Tomi Adeaga & Sarah Udoh-Grossfurthner (eds), Payback & Other Stories: An Anthology of African & African Diaspora Short Stories

Summary

This collection travels the world and covers a wide spectrum, from a mother who ends up on death row, to a mother whose breast refuses her newborn milk, until the death takes the child from her breasts. It is a remarkable collection of short fiction by a contemporary generation of African writers living across the world. It has a fascinating polyvocality that far more than anything else demonstrates the varieties of new, compelling experiences that define the new utterance of African literature in new and interesting ways too.

Raphael D’Abdon's story, ‘An Easy Sunday Morning’, is truly short and ruminating. A woman sits one lazy Sunday morning – never ‘been church people’ – in her home; the ‘gentle Merlot and sweet reefer … smoothly topping my weary body’, when she hears squabbles outside her window. It is her son who had gone off to play basketball returning, and is being beaten by two white cops who hold him down in spite of his protestations of innocence. In the haze, the narrator comes out, and without question shoots the two cops. At the end of this story, we learn that she is the mother, and though her son is free, she is in jail, awaiting execution for killing the policemen who were brutalizing her son. We have a sense that she has no regrets, and that is the unsettling fact of the story – a willing, almost fatalistic acceptance of her action as a form of maternal duty, a necessary martyrdom to save the new generation of black men represented by her son. The story more than makes a hint at the situation of the killings of African-American men, and it is interesting that Rasheed, the young man in this story bridges that world, because the writer here plays with transnational identity, both in the way he names the man, and in the veil around the mother. We do not know whether she is an immigrant African mother or an African-American mother. We are not permitted to know. All we know is that she is flawed in other human ways, but she is oddly redeemed by her willingness for self-sacrifice. It is just the lot or burden of the black mother unwilling finally to watch her son be killed for being ‘black’. It is the unsaid things in this compact and powerful story that makes it intriguing and remorseless.