Fofana, Lam, Morrison, Ogunyemi, Scott, Smith and Smyth

Short Stories in January, February and March 2023

Whether read all-in-a-burst or over several weeks, these stories capture a variety of reading moods.

This quarter, I returned to three favourite writers and also explored four new-to-me story writers.

Toni Morrison’s Recitatif (1983) is a short, potent work that pokes at the very idea of categorization: just 39 pages long, it’s more complex than many novels. As Zadie Smith writes: “There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions.” Morrison herself describes the story as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.”  If all that sounds intimidating, nevermind: it’s concise, gripping, and an excellent introduction to Morrison’s work. (I’ve just one novel of hers left to read.)

Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia (2013) was originally published across two consecutive issues of The New Yorker, but I enjoyed it more in this standalone. It doesn’t feel longer than Recitatif, but it’s 69 pages long—long enough for an overarching narrative voice to root and gain authority. At the beginning, however, it’s a detailed scene, with the sounds of badminton played at the Embassy: “Pock, smash. Pock, smash. This summer we watched the Olympics, becoming well attuned to grunting, and to the many other human sounds associated with effort and the triumph of the will.” There are some ordinary but richly detailed scenes that beg for screen adaptation and provoke curious questions. What’s out of view because it’s obscured? What do we choose not to see? It’s readable and provocative.

Naomi sent me a copy of Donna E. Smyth’s Among the Saints (2003), which excited me as Smyth was the founding editor of a women’s studies journal at Acadia University (in Wolfville, Nova Scotia) that I’ve long admired: Atlantis. No surprise that the stories are women-centred. Readers who admire Carol Bruneau, Marina Endicott, and Heather O’Neill will appreciate these, with equal parts characterisation and concept. It contains some quintessential Maritime moments: “Winter fog hangs like a shroud over the harbour, over the dark streets, bone-chilling murk.” But overall the focus is on how we locate ourselves, in regards to one another and our environments: “The story I am trying to write has a bird character, a Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) named Linnaeus. Linnaeus and his gull tribe want an answer to a simple question: Where are the fish?” Thanks, Naomi!

Contents: The Temptation of Leafy; Birdman; Red Hot; Sweet Mary; Death Trumpets; Among the Saints; In the Bleak Mid-Winter; A Fine and Private Place; The Hunger Artists; Women Flying

Similarly thoughtful but with a darker, contemplative air is Barbara Joan Scott’s The Quick (1999), which I read to prepare for reviewing Scott’s new novel The Taste of Hunger (2022) for EVENT (here’s a link to the magazine but the review’s in print, not online). These stories reminded me of Cynthia Flood’s and K.D. Miller’s quiet and determined explorations in short fiction, and of Kathy Page’s and Sharon Butala’s novels. It’s a skinny volume, but I flagged an inordinate number of passages. Some observations: “My grandfather is Henry Fonda, with jutting chin and stoic bearing, my whole family stiff with peasant dignity—the Joads, but with Ukrainian accents.” Some meditations: “I look out on the gathering darkness and I think, that’s as much as you know. For the truly terrible thing is not death at all, but life. It is life that eats away at muscle until there is nothing left but bone beneath loose skin, life that forces spleen and liver to swell with blood cells long after the marrow has given up.” And if any of that appeals to you, I recommend the novel too: The Taste of Hunger truly showcases her capacity to inhabit a range of characters with grace and grit.

Contents: Oranges, Lifeguard, Minor Alternations, The Quick, Surface Scratches, The Gift of Tongues, How to Talk to Plants, A Fragile Thaw

Another outstanding Canadian collection: Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures (2005), linked stories about young residents in a Toronto medical school, which I’ve reread once previously. This time I returned because his new novel On the Ravine (2023) continues some of these stories. (There’s also a link to his 2012 novel The Headmaster’s Wager too.) Lam’s perspective is complex: “The accounts always changed a little depending upon who told them, and my Yeh Yeh’s versions could shift from morning to evening. Rarely did a new version of a story require the old one to be untrue. Instead, it was as if the new telling washed the story in a different colour, filling in gaps and loose ends so as to invert my previous understanding of the plot.” It’s not necessary for readers to track the reflections and refractions—the moments of vulnerability he explores are powerful as standalone stories too (mostly)—but his body of work rewards readers who take care.

Contents: How to Get into Medical School, Part I; Take All of Murphy; How to Get into Medical School, Part II; Code Clock; A Long Migration; Winston; Eli; Afterwards; An Insistent Tide; Night Flight; Contact Tracing; Before Light (Plus a glossary of medical terms)

Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi’s Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions (2022) is also a linked collection. At the heart of the stories is the death of a young girl in the wake of a student strike in Nigeria; she and her three friends are portrayed credibly and, as time passes and settings alter, readers see how childhood events continue to reverberate. Ogunyemi pays careful attention to delineate the girls, and their language and understanding change over time, in response to experiences that challenge and inform them. There’s something in the density of the prose that whispers that this could have been a novel proper (with multiple perspectives still, but key moments in their lives explored in more detail) because the kind of intricacy and precision promised by the subtitle—A Novel in Interlocking Stories—isn’t as prominent as the emotive and scenic elements that make the characters’ experiences so memorable.

Contents: Fodo’s Better Half; Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions; Reflections from the Hood of a Car; Guardian Angel of Elmina; Goody Goody; Czekolada; Last Stop, Jibowu; Start Your Savings Account Today; Area Boy Rescue; messengerRNA

Even though many months have passed since I read Sidik Fofana’s Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (2022), the titles of the stories vividly recall the characters who inhabit this linked collection. It’s set in Harlem, so it’s impossible not to think of Gloria Naylor’s Brewster Place (the subject of two collections and made into a movie) because Naylor, too, makes characters breathe so naturally on the page that you can’t believe you haven’t always known them or seen them around the neighbourhood, at least. There are moments of difficulty and celebration, stitched together with ordinary details that Fofana handles with delicacy and compassion.

“My apartment is such that I can watch my shows while smellin what deliciousness the Africans is cookin across the hall. I can look out the winda and see down the avenue, and then take a warm shower and think about life for the fifteen minutes of heat it allows. My bed is low enough I can roll out of it with no injury and disappear into my own pot of coffee. I got a box fan on the sill aimed right at my favorite chair when I sit down.”

Contents: Rent Manual, Mimi 14D; The Okiedoke, Swan 6B; Ms. Dallas, Verona Dallas 6B; The Young Entrepreneurs of Miss Bristol’s Front Porch, Kandese Bristol-Wallace 3A; Camaraderie, Darius Kite 12H; lite feet, Najee Bailey 24M; Tumble, Quanneisha B. Miles 21J; Federation for the Like-Minded, Mr Murray 2E