The past year may have been exceptionally bleak in terms of geopolitical events, but it provided rich soil for stories. At a historical moment when global travel is ubiquitous, people – desperate, hopeful, pragmatic, brutally displaced – are wandering like never before.
People on the move are threatening; at least, this is the anti-migrant narrative heard around the world, particularly in countries once known for their humane attitude to refugees. But this collection of twenty-one unusual and imaginative stories provides alternative perspectives, demonstrating how varied and inventive responses to or accounts of migration can be, the potential they open up for new ways of seeing and understanding. In an era of disquieting xenophobia, these stories provide relief, reminders that human history is the history of human movement, whether in search of a new world, or wrenched from home and hearth by darker tides of war and slavery.
The SSDA anthology has since its inception in 2013 included a mentoring component. This year, for the first time, this expanded beyond the writers to the editors of the collection. Publishing a collection of the finest short stories from the continent involves identifying and nurturing not only writing talent, but editorial skills. Helen Moffett worked alongside Bongani Kona and Efemia Chela to polish the selected stories to a high shine. Editing, however, is far more than a matter of rearranging words; it involves partnering with authors to enable them to hone their skills. The contributors to this volume responded with enthusiasm, and the editors thank them all for the learning opportunities they afforded us.
The SSDA team are particularly grateful to the judges for making the hard decisions – each story had merits, surprises and quirks that surely marked it as a contender for the SSDA Prize. The judges agreed, describing the stories as “outstanding”. Ultimately, they chose Sibongile Fisher’s “A Door Ajar”, a reinvention of the traditional tale of the prodigal sibling leaving the bright lights to return to the remote location of childhood, as the winner. Fisher’s hypnotic prose turns an account of a horrifically dysfunctional family into a subtle, rich, and complex work of art. TJ Benson, the first runner-up with “Tea”, likewise upends convention by turning the grim subject of human trafficking into an endearing and unusual love story. And Megan Ross’s “Farang”, the second runner-up, transcends the traditional travelogue as it uses the structure of learning a foreign language to describe romance and loss in Thailand in intimate detail.
As this already indicates, one of the joys of this collection is the range of interpretations given to the prescribed theme. Some were pressing: for those seared by the photo of toddler Alan Kurdî’s drowned body on a Turkish shore, there is comfort to be found in Mirette Bahgat Eskaros’s exceptionally moving account of an encounter between a boy on a boat and the story’s rather unusual narrator, whereas in “Teii mom, win rekk lah”, Francis Aubee tackles head-on the double hope prevalent in parts of the African continent: that a better life is possible abroad, and that sport (in this case, football) can offer a golden ticket to that better life.
The authors’ imaginations conjured journeys without and within, sometimes in alternative versions of the cities and countries we know, sometimes in terrain readers will recognise. Familiar themes, such as the utopia that is in fact dystopian, are burnished anew in stories like Blaize Kaye’s moving and witty version of a world in which humans and computers finally merge, and Anne Moraa’s chilling account of a young woman’s journey as a “vessel” to ferry a wealthy older man to another world.
Many contributors used the framework offered by ordinary journeys to tell powerful and poignant stories of the spillage of the human heart, the pain of leaving home, the possibility of fresh starts. Mignotte Mekuria’s lyrical and lush “Of Fire” presents a journey around the varied landscapes of Ethiopia, and a return to home and healing. It is convincingly told from the perspective of a child, as is Aba Asibon’s “Things We Found North of the Sunset”, in which a girl’s bold trip towards a dream world is witnessed from the viewpoint of the child left behind. In “The Castle”, Arja Salafranca turns a day trip around the historical sites of Cape Town into a melancholy meditation on the separation of lovers and the yearning for connection, while Izda Luhunmyo’s “The Impossibility of Home” transforms a quest for an absent father into a dazzling account of connection and friendship between two women wanderers. In contrast, Lauri Kubuitsile’s “Movement in the Key of Love” charts the turbulent passage through marital betrayal towards self-reliance and healing In Nyarsipi Odeph’s “My Sister’s Husband” and Gamu Chamisa’s “Bleed”, bereavement and unresolved grief respectively draw their heroines home from foreign countries, to build or destroy family ties, to confront demons and overturn expectations, while the evergreen theme of the stranger abroad is cheekily subverted in Fred Khumalo’s “This Bus Is Not Full!”, in which an African scholar on a bus trip in Boston turns an anthropological eye on his fellow passengers.
But not all journeys involve travel: the narrator in Stacey Hardy’s “Involution” ventures on an interior exploration that is both wickedly funny and queasily erotic; and the lone lighthouse-keeper in Karen Jennings’s “Keeping” has become so self-reliant, he dreads evidence of the world beyond washing ashore. Likewise, not all journeys end well: in Umar Turaki’s hallucinatory assembly and exploration of words from a rich range of sources, “Naming”, the simple tale of a breakdown on a lonely road at night becomes a Gothic tour de force; and in Edwin Okolo’s “The Fates”, siblings displaced to the home of an aunt experience trauma that is all the more disturbing for the normalcy of the domestic setting. Mary Ononokpono’s exquisitely written “Ayanti” intertwines two classic narratives – intrepid children who venture into the jungle to discover a ghost town and the hideous journey of the slave trade. Okafor Tochukwu’s “Leaving” likewise explores wounds of displacement and difference in a coming-of-age story that is both heartbreaking and hilarious.
These stories, by both seasoned and emergent authors, offer an invigorating sample of the talent, imagination and energy of contemporary writing from Africa. They demonstrate a flair for observation, engagement and solutions that bodes well for the future. The SSDA team looks forward to following the authors’ careers and thanks them, and all those who entered, for their trust and enthusiasm.