Kate Sherrod blogs in prose! Absolutely partial opinions on films, books, television, comics and games that catch my attention. May be timely and current, may not. Ware spoilers.
Showing posts with label African literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label African literature. Show all posts
The reader is a full quarter of the way through Womb Citybefore anything, in this case a chapter heading, actually mentions misogyny, but make no mistake. Womb City is a novel more deeply concerned with misogyny and misogynoir than anything else I've read and bitches, don't even mention The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's feminist nightmare dystopia persecutes its female characters with 19th century technology at best. Womb City incorporates the cyberpunk tech of Richard K. Morgan's Takashi Kovacs novels into its workings to create a surveillance state like no other, and sends us exploring it through the eyes of one of its most deeply fucked-over victims for a few eventful months in her privileged but precarious life and it goes HARD.
Nelah Bogosi-Ntsu might seem, at first glance, to have it all: part of the "body hopping" upper crust of a high tech future Botswana in which consciousness is stored on silicon and can be swapped among bodies to escape disease, experience life in a body of another sex, immigrate to another country, or just enjoy exceptional longevity, but this luxury comes at a whole terrifying range of high costs. Bodies are both disposable and precious in Nelah's world, and the technology's incorporation into the criminal justice system alone is utterly terrifying: you can be forcibly extracted from your body as punishment for even little misdemeanors. If that happens, your consciousness gets stored in a mind prison where, in most cases, it will be continuously tortured until its time is served and a body becomes available again; meanwhile, your new body has been microchipped with a dizzying array of surveillance technology so that everything the new occupant does, says, or has the barest potential to do or say in the next year, can be replayed like a movie for a supervisory board of forensic specialists to whom records are submitted for judgement.
Nelah is a 430-year old in a 29-year-old criminal's body, but since part of the embodiment process that put them there erases one's memory, and because records of a body's prior occupants' deeds are essentially sealed, Nelah has no idea why one arm is a fancy prosthetic and other parts are weirdly scarred -- or why the body's rich and important original family, with whom they're sort of expected to re-integrate by social custom, is so much weirder around them than they've been led to expect.
This all sounds like spoilers, but I'm merely describing the milieu in which the novel's intricate potboiler of a plot takes place -- Tsamaase owes a lot more to the aforementioned Richard K. Morgan and a host of other sci-fi thriller writers than she does to Margaret Atwood.
Also unlike Atwood, Tsamaase is deeply, deeply intersectional, and this novel is more concerned with class and privilege and how the ultimate surveillance state -- I mean, move over, Big Brother -- affects every life; when our hero and her motley and complicated web of connections transform from a comfortable but confined citizens to rebels, they're acting not merely on behalf of women of reproductive age but everybody. And there's more.
The Botswana of Womb City is inextricable from the Botswana of the distant past, its cultural heritage and especially its particular mythology, its creation fables, its spiritual life, its haunting shared memory -- all things about which I have been ignorant. Reading Womb City has been a hell of a way to learn about it!
I've always hated the saying that two people "fight like sisters," though at times I've also been grateful to hear it, once I realized that the kind of guy (it's always a cishet dude) who uses it is one I needn't associate with beyond what's necessary for politeness. Kind of like the guy who spends the whole first date bitching about his ex. There are red flags and then there are gigantic swaths of fabric the color of arterial blood and still wet enough to drip and fully, it sure smells like iron in here all is a sudden...
My Sister, the Serial Killeris first and foremost a novel about sisterhood, about a relatively plain but infinitely capable, patient and compassionate older sister, Korede, and a gorgeous, glamorous and slightly spoiled younger one, Ayoola. Korede works as a nurse in a hospital where she is highly respected, if not exactly universally liked, and is up for a promotion there; Ayoola gets jetted off to places like Dubai for weekend shopping sprees and night life on the arms of rich and shady businessmen.
Guess which one their mom likes best.
And which one a handsome doctor who has had Korede friend-zoned for years falls head-over-heels for after meeting her just once.
