The best short story writers do something to you just after you read that last paragraph: they leave a kind of quiet inside you. Or is it peace? It is different things for different people, but I know that after reading a good story, something happens to you on the inside that you just can’t brush off, something that will return to you at odd times when something reminds you of one of the characters from the story or of the story itself.

All three of these stories do just that. All the stories are about children trying to make sense of their normal world that’s beginning to go wrong, or, as in Anena’s story, a world that has always been wrong that the main character is trying to make right. Two of the stories are narrated by children—and their voice is so beautiful and innocent!—the third is narrated in second person, which still gives the story the required feel.

One of the stories was published in The New Yorker in 2006, was shortlisted for the Caine Prize the following year, and appeared in Uwem Akpan’s acclaimed collection of stories, Say You’re One of Them (in fact, the book’s title is pulled from this story). The other story appeared in a collection of selected short stories and poems published by the African Writers Trust in 2013, Suubi. The stories in the anthology were born out of a mentorship program organized by the AWT, where emerging Ugandan writers were paired with established UK based writers. The third story comes from a writer whose poem was also included in Suubi, and this story was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2018, and appeared on adda.

The best short story writers do something to you just after you read that last paragraph: they leave a kind of quiet inside you.

 

Oyet Sisto Ocen “In the Plantation”, published in Suubi.

None of the stories in Suubi have ever once lost their grip on my mind, but then this story about a small happy girl, Nakato, and her twin brother, Kato, and their family and friends and an Uncle Tom who lives in the city and has become very rich is one story that would not live my head. The voice of the narrator is so moving and so innocent that we cannot help but fall in love with it.

When, one day, she returned from school to meet many-many people in their house and her aunt carried her and told her that Kato’s head, her brother’s head, was gone, she said: “If Kato’s head had gone, it would come back. It would find Kato and fix itself, we would still run in that long trail of the banana plantations, we would meet Joe and Katumba, probably we would still plan to go and steal the pawpaw from Mr. Mukasa’s plantation and eat in our backyard.”

This juxtaposition of beauty next to blood, innocence next to the evil of men who are supposed to be matured, and peace and grief is the thing that makes this story what it is.

The beautiful thing about this story is how it immerses us in place, in the environment. The story opens with the children searching for nsenene, later they are running to Mr. Mukasa’s plantation to steal pawpaw. All of those things are things that anybody who had real fun in the real world—I mean, I used to sling sparrows and suck the juice from flowers and catch grasshoppers—when they were young would know of. And, quite brilliantly, it is amidst all of these innocence—which also includes the sweet they always got from Uncle Tom, which they ran to share with Katumba, the child who liked to play with his private part, the running after Uncle Tom’s car on their way back from school—that we are suddenly thrown into the bitter world. And I think it is Sisto trying to show us how disaster doesn’t know young or old or maturity or innocence—or rather, that evil men do not care.

This juxtaposition of beauty next to blood, innocence next to the evil of men who are supposed to be matured, and peace and grief is the thing that makes this story what it is.

The other beautiful thing is the use of very short sentences, which is just the best because the narrator is a child. Here: “I still recall its sweetness when he gave it to us. Uncle Tom found us playing in the banana plantations. We were searching for nsenene, the grasshopper which appeared seasonally when it rained in our village. We searched for them on the ground and in the folds of the banana leaves.” These short sentences will keep carrying you, magically (because the magical doesn’t have to be loud and glaring; in fact, the best writers are those who do wonders with the sentence such that it doesn’t distract you from the story itself), such that when you get to its end, you’ll be unable to uproot the feeling that this story would have grown in your chest.

Harriet Anena “Dancing with Ma”, published in adda.

Her mother died just after she was born, so they, the people who found her, named her Kec-kom (misfortune)—“Kec-kom, because you were Aba’s misfortune…Kec-kom, because you were Ma’s misfortune, too”—instead of Gum-kom (fortune). However, after a series of unfair treatments to the young motherless girl (from Auntie and Grandma, the both of them from Aba—the man who is supposed to be her father—’s family, and sometimes even from Aba, too), which made her so angry that she torched the house with fire one day—Kec-kom parked the few things that could be called hers and left the house. She walked 24 kilometers, walking slowly but without stopping, until she arrived a house where she met a woman—Calina Aber—to whom she introduced herself as “Gum-kom”. But even this Jabez-y act wouldn’t change her story. Even here, with Calina, a woman who couldn’t bear a child, and her husband, Simeo Latim, a teacher—even here, with this seemingly nice people, her story becomes another story of kec-kom.

