Reader's Place: February 1, 2023
In honor of Black History Month, we’ll look at fiction and nonfiction from authors of the African diaspora.
Kibogo, by Scholastique Mukasonga; translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti. 2022. (Catalog)
A Rwandan storyteller recounts the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge. Kibogo's tale is at once an origin myth, a celestial marvel, and a source of hope. And for the white priests who spritz holy water on shriveled trees, it's considered forbidden, satanic, a witch doctor's hoax. Everyone energetically debates Kibogo's twisted story, but deep down secretly wonders: Can Kibogo really summon the rain?
Afterlives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2022. (Catalog)
When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. As young people live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, ready to snatch them up and once again carry them away.
Perish: A novel, by LaToya Watkins, 2022. (Catalog)
Told through alternating chapters, and set in a vividly drawn, tight-knit rural, Black Texan community, PERISH explores the effects of inherited trauma and intra-generational violence and pain as the family's reunion unearths long-kept secrets and forces each member to ask themselves important questions about who is deserving of forgiveness and who bears the cross of blame.
Dele weds destiny: A novel, by Tomi Obaro, 2022. (Catalog)
Funmi, Enitan, and Zainab first meet at university in Nigeria and become friends for life despite their differences. Funmi is beautiful, brash, and determined; Enitan is homely and eager, seeking escape from her single mother's smothering and needy love; Zainab is elegant and reserved, raised by her father's first two wives after her mother's death in childbirth. Their friendship is complicated but enduring, and over the course of the novel, the reader learns about their loves and losses. The complexities of the women’s friendship—and the private wisdom each has earned—come to bear on a riveting, heartrending moment of decision.
Stakes is high: Life after the American dream, by Mychal Denzel Smith, 2020. (Catalog)
In Stakes Is High, Smith exposes the contradictions at the heart of American life - between patriotism and justice, between freedom and inequality, incarceration, police violence. In a series of incisive essays, Smith holds us to account individually and as a nation. He examines his own shortcomings, grapples with the anxiety of feeling stuck, and looks in new directions for the tools to build a just America.
Big girl: A novel, by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, 2022. (Catalog)
For Malaya, the pressures of her predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are relentless, as are the expectations passed down from her painfully proper mother and sharp-tongued grandmother. As she comes of age in the 1990s, she finds solace in the music of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, but her weight continues to climb-until a family tragedy forces her to face the source of her hunger, ultimately shattering her inherited stigmas surrounding women's bodies, and embracing her own desire.
Compiled by Ina Rimpau