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  • The Temperature of These Times
  • Fred D’Aguiar (bio)

Callaloo has a stellar tradition of taking the temperature of American fiction from time to time to see how the body of the nation is doing as story, as myth, and as a reinvented entity in perpetual mutation, or morphing constantly, or by necessity turning over a new leaf each generation. The nine stories gathered here range from settings in London, England, to the Caribbean and all poles of the United States. The writers perform in a multiplicity of styles and keep surprising this reader with humor that is uproarious and deep feeling that is so caustic it scalds the nerves.

“Elevation Night” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin is hilarious from the first sentence jibe when the narrator is mistaken for one of the waitstaff despite being in costume. The tone is pitch-perfect in its selection of comic detail and in the narrator’s jaded view of what is happening to him with his consent. Though the narrator is irked by the fact that whites around him take him for a waiter, despite his peculiar costume, it isn’t until page three that the reader learns what the costume is—the narrator is dressed as a centurion—and the reminder is that race trumps everything: he is black and a centurion but still most likely to be viewed as a waiter than anything else. The humor is jaded, worldly wise but not cocky and not without vulnerability. (He confesses to his average endowment that disappointed white girlfriends during his college years “who wanted to send me back after unwrapping me and seeing the modest package.”)

Ruffin’s energetic, verb-driven writing style adds extra oomph to the humor. When the narrator realizes his hostess wants him to look more like the part he was meant to play than his centurion get up denotes he takes the opportunity to change into a more fitting costume from a selection in the upstairs museum of the lavish house. His return to the party causes a splash when an executive responds to the sight of the newly attired narrator by dropping his glass. “Liquor spread, a pale imitation of lifeblood.” His tribal dance reaches a comic crescendo when his loincloth works loose and he is the last to notice the fact. Laugh-out-loud funny. His nudity, the story’s denouement, is the price of his climb to success and it is shaming and undignified and lonely. That cold that he feels taking over his body turns out to be the cost for selling his soul.

“Genesis” by Tope Folarin tackles the ideas of exile in pursuit of the much-vaunted American dream from the viewpoint of a child. Undertones of dream and longing create an atmosphere of a fable. The figure of the mentally sick mother who exerts total control on the child narrator’s life and that of his brother and their father creates a claustrophobic and tense world for the reader. Folarin’s prose is fine-tuned and beautifully modulated and replete with detail. Coming to America from Nigeria is never easy, but making the deliberate choice to live an isolated life in Utah, away from the usual centers of immigrant life such as New York and Houston, leaves the children vulnerable to the machinations of [End Page 1060] their mother’s illness and to the goodwill of locals. A by-product of the isolation is that it opens this chance for a dream life for the narrator and this is the crux of the story’s title, that promise of a better beginning, one that improves on the disappointment of how the new start offered by migration turns out to be something more otherworldly taken up as a retreat from the risk and unpredictability of the real world. The “silence is love” riff is a heartbreaker as the child mounts his self-defense against adult rejection and endures the mother’s rage; with a blanket the child and his brother secure her and reattach themselves to her but with the switched parental roles of the children playing the parts of nurturer and protector.

The narrative sticks to childhood with flashes forward...

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