I can't remember how I stumbled upon this, but I have been searching for African-authored literature lately. I do remember listening to a really interesting interview with Parkes, but now I can't find that particular interview.
One of the most interesting things about writing is it is up to the individual writer to decide how their career can go for them. Ultimately, it is up to each writer to do their thing.
Which is rather good advice for any writer, and something I'm taking to heart in my present situation.
I absolutely loved this book. It was brilliant. It begins as a sort of whodunnit, deeply steeped in Ghanaian culture. Reminded me a lot of Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri crime series. Only - without spoiling it - it's not at all what you expect.
I must admit, I learned a lot about music, as Parkes likes to throw tracks in there: Hugh Masekela's Zulu Wedding, Stevie Wonder Too High, Jewel Ackah, Egya Koo Nimo's Akora Dua Kube (which I couldn't find, butEfie ne Fie).
I love a good book you can groove to.
Also, lots of mention of food, including fufu, which is a dish known throughout Africa, and always good with meat sauce. Other dishes included:palaver sauce, apemand kenkey. I wish we cooked in East Africa as well as they do in West. Mouthwatering memories of Sierra Leone: peanut butter chicken, jollof rice and palm wine.
I also learned that, apparently, if you add bonsamdua (distemonanthus benthamianus) extract to palm wine, it makes it stronger. I assume that wasn't entirely fiction.
I've had more trouble looking up animals of the forest, though. If anyone can let me know what aburuburu, ndanko, otwe and duiker are in a comment, I'd be grateful.
This was such a fun story. All about a UK-educated forensic investigator returning home to Ghana, encountering frustration at the nepotism and corruption of furthering his career, ending up being forced to work on a crime out in a rural village. Completely pulled me in. Parkes is also a renowned poet, and it really came across. I'm starting to think that poets can be seriously impressive when they turn their hand to prose. There's a certain quality there.
Love this little simile:
The obsidian from the water pot was lying under the kete like the lost eye of a bat.
As always, I honed in on the parts about stories and storytelling, of which there's quite a bit:
That is the story. Like all stories, it is a story about forgetting, for if we didn't forget there would be no mistakes and there would be no stories.
On this earth, we have to choose the story we tell, because it affects us - it affects how we live.
Kwaku Ananse is employed by one of the storytellers, and I almost dropped the book when the hunter telling that story came out with this:
...in the tradition of our elders, maybe I will put myself in the story but it is not me, you hear?
The reason it hit me so, is because people say the same here in Rwanda. You tell stories after dark, because they bring bad luck in the daylight, and you're always careful to make it clear that it is the characters in the story, not you, the storyteller, lest you become trapped within the story you are telling. There is an example here in Maguru and Insibika. It was fascinating to see that this is a pan-cultural thing across Africa, and I wonder whether we find it in other cultures around the world?
Talking of pan-cultural, one of the characters, a lady, good-naturedly says "Oh, get away." That took me right back to my nana in Carlisle - such a northern phrase in the UK. Interesting to hear it in Ghana. I wonder whether it's a traditional turn of phrase, or whether it arrived with the colonists?
The story was strewn with proverbs and canny observations. I particularly enjoyed these ones:
When fear catches you, it returns you to screaming, your first language.
You do not light a fire under a fruit baring tree.
Book law and gun power can never teach you how to deal with human beings.
Man has his plans and the ancestors have their plans, and sometimes they are not the same.
Even ghosts, when you get close enough, are our kin.
I think my favourite was:
My mother used to tell me that it was good to finish your business before the sun sets, because then the sunset was not the end of the day, but the beginning of the night.
This is a brilliant book. I was really sad to hear him say in the interview I listened to (but can't find!) that it was a stand-alone and he wasn't planning to write any more. I hope that changes.
It's not entirely easy being a writer in Africa. I'm currently sitting here in the dark, and yesterday I had no electricity for so long my laptop battery ran out and all the ice-cream in the fridge melted. I can live without ice-cream, but it's hard to write a novel without a computer.