“Dancing with Ma” is a fast-paced short story that shows us the life of a young motherless girl, who, in spite of all the shit that the world was throwing her way, took life so gently it is surprising. Or, maybe all the shit that life hauled at her is what makes her so matured (which is the thing for motherless children anyways, we grow up while children our age are playing with their mother’s breasts; while they’re suckling at their fingers we are testing the potency of fire with ours). How being motherless makes one, as Safia Elhillo puts it in a poem: “everything’s child”—that should sound good, but for the fact that when you belong to everything, you are not really anything’s; you are just passing through life, serving here and there, moving from here to there, collecting dust and soil, sometimes joy. All of this is what Kec-kom’s life is: 13, but she already ran away from home, already lost a mother, is not in school, had a man between her legs, ran away from another place, lost a child.

“Dancing with Ma” is a fast-paced short story that shows us the life of a young motherless girl, who, in spite of all the shit that the world was throwing her way, took life so gently it is surprising.

This story would not be as moving as it is if not for how Harriet Anena writes prose, so simple and beautiful that I just want to cuddle her words. (“They found Ma in a banana plantation, knees to chest, arms stretched forward, as if she was trying to scoop something towards her bosom.”; “An hour later, you felt a prick, a tear, a pull and twist in your stomach, as if a knife was in there.”; “Ma had laughed softly, hesitantly, like a young woman being tickled by a suitor she liked but didn’t want to show that she did; because she was told only a slut laughed all her laughter at once.”) No, the prose is not sexy, it is teddy bear-y.

Anena just tells the story, only and only with empathy.

Her voice is moving, just the way Labrinth’s “Jealous” is, but she does it so well that it doesn’t feel quirky in the way a poor movie scene feels—and, considering that she’s writing about pain, a little girl, poverty, abortion, rape, and more?! Any other writer might just have gone preachy, or finger-pointing, or raging, but Anena just tells the story, only and only with empathy.

Uwem Akpan’s “My Parents’ Bedroom”, published in The New Yorker.

When war knocks on the door of a happy home and a child is the one who goes to open the door to welcome it in, and when it enters in, what does it look like to the child, how does that child tell the story?

This is what Uwem Akpan’s “My Parents’ Bedroom” is about. After Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, on his way back from a negotiation in Dar es Salaam, people began to talk in hushed tones on the streets, riots began, houses (Tutsis’ houses) were razed, men (Hutus) clutched machetes, entered houses (Tutsis’ houses) and ran the blade into people’s (Tutsis) bodies till their sputtering blood-oozing bodies went quiet and death stole the last breath from their lungs. It was so brutal, it is not even imaginable (there is nothing imaginable about war), especially considering that the Tutsis did not suspect that something that brutal would come in the next hour and, when it all dusked on them, there was no aid from anywhere.

However, the thing was that not only did Tutsis suffer, but even Hutus who saw humanity in Tutsis were considered evil. There was the Hutu Ten Commandments published by Kangura in 1990, which stated how Hutus should interact with Tutsis. The first law: “Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, wherever she is, works for the interest of her ethnic Tutsi group. Consequently, we should consider a traitor every Hutu who: a. marries a Tutsi woman; b. befriends a Tutsi woman; c. employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or concubine.”

As in “Hotel Rwanda”, Uwem Akpan’s characters are a mix—the husband and father of the child narrating the story, Papa, is Hutu, but his wife, Maman, is Tutsi. However, unlike in “Hotel Rwanda”, this story doesn’t end with the reader getting a gentle smile on their face—in fact, you most likely will have tears in your eyes when you get to the end of this one. And, while it is not a movie or novel, this story is so visual—and the fact that the narrator is a child and doesn’t understand what is happening makes this story so moving.

At the beginning of the story, her mother went out at night, which is something that doesn’t happen because her mother always said “only bad women go out at night.” Unknown to the little girl, the woman had gone to hide—her husband had told her to run but she could not, so she came back. As she asks her mom, Maman, questions, the woman, with tears shining in her beautiful eyes, tells her daughter: “Swallow all your questions now, bright daughter.”

“When they ask you… say you’re one of them, OK?”

As the story unfolds, flipping between their past peaceful life and the present bloody dusk—narrated by Monique, the girl, who is “nine years and seven months old”, and who is in real trouble because she looks like her mother who is Tutsi (her mother tells her at the start of the story: “When they ask you… say you’re one of them, OK?”)—the brutality of war, what it does to the peace and beauty of the life of ordinary, good people, comes into full view, and their hopelessness; and the reality that love (the Hutu Papa marrying a Tutsi woman) and what some call “enlightenment” (“Papa…went to university and works in a government ministry”) doesn’t do shit in such times.

