#WeekendRead - Namwali Serpell's "The Sack"

This weekend, get caught up in "The Sack", Namwali Serpell's 2015 Caine Prize-winning story. Zoë Wicomb, head of the judging panel, that year called it, "formally innovative, stylistically stunning, haunting and enigmatic in its effects." Our #WriterWednesday has also mentioned that it forms part of her forthcoming novel. So consider it an advance preview of The Old Drift as well!

There’s a sack. 

A sack?

A sack. 

Hmm. A sack. Big? 

Yes. Grey. Like old kwacha. Marks on the outside. No. Shadows. 

That’s how I know it is moving. 

Something is moving inside it? 

The whole sack is moving. Down a dirt road with a ditch on the side, with grass and yellow flowers. There are trees above. 

Is it dark? 

Yes, but light is coming. It is morning. There are some small birds talking, moving. The sack is dragging on the ground. There is a man pulling it behind him. 

Who is this man?

I can’t see his face. He is tallish. His shirt has stains on the back. No socks. Businessman shoes. His hands are wet. 

Does he see you? 

I don’t know. I’m tired now. Close the curtains. 

Yes, bwana. 

J. left the bedroom and went to the kitchen. The wooden door was open but the metal security gate was closed. The sky looked bruised. The insects would be coming soon. They had already begun their electric clicking in the garden. He thought of the man in the bedroom, hating him in that tender way he had cultivated over the years. 

J. washed the plates from lunch. He swept. A chicken outside made a popping sound. J. sucked his teeth and went to see what was wrong.

The isabi boy was standing outside the security gate. The boy held the bucket handle with both hands, the insides of his elbows splayed taut. His legs were streaked white and grey.

How do you expect me to know you are here if you are quiet? J. asked as he opened the gate. The boy shrugged, a smile dancing upwards and then receding into the settled indifference of his face. J. told the boy to take off his patapatas and reached for the bucket. Groaning with its weight, J. heaved the unwieldy thing into the sink. He could just make out the shape of the bream, flush against the inside of the bucket, its fi n protruding. J. felt the water shift as the fish turned uneasily.

A big one today, eh? J. turned and smiled.

The boy still stood by the door, his hands clasped in front of him. His legs were reflected in the parquet floor, making him seem taller.

Do you want something to eat?

The boy assented with a diagonal nod.

You should eat the fish you catch. It is the only way to survive, J. said.

I told him about the first dream but I did not tell him about the second. In the second dream, I am inside the sack. The cloth of it is pressing right down on my eyes. I turn one way, then the other. All I can see is grey cloth. There is no pain but I can feel the ground against my bones. I am curled up. I hear the sound of the sack, sweeping like a slow broom. I have been paying him long enough – paying down his debt – that he should treat me like a real bwana. He does his duties, yes. But he lacks deference. His politics would not admit this, but I have known this man since we were children. I know what the colour of my skin means to someone of our generation. His eyes have changed. I think he is going to kill me. I think that is what these dreams are telling me. Naila. I cannot remember your hands.

They lifted the bream out of the bucket together, the boy’s hands holding the tail, J.’s hands gripping the head. The fish swung in and out of the curve of its own body, its gills pumping with mechanical panic. They flipped it on to the wooden board. Its side was a jerking plane of silver, drops of water magnifying its precise scaling. The chicken outside made a serrated sound.

Iwe, hold it down! The boy placed his hands on either end of the body. J. slid a knife beneath the locking, unlocking gills. Blood eased over their hands. The fish bucked once, twice. Stopped.

I needed your help, J. smiled.

He deboned and gutted the fish. The boy wiped the chopping board, hypnotised by his own hand tracking thin loops of purple and yellow entrails across it. J. fried the fish in cooking oil with salt and onions and tomatoes. He served a piece of it to the boy, setting the plate on the fl oor. He set a portion of the fish aside for himself and took a plate with the rest of it to the man in the bedroom.

The room was dark but for an orange patch on the wall from the street lamp. Who is here? The isabi boy. J. put the plate on the side table and turned on the lamp.

The man began to cough, the phlegm in his chest rattling as he heaved and hacked. J. helped him sit up and rubbed his back until the fit ceased. When it was done, the man was tired.

Why is the fish boy still here? Did you not pay him?

I gave him supper.

As if I have food to spare, the man grunted. He took the plate on to his lap and began eating.

