on my lunch break today, i read chimamanda's delicious new short story, "ceiling," in the summer issue of granta. i took too long on break, so i didn't have time to copy down an excerpt for you. it's only available in print, so forgive the disappointment if you visited the link. i will have to pop by mcnally jackson again this week and excerpt it for you. i wish i could also scan the image facing the story of a woman standing like an amazon over an entire city--her right foot in one neighborhood, and the left in another. but, sadly, i can't afford granta.

"ceiling" is about a man who marries and then realizes he is no longer in love with his wife or his life, the revelation brought on by an email from a former girlfriend. there's something refreshingly transgressive about stories with africans on blackberrys. i am definitely sold.

this topic, about falling out of love with one's life, keeps popping up for me, first in a short story by one of my writing workshop colleagues, and then in the film revolutionary road, that i finally saw last night. i suppose it is only because i am not happy with my life either--stuck in this job, trying to figure out what's next.

if only these stories also came with answers. --AL.

i read the Caine Prize-winning stickfighting days by olufemi terry yesterday.

boy. writing is such an interesting thing. we all have such different psyches, so many different energies and urges manifesting within us.

i honestly had to wonder what would possess someone to write a story about street children bludgeoning each other to death with sticks. i am not good with gratuitous violence, even if well written, and was actually quite horrified in the end and wished i had never read it. (and i can't say that about too many stories!) i am not knocking his work, or the prize, i'm just saying. don't take my word for it, though. you can read the story online yourself.

Update: I wanted to add that, upon further digging, I learnt that this story was originally published in Chimurenga Vol.12/13: Dr. Satan's Echo Chamber. Puts it in a little more context, so I now understand that this macabre killing fantasy was compelled by a call for submissions. I still kinda want to gouge my eyes out, but I suppose that's a testament to the strength of the writing.

One of my favorite online literary mags has a piece up by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It has been published before under different cover.

I won't comment, lest I be accused of bemoaning my literary failures again, but one of the passages really tickled me. Like the protagonist, I also sport dreadlocks and refuse to eat meat. ;)

***
Excerpt from Quality Street, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
guest-edited by Claire Messud

...Perhaps Sochienne should never have been sent to school in America. But who knew a private university in Ohio would mean that Sochienne would return six years later, announcing that she was engaged to a Kenyan, refusing to eat meat, asking the baffled houseboys about fair wages, and wearing her hair in long rubbery dreadlocks. What should have alerted Mrs. Njoku, she realized now, was discovering, on her first visit to her daughter’s university, that the students wore bathroom slippers to their lectures. Oh, mummy, they are wearing sandals because of this rare blast of warm weather, Sochienne said when she pointed it out, as though giving bathroom slippers the American label of sandals would make them more respectable. There was, also, a certain alarming sloppiness to the students. Mrs. Njoku had been assured that wealthy Americans sent their children there—the outrageous tuition certainly suggested that—but here were young people in slouchy T-shirts and discolored beads around their necks. Still, she had not worried too much about her daughter then, nor did she in the following years, because she assumed that the child she raised would retain her good sense. She had wanted Sochienne to be educated in England after completing primary school and had suggested that they send her to Cheltenham Ladies College, where many of their friends sent their daughters, but her husband said Sochienne would not go abroad until university because he did not want her to turn out like those Akindele children who had spent so long in England that they referred to fellow Nigerians as “those people.” He wanted his daughter to attend secondary school in Nigeria so that she would know who she was. Most of all, he wanted her to get an American university education. America was the future. It was time for Nigerians to get over their colonial clinging. Mrs. Njoku should have resisted more. If only her husband were alive now to see what Sochienne had become; so much for knowing who she was...

I have been trying to fix a particular chapter for about a week now, to submit for a grant application due Friday. This means I have been spending vast amounts of time simply staring into space waiting for the words to appear. Often times it takes reading someone else's work to figure out just what is not working in mine. Unbeknownst to my process, The New Yorker published a short story, Baptizing the Gun, by acclaimed author Uwem Akpan (or at least, let us say, "Oprah's Book Clubbed" author, not sure the level of critical acclaim that affords apart from the NYT bestseller list). What a delight to see mention of Awilo Longomba in the pages of such a stuffy mag.

Last year, Akpan published a collection of short stories, Say You're One of Them, about children growing up in various conditions of social, economic, and political disrepair throughout Africa. I bought the audio book several months ago and have waited to review it here as I have taken long to get through the book. At first I thought it was the poor audio recording (imagine fake, largely caricaturized African accents) that was stopping me in the work, but then my sis, also in Nigeria for the holidays with paperback version in tow, echoed my same impression of the book. I slogged partway through the paperback, silencing my brain's refusal to engage with the characters and settings, ultimately giving up on the whole thing in the end.

It is the kind of text that is unreadable to me, in certain ways, representing in labored, broad, overly historical strokes what should instead be subtler, simpler, and more personal stories. Akpan is a writer young in craft, and it is often apparent in the stories when he tells more than shows what is going on. I find in his stories the same problems I find in my own work, that frustrate me to the point where I cannot read another single word of my not-so-subtly-embedded social commentary, or bold attempts to expose the "rawness" of life. I am well aware that this writing of mine must be refined before it can be presented to the world, or maybe it does not need presenting at all, as it is but an echo of more famous and highly-praised attempts at portraying the rawness of life.

Perhaps there is something more interesting in understanding why certain powers are so captivated by these endless stories of war and starving babies and abuse? For Oprah in particular, whose narrative of the African girl child echoes the one portrayed in Akpan's book by a less than skillful hand. It's not my intention to berate the man, or to question his success, but to attest that it is the desire to refine that matures one as a writer. And that we should all, myself included, continue honing our craft, being truer to our histories and characters and stories especially when others have cosigned them, taking them at face value, baptizing us as writers in a literary landscape languaged primarily by white supremacist imperialism.

But what I really meant to say was, after reading Baptizing the Gun, I had a huge belly-holding chuckle. Three quarters of Akpan's short story take place in a Lagos go-slow, with all the necessary child hawkers and Ndombolo music and food stalls by the roadside. Here I was struggling to edit my own chapter, that starts in a Calabar go-slow, trying to cut back on the amount of visual stimulation and provide more space to make it readable, when Akpan is just piling and piling and piling it on. So perhaps I can consider my job well done?

There are a lot more technical issues with his story that make me wonder why The New Yorker included it. Again, not to berate the man, but simply to understand what it all means.

Petina Gappah has won the Guardian First Book Award for her collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly. I first heard about her in an African Voices interview (Part One below, find the rest on YouTube) with memoirist Alexandra Fuller, author of the phenomenal Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. I remember watching Petina bristle sitting beside Fuller, a white Rhodesian woman, talking about the plight of the Zimbabwean writer.

Her palpable defensiveness, though thinly veiled in pleasantries, was diffused by the authenticity with which Fuller interrogated her own entitlement as a white woman. And I found myself confused about whether hers was a fruitless anger. But I have come to understand that what I interpreted as anger was only Petina's embodiment of radical autonomy. On closer examination, she is simply engaging in a disruptive act by writing, pushing against a deeply ingrained power structure that was not meant to include her own voice. In that way, I too may appear "angry" at times (and I certainly will own up to that).

Thank goodness for vindication.