Say You’re One of Them
by Uwem Akpan
Published by Little Brown & Company
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Reviewed by Beth Cummings
This group of short stories by Nigerian-born Jesuit priest, Uwem Akpan, is absolutely stunning. I mean that in two distinct ways.
First, the stories are wonderfully constructed with characters that come alive on the page. The descriptions of family/village/street life in Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Benin and Kenya are often both detailed and horrific. Which leads to the second way in which the stories are stunning – the difficulties experienced by the young protagonists in these stories continued to stun me long after I put the book down.
In “An Ex-Mas Feast,” Uwem Akpan takes us to the seedy street world of Nairobi, Kenya, where a family – parents and children, live off of the earnings of the twelve-year-old daughter who sells herself to rich men in fancy cars. Some of the earnings are supposed to help her brother go to school. He is bright, sensitive and knows what is going on – and is not happy about it.
The children in “Fattening for Gabon” are being prepared for sale into slavery by their uncle. In “What Language Is That?” two little Ethiopian girls are best friends until their parents suddenly say they cannot speak to each other ever again because one is Muslim and the other is Christian. In “Luxurious Hearses” a Nigerian boy from the north is trying to escape to relatives in the south – on a bus filled with the same religious animosity that he hope to escape. The final story, “My Parent’s Bedroom” describes the violence between the Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis as seen through the eyes of a young girl who has mixed parentage.
These stories all are full of hatred and humanity, love and unspeakable evil. They bring some understanding to news from African nations and make it feel personal.
Uwem Akpan does use quite a bit of native dialect in the speech of the characters. He also sprinkles it with many non-English words. A brief glossary at the end of the book would have been useful. I could understand the terms in context, but I’m afraid that subtle and possibly not-so-subtle nuances were lost.
Armchair Interviews says: Up close and personal with people in these countries.