In the first dream, the sack is full and it is being dragged. In the second dream, I am inside it. What will the third dream reveal? You laugh. You say that dreams move forwards, not back. That I am imagining things. But that is why you chose me, Naila. Or at least that is what I fancied then. Now I am not so sure. Some days, I think you loved me for my hands. Other days, I think you threw stones to decide. 

The plate on the kitchen floor was empty. The boy was gone. A tongue cleaned that plate, J. thought as he went to the doorway. The security gate was scaly with insects now, some so heavy their bodies chimed against the hollow metal bars. J. opened it and descended the short set of steps outside. He squatted to open the thatched door of the coop. He could hear the creaking, purring sound of the birds. Light from the house slivered the dark. J. inched along, his hipbone clicking as he went from one chicken to the next. They pivoted their heads and puffed their feathers. The last chicken sat upright on its nest but it wasn’t moving. J. heard a shudder and scanned the wall. The boy. Crouching in the corner, light-mottled.

J. turned back to the chicken and inched closer, reaching for it. The feathers were strung with light brittle spines. The bird fell limp in his hand. Then he saw them, hordes of them, spilling down the chicken’s body, rolling around its neck, massing from its beak. J. started back. The chicken caved in as a flood of ants washed over it. J. stood, hitting his head on the thatched roof. The chickens were yelping and flapping, feathers rising from the ground. The ants snipped at his skin. As he hunched his way out of the coop, a chicken beat its way past his ribs and loped across the yard, head at full piston. Methodically, J. brushed his body off. Then he reached back and pulled the shaking child from the shadows.

My chest is full of cracked glass. That is how it feels when I cough. But the glass never shatters – there is not even that relief of complete pain. I am sick, Naila. Working for me has only made him stronger. Why does he bother? I thought at first that it was the money. But now I think he has been waiting. I wonder at the dwindling of our cares. We began with the widest compass, a society of the people, we said. But somehow we narrowed until it was just us three. Jacob, Joseph, Naila. You replaced yourself with the baby you birthed. So there were still three. But then your family took our son away. And now there are only two. Every day this sickness bites into my body and soon there will be only one. In the dream that just woke me, I am on the ground. It is night. The man kneels at my side. The face is melted but his hairline has washed back with a froth of white hair and he has those same strong arms. His hands are wet. He is tugging the mouth of the sack up over my thighs. This must be when he puts my body into it. We are in the garden. I woke to the smell of smoke.

J. burned the coop. The four chickens left – one had disappeared in the night, snatched by a lucky dog – huddled in a makeshift corral. The fire smelled good; the dead chicken was practically fresh-cooked. From the kitchen doorway, J. watched the last of the smoke coiling up to join the clouds above. The sun took its time. His saliva was bitter and when he spat in the sink, he saw that it was grey. The boy was sleeping on a blanket on the kitchen fl oor. J. leaned against the counter, watching the boy’s chest catch and release. His skinny legs were clean now, greased with Vaseline. J. had hosed the ants off him and anointed the rash of bites. J. made a cup of tea – Five Roses, milk, no sugar – and balanced it on a tray.

The bedroom was ripe with the metallic smell of dried blood. A copper dawn lit the window: Kwacha! Ngwee . . .

The man looked up when J. entered the room. What was that fire?

I burned the chicken coop.

Why?

J. put the tray on the side table and began to leave the room. Do not walk away from me. The man spat.

J. wiped the spit from the floor with his sleeve. White ants, he said.

Bloody superstitions. The man sucked his teeth. Is that bloody fish boy still here? I don’t like people coming here. They f nd out who I am and ask for money.

He doesn’t know who you are. He’s too young. This boy has no family, J. said. We could use the help.

The man lifted his cup, his hand trembling. He sipped the hot tea and winced with pleasure. The boy goes. I can’t afford such things.

The light had gone from copper to white gold, the day spending itself freely. J. squatted on the stoop outside, shelling groundnuts to cook a dish of pumpkin leaves. Students in pale blue uniforms flirted in the dirt road. J. watched them with fond pity as he pressed the knuckle ofhis thumb to the belly of a shell. He hadn’t tasted chibwabwa ne’ntwilo in twenty years. Naila’s favourite. When he returned to the kitchen, he could hear voices in the living room. J. looked through the gap between the door and the frame. The man was leaning against the far wall, his pyjamas low on his hips. J.’s eyes narrowed: the man hadn’t left his bed in weeks. He was shouting at the boy, who stood with his back to J.

