This post is part of a series of reviews of the Caine Prize 2016 shortlist. You can download Lidudumalingani’s story here as a pdf.

This story, one about losing someone to mental illness, and trying to navigate a path between bad options regarding it, is a beautiful one. Lidudumalingani manages to weave the narrator’s memories – flashes of her sister’s episodes of schizophrenia – with a story of coping, escape, and love among siblings. It’s also, as Ikhide Ikeloa notes, a story that sheds light on the precarious situation of South Africa’s rural population in regards to healthcare. The sister undergoes treatment after treatment that renders her docile, but not well. She has no episodes, but she also has no life anymore. Finally, their mother decides to take her to a healer with a frightening reputation:

[T]he next day my sister would be taken to Nkunzi to be baked. This is what they did with people who heard voices or demons, as they called them; they baked them until the demons left them. What was even more terrible than the baking was that people had come to be convinced of it. I had heard of how Nkunzi baked people. He would make a fire from cow dung and wood, and once the fire burned red he would tie the demon-possessed person onto a section of zinc roofing then place it on the fire. He claimed to be baking the demons and that the person would recover from the burns a week later. I had not heard of anyone who had died but I had not heard of anyone who had lived either.

Between medicine that makes you a vegetable and a sangoma that bakes you like one, the options of mental health here are not good. Recently, an interlocutor here in Uganda tried to explain an Acholi phrase to me. He likened it to being in a situation where all options are bad, and you must be prepared to leap at a way out. This whole story, as we move from one schizophrenic episode to another and to the community’s solution, I was hoping for a way out. An out to which the main characters indeed leap to.

This is surely a story about community – the village community that gathers during key moments as well as the familial community and the bond between sisters. But in addition to community, it is also a story about place. When the narrator describes the villagers as they search for her missing sister in the night during a particularly bad moment, for example:

Those without torches or candles walked on even though the next step in such darkness was possibly a plunge down a cliff. This was unlikely, it should be said, as most of them were born in the village, grew up there, got married there, had used that very same field as their toilet for all their lives, and had had in overlapping periods only left the village when they went to work for the white man in large cities. They had a blueprint of the village in their minds; its walking paths, its indentations, its rivers, its mountains, its holes where ghosts lived were imprinted in their blood.

Surely some of the villagers are reluctant to go off into the night in the search, but they are a part of the community, so they do their part. They are also part of the space that they’ve existed in all their lives, and so they are able to go out into the dark. Later, when the narrator tries to whisk her sister away from their mother’s plan to have her baked, they must escape not just the situation, but also the community, also the place:

We walked by the river and then abandoned it, walked up a mountain and down the other side into a village. I was not sure whether it was Philani or another village. I had only ever been there once before and that visit was not even physical. My mother had mentioned it in one of her stories before she moved us into the new house – before a week later replacing our father, and us, with the Smellyfoot.

Once we descended the mountain and found ourselves in a strange village we would knock on the first house that had its light on and sleep there. That had been the initial plan, but it was flawed. Everyone in the villages knew everyone. I was convinced that whomever we asked for a place to sleep, even if we were to lie and give them false names, tell them that we were heading to the next village but something had delayed us, they would have recognised us, either because we have my grandfather’s ears or my mother’s nose or that they had seen us when we were toddlers, even stroked our buttocks. It had always been said that my sister had my grandfather’s forehead. The plan was too risky.

We are close, I told my sister. Close to where, I had no idea. All the same, we were going forward, and it felt like we had reached where we were going, which was nowhere in particular. All that mattered was that we were now far from home. We had no idea where we were going to sleep, what we were going to eat or how we were going to live, but returning home was not an option.

To escape the situation, they had to escape everything else. In the end, the sisters continue on, “to somewhere.” Anywhere but home – even nearby villages ran the risk of being part of the wider community that they were a part of. They needed to escape completely in order to help her sister. She might not be able to escape her mental illness, but she can escape the treatment and the sedation and the burning. But to do that she has to be removed from the community in a different way.

This post is part of a series of reviews of the Caine Prize 2016 shortlist. You can download Kona’s story here as a pdf.

