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The Girl With A Louding voice is an offering by Abi Dare that explores the experience of a little black girl whose life is upended by the passing of her mother. Adunni’s character is so rarely depicts the life of a child that we almost forget that she is 14 years old. She is encumbered with the burden of black womxnhood from a young age, so much so that we don’t even see child like desires from her. When she is ripped from her family, it’s almost like she’s a flailing limb wondering how the rest of the family body consisting of men will attend to the needs of this body. Her desire for education lies heavy on a bound tongue that is tied to chopped English. Her father in a typical “can you eat your books” move sells her to a polygamist who has not yet borne a male heir.

A book that is a framed around the resilience of a black girl child in the face of suffering really makes me think “not this again.” I think the author did not have enough outrage for the character, it almost feels as if the harrowing dishing out of trauma to this child was dealt with flippantly. The anger simmers but never bubbles over. There is really no sense of justice for all those who perish and patriarchy seems to be a towering tree that isn’t even chipped with some axe of resistance. Everybody gets away with everything they did to this girl. All the men who exchange her between their filthy hands like a communal towel that wipes their financial, domestic or “not having male child” problems.

The peak of my disappointment comes with a character that we are made to believe will atleast be revolutionary. She rejects the ridiculously ostentatious convening of society womxn who resemble yellow gold pillar classlessness. This pretentious life doesn’t align with her politics especially because she is an environmentalist who has recently come from the United Kingdom and has bodily autonomy. It’s kind of awkward that the one character that is “world traveled” is the one who can condemn the fact that Adunni is a child slave and is thus the better black positioned to pinpoint human rights violations. However, her character in a poor attempt to be complicated and riddled with a nervous condition, undergoes a fertility treatment that does not exert the anger, betrayal and emotion suitable for the character.

I have ruminated on whether this is how the author wanted the book to sound because it’s being narrated by a child with broken English. Maybe she does not have the language to name these traumas. Perhaps my disatisfaction at the simple was of this book is also rooted in the fear of what this book does in the frame of the white gaze. Black girls and womxn seemingly live joyless lives where they are expected to constantly overcome while the outrage remains subpar. Additionally, the loudest monster in this book was Big Madame, the womxn the child was sold to as a domestic servant. Big Madam starves, beats and degrades the child. Her husband is a paedophile in the periphery. And there’s still no justice. The happy ending is not enough for me because there is no accountability. Or perhaps that’s reality and getting away is enough.

I have finally arrived at the door of a world created by Emezi. The highly anticipated exploration into a utopian world is led by 15 year old Jam who enjoys softness and joy in a world where marginalization does not exist. The story is based in a place named Lucille, where the monsters have been ripped from society and the landscape has been smoothed by love, justice and unconditional acceptance. These monsters wear faces of politicians, bigots, thieves and abusers. However the truth remains, a monster always has a human face. And there is a monster that still roams in Lucille, surreptitiously slipping past Angels as a transparent gas would. Jam watches as her father shields her from a world that made him shudder, his fear overtaking his rationality at times. He is also a father who is grateful that he is raising a transgender daughter in a world that has not sharpened its sword in preparation to wield it against subversive sexual orientation and gender identity claims. Her mother is quite the cool womxn, a young Assata I would imagine, with flowing braids and painting obscure centaur like beings while listening to grime in her studio. Jam accidentally awakens her mother’s drawing whose massive body crushes the quiet of Lucille and reminds them of a time when monsters hurt children. The young protagonist has to negotiate between obedience and duty, lies and omission. The themes in the book could arguably be categorized as heavy. Heavy in a way that tips into the politicized side of the spectrum and out of reach to young adults who aren’t necessarily well versed in politics. In some instances the author could be accused of delving into dense subjects in a superficial manner. This can be an overestimation of the reader’s social awareness. However, I would argue that there is a manner of “normalizing” of certain realities that our society has pushed to the margins. There is also the sensitivity with which the writer handles the offense, carefully circumventing the details of the violence. Care is an intentional element in the book.

What I appreciate most about this offering by Akwaeke is their ability to write a story in which a child’s life was in danger without the transgender person being harmed or running the risk of having a trans reader being triggered. Joy is an important lens to employ when writing about queer bodies, especially when certain identities are often associated with violence. In a chapter of my Masters, I explored the use of the violence narrative as a form of representation as being tantamount to erasure and robbing queer bodies from joyful stories. Akwaeke wrote a story where a queer child was not victimized, their identity was not weaponized and for that I am grateful.