Isa kuno, the man said sternly. Come here! Are you deaf?

The boy moved hesitantly over to him and the man’s hand fell trembling on to the bony shoulder. He used the boy as a crutch, levering himself to the sofa. His breathing rasped, shaving bits of silence off the air. In the dull light of the living room, the boy’s skin was the colour of a tarnished coin.

There, the man pointed at a picture frame face down on the floor near the sofa. What is that?

J. opened the door. Leave him, he said.

The boy rushed to J.’s side.

He broke it, the man snarled, picking up the framed photograph.

He doesn’t know, J. said, looking down at the boy leaning against his leg.

I don’t want him here, the man panted.

I owe it to him, J. said.

The man gaped, a laugh catching in his throat. The only debt you owe is to me, old man.

J. pushed the boy ahead of him into the kitchen. 

Read the rest of "The Sack", for free, here. 

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at UC, Berkeley. Her story “The Sack” won the 2015 Caine Prize for African writing. It first appeared in the Africa39 anthology, a 2014 Hay festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2011. Her first published story, “Muzungu,” was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2009, and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize. Her first novel, The Old Drift, will be published by Penguin Random House in 2018. She tweets occasionally @snamwali.

"I write out of a sense of curiosity." An Interview with Namwali Serpell.

Namwali Serpell's creative work plays fast and loose with genre, making her popular with readers piqued by the unexpected. SSDA teamster, Efemia Chela got a sneak peek of the Zambian writer's newest short story, "Company" and chats to her about its exciting premise, Afrofuturism at large as well as her highly anticipated debut novel.

Perhaps what I enjoy the most about your writing is the inherent element of surprise in your work. I listen to this strange podcast called Welcome To Nightvale and the host has a mantra - "Past performance is not a predictor of future results." This statement applies to your writing in some ways; readers can never anticipate what you’ll write next. We’ve had a bank statement, Facebook posts and your latest story uses Samuel Beckett’s play, “Company” as a point of departure.

Could you speak to your peripatetic (I suppose one could call it) approach to subject, character and form in your storytelling?

NAMWALI: I write out of a sense of curiosity. The idea of having the same voice--these days, people call it a “brand”--bores me immensely. I also believe that constraint is the mother of originality, so the delight I take in writing often comes from figuring out which form resonates with the experiences that intrigue me at any one time. These are often quite distinct.

Being a Zambian writer, when you look at Zambian literature does it influence your writing at all? Do you think there are any gems, overlooked novels or stories that people should read?

NAMWALI: The Zambianness of my writing comes more from a sensibility I derive from hearing stories from friends and relatives than from our print literary tradition, which as you know, is not very extensive. My father’s colleague collected and translated a big volume of Zambian folk tales about Kalulu that we used to read when I was a kid--we called it the Omnibus. I loved them! But your own writing is some of the best Zambian fiction out there--so I’ll recommend Efemia Chela’s “Lusaka Punk” to those looking for places to start.

Ha ha. You're too kind!

“Company” is an incredible sci-fi story - ripe with bizarre sensory images, ominous apocalyptic grandeur and clever social commentary on race. It features in McSweeney’s most recent quarterly. Though I don’t want to give too much away, the story is about a woman, Lila and the unnamed narrator on a space and time-travelling quest for a valuable natural commodity. On what should be a routine stop in a village to harvest some, things go badly awry.

How did the idea for story evolve and finally come to life?

NAMWALI: I had a dream about a bubble floating over the ground with little legs sticking out from the bottom--it was a portable invisibility room of sorts. It became a time travel machine in the story, and the rest sort of grew out of that. I have long been obsessed with the opening line to Samuel Beckett’s "Company": “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” I had included the sentence in an early draft of the story to describe the beginning of the protagonist’s training.

After I had a complete draft, McSweeney’s reached out to me to solicit a story for their “Cover Stories” issue, asking that I cover a classic story, the way you might cover a song--I was given complete freedom as to how. Since I’d already included one Beckett line in my story, I decided to go back and reread "Company", and I discovered many other lines that resonated with the Afrofuturist story I’d already written. So I incorporated them into my prose--the story is now about 40% Beckett’s original lines. It was a wonderful way to be in conversation with his work. I think of it as a Janelle Monaé cover of a Philip Glass song.

Your writing often addresses technology, an uneasiness that characterises modern living and it unlocks wholly imaginative futures. As a theme in your work why do think you peer into the future so often?

