Harare Review of Books, October 2023
Hiii!
(Because it’s basically Christmas.)
I totally went trespassing (accidentally) with my sister, and we saw a … deer? Like, we had no idea there were deer here? (I hope you got all of that because I put in some effort.)(One clue below.)
I wrote an essay!
… (my first scholarly article!) for Safundi back in July, and it’s out over at T&F. There are still some free downloads available:
Delighted, &c. With many grateful thanks to Prof. Christopher Lee, Prof. Diana Mafe, and @Safundi: “Imagining Africa: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever vs The Woman King”.
Download link: Imagining Africa: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever vs. The Woman King: Safundi: Vol 0, No 0
Suggested companion reads:
Recently, on the blog
People often joke about Zimbabwe’s $100,000,000,000,000 (it’s like spelling Mississippi) note, or make clever comments about the parallels between Venezuela and Zimbabwe—but these jokers and commenters do that rather at the expense of real people, of real lives ruined by economic catastrophe. It’s like being caught up in a war, but without the world’s empathy. Instead, citizens are shamed, scorned, mocked—somehow taking the blame for authoritarian leaders’ failed policies. I know, because I lived it, and still do. [More]
E. Lily Yu presents to us this jewel box: a close-to-perfect collection of twenty-two (such riches!) stories. Yu’s writing is magical, and the execution of all of these wildly varying ideas is perfect. From a flying prayer mat, to the musician who retrieves his beloved from a hellish place (but perhaps hell is everywhere), on the Apocalypse through the lives of the New York rich, a magician and maker of eyes, aliens (the refugee kind), unicorns, a space traveller, a knight and a witch, and so much more, the worlds Yu builds are enchanted and enchanting. [More]
There’s the almost illegible, pretty inscrutable MC: why has she let her flat go to wrack and ruin? With a little thingy sprouting out of the kitchen counter? Why does she spill sauerkraut on purpose on a stranger on the bus? Why is she such a weird and creepy friend? And if she’s a genius (and she is, almost), why isn’t she doing more with it? A good book is like great theatre: the mom appears on the scene in the middle, and it explains (almost) everything. (For the record, I don’t know if that’s good theatre.) [More]
Eugen Bacon makes me think, and I love that about her work. In this collection, she examines various aspects of Blackness, from cultural production, to living and dying while Black. And in a very moving essay, Black Is Not Blak, from a perspective I have definitely never encountered before, she tells of her experience as African Australian after coming up against a misunderstanding rooted in racism and a failure of solidarity between two historically oppressed peoples. [More]
Black Punk Now feels like the only book you’ll need to read on the subject, but even if it isn’t, it introduces you to some of the important figures in real Afro-punk, so you can go digging further if you wish. [More]
Pearl is a work of art, and its beauty is in how it’s pieced together. It’s a beautiful tribute to love and family and to motherhood, as well as a keen portrait of loss. [More]
Love a meaty sci-fi read, although this novel is less sci-fi than (mostly) the politics of a society set on a ship in space. For Mammay, a “generation ship”(?) is a way to explore how an isolated human society might evolve and work after 250 years. Not all of it is persuasive; 250 years of relative peace is complete utopia, by human standards, I’d argue. But there’s enough thoughtful and realistic conflict in it to satisfy. [More]
I spent a whole week somewhere in/over/under some part of Nigeria, in the world created by Nigerian and West African cosmology. Ekpeki and Omenga introduce a new term for this (old) genre: Afropantheology, to show that the themes in this kind of writing are not fantasy to the main audience, rooted as they are in African belief systems—an argument I have found persuasive. [More]
Four friends are about to turn 30. They’re successful women who’ve passed various milestones, or hope to, and they have all of the expectations you will remember (or have) around the big three-oh. What transpires for each of them isn’t what they imagined, necessarily; but this is a book with happy endings. [More]
This marvelously witty book skewers capitalist consumption and also manages to keep up a running commentary on decades of life as a Francophone African immigrant in Paris. In-between stories of the lives of security guards, Standing Heavy records their thoughts and observations on the job, which is where most of the humour is—which we need, because the life of an immigrant on the verge of precarity is really grim. No one chooses that life, but it’s remarkably easy to get caught up in it. And, as one character’s story shows, choosing to move back home does not necessarily free you from its impact. [More]
This memoir-of-sorts (semi-fictional memoir?) is a torrent of emotion poured out on the page—both in fictional personal recollections, and in the history of the war in Tigray. Issayas Y. Bahta has used his father’s death in 1976 at the hands of the Ethiopian army as a vehicle of memory to relate events around Ethiopia’s ongoing project to assimilate Tigrayans. [More]
There are few scholars better placed to write the definitive treatise on a Black cultural moment than Womack, who wrote perhaps the definitive book on Afrofuturism (Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture, Chicago Review Press, 2013). This new book, a cultural exploration of the Black Panther, reviews the history and origins of the icon, as well as all of the associated creative output (of which, as you may imagine, there are now tons).