By the time Dr. Handsome meets Ayoola, though, we have learned that Korede's bombshell sister has an annoying habit of killing her boyfriends "accidentally" and "in self-defense" -- and of relying on her calm and competent, medically trained sibling to help her do away with the evidence and clean everything up.
Now Korede must watch as her crush falls in love with her sister, and seems handpicked by fate to be Ayoola's fifth victim (though at the time they meet, Number Three has only just been pulled out of the trunk of Korede's car and dumped into the lake).
That all could feel very plot-by-numbers, especially given the short length of the novel (just above four hours in Adupero Odunye's note perfect narration); it could have resulted in a very formulaic novel. Debut novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite, though, saves her book from this fate by giving her point of view character an emotional candor that lets us really feel her conflicts as she goes about her complicated days at work and at home, and by giving us some very unusual and touching plot devices that carry her further into her dilemmas, like a lovely sub-plot concerning Korede's relationship with a coma patient at her hospital. Which sub-plot manages, deftly, to have a significant impact on the main plot. Braithwaite knows what she's doing.
We get to see Korede taking on the unaccustomed mantle of officially acknowledged leadership (having been an obvious but unrewarded leader for years beforehand) at the hospital, struggle with her feelings for Dr. Handsome and her fears for him, and deal with both her deep concern for and growing resentment of Ayoola*, often in the same taut and affecting scene, making My Sister, the Serial Killer a perfect little jewel of a novel that rewards your tiny investment of time in reading it far out of proportion to its brevity. I look forward to more of Braithwaite's work. And I guess I have to tweak my search parameters a bit in future, too. I obviously don't read enough thrillers, you guys.
*Beautifully complicated by the fact that part of her objection to the relationship between Dr. Handsome and her sister is that he doesn't love Ayoola for any of the reasons Korede thinks make Ayoola worthy of being loved; at one point when Korede asks him point blank why he loves Ayoola, all he can tell her is that Ayoola is "beautiful and perfect," meaning he doesn't know Ayoola at all. Meanwhile, Korede is listing off all of Ayoola's best qualities, which only Korede knows, in her head. That's a very good sister!
Admit it: you've been waiting your entire long, lonely, colorless life to read a novel that contains a line of dialogue as brilliantly bizarre-yet-perfectly-contextual as "these are difficult times for sorcerer roosters."
Satisfaction is just a few clicks away. Hurry up and get yourself some format of Angolan novelist Ondjaki's incredible Transparent City, which I caught myself explaining to my mom as "Ulysseswith less stream-of-consciousness and more characters but also imagine if they discovered oil under the slums of Dublin and the Chinese were the economic powerhouse of the day."*
The "sorcerer rooster," by the way, is largely unremarkable except it recently lost an eye when, preparing to do his job and start the day with a mighty crow, he was instead struck in the eye by a stone shot from a great height by a young man in the multistorey apartment building next door -- which building is almost a character in itself, as is an albino cockroach that keeps appearing and stealing scenes -- one morning in 21st century Angola.
The rooster is no more a sorcerer than any other urban bird; he is just referred to as one by a pair of suspicious tax inspectors struggling to make sense of the aforementioned building and its inhabitants, which, get ready for the inhabitants, most of whom sport incredible names like Ciente-the-Grand and Strong Maria and Little Daddy and João Slowly. And our sort-of protagonist, Odonato, which is very close to the insect order Odonata (which includes dragonflies and damselflies and is evolutionarily quite ancient even for insects), derived from the Greek word for "tooth, " and someday is really like to have a look at the original Portuguese text of this novel to see if all the character-names-as- English-words are original to that text or translated from the Portuguese words, and if so why Stephen Henighan left Odonato** alone instead of calling him "Dragonfly" or "Tooth." But that's a project for long winter months instead of brief summer ones.
