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Discovering Home, wherever it may be
Discovering Home: A selection of writings from the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing
2003
Jacana, Johannesburg
Reviewed by Richard Bartlett
Every year, with the awarding of the $15,000 Caine Prize for African Writing, a collection of the previous year’s winning stories is released in book form. Discovering Home is the title of the winning story by Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan and one-time resident of Cape Town. He encapsulates this collection, both literally and figuratively. Another of his stories, ‘Ships in High Transit’, rounds the collection off. And discovering home is a theme in many of the stories, whether that home be Lagos, Durban or Bufumbira.
The collection is made up of the five short-listed stories from the 2002 Caine Prize and 14 stories which are the product of a writers workshop held in Cape Town early in 2003 – organised by the Caine Prize committee.
Binyavanga’s winning story was first published on the internet site G21Net and in some ways it is more travelogue that fiction. The story opens in Cape Town, in a den of the city’s hedonistic excesses, on the eve of his journey back home, from southern Africa to central Africa. What makes it much more than a mere travelogue is that Wainaina has reclaimed the genre. Travel writing is too often a focus on difference, a condensation of ‘their’ otherness in comparison with our cultural expectations. ‘Discovering Home’ turns this on its head – he is discovering a world made disfamiliar through his own departure.
He tells of returning to Kenya and the journey to his grandparents' house in Uganda for their 60th wedding anniversary. It is about discovering new sights in old haunts, fresh memories on well trodden paths and the joy of family beyond the comfort of four walls.
There is no doubt he was deserving of the $15,000, and he used it wisely too. Visit www.kwani.org to see how.
Wainaina’s second story in the collection is also a reclamation of the travel writing genre, from the
inside looking out. His highlighting of the absurdity of foreign tourists who think they "know" Africa because they have seen it on TV nature programmes is wont to invoke hilarity if it were not so prickingly accurate. In some way he even manages to analyse his own style of writing as his character Matano, lies in bed with one of his annual Swedish lovers. She is reading Marquez and he inquires as to this Western obsession with magical realism. Why is the rich world so keen to read the poor in terms of magic rather than reality? Wainaina has infused his reality with an descriptive richness that has condensed the real, discarded the magical trinkets, and left us with a new type of realism that is neither travelogue nor magical. It is funny and painful at the same time, especially for those Africans who have tasted too much of non-African arrogance and paternalism.
"The absurdity of tourists who think they 'know' Africa because they have seen it on TV nature programmes is wont to invoke hilarity if it were not so accurate"
The other four short-listed stories are from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria and Senegal. ‘You in America’ tells of a Nigerian woman’s struggle to fit in small-town USA, and the anguish of leaving home for the hope of life in the land of the rich. It is the anguish of always being outsider, always different and the hopelessness of making ‘them’ understand this.
‘Small Hells on Street Corners’ tells of a day in the life of a street child. It begins with him stealing a locket, escaping, falling into the hands of a much bigger criminal, escaping and the young life’s eventual demise on a busy street corner. Florent Couao-Zotti carries on the shoulders of the young criminal as he runs through the market heat, runs along dusty streets and along the alley ways of the big city’s forgotten corners.
In ‘Zimbabwe Boy’ a frustrated white farmer picks up a similarly frustrated young black man and they share a night of mutually gratifying sex. It is about life on the edges of a country on the edge. The young man is unemployed and lacks hope in a city which seems to perpetually in the service of others. The farmer is frustrated in his business life by a government which seeks to deprive him of his livelihood, which spreads into all parts of his life. The relationship is about the exchange of bottled up frustrations – breaking the law, passionately.
Allan Horwitz, in ‘Courageous and Steadfast’, tells the story of the anti-apartheid activists in the ordinary post-apartheid South Africa, about real life intruding on theoretical debates on saving the world. In realist style Horwitz traces a few hours in the aftermath of a non-governmental organisation conference, of the personal dynamics, the prejudice, political decisions and of how extraordinary events sidle up to give certainties a surprising lack of clarity.
The remaining 14 stories are the product of a writers workshop which included Caine Prize finalists, including Wainaina and the 2001 winner Helon Habila, the facilitators of the workshop and a handful of young writers, together representing a number of countries, from Nigeria and Zimbabwe to South Africa and Kenya.
It would be an injustice to try and precis all the stories, considering their lack of a unifying theme, apart from having been written at the same time and in the same place – Cape Town.
One of the most memorable stories is ‘Colours’, by Zimbabwe Rory Kilalea. This one-sided conversation by a coloured woman with a ‘slow leak’, as HIV/Aids is known, is intriguing for the prejudices it confronts, the language it uses and the way Kilalea slowly unwraps the monologue until the reader is left sitting on the edge of a grave admiring the plastic flowers.
This collection is remarkable for its variety and the use of stories from the writers’ workshop instead of additional stories from the shortlisted writers, as has been done in previous years, for example in Timbuktu, Timbuktu, gives a much more intense experience of what African writers have to offer the world.
My only complaint is the disservice done to Wainaina’s second story at the end of the collection. It is riddled with typographical errors, as if the proof reader’s shift was over before they finished reading that particular story. I certainly hope the publisher, Jacana, can afford a longer shift for their proof reader next year. Well, there is another less important complaint - the glossary provided with Kilalea's story has a few inaccuracies that many people familiar with South African English slang would be able to spot. And spelling one of the writer's names incorrectly is not very good either.
Nevertheless, a collection that does justice to the short story genre from the continent.
Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books