NAMWALI: “Peer” is the right word. I am a big fan of sci-fi that reaches slightly forward from the crest of the present--the “near future.” The show Black Mirror, for instance, appeals to me because of its plausibility and its satirical edge. I was greatly pleased to discover, for example, that one element of a sex robot I invented for a Tin House story in 2012 had been patented by the time I gave a reading from the story in 2013. An audience member at another reading I gave pointed out that, despite the insistent variety, my stories all concern mediation--the things between us, through which we talk, love, hate, hurt, and so on. Sometimes they are texts, sometimes they are technology, sometimes they are other people.

I’ve often thought that Afrofuturism, retrofuturism and SFF have such great appeal in Africa because living with the disappointment, the discontents of the postcolony, it is a way for us to begin again. To relive and reimagine both the past and the future as a creative continuum. This genre is something you both lecture on and write about in fiction. What are your thoughts on Afrofuturism?

NAMWALI: Well, they’ve only had such great appeal in Africa lately, as Nnedi Okorafor points out here. And in the founding document of Afrofuturism, Mark Dery’s 1992 essay, “Black to the Future,” he coins the term in the midst of bemoaning the relative dearth of Afrofuturist texts: “Why do so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other – the stranger in a strange land – would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists?” That historical absence is telling--how can you imagine a future when your present remains so steeped in material lack and violent negation?--but it also inspires the Afrofuturist writers who are scribbling away now. My aim as a black sci-fi writer is not only to help fill that void, but also to riff on the void, to think about the annihilation of black bodies and black culture as a ground zero from which we might build a new politics or even a utopia, which etymologically means "no" + "place".

You’ve written a lot of short stories but just finished the manuscript for your first novel. Did this change in form, require a changing of gears or was the segue into a novel quite natural for you?

NAMWALI: Well, some of my short stories are just chapters of a future novel! But, yes, now that I have moved into the process of editing the entire manuscript, I am thinking more about larger scale questions: How and when do characters return to influence the plot? What are the thematic threads stringing this mess together? Where do I cut off a chapter to keep the momentum going rather than aiming--as one might in a short story--for a sense of closure?

Are you allowed to tell us a little a bit more about your forthcoming book, The Old Drift?

NAMWALI: Yes! This will be my debut novel and it should be coming out in 2018. It spans more than a century and multiple genres, including the Gothic and sci-fi. It tells the story of three multicultural Zambian families over three generations, spiraling down to a love triangle and a political movement. I use the saga of these families to pose some rather grandiose questions: How do you live a life or forge a politics that can skirt the dual pitfalls of fixity (authoritarianism) and freedom (neoliberalism)? And what happens if you treat error not as something to avoid but as the very basis for human creativity and community?

Being an African writer is unique kind of burden. Thinkpieces on us, what we should write, how we should conduct ourselves, where we should live, even, abound. Often where one’s home country doesn’t have a particularly strong literary community, any pre-eminent author that arises is pressured to grow it. Or write for their nation, whatever that means. These discussions often come down to at their heart, the role of the writer.

Do you have any opinions on the role of the writer?

NAMWALI: The role of the writer is to write. I do like to say that The Old Drift is the Great Zambian Novel you didn’t know you were waiting for, but my tongue is firmly in cheek. I am more interested in trying to capture the quiddity of a place and its cultures than in propaganda, pronouncements, or pulpits. I’m too "movious", as we say in Zambia, to be patriotic.

On Namwali’s Bedside Table

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s brilliant novel Kintu, which has just been reissued in the U.S., and which I’m rereading for a conversation I’ll be having with her in Brooklyn next month; Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue; and I’m privileged to have an advance copy of Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom.

"Company" by Namwali Serpell can be read in Issue 49 of McSweeney's which is out now.

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at UC, Berkeley. Her story “The Sack” won the 2015 Caine Prize for African writing. It first appeared in the Africa39 anthology, a 2014 Hay festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2011. Her first published story, “Muzungu,” was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2009, and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize. Her first novel, The Old Drift, will be published by Penguin Random House in 2018. She tweets occasionally @snamwali.

Interview by Efemia Chela a.k.a. @efemiachela 

#WeekendRead - Efemia Chela's 'Perigee'

Perigee was first published in the NIHSS award-winning, 2014 Short.Sharp.Stories Anthology, Adults Only. The story is about youth, sex and losing. Its title refers to the stage in the moon's orbit when it is nearest to the earth.

