This Kenani short story takes on the issue of gay rights in
Malawi, but Africa more broadly. There was a real effort on the part on the
writer to go after the rationale for the holding back gay rights and the
dehumanization of people based solely on their sexuality. This frustration for
any progressive-leaning person living in an African country is understandable,
but one must wonder how best to tackle it in fiction (hint: not like Kenani
chooses to here).
I found the title a bit misleading. I understand where “Love
on Trial” comes from, but there really is just one person on trial here: Charles.
This is not like that the gay couple arrested in Malawi for attempting to marry;
this is a man who people have found out is gay and not has to defend himself in
the open (lucky he is a lawyer, huh?). I quibble with this, because I think it
is unnecessary in its call to our conscience, but also because I find it
strange because there is an actual trial which ends in his being thrown in
jail, and it was not thoroughly dealt with. We’re given a TV show spectacle
instead.
The sad part is that there was plenty of potential for the
story to take a more subtle, more illuminating path. By starting off the story
with the drunken Lapani Kachigwe who used his recounting of how he came walked in on
Charles and his lover in flagrante to get free alcohol for his friends was, to
me, brilliant. It was a subtle way of showing how unthinking Kachigwe was, how little
he considered that recounting the story over and again would do to someone’s life, and a nice way of introducing the question of privilege.
He could have used the omniscient point of view to put Charles’s actual trial
as the center of the question and really spend time teasing out the cultural
issues and to fully flesh out the frame of mind of the people who are putting
the young man on trial. Kenani could have used his story as a thoughtful rumination
of privilege, a consideration of how we apportion humanity in post-colonial
societies. Rather, he used it to shake his fists at our collective morality.
Hell, he even ended the story with the parable.
I think one of the hardest things for African writers is to
balance a deep political consciousness with the discipline to prioritize the
writing of a good story. Kenani, with this story, focused too much on former than
on the latter. In focusing on the
brouhaha gathering around Charles, he offers only a cartoonish version of the
townspeople and no real reason why his family, unlike the townspeople, is
tolerant of their son’s homosexuality. When we get to the TV show section of
the story, the writer almost forgets about setting and the importance of characterization
of the people he is depicting. Charles is the gentle, intelligent gay man who
is faithful to his boyfriend and wants to be a lawyer, but all we know about the TV
show host is that he thinks homosexuality is a sin.
African writers can write about just whatever they please,
like any writer anywhere else, but African writers who know of their cultural setting enough to write about must know the length and breadth of the humanity of those (s)he chooses to depict. As complicated as it is, there are plenty of good, intelligent, even morally-upright people across who would blanch at the thought of equal rights for gay citizens. Kenani, however, makes no notice of this albeit-inconvenient truth. While I agree on full human rights for gay citizens in my country, I take exception to the writer's inconspicuous kindness only at characters who agree with him, and I remain unconvinced that the best response to unresolved cultural issues is to resort to the smugness that will not allow us to see the humanity in those we do not agree with.
Read other bloggers' reviews:
- Stephen Derwent Partington
- Backslash Scott
- Cashed-In
- aaahfooey
- Black Balloon
- City of Lions
- Practically Marzipan
- Ikhide
Read all the Caine Prize shortlisted stories:
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