This anthology of short stories, collected from the finest emerging writers on the African continent, ushers us, quite boldly, into a layer of love that is not widely appreciated – love wrung out of the grief of watching what you cherish die; how it floods the heart with pining, how it converts admiration and affection to wistful reverence.
This collection of 15 stories is replete with interesting flavours of death-inspired love, and Roseline Mgbodichimma’s Omnipresent is one of the stories that stand out. A mystical story about an ogbanje whose attending spirit in the spirit world kills her human family because she has fallen in love with them and overstayed her welcome.
In the story, Ms. Mgbodichimma opens us up to the possibility of an ogbanje – notorious for dying and re-entering the world and causing her human parents pain – being able to feel the pain of the loss of her human family so much that she resolves to seek revenge against her spirit brethren.
Miracle Ifesinachi’s Across Vistas is an immersive experience – expertly narrated by a female protagonist while pushing her terminally ill grandmother in a wheelchair – that burdens us with the dilemma of a young woman whose husband has been taking drugs to lower his sperm count and deny her a the opportunity of getting pregnant , and when she eventually manages to get pregnant and give birth, he kills the newborn, leading to something more tragic.
Going to Look for Adesua by Michael Chukwudera is remarkable for Chukwudera’s masterful use of language. He uses a child narrator and protagonist to tell this story of the death of his (the child’s) primary school seatmate, Adesua. Chukwudera’s invocation of the Nigerian child’s vocabulary gives depth and vividness to this story, and at times it feels like the child narrator has jumped out of the pages and is standing before you in his a-size-too-big school uniform, eyes brimming with innocence, telling you how much he misses Adesua.
Enitayanfe Akinsanya’s Aubade in Sagamu portrays how ruthlessly queer love is punished and snuffed out in Nigeria. It also highlights how a young man is determined to brave this adversity by coming out to his religious parents as a final act of wistful respect to his friend and secret admirer who has a tragic run in with a homophobic mob.
This collection is not lacking in sizzling prose, especially with the presence of Chinonso Nzeh’s Sweet Basils, a story told with so much care you’d think Nzeh cradled and cooed and wrapped every sentence in cotton wool. Sweet Basils excels at symbolism, chronicling the longing of a woman who is mourning the death of her father, and the only thing she has to remember and reverence him by are the sweet basil plants he spent his lifetime nurturing and teaching her to tend. At the peak of the funeral trauma, she receives a call from her house help who informs her that her sweet basils – which were withering – had started blooming. Her mood instantly changes and it is as though a heavy burden has been lifted from her shoulders and the air around her has become fresh and crisp. Her sweet basils blossoming means that her father will never be dead to her, that he will be always be there in every tendril that shoots out and shimmers in sunlight, in every leaf that dances as she showers it with love from the watering can. This is why Nzeh’s story is one of the shining lights of this anthology: he has the linguisticwherewithal to match every emotion needed to drive this story to its symbolic destination.
I find Mustapha Enesi’s Yesterday and Today and Tomorrow to be thoughtfully written and I feel it is one most satisfying interpretations of this anthology’s theme. He shows us a woman living with Alzheimer’s whose husband still showers her with affection despite the fact that she often doesn’t remember who he is. He knows he will never get her back in her right mind yet this is what binds him to her. Enesi sumptuously interprets this theme to show that you can lose a loved one while they are still alive.
For a theme so narrow, I am quite impressed by the ability of the fifteen writers to create piquant flavours for this anthology, and this is as brilliant a representation of the human condition as you’d find. This anthology, curated by Tope Akintayo and co-edited by Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim and Basit Jamiu, makes a clear and fearful assertion: you don’t know how deep love can go until you know the pain of losing someone to death.
To grieve is to love.