As soon as my phone brought news of where she was, I tore up my room looking for perfume and the cleanest of the clothes on the floor. I thought anything would be fine as long as I could cover it with this fine brocade coat that was hiding somewhere. In hindsight I don’t know why I bothered. I had known her for so long then that she knew how the crevices of my body drew in all fabrics, no matter how loosely draped. And how I smelt a little like alliums and sour milk when I attended early morning lectures without showering.

I slammed the door and jumped two at a time down the stairs. Behind me, my next-door neighbour shouted threats of filing a complaint. I wondered why loud noises bothered her in a way that my dealing never did. I ran, wind rushing in my ears, ricocheting off the clips in my hair. So fast, I didn’t even notice the girth of the moon. Only later I would realise how full, how round, how milky it was. And so close. It was at its perigee waiting to be plucked from that vast black cloth by someone brave. I avoided its pupil-less gaze, afraid of what I would see in its surface.

I got there quickly, my heavy breath arrived a step ahead of me. The bar was full of locals who didn’t bother look up when I walked in. They could smell I was harmless. I caught a glimpse of myself in the cracked mirror just before the pool tables. I looked uncharacteristically beautiful. Maybe it was the moonlight. My looks flickered on and off like a faulty lamp and I never knew when things were in my favour aesthetically. I took a second look in the mirror and saw a kind of mournful beauty like an old silent movie star, losing to the talkies. Losing. Losing. Losing.   

I searched for her. Now that she had cut her hair it took double the time. Still that wasn’t very long. I had memorised her silhouette like a redemptive prayer. “Meryl. Meryl,”my heart murmured. I knew almost certainly she’d be in the outdoor bunker, under the fairy lights where you could smoke a joint with the owner’s blessing. I pushed the slow stickied door with an open palm and regretted it instantly. Should have used my sleeve. I put my clean hand on her sloping left shoulder. She looked up and smiled all the way to the curve of her eyelashes. That smile had the same effect on me every time. It stirred the pot and thickened the evening’s plot. My lips queasily formed the word, “Hi.”

“You look really bleak with life, friend,” Meryl said as I sat down opposite her in the bottle green booth. “I’m so glad you came. I was really worried about you.”

She reached over to clasp my hand. I felt the jab of one her pointy rings.

“Yeah. Well... unrequited love isn’t easy. It’s a fucking nightmare. It’s a lot like being a monk but there are no orange robes,” I said.

“Bummer. You look good in orange,” she joked. “But I don’t get it, monks? How? No sex?”

“You’re believing in something. Something... which most people don’t believe in. And honestly which can’t, with real incontrovertible proof, be said to truly exist.”

“Or a person. A person who doesn’t exist,” she said. “He can’t exist the way you want him to. You know that. He’s a bastard! I get it. I know what you see in him. You see everything that’s bad for you and that makes you want it more.”

“My moth tendencies...,” I offered weakly.

“He’s going to fuck you up!”

I ignored her. The pot calling the kettle harmful and all that.

Betty swaggered up to Meryl, the intrusion stopping wherever our conversation was going. All bound breasts and big lies she placed her hand firmly where mine had just been. It seemed to fit there better. It might as well have been a hot brand. Fuck, I hated her and her greasy confidence. She could make you feel like you were enough. “You were all and that was it,” her exes all testified. Betty had the pushiness of someone much older spiked with the hard-headedness of someone much younger. I’d never seen her sit down. Her grasping nature wouldn’t permit it. That and I’m sure one of her exes had a hit out on her. She used her ruthlessness to beat her way in the world and beat people out of it. She didn’t meet people so much as manhandle them. Sometimes I thought I could see the very cogs whirring behind her sharp temples.

This was who Meryl had chosen to be hurt by. But people can live off hurt. They can’t live off nothing. So they kept on.

There wasn’t a lot of motivation to stop. Life was boring and the winters here were harsh. I avoided Betty’s eyes like I would a growling bear. Her gaze withered me anyway. I felt increasingly dry and irrelevant so I left to get a drink. “Maker’s Mark. Neat. No rocks,” I must have said to the barwoman. I only realised what I’d asked for when it was resting, brown and quiet in a tumbler in front of me. It wasn’t my drink; it was his. He’d taken over. I didn’t know what to do with it. Bourbon was a plantation owner’s drink. Nothing to do with me. Or him either. He was ex-struggle. What was a small-town lecturer doing sucking down the oppressor's fuel?