Odonato is the father of Ciente-the-Grand, and has already begun (but barely) to become the literally transparent man he will be by novel's end when his wayward son gets himself shot in the ass and wanted by the authorities, which sets in motion the incredible mutual aid showcase that is the building most of these characters call home. They have worked out elaborate warning systems to alert one another of any government or other unwanted attention they're getting, have worked out schedules for exploiting the weird pools of water that collect in the first floor hallway (possibly due to deferred maintenance on the city's water systems, but maybe also a feature the building's residents created for themselves. Or both. I'm inclined to say both)***, and are in general very much entangled in one another's lives to a degree we mostly associate with extended families and I had to keep reminding myself that for most of human history this was the default setting for humanity -- mutuality and cooperation whenever possible, competition only when absolutely necessary -- while I caught myself regarding these relationships that pretty much amount to found family, with wistful awe.
As you see from these international book covers, the city is only part of the title in the English language editions, and is thus singular. For once, though, I think I like the English/ American title better; the plural in the romance languages (including the original Portuguese) would more directly translate as something like "The Transparents" as in, perhaps, the transparent people, but making it a singular/collective noun phrase and extending it as a description of the city of Luanda entire, it draws our focus to how most of the many foreign visitors drawn into the story of Odonato's building and its inhabitants must view the city: the petroleum engineers and other consultants brought in by the government to complete plans to exploit the oil that's been discovered literally under the city, for instance, seem to look right through its buildings, its infrastructure, its people (and of course a lot of the oil is under the Angolan equivalent of the famous Brazilian favelas). Even its local officials seem to have shifted to this perspective; those who aren't busy entertaining visiting American geologists are working to capitalize on another, more fleeting and ephemeral natural resource their country has to offer in the form of a coming solar eclipse, which will be total in Angola. As a Wyoming girl, still living in a place that is functionally also a resource colony with delusions of sovereignty that also, just a few years ago, cashed in on eclipse mania, I felt a kinship with the characters in The Transparent City and their ambivalence about the coming opportunities (a homeowner in Wyoming's capital city for many years, and a former journalist who covered the mineral extraction industries, I was always extra wary after learning that I did not own the mineral rights to my own property and that this is standard out here. Meaning of course that if oil, natural gas, etc were ever discovered in my neighborhood there would be swift eminent domain action and I would have to just hope that I'd be offered something reasonable in exchange. These characters, though, in Odonato's building... are they renting tenants? Co-operative owners? Squatters? It's never addressed.).
Ultimately this, like so many good literary novels, is a story of relationships, not so much between family members for all of the Odonato/Ciente plot as between friends, neighbors who have become friends, and yes, a few romantic relationships, such as the long marriages between Odonato and Xilisbaba and between their neighbors Edu (who has a formidable and world famous hernia swelling right next to a testicle that he carries around a little stool to support whenever he gets to sit down) and Nga Nelucha, between the entrepreneurial Joao Slowly and the actually hard-working Strong Maria, and the supportive appreciation the entire building extends toward a character known only as The Mailman, whose only wish in life is to be issued a moped with which to make his rounds delivering the city's mail but who can't even get home anymore because a huge and sprawling unauthorized garbage dump now blocks all access to his house so he sleeps... we don't know where he sleeps. Too, the figure known as Little Daddy, who was separated from his mother in the most recent interlude of Angola's civil war and who is hoping that an upcoming TV appareance will help reunite them. Little Daddy just sort of crashes at the apartment building and maintains goodwill with its official residence and sort of earns his keep by doing any and all odd jobs that need doing, is a lens though which we see a huge variety of tendernesses and neighborly acts of good old fashioned kindness. It's all rather deftly sketched through us in Ondjaki/Henighan's understated style but we get to know everybody well enough to know them as distinct characters and to weep along with them and their friends when a few meet ignominious fates.
