Great African Reads discussion

Happy New Year!

January features the short story. Our first contemporary work of African literature this year is the short story collection Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan.

Uwem Akpan is a Jesuit priest from Nigeria and currently serves in Lagos. He received his MFA in creative writing in 2006, three years after his ordination as a priest. Clearly Akpan is gifted. :)

His first collection of short stories (which we are reading right now!) won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and the PEN Open Book Award.

I'm excited to be reading this with all of you because i tried to read it a year or so ago, but felt overwhelmed by the power of his writing. I plan to read one story every few days. Please do start sharing your thoughts as you read!

ETA: i linked to his website above, but he also has a fan page here at goodreads.

Hi guys...so in my memory there were a lot more stories! silly me. there are five stories in this book, one of which is probably really a novella. It's the second story in the collection, and i believe i will start with that because i read the first one already. I'm going to read the first one last this time.

Has anyone else started this? or if anyone has already read this (i think many have), feel free to share any thoughts you have...

I've got it from the library and will start reading it soon. I'm looking forward to this collection; don't read as many short story collections as I would like. But, I have a couple of other books that are due before this one, so....

I read this a couple of years ago, but have borrowed a copy from the library to refresh my memory. Thanks for the link to the author's website & reading guide.

Finished the first story yesterday (“An Ex-mas Feast”). I must confess that I have been reading quite a bit of fun “fluff” these last few months so this story jarred me right back to reality. I enjoyed Akpan’s smooth writing of the physical chaos that he was depicting – thought it contrasted nicely.
I just started the second story. I like that the stories are bit longer than traditional short stories – I am able to lose myself in them a bit more. :)

I finished the book last night, in tears. My review is here, but if you don't want spoilers on the stories maybe wait until you've finished it to read it.

Without giving anything away, I feel like Akpan writes in such a way that you keep expecting things to turn out okay, but if you don't just let your mind gloss over it, there is incredible violence present in each story. In a few of them, you have to understand what the child characters do not. I feel grateful for the ignorance of childhood, but these are devastating. Each and every one.

I'm glad we chose this book though. Many of the stories are set in countries of Africa that I don't know well - Niger, Rwanda, Benin, Sierra Leone.

Jenny wrote: "I finished the book last night, in tears. My review is here, but if you don't want spoilers on the stories maybe wait until you've finished it to read it.

Without giving anything away, I feel l..."

wow Jenny...thanks for the heads up about tears. i will plan my reading accordingly.

I'm going to start (hopefully finish) the second selection today.

I didn't read your review yet; i will wait until i've read all the stories. But in the meantime, can i ask you if there was any particular story that affected you the most? or one that you felt was weaker than the others?

I will be starting the book tonight and will read a story a day - my norm for reading short story collections but for this book especially because the subject is the same and painful and also it will help me to better understand each story as an unique experience.

Beverly--just a heads up that the second story is very long. It is more of a novella, at least in length. I'm about half-way through that one and I still have 70-ish pages to go.

Marieke wrote: "wow Jenny...thanks for the heads up about tears. i will plan my reading accordingly.

I'm going to start (hopefully finish) the second selection today.

I didn't read your review yet; i will wait until i've read all the stories. But in the meantime, can i ask you if there was any particular story that affected you the most? or one that you felt was weaker than the others? "

I would say that the very last one was the hardest, at least the most bloody. The second one has some humor and some dialect that remove you a bit from the core of terrible things.

I'm in the middle of the second one and the children make me laugh a little but I'm reading it with this peculiar sense of foreboding, likely because of the first story. I just can't help but think something bad is going to happen to these kids.

Marieke, I just opened up this thread to post the same thing! I am about a third of the way in and I just have this horrible feeling when I read it - makes picking up the book hard even tho I really like his writing.

I have finished the first story - An Ex-mas Feast which is set in Kenya. Imagine that as a 12 year old your family relys on you being a prostitute to provide "food" and to gather the school fees for your brother to go to school (where he will be the oldest person in his class) and this is all you can be because you were not allowed to go to school. Very powerful writing as the author gives his characters dignity yet gives an honest portrayal.

It was also the little things in the description that stayed with me:
- the mother taking pride and careful care to use two plastic bags as galoshes. Items that often seen as nuisance in the world I live in.
- the young child (2 years) waking up squatting to use the bathroom where he just slept and then grabbing his mother's breast so he could have "breakfast"
- the sniffing of chemicals to "erase" hunger
- these "street children" who come back home to their families at night (this opposed to reading about street child who lived in packs among themselves on the street)
- the brother refusing to go to school (though he dreams of attending) when he sister becomes "full time)

I have finished second story - Fattening for Gabon. It was slow going at first but thought the pacing worked well in the end as the young narrator figured out what was happening to him and his sister. The story did a good job of showing how sexual trafficking is all about business and there is a plan of action on how to "condition" the children.
But it is the last line that tells it all - "I ran and I ran, though I knew I would never outrun my sister's wailing."