Still, onward.
How has my life changed now that I've decided to admit that I am a writer rather than a development consultant?
Well, main changes include:
Turning off my phone and telling my friends not to expect me to answer if they call in the mornings. I've always been a night owl, so I accept that I get up late, drink coffee, and start work when most people have been at work for several hours. My phone, and social media, goes on once I hit my writing target, not before.
I'm doing my own housework. You may scoff at this, but when you live without washing machines, hoovers and other household appliances, a full-time worker enlists help to get the chores done. As I now don't have a full-time job, and writing is an exceedingly sedentary profession, I need to do the housework to get some exercise. And stamping on laundry in a large bowl of suds does take a lot of energy.
I'm panic-meeting with people I think might have writing-related work. I've set up an editing service (which I'll start advertising this week), I'm in talks about running a creative writing night class at a local college, and generally arranging to meet publishers and creatives to see what's going on in an industry I haven't been a part of before. One positive sign is that Rwanda's Immigration department lists Author on their Occupations in Demand List (ODL) - so I'm trying to find out what sort of authors, and in demand by whom, in the hopes there might be some work out there.
Most of all - I've been writing.
I polished off 3k today to push myself over the 50,000 mark on Secret Order, my first attempt at a trilogy. Well, the first book of my first attempt at a trilogy.
It's been tough going. I think I may have introduced too many characters (but then I think about R. R. Martin and realise I can always kill most of them off). I'm still not entirely sure where it's all going, even at this stage, and I'm sort of hoping it'll magically all come together soon-ish. But, one step at a time - I am writing, and that's the important thing.
The Children of Lir isn't even in edit with its publisher yet, so as an author of fiction, you always have to be looking a year ahead. What I write now is unlikely to bear fruit for at least twelve months. But if I don't sow any seeds, I'll reap no harvest.
Thanks to my dad, I've been interested in computers from a young age. Before the Internet took off, there was FidoNet, and before MSN and Facebook burst onto the scene, geeks like me used to chat via IRC (Internet Relay Chat). If you don't know, that's where Twitter nicked its #hastags and @handles from.
I hadn't logged on for a few years. The other week I decided to see whether it still exists.
It does.
Though quieter than ever.
Whilst there, I did a /list command on Undernet, looking for active channels. The most popular channel (chat room) by far was #bookz. It regularly has over 350 accounts (mostly human, some bots) on there. Unlike other #chatrooms, this one isn't for chatting - you get booted off if you try to be sociable. It's specifically designed for file sharing books. If you'd like to know the specific ins and outs of how it works, you can read about it on Encyclopedia Dramatica.
A little while ago I wrote a post on here about copyright, and whether we could get rid of it. For a long time I've had my suspicions that our current copyright laws are detached from modern living, but I also suspect that file sharing books might have different consequences to file sharing music and films.
So, in pursuit of enlightenment, I decided to look deeper. I talked to publishing guilds, talked to authors, talked to one reluctant publisher, and three members of the #bookz file sharing group.
I'm aware that's a lot of information for a little blog post, so I'll try to condense things down a bit. I really didn't have any agenda when I set out. I just wanted to know more about the file sharing of books, how it is perceived, and what motivates it.
The Industry
Ever since watching Rob Reid's TED talk on The $8 Billion iPod, I have been extremely sceptical about the true cost of file sharing to the arts industry.
The Society of Authors sent me this article, which was published in their Summer 2011 edition of The Author:
To give an idea of how far reaching the piracy can be, the now infamous bit torrent tracker TextBook Torrents, a site allowing users to exchange scanned copies of textbooks amongst each other, had at its height over 20,000 people exchanging files at any given time. A concerted effort by publishers and rights holders resulted in the site being closed at the end of last year. It is almost impossible to gauge accurately the true scale of the threat piracy presents to publishers and authors, but even conservative figures show it to be a growing problem.