While Black Panther was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in that watershed year of 1966, many, many creatives have contributed to the character as we know it now—up to and including those who worked on the blockbuster film of 2018, the 2022 sequel, and all of the spin-offs—from comic book writers like Don McGregor and Christopher Priest and authors like Nnedi Okorafor and Ta-Nehisi Coates, to the incomparable, legendary, award-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who created most of the images we have in our heads of Black Panther and Wakanda, along with illustrators like Alitha E. Martinez and Afua Richardson. All of these luminaries and more are mentioned, and their contributions described. [More]
This is a novel about Jonathan Abernathy, enslaved through capitalism and student debt. He’s young, and lonely, and insecure, and all of the things that make him an isolated figure in a kind of aimless, untethered life. He’s surrounded by potential connections, though—through his neighbour and her daughter, and other characters that appear. All of that, unfortunately, is ruined by his taking of his one chance at freedom, when he’s promised the end of his debt in exchange for some really shady, nightmare-related business. [More]
Peter J. Maurits’s book pile
What a happy pile of African Lit! Please show me your book pile, and I’ll feature it.
Happening in books
The Feed: Happening in Books—an HRB newsfeed
News
The Labone Dialogues: Reclaiming the Narrative were at NYU Accra from Oct 19-23. Keynotes: Wole Soyinka, Chris Abani, Aminatta Forna, Jennifer Makumbi. More in the links: Labone Dialogues | Labone Dialogues Is the Year’s Big Event in African Literature
Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck passed away at the age of 80.
The final book in Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orisha trilogy has a cover. Children of Anguish and Anarchy will be out in June 2024: Check Out the Cover for Tomi Adeyemi's Final Book of the Legacy of Orisha Trilogy
Lola Shoneyin received the inaugural Afficionado Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair, for her work on the Ake Festival.
Perplexingly, the Frankfurt Book Fair cancelled an award ceremony for Adania Shibli (Minor Detail) due to the Israel-Hamas war.
The Harare Open Book Festival happened in October. Check out Book Fantastics and Beaton on Twitter for more. (Also, Book Fantastics are pretty reliable suppliers of reads in Harare.
I found this interesting: Ann Morgan says (she heard that) 95% of books published in the US now sell fewer than 5,000 copies :(
Here’s a post-storm (not the same, is it) from Celeste Ng in response to Ian McEwan’s thoughts about sensitivity readers.
I’m shook that Marjane Satrapi’s next literary endeavour will be a graphic anthology (whaaat), WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM, to be published in (presumably) US Spring of 2024: Seven Stories Press on Twitter / X
The JIAS hosted a Creative Writing Masterclass by Prof Zakes Mda on Oct 12.
Salman Rushdie’s memoir about the attack on him last year, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, will be published on April 16, 2024 by Random House: Random House to Publish Salman Rushdie Memoir
The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories will be in UK bookshops in March of 2024: Arunava Sinha on Twitter / X
Electric Lit are partnering with Banned Books USA to (fight book bans and) provide restricted and challenged books to Floridians: Tech Tycoon Paul English Launches Banned Books Giveaway for Floridians
Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk will be out from Tor dot com in May 2024: Facing the Music: Revealing Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk. It’s described as “Octavia Butler meets Neil Gaiman in a tale about running from your past and hiding from your future.”
Cassava Republic Press have announced the Cassava Republic Press Black Women’s Non-Fiction Manuscript Prize, “to redefine the narrative for Black women writers across the globe.
Zimbabwean Lucille Sambo will publish her debut sci-fi novella, Iridescent, in 2024: Brittle Paper Writer Lucille Sambo is Set to Publish Her Debut Sci-Fi Novella About Human-Robot Mutants (sounds amazing!)
Incidentally (*.*) Zim SF is the theme of #shonareadsYourStoryHere2! Don’t know what that is? Check out the first one, #shonareadsYourStoryHere. There will be an announcement in the coming days.
