Sex and the African Short Story- Neel Mukherjee Judges the 2015 Shortlist

‘God, there’s a hell of a lot of sex going on in Africa,’ exclaimed one fellow- judge halfway through our reading of this year’s entries for the Caine Prize. In the year of the highest number of submissions for the prize – 153 stories – there is yet another record, dubious this time, which cannot pass unnoticed: the highest number of stories centred on sex. Masturbation features a lot, especially female masturbation. Male genitals, erm, dismembered (and disembodied), appear on a wall (yes, you read that correctly). There’s even sex – well, almost – with a tokoloshe. There’s an explicit little number, by no definition a story, in which a male narrator justifies his infidelity by his wife’s refusal to shave her legs or blow him after their marriage. And there’s your common-or-garden variety sex as well; often called vanilla, I’m reliably informed. Oh, did I forget female orgasms and ubiquitous ejaculations? 

The judge who commented on the pervasiveness of sex in Africa got an eye infection halfway through the reading because ‘all that ejaculation got into my eye’. What on earth is going on? One of the reasons behind this high incidence of writing about sex could be the (baneful) influence of Fifty Shades of Grey, the judges surmised. If this is true, then one can only lament. 

But it set me thinking: could it be that, after decades of being expected to write about poverty, famine, AIDS, corruption, dictators, writers from most of the countries on the continent are writing about whatever the hell they feel like writing about? But the problematics of this ‘liberation’ don’t need spelling out. 

The other problem is the knotty business of writing about sex. It’s notoriously difficult – bordering on impossible, in fact – to write well about it. While it is to be lauded that this has not held back some of the writers whose stories I have in mind – nothing ventured, nothing gained,

remember? – I wish the outcomes, in each of these cases, had lived up to the risk taken.

Two of the shortlisted stories show how to write about sex in extraordinary and powerful ways. One casts the briefest of glances at homosexuality in the subtlest way imaginable; it is barely a whisper. The other works by the suggestion of adultery or unfaithfulness -- the story leaves so much unsaid that one wonders if it is really that -- that casts a long shadow and seems to be one of the undersurface motors driving the motivations of the characters.

Read the shortlist here.

Neel Mukherjee is one of the 2015 Judges of the Caine Prize and the author of the award-winning debut novel, A Life Apart (2010). His second novel, The Lives of Others (2014), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has reviewed fiction widely for a number of UK, Indian and US publications. He lives in London.

The Port Harcourt One Day Short Story Surgery - Feedback from Participants by Jinaka Ugochukwu

Pemi Aguda winner of 2015 Writivism Prize

Congratulations to Pemi Aguda, whose story 'Caterer Caterer' has won the 2015 Writivism Prize. Pemi took part in the 2014 Caine Prize one day short story surgery, which Stanley Kenani wrote about in his blogpost back in November last year. 

The short story is in rude health. 

It’s striding along inspiring competitions, compilations and festivals in its name. This year already there has been the Time of the Writer Festival in Durban, the Costa Short Story Award, the London Short Story Festival in June, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Writivism and there's still the Short Story Day Africa Prize to look forward to.

Last year The Port Harcourt Book Festival was one such event in the calendar.  Taking place in October and celebrating Port Harcourt’s status as UNESCO 2014 World Book Capital, it also showcased the short story form. 

Africa 39 was launched there, a compilation of short stories and excerpts from novels and The Caine Prize One Day Short Story Surgery was facilitated there.  15 participants, selected from an open call for applicants were offered the opportunity to ‘become surgeons…to cut open their drafts and mess with the guts’ 

The one day surgery was the first of its kind for the Caine Prize which has hosted annual 10 day workshops, for the Prize’s shortlisted writers and others who have caught the attention of the judges, since 2003. 

The 3 facilitators of the short surgery were Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Abubakar Ibrahim and Stanley Kenani.  Stanley Kenani has written about the experience from the facilitator’s point of view here on the blog.  He outlines the group’s analysis of the key elements of storytelling (setting, language and character) through critique of the participants’ own work and that of 2010 winner, Olufemi Terry.