The Publishers Association has estimated that the size of the criminal market based on pirated and counterfeit books in the UK is worth approximately £30m a year, and the Association of American Publishers recently reported that US publishers lost in the region of $600m last year from copyright piracy. The publishing industry is by no means alone in this: the British music industry posted figures in 2006 estimating the loss of sales due to piracy as costing in the region of £165m. The losses attributable to copyright theft across an economy as a whole can become gargantuan: a US Trade Representative report in 2005 estimated that losses to US copyright-based businesses due to piracy were between $17 and $23 bn.
When I tried to obtain more up-to-date figures specifically relating to the UK economy, I received this response from the Digital Infringement Manager at The Publisher's Association:
There are no publically available statistics on the potential costs of piracy to the UK market, this is for a variety of reasons but one of the biggest challenges is working out whether a download represents a (whole or partial) lost sale.
At least that sounds like the beginning of a rational conversation. It's also a consideration echoed by Verso, one of the file sharers I spoke with (more on that shortly):
I doubt the argument, as we've been hearing
at least since the RIAA learned about Napster, that suggests that each pirated
copy represents a lost sale, which copyright-reform activists such as Cory
Doctorow have been challenging for years.
In the UK there is a fairly comprehensive online copyright infringement tracker called 5th Wave, where you can get statistical breakdowns on copyright infringement across all media categories. Of online media consumption March-May 2015 (both legal and illegal), books made up around 12% of total consumption, along with computer software and video games. Leading the downloads were music (35%), TV programmes (34%) and films (22%). The report states that consumption has increased since the last report, due mostly to a boom in online film consumption. In a three-month period, ebook downloads seem to have accounted for only 1% of illegal downloads.
The reverse trend seems true on Undernet, where the following number of users were recorded on media download channels during one /list in January 2016:
Havoscope also has some useful US and world statistics on book piracy, mostly focused on physical copies.
The Authors
I ran a few searches on #bookz to see whether any of my friends' titles were available for free download. Almost all of them were, with between 3-100+ separate files available for each.
I decided to ask friends what they felt about this. Here are the responses from two authors. I've disguised their identities. John is a crime writer and Ann is predominantly romance.
John
(93 entries available for download)
I liken the idea of book piracy to stealing apples from a market stall. If one person does it, one might argue, where's the harm? There are plenty more apples on the stall. But if that person goes off and tells all their friends that apples are easy to steal from the stall, pretty soon the trader has no apples left and has worked hard for no return.
In short, piracy is theft, pure and simple. I don't hold with the idea of free market access because it's my work that's being stolen. Yes, there may be cases where open access, especially with films, deliberate or not, has worked well. But that was largely because a fan base gave sufficient push to a product that it spread far and wide and included a great many paying people. I'm pretty sure I'm not in that league!
Ann
(28 entries available for download)
Piracy? Meh, it's an ongoing problem that I can't see any real solution to. Just a couple of things occur to me though. One is - a lot of these sites that advertise ebooks for free are actually phishing sites. You go on and try to download a book and they make you put in a credit card number 'just to check you are in the right geographical locality to download this version'. Next thing you know they've cloned your credit card and run off with all your money - and you still don't have a book to show for it. So I'm not sure there's that many actual pirate sites about that really do give away (or even sell) pirated copies.
Secondly - generally the people who download books from these sites are people who wouldn't buy my books anyway. They download the content, because it's free. They never read the books, they were never going to read the books. It's like people who download books that go free on Amazon, most of them never even read it.
Thirdly - if they *do* download my books, read and enjoy them....well, at least they've read and enjoyed! They may, and it's only a small chance, but they just might, go looking for other things that I've written that might not be on the site and end up legitimately buying those.
Fourthly - I have heard that geographical restrictions in some places prevent readers from buying books from legit sites. I'm talking about countries that have restrictions on books with 'unapproved content', LGBT books, anything considered subversive; some countries ban these from sale. The only places that these readers can get such books, are pirate sites. So they can have a positive side!
In short, I am far easier to find on Amazon than on a pirate site! Most of the sites that turn up my book if you Google, if they aren't proper retailers, are phishing sites. So I doubt I'm losing millions of sales to these places. And if I am, what could I do about it?
