#YISHREADS February 2024
By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob
February’s Black History Month! Last year I did a column on speculative fiction by authors from Africa and the diaspora;[i] this year I’m casting my net a little wider, looking at classic literature and crime thrillers in addition to SFF… though the content of these works often verges on magical realism anyway.
Mind you, there’s something more than race and style that’s binding these novels together, whether they’re set among post-apocalyptic Jamaicans in Toronto or Yoruba gods in London or street hawkers in Nairobi. Each of them reflects the trauma of modernity, the difficulty of holding on to tradition and basic dignity in the wake of colonialism and capitalism—and I’m sorry to say it, but our protagonists don’t always emerge triumphant.
I’ve also gotta mention a deliberate politics behind my choice of authors. I’d wanted to at least acknowledge the ongoing genocides in the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo by representing books from these nations… then realised, to my dismay, that Alain Mabanckou hails from the Republic of the Congo, which lies next door to that civil war-tortured nation.
In addition, I’m delighted to share the work of the Singapore-based Kinyanjui Kombani, and the formerly Malaysia-based Wole Talabi (he just moved to Australia last year!). The Black literary tradition isn’t all that foreign to our Southeast Asian shores; some of it’s actually being written right here.
Hawkers-Pokers, by Kinyanjui Kombani
Longhorn Publishers PLC, 2022
Here’s the latest novel by this Singapore-based writer (he finished it in his native Kenya; who the hell has time to write in this crazy country), and I dare say it’s his best so far.
It kicks off with the structure of a thriller: our POV character, the 21-year-old Rada, is the target of a police megaraid for kidnapping Mike Thumbi, the son of one of the richest men in Nairobi… but he’s innocent, having only rescued him from the gutter in his drugged state. We get a glimpse of Rada’s wretched life as a riitho, an illegal scout for street hawkers (not just sellers of food but also power banks, perfumes, etc.), always dodging traffic and police and gangsters. Then Mike steps in to help him, and he gets pulled into the world of Crazy Rich Africans, living in a mansion, giving motivational speeches based on his street smarts, getting pulled into a reality TV show… and all the while, any trope-savvy reader is aware that this whole thing is going to end in a very soap opera-style disaster.
What I really appreciate about the book, however—and this requires a bit of a SPOILER WARNING—is that it doesn’t wrap things up with a happy ending. Mike’s rhetoric of “people of different classes can just get along” and Rada’s counter of “it’s not that easy” really does explode at the end with a revelation that the billionaire spirit is one of sociopathic buccaneering, and that men like the enterprising Mr. Thumbi create poverty and suffering more than they do jobs. No hopeful epilogue, like Kombani gave us in his 2004 novel The Last Villains of Molo. No easy solution when there’s no forgiveness possible and no justice in sight.
Brown Girl in the Ring, by Nalo Hopkinson
Warner Books, 1998
This novel was listed in Time Magazine’s “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time” list,[ii] and from the cover, you'd think it’s one of those superficially ethnic YA novels about a POC girl getting magical powers for once, instead of a white boy. Turns out it’s an intense fantasy/sci-fi/horror mashup, and arguably not for kids at all.
It takes place in a dystopian future Toronto, with its downtown abandoned by the wealthy white ruling class, while the mostly Black residents manage to sustain themselves against bad government and violent gangs via homegrown crops and folk medicine. Our protagonist, Ti-Jeanne, is a single mum who still hasn't named her two-month-old baby (a Caribbean custom, it seems) and is resisting her Mami (grandma) 's efforts to make her a practitioner of obeah—even while spiritual visions jump out at her while she's walking down the urban street.
But this is a crime story as much as a coming-of-age story. Ti-Jeanne's baby’s daddy Tony is on the hunt for a human heart to donate to the Canadian Premier, a sinister ganglord's commands on his tail... and it turns out Mami is a blood type match. Séances with Osain and Legbara ensue, a duppy's possession of a madwoman, a chase through abandoned subway tunnels, a climactic showdown on top of the CN Tower…
Ripping stuff! With a shocking amount of gore in the middle, plus chapter heading quotes from Jamaican folksongs and Derek Walcott.
African Psycho, by Alain Mabanckou
Translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley
Serpent’s Tail, 2017
Since we’re on the topic of gore, here’s a Congolese-French first-person novella about Grégoire Nakobomayo, a would-be serial killer in the urban district of He-Who-Drinks-the-Water-Is-an-Idiot, who somehow keeps fucking up all the opportunities he has to murder and commit sexual violence, despite his adulation of the infamous mass murderer Angoualima.
Shades of Ngugi's Devil on the Cross in the orality and magical realism, especially in Angoualima's larger-than-life exploits of decapitating randos and leaving their heads on the beach with cigars in their mouths, and the police's utterly bumbling attempts to collar him, and in the fact that Grégoire has ritual chats with his spirit on top of his grave.