The Library of Africa and the African Diaspora have a new residency programme that is open to writers whose “work grapples with the complexities and nuances of what it means to be African, or of African descent, in the 21st century.” (Closed Oct 29). Details: Announcing the LOATAD Black Atlantic Residency 2024
Events
Registration is open for the 11th edition of Ake Arts and Book Festival, which will run from Nov 22-25, 2023 in Lagos, Nigeria. Ake Arts and Book Festival
The second annual Gauteng International Book Festival will be at Ubuntu Kraal Lifestyle, Soweto, on Dec 9, 2023. #NeverStopReading on Twitter / X
Prizes
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 is Jon Olav Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”…
The winners of the 2023 Caine Prize for African writing have been announced: Mame Bougouma Diene and Woppa Diallo (Senegal) for 'A Soul of Small Places', TorDotCom (2022) The Caine Prize for African Writing on Twitter / X
The Goldsmiths Prize 2023 shortlist has been announced: The Goldsmiths Prize on Twitter / X. From their website: The Goldsmiths Prize was established in 2013 to celebrate the qualities of creative daring associated with the College and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The annual prize of £10,000 is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best. The winner will be announced on Nov 8.
Keabetswe Molotsi (Botswana) is the winner of this year’s Kendeka Prize for African Literature for her story Matlhalerwa. The LLB graduate is a secondary school English teacher. Hussani Abdulrahim was first runner-up, and Shedrack Opeyemi Akanbi was second (both from Nigeria). Judges were Natasha Omokhodion-Kalulu Banda (Zambia), Richard Ali (Nigeria) and Pasomi Mucha (Kenya). There will be an anthology! Motswana Writer Keabetswe Molotsi Wins the 2023 Kendeka Prize for African Literature
Michael Magee has been awarded the 2023 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Mauritian writer Ananda Devi is winner and 28th laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for outstanding literature worldwide: Ananda Devi Wins the 2024 Neustadt Prize
Here are the world fantasy award winners! World Fantasy Awards℠ Ballot and Winners
The 2023 National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose (American Literary Translators Association) shortlists are out: Announcing the Shortlists for the 2023 National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. Winners will receive a cash prize of $4,000 each.
Here’s a thread of the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Awards shortlist: Chicago Review of Books on X
Here’s the longlist for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023: Longlist 2023
Podcasts
I enjoyed this pod: Coode Street Podcast Episode 632: Wole Talabi and Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon
Griots and Galaxies is a new African SF podcast hosted by Chinelo Onwualu, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu and Prof. Jenna Hanchey: Griots and Galaxies Archives - Center for Science and the Imagination
Other cool stuff
Check out this coooool article from African Arguments: Has African climate fiction already shown us the future?
Here’s a Palestinian folktale: The Lentil
Check out this conversation between TL Huchu and Farai Mudzingwa on Mudzingwa’s new book, Avenues by Train.
American Fiction, starring Issa Rae and Jeffrey Wright, will be in theatres in December. Keen! American Fiction
Here’s an interview with Shona poet Memory Chirere: Top poet takes out sjambok
Internships, residencies, jobs
Applications are now open for Cassava Republic (busy people!)’s internship programme: Cassava Republic on Twitter / X
Submissions
The Island Prize for debut African novelists is open for submissions from Oct 1, 2023 to Jan 1, 2024. Deets: The Island Prize 2023-2024
Galley Beggar Press are open for submissions from women writers from Oct 9 to Nov 10. Submissions — Galley Beggar Press
Wasafiri have put out a call for creative submissions from Nov 1-15: Wasafiri on Twitter / X
Camille U. Adams would love to read your creative non-fiction for Variant Literature. Camille U. Adams, ABD on Twitter / X
Meekling Press are open for submissions from Oct 15 to Nov 19: meekling press on Twitter / X
Submissions to Door is a Jar lit mag are always free and open.
Exciting news! Makena Onjerika will be editing and publishing an anthology of Kenyan SF! Paying Kes 1 per word, 2000-5000 words. Deadline Dec 19. See tweet for submission link: Makena Onjerika on Twitter / X
October reads (more on blog)
November releases I'm looking forward to
That's it for now. You can find me in all of the usual places: linktr.ee, on the blog, or by replying to this email. Also, in The Continent (frequently), and in The Sunday Long Read (fortnightly).
Take care! x
St 💫
“If the past is important as a stepping off point to create the future—and it is—then unworlding must work in both directions, the past and the future, and can be applied to histories of Africa, and who tells them.”
Jacqueline T. Nyathi (06 Oct 2023): Imagining Africa: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever vs. The Woman King, Safundi, DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2023.2256519