When it comes to marginalized bodies and story telling, one expects a newspaper printing press of the headlines and themes over and over again. It’s a laborious and necessary task for a writer to upend the expectations of those who think the stories of blackwomxn are monolithic. However, Evaristo illustrates that the sealing of black lives can be effortless, honest and roariously entertaining. Sowing the skin onto different skeletons reveals characters who aren’t just black and womxn, but breathing and living as a kaleidoscope of experience.

I’m pleased to meet the 50 plus lesbian who spent her life dodging commitment and has womxn who, thirty years after the fact, chase her down the street for never calling them back. Her feminism is the type that would have her canceled, her daughter reminds her of the way in which gender will prove to be obselete and so will her type of feminism. We meet a womxn who raises a hurt child, her blood left on the grass of a park because her crush manage to convince his friends of her accessible nature. Her mother, an immigrant, will embark on a journey of sexwork at 50 and fall madly in love with another womxn who cleans and remains invisible to the privileged.

Through the 12 different stories that are etched into this book and quite frankly into my memory, I’m quite interested in the flow of sexuality and the subversive sexual identities claimed by these characters. The display of sex, desire, softness especially from older womxn is revolutionary. The reader starts to see and quite frankly become attracted to some of these womxn.

Evaristo also navigates into the horrific and unmapped territory of same sex intimate partner violence. It doesn’t happen with the quickness of a windscreen collision of a crash test dummy but rather seeps . Like spilt wine through a couch, slipping beyond the surface and ruining every fiber in its wake. A violence that first rips a womxn to a place where she’s more of a foreigner than where she was born, a violence that bars her from speaking to other womxn. Slowly we watch a womxn slip out of her identity and only a timid quivering remainder is met by her best friend years later.

The interesting theme that is pervasive throughout the book is the growth of characters, although time is not linear and the chapters follow a different characters’ narrative, characters we have met before walk in the back ground of every story. Stories date back decades and all link seamlessly with all of them attending a play. It’s like people watching, some have met, others have passed each other, slept with mutual friends or slept with their daughter’s husband. It’s also delighting I’m watching the transition of feminism and what it means in different times, especially at a time where the only family member to understand her transgender great grand child was born almost 100 years prior.

“The Barbies with their stick legs and rocket breasts were another problem Megan had to endure. She was supposed to spend hours dressing up or playing house with them, including the darker ones she was supposed to find more relatable. In a fit she’d once tried to commit Barbicide, defaced them with colored marker pens, chopped off hair, extracted eyes with scissors and de-limbed a few… The Barbie invasion proliferated on birthdays and at Christmas, relatives talked about incredible collection, as if she’d actually chosen to have them in her life.”

The act of including a transgender character in a book meant to show the diversity in the experience of black womxn in Britain is revolutionary. It’s not an act saturated by tokenism, but an intentional overhaul of how we understand gender, relationships and feminism. The intentional task of showing older lesbian womxn, womxn who sleep with womxn for the first time when their over 60, womxn who are fucking and over 70.

My reactions to some of these stories which range from horrific to scandalous to jarring were like Sonia Sanchez reading the Bluest Eye. Once I closed this book, I had no idea what I was going to do with myself for a while.

Quite frankly, while I was reading this, I was holding a revolution in my palms.

Motherhood isn’t a jacket to be picked off a conveyor belt, a random pick that might be too snug, too big with mismatched buttons but you have to make it work. We meet Patsy who didn’t quite want to wear this jacket, longing for another type of warmth that lays an ocean away.

Patsy is a black queer womxn under surveillance from the eyes of Jesus scattered over her mother’s house. She works a job that brings no satisfaction but holds onto the hope of leaving Jamaica behind to revisit the love that glows from the American dream. This lover, by the name of Cicely frequently throws the stars of the American flag at Patsy who envisions a world where she can be who she wants away from poverty and away from her daughter.

Dumping Tru, her 6 year old daughter, with her father who is married with three kids, Patsy believes that her absence would be a better parent to Tru than her presence could be. Tru is immediately besieged by the nightmarish existence of being a motherless child, belonging to nothing and nobody but a man who reminds her of how much of a financial burden she is. As the story persists, we grow to see a warmth in Roy, Tru’s father, that is reserved for Tru. He does not interfere with her growth as her identity changes and bends towards masculinity. A bald head, a binder and a soccer ball. Dennis-Benn intentionally omits calling Tru’s identity by name for the sake of the authenticity of the story. Terms such as Gender Non Conforming disrupt the narrative of the story set in the early 90s to late 2000s. However we see Tru willing her breasts to return to whatever place they sprung from to disrupt her anatomy and betray her as feminine.