About that style, though: if you're not used to, say, Portuguese literary fiction and yes I'm mostly thinking of Jose Saramago here (and hey, this book was awarded the Jose Saramago Prize!), it might take you a while to get used to this text, in which there are phrases and phrases that feel like they could be sentences in that they contain subjects and predicates but are neither capitalized at the beginning nor punctuated at the end with periods, to say nothing of spoken dialogue, which mostly just appears amidst narrative lines, set apart at best with an em-dash. It's not at all good English literary prose like we're taught to respect and to try to produce in school, but its effective and evokes the way real conversations happen and real thoughts occur and real events unfold without resorting to the stream of consciousness text that makes, say, Ulysses so challenging for so many.
I have a lot of candidates for "my very best read of 2023" already as I've no doubt shown in this blog, but were I to explicitly list them all, Transparent City would be one of them, and were I to make a short list it would probably be on that as well, though the year is not yet half-over. The next time you want to feel something from a read, you could do a hell of a lot worse than get your mitts on this, or, I suspect, anything else of Ondjaki's. I'll be looking for more of his work sometime soon.
*This is not to disparage Ulysses, especially not so close to Bloomsday, which I always devote to enjoying that book on audio, but a) Ulysses is on my mind because it is almost Bloomsday and b) I've had more than one person tell me, in my lifetime, that they like the grand tour of Dublin life James Joyce shared with the world but would prefer it without all the interiority and linguistic pyrotechnics. To which a legit reply might be, "then don't read Joyce, read, say, Edward Rutherford instead" but whatever. You do you.
**Though I can certainly see why Odonato's wife, Xilisbaba, is left alone in this regard. What even is that name, though an exceptional name it is to be sure! I thought, of course, of the Mayan underworld, Xibalba upon first encountering this name but that's as close as I could get on this one.
***At first this just sounds like an unfortunate puddle from leaking plumbing that has been neglected and allowed to accumulate a bit but this actually turns out to be at least deep enough to soak in like a hot springs and several scenes take place here with residents of the building and their guests soaking and socializing and affirming belief in the healing or restorative powers of the building's waters. And then the tax inspectors behold it and...
Phew! I feel like I just binge-watched like 15 seasons of a top quality family saga/soap opera on a par with, say, the original TV adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, but with more life and color in just one scene than that masterful production had in its whole run, not because The Forsyte Saga was dull or colorless (though the original adaptation was in black and white, tee hee) but because The Old Drift, especially as brought to life by Adjoa Andoh and Kobna Holbrook-Smith*, is so intense, colorful, grand and real that I feel like I've known these characters for years now.
And while the fact that The Old Drift -- the title refers to a part of the Zambizi river that is slightly more navigable for crossing than it is for most of its length, where an early settlement is established around the turn of the last century -- is set in and around Zambia instead of a few neighborhoods in London might give it an unfair advantage in terms of vividness, it's really author Namwali Serpell's intense involvement and intimacy with her characters, given incredible life by the devastatingly talented Adjoa Andoh, showing off a broad range of accents, tones and stylings that make the audio edition a true standout -- and her commitment to sharing that involvement and intimacy with her readers, that sends The Old Drift to a whole 'nother level of storytelling.
Also, it has a Greek chorus of mosquitos. And I'm not going to say that's the best part of the book, though it certainly would be, for me, for most books, because The Old Drift has so many other contenders for "best part" that the mosquito chorus becomes just another astonishing wonder among many.**
The story the mosquitos and the more conventional narrator tell are tremendous in scope -- over a hundred years of Zambian history, from its initial contact with white settler-colonialists through its years as part of that travesty called Rhodesia to its emergence as an independent nation state that once even had a space program and beyond -- but also, as I said before, incredibly intimate. By this I don't just mean you are going to experience a lot of menstrual and pregnancy issues right along with the novel's characters, though of course there is that -- but also that as the generations of three different families keep meeting and interacting in strange ways, the reader comes to feel that she knows them better than they do themselves, because the reader recalls bits of their histories that the characters themselves don't seem to know, to wit...
