ID also from short story day africa Feast, Famine & Potluck: African Short Stories Terra Incognita: New Short Speculative Stories from Africa Water: New Short Fiction from Africa Migrations: New Short Fiction from Africa IDNEW SHORT FICTION FROM AFRICA short story day africa 2018 ID: New Short Fiction from Africa Published in South Africa by Short Story Day Africa in June 2018 Short Story Day Africa is a registered non-profit organisation in the Republic of South Africa, NPO #123-206 shortstorydayafrica.org Co-published in the United Kingdom with New Internationalist ISBN: 978-0-6399526-0-4 print ISBN: 978-0-6399526-1-1 ebook This collection © Short Story Day Africa 2018 The copyright of individual stories remains with their authors. Edited by Helen Moffett, Nebila Abdulmelik, and Otieno Owino Typesetting by Megan Ross Cover design by Megan Ross Cover image by Nick Mulgrew Proofread by Jason Mykl Snyman and Karina Szczurek This book is set in Garamond Premier Pro contents Sew My Mouth Introduction 7 Cherrie Kandie 145 All Our Lives Waiting Tochukwu Emmanuel Okafor 13 Harriet Anena 157 The Piano Player Limbo Agazit Abate 23 Innocent Chizaram Ilo 175 God Skin Unblooming Michael Yee 39 Alexis Teyie 193 Plums The Things They Said Kharys Laue 53 Susan Newham-Blake 203 Ibinabo South of Samora Michael Agugom 69 Farai Mudzingwa 213 Anna Transubstantiation Chourouq Nasri 85 Genna Gardini 225 The House on the Corner What We Could Have Been Lester Walbrugh 95 Heran T. Abate 241 This Is What Waking Feels Like Taba Alithnayn Abdulkareem 107 Adelola Ojutiku 257 One Brief Eruption of Madness Who We Were There, Who We Are Now Éric Essono Tsimi 121 Nadu Ologoudou 267 Per Annum The Geography of Sunflowers Mpho Phalwane 133 Michelle K. Angwenyi 283 biographies 293 acknowledgements 298 donate to ssda 303 The publication of this book was made possible with the support of: To donate to SSDA, please visit shortstorydayafrica.org/donate introduction hen planning this anthology, its title playing both on the W abbreviation for “identity” and the psychoanalytic construct of the “Id” – that deep structure that houses our unconscious desires – we called for “innovative short fiction that explores identity, especially (but not limited to) the themes of gender identity and sexuality…. In modern Africa, our identities are too often defined for us and not by us…. We hope to see work that seeks to break and redefine the strictures put on our identities, as individuals and as peoples; fiction that looks beyond the boundaries of expectation, into the truest definitions of ourselves.” We were impressed as never before by the multiple ways in which writ- ers from all over the continent responded, the depth, variety and inno- vation of their interpretations. From Benin to Ethiopia, from Morocco to South Africa, the stories in this collection reveal uncomfortable and fascinating truths about who we are. We have no doubt the reader will share both the delight and enlightenment we experienced compiling this anthology. Some figures will perhaps give a sense of the quality between these covers: a team of volunteer readers sifted the hundreds of stories received and came up with a “long” longlist of forty-odd stories – which had to be reduced to twenty-one. The debates that ensued were long, earnest and sometimes heated, and we still think with regret of those discarded stories, as well as the flashes of excellence and intrigue we saw elsewhere in the sub- missions. We only wish we had the capacity to send feedback along with rejections; the talent, in and from the continent, into which this project allows a glimpse, is prodigious. Seen here are a variety of explorations of queer sexuality – an extremely important and necessary creative intervention, given the grim march of homophobia, including in legislative forms, across the African continent. 7 INTRODUCTION Susan Newham-Blake gives voice to the experience of parenting as a les- bian couple in “The Things They Said”; Michael Agugom charts the chal- lenges of negotiating biracial and sexually complex identities in a small and watchful Nigerian island community in “Ibinabo”; and Cherrie Kandie presents a powerful and painful portrayal of the silencing (literally) of les- bian love in urban Nairobi in “Sew My Mouth”. In “The House on the Corner”, Lester Walbrugh provides a moving interpretation of the perhaps ubiquitous “gay life in Cape Town” narrative; in “Plums”, Kharys Laue tells of the devastating consequences of a collision between childhood sexual exploration and overt racism; and Innocent Chizaram Ilo provides a de- lightfully unusual and fantastical account of heartbreak as experienced by a lesbian scarecrow in “Limbo”. In “Transubstantiation”, Genna Gardini playfully tangles a young woman’s Catholic roots, drama-student anxieties and attraction to a more sophisticated friend into a witty and vigorous “coming of age” story; and Adelola Ojutiku tells of young women resort- ing to a