Feast, Famine and Potluck

Description

A dazzling collection from across the African continent and diaspora � here SHORT STORY DAY AFRICA has assembled the best nineteen stories from their 2013 competition. Food is at the centre of stories from authors emerging and established, blending the secular, the supernatural, the old and the new in a spectacular celebration of short fiction. Civil wars, evictions, vacations, feasts and romances � the stories we bring to our tables that bring us together and tear us apart.

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine
• Collection
• Collections

Informations

• Publié par: Modjaji Books
• Date de parution: 14 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780620588867
• Langue: English

Extrait

Feast, Famine Potluck
Published in South Africa by Short Story Day Africa in 2013 Registered NPO 123-206 http://shortstorydayafrica.org
Print Edition published by Hands-On Books, an imprint of Modjaji Books PO Box 385, Athlone, 7760, Cape Town, South Africa www.modjajibooks.co.za/titles/books/hands-on/
Print ISBN: 978-0-620-58887-4 E-book ISBN: 978-0-620-58886-7
The individual authors as indicated in their works
Edited by Karen Jennings Typesetting and cover design by Nick Mulgrew Cover illustration by Candace di Talamo
This book was typeset in Minion Pro and Bodoni
FEAST, FAMINE POTLUCK
SHORT STORY DAY AFRICA
I NTRODUCTION
My Father s Head O KWIRI O DUOR
Choke J AYNE B AULING
Chicken E FEMIA C HELA
Bloodline T ARRYN - A NNE A NDERSON
The Broken Pot D ILMAN D ILA
Heaven Scent K ATHERINE G RAHAM
The Dibbuk M ANU H ERBSTEIN
44 Boston Heights, Yeoville C ATHERINE J ARVIS
A Serving of Honey B RYEN W ALTER K ANGWAGYE
Black Coffee without Sugar L AURI K UBUITSILE
Where is the Tenderness? G REG L AZARUS
The House of the Apostate A BDUL - M ALIK S IBABALWE O SCAR M ASINYANA
Ponta do Ouro N ICK M ULGREW
Mogadishu Maybe C HUKWUMEKA N JOKU
Looking B EVERLEY N AMBOZO N SENGIYUNVA
On Time A CHIRO P ATRICIA O LWOCH
Burning Woman M ICHELLE P REEN
Hyena R AMONEZ R AMIREZ
Fizz Pops H AMILTON W ENDE
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
I n 2011, when we founded a Short Story Day in Africa, we set out a number of goals we hoped to accomplish one day. I m proud of how many of those goals have been realised in three short years - one operating in southern Africa and two throughout Africa. This anthology of nineteen stories, collected from African writers, both established and emerging, is the pinnacle of those goals. Contained within these pages are the nineteen stories that were longlisted for Short Story Day Africa s Feast, Famine and Potluck competition.
We tailored our submissions guidelines and judging process for the competition according to needs we identified within the Short Story Africa community in 2012. Three main issues arose:
1. The desire for a platform for emerging writers to showcase their work (due to a lack of resources, we are only able to showcase the work of previously published writers on our website).
2. A sense that many African short story competitions were unfairly weighted in favour of Eurocentric writing.
3. Exclusions from competitions for various writers. i.e. What makes writing African?
We therefore decided to open the competition to any African citizen, or person who is part of the African diaspora, as well as to persons residing permanently in an African country, whether they had a publication history or not.
We received sixty-eight stories. Each story was then formatted to a standard and stripped of any identifying details, after which it was sent to two readers. The readers were asked to mark the stories out of ten, following a broad set of guidelines, but also going on gut feel - an important tool in pinpointing great art. An interesting trend emerged. The highest scoring stories were awarded equal scores by both readers or were, at most, a point apart.
The judging panel consisted of three judges, Isabella Morris, Novuyo Rosa-Tshuma and Conseulo Roland, who compiled a short list of six. These six were sent to Petina Gappah who was tasked with selecting the three overall winners. As with the reading process, all judging was blind.
The winning stories are:
1st Place: My Father s Head by Okwiri Oduor (Kenya) 2nd Place: Choke by Jayne Bauling (South Africa) 3rd Place: Chicken by Efemia Chela (Ghana)
This year, we applied for, and received, NPO status. As a Non Profit Organisation, we will be able to apply for funding, though the spirit of collaboration that has driven this project from its inception will always be at the heart of Short Story Day Africa. This project and the Feast, Famine and Potluck anthology would not have been possible without the overwhelming support of the African writing community and those beyond our continent s border who value the ideal set out by the Short Story Day Africa project: that Africa gets to tell its own stories, in its own voices.
I look forward to the anthology becoming a feature on the African publishing calendar in years to come.
Rachel Zadok
Founder and Short Story Day Africa Project Coordinator
- W INNER OF THE 2014 C AINE P RIZE -
My Father s Head
Okwiri Oduor

