prominence. Yet in the background of his lengthy prose grew just as rich a mastery of brief fiction. With Minutes of Glory and Other Stories, Ngũgĩ assembles the quintessential collection of short stories spanning the length of his literary career. Just as the scope of Ngũgĩ’s craft encompasses a myriad of Kenyan culture, so too does this anthology channel an equally broad spectrum of emotions and ideas. Divided into four major movements, Minutes of Glory includes the nearly sixty-yearold short story “The Fig Tree” alongside the much more recent “The Ghost of Michael Jackson.” Such a wide gamut likewise offers a biographical peek into Ngũgĩ’s career previously unavailable through his novels, albeit not entirely assembled chronologically .The first two overarching subjects of the collection are also its most permeating as Ngũgĩ wrestles with trials of family and faith. “The Village Priest” details the titular priest’s struggle to conjure rain and maintain his spirituality against a far more prolific rainmaker. Throughout his text, traditional practice rallies against Western influence seeking to assimilate if not render the bulk of Kenya vestigial. At the heart of each tale pulses the rhythm of an individual as Ngũgĩ finds the agency to prevail against any social influence. Even so, and such is the case with “The Black Bird” and “Goodbye Africa,” Ngũgĩ acknowledges the quest for agency is often tragic. Though the collection’s third part also contain its eponymous story, the preceding movement, “Fighters and Martyrs,” carries the most weight. Minutes of Glory’s final three pieces seem almost auxiliary, as if to only give one a better sense of Ngũgĩ’s musings in retrospect. This aside is not inappropriate but would have perhaps been better woven into the text’s earlier works. Structural weaknesses aside, Minutes of Glory is still a necessary staple of Kenyan literature. Ultimately, the text offers an insight deeper into Ngũgĩ himself than any other form of his prose possibly can. Daniel Bokemper Oklahoma City Sinan Antoon The Book of Collateral Damage Trans. Jonathan Wright. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2019. 303 pages. So many books have been written about the Iraq War (2003–2011) from both sides of that conflict, but Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage is unique in that it chooses to represent the human and environmental cost of that war. Nameer, an Iraqi American intellectual, visits his home country after the war and is traumatized by the hurt and damage he witnesses . Navigating the divide of his home and host cultures’ views of the war, he collects pieces of American news stories of the war and files them as “collateral damage.” Wadood, his narrative double, imagines and documents the detailed history of the war as expressed by “colloquies” of the people, places and things damaged by the war. The two meet at al-Mutanabi Street, the historical cultural hub of Baghdad. Nameer is hired by American filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Wadood, an eccentric bookseller, sends him a manuscript of a narrative catalog, “a circular history” of the war as experienced by the victims and the things that the war has destroyed. Nameer reads Wadood’s narrative as he navigates his life in the post-9/11 United States. The manuscript transfers Wadood’s trauma to Nameer, who is diagnosed with PTSD but refuses the bourgeois psychoanalytical approach to his condition. Wadood’s colloquies lead to the central moment of an explosion that took place in al-Mutanabi Street in 2007. The moment of the explosion crystallizes the story of the war, bringing past and present together, As Shiferraw gives space to the messy multiplicity of a self born from trauma, again she offers a rebuke to the demand that she silence the complicated. Throughout the collection, the poet’s lens expands beyond the self to other women, most movingly her mother. In “The Fruit Mother,” Shiferraw returns to the symbol of cactus fruit, also found in her 2016 collection , Fuchsia. With the beles, the reader is again plunged into a violent invasion of the domestic. “My mother is a cactus fruit, but...
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Oct 16, 2024
Caroline K Iraku + 1
Open Access
