Here's the fourth installment in my blogging of the Caine shortlist, along with others in a ZunguZungu-led coterie of bloggers. The story I'm reviewing is Melissa Tandiwe Myambo's "La Salle de Depart" (pdf).
This is the first of the Caine stories which actually seeks
to thoroughly understand the characters that it depicts. Fatima is wonderfully
drawn, and in beautiful sentences and fantastic imagery that is both tender and
unsparing in its honesty. What you get is a real economy in the sense that we
are told everything we need to know about the characters to neither excuse nor
rebuke them, but to understand them. You can almost see the tension as Fatima
seeks the words to ask Ibou about Babacar, you see the resentment and even the
inadequacy that goes into Ibou’s rejection. In the salle de depart, Ibou does
more than travel back to America; he emphasizes the differences between Fatima
and himself. Even as he physically was in Senegal during his visit, he had left
them a long time before, and would always feel that degree of remove.
One comes away with a sense of just how
different we become when we leave our respective African countries to live
elsewhere. Nothing looks the same anymore, and there is often this tug between disillusionment of greener pasture you have moved to that clambers awkwardly alongside this new vision of where you have left. Sometimes home benefits from the distance, and other times, in many ways, it does not. Home did not benefit from the distance for Ibou, and you get the sense that Ibou flounders as he tries to explain, because to speak more eloquently will be to express how much he neither wants to be home, nor wants to be reminded of home. Myambo also alludes to
Ibou’s shame of not being well-to-do in Senegal, compared to Ghada’s wealthier
French-educated family. Where she and her mother speak classy French, his
family is simpler, especially the sister he used to be so close to when he was
younger,
When she reminds him of how her education was sacrificed for his, he
does not say anything, mostly because there is nothing to say. It was never
anything he had to think about. It was not among the list of annoyances that he
thought of when he texted Ghada that he felt “like an ATM machine”. It was just
the way things went. There was nothing he could say about that. It was not his
fault, after all, that she was bound by her womanhood and sisterhood into such
a sense of duty that, even as upset as she was, she would still stay in the
airport until his plane had taken off. It was not his fault that he felt no
similar sense of duty. They were the ones that had sent him away.
What I love most about this is that, even with the familiarity of this story for a lot of Africans, especially those in the diaspora, Myambo gives us a real story. She takes the time to give us
imagery, to make us feel the words stuck in Fatima’s throat, to understand her
confusion, to get a sense of Ibou’s relationship with Ghada, to stand there in
the airport with Fatima and understand how hard her final words to Ibou must
have been to say. She walks the fine line that African writers often walk
between managing the weight of testimony and the skill of fiction. She does not
for one moment forget she is telling a story, and this story is the better for
it.
Read all the Caine Prize shortlisted stories:
- Rotimi Babatunde (Nigeria) ‘Bombay’s Republic’
- Billy Kahora (Kenya) ‘Urban Zoning’
- Stanley Kenani (Malawi) ‘Love on Trial’
- Melissa Tandiwe Myambo (Zimbabwe) ‘La Salle de Départ’
- Constance Myburgh (South Africa) ‘Hunter Emmanuel’
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