Better that there's a chance the book is getting read by someone....
A friend in the publishing industry was a little reluctant to speak her mind publicly because she didn't hold with the industry view that piracy is always theft, but felt that saying so went against the official stance of publishers and could damage smaller press with less income. Although she doesn't pirate books herself, she felt there was a difference between readers getting their hands on books they can't afford to buy, versus people reselling books they've obtained for free:
There's a fine line between an acceptable amount of piracy and the end of small press publishing.
We know a lot of book pirates. They're all people who can't afford to buy as many books as they want to read.
Books are not "essential" but they're important. A person who loves reading shouldn't have to live without. Someone who has no money is not stealing a copy of a book in the same way that a person who has no money is not stealing bread from the bin.
She echoed Ann's sentiment that people pirating books wouldn't have bought a copy in the first place, so probably don't represent lost sales.
It's also interesting to consider, just as a point of perspective, that around 77 million books get pulped each year because they haven't been sold.
The Pirates
We hear a lot about piracy from the publishing industry and from authors, but I wanted to go a step further and talk to some of the file sharers. I wanted to see whether the views expressed above held true from the perspective of people sharing books online. I headed over to #bookz and asked around.
Three people came forward to talk to me. I have disguised their handles (online names) to protect anonymity:
Booker_: Poland, 24, college student, first time using #bookz
FlipChart: USA, 20, college student, infrequent user for about a year
Verso: USA, mid-30s, odd jobs, monthly user for about four years
The big question I was curious to know, was whether file sharers felt that what they were doing was theft or not:
Booker_: Yes, I do belive that the argument 'downloading is theft' is right to some extent. Morally, you really couldn't justify getting someones work for free. For me it is strictly finacial choice, and really books have value much higher than material goods. In a sense, books are like healthcare, or insurance, or taxes - they are source of intellectual wealth, that not everyone can afford, but everyone absolutely needs it.
FlipChart: Oh definetly not. I've been downloading since I was 14. It's become a big part of my life and who I am and I've always challenged it as beeing thievery. I don't agree with it. I believe it is a right
Verso: Not for a meaningful definition of theft. It's copying, not deprivation... There's also the issue of privatizing scientific or scholarly knowledge (since I mainly dl and ul nonfic), especially when those studies were publicly funded. I admit the ethics of pirating works of living authors, especially novelists, is less black-and-white, but I would like that to be clarified by public discussion and participation.
If I were pressed I would make a utilitarian argument in support of piracy, that it serves the interests of more than enforcing copyright, that we need an art-inspired and knowledge-informed public more than we need moneymakers, especially when those moneymakers aren't the creators but middlemen. And to spite those companies with walled-garden business models, who make most of their profits from keeping art and knowledge artificially scarce, I might even make a capitalist argument (though I'm generally critical of capitalism), and say that piracy is the market telling them to correct their pricing.
When I pressed further by asking 'how do authors make money if no one purchases their books,' Flipchart said:
FlipChart: I guess it is much harder to say for authors but I will apply the same reasoning from music. [File sharing] is a way of advertising really. If more people read it or have access to one's work then... it reaches more people no matter how it was obtained... it's much harder to say for books than music. For music it really doesn't matter because most revenue comes from touring. Not to mention the contract between artist and recording company. Also, exposure. I belive there really is no winner or looser when it comes to downloading music for free... For books: the exposure helps because it can lead to a film or television adaptation
Whether you agree with that assertion about the music industry or not, it does raise the theme of promotion - reaching audiences you wouldn't usually reach. But the logical hiccup there is: what does it matter the size of your audience, if none of your audience are paying? It's hardly an argument for file sharing from the perspective of an author.
I'd suggest that the big difference is that download rates for films and TV are logged, they make up the majority of the download market, both legal and illegal. Whereas it's hard enough to keep track of legitimate book sales (Laine Cunningham's book gives a brief intro to how that doesn't work). The piracy rate of books is so small, no one's really watching - so you're never going to get the big buzz you do around a TV series.
