A fardel of stories

One World: A Global

Anthology of Short Stories

By Various Authors

191pp; New Internationalist

The declared intent of the New Internationalist literary projects of which the One World Anthology of Short Stories is one, is to heal the world. The artistic impulse is at its purest when pecuniary advantage takes secondary place. In One World: A Global Anthology, with at least a representative story from every continent except Antarctica, we have twenty three stories worth the reading.

To be sure, some of the stories in this collection are as ordinary as a loaf of bread. Not entirely a bad idea. The world won't mend on medicine alone. Some are brilliantly episodic, as lushly told as any passage in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. A few of the stories attain the platinum standard in stories. They resonate and reverberate like the sound of a waterfall heard from within a lighted cave, they are scented emissaries from the storytellers that will hold your hand the length of your human memory.

The anthology opens with a story by Elaine Chiew, ‘Leng Lui Is For Pretty Lady'. It is a punctiliously told tale of servitude, mind-games and unlikely bonding between the modern serf and her ward of innocents.

The next story is Molara Wood's ‘Kelemo's Woman'. If a short story can portray the Nigerian tragedy, this one does. But it does so with an emphasis on the culpability of the female gender. It is as if the prescient storyteller knew that someday, Mrs Ayoka Adebayo will judge the outcome of Ekiti electoral results.

The inscrutable inner psychology of the macho mind-set is explored in Martin Ramos' ‘The Way of the Machete'. It is told in a voice with romantic sympathy for the bloody ways of the machete but an eye for transformation in a society trapped by tantrums of testosterone.

In Henrietta Rose-Innes' Porcelain, the reader encounters subtleties of plotting and an elegance in rendition very rare indeed in our MFA-driven short story ‘industry'. I could not but recall the eternal quote by the poet Derek Walcott: "Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."

Lauri Kubutsile's ‘The Rich People's School' and Wadzanai Mhute's ‘Cow Hearted' are two distant tales with a commonality in tragedy that is jarring. Only the wisdom of a grandmother redeems the child in Kubutsile's tale. Mhute's protagonists are the children we see all over Africa, who live in the simulacra of childhood, who grow to re-enact the instabilities that rocked their worlds off the cradle.

‘My Mother, The Crazy African' - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's story in the anthology - tries the limits of plausibility. Certainly, some mothers do have them. But this is one story in which one hopes that life does not imitate art. Still, the story challenges our views of alterity and requires a solemn reflection of our place in a world in flux.

Shabnam Nadiya's ‘Ishwari's Children' is a tribal tale told from the perspective of a young boy. The narrative is instantly Bangladeshi in tone and geography, the characters are rounded, palpable, reticent but alive. The dialogues of Kamrun Munshi's wife and Dadajan is worth a hundred pages of anthropological inquiry. ‘Ishwari's Children' is a gem and a credit to the editorial acumen of the editors of this anthology.

No anthology of short stories is ever complete without a piece in the mould of ‘Air Mail' by Ravi Mangla. It is well told but suffers from a weak denouement.

Chika Unigwe's ‘Growing My Hair Again' is a sharp indictment of a state of affairs in the homeland. Unigwe is in her element in this story, bringing it all around in a very sinister finale.

A pleasant discovery is Dipita Kwa. His voice carries, is strong and is authentic. The texture and timbre of that voice in ‘A Woman's Honour' does Cameroon proud.

Vanessa Gebbie's ‘The Kettle on the Boat' is the most dream-like in its sequence. Yet it is a story of humanity past, present and future. This Welsh writer will go far. A similar but not identical theme is treated in Sequoia Nagamatsu's ‘Melancholy Nights in a Tokyo Cybercafe'. Those on the fringe, those of whom the majority of humanity hardly ever pays but fleeting attention come to life in Nagamatsu's story, reminding us that much progress remains to be made in the human heart regarding the human condition.

Jude Dibia's shared proximity with Konstantinos Tzikas in the anthology is almost Freudian. From different ends of the narrative spectrum, they treat the subject of identity. And identity, first of all, is what every (wo)man must resolve in order to make significant progress. Tzikas is almost Kafkaesque in his treatment of his protagonist. His story will appeal to many. Petina Gappah's story, on the other hand, deals with alienation generally and more specifically examines its effects on the family unit.

You will find Ken Kamoche's rendition of the dispossessed moving and sad. But Kamoche's story has a moral that is redemptive: he is not poor who has people. This, in a more singular setting, is what Lucinda Nelson Dhavan achieves in her story, ‘The Volunteer'. In addition, Dhavan draws our attention to a truth: it is not what is given but how. Adetokunbo Abiola's ‘The Albino' moves beyond what is given to what is taken. It is a bold story of a gifted albino musician seizing his place in the sun. As ordinary as the storytelling is in places, overall it sends a powerful social message to all albinos of the world to stand up to the taunts. In Tanzania, most recently, some albinos were victims of money-making rituals, not just of apathetic dislike.

In ‘Fireweed', Skye Brannon thrills with a linguistic journey into parallel worlds. It goes to show how much language can accomplish all by itself.

The shortest story in the collection is ‘Maryanne Clouds Today' by Ivan Gabriel Rehorek. I will urge you to read this story for yourself as I will urge you to read Ovo Adagha's ‘Homeless'. These are serendipities as pleasant as if a man should scrutinise a haystack for a pin only to discover the farmer's daughter or BMW.

Jhumpa Lahiri's name precludes surprise. She is one of those writers whose name alone is sufficient to presume that anything is possible with the narrative. Her story ‘The Third and Final Continent', is so finely told that most of the magic is easy to miss. Lahiri, like Tagore before her, fortifies the reader with a kinesis as finely wrought as any proverb in Bengali.

The One World anthology is decidedly Afrocentric. This is not a bad thing. The editors have a sense of the symphonic which carries the reader through the ordinary, the episodic and the epiphany. This fardel of stories will heal the world.

Tade Ipadeola is the author of ‘The Rain Fardel'.