There is a phone call that stands as an unending mist in Tru’s childhood, the one where Patsy called and hung up. Patsy swallowed the guilt along with the disappointment of an unavailable lover, being an undocumented person and having to be seen in America. The story follows Patsy’s alienation from the rest of the world, having to work in bathrooms scrubbing toilets, having to be alone and filling the ardent void with bodies of men who cum fast and don’t stay. Time speeds and Patsy zips another type of motherhood jacket over her body that is aware of its blackness and ballooning weight due to American food. A nanny to children who she leaves as soon as they turn 6 because that’s her only memory of Tru. Internally battling with the tension of raising children whose parents don’t care to entertain and her own emotional unavailability towards her daughter, Patsy moves through life. Without passion, without purpose and the realization of her dreams.

This book speaks on the heavy themes of body politics, race, class and displacement. I found myself begging the narrative to shift, to alter and for Patsy to catch a break. However, mirroring the complexity of life lived off the street pages of books

I find myself quite frustrated with Patsy’s choices and her self involved project of seeking a life away from her daughter. I think the writer portrays a life of constantly seeking without fulfillment quite viscerally. There are memories of what you’ve left behind in the pursuit for more only to find the future as empty, if not more, than the past.

There are themes in this book that I enjoy profoundly. The names of roads and utterances of villages that aren’t popular on the tongues of South Africans. I enjoy the telling of tales of places that my feet have explored. The Great Limpopo, the glint of Pride in my father’s eyes. I recall the places he has pointed to, the stories that have rumbled through his own grandiose presentation of his home.

There is a semblance of home and history in this book. Personally, I fancy this to be a secret language that those who have been ostracized can appreciate. In this collection of short stories published by Black Bird Books, Mopai tackles the lived experiences of marginalized identities. What is particularly interesting for me is the impact of a Mopedi womxn taking the reigns of story telling considering the stereotyping that confronts Bapedi. As tribalism would have it, Bapedi are frequently forgotten in mainstream discourse. This is greatly disappointing as Bapedi are incredible story tellers, a trait that may be verified by the folklore that danced from my grandmother’s trunk of stories. It’s as if they were tucked right into tjali ya hae, snug around her waist.

The collection of stories challenges the cruelty of others towards us and the venom that bubbles in black families. It brings forward conversations that our generation have been trying to pry from our parents’ hands. This includes the popular adage of “ba tla reng batho” when a teenage girl is forced to hide her pregnancy at the funeral of a brother who lost the fight against his mind. The conversation of fathers who attempt to physically break the backs of their wives. The conversation of a tongue heavy with English but hair coils stubborn in blackness.

I quite enjoyed the lascivious whispers of bo nyatsi and stolen men. I particularly love the beautiful embroidery of stories that gives color to every voice dimmed by society. Stories of queerness, colourism, sexual violence, racism and gender patriarchy. I was quite surprised at the manner in which the young author was able to wear white skin, zip it with ease and lead me to believe that they are speaking from the mouth of a white farm boy in Tzaneen. This occurs with a number of different voices and it is astoundingly believable.

The author shows a lot of potential to write colorful stories from a myriad of voices, this is only but just the beginning of quilt. At times I wondered about the ambitious nature of including so many stories in a first project where attention to detail is clear. I found some stories to be more simply written than others which unsettled me. Of course, I interrogated the possibility of the introduction of a new voice and positionality that makes the story so different from the rest.

I look forward to hearing more from Keletso and hopefully await another project that brings visibility to stories that are being erased.

There are some forms of heaviness that our bodies will break under. Sometimes it’s not the stomach that sits on your thighs in perpetual disappointment. Sometimes it’s not the extra skin stretched to capacity by fat. The fat that tries to hide under our armpits when the shirts are too tight. The fat the sneers at the new pair of pants that will break and sigh at the consistency of your rumbling thighs determined to ruin fabric.

Sometimes the heaviness lies in being raised by a narcissist, witnessing a gang rape and witnessing your mother beating you while whispering I love you. Sometimes the heaviness is your blackness, your intelligence, your compassion and lack thereof. Sometimes the heaviness is everything.