Bongani Kona’s story, a reflection by the narrator – Christopher – to his late brother Abraham about their lives growing up, moves in interesting ways. Mostly, as Aaron Bady notes, because it doesn’t move it all. “At the beginning of the story, the brother is dead; at the end, the brother remains dead. In seven short pages, we go nowhere.” The first page also includes a descriptive “rewind” as the brother is wheeled out of the ambulance, back to the tree from which he killed himself, and back into the house. From there, we dance around the event of the story and through stories of their childhood, their separate lives as adults, and to the funeral.

And yet, the story does go somewhere. While it may not feature the types of events that a short story is often centered around or at least uses to mark its movement, “At Your Requiem” nonetheless features a gradual emergence of a state of things. We find hints of what drove the brothers apart, what led to Abraham’s death, what sort of environment punctuated their lives growing up. In this way, by gradually sketching out a state of things, the story develops – in a perhaps indirect and all too brief way – an arc of tragedy in family. In this way it echos some of the other stories shortlisted this year.

Also like some of the other stories this year, it addresses illness – specifically drug and alcohol addiction. However, in “At Your Requiem” these issues are mere facts of the story – rehab is mentioned, alcohol abuse is spoken about – rather than features of the narrative being spun, in the way of Tope Folarin’s and Lidudmalingani’s stories. In fact, everything here is a moment, a flash in the story as we shift from one scene to another until, as Bady notes, we end up right where we started.

This post is part of a series of reviews of the Caine Prize 2016 shortlist. You can download Folarin’s story as a pdf here.

Tope Folarin has a way of telling stories from a child’s point of view. His 2013 Caine Prize-winning story, “Miracle,” was about a child at a church service in Texas. I loved reading it, and I saw him do a reading from his story in the Africa 39 collection, which was also very good. I’m glad I get to read more work by him (seriously when is that book coming out?). “Genesis,” Folarin’s story shortlisted for this year’s Caine Prize, is a really powerful story about mental illness, race, and family in America. It weaves these themes together in a really intricate, beautiful, and sad way.

The story is about a boy’s experiences living in Utah, including being the only person of color at school, or encountering religious differences (and racism) from the vantage of the naivete and vulnerability of a child. It also deals a lot with mental health, as the boy’s mother endures episodes of anger, violence, and even seeing things. These episodes lead the mother to eventually escape with her children to a shelter for a time. Viewed from a child’s perspective, these experiences have a sort of rawness that is really powerful. The story doesn’t just tell what happens, nor does it try to analyze it – the storyteller responds, and it colors the events throughout.

The story is also perhaps semi-autobiographical. Folarin was born in Ogden, Utah, to immigrant parents, just like the narrator of this story. He has also talked before about his mother dealing with mental health issues when he was little, ultimately resulting in her returning to Nigeria. Folarin’s work has always been rooted in his own experiences, which I think is part of what gives strength to the writing. When Aaron Bady asked him about his autobiographical novel-in-progress (from which, I would assume, “Genesis” emerged), Folarin said:

It certainly is autobiographical, I’m not going to claim it’s not. But I’ve discovered that even if I start with an autobiographical premise—yes, I was born in raised in Utah, yes, I went to high school in Texas—the moment I sit and attempt to pin down these ideas, it becomes something different. If a reader is reading my work, and they say “Now I know all there is to know about Tope, or “Ta-peh,” because of what I’ve read,” that would be inaccurate. I’m trying my best to tell a very particular story about identity that, in some ways, is similar to mine, and in some ways isn’t.

Moments in the author’s life surely shaped how and what he has written. This is likely true for many authors, but especially for someone writing fiction that travels in the same circles and paths as their lived life. Unlike Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, who took issue with a fictional story trafficking so heavily on autobiography (to be clear, Túbọ̀sún wasn’t critical of the story as such, but thinking through categorization and what the Caine Prize includes), I’d rather we shatter the categorical differences altogether. What makes fiction non-fiction? Buried many novels that take place in faraway worlds often lurks the “real.” And non-fiction can be written in a way that bends reality as well. Such categories obscure the complexities of a story. For a writer to write aspects of his life into a story that is also sometimes fiction seems quite fine to me, and if that process also leads to the story feeling that much more resonating, all the better.

