Terra Incognita

Description

In Terra Incognita, Short Story Day Africa is proud to present nineteen stories of speculative fiction. Contained within the pages are stories that explore, among other things, the sexual magnetism of a tokoloshe, a deadly feud with a troop of baboons, a journey through colonial purgatory, along with ghosts, re-imagined folklore, and the fear of that which lies beneath both land and water. Terra Incognita. Uncharted depths. Africa unknowable.

Sujets

• Romance
• Romance LGBT
• Collection
• Collections

Informations

• Publié par: Modjaji Books
• Date de parution: 23 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781920590994
• Langue: English

Extrait

HEC PARS AFHRICE ANTIQVIORIBVS MANSIT INCOGNITA
Terra Incognita
 
Published by Short Story Day Africa in 2015
Distributed by Hands-On Books
 
Print ISBN: 978-1-920590-91-8
E-book ISBN: 978-1-920590-99-4
 
The copyright of any work in this book remains with its author. No work in this collection may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without the prior permission of its author.
 
Edited by Nerine Dorman
 
Cover and inside page design by Nick Mulgrew
Cover detail from Thomas Burke , Cupid Inspiring the Plants With Love, an engraving from a painting by Philip Reinagle : New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linneaus ; … The Temple of Flora, or Garden of Nature
Detail on page iii of printed book from Sebastian Münster’s map, Africa, Libya, Morland, mit allen Kunigreichen so zu unsern zeiten darin gefunden werden . (1544-1545)
Image on endpapers from Johan Bussemacher’s map, Afrique (1600)
 
E-book formatting by Fox & Raven Publishing
 
The print version of this book is typeset in Gestalt, Brandon Grotesque, Minion Pro and Bodoni
TERRA
INCOGNITA
 
 

CONTENTS
 
Introduction
 
Leatherman
DIANE AWERBUCK
South Africa
 
Caverns Measureless to Man
TOBY BENNETT
South Africa
 
I Am Sitting Here Looking at a Graveyard
PWAANGULONGII BENRAWANGYA
nigeria
 
Hands
TIAH BEAUTEMENT
united states of america / south africa
 
Marion’s Mirror
GAIL DENDY
South Africa
 
How My Father Became a God
DILMAN DILA
uganda
 
In the Water
KERSTIN HALL
South Africa
 
Mouse Teeth
CAT HELLISEN
South Africa
 
Spirits of the Dead Keep Watch
MISHKA HOOSEN
South Africa
 
Stations
NICK MULGREW
South Africa
 
Editöngö
MARY OKON ONONOKPONO
united kingdom / nigeria
 
CJ
CHINELO ONWUALU
nigeria
 
There is Something That Ogbu-Ojah Didn’t Tell Us
JEKWU OZOEMENE
nigeria
 
Ape Shit
SYLVIA SCHLETTWEIN
namibia
 
What if You Slept?
JASON MYKL SNYMAN
South Africa
 
Esomnesia
PHILLIP STEYN
South Africa
 
The Lacuna
BRENDAN WARD
South Africa
 
The Carthagion
SARAH JANE WOODWARD
South Africa
 
The Corpse
SESE YANE
kenya
 
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
 
Over the past decade, the publishing industry has become risk-averse. The words “genre-defying” and “original” make agents and editors break out in a cold sweat – or so we’re told. The industry is constantly described as conservative. Manuscripts are rejected for being too cerebral, unsellable in a market that wants only apple pie. An alternative publishing model has grown up around writers looking for new routes to readers. However indie publishers are often (unfairly) perceived as exploitative and the work produced by them as subpar.
It is in this climate that Short Story Day Africa was formed and, in the four years since inception, the SSDA team has developed a survival ethos: to subvert and reclaim. Reclaim the place of the short story. Reclaim a space for non-conformist writing. Subvert ideas about what it means to be a writer in Africa. Subvert ideas about what makes a story African.
No surprise then that, when we sent out the call for speculative fiction stories, we asked writers to subvert the idioms of both the genre and our vast continent. We received 116 answers to that call, around thirty up on last year’s entries. The list was whittled down through a blind reading process, but also through careful curatorship. This meant that some of the stories that made it through the reading process, even some that scored highly, did not make it onto the long-list of eighteen. These were well-crafted stories, good stories, but we wanted stories that had interpreted the theme in unexpected ways.
As a result, around a fifth of the voices contained within these pages are being published for the first time. These voices appear alongside established writers, like Diane Awerbuck, who penned “Leatherman,” this year’s winning story. In fact, “In the Water”, the story that took third place, is Kerstin Hall’s first published story. Second place went to Sylvia Schlettwein for “Ape Shit”, with “The Corpse” by Sese Yane getting a special mention. Needless to say, these eighteen are writers who are not afraid to bend rules, genre and language.
The nineteenth story in this collection did not come from the competition entries. “Hands” was written by Tiah Beautement, a member of the SSDA team, in response to a chronic and often debilitating condition she has lived with these past four years. In spite of the physical limitations imposed on Tiah she has never shied away from the challenges of co-running Short Story Day Africa.
In Terra Incognita , Short Story Day Africa is proud to present nineteen stories of speculative fiction. Contained within these pages are stories that explore, among other things, the sexual magnetism of a tokoloshe, a deadly feud with a troop of baboons, a journey through colonial purgatory, along with ghosts, re-imagined folklore, and the fear of that which lies beneath both land and water.
Terra Incognita. Uncharted depths. Africa unknowable.
 
