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  • I’ll Be One of You
  • Jennifer A. Reimer (bio)
Say You’re One of Them
Uwem Akpan
Little, Brown and Company
www.littlebrown.com
368 Pages; Print, $23.99

Until the lion has its own storytellers, the hunter will always be glorified.

—Nigerian saying

The contemporary Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, speaks eloquently of “the danger of the single story.” In particular, she discusses the “patronizing well-meaning pity” non-Africans have about Africa. This “pity” is one part of the “single story” of Africa made available to non-Africans: the story of a catastrophic continent (whose countries are indistinguishable to non-Africans) torn apart by corruption, war, disease, and human rights violations; an underdeveloped continent in need of Western benevolence; or a place of impossible natural beauty where zoo animals roam freely. In Say You’re One of Them (2008), the Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan’s debut collection of short stories, Akpan destroys the “single story” of Africa with a literary precision as clean as the strike of a machete blade and the narrative compassion of a priest (Akpan is an ordained Jesuit priest).

The problem with single stories is not that they are untrue, according to Adichie, but that they are “incomplete.” So it’s not surprising to find elements of the stereotypical African “story” throughout Akpan’s five stories: devastating poverty, AIDS, tribal warfare, ethnic cleansing, rampant corruption, and religious divisions that tear countries and families apart. But Akpan shifts the narrative power away from the realities that frame the stories by empowering children with the act of storytelling. By giving children a voice and a story, Akpan gives them power to fight against the reader’s well-meaning pity. Jubril, the Muslim teenage narrator of “Luxurious Hearses,” tells us: “Like his multireligious, multiethnic country, Jubril’s life story was more complicated than what one tribe or religion could claim.” Instead of feeling pity for Jubril when his plan to disguise himself as a Christian and escape to safety ends in his exposure and subsequent beheading, or for the brother and sister sold into slavery by their uncle in “Fattening for Gabon,” or for the older sister forced into prostitution to escape the poverty of the Nairobi slums in “An Xmas Feast,” we readers are drawn deeply into these richly narrated testimonies not because we can completely identify with these characters—their stories contain too much horror and brutality—but because, once we’ve heard these voices, we cannot forget them. The stories remain.

Although Akpan writes from the point of view of children, his writing, like his characters, is neither naïve nor sentimental. Emotions are rarely directly expressed. Fractured relationships with families, parents, and other children become the lens through which we catch glimpses of the larger structural problems in each of the various African countries where the stories are set. Non-governmental organizations, the government, the military, authority in general, and even churches are all suspect and imbricated in the terror experienced by the narrators. Yet, the careful distance and the exactitude of Akpan’s writing reflect the distance his young narrators feel from these opaque institutions. They are ghosts that haunt their imaginations, stories told to them by others, by the television, by adults with secret agendas. Instead of institutional violations, Akpan shows us how violence and exploitation are routinized as part of daily life and manifested in familial or personal relationships. “No matter how rootless and cheap street life might be, you could still be broken by departures” is the closest Akpan’s narrators come to emotional revelation, and even this confession is filtered through the use of the second person point of view, which reveals the narrator’s inability to own—in the first person—his heartbreak over his sister’s departure to become a prostitute. When parents encourage glue-sniffing to avoid hunger pangs, or when Jubril witnesses his own brother’s stoning for being an outspoken Christian in a Muslim neighborhood, the narrators do not linger in these moments with sentiment. The characters share the same detachment from state violence:

It was not really the sight of corpses burning—or the gore when some...

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