I looked left down the bar hoping he would appear at my side. I waited to feel his hand cinch my waist. It would have been a good time to be distracted by a long story about where he’d picked up the Maker’s habit. No one was there. I heaved myself onto the barstool for something to do. As I did I felt something pop out of place inside of me. It was like this sometimes. I felt dizzy and not just from all the joints I’d smoked that evening. From time to time a part of me broke off and then I felt watery. Like my legs were ill-fitting prostheses and after years of chafing, were about to give out.

I looked back at the two of them, through the smudged glass window. Meryl looked at Betty; she looked at her, in love. Her small pudgy hands were weighted with the rings she never took off and they glinted as she stroked Betty’s hair. They whispered soft as feathers to each other. Betty bit her ear playfully. They shared the same whisky and water passing it between each other like a chalice. Priest and sinner? Who was who? No matter. They kissed. Pulling tenderly at each others’ lips. Then Betty moved up and whispered something into her girlfriend’s hairline. When she curled her arm round Meryl’s neck it looked like a chokehold. All hell broke loose. Meryl slapped her. Betty blushed all the way to her dirty blonde roots and ran off to the pool table, forgetting her usual swagger, to lick her wounds. Or make some nice boy lick them for her while she schemed revenge. She put on being straight like an old hat. Even boys who knew the truth let themselves be fooled. They thought the lesbian thing was a cool little quirk. It meant someday they might get to watch. Meryl looked at me through the window. I couldn’t tell if it was her or the window clouding over.

I rushed across the room like a silent ambulance. She lay her head on my breast and shuddered. Not quite crying but not quite dry-eyed either. She’d been there before. But I might never get this close again. I mumbled things I can’t remember now and laced my fingers with hers. We sat like this for some time then she pulled her hand away to fumble blindly for a tissue or a lighter or something else in the  black hole of her bag. I traced letters in the water left by her glass while stamping out a smile. How glad I was near to be her and how sure I was that I was right.

Prof liked to be right too. It was his job. He was a scavenger of dead languages and reveled in his colleagues thinking what he did was useless. It meant they never bothered him; they never read his sprawling papers or reprimanded him for having a sleeper couch in his office. He was an agile speaker. Not content with wild gesticulating, he paced, and rocked back and forth, and bounced from one leg to the other. Which was a small feat since one of his legs was slightly shorter than the other. The book in his hand was a formality. He knew stretches of those ancient poems by heart, those he performed to us. We listened rapt to his rollicking voice that shook each character from centuries of sleep. We circled and underlined and translated and analysed the remains of Greco-Roman mythic incest.

Betrayal, love and rape, all running and feeding and borrowing from each other. Sin and glory. Zombie poetry. Pages and pages of old words that we knew to be dead though they felt so alive.

Maybe he picked me out from early on. Set me aside for some alternate purpose. I was never top of any classes apart from his. He groomed me with recommendations from his personal library. We tea-d and talked every afternoon. I tried to pry him open like a pistachio. He was polite enough to let me think I had. Lying on his office couch, I offered myself up to him, if he was willing. So much of nothing happened and it all meant the world to me. I tried to infuse my every touch with all of my mixed-up emotions about him. And just when I thought we were something I’d just made up he’d let something small and potent drop into conversation. He’d take a rare and peculiar interest in a kink in my wire. A flaw in my thigh. A dent in my back. Instinctively, he knew the rotting disused trail to my heart - how to tend all those bushes I’d cultivated alone.

It was too much, to think of you and him in such quick succession. In such close orbit. My hand started to shake as I tried to keep stroking your shoulder. I was perverse. I was wet. I recoiled at the thought of having wet myself in a fit of nervousness. In public. Near you. At my age.

“I’ve just got to-,” I said. She was too distraught to care.

I walked to the bathroom trying too hard to look normal. I ducked my forehead into a stall. When, by the tail of my skirt, I was yanked into a dark place.

Fear chilled me. My ankles itched and the backs of my arms prickled. I tried to break away. The stranger’s descending hand was about to become nastily damp. I waited for rejection. My cheeks warmed up for anger and shame. Instead, a sultry calm blossomed below. Pleasure unfurled in my hips. It, this tremendous feeling, spread out all over me and gripped the nape of my neck. I was wet. I was deliciously wet. He pushed me into his chest and I fumbled with his hair. Those tight curls - it was Prof! He silenced me with a torrent of kisses. His head disappeared between my legs. I lost myself in him and melted. Melted into someone I didn’t know. When I came, he left. He left me half-clothed.