All of this starts when a British would-be-explorer makes a stupid blunder in a frontier bar, and the blunder's victim's daughter overreacts and does permanent, debilitating injury to a bystander/bar employee. This incident lives in the lore of the three families -- the British guy's, the victim's daughter's, and the bystander's -- for only a generation or so before being forgotten, or at least never mentioned by any of the later generations of characters in the novel's text, but the reader gets to appreciate how the courses of all of these lives bear the mark of this ridiculous incident, and of subsequent ones in later years such as the decision of a honeymooning couple who hit a bicyclist with their car to just leave him where he lays with a pile of money instead of staying to help him, or of a wife still very much in love with her husband to take the necessary steps to go and confront the woman he's sleeping with instead of her.
See where it's so like a soap opera? It's utterly engrossing and unfailingly dramatic but it's also way more grounded in reality than any soap opera I've seen, and beautifully, beautifully told. Namwali Serpell's skill as a poet shines in the mosquito interludes, but her mastery of prose is there for us to admire throughout:
Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly - weeping was just what she did now, who she was - Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied.
Which is a pivotal moment in the named character's development,and then there's heart-shattering stuff like this that speaks to and for us all:
Old like her father was old, a shaggy shambling old, an old where you'd lost the order of things and felt so sad that you simply had to embrace the loss, reassuring yourself with the lie that you hadn't really wanted all that order to begin with.
Time is a bitch.
There is also a gentle strain of what I can only call magical realism in the novel. One character, Sybella, is born with so much hair that grows so thick and fast that she lives most of her life as a sort of female Cousin It (but still finds a husband and raises a daughter and then grandchildren); another, the Matha of the first pulled quote above, never, ever stops weeping copiously after the moment there depicted, to the baby's endless detriment until that baby grows up into a strong and self-reliant woman who winds up doing incredible business making and selling wigs made from Sybella's hair. Sybella and Matha's lives and fates are united by the Stupid Inciting Incident; Sybella is the daughter of the girl who pushed the bystander and Matha is the granddaughter of the bystander, but neither of them knows this, or that they're destined to meet the bumbling Brit's granddaughter-in-law in a scene that is so dramatic and disastrous and riveting that it doesn't need all of that historical baggage to be a jaw-dropper, but since the reader has it, that Simpsons-racing-to-the-couch moment is utterly unforgettable and deserves to be as famous as the Simpsons scene I referenced.
And that's not all, for The Old Drift is not just a historical family saga with magical realism elements, it is a grand example of speculative fiction in its fullest and most inclusive sense, for as its arcs and family lines approach the present day, its characters are looking toward the future with ambition and purpose, and the three families are each as important to those ambitions and purposes as they are to one another, as children from each family come together to continue the work of one's father -- a physician and medical researcher who has made the conquest of HIV his obsession to the cost of pretty much everything and everyone else in his life -- and to mitigate the harm that father's singleminded pursuit of a cure for AIDS has inflicted on another's mother, who turned out to have a T-cell receptor mutation that showed tremendous promise toward the creation of an eventual HIV vaccine. Meanwhile, that mother's son is obsessed with inventing a mosquito-sized drone, and the daughter of the third family is in the picture, too, as she attends school and learns about activism, Marxism and the art of political protest. Later in adulthood, this trio pools its many talents and resources and hatches a plan that will change Zambia forever. This is African futurism at its very finest and most pointed because...
Zambia, both in the novel and in the real world, is at or near ground zero for investment/meddling by the People's Republic of China, continuing the long tradition of exploiting Africa for extractable resources in a somewhat kinder disguise as Chinese money, immigrants and visiting executives build roads and factories, re-open mines, establish schools and hospitals, projecting Soft Power in a very rigid fashion. Grappling with this reality is the biggest challenge the Millennial generation of Zambians, black, white and brown, face as they continue to work toward nationhood, equity, dignity and strength, hopefully without sacrificing a cultural heritage that predates Cecil Rhodes and David Livingston, for all that they and men like them arrived on the African continent and assumed it had been created for their use and damned whatever inconvenient people got there before them (or, this being Africa, never left in the first place).
