WITMonth Day 29 | Dark Heart of the Night by Léonora Miano | Review

There's a lot of meta to unpack before I can write about Léonora Miano's Dark Heart of the Night, translated from French by Tamsin Black. Miano, after all, is credited with disliking the University of Nebraska Press edition of Dark Heart of the Night even on her own Wikipedia page, having publicly critiqued the book's foreword (which I assume has been removed from subsequent print runs, since my edition has none) and much of the book's paratext (cover and title). A little digging reveals that Miano had serious concerns about how the University of Nebraska Press ultimately framed the book, from the foreword that was "full of lies" to changing the book's original title to resemble Heart of Darkness (a comparison that is also mirrored in the back cover description). I thus came into Dark Heart of the Night knowing that Miano had critiques, but not quite remembering what they were, instead reading into it more after reading the book. And I have to say - her critiques are valid from all sorts of perspectives and also point to a pivotal reading of the novella itself.

I'll start with my conclusion: Dark Heart of the Night is a bit of a brutal, unpleasant read, but one that is uncompromising and fascinating. It's a book that batters its reader again and again from all sorts of perspectives and doesn't seem particularly concerned with expectations of how the story is supposed to advance or fall into place. Its pacing is steady, its plot scattered without a single fixed peak, and its emotional impact a sort of pulsing, constant effect. Miano packs an extensive critique of different forms of violence and community life in the short novel, with a sense that there is much more that she could say on either topic (as well as many others). Dark Heart of the Night does a lot, almost all of it efficiently and effectively, and the end result makes for a book that is hard to set aside but also... not entirely enjoyable.

One of my impressions while reading Dark Heart of the Night was the Miano sought to create a sort of generic form of violence in the face of war and chaos. Miano's descriptions of village life as a contrast to city life all felt a little purposely blurred, with fictional names designed to place her story across a wide range of regions. Nationalism does not feature in regards to this specific country, exactly, rather the story's core violence stems from a place of a flawed and despotic perception of African identity. Perhaps I should have, but I did not assign too much importance to this on a deeper level; can Miano not critique violence in the same way that any other novelist might write of in the world? 

The brutality of violence that Miano introduces feels like a contrast to the individual identity subplot that centers now-village-outsider Ayané who has returned to her home village following her mother's death, yet the two narratives intertwine in defining identity, community, and belonging. Dark Heart of the Night is not just its most violent moments, but also their aftermath, their effects, and the way these fit into larger political balances. It seems important to remember that the novel continues past what can be viewed as its darkest moments, with that unrelenting continued bluntness. 

It's hard to write about Dark Heart of the Night without getting into details, and I think that any details take away from the book's power. It is a powerful novel, in many of its different threads. It's true that they occasionally muddle and the writing style sometimes feel out of place for the different subplots, but the book on the whole is depressingly effective. 

It's also - to loop back to my introduction - a lot more nuanced and complex than its paratext would suggest. To begin with, the back cover description centers Ayané in a way that frankly seems to emphasize one of the novel's themes over others. While Ayané is very much the novel's main character, she is often counterbalanced within the story and her experience contrasted. These contrasts feel important in how Miano builds a larger narrative regarding that blurry African identity. Furthermore, the casting of the novel through the lens of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (a work that has roundly been criticized for its racist, generalizing portrayal of Africa, though I have not read it myself...) also seems to strip away some of the weight of Miano's vague placement of her story. I can't imagine how the original foreword also attempted to alter Miano's experiences and identity herself in order to fit a narrative regarding African literature. Why can Dark Heart of the Night not simply be allowed to stand on its own?

I'm not sure that my own review doesn't fall into similar, problematic patterns in terms of what I'm mistakenly focusing on. I feel as though I walked into the novel mostly unaware of the controversies and thankfully unaware of the actual plot. (For once, I can at least be grateful for the book's vague and vaguely inaccurate back cover for not creating false expectations.) I read the book with little external context and without feeling like I knew enough to place Dark Heart of the Night's plot in any one specific place. My ignorance, it seems, ultimately matches Miano's own intentions. But is my sense that Miano is deeply involved with questions of identity something that follows from the retrospective reading of her critiques of the original foreword? Am I misreading her response to it? Was there something else in reading this novella that I was supposed to take away? Knowing what I now know in terms of Miano's own sense of her work, I find myself wishing for a deeper, detailed analysis that views Miano's work as part of a larger whole. Individual debut work as it may be, Miano clearly has had more to say, having published several books over the past decade. Would we as readers not benefit from reading those works as well? (Yes, we would.)

I did not struggle with reading Dark Heart of the Night, though the book saddened, angered, and disheartened me in many ways, as I believe it intended. The writing is brisk and clean, and again, the pacing is remarkably steady for a book that contains several different gut-punch peaks. It is far from a pleasant book, but it is definitely a good one, perhaps even a great one. It is certainly a work worth reading. I also think there is some value in the questions it forces us to grapple with regarding how works by African writers in translation (and perhaps African women writers more specifically?) are packaged for English-speaking audiences. Miano's critiques may be presented as a surprising bit of anger from an author over how her writing is sold in translation ("drama"), but ultimately it's worth noting two things: 1. The original foreword no longer appears in print, and 2. Miano's critiques end up providing a much better context for what Dark Heart of the Night is trying to do than the book's remaining paratext itself. I suppose some good comes of bad as well...