Rachel Zadok
Short Story Day Africa
LEATHERMAN
 
Diane Awerbuck
 
For Clare
 
It was not that she was a prude. Joanna had just not found anyone she liked enough to relieve her body of its tight-wadded burden—the bud, the bouquet, the burning bush of her maidenhead. She wanted an expert, a light-fingered someone with a cunning tongue, but the hopefuls who knocked on the door were boys too young to know better, or her father’s hairy, beery friends.
It was not the hair, really, either—it was the geography of it. Silverbacks, tonsures, furry-purry fright wigs: Joanna had refused to run her fingers through them all. But, more than that, it was the men’s discomfort with their own topography that dampened her passion, the way one sucked in his gut when he passed her in Hatfield Street, or another whistled through nasal topiary when she skirted him on the steps.
And time passes more quickly when you’re busy, as anyone who’s ever attended a sickbed will say. Soon she hardly thought about her sanitary state. At Allure she researched features for the other women, invariably older, pencil-skirted, divorced. They smoked but never ate, and spoke in deep voices about the Dirty Thirties and robbing the cradle . Joanna couldn’t see the point of younger men. Was it so much to ask, for someone she liked, who liked her too? She looked for him on the horizon, wished for him in the evening on Venus’s unvarying machinery—the big-night star, the morning-after star—which should by rights have watched over her.
Joanna wasn’t an idiot: she had known that a big city meant a certain amount of loneliness, but the Mother City was harder than she had imagined when she was back in Kimberley, mooning from the window of matric. She was unprepared for the carelessness of Capetonians, for sex-as-premise, for the difficulty of comprehending the unspoken rules, like iron filings rustling untouched on a sheet of foolscap. By the time you worked out the magnet’s movements, it was too late.
The ticket to YDESIRE had been comped to Allure for publicity. “Oh, please. Take it,” Siobhan had told her. Joanna found her dyed hair difficult to look at, brickish, hard against the hand. Siobhan breathed neglect and necrosis: her stomach was digesting itself. The editor fluttered her starved fingers. “Another fucking art event. ”
During her lunch hour, Joanna had gone to The Emporium, searching for an outfit that would make her look like the girls she spied on in Mister Pickwick’s: thinnish, hungover, imperfect girls who would skinny-dip in waterfalls with your boyfriend or produce large-eyed love-children with French seamen. They smelled of dirty panties and oily scalps, of snail-slick contamination, of sliding focused and impervious to some decided finish. Joanna in her slabbed flesh was unpierced, unmarked, a concentrated negation. She had looked under the rock and seen its workings. This was her last chance: really, the final countdown.
SOFTSERVE 4 , said the invitation. Disbelieving, Joanna kept taking it out of her bag, like a guidebook. YDESIRE. The map of the Castle’s innards was spread in pink on the reverse; the main building itself was an icon, an areola, a stamp for a club that had never let her in. Joanna imagined the pockmarked walls hung with fairy lights for this one bright night, translated at the witching hour. Tonight she would dance on the heathen grass, twist under the tinselly stars, stretch out her sore back that had been slumped by plainness and office chairs. In a few years, Joanna knew, she would have a widow’s hump. A Windows hump. If this doesn’t work, I’m going to be a librarian, she told herself, as she made her way to the changing room with its corrugated door like a rocket ship and its promise of astral travel.
The clothes draped over her arm were doll-sized, made for aliens. She should have been used to it from the magazine ( GET HER LOOK! ) but it still took her by surprise, the Asian cookie-cutter that she saw descending on the dough of women’s bodies. She began to st