"From Africa: New Francophone Stories" edited by Adele King ***

• Short Stories
• Authors from:  Togo, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Guinea, Congo, Rwanda, Djibouti, and Madagascar
• Originally published in 2004
• Vocabulary:
• marcescent:   withering but not falling off, as a part of a plant.
• deliquescent:   to melt away
• Authors praises of the short story form:
• ".....the short story is the literary genre which manages to bind together poetry and prose."
• "...it is autonomous and self-contained."
• "...the story is the form par excellence for the poetic apnea:  holding your breath as long as possible then letting it go, just at the moment you are about to digress, thus suffocating."

• "A Woman and a Half" by Abdourhaman A. Waberi:
• Epigraph:  "Our women are beautiful; we must show them.  Do we veil roses?"....Kateb Yacine
• "For a long time now, men have sealed women's openings: mouth and sex sewn shut.  However, without their mothers, daughters or wives men are dwarf palm trees in a dying oasis; men are clouds of dust while women are the hummus of the earth."....the uncle of the protagonist fleeing the shantytown

• "The Legend of Abla Pokou, Queen of the Baoule People" by Veronique Tadjo
• Queen gives up her child to save her people
• "The belly of the sea is a vast womb."

• "A Fistful of Groundnuts" by Tierno Monenembo:
• Epigraph:  "The child without memory will never have solid crap. - Peuhl proverb
• "Who can really say what can be strong:  Take for example the wrestler and the fart.  One can bring down a man, but the other can put an assembly to flight."
• Survival
• "My Father's Lamp" by Nimrod: 
• "In a certain way, we are mutes condemned to contemplate the twilight, because the one who is moved by lamps and books readily lets his gaze--and sometimes his tears--speak, but he makes no words because, born from books, they come back to him and God, in the thick of this little game, is very jealous."
• "The Spider's Fart" by Kangni Alem:
• Epigraph:  "Pick u a circle, caress it, and it'll become vicious." - Ionexco, "The Bald Sopranos"
• Intense
• "Babyface" by Koffi Kwahule:
• Epigraph:  "If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." --I Corinthians 13:2
• "Everybody says he disappeared, didn't leave a trace; but with each new moon Babyface appears to me on the rump of the dusk's red clouds, smiles at me.  But nobody sees that."
• "The Labors of Ariana" by Caya Makhele:
• Revenge
• "The Ballad of a Shipwreck" by Michele Rakotoson:
• "What is the point of yielding to despair?"
• "Fahvalo" by Jean-Luc Raharimanana:
• "Waiting for being to explode."
• "Our Neighborhood Fool" by Patrice Mganang:
• Faith in what can and cannot happen
• "A Hunting Scene as Observed by a Sentimental Photographer" by Kossi Efoui:
• Heartrending, witness to atrocity
• "Dead Girl Walking" by Benjamin Sehene:
• Nickname for survivors of genocide
• Inability to connect
• "Bessombe:  Between Homeland and Exile" by Nathalie Etoke:
• Exile
• "Offering one's charms to pot-bellied, senile white jerks who are decrepit but loaded with francs, that's just part of daily life in a society with its back to the wall.  What can I say?  One has to survive."
• "At age twenty-five I look to the future with lassitude and wory.  Relegated to the secret dungeons of an evanescent memory, my youthful dreams have become the gaping wounds of a soul bruised by the vicissitudes of life."
• "I had had enough of conjugating the verb 'to suffer':  I have suffered, I am suffering, I will suffer."
• "The Milka Cow" by Bessora:
• allegory

• Review:  While this collection of short stories by contemporary authors is wide ranging in terms of style and also wide ranging  in terms of content, I was generally lukewarm in my response.  The authors hail from multiple Sub Saharan nations in Africa, and the style ranges from lyrical to allegorical to directly sociopolitical.  Certainly key issues are raised such as the immigration experience, the experience of exile, of sexism, of brutality, of cultural clashes within and between nations.  I would say that my favorite story was entitled, "A Woman and a Half", for its plot and it's moral of strength, trust, and wisdom.  It was not an exhilarating read, but not bad at all.