Still, it's pretty hard to pin down what all the bluster and braggadocio is critiquing—the self-important, grasping ambitions of the everyman, maybe? But it's pretty telling that his toxic masculinity (he literally spends a bunch of the book plotting how to kill his live-in, sex-worker, girlfriend Germaine) doesn't actually get stumped by female agency or mockery. I've seen stuff online saying Mabanckou holds Africans responsible for their own subjugation rather than European colonialism, and that kinda comes across—he makes fun of the absurdity and chaos that's happening on the ground, but doesn't seem super-interested in the roots and structures that explain why it's happening.
A fun read, if you're OK with mentions of gendered and sexual violence. But not terribly "educational", if you're hoping this'll give you an insight into world cultures (which isn’t the purpose of literature, anyhow), and not what I'd call a must-read.
The Wedding of Zein, by Tayeb Salih
Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
New York Review of Books, 2009
This book actually comprises two short stories in addition to the titular novella, all written by the famed author of Season of Migration to the North, which I read two decades ago as an undergrad. Compared to that adamantly postcolonial novel—which centres on an academically successful guy who leaves his village to study in the UK, schtupping white girls with tragic results, and returning home to disgrace and doom—these tales are a smidgeon more optimistic.
The first two stories centre on the clash between an old way of life and vigorous modernity. I'm especially charmed by "The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid", taking place in a sandfly-plagued village so stubbornly backward that they reject the prospect of a steam ferry cos it'll stop on Wednesdays afternoons, the same time they pay respects to the saint's tomb at the foot of their sacred tree. In an age of decoloniality, it feels like a triumph of land and indigenousness—but the storyteller admits that the village is a shithole, and that there is space enough for both the steamer and the sacred, if only folks will get their heads out of their butts. "A Handful of Dates" has a grandfather boast of the value of industry to the young POV character... who then starts to realise how cruel the exploitation of his neighbour Masood is, as the grandfather demands tax on the date trees Masood used to own. Capitalism is awful, the kid realises, and vomits.
As for “The Wedding of Zein” itself... ah, here's a conundrum. Zein himself is a dervish-like madman who's tolerated in his village despite the fact that he guzzles down wedding food, consorts with disabled outcasts, and continuously declares his ardent love for different girls in town... because it actually works to everyone's benefit: his declarations of love alert folks to the eligibility of these maidens, who soon get proposals from handsome young bachelors, whereupon he moves on to the next lady. Creepy in our time, but this is juxtaposed with the ickier characters of the Headmaster, who craves a teenage girl for his second wife, and Seif ad-Din, who lives dissolutely and abusively upon his father's inheritance, then suddenly repents and transforms himself into a conservative mosque-goer.
Then out of nowhere, news comes that Zein's getting married—the headstrong and beautiful Ni'ma proposed to him herself, puzzling everyone, becoming the talk of the town, with everyone coming up with their own scenarios for how it could be happened. And the story ends with the glorious wedding feast, but not an assurance that everything will work out—Zein disappears in the middle to mourn at a holy man's tomb, and the event is accompanied by such a series of prodigious harvests and economic opportunities (it even snows in the village!) that one senses that this festival of tolerance may be the end of an era, and that darker times may be ahead...
Which is true, isn't it? They say what's happening in Darfur right now is worse than in 2003. It’s soul-destroying, having to care about more than one genocide at once.
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi
DAW Books, 2023
Note the “for your consideration” label on the cover—this was an advanced reader copy, gifted to me by the author as part of a book exchange at the now-infamous Chengdu Worldcon! (Bear that in mind when you judge the objectivity of this review.)
Anyhow: this is a really cool work of urban fantasy, with the actual pantheon of Yoruba orishas as characters (is that even allowed?), running a worship-based corporation with Shango as its CEO and Olorun as Chairman of the Board, operations extending from the spirit world to the universities of Ife-Ife, the lux hotels of Lagos, the clubs of London, the beaches of Terengganu (Talabi was based in Kuala Lumpur when he wrote this) and even the cocktail bars of Singapore.
Our hero's Shigidi, a minor nightmare god, who gets turned into a superpowered studmuffin by the succubus Nneoma (Naamah out of Abrahamic demonology)... though amidst their constant ecstatic lovemaking, he's still insecure about whether she actually loves him. Their saga unfolds out of sequence, with flashbacks to 11th century Aksum and 1915 Algeria, but at its core, it's a heist story, with the two stealing the Benin bronze mask of the title out of the British Museum, with the help of a rejuvenated Aleister Crowley.
It's action-packed, very sexy, and comes with its own magical tech system—characters bleed spirit particles and learn to sculpt them for transformations—plus, its whole global mythology system means they get to have showdowns with ancient British giants, and at one point Shigidi straight up unalives Lord Murugan right after Thaipusam. (Don't let Hindutva find out!)
Are there downsides? I did think the prose felt a little cartoony at times, and I was disappointed there wasn't actually a bunch of exploration of West African history—the Benin mask ends up just being a vessel of Olorun's spirit rather than having a major story behind its crafting and looting. But I also understand that a lot of this is playing with Nollywood tropes, which I wouldn't get—this is a tale anchored in the Nigeria of today, cosmopolitan and high-tech, tradition mutating to adapt to the present, rather than deep precolonial nostalgia. (One of the orishas is casually portrayed as nonbinary!)
Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.
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