We meet Kiese Laymon, a black boy from Jackson Mississippi contending with body issues and an abusive mother. Laymon writes a fascinating tale in which we meet a mother but never know her name. A brilliant Womxn who allocated blame on everything but her actions, who beats her son into a box that his body could never belong to. A boy who drinks wine to drown out the moans of his mother under the man who beats her. There is a cognitive dissonance that accompanies Kiese who knows the capacity of his mother’s brilliance but watches as she drowns in debt, starvation and stories of her imagination. His mother is an academic, chasing a PhD and over-pronouncing words to insulate herself from the violence that comes with being black. She sleeps with a gun under her pillow and demands her son to write essayslike Faulkner. She’s uses her belt as often as she uses her mouth to lash him but only uses “I love you” as an apology.

“Parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them.”

There are more words in books that threaten to overthrow the household than there are warm meals and affirming touches from mother to son. Any touch feels like love until it doesn’t. The violence becomes louder as Kiese grows from boy to man, all the while existing in the body of a man. An overweight man who perpetually has to contend with how his body is dangerous in lily white spices.

I find it quite interesting when we meet one of Kiese’s students who is caught with an incredible amount of cocaine. At his disciplinary hearing, the small smart white boy states that his first encounter with drugs was when he wears solicited by a big dark man in a club. I started to recall the Oscar Pistorious’ defence of an intruder that caused him to kill his partner. I recall the young man from Stellenbosch who hacked his parents to death and mauled his sister. His defence: imaginary black intruders. Even when our bodies, particularly the bodies of black men, are not in their perimeter of the crime, the conjuring of the imaginary black body and the dangers it represents is enough to expunge white men from crimes.

We witness Kiese’s addiction to weight loss and the fallacy that his smaller body is less harmful to white Americans. But no matter how many pounds are shed, how his skin now hugs the ribs it has never been this close to, Kiese remains a big dark black man in the eyes of America. The writer also recognizes that the labor of his grandmother washing the undergarments of white families is congruent to the labour of fighting whiteness in institutions.

Food. Race. Abuse. Sexual Violence. An eating disorder. These play an inextricable role in this memoir addressed to his mother. These could all be the starting points in conversations that we could have with our own mothers, of their neglectful love and traumatic assertions of doing what is best for us. The truth is heavy. Naming your mother’s abuse is heavy.

Hemmingway is quoted as saying all stories end in death “…and he is no true story teller who would keep that from you”. Niq Mhlongo’s short stories seem to always have a link to death. In his first collection, Affluenza, seven of the eleven shorts featured death. In his recent collection, Soweto under the apricot tree, he’s got the same ratio; seven out of eleven feature a deceased person. And one deceased cat. The deaths are seldom the subject or even the theme of the story itself, but there always exists their pallor in his content. You would imagine a high level of earnestness in his shortsthen, but he does manage to add some interesting colour and comedy here and there.

 

In Soweto under the apricot tree the short stories are set in and around the townships of Soweto. In this batch Niq has collaged a portrait of the peri-urban that reveals the many social interactions and dynamics at play. An assortment of characters presents the issues in and around black life in interesting and quirky stories that explore a variety of topics. From paternity to xenophobia; from revolutionary politics to tenderpreneurship; from aspirations to vigilantism. And that dead cat. 

 

“Curiosity killed the cat” is about the tension that builds between two suburbia neighbours around the death of a cat inauspiciously named Napoleon Bonaparte. Like the megalomaniac military man, Napoleon strikes a colonial terror on Ousi Maria, the domestic helper to the Phala household. The neighbour’s cat seems to sense her superstitious reservations and regularly saunters in her vicinity. On this one fateful day, his bullying lands him in the swimming pool and Ousi Maria watches him drown. Then ensues the tussle between African culture,with its non-filial connection to domestic pets, and Western Culture with its adoptive embrace of the cat and the dog. Children (black) are called Satanist cat killers at school and threatened with suspension by the school principal (white). Wives (white) sulk at other wives (black) for not attending the burial service of Bonaparte. Wives (black) fight with husbands (black) and domestic workers (black) about the traditional cleansing that is now required for the swimming pool. The story does a good job of juxtaposing the beliefs of one race against another, together with the intra-race tensions from black people’s moves away from their cultural reference points.