I learned a hell of a lot about Zambia in the course of listening to this stunning work, enriched by what little knowledge I did already had, which was entirely and only about the Freedom Rock or "Zamrock" of the 1970s, in which a small but immensely creative and talented group of muscians who had grown up on American and European pop music took up that industry's tools, especially the electric guitar, and made their own thing with it and I am a fan! At least one character in The Old Drift discusses this amazing flowering of musicianship in passing, and several other scenes mention slightly older examples of Zambia's earlier pop music history (OMG, The Dark City Sisters, you guys!), and so of course I'm going to spend a little time sharing some of my favorite examples of this music, including first and foremost, only because this novel begins at the famous location after which a band I really dig named themselves, but they ain't named Victoria Falls, friends, oh no. They are Musi-a-Tunya (the original name of the falls) and just listen to this song by the same name!
In fact, really, you should just go listen to that whole album, Welcome to Zamrock on your streaming service of choice*** as many times as it takes for you to fall in love and then buy the damned album on physical media because you never know when streaming services will fail or have a dispute with the artists or other nonsense. And then listen to the sequel album, Welcome to Zamrock Volume 2. And hunt up other individual tracks by whoever catches your fancy. There's so much goodness out there, you know how it works!
And while you're at it, check out Dark City Sisters because oh my goodness the tight girl group harmonies alone are worth a click or two, here's my favorite of theirs. Thanks for the recommendation, Namwali!
Have another favorite of mine:
But now I'm really digressing and robbing you of the fun of exploring this stuff for yourself. Go, explore! And listen to the 100% pure high grade awesome that is The Old Drift in audio book form. Probably you should plan on listening twice, because this is another one in which the ending reveals a whole 'nother way to interpret what you've been hearing as it also makes you realize that you've been too distracted by the incredible character drama to notice the slow burn infrastructure going on behind it.
This. Is. A. Masterpice!
*Richard E. Grant only appears at the very beginning, which concerns itself with the founding blunder and has a white English colonizer for a protagonist.
**Though the mosquito interludes are where Kobna Holbrook-Smith takes over and makes an absolute meal of the chorus' dramatic lines and strange perspectives and sound effects and the poetic rhythms of their text. I would listen happily to a whole book of just that, but I don't suppose there'd be much of a market for such a thing. I'd sure like to visit the universe next door where everybody clamors for narratives from the point of view of mosquitos delivered like speeches from Sophocles, though!
***Psst. If you actually care about some of your streaming dollars maybe actually making it to artists, or at least to their heirs/copyright holders/sick old grannies/whomever, some services are better than others. I'm only using YouTube here because it's easiest to embed clips on Blogger from it, and it's also a service that you don't have to have an account to enjoy instantly. But otherwise...
Once again I am reminded how big a mistake it is ever to snooze on African speculative fiction; Ugandan writer/filmmaker/activist Dilman Dila has a whole sky full of fresh air to blow through the genre, and I'm annoyed as heck that I only heard of him via a Story Graph challenge some eight years after his collection A Killing in the Sun was published.
But, better late than never.
From the very first story, "The Leaf Man" we see that his imagination is both powerful and on point. "The Leaf Man" is a traditional healer and occasional shaman who has been helping his country deal with the malaria problem for his whole career, traveling from village to village on his government-issued bicycle with a passel of herbs and wisdom. Until one day, a foreign corporation talks its way into using his home village as a test locus for their latest Big Science solution to the malaria problem, which not only proves to be worse than the original problem but to get worse with every attempt to solve the new problem. Meanwhile, our Leaf Man has figured out how to keep himself and one starving foundling child safe, only to become a hunted figure. This story alone is a must-read for everybody who thinks CRISPR is going to be the answer to everybody's prayers and monkey's paw? What's that?