WITMonth Day 5 | A Rain of Words edited by Irène Assiba d'Almeida

I was surprised to realize I never reviewed this collection. I was certain - certain! - that I must have reviewed it last year. Did I simply discuss it? Did I mention it in so many other contexts that I forgot to discuss it here? Either way, A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women's Poetry in Francophone Africa (edited by Irène Assiba d'Almeida and translated by Janis A. Mayes) is a remarkable collection that deserves that much more attention and recognition.

I have often described my inability to review poetry books, and this feeling is exponentially higher when it comes to poetry anthologies. How can I really review a book that encompasses so much, that showcases so many voices, that alternates styles and perspectives and approaches? Some writers are given little more than a handful of lines to get their words across while others leap across multiple poems and pages. Some write succinctly, some write sprawlingly, some use intimate imagery, some use direct references, some bathe in lyricism, some laugh in modernisms, some are angry, some are happy, some are beautiful, some are not to my taste... The usual problems I have in addressing how poetry makes me feel are fully exacerbated by the nature of anthologies. So is this really a review? Who knows.

Suffice to say that I enjoyed A Rain of Words on just about every possible level. Did I love all of the poems? Of course not. I disliked some, was ambivalent about several, enjoyed many, and adored just a few. Each writer brings her own style and flair to this collection, making it less an individual song and more a cacophonous choir that doesn't always know what it's trying to do. Yes, there are moments when it sounds a little awful, but it's mostly glorious just to have the opportunity to experience it.

And in a WITMonth when I'm trying to focus on African women in translation in particular, it seems necessary to remind people that books like this exist. Some of the poems here address topics that can be viewed as uniquely "African", whether in addressing politics within their own or neighboring countries, or in raising specific cultural or religious touchstones. Some are from uniquely feminine perspectives, like poems that deal with motherhood or sexism. But many of the poems simply are, without adhering to any cultural assumptions or expectations, sometimes telling a specific story about a specific place and a specific experience and sometimes not. Poems about family, love, nature, peace, war, politics, life. Each one of these poems has value for the same reason that any poem does, and simply from the perspective of experiencing new poetry, I'm grateful to the CARAF Books series for putting out this collection. The collection sent me hunting for more works by these writers, and though I'm disappointed to see that too few of their full-length books have been translated into English, I am grateful for the exposure to those that have, whether poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. This book was indispensable for me while compiling this year's 50 Day Countdown (see tomorrow's post as well) and has been a great jumping off point in terms of finding other works.

For you, O poetry lover, I simply say this: In the same way that we seek out collections by writers from all sorts of different backgrounds, so do I recommend A Rain of Words. I think you'll enjoy it as I did.

WITMonth Day 3 | Don't Whisper Too Much / Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella by Frieda Ekotto

It wouldn't surprise me if you missed the publication of Frieda Ekotto's Don't Whisper Too Much / Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella (translated from French by Corine Tachtiris). Published in 2019 by Bucknell University Press and distributed by Rutgers University Press, this isn't exactly a major publishing event. There's a part of me that also feels that it shouldn't be a major publishing event, because queer African literature in translation should simply be a natural part of our literary landscape. And yet... we're nowhere near that reality.

On each level, Ekotto reflects the ways in which bias pervades our literary consciousness. In her introduction, Lindsey Green-Simms tracks the difficulty Ekotto had in initially publishing Don't Whisper Too Much in French, writing: "Ekotto persisted for ten years until the novel was eventually picked up in 2001 by Editions A3, a small publishing house in France, and then reprinted in 2005 by L'Harmattan, who also published Portrait in 2010. Thus, even the publication history bears the traces of confinement and the difficulty of breaking through power structures." That it would take almost two more decades to publish Don't Whisper Too Much in an English translation doesn't even surprise much. The WIT publishing gap is especially wide when it comes to African women writers in translation (particularly black African women writers, it should be noted), and it's not as though the English-language market is particularly eager to embrace queer stories from outside a handful of highly specific (and often fetishized) narratives. 

And yet Ekotto's work is, surprisingly (and pleasantly) enough, not the only queer book by an African women writer to be translated into English in recent years. While there is absolutely no similarity between these books in either writing style, storytelling approach, subgenre, or even broader socio-political context, my immediate association is with Trifonia Melibea Obono's La Bastarda (translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel). It's an unfair association for both works, largely borne only because both books deal with African love between women, but I think it's also reflective of why we need more stories like this - each represents a wholly different experience and perspective on queer African women. That's exactly the point of why we should all be trying to read more widely, in that eternal effort to avoid Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's single story and experience the world through different voices.