 

The evaluation of black folks diminishing affinity to ancestral engagements is a topic in which Mhlongo is interested. Particularly, he explores the substitution of African beliefs for Christian faith and liturgy in black lives. In “My Father’s Eyes” a woman is shocked when her seemingly good Christian husband consults a traditional healer to establish the cause of their daughter’s cerebral palsy. The shock is doubled when the remedy is cited as being the act of locating an absent father’s grave and ancestry, with which the woman needs to make amends. “I really don’t understand why we black people have to slaughter goats and cows to ask ancestors for money, employment and things that are beyond us by nature, like Fufu’s disability…” reflects a mother to a son-in-law about her granddaughter. “There are some things about tradition that Christianity cannot solve” rebuts the son-in-law.The contemplation of tradition also features in the story titled “Avalon”, named after a popular cemetery in Soweto which is the scene for the philosophical reflections of the story. “You see ntwana, white people don’t waste money like us black people when it comes to death and burial…when one of them dies today, they bury or burn you tomorrow” says Bra Makhenzo, a local political enthusiast and faux “successful business man” who floats around the township in his BMW 5 series while drowning in debt. “But we’re not white”, replies the narrator of the story, who is not named. 

 

That’s another thing Mhlongo does often in his stories; not giving his first–person narrators a name. Nor his second person narrators for that matter. These literary devices add an interactive element to the stories; they bring you close to the action, as you observe like a fly on the wall while the narrator addresses a non-responsive third party; but it keeps you removed enough as you hardly get to first name basis with the main characters. In “Private Dancer Saudade” a female narrator speaks to a muted male suitor whom she meets in her stripper job. The story is an account of the topsy-turvy emotions of a woman swept away by a wealthy man who spoils her with fancy clothes and sleep overs at high end hotels. She takes the absent beau through her elation at his love and distraught at his abandonment, as she sits in jail charged with being an accomplice to criminal activity about which she has no clue. The second person narrative connects us as readers to her blind love and takes us along for the tumultuous ride. 

 

Generally, reading Niq Mhlongo’s stories is like discovering a Russian doll. If you’re not familiar with one, you’ll think it merely a quaint ornament. When you realise that there’s another version inside, and another inside that, and yet another inside the inside, you’re intrigued and excited and incredulous; each layer and its detail coming from a seemingly impossible place. The titular story “Soweto under the apricot tree” is one such Russian doll. Sipho, the narrator, sits with his friend Siya and a few elders in the aftermath of a successful tombstone unveiling. Mhlongo starts the story with an innocuous lesson on the history of the apricot, peach and plum trees in apartheid era Soweto. The story meanders on random detail, like “Uncle Bhodloza drinks a glass of water after eating some raw green chillies. Beads of sweat cover his forehead. The water seems to cool him…”. Then, out of nowhere and unprompted, “Uncle Bhodloza’s eyes turn to Siya. ‘You see that branch where the pigeons have just settled? That’s where your father committed suicide’”. From here details of 70’s township tsotsi’s and their exploits expand into the disclosure of a family secret that leaves Sipho as confounded as the reader. “Overwhelmed by these family secrets, I decide to go inside the house to play… ‘Mannenberg’ by Abdullah Ibrahim. Were my mother’s marriage and my birth really just accidents of apartheid?”. All that action ends as abruptly as finding the last piece in a Matryoshka doll. Not in any cliff hanger kind of way, but in the quotidian way that you realise the setting sun has suddenly disappeared and it’s dark outside.

 

Niq’s use of death as the backdrop for the debate of new ideas and the space around which new ways of being are explored (particularly in the black lived experience), make him a true story teller in that Hemmingway kind of way. He doesn’t have the brevity of Hemmingway in his short story writing and often adds odd details and facts which come from his curious observation of daily life. But he’s got as much adventure in his writing and is as good a story teller.  

 

 

Image by Nora.Reads

I must admit I was apprehensive when I first came across this book. It’s short and does not have the characteristic winding sentences that demand that the mind convert into a theater. Lights camera action, words transferred into pictures and taste and smell. I did not get this from this book which is simply written and intentionally so. The chapters are short, sometimes just descriptions of items found at the crime scene and sometimes anecdotes about the monstrous father who exists at the periphery but is instrumental in the creation of these Womxn being beast and beast keeper.

In the beginning of the book we encounter the methodological and sterile disposal of body. The narrator, the sister to a narcissist who has a proclivity for killing her lovers, inspires a rage in me.

What hooked me and refused to let go until I had completely stormed through the book was the identification of a narcissist and empath relationship. At face value, the relationship between the two sisters can be dismissed as that of the beautiful Brat who infantilizes herself and her sister who cleans up her mistakes. Seems like a regular sibling relationships except one sister keeps killing her partners and the other sister keeps disposing of the bodies. One is disempowered by her darkness, her lankyness and general unfortunate features. The other is beautiful, cunning and innocent.

The story has no major plot twists or a devastating trauma that creates a killer that looks like a “Bratz” doll. For the most part, the story continues without major events that would elicit excitement for the reader. However, maybe sometimes a monster is not created by an incredible traumatic event but merely exists and continues to do so at tandem with the complicity of those around them.