* * *

I met her twice before she met me. Her right ear jutted out of her hair.  She later intimated that she always caught a tan first on the very tips of her body - the knobbles of her knee, her nipples, her snub nose. In the winter she was sallow and in summer she was olive. I would have re-focused myself on Prof’s lecture in the following seconds but then she laughed. It was so mirthful that the tickling genesis of a laugh bubbled in my own stomach. Like a magnet, Meryl’s laugh drew all the world’s happiness into the room. She was laughing at Prof.  By then he’d already burnt himself into me. He made me want things I’d never known I’d wanted. But he never made me do anything I didn’t want. At least anything I’d admit to

I met her again by way of her left ear. I was waiting uneasily for a march to start. A feeling of powerlessness pressed down on me. I knew the protest would be heralded as a success even though its effects would be short and concentrated, then dissipate without a trace like the modest crowd after half an hour. But in the diaries and CVs of the leaders it was the best they could do and their best was good enough. I was meant to be listening to Prof’s self-proclaimed bold attempts to ‘speak truth to power’. There was a constant ruffle as power had instructed someone underpaid to sweep away dropped flyers for recycling during the proceedings. Then his part was over and someone privileged recited their suffering cred for the crowd of bleeding hearts in matching T-shirts. She turned around abruptly and smiled cautiously. One half of her face at a time. Meryl always smiled like a broken puppet. Disjointedly, like half of her didn’t want to.

She grabbed my hand and said, “We’re power. No one likes us. We should go.”

And so we did. We ran and ran and ran. I looked at her, blurred a little in motion. She looked at me. We whipped our heads back to see. It was only our own hair and legs. We started slowing down, disappointed no one was following us.

We broke into the vault of the old library together. It had fallen to the new world-class library erected on top of it. We would sit between the stacks of bound theses and set-works for discontinued gods and courses. She cross-legged, and me, struggling to copy her with my bigger thighs that went dead too quickly then tingled sharply back to life when I moved. We wondered to each other whether we’d written down essay questions correctly. Usually our hearsay and half-listening came close to a whole assignment. More often than not we lit a joint and got extra-curricular. We rose higher and our voices swelled in the book cellar. We rose higher and our voices. They echoed off the walls forming parallel lives of their own and imbuing the trivialities we spoke of with a booming gravitas.

It was perfect lying on our tummies, our eyes half-closed, reading a piece from a randomly selected book off the shelf. Cinematic Review 1934. Ornithorhynchus anatinus : A Webbed Life.

“The unusual appearance of this egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it, with some considering it an elaborate hoax”

Dust motes coasted lazily on the air. Once a piece of hot ash fell on her sheer creamy blouse while she was lying on her side. She brushed it away but not quickly enough. We were in a world of our own and time had gone gooey for us. It melted a small hole in her top revealing her nipple. I swooped in and kissed it gently. It was brown and hot like a penny warm from the sun. I felt her hand tighten on my arm. She moaned in pleasure while I nibbled and sucked.

I underestimated the joy of not knowing. I basked in her company and the light in her eyes. We were so close I could see into her heart and know things she didn’t want me to. We had sex when we were lonely. We didn’t discuss it. I didn’t know too much about my feelings for her then. For years they were just an abstract nebula of warmth and wonder in my breast. Later I knew it to be love. And love hurt. Before love it was a blessed time. It was before enthusiasm for our studies got extinguished by debt and cynicism.

We ate badly, that is to say we ate too well and didn’t exercise beyond laughing. We drank too much but it was without menace.

It was just part of our culture - youth culture.

“But there’s no such thing as youth culture,” she said.

We were on my balcony trying to light up. It was just at the start of winter when everyone was still denying it was here. So were we. We squinted in the wind. She was trying to rub the goosepimples out of her flesh while I was trying to keep a joint going.

“There isn’t. We’re unenchantingly normal. We’re just like grown-ups but no one believes us,” she said.

“No. We’re not like our parents at all,” I insisted. “They were of a people. They stayed and knew a place just so they could know it well and take comfort in it.”

“ Maybe you’re on to something. We’re not like that,” she said, “We mill and seethe.”

