9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful slices of African lives, September 23, 2005
This review is from: The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories (Paperback)
"The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories," edited by Nadezda Obradovic, brings together 34 stories from many parts of the continent. The copyright page notes that an earlier edition of the book was published under the title "African Rhapsody: Short Stories from the Contemporary African Experience" in 1994. The stories take up 369 pages of text, making for an average length of about 11 pages each; the longest story, Charles Mungoshi's "The Brother," is only 26 pages long. An illuminating foreword by Chinua Achebe gives some literary and historic context for the short story genre in Africa.
This is a rich, diverse collection. There are several selections by women writers. The editor has included both stories written in English and stories translated into English. The writers represent many African nations: Sudan, Mozambique, South Africa, Benin, Nigeria, Morocco, Ethiopia, and more. Among the many topics covered by the stories are economics, the supernatural, family ties across generations, sex, addiction, the role of domestic workers, language, race relations, marriage, capital punishment, AIDS, education, and war. I was particularly intrigued by the stories showing the role of Islam in African lives.
There are many noteworthy selections in this anthology. "The Prophetess," by Njabulo S. Ndebele, is about a boy on a mission to acquire holy water from the title character. "It Was Easter Sunday the Day I Went to Netreg," by Sindiwe Magona, shows three generations of women in an African family as they confront a serious family crisis. "Hot Days, Long Nights," by Nnadozie F. Inyama, offers intriguing glimpses of both the marketplace and the nightlife of the city of Akassa. "Her Three Days," by Sembene Ousmane, is a disturbing look at the wife of a polygamist.
"The Three-Piece Suit," by Ali Deb, is a compact but biting satire of conspicuous consumerism. "The Wicked Tongue," by Mohammed Moulessehoul, is a parable-like tale of justice; this story is also noteworthy for its Islamic setting. "God of Meme," by Ndeley Mokoso, looks at the conflict between a crocodile cult and local officials. "Africa Kills Her Sun," by Ken Saro-Wiwa, is written in the form of a letter from a death-row inmate. In "The Waldiba Story," by Hama Tuma, a monk tells his story to a doctor serving with guerrilla forces. But my favorite story in the collection is "The Museum," by Leila Aboulela, which looks at the experiences of a Sudanese woman studying abroad in Scotland; this is a wonderful, vividly written piece that left me wanting to continue following the characters.
My only complaint about the anthology involves the editor's "Introduction to the Second Edition" (pages xi-xii). She ruins a number of the stories by revealing the endings--in my opinion, this is one of the worst offenses an anthology editor can commit. So I recommend that readers refrain from reading this introduction until after they have read all the stories. Overall, this is a powerful and rewarding collection which I highly recommend for classroom use, for reading groups, and for individual readers.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended, April 4, 2007
This review is from: The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories (Paperback)
This collection, published in 2002, was the revised edition of a book that came out in 1994 under the title African Rhapsody: Short Stories from the Contemporary African Experience. It contained 34 short stories by as many writers from 19 African countries. The major regions of east, west, north and south were represented, broadly speaking, and Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa had a handful of stories each. Ethiopia, Congo (Dem. Rep.), Kenya, Uganda and Ghana were the most populous countries whose writers weren't included.
The works were written between approximately 1951 and 1999, and most were from the 1980s and 90s. Two-thirds were published originally in English, with the remainder translated from Arabic, French and Portuguese. Nothing translated from indigenous Sub-Saharan languages was included, but that seems to be the norm in anthologies for this region read so far.
About half of the writers in the book were born after World War II. The earlier writers included Sembene Ousmane, Henri Lopes, William Modisane, Olympe Bhely-Quenum, Tayeb Salih, Alifa Rifaat, Mohammed Berrada, I. N. C. Aniebo, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Ali Deb. The book didn't include short stories by writers such as Diop, Tutuola, Mphahlele, Ekwensi, Camara, Gordimer, Achebe, Nwapa, Djebar, Amadi, Head, Breytenbach, Ngugi, Aidoo, Iyayi, Wicomb or Vassanji, or excerpts by novelists such as Emecheta or Coetzee.