Undeniably, though, piracy has its uses, and is largely credited for the meteoric rise to fame of Game of Thrones. It's worth watching this video through to the information on merchandise figures:
This is another major part of the puzzle I wanted to ask about.
It has long been evident that people who occasionally pirate media, also spend the most money on legitimate media (up to 300% more in some studies). Even our 5th Wave report backs that up:
For four of the six categories, those who consumed a mix of legal and illegal content claimed to spend more on that particular content type over the three-month period than those who consumed either 100% legally or 100% illegally. The ebook infringer base was too low to analyse.
This sort of stumped me, because, if pirates are spending more money on media than the average consumer, the argument of 'poor book pirates' can't hold true.
So I asked my friends on #bookz what their main motivation was for downloading:
Booker_: I download books because I want to learn something. I used to read novels when I was in my teens, now I'm 24 and I moved towards science books and generally more informative books: biography, autobiography, history, biology, physics, management, leadership. I use #bookz, I use torrents, and any internet sources really that I can get my hands on books... I am a student with only small scholarship, so tight budget is the main reason why I prefer to download over buying, however I do buy at least a book or two a month... Since I am a Pole, and because english books are alot of hassle and money to get, I prefer to download them for free at the moment.
FlipChart: I would rather not spend the money for physical books. I'm a College student so downloading books is way cheaper. I even bought a tablet just to read my books on. But if a book interests me I would definitely purchase it... College students don't see [downloading] as a right (atleast not all of them). It's more about not being able to or not wanting to pay for expensive texts... [T]here aren't multiple copies [in a library] and not every book will be available. Downloading is easier and I get to keep it incase I need to refer (probably not likely). There couldn't be enough copies to go around for every student who would need that book in a semester
Verso: I use #bookz mainly for the convenience. For a long time I didn't have access to a public library, and since my interests tend to be obscure I often need an interlibrary loan anyway, plus I fail to see the wisdom in privatizing knowledge (much of it publicly funded: the "Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings" series is several thousand dollars for the ebooks alone) or having to pay upwards of $40 for a book (or even merely 48-hour access to a journal article) just to find a few facts.
All three respondents focused strongly on non-fiction works, none of them regularly read or downloaded works of fiction. When I asked about their purchasing habits, they all had personal libraries of physical books at home, ranging between 60-70 to 'a couple of hundred'. And Booker_ said that he didn't illegally download music, but used Spotify.
So it does seem true, at least within this small sample, that book pirates also spend a substantial amount on legitimate copies. I was really touched by their sentiments on books:
Booker_: In a sense, books are like healthcare, or insurance, or taxes - they are source of intellectual wealth, that not everyone can afford, but everyone absolutely needs it.
FlipChart: I still remember my first book... Reading is Fundemental... that's what we were told at a young age. It was almost a slogan at the school. But I beive it is too because reading forms a basis for knowledge. If you know nothing, but know how to read, there is a way for you to know there is a path to self-education. You can be very poor and not have access to education in a classroom. But if you have a book, even if it is not of an academic subject, you have an opportunity
Conclusion
I set out to see how I felt about book piracy online.
I'm both a computer-loving geek and a published author, freedom of media consumption and piracy both affect me in different ways.
What I find interesting is that there seems to be more in common between pirates and the publishing industry than I first thought - in that both sides are passionate about books, and about books being distributed to the widest audience.
The downloaders and file sharers on #bookz aren't some evil, clandestine group hell-bent on depriving authors of an income. They're often college students, financially restrained, rampant book lovers. And I can really sympathise there, having been a student myself and seen academic works retailing at £90 to over £200 a piece, plus the interminable delay whilst waiting on inter-library loans.
But here's where I hit a snag. In my original post on copyright, I included a TED talk by Johanna Blakley on Lessons from Fashion's Free Culture, in which we learnt that fashion doesn't have copyright protection, and that industries without copyright protection are both creatively and financially more productive.