I thought uncomfortably of the place embossed on my passport. I couldn’t differentiate my country from a row of depressing statistics or dusty pictures on the news. My parents lived there. They had selfishly made it so much theirs that it could never be mine. I couldn’t see myself there. Or anywhere yet.

And maybe that was what derailed everything.The blank sweep of life stretching out in front of me was too much to bear. It demanded of me, silently and sternly. It’s very presence demanded a response. One it deemed worthy. It asked me to make myself up and I couldn’t. I was paralysed by the stark white space. Formless but palpable; a desert of expectations. It stopped me mid-thought, mid-sentence, mid-life. It trailed after me like a clubfoot and wouldn’t let me hide. When I was alone I could feel it forcing its way into every orifice. My ears, the space under my nails, my nostrils, my vagina, the gaps in my gritted teeth. Relentlessly past every little hair into each pore of my skin. Pushing, pushing and pushing. At first I could ignore it. It let me act normally. It let me see people. It let me work. And then it drowned everything and made me watch.

The nurses and therapists and psychiatrists made me cry myself back to life. I cried and cried and cried. The sad noises of my racking body rang out a small pathetic space for me in the world. I stopped to swallow pills and snot. My voice became hoarse with the stress of recovery and the talking of feelings. Such routine self-scrutiny only either kills you or makes you well. Gradually I got better. Or maybe just different. Every bad day felt predictable and every good day felt like a lie. I no longer cried. The tears no longer came. They blocked up my head and nasal passages. My body re-absorbed them. My head felt hot and swollen all the time, like rotten fruit engorged in the sun. And that’s why when I found them together, naked, on top of a Makana District Marriage Register from 1888, I couldn’t cry.

* * *

“2, 2, 4, 3, 5, 4, 4, 4.”, she announced. “This bar is full of fucking fours! What a bust.”

“Just let it go, Betts. Another night, okay?” Meryl said into her blue check collar.

I could have told her there was no use trying drag Betty away from the scent but I didn’t feel like being right any more for some reason. Betty said it would happen and it would happen tonight. He was here, they just hadn’t found him yet.

“Oh look, a 6,” she said, pointing.

She left the booth and wandered off for closer inspection. I followed her gaze - green and concentrated as a laser. She looked like she had half a mind to open his mouth and count his teeth like a slave trader. But with a simper and a flick of her hair that person was gone and someone else was asking him coquettishly for a cigarette, putting her right leg behind the other and stroking it.

I heard the scrape and burst of a lighter coming to life across from me. A smoke was born. Poppy-coloured lipstick stained the cigarette butts on the table scattered in front of her.

“You just don’t have any say in it. That’s the thing,” Meryl said apropos to nothing.

I took it from her and inhaled deeply in lieu of a response.

“I just don’t want to lose.” She sighed and motioned for me to give it back.

It seemed like just another one of those long nights of trailing admiration. I rolled and lit up until time glazed over it. I couldn’t sleep for fear of missing out. None of us wanted to miss out but on what we weren’t really sure. People sang about it, people wrote about it, people died for it even. But we didn’t. We sat around bars, kicked lamp posts and shuffled around dance floors waiting for something to happen. For someone to happen. I’d wake up at three the next aftermoon with cottonmouth, an aching heart and sore heels. I knew it had to stop but I’d go out and follow them again. Padding along behind and beside them. They didn’t mind.

I’d say we hung out as a group but our proximity was merely a coincidence of space and clinginess on my part rather than shared camaraderie.

I just didn’t want to miss the moment she was vulnerable again. Vulnerable enough to give herself up to me.

“You know I’ve always wanted you,” I said.            

It escaped out of my lips. As easy as reckless things do. In the awkward silence afterwards my hands trembled on my knees and my insides crumpled and re-crumpled on themselves until I could barely breathe. Still nothing. She looked away. I looked down into my lap moving away and towards me. Away and towards me like a swing. The soundtrack of pool balls clacking against each other continued. Some men by the pool table cheered. Someone was losing.

“You don’t understand. It’s hard when you’re in a relationship to keep things alive and interesting. Y’know, you see each other all the time and when you don’t you hear rumours about each other. You fuck every day. The only way to stop it becoming boring is to bring someone new in. They don’t stay forever. They’re just visiting.”

“We’re all just visiting each other aren’t we?” I said. “No one gets to stay.”

Betty brought over her pick.

“Shuffle up,” she barked