Several of the other stories in the collection share a universe in which most, perhaps all, of the African continent has come under the dominion of a very powerful being with either supernatural powers or access to otherwise unknown advanced technology, who has set himself up as the Emperor of Africa and created an Orwellian nightmare in the name of freeing/decolonizing the continent's peoples. All white people (and possibly Arabs, too?) have either been expelled or secretly enslaved; the remaining population all live in giant "pyramids" with thousands of other families and are strictly monitored for conformity to the Emperor's idea of what constitutes truly African culture; but hey, there are personal ornithopters and it seems to be a post-scarcity economy. BUT, among the things that are considered colonial/not-African culture are non-procreative sex and any kind of female empowerment or emancipation, and a standardized skin tone is enforced on everybody by means of a chemical that is both a dye that can be rubbed into non-conforming skin or a drug that pregnant women are required to ingest to make sure that their babies are born dark enough.
Of these stories, the most impactful for me was "A Wife and A Slave" which concerns a man, Kopet, who once upon a time had plans to emigrate with his fiancee to Sweden but just as they were leaving the new African Empire was declared and they elected to stay home -- to his tremendous regret, as not long after their wedding his now-wife, Akello, has taken all of the new emperor's strictures to heart, especially the one about non-procreative sex and how the husband must not have to dress or even wash himself, not even his hands after a meal (which he must eat with his fingers, cutlery being a shameful colonial artifact). The bright and engaged and independent woman he fell in love with, and had enjoyed a healthy sex life with before Empire, is now fully engulfed by her role as Good Wife. The story concerns a series of near-misadventures and an encounter with an escaped white woman who was born into slavery but has dared to try to escape it, on the way to finding out if his marriage is doomed forever. No, your eyes are leaking.
Other stories, such as "The Healer" concern the eternal conflict between Western-style religious beliefs and traditional folk medicine and what happens when one tribe adopts the former and all but exterminates another who still practices the latter (which, because this is speculative fiction, actually works to the extent that it is basically magic, as is also the case in "The Leaf Man). Then there's "Itanda Bridge" in which the military forces a young man, Obil, to dive for evidence from a car crash at the bottom of a river, only for Obil to discover an amazing Lovecraftian secret just a bit downstream from where the wreckage isn't. The title story, "A Killing in the Sun" threatens to feel like a rehash of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Secret Miracle" right up until it totally doesn't because there are Witches Involved. Every story has a recognizable speculative fiction touchstone but does something unique and unexpected with it, usually in such a way as to tug at the reader's conscience and her heartstrings as Dila explores friendship, romance, the love of a father for his children, and the question of how much of a person's loyalty a regime has the right to claim -- except for one story near the end, which comes completely out of left field and turns the bizarre up to 11.
"The Yellow People" could be viewed as just another clever twist on a zombie story, but it could also be viewed as a very clever twist on a serial killer story! It's told from the killer's point of view -- he's a white man who moved to Uganda to better practice his grisly hobby with less chance of being caught or punished -- and that killer racks up a truly epic body count before something weird starts happening with the bodies he has stashed away on his property. I found "A Wife and A Slave" more emotionally satisfying but "The Yellow People" is quite possibly the best and most intriguing story in the bunch - and, no, by the way, there isn't a dud among them. You might wind up liking the collection's final entry, "A Bloodline of Blades" and its struggle between a tradition of assassination and a competing one of music to be better than "The Yellow People"; you might also prefer the creepy delights of "Okello's Honeymoon" as it tells us the story of a young man's near destruction by supernatural forces on his wedding night. Point is, there's something for everybody who loves speculative fiction.
Dilman Dila is definitely going on my "OMG must read everything he does" list. And as I mentioned above, Dila is also a filmmaker. I wanted to embed one of his shorts here, but YouTube won't let me because there's adult content. Do yourself a favor, though, and go check out his YouTube channel. His films are narratively compelling and universally appealing, full of suspense and just enough WTFery to keep the viewer riveted. I especially recommend his very recent Kifaro, which could easily fit in as an entry in A Killing in the Sun as it explores the intriguing relationship between binary computer code and African divination systems through the time-honored story of a man who catches his cheating wife. Give this man a proper film deal already! I want to see what he can do with a feature length.