Also finished the third story - "What Language Is That". It told the story that affects so many people and parts of the world and it was only a few pages long. Hopefully the childhood friends will remember their friendship and as adults use their compassion to ease the religous strife.

Beverly wrote: ""I ran and I ran, though I knew I would never outrun my sister's wailing."
"
Very powerful line. I still managed to talk myself into it 'just' being about slavery, not sex slavery.

I finally started! Just the first story and I thought it was really good. I'm curious, does anyone know why he used the spelling Ex-mas? I couldn't decide if it might just be local convention or if it was symbolic of the ex-family or...

I finished the fourth story - Luxurious Hearses. This story did a good job of illustrating how fragile and ever changing the "correct" answer for your survival can be depending on where they are and who you are talking to. It was a good illustration of the attitudes towards the different religions, languages, class structure, generational differences, and even different attitudes towards different types of government. Once again it was the final couple of sentences had the most impact on me.

Jenny wrote: "Beverly wrote: ""I ran and I ran, though I knew I would never outrun my sister's wailing."
"
Very powerful line. I still managed to talk myself into it 'just' being about slavery, not sex slavery."

Jenny - I think the truth is that it is probably not "sexual" slavery but based on that these children would be stripped of their humanity - there was probably going to be a sexual element to their treatment as a slave.

Jenny wrote: "I finished the book last night, in tears. My review is here, but if you don't want spoilers on the stories maybe wait until you've finished it to read it.

Without giving anything away, I feel l..."

Jenny - I have to agree with you that I too kept thinking that everything will be not as bad as the endings especially were.

Especially in the last two stories - I thought that once the bus got moving that things would settle down a little on the travels. Jubril (Gabriel) did a good job of hiding his wrist and holding in his emotions but could not stop the tears from flowing and using his right arm to wipe them away.
And in the last story - I am glad it was one of the more shorter story and the author had us "knowing" the characters before the horrors they inflict on each other.

"What Language Is That" was so moving, in such a short set of pages.

I found "Fattening for Gabon" very interesting, as I'd not really considered the process through which children end up as slaves in that way - that there would be a period of training.

I'm maybe a third of the way into the fourth story now.

My review.

I really liked the book, as hard as it was to read. There was one thing that pestered me throughout the book and that was the word dey. I couldn't quite figure out what it meant/how it was used.

Luxurious Hearses tied in nicely to the chapter of African history I'm studying at the moment.

From urban Dictionary:


2. dey 37
1. to be
2. to exist
3. the state of being or existing
That thing still dey?
Send me text I no fit hear you, I dey for club.
You still dey into shipping business?

Cool, thanks.

So, sort of related - I was a bit surprised that the book has such a low star rating overall, considering how incredible I thought it was, and so though I seldom read reviews of non-friends on GR, I went through a few of the lower ratings.

Two big things were pointed out: first that the dialogue was hard to follow and to be honest, maybe I'm a jerk, but I tend to find that sort of comment indicative more of a lazy reader who is quite sheltered in their exposure to only English and only their own kind of English. I've lived in Canada, Scotland and South Korea and I've been exposed to lots of different dialects and kinds of English slang and taught the language to ESL students and travelled widely in countries where English is widely spoken though not as a first language, and I think perhaps that makes it easier for me to not only appreciate the language in this book but also to be unbothered by what I don't understand.

The second thing that came up a few times was that the narrative was very detached or unemotional. I really didn't find that to be true. In fact, I thought in particular of having the child narrators and their imperfect understandings of the situations slowly becoming more clear really made for an emotional punch in the gut by the end. What did everyone else think?

i haven't finished yet, but i feel very similarly, chinook.

in fact, i have had trouble finishing it because of that punch in the gut. i read the very last story a long time ago, in granta, or in the new yorker maybe...so i'm trying to finish Luxurious Hearses tonight. i had such a hard time getting through Fattening for Gabon. but not because of detachment or because i was having trouble with the language. the language *did* slow me down, but i do not consider that something that takes away from my reading experience.

I don't disagree with you, Chinook, about the lazy reader. It is important to note that this was an Oprah Book Club pick, which indicates to me that it was picked up by a lot of readers who may not have touched it otherwise.

I would not be surprised by the low ratings on this book especially if it was picked up by many if it was based the Oprah Book Club choice.
Short stories are often not the fav genre of many and that would influence ratings. The stories while connected by a similar theme were not necessarily linear and was not always clear on some of the background information and which country (situation) the storyline was about.

And while the language was not a problem for me - I can see why it would be for many.