Writing advice can often boil down to ‘write more and read more’ so did the participants, Jo Nwinyi, Ndubuisi Newman, Tope Rotimi, Ikenna Okeh, Victor Emmanuel Idem, Nihinlola Ifeoluwa, Kechi Nomu, Louis Ogbere, Chika Tobi Onwuasanya, Jennifer Nkem-Eneanya, Yomi Kolawole, Adeniyi Mopelola Omayeni, Owoyemi Olorunfemi, Pemi Aguda, find this approach useful?

Here is some of their feedback:

So much learning and discovery stuffed like a Thanksgiving Turkey into a few hours – Jennifer Nkem-Eneanya

The Caine Prize Short Story Surgery opened for me a whole new perspective on how to approach writing - Louis Ogbere

[The surgery was] validating for me as a writer – Victor Emmanuel Idem

And perhaps only in Nigeria, and other countries on CAT (Central African Time), would the ‘punctuality of the facilitators’ be something to highlight but that caught the attention of Chika Tobi.  She also, like several participants, commented on the skill and expertise of the facilitators.

Ellah Allfrey [created a setting] which allowed [all] to speak, encouraged [all] to listen and persuaded [all] to learn - Chika Tobi

The facilitators made it worth each of the 21,600 seconds it lasted - Anaele Ihuoma

And Tope Rotimi put it simply - the facilitators were brilliant, warm and very well prepared

It was clear also that the facilitators had had a longer term impact on the writing of the participants.

I constantly see Mr Stanley’s face before me when I embark on too intense a description or explanation - Jennifer Nkem-Eneanya

[I learnt new things] especially not leaving my characters alone as it allowed for them to travel backdown memory lane rather than moving the plot(s) forward - Victor Emmanuel Idem

I heard the phrase ‘thought verbs’ for the first time [and I learnt] the importance of showing, not telling - Chika Tobi Onwuasoanya

Resoundingly the day was a positive experience for the writers. 

They were pleased to have been plugged into social media where they found out about the call for applicants and they enjoyed being associated with the Caine Prize and they are looking forward to developing their writing.

[The] event reinforced my determination to pour out my soul into my future writings - Victor Emmanuel Idem

There are things you feel you are good at until someone else show you how to be better - Louis Ogbere

[It] was an exhilarating experience - Tope Rotimi

Thank you for the experience of the workshop - Pemi Aguda

So whilst there are no immediate plans to repeat the event, ‘The One Day Short Story Surgery is a one off, for now’ says Caine Prize Director Lizzy Attree, it would likely be a successful undertaking if it were.

It was perhaps appropriate to have the surgery in Nigeria a country from which there have been three winners, and from which its writers are shortlisted almost every year and where year on year they contribute the most entries for consideration.  In recent years workshops have been held in locations from which the Caine Prize would like to encourage submissions. Let’s look forward to the future of these 15 writers and anticipate their future contributions to the ever growing short story canon.

2015 Shortlist: F.T. Kola (South Africa) for "A Party for the Colonel"

As well as recognising the talent of established writers the 2015 shortlist, which includes one past winner and two previously shortlisted writers, is also one to celebrate new talent. Shortlisted on the merit of her first published story, FT Kola draws on a childhood anecdote often told by her parents of the writer as a toddler growing up in South Africa.

Bio: F.T. Kola was born in South Africa, grew up in Australia, and lived in London and New York City before pursuing an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin, where she is a fellow in fiction.

What it's about: A grandfather trying to blend into a world in which he would never belong is inadvertently exposed at a party by the young child of his activist son.

Read it for: Narrated through the eyes of the Colonel’s wife’s insecurities, an emotive look at the nuances and exploitative hierarchies of South Africa’s apartheid system from an Indian family’s perspective.