It further helps, I think, that this book comes in a bundle. Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait are two very different works, both in terms of style, narrative voice, and "messaging". There's a lot to learn from both works individually. From a purely literary perspective, however, I wasn't able to read the two fully back-to-back (I paused for a few hours between the two halves), and I think that the stylistic differences of each work would have been better served by a cleaner separation. Oh well.

Don't Whisper Too Much is the first of the two works, and the more... I suppose the word "lyrical" or even just "stylistic" is the closest way to describe it. It's a story that feels somewhat removed from time, hovering at the outskirts of village life and shifting narration and era in a way that feels consistently fluid. I also felt this fluidity in the central, encompassing "love story" that forms one of the pillars of the novella, something in the way Ada seems to move between childhood and adolescence in the context of her growing love for Siliki. This style isn't always my favorite, and I have to admit that it didn't always work for me here either. Parts of the story felt like they connected all too loosely, and I found myself somewhat at a loss when the story ended. This is partly intentional with several stories explicitly untold by the novella's end, but it didn't make me feel any less... unsettled. Perhaps that was the point.

Other aspects, however, struck me hard. The storytelling theme translates much more specifically into the promised whispering from the title. Ekotto frequently returns to this theme of women's voices and women's intimate stories, whether in Siliki's stories of her mother, the lessons Ada learns from Siliki, or Ada's own storytelling around Siliki's daughter Affi. Early in the story, Ada "[...] decides to give her own version of the story of the old legless witch. No matter what, she must tell her own story, which includes the stories of all women without voices, condemned to muteness." This follows her passionate interest in Siliki, even before "gain[ing] admittance to her refuge". Ada draws parallels between her own status as a cast-aside daughter and Siliki, the legless hermit. Later, Siliki's voice literally rings out: "The force of Siliki's voice awakens [Ada's] entire realm, not because she speaks loudly but because her voice overflows with a strength that envelops every creature's soul in immense joy." Yet in the very next passage, Siliki is whispering. Later still, deep into their relationship, Ada reflects on the lessons she has learned from Siliki: "Siliki once told her how important it is to sculp violent words onto her skin. The hollow of the text always loses its strength, but a woman's text - a text that inscribes her pain - is powerful. A woman's written story is not at all saturated; on the contrary, this writing is animated by the sign of survival, the symbolics of life where language is traced." In a novella where women's texts outlive them and carry their stories onward in direct and plot-relevant ways, it's hard not to feel that this theme of words, stories, and women's voices (particularly in the context of queer love) is the most important pillar on which the novella stands.

There are other themes as well, alongside subplots and side stories that are effective to varying degrees. In one thread near the novella's end, Ekotto introduces an American couple that, while moving the story forward in a relatively minor way, seem mostly to present a social commentary on many "Western" attitudes toward African villagers. "'We want to observe the marriage ritual of the Fulani culture. These poor women are victims, oppressed, bullied by their traditions. It has to be exposed!'" This proclamation triggers a fierce response from a new of Ada's, Nafi, who criticizes the "anthropological" approach of Westerners coming to Africa and ultimately describes (albeit not in these exact words) the ways in which different cultures may define things differently, and particularly what that means for women. This section of the novella also comes with a slightly tighter, more traditional writing type; it's a fairly jarring shift, and despite appreciating many of the cool observations Nafi and additional friend Sula whip out in the face of American obtuseness, I'm not entirely sure that the story flowed well around it. The tonal shift along with my general preference for tighter stories meant that I came away from Don't Whisper Too Much feeling somewhat disappointed.

Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, in contrast, feels like a much more "standard", straight-forward narrative. A short story collection that alternates narration and storytelling style and is deeply rooted in modern city life, it ends up feeling wholly distinct from Don't Whisper Too Much. I also, accordingly, ended up enjoying it a whole lot more. There's something a lot more casual about Portrait, whether in its quiet, sly self-references linking the stories together, or its portrayal of life in Bona Mbella, or the way love between women simply seems like a natural part of the world. The more structured nature of the short stories also meant that I felt like I was better able to follow what was happening within each vignette. I thoroughly enjoyed the short collection, and though I liked both Ada and Portait's primary narrator Chantou in relatively equal measures, I felt like the mysteries and vagueries of Chantou's life were more justified within the context of her (short) passage through time. Portrait felt like a series of crisp, detailed snapshots, filled with characters who felt real even without much explanation or exploration. 

Together, these two works form an odd whole, but it's very much a whole worth seeking out. Not all of Ekotto's different writing styles worked for me in the same way, but all were still remarkably effective in getting their story across. Even at the moments that I felt most disconnected from the text, I still had the pressing need to keep reading, to keep listening, to keep seeking out those stories that Ekotto was bringing forward. Later, in Portrait, there was also a sort of comfortable rhythm keeping the stories moving from scene to scene. The stories all work in different ways, but that too can be seen as part of the appeal; the way different voices leap out of the page across the various stories and sub-stories is another bonus. Not everything will work for every reader, but you're likely to find that one theme or perspective that will work for you, and it'll be totally worth it.