Folarin has said that his “life has been kind of about moving on from one place to the next, and developing an identity that is composed of disparate parts. So my fiction is concerned with that kind of journey.” Taking this story, alongside his other recent works, a broader story of placelessness is surely taking shape, and it’s one that brings family, race, and faith together in very interesting ways.

This post is part two of a series of reviews of the Caine Prize 2016 shortlist. You can download a pdf of Arimah’s story here.

When a man falls from the sky, it can mean many things. It could mean an accident has occurred, or that the man was pushed. It could mean he committed suicide. In Lesley Nneka Arimah’s interesting and ambitious story, it means that someone who had tried to use a mathematical equation called the Furcal Formula – an equation that explained the core of humanity and the universe – to defy gravity, had failed. Before I got very far into this story, however, it made me think of a different reason a man might fall from the sky. Witchcraft. Or, rather, failed witchcraft.

Let’s back up a step. Just last month I read Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio by Harri Englund. Not a lot to do with fiction and the Caine Prize, but bear with me. In this unrelated but otherwise very good ethnography, Englund highlights how a particular Chichewa news program in Malawi created a new space and new ways for listeners to think about the society they lived in – thinking especially about equality and about rights. One example he gives is a news story in which a man had been flying and flew over a house with powers that knocked him right out of the sky. Another example is a man who took his coworker across the country in a blink of an eye, but on the return flight the coworker let go and dropped in the middle of nowhere. I won’t go into Englund’s arguments, because that’s for another post someday, but it’s why I thought of witchcraft.

Witchcraft, especially witchcraft as it features in (Western) academic scholarship, is often a site of conflicting epistemologies. As far as I’m concerned, so is math and algorithms as applied to social (and emotional) life. And yet, in Arimah’s sci-fi short story we find ourselves in a world where math explains everything, and I mean everything. My own quant-wary sensibilities clutched their pearls as I read about how the formula could explain people’s emotions, and even change them.

Nneoma, the story’s main character, is a “grief worker” – a mathematician who specializes in “calculating and subtracting emotions, drawing them from living bodies like poison from a wound.” This ability is derived from the formula, which explains the universe and everything in it. But when the man fell out of the sky, it fed rumors that the formula was imperfect. Unfortunately, we also quickly learn that being a grief worker is perhaps a precarious profession – one recently drove himself mad and killed himself, another simply disappeared. Nneoma uses her skills to make money removing the grief from wealthy parents who have lost their children. Meanwhile, her ex, Kioni, has dedicated her energy to refugees and other “distressed populations.”

When Nneoma goes to give a talk to some school children – an educational talk that also acted as a recruiting drive for those who could make sense of the formula – she described her job as “fix[ing] the equation of a person” by removing bad emotions. After her presentation, Nneoma faced two different responses – a protest and a plea. One student echoed his father, saying that “you shouldn’t be stopping a person from feeling natural hardships. That’s what it means to be human.” Nneoma dismisses this without a beat, arguing that the child and his father live easy lives free from the type of pain she alleviates (sidestepping the fact that she only works with wealthy parents, whose grief might be relatively less than victims of war, displacement, and torture. Immediately afterwards, however, a poor Senegalese immigrant and survivor of untold tragedy asked, “So you can make it all go away?” to which Nneoma said yes – but hedged that she could not help this girl due to regulations, costs, and citizenship. Despite this, Nneoma takes her grief away, soaking it up herself.

Grief workers don’t just make sadness and pain disappear. They take it. And it builds. When Nneoma tried to help your father get through the loss of her mother, she faltered because of the interconnected emotions. Just speaking with the girl unsettled her – which is why “she rarely worked with refugees, true refugees… the complexity of their suffering always took something from her.” When you subtract, it has to go somewhere.

Also embedded in this ambitious story is a whole setting on which the reader dwells. The story includes short snippets and nods to the Biafra-Britannia Alliance, an agreement the British used to gain asylum but one in which “one hand reached out for help [while] the other wielded a knife,” or to the French “Elimination” of the Senegalese. Or whatever America did to Mexico. These snippets include a paragraph that is packed with new information that we only get a glimpse of:

At checkout, the boy who scanned and bagged her groceries had a name tag that read “Martin,” which may or may not have been his name. The Britons preferred their service workers with names they could pronounce, and most companies obliged them. The tattoo on his wrist indicated his citizenship – an original Biafran – and his class, third. No doubt he lived outside of the city and was tracked the minute he crossed the electronic threshold till he finished his shift and left. He was luckier than most.