maternal erotic tradition in “Taba”. But writers also tackled thresholds and faultlines in the making and unmaking of identities; in “Unblooming”, Alexis Teyie traces the inclusion and exclusions marked by the onset of menstruation; and in “This Is What Waking Feels Like”, by Alithnayn Abdulkareem, a rape survivor from a comfortable urban family takes a brave step towards connection. Chour- ouq Nasri presents a haunting account of the claustrophobic life of a single woman professional in a modern Moroccan city in “Anna”, with the pro- tagonist hearkening back to a friendship from her “lost” years as a student in France. Nadu Ologoudou takes up a similar theme in “Who We Were There, Who We Are Now”, looking at the delicate negotiation of identity, especially in terms of sexuality and independence, when caught between home country and colonial country. And in “Per Annum”, a fast-paced piece of speculative fiction, Mpho Phalwane explores the notion that we root our identity in our memories. Interestingly, the two stories that chart heteronormative love set their characters’ experiences in the framework of madness; Éric Essono Tsimi’s 8 INTRODUCTION “One Brief Eruption of Madness” is a dark and painfully funny account of the gap between a writer’s self-perception and that reflected by the beloved he has won from an apparently mentally afflicted friend. Michelle Ang- wenyi’s lyrical and hallucinatory “The Geography of Sunflowers” presents love and loss as experiences that both heighten and blur identity. Harriet Anena explores a different element of sexuality; in “Waiting”, her protagonist experiences an absence of desire that runs counter to the expectations of courtship in Uganda. Identity is also formed through friendships and family bonds, and in Farai Mudzingwa’s delicate and moving “South of Samora”, a young man whose social standing is dependent on where he lives, forms a friendship with an ailing child that forces him to define himself. Likewise, in “What We Could Have Been”, Heran Abate gives us an account of a young woman doggedly pursuing her goal to become a musician against the backdrop of the Ethiopian civil war – while her brother is increasingly defined by the violence of that conflict. Although, as this shows, the interpretations of the theme were varied, if there is one quality all the stories in this collection have in common, it is their complexity. Interestingly, none of the stories engage with nation- alism or ethnic identity. The contributors chose counterpoints to crude and over-determined aspects of identity; to the war-mongering seen in the media, to the increasingly simplistic constructs found online, which fuel anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and sharpen the teeth of racism and sex- ism, with lethal results. This collection is a bracing corrective: it celebrates difference, nuance, intimacy and insight. Once editing (more about this process below) was completed, the debates began all over again. This year, for the first time, we opted for a broad spread of volunteer judges, ably assisted by The Johannesburg Review of Books, rendering the evaluation process flatter, more consultative and democratic. The combination of the new scoring system and the extremely high standard of the stories meant that for the first time, we produced a short list of nine stories, instead of the usual six. 9 INTRODUCTION Although in terms of critical attention and excellence, the SSDA an- thologies have punched well above their weight since their inception, this platform is indeed only six years old, and the learning curve still slants upwards. The decision to edit the stories and to engage with the authors before judging (this is the second year we have done things in this order) has proven to be invaluable in enabling novice writers and raw talent to compete on an equal footing with their more established and experienced peers. The final stories and indeed the shortlisted stories are more evenly balanced between those already making their mark in terms of publication and awards, and extremely talented writers who are new to the adventure of publishing or only just venturing into the terrain of short fiction. Although it was a close-run thing, democracy worked smoothly (not something to be taken for granted) in throwing up Tochukwu Emmanuel Okafor’s “All Our Lives” as the clear winner. We have published this gifted writer before, and were enchanted by his wry, clear-eyed, humorous and characteristically compassionate account of the identity (multiple identities, in fact) of a much-maligned community – young and disaffected men who drift into Nigerian cities in pursuit of a “better life”. Two stories – “The Piano Player” and “God Skin”, by Agazit Abate and Michael Yee respectively – tied as runners-up. The former is a brilliant inversion of the “African abroad” narrative as it presents snapshots of life in Addis Ababa through the eyes and ears of a pianist in a luxury hotel bar.