Excerpt:

The more money the Colonel made, the more he was convinced that all along he had been right. But the Colonel’s wife, in private moments, thought differently. The Colonel’s money did not bring them favor, or let them into the forbidden places from which they would always be excluded: it merely let them pretend, sometimes, that Apartheid didn’t exist at all. Where the fact of inequality crept into their daily lives, the Colonel simply replaced the inevitable with the illusion of choice; going only to the Indian cinemas because there were no “for use by white persons” signs since no white people ever went there at all; sending Mohammed to a private school in Botswana; telling his wife to take a more scenic route from the market rather than the direct path through the cemetery where white children would hide behind the gravestones to throw rocks at her; never going to the annual Rand Easter show where a man of his color would be denied entry on certain days or to the nicest pavilions no matter how much he might pay for a ticket, but where the poorest white would be allowed to enter.

In the summer, the family went on trips to places where one could be treated as an equal: to Spain, to England, to Botswana, to Portugal. The Colonel managed eventually to buy the largest building in their area, one that took up the whole corner of the block, and had given himself a spacious set of offices downstairs and leased the rest out to a café. He had tasked his wife with transforming the upper floor (which the Colonel preferred to call the penthouse) into a charming warren of imported marble tiles, costly fabrics, and modern conveniences. They had hired Eunice, and the Colonel had built a sparse, four-by-four room on the roof for her to live, a room in which she would live for the next thirty years. For the Colonel’s wife, Eunice soon became like a friend and daughter, as well as an older sister to her son, so much so that she often forgot Eunice had a family of her own, in far off Transkei, a husband and child whom she saw just once a year.

It had stung the Colonel’s wife a little when Mohammed, at sixteen, had come home on school holidays to admonish his parents for hiring Eunice, claiming that they imprisoned her, and asking why she was not permitted to eat dinner with the family. He followed Eunice around while she made beds and chopped vegetables and washed the floors, lecturing her on Communism. The Colonel’s wife had to shoo her son away—Can’t you see she’s busy?—and the Colonel and Mohammed had fought in the evenings once Eunice was safely away in her own room. The Colonel claimed that hiring Eunice was practically charity, and besides, this life was something he had earned, while Mohammed accused him of trying to live like a white man, blind to the fact that he would never be one. Though she would never say it to her husband, the Colonel’s wife agreed. They did not live in Houghton, or Hillbrow. The view from their windows was bleak, and the stink of frying from the café below made its way into every gold-embroidered sofa cushion and filigree cedar wood shutter. They would never be able to go any further than they had come.

Read the full story A Party for the Colonel here.

Each shortlisted writer receives £500 and the winner of the £10,000 prize will be announced at an award ceremony and dinner at the Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, on Monday 6 July. Each of these stories has been published in New Internationalist’s Caine Prize 2015 Anthology which is available here.

Chair of Judges, Zoe Wicomb, on the 2015 Caine Prize Shortlist, Child Narrators and Poverty Porn

The Caine Prize has of late been roundly criticized for favouring child narrators, the charge being that their perspectives contribute to the infantilization of Africa. This year’s judging panel has failed to heed the warning; perversely, we have allowed three child narrators on the shortlist. Moreover, all three tell stories of impoverishment, the nasty addictive ingredient, we are told, that converts so readily into ‘poverty porn’. Have we then deliberately chosen to perpetuate the parlous condition in which the representation of African writing is said to find itself? If child narrators are accused of trading in pornographic sentimentality, our three chosen ones deftly sidestep such charges.

Yes, the stories (‘Flying’, ‘The Folded Leaf’, ‘Space’) deal with poverty and disadvantage, but literary value is, of course, not based on content. Stylistically, these stories prove irresistible; their simplicity is strategic; and far from infantilizing the societies in which they are set, they make extraordinary and sophisticated demands on readers’ inferential skills. Poverty is not presented as a single meaning, begging bowl in hand; instead, meaning proliferates as we are prompted to infer the unspoken: that which lies just beyond what can be seen, or what can be heard, said, or done under social restrictions and conventional morality (––or, in western words, beyond what-Maisie-knew). Beyond poverty and underdevelopment are the clear-sightedness, the aspirational, the will to truth, the empathy and the ethical that lie within reach of the child as artiface. Through the child narrators ambiguity and irony are introduced. 

These stories seem to go a long way towards answering a pressing question that we fail to ask whilst we focus on what African writing looks like from the outside: Why do so many literary writers choose the narrative perspective of children?

Read the Caine Prize 2015 Shortlist

Zoë Wicomb is a South African writer who lives in Scotland where she is Emeritus Professor in English Studies at Strathclyde University. Her critical work is on Postcolonial theory and South African writing and culture. Her works of fiction are You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, David’s Story, Playing in the Light, The One That Got Away and October. Wicomb is a recipient of Yale’s 2013 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.

2015 Shortlist: Elnathan John for 'Flying' (Nigeria)

The five writer shortlist for the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced by Chair of judges, award-winning South African writer Zoë Wicomb. In a sign of the established calibre to be found in African writing and as the Caine Prize matures in its sixteenth year, the shortlist includes one past winner and two previously shortlisted writers including Nigerian writer Elnathan John for his story ’Flying’ published in Per Contra (2014). Elnathan John was previously shortlisted in 2013 for 'Bayan Layi' also published in Per Contra.

Bio: Elnathan John is a full time writer who lives and works in Nigeria. His writing has been published in Per Contra, ZAM Magazine, Hazlitt, Evergreen Review, and Chimurenga's The Chronic. He writes political satire for a Nigerian newspaper and his blog for which he hopes to someday get arrested and famous. He has tried hard, but has never won anything. His first novel is due from Cassava Republic Press in 2015 and Grove Atlantic’s Black Cat in 2016. He is a 2015 Civitella Ranieri fellow.

What Flying is about: A young school boy growing up in the Kachiro Refuge Home who flies in his sleep.

Read it for: A soft exploration of self discovery, loss and re-incarnation.

Excerpt:

I wake up in fright, earlier than I used to. I felt like I was disappearing. My night had no dream. No flying. No running and gliding. No choosing where to fly to. Nothing. Not even crashing. For the first time since I remember dreaming, I did not fly. I am afraid.

The minutes are passing slowly and my hands are trembling. I am sure Aunty Keturah will know what this empty night means. The earliest I can see her is during break and I don’t know if I can hold on for that long.

After cleaning the office, I sit in her soft black chair, with the record book in my laps. On Gideon’s page, I read, "found crying and abandoned in the market." Maybe someone even stepped on him as they went by, I think, feeling sorry for him. Then it comes back to me- my night without flying and I am afraid again. I turn to my name in the book even though I have told myself I wouldn’t look at it yet. I can hear my heart beating and it is hard to breathe.

Tears are gathering in my eyes. I am scared of seeing my story. Not left in a toilet like Biggie, I pray. I trace the words with my forefinger.

Read the rest of ‘Flying’

Brian Chikwava on Why Being a Good Writer is Not Enough- Judging The 2015 Shortlist

What makes a winning story is a question that has been discussed often on the Caine Prize blog by celebrated storytellers and previous judges. Nathan Hensley (Judge 2013) described the tingle of responsibility of “doing the work of cultural consecration, separating “good” literature from “bad” and, inevitably, enforcing the standards that might determine what counts as good in the first place.”

How do you determine that from just 3000 words? “Short, where narrative is concerned, is not easy: it requires more art.” argues John Sutherland (Judge 2013) in his reflections of the judging process, but an art that he says that “African writers are so damned good at.” For Helon Habila (Judge 2014), “their plotting, focalizations, narrative voices, rhetorical devices, and structural features call into question the idea that there might be any single definition or model against which the African short-story might be measured.” But decides that “if it is a good book, people will make a beaten path it.”.

Leila Aboulela, 2013 judge and 2000 winner, determined the good stories as the ones that were “the kind of stories I would want to pass on to friends, the kind of stories I would be keen to recommend.” And it’s not necessarily the ones with the serious subject matters.

However after going through the most recent shortlist announcement, Brian Chikwava, having won the 2004 Caine Prize for “Seventh Street Alchemy” and returned as a 2015 Judge, learned that “being a good writer alone is not enough to guarantee a place on the shortlist. One also needs luck. Plenty of it.”

“Judging the works of other writers can be a humbling experience. One gets to observe the capricious nature of the process and it was an eye opening pleasure to read through the astonishing range of entries and try to whittle it down from the overwhelming volume of 153 entries to five depending on their ideas, execution, the quality of the writing and how that package holds together.

Based on the frequency with which they appeared across the individual judges’ lists of the favourite ten, some stories initially gave the impression that they would sail into the final shortlist. But a surprisingly different picture began to emerge after illuminating discussions on the merits of each story, which perhaps speaks to the quality of the stories. One judge's reading may throw new light on a story whose strengths weren't so obvious to begin with, and suddenly…

After pleasant agreement and disagreement it also became apparent that in some cases arguing for or against one story or another had reached its limit. A bit of horse-trading therefore seemed like a sensible way of moving forward. At this point the process can take on a political complexion so that the final shortlist to an extent hinges on how firmly held individual judges’ positions are with respect to competing considerations: whether taste, predilection, conviction and other perceived or urgent concern of fiction/writing can be traded in order to arrive at a result that leaves no one judge feeling short-changed.

Inevitably not all of the stories that we liked as individuals made it to the shortlist. I would have loved to see Cat Hellisen’s Mouse Teeth and Melissa Tandiwe Myambo’s Special Meal on the shortlist. They are well crafted, engaging and there is a nice freshness in the treatment of their subject matters. I also loved Jowhor Ile's Supersonic Bus.

It does make me wonder about the debates that must have taken place when my story Seventh Street Academy was selected as the 2004 winner. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during those discussions but no one wants to find out that a good outcome may not have been down to their staggering genius.”

For more insight into the judging process of the Caine Prize read Bernadine Evaristo (Chair of Judges 2012) and Samantha Pinto’s (Judge 2012, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University) descriptions of the kinds of questions that came to mind as they read the stories. 

Find out who made the 2015 shortlist here and the full judging panel here. 

Written by Kiran Yoliswa

2015 Shortlist: Segun Afolabi for “The Folded Leaf” (Nigeria)

The five writer shortlist for the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced by Chair of judges, award-winning South African writer Zoë Wicomb. “For all the variety of themes and approaches, the shortlist has in common a rootedness in socio-economic worlds that are pervaded with affect, as well as keen awareness of the ways in which the ethical is bound up with aesthetics. Unforgettable characters, drawn with insight and humour inhabit works ranging from classical story structures to a haunting, enigmatic narrative that challenges the conventions of the genre.”

A previous winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2005 for ‘Monday Morning’, Segun
Afolabi (Nigeria) has been shortlisted again for “The Folded Leaf” in Wasafiri (London,
2014).

Bio: Segun Afolabi was born in Nigeria and brought up in the Congo, Canada and Japan. He
lives and works in London. He is the author of A Life Elsewhere, a short story collection, and a
novel, Goodbye Lucille. He is currently working on a new novel and collection of short stories.

What 'The Folded Leaf' is about: A young girl travels with her father and a group of sick children to Lagos to pray to one of Nigeria’s infamous celebrity pastors for healing.

Read it for: an expertly guided awareness of the narrator’s experience, a delicate allusion to
homosexual love, and the rise and fall of a desperate hope.

Excerpt:

Silence. Noise. Silence again. The sounds slipping away, returning — a seashell back and forth
against my ear. I am both giddy and fearful. I have always been afraid, I know, of the night, of
silence, of losing Mama or Papa, of Bola running away, never hearing from him again. More than anything, I am afraid the pastor will see right through me to my sin, my doubt, my disbelief.

I am frightened because, in spite of myself, I want so much for something to happen. ‘Tunde, Mrs Kekere — take this,’ Papa says. ‘Sam, Bola — one one for each of you.’ He must be distributing the funds we’ve raised in church, months of donations sealed in envelopes, used partly to pay for the driver and the minibus and today’s collection.

‘Stop trying to stand,’ Tunde says. ‘He wasn’t talking to you.’

‘But I can feel something,’ Sam says.

‘Give all you can!’ a voice booms, though not Pastor Fayemi’s. ‘He sees into your hearts. Don’t cheat Him, oh!’

Read The Folded Leaf