I had meant to summon my father only long enough to see what his head looked like, but now he was here and I did not know how to send him back.
It all started the Thursday that Father Ignatius came from Immaculate Conception in Kitgum. The old women wore their Sunday frocks, and the old men plucked garlands of bougainvillea from the fence and stuck them in their breast pockets. One old man would not leave the dormitory because he could not find his shikwarusi, and when I coaxed and badgered, he patted his hair and said, My God, do you want the priest from Uganda to think that I look like this every day?
I arranged chairs beneath the avocado tree in the front yard, and the old people sat down and practiced their smiles. A few people who did not live at the home came too, like the woman who hawked candy in the Stagecoach bus to Mathari North, and the man whose one-roomed house was a kindergarten in the daytime and a brothel in the evening, and the woman whose illicit brew had blinded five people in January.
Father Ignatius came riding on the back of a bodaboda, and after everyone had dropped a coin in his hat, he gave the bodaboda man fifty shillings and the bodaboda man said, Praise God, and then rode back the way he had come.
Father Ignatius took off his coat and sat down in the chair that was marked, Father Ignatius Okello, New Chaplain, and the old people gave him the smiles they had been practicing, smiles that melted like ghee, that oozed through the corners of their lips and dribbled onto their laps long after the thing that was being smiled about went rancid in the air.
Father Ignatius said, The Lord be with you, and the people said, And also with you, and then they prayed and they sang and they had a feast; dipping bread slices in tea, and when the drops fell on the cuffs of their woollen sweaters, sucking at them with their steamy, cinnamon tongues.
Father Ignatius maiden sermon was about love: love your neighbour as you love yourself, that kind of self-deprecating thing. The old people had little use for love, and although they gave Father Ignatius an ingratiating smile, what they really wanted to know was what type of place Kitgum was, and if it was true that the Bagisu people were savage cannibals.
What I wanted to know was what type of person Father Ignatius thought he was, instructing others to distribute their love like this or like that, as though one could measure love on weights, pack it inside glass jars and place it on shelves for the neighbours to pick as they pleased. As though one could look at it and say, Now see: I have ten loves in total. Let me save three for my country and give all the rest to my neighbours.
It must have been the way that Father Ignatius filled his mug - until the tea ran over the clay rim and down the stool leg and soaked into his canvas shoe - that got me thinking about my own father. One moment I was listening to tales of Acholi valour, and the next, I was stringing together images of my father, making his limbs move and his lips spew words, so that in the end, he was a marionette and my memories of him were only scenes in a theatrical display.
Even as I showed Father Ignatius to his chambers, cleared the table, put the chairs back inside, took my purse, and dragged myself to Odeon to get a matatu to Uthiru, I thought about the millet-coloured freckle in my father s eye, and the fifty cent coins he always forgot in his coat pockets, and the way each Saturday morning men knocked on our front door and said things like, Johnson, you have to come now; the water pipe has burst and we are filling our glasses with shit, and, Johnson, there is no time to put on clothes even; just come the way you are. The maid gave birth in the night and flushed the baby down the toilet.
E very day after work, I bought an ear of street-roasted maize and chewed it one kernel at a time, and when I reached the house, I wiggled out of the muslin dress and wore dungarees and drank a cup of masala chai. Then I carried my father s toolbox to the bathroom. I chiselled out old broken tiles from the wall, and they fell onto my boots, and the dust rose from them and exploded in the flaring tongues of fire lapping through chinks in the stained glass.
This time, as I did all those things, I thought of the day I sat at my father s feet and he scooped a handful of groundnuts and rubbed them between his palms, chewed them, and then fed the mush to me. I was of a curious age then; old enough to chew with my own teeth, yet young enough to desire that hot, masticated love, love that did not need to be doctrinated or measured in cough syrup caps.
The Thursday Father Ignatius came from Kitgum, I spent the entire night on my stomach on the sitting room floor, drawing my father. In my mind I could see his face, see the lines around his mouth, the tiny blobs of light in his irises, the crease at the part where his ear joined his temple. I could even see the thick line of sweat and oil on his shirt collar, the little brown veins that broke off from the main stream of dirt and ran down on their own.
I could see all these things, yet no matter what I did, his head refused to appear within the borders of the paper. I