These sentences sketch out a truly dystopic world – one where North America, Europe, and Russia are submerged, and refugee populations have radically changed the social fabric of what used to be Africa – now the United Countries. But the sketch is only ever that – nothing comes into clear view, Arimah doesn’t linger on any of the context for more than a few sentences. But she lingers on the aftermath of all this grief work.

Nneoma’s experience trying to help her father, and her reaction to helping the Senegalese girl, give a prelude to the story’s tragic end. So to does the man falling from the sky, a signal that there is something wrong with the formula on which all of this work is built. If eating people’s emotions and suppressing them into distant memories is only possible through Furcal’s Formula, then a mistake in the formula could – and does – have dire consequences for Nneoma and her ex, Kioni. When Kioni finally appears in person, it’s only as what’s left after the grief within has consumed her. And in a last ditch effort to help her lover, Nneoma dives headlong into the “ten thousand traumas in [Kioni’s] psyche,” never to emerge.

In the end, perhaps the Furcal Formula was incommensurable with emotions, with human flight, with the universe and everyday life. Just as trying to explain witchcraft with functionalist analysis and explain political decisions with big data and even ranking burritos via data mining eventually run into problems, explaining emotions with x- and y-axes is a mission that is perhaps doomed to fail. And when you rely on math and turn out to be wrong, you face dire consequences. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for those who rely too firmly on unstable epistemologies.

This post is the first part of a short series of reviews of the Caine Prize 2016 shortlist. You can download Adan’s story here as a pdf.

This was the first story on the list, and I have to say I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. It’s creative, it’s interesting, it’s very original. It weaves the reader through senses and feelings in interesting ways. It’s also really, really weird. The story is about a narrator who has been suspended from his TSA job for “settling” on a mole on a passenger’s leg. But over the course of the story we find that this isn’t a one-off incident, but that he has an obsession with the so-called Lifebloom Gift.

Viewed as a story about obsession, about yearning, the story moves in interesting ways around the narrator and his friend, Ted Lifebloom. When the narrator meets Ted, he immediately begins to experience new feelings, expanded senses. “I thought I saw the universe in his eyes – the future and the past, and most of God’s holy best” for example. Or, when Ted rests his hand on the narrator’s shoulder and “I got carried into a greenish world I had only seen in dreams until then… It was a thing of the heavens.”

The heightening of the senses is something Ted brings about in the narrator, but Ted himself encounters the senses in a different way. He is tactile. When he was young, he clung to his mother. As an adult, he once asks to touch the narrator’s head to “reassure himself of my existence.” Ted himself says that “to experience something, one had to touch it. He denied the existence of anything he couldn’t touch, including air, the sun, the sky, the moon, and people he hadn’t touched.” But when he touched people, he brought about new feelings. As the narrator describes him – “Ted was love itself in human form.”

The obsession with this feeling, and with bringing about the feeling in others, leads the narrator and Ted to embark on a mission. They sneak into nursing home to find another potential “Lifebloomer.” They approach and overcome an old man, holding him down and touching his moles in an effort to awaken the Lifebloom Gift in him. The obsession with the Gift drives them to great lengths, but to no avail – he never calls the number they leave behind. This leads to Ted’s departure into the wild, and the narrator’s quest to find another Lifebloomer – a quest that leads him to a job and a firing at the TSA.

I agree with F.T. Kola that the story seems constrained by the workshop format (it was published in the Caine Prize anthology). There is a lot of potential in the story – a lot of things that could have been expanded and filled in. Instead, we have snippets – and snippets often work! but here I think the story could do more, could be more. At the same time, as a story about obsession deferred – a desire that never gets fulfilled – a story as short and incomplete as this works, in its own way. The yearning for more of the story is perhaps as close as one might get to the narrator’s hopes to feel.