“My Parents’ Bedroom” is a painful story, it’ll almost rip your heart out of your chest and shred it the way a child shreds paper with scissors.

You can check out other recommended stories here.

The post Recommended Short Stories You Can Read Online, by: Oyet Sisto Ocen, Harriet Anena, and Uwem Akpan. appeared first on Creative Writing News.

In the introduction to “The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallunt”, she wrote:

“There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I may never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.”

All from Adda—two of them shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2019, the third published on the site last year—the stories I recommend this week deserve to be read just how Mavis Gallant advised: Read one. Shut the tab. Read something else. Come back later.

I hope you enjoy them.

How to Marry an African President by Erica Sugo Anyadike.

Beautiful, funny, heartbreaking—those are the best descriptions for this ‘how-to’ story that was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2019; it was recently published on Adda.

This story is a story and a guide, and here and there, there are instructions, or say, anecdotes—all for the woman who wants to become an African President’s wife. From being a secretary who is forty years younger than the President, she becomes the First Lady. Though before her, there was a wife, and she was also married. Things happened. Her husband was given “a posting faraway” by the President and she never heard from him again; the President’s wife was sick, so she died. Soon, she gets pregnant, and we are taken through a series of things that she, secretary-turned-African-President’s-wife, becomes. She has a wedding that made headlines all over the country; she asks the President, in the subtle way a woman asks a thing, for her own house without asking (“You’ll pout and tell him how hard it is to live with his first wife’s lingering memory haunting the house.”); she goes from one country to another for shopping trips (“Tell him the wife of such a Big Man like him should be better dressed. Aren’t you a reflection of him and his largesse?”)

Erica’s short story, like every ‘how-to’ short story, seems very easy to pull off (Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl”, Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer”, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”, and, though this isn’t a short story, Binyavanga Wainana’s satiric “How to Write About Africa”), but it only seems so. One of the reasons why is, in a ‘how-to’ story, there is a ‘you’, there is a series of instructions, or a guide, and most of the times, the writer is writing about a whole group of people, which makes it difficult to pull off because the character must be as dynamic as possible. If not careful, the writer could descend into the obscure and stupid. So, more than anything, this form requires mastery, which is why I haven’t read a book that uses this form all through, except of course, Elnathan John’s “Be(com)ing Nigerian: A Guide”. But, in fact, each chapter of Elnathan’s book reads like a short story.

Thankfully, in How to Marry an African President, Erica shows a level of mastery, especially in how she creates her character—flawed, wanting, human. And she deserves three thumbs up because she is writing about a whole continent, and, if not all the time, most times she is right: “If you want something, someone will be immediately dispatched to go and get it. And all you’ll have to do is immerse yourself in charity work, open a few orphanages, kiss a few babies and accompany the President to state events.”

However, what makes Erica’s story good isn’t just her accurate descriptions of what it means to be the wife of an African President, but her voice, and her use of language. While, as with the Caine Prize-winning “Fanta Blackurrant” and Efua Traore’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize-winning “True Happiness”, there is no bending of language to fit the environment—it wouldn’t have worked, because there is no particular environment—it is clear that the narrator is an African, that the English here is from an African mouth. Here: “Your reception will be a who’s who of powerful people in African politics. Paparazzi will describe your wedding as outrageous and over the top. You have arrived.”  If you are Yoruba, you know that ‘a who’s who’ sounds like a translation of some Yoruba phrase: Eyan jankan jankan—and ‘You have arrived’.

Although some of her descriptions didn’t do it for me (“His skin will be pink and thin, translucent like a lizard.”), she writes very punchy sentences: “He will dispense favours like tokens at an arcade.”; “Jealous journalists will give you a nickname, something alliterative.” (note that ‘jealous journalists’ is alliterative, which is a play that implies that even the journalists desire, in the depth of their insides, this life she now has); “your fear stuck like a lump of mealie-meal in your throat.”

In this story, there is truth, and this truth is coming from a mouth that knows how to tell it well, and if anything matters, that is all that does.

The Bride by Adorah Nworah.

It opens with one of the catchiest short story sentences I’ve come across in my reading life (Nneka Arimah’s “When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters”, from “Light”, being on top of that list):

“The man in the back seat of the powder blue Toyota RAV4 is not Dumeje Nwokeocha, the groom.

But you are the bride.”

Immediately, we are launched into a story that promises to be fun. And, coincidentally, we begin to experience what the world does to daughters, as we meet a lady whose name is Somadina, Adina for short. But even her name isn’t always her name, sometimes it is “baby, or Din Din, or the black girl, or the quiet girl, or her, or the chubby one, or bitch, depending on the mouth, or the mood.” The fact that we learn, very early into the story, that her name can change, ‘depending on the mouth, or the mood’ (of some other person, since it takes another person to call the name, which is almost always a man)—that fact is what this story builds upon. That a girl, lady, or woman must understand that whatever they are is not theirs to determine, but that society determines that for them.

However, “Today, your name is the bride, but the man in the powder blue Toyota RAV4 is not the groom.” In one sentence, the writer repeats the first two sentences of the story, probably to remind herself that this story is also about ‘the bride’ and not just about what names the society places on a woman’s head. This groom has a burn mark and scars on his arms, and one of his legs is longer than the other; unlike Dumeje who is supposed to be the groom, the original groom, whose “forehead is not just right. It is spectacularly long, or tall. It is a walking, breathing man with distinct needs and inclinations” (though I don’t get the description of the forehead as “a walking, breathing man…”, and there’s a good deal of descriptions in this story that I feel don’t work).

The thing is, while the new man is not Dumeje, he is also Dumeje. What the short story writer is driving at is, every man is not always what you thought him to be. “There is the man who is not Dumeje. His limbs are thinner and longer in this room. His lips are just as chapped as you remember them, or the man they once belonged to, or the other man”, she writes. Dumeje will always be ‘the other man’. When Adina tells her sister, “‘I don’t know him, Nono’”, she isn’t just talking about recognition; it is also a play on how a woman can never really know a man—they change.

She also makes this point earlier in the story when Dumeje, the Dumeje, asks Adina, “where do you think you’re going dressed like that?”—though the dress she is wearing is the same Herve Leger dress she wore when he met her. His comment then was, “This your dress go kill somebody, oh.”

However, she, Adina, would have that Dumeje instead of this man, but she can’t afford to stop the wedding now. One of the most brilliant dialogues, describing how parents, though they see it, too, mother’s especially—how they just won’t do what’s best for their daughters because of ‘embarrassment’.

“‘So what if the poor man’s skin is a little dull, eh?’ your mother cries, her face a crumpled note. ‘Will you now embarrass me and your father by calling off the festivities? Do you hate us this much?’

‘Ma, you don’t understand.’

‘Oh, you think I don’t see it too,’ she whispers, and her breath falls on your chest. ‘I see it all, Nne. Today, it is the color of his wrists. Tomorrow, it will be the demands he makes of you, each one harder than the next, till you are left with only those parts of you that serve his needs.’”

If there’s anything that makes this story worth the read, it is not how Adorah tries to make a joke every chance she gets in this very serious story, or her descriptions of falling saw dust as snow, or how she reminds us over and over and over and over again that “Today, your name is the bride, but the man in the powder blue Toyota RAV4 is not the groom”—what makes this story important is the theme it has taken up, and how it deals with that theme.

Beautiful by Helon Habila.

Opening with a description on “the two ways to enter Ajegunle”, Beautiful is a gorgeous story about the life of an Ajegunle-raised footballer, Buzuzu—from the time he scored the goal that was so ‘beautiful’ it could only be compared to the scorpion kick by Rene Higuita, through all the stories of the teams he played for, trying to get to a team in Europe to play for the Big League, and it follows him even after, like most Nigerian players, he returned back home to Ajegunle with “the single most important thing that has ever happened to me”.

In this short story, the prose is beautiful, elegant in fact, but there were parts of this story where I was thinking the narrator is a white person, writing for a white audience (“Here you measure distance in bus stops, not in minutes or hours, because a ten-minute bus ride could end up taking over an hour.”), as he spends the first six-hundred-and-thirty-nine words describing Ajegunle and life in Ajegunle—the girls selling gala and pure water, the traffic, the overcrowded bus. While I can relate to these descriptions, I felt some of them dragged reality a little bit (“Our bus is hardly moving in the deafening, chock-a-block traffic that has something almost apocalyptic about it.” Italics mine). But then again, the narrator is a journalist who works for Vanguard newspaper, who decided to become a sports journalist after seeing the ‘beautiful’ goal by Buzuzu—how will a journalist tell a story?

The success of Beautiful is in how it spans almost the lifetime of a character, how it presents a whole community and its people, their dreams, troubles, and the pride that comes with having one of us there. Additionally, there is a way the narrator holds the reins of his own emotions; he holds them in a way that they don’t even seep through the spaces between his fingers—though I would have loved to feel what he is feeling that he doesn’t show.

Thank you for reading. Check out other recommended stories here.

The post Recommended Stories You Can Read Online, Featuring Stories by Erica Sugo Anyadike, Adorah Nworah, and Helon Habila. appeared first on Creative Writing News.