pities” her aunties “too much to be truly angry” at their demands. Mid-story, however, there is an abrupt transition as Kaba struggles to make a life of her own apart from her family in a country that sounds like South Africa. She speaks of the cool Afropolitan life she tries to inhabit here, as she joins other young people who occupy formerly whites-only pubs: “Another generation tasked with saving Africa, yet ignoring the brief. Overwhelmed, we sought to please ourselves as best we could, whether that meant siphoning profits off family businesses, accepting scholarships overseas and never looking back or being assimilated into the incompetent state. Laughing, talking, smoking and dancing we could have been young people on any continent.” Yet, as she becomes estranged from her parents when she chooses studies they do not approve of, she begins to struggle with poverty for the first time. As she sinks toward the same economic strata she had once pitied, she herself becomes an object of pity by those whom she hopes would be friends and lovers. The story is titled “Chicken” but it could well be titled “egg.” Instead of protecting growing life, eggs here turn to dust. The lover with the egg tattoo spurns her. Early on as Kaba anticipates rejecting her parents’ desires for her, she kills the chicken. It will lay no eggs. She desires to contribute to the world through her research, but that too is stymied. She finds herself at the end, like her aunts she once pitied, giving up part of herself for wealthy people she will never know.
Zimbabwean author Tendai Huchu also sets his story abroad, among the Zimbabwean community in the U.K. “The Intervention,” though dark, is the funniest story on the shortlist, brilliantly told in the irreverent voice of a drunken wise-cracking and sometimes profound Zimbabwean “poet,” Simba, who accompanies his friend Z “a manwhore of the lowest kind” on a trip to Leicester to see one of his girlfriends Precious. Z and Simba arrive “from Newcastle where we’d been slugging and whoring for a couple of days until the natives ran us out with pitchforks,” yet they find themselves being introduced as “uncles,” joining a community meeting to help reconcile a young Zimbabwean couple, Tamu and Sarah. The young man Tamu refuses to marry his girlfriend Sarah who had sponsored his ticket to the UK. The overt conflict between the young couple is set against the subterranean conflict between the other characters. In a moment of clarity, Simba realizes “our complete and utter inadequacy to help this young couple,” being that Precious “was compromised, if only because of the poor judgment she demonstrated by going out with my gororo, Z.” She would “one day, in the not so distant future” be “crying with a mincemeat heart over how [Z] dumped her suddenly with no explanation.” The other middle aged characters neither of whom “could hold down a stable relationship,” “sure as hell shouldn’t have been playing marriage counselors.” The ineffectual reconciliation attempt seems a smaller scale reflection of the world news playing out on Al-Jazeera and which the characters interrupt their relationship counseling to discuss: violence in Egypt and Syria, the rigged election in Zimbabwe. Simba’s questions about the meaning of the broken Zimbabwean diaspora community in the U.K. resonate with larger existential questions about the meaning of life on an earth peopled with selfish, incompetents. The flippant tone of the story will make you laugh, but it will also leave you troubled by your laughter.
In “The Gorilla’s Apprentice” by Kenyan author Billy Kahora, the characters experience an economic decline similar to that of Kaba in “Chicken.” The teenage Jimmy and his mother are forced to move to a shabby apartment after Jimmy’s father leaves them. The story is a powerful layered piece that links the 2007 Kenyan election violence to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This is Kwani editor Billy Kahora’s second time on the Caine Prize shortlist—he was first shortlisted in 2012 for his story “Urban Zoning”—but to me “The Gorilla’s Apprentice” has the soul that I missed in the clinically perfect “Urban Zoning.” Physically abandoned by his father and emotionally abandoned by his mother, the teenage Jimmy seeks refuge every weekend in a zoo ironically called the Nairobi Animal orphanage. Kahora makes ambiguous the distinction between the animals orphaned here and the humans who seek solace with them. Over the years, Jimmy has struck up a strange friendship with the Rwandan gorilla in the zoo. On a Sunday afternoon when most of the other visitors have fled because of the nearby election violence, Jimmy and the gorilla Sebastian start “their dance, small mimicking movements they shared. Scratches and hand flutters, heads bowed forward and swaying from side to side.” The communication between boy and beast is far deeper than mimicry. Just as “a blood clot had blacked out” Jimmy’s “sight for months,” the old gorilla Sebastian is going blind. Sebastian, who had been transported to Nairobi after the Rwandan genocide, seems deeply affected by the violence on the other side of the orphanage walls. When Jimmy observes a mysterious professor speaking to the gorilla and the animal “standing fully upright, running in short bursts to the left and the right, beating his chest as if he was welcoming an old friend,” Jimmy begins to hope that he too may learn to speak to Sebastian before he dies. The professor, however, has dark secrets that seem to meld with the horror overtaking Nairobi. Kahora here seems to question how violence done by humans affects the earth. After Jimmy and the professor drive “past Carnivore restaurant,” past figures dancing “in the road, yelling and waving pangas, grotesque in the firelight” “as if driving around in hell,” the Professor tells Jimmy “Nothing alive can take the past he has come from and have to repeat it in old age.” “We are in the abyss and the abyss is in us.”
As I think of how the kidnapping of the Chibok girls layers onto older histories like the 1996 kidnapping of 139 schoolgirls from St. Mary’s College in Aboke Uganda by the Lord’s Resistance Army, how school killings echo on a smaller scale the massacre at Murambi Technical School in Rwanda twenty years ago, I find myself returning to Kahora’s story. Evil and regret and repentance meld, as beast becomes man and man becomes beast, and words are swallowed by the darkness.