The editor, Nadezda Obradovic, selected mainly pieces that portrayed daily life, family relations, culture, tradition, religious beliefs, marital customs and people's behavior in crises such as war. Most of the stories reflected "shared situations of conflict" related to the inherited past or the new era: the transition from childhood into maturity or from rural to urban environments, the encounter with foreign or Western cultures, the rebellion against colonialism, disappointment with indigenous political movements, the struggle against corruption, poverty, unemployment and the oppression of women, and the loss of values and honor. In a foreword, Chinua Achebe wrote that the stories shared a pervasive atmosphere of pain and life's injustice, and that many depicted the betrayal of innocence.
Most of the pieces were straightforward and realistic, focused usually on the personal, occasionally probing deeply the psychology of their characters. For me, one of the most interesting was "The Museum," by Leila Aboulela (b. 1964), among the youngest writers in the collection, about a young Sudanese woman from a high social class who was studying in Scotland and taking the first steps beyond her own prejudices to befriend a bright but awkward local student. The differences in culture, customs, history and class were described well, as was the description of attempts to bridge those barriers.
Other stories were "Her Three Days," by Sembene Ousmane, in which a frail woman who was a husband's third wife awaited his visit, and which described sensitively the wife's problems and social customs in her village. "The Brother," by Charles Mungoshi, was about a student's discovery of what had happened to his older brother in the city. "Civil War I-VII," by Adewale Maja-Pearce, comprised seven vignettes from the Nigerian civil war that showed people's inhumanity to each other caused by the conflict. "At the Time of the Jasmine," by Alifa Rifaat, depicted a son's return to his village to take part in his father's funeral. And "Thirty-One Beautiful Green Trees," by Salwa Bakr, was a woman's description of several crises in her life that showed well the social pressure faced by a woman and individual in a conformist society.
Some of the pieces were humorous, such as "The Dignity of Begging" by William Modisane, in which a beggar resisted all pressure to go straight, taking pride in his chosen profession, and "The Suit" by Ali Deb, in which a man bought new clothes to improve his image but regretted the consequences.
Modisane's story was also noteworthy because it was published so much earlier than the others, in 1951. Another writer of note whose work was included was the Algerian Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former army officer known for detective thrillers set in his home country and other fiction on the rise of radical Islam, and who made the news a few years ago after revealing he'd published several books under his wife's name to avoid military censorship.
The stories in the anthology didn't contain any explicitly political or politically satiric works. Nor was there anything that could really be called experimental in the sense of unreliable narrators, abrupt transitions in narrative or breaking of other stylistic conventions. A handful of the stories were populated by talking animals, ghosts, the spirit of a crocodile and so on. One of these, "A Child in the Bush of Ghosts," by Olympe Bhely-Quenum, in which a wanderer crossed briefly into the land of the dead, was remarkable for its dreamlike atmosphere.
I think the strengths of this collection were in its variety of writers and subjects and its fairly wide coverage of the region. I would've rated it more highly if more of the omitted writers and countries mentioned above had been included, insightful political or satirical pieces had been added, and a greater number of the stories had really struck me.
I'd recommend this book as one of the best recent anthologies for the region. Other collections in English in the past 20-odd years include African Short Stories (1985), African Creations: A Decade of OKIKE Short Stories (1985), Looking for a Rain God: An Anthology of Contemporary African Short Stories (1990; also edited by Obradovic), The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories (1992), The Heinemann Book of African Women's Writing (1993), Under African Skies: Modern African Stories (1997), Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Women's Writing (1999), The Picador Book of African Stories (2000), From Africa: New Francophone Stories (2004), African Love Stories: An Anthology (2006) and the 900-page Rienner Anthology of African Literature (2007).
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