I want to believe in that, and I wonder what the implications might be for a publishing industry without copyright. But I think there's a flaw to the idea, which particularly applies to fiction.
If anyone can do anything they like with an idea, then it will always be the people with the money - at the top - who have the power to promote that idea over the heads of those at the bottom. For example, Jane Doe might come up with a really trendy new design, but it's Gucci with the money to put it on the catwalk, attracting the type of exposure that guarantees sales.
Same with books. There are countless fabulous novels published each year, but only a small handful with the financial backing of Random House behind them, getting those full page glossy spreads and bus stop posters.
When we talk about free file sharing promoting reading - yes. In a Game of Thrones way, it's undeniably good for the industry in terms of physical sales and follow-up merchandise. But the industry isn't everybody. It's very distinctly divided into those with money, and those without. Those with money aren't going to miss a few books being downloaded on the sly. Those without money really are. And the idea that a downloaded copy doesn't represent a true sale, sort of adds injury to small authors when they know that the person who downloaded their book for free is statistically very likely to spend their money on somebody else's book or merchandise.
FlipChart suggested that the exposure from file sharing books might help to swing a television series or film, but as I mentioned above - who's recording illicit book title downloads? They don't count towards sales records, and it's sales records the producers are looking at whilst calculating how many viewers they might attract.
So, even though a pirated book might not represent the loss of a legitimate sale, a legitimate sale counts more towards supporting a living author's career. At the same time, especially with non-fiction, it would be interesting to know what the worth of those pirated works translates to in terms of the economy: more knowledgeable and informed graduates and entrepreneurs in the workplace. If a pirated title has a loss value, a read title must also carry a positive value?
It's hard to say where the balance lies. It doesn't seem fair to punish file sharers who love books but can't afford every title they want to read, whilst statistically spending more of what they do earn on purchasing books and media. Yet it doesn't seem fair that struggling indie authors should ever lose the cost of a book they worked so hard to produce.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.
I'll leave off with perhaps the most balanced copyright notice I've ever seen - click to enlarge.
I picked this up after a discussion with friends about African Sci-fi. I was curious to know whether there was any. I'm considering setting up courses in creative writing this year in Rwanda, and can't help feeling that it'd be easier to get people interested in strong, well-written, contemporary African writers than the type of good-but-usually-deceased 'classics' we covet in The West (tm). Austen, Shakespeare, the Brontës - all good, but all very dead.
Plus, I wanted to broaden my own reading. I very rarely read Sci-fi, and I wondered how it would look from an African perspective. Generalising, most Sci-fi is quite futuristic, focuses on gadgets and science, and often outer space. Many countries in Africa are not on the cutting-edge of technology. It often exists in the peripheries of daily life rather than at the forefront. Out of sheer curiosity, I wanted to know which themes would come up in Sci-fi written by a Nigerian-American author.
That's why we read, right? To see the world from a different perspective.
Who Fears Death had me from the outset, as it focuses strongly on genocide. Living in Rwanda, that's your starter for ten. I know genocide to be a very factual thing in literature, there is a lot of non-fiction about it. The idea that someone might fictionalise genocide and explore it from a fantasy angle piqued my curiosity.
I really enjoyed Okorafor's style. She's gritty. A female-centred story not afraid to incorporate really strong issues: genocide, female genital mutilation, rape, misogyny, child soldiers, slavery - it was an intense ride, full of masquerade spirits and fire-spitting Kponyungo.
I remember giving my clothes to Mwita and then changing and shifting into things, growing claws and tiger's teeth. I remember weaving between the physical world and the wilderness as if they were land and water. I knocked men off women, their penises still erect and slick with blood and wetness. I fought men with knives and guns. There were many Nuru soldiers and few Okeke ones, I fought both, helping whoever was unarmed. I took bullets into myself, expelled them, and moved on. I closed up my own stab and bite wounds. I smelled blood, sweat, semen, saliva, tears, urine, feces, sand, and smoke with the nostrils of various beasts.
*
We cried and sobbed and wept and bled tears. But when we were finished, all we could do was continue living.
And moments of true beauty:
They're ancient words. They don't exist among any other group of people. There is no direct translation in Nuru, English, Sipo, or Vah. This word only has meaning when spoken by a man to the one he loves. A woman can't use the word unless she is barren. It is not juju. Not in the way that I know it. But the word has strength. It's wholly binding if it is true and the emotion reciprocated. This is not like the word "love". A man can tell a woman that he loves her every day. Ifunanya is spoken only once in a man's life. Ifu means to "look into", "n" means "the" and anya means "eyes". The eyes are the windows to the soul.
The schism in the story derives from two races:
The Okeke people have skin the colour of night because they were created before the day. They were the first. Later, after much had happened, the Nuru arrived. They came from the stars and that's why their skin is the colour of the sun.
There's a strong nod to colonialism both in the sense of skin colour causing divides, and also The Great Book, which people take as gospel, and which preaches one race is superior to another.
Before the Nuru arrived, the Okeke are said to have been technologically advanced people, more similar to the city of Atlantis than the Kingdom of Dahomey. The Nuru not only enslaved the Okeke, but destroyed their computers.
The world is intertwined with juju (magic) and powerful sorcery, as well as the Red People who live inside a sandstorm.
I really enjoyed the use of language in this book. I'm not someone who needs to understand every word I read (though I look up most of them). I enjoy the mystery of mixing English with other languages.
There were a few other quotes I wanted to mention. This one, because it's the story of a travelling storyteller. Although fiction, it strongly resonates with the stories of people I know. I wonder very much how this book would be received in Rwanda, so I'll leave my copy at the library in town:
"They killed my papa and brothers with machetes. I managed to hide in a closet for three days," she said, her voice dropping. "As I hid, in that room, Nuru men raped my mother repeatedly. They wanted to make an Ewu child... As it happened, my mother's mind cracked and the stories she carried spilled out. As I coward in the closet, I listened to her tell all the tales that had comforted me as a child. Tales that shook to the rhythm of the men repeatedly entering her. When they finished, they took my mother. I never saw her again. I don't remember gathering my things and running, but I did. Eventually, I met others. They took me with them. That was many years ago. I have no children. My storyteller lineage will die with me."
In Who Fears Death the children of rape are called Ewu, and they have skin the colour of sand, so everybody can see who they are. It is said that because they are born of rage, they carry rage inside them. The lead character Onyesonwu (who fears death), is an Ewu child. She sets off across the desert with her friends to take revenge on her biological father.
I also like this section, which reminded me of a mushroom trip - that complete sense of visual and sensory exactness:
I'd be washed with a terrible hyperawareness. I'd be able to hear a fly breathe or see a grain of sand tumble to the ground like a boulder. I'd suddenly have hawklike strength, vision or I could nearly smell everyone's mortality. Mortality smelled muddy and wet and I reeked of it.
There are some recognisable parts borrowed and changed from true life. Close to the beginning, Ogun is referred to as the goddess of metal (the god of metal in Yoruba religion), and the city in which the story comes to its climax:
Durfa was diseased and I had caused its disease to rise up like a cobra.
May be directly related to Darfur, as this story is set in post-apocalyptic Sudan.
I do love a good pop-up book. Whilst back visiting mum, I discovered a whole stack of them from my childhood. None of them really had much inside with regard to publishers and dates, but here's some of my favourite pages. I think this one, Wie Die Tiere Marchen Spielten was by Bayreuth, Gondrom, 1983.
Super excited. My publisher, Ghostwoods Books, have just launched their super sparkly new website.
To celebrate, they've been interviewing their authors.
You can listen to me talking about myself, and my forthcoming novel. Sorry for the umms and aahs folks, I am working on it. I still get that rabbit-in-the-headlights sensation during live interviews.
I'm also going to add links to the other interviews as they come up - I think there's eleven in all - so bookmark this post and check back, or follow Ghostwoods on Twitter for the latest.
