BY CHIDELIA EDOCHIE, NONFICTION EDITOR
Sefi Atta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and is a novelist, playwright, and short story writer. She is the winner of PEN International’s 2004/2005 David TK Wong Prize, and in 2006 her debut novel Everything Good Will Come was awarded the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Her short story collection, Lawless, received the 2009 Noma Award For Publishing in Africa. Lawless is published in the US and UK as News From Home. She lives in Mississippi with her husband Gboyega Ransome-Kuti, a medical doctor, and their daughter, Temi. Below is a review of the new collection, and you can click here for 5 Questions with the author.
The eleven short stories of News from Home cross oceans from Nigeria to America to the UK. This triad of strongly rendered locales illuminates the dominant theme of dislocation that permeates the entire collection. In the opening story “The Miracle Worker”, Makinde’s is a mechanic in Lagos whose car lot is overrun by the overzealous when an image of the Virgin Mary appears on the windshield of an old car. He at first attempts to rid his lot of the worshippers who flock there as if on a pilgrimage, but then decides to try and turn a profit, with disastrous results that eventually send him to the place he ridiculed—church. In “Spoils”, a young Muslim girl in northern Nigeria laments the other village girls being whisked away to America by a “wrinkled old white woman with two big balloons in her breasts.” In “Last Trip” we meet a heroin trafficker, a woman using her retarded son as a decoy while she smuggles balloons of the white, lethal powder from Lagos onto a British Airways flight.
And in the title story, “News from home,” a nanny for a rich Nigerian family in America worries about an oil protest taking place in her hometown, and plans her escape back to Nigeria. We also meet a pretty light-skinned African boy hoping to pass as he illegally swims the border into Spain; an overeducated, overly privileged Nigerian girl slogging away at a desk job in London; and a deeply sensitive Nigerian woman dealing with her husband’s infidelity, and the prospect of committing her daughter to an asylum. In short, in the stories in News from Home no one is where they should be. All of the characters are trapped in locals that they would rather rid themselves of, or are on their way to fate worse than they could have imagined.
Atta has a knack for beginnings; take the first line of “Hailstones on Zamfara”: “On the day I die I will rise up, arms outstretched, magnificent as the mother of the Holy Prophet, then my executioners will be forced to admit, ‘We were wrong. We should have revered you more.’” While her stories often begin with a lyrical bang, they tend to peter out into endings that do not exactly surprise, nor do they satisfy a reader looking for the conventional epiphany. If you read Sefi Atta’s new collection, News from Home, be prepared for an intense look into contemporary Nigeria and its citizens, as well as a steady thrum of wrenching emotion that sneaks up on you the deeper into the collection you read. To get to know the author, check out these 5 Questions with Sefi Atta.
News from Home by Sefi Atta
Interlink Books (April 1, 2010)
320 pages, $15.00 Paperback
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Chidelia Edochie is the Nonfiction Editor of Sycamore Review, as well as the journal’s Book Review Coordinator for new releases of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her fiction has won prizes from AWP, as well as from the Wesleyan Writers Conference. She is currently getting an MFA in Fiction at Purdue University, with secondary studies in Nonfiction.