I want to declare that Toni Morrison’s writing is my compass. Spiritually, what a raw threading of black existence that transcends time. Lynching goes by a different name now in America. The story of Macon Dead is taut with tension between his very blackness and his desire to be the white man society considers him to be.

So here is this book that I’ve purposefully delayed finishing because every chapter is a climax. Here is a book about a man who has been brewed in the belly of incest and falls in love with a cousin over a pints of homebrewed beer. A story of a man who is not quite a man even though he has been raised so close to mimicking whiteness. In spite of his uppity ways, born into privilege and complacent in it, Milkman must soon learn that he is a black man. However, the coil in his stomach knotting for over 30 years is not caused by being a black man in America but by being his father’s boy. These lessons come from Guitar, a man well versed in the violence that is essentialized into the black existence. Set in the 1930s, we see the sharp contrast of a man taught to revere whiteness and another performing retribution by way of joining a terrorist Group.

Although this story centers the story of Macon Dead, we learn of the various Womxn who accelerate the viscosity of the narrative but remain in the periphery. The Womxn in this book actually have character traits that sabotage the the antagonist’s own with their brilliance and should probably not be sharing the spotlight. It’s a wonder how Milkman is not lost in the glare of his mother who breastfed him for too long, his off-white sisters who never marry in spite of their complexion and the band of bat shit crazy Womxn he calls, aunt, cousin and lover.

Pilate, Milkman’s aunt and the mother of his lover, is a formidable Womxn who I picture to look like a mountain. Y’all, bald

Published in 1977, this was Morrison’s third book following The Bluest Eye And Sula (which I am obsessed with). Song Of Solomon centers a male character and ventures into excavating what informs black middle class masculinities. Ruminating on her days at Howard, Morrison recalls the middle class boys choosing Womxn based on her straightness, class, skin tone. Although most of her stories are set in a different time in which being black and existing was illegal, they resonate in contemporary America.

Okay let me go read my last ten pages now, I guess I have to let it go.

I expected her to lead an extraordinary life afforded by the opportunity of living in close proximity to whiteness. I think she expected that the culling of her traditional ways and facets that made her like her barefoot mother would destine her for greatness.

Instead I read Tambu’s life as a middle aged Womxn who has achieved so little that using mediocre as a descriptor would be generous. The reality is that Tambu could be anyone of us, the promise of greatness unravel and land on a pile of our accolades that may as well be a pile of shit.

I read this book with fear taunting as a silhouette beyond the covers of this novel. The Tambu who is destined to replicate the trajectory expected from black girls who have attended the Christian Schools and the universities and are expected to seamlessly belong in society is a failure. The work of ridding yourself of the past and the stench of poverty is extensive and violent. Somewhere between creating a black identity that is less offensive, you’ve displaced yourself and your life begins to haunt you through a sack of mielie meal.

The men in this book manifest as various piles of trash. When Tambu eventually leaves the hostel for young Womxn, she moves into a boarding house of an eccentric Christian Womxn who embodies the statement “when I was rich.” Shine shares the lodgings with Tambu whose mind has started to scatter all over the cracked floor like ants dispersing from a Doom attack. Shine shows the veracity of his toxic masculinity through the constant parade of Womxn whose screams bounce of the walls and work at taunting Tambu’s volatile mind. But much like the bad things in Tambu’s life, Shine is a predator waiting to devour everything in its wake.

The precarious nature of life as an educated blackwomxn in Zimbabwe is also represented by Tambu’s cousin Nyasha. A Womxn educated abroad returns to Zimbabwe to lead a desperately normal life teetering at the brink of financial destitution. I am still finding it difficult to find someone content with the position in life in this novel.

This latest title by Dangarembga is not an easy read. Perhaps the usage of the second person is instrumental in uprooting the vines of existentialism that clasp at the reader. Perhaps the story is too relatable and the realization that education is nothing but a chip on the door of poverty. Then there is the omnipresence of mental illness that stalks at the periphery of Tambu’s consciousness like a scavenger waiting.

Books that make me feel uncomfortable are always what I’m drawn to. It allows introspection and awakens my mind to draw parallels between facts and fiction. It also allows me to question the value of the bodies of blackwomxn in Africa and particularly in Zimbabwe. There is a lot of pilfering that manifests in physical abuse, the denial of autonomy and the shaming of bodies which are not considered desirable.

I’ve said enough. Read the book.