African Lives: An Anthology of Memoirs and Autobiographies

Abstract

the delightful miniatures, impressionistic aphorisms, and intimate poems written in the manner of a poetic diary. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin David Shook. Our Obsidian Tongues. London. Eyewear Publishing. 2013. isbn 9781908998071 David Shook is quite right that, on the days when you can see them through the pollution, the volcanoes that surround Mexico City are a perfect metaphor for the city’s way of existing at once in the present and in the past. Through their lava, rock, and ash, they symbolize both origin and aftermath, and it is this sense of the city as bubbling life and dying remains that Shook explores in Our Obsidian Tongues. The poems in the collection move fluidly between original work and translations from Spanish and indigenous languages like Zapotec, and the city they circulate shifts too, as we move among butchers, kidnappers, businessmen, mango sellers, and the “celestial bouncers” of the clouds. And yet, despite its varied cast, what stands out about Shook’s Mexico City is not its voices but its silence. It is not entirely silent, of course—we are never far from the sounds of police helicopters, whining machinery, and shrieking sirens—but it is silent in that nobody speaks. Instead, the various protagonists —kidnappers and their victims, tourists, immigrants living in the United States—write letters, which sometimes mislead or arrive too late and which always go unanswered. Mouths in the book are coated with thrush “like cobwebs over tongues too seldom moved.” Lips and throats do not belong to people but to water cisterns, volcanoes, and valleys: they are parched and dry, with no hope for anything better than the next lot of acid rain. Everything feels left behind, running out or drying up: in this sense, rather than being a celebration of the city’s many voices, Our Obsidian Tongues seems to be a lament for their absence. This raises questions about how Shook sees himself here, as poet of this dust-covered metropolis and student of its tongues. To have thrown himself with such zeal into this multifaceted project of writing and rewriting, and yet for the results to read so pessimistically, seems strange. What does it mean to produce such fiery, vivid translations and at the same time to scatter them among the ash in a landscape where it seems to be too late—everything too sick, too lifeless—for speech? Whether or not Our Obsidian Tongues provides the reader with all they need in order to answer these questions (and I am not sure that it does, but neither am I sure that it wants to), it certainly impresses as a brutal, clever, and tautly crafted portrait of a city that deserves no less. Annie McDermott São Paulo Miscellaneous African Lives: An Anthology of Memoirs and Autobiographies. Geoff Wisner, ed. Boulder, Colorado. Lynne Rienner. 2013. isbn 9781588268624 In African Lives, Geoff Wisner’s selection of memoirs (inclusive of an interview, a speech, and court testimony ) and autobiographical works answers the need for a collection of “true-life narratives” about the people of Africa. The anthology contains forty-eight works of nonfiction that span the continent during various times in its turbulent history. It is an amazing anthology—a cacophony of African voices in splendid diversity as vast as the continent itself. Geographically divided into north Africa, west Africa, central Africa, east Africa, southern Africa , and South Africa, the anthology includes the works of celebrated authors, common people, and leaders who share the particular intimacies of their lives. In “Machete Season,” 74 worldliteraturetoday.org Jean-Baptiste Murangira recounts his participation in the genocide in Rwanda. In “Encounters,” Mohammed Dib (Algeria) describes his first encounters with Europeans. Nisa shares her life (with Marjorie Shostak) of hunting and gathering during the early twentieth century in Botswana. Like Nisa’s account, Tepilit Ole Saitoti’s “The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior” is moving in its simplicity, with the attendant theme of survival and longing. One of the most powerful pieces in the collection is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (Nigeria) “African ‘Authenticity’ and the Biafran Experience .” Echoing Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others, Adichie writes, “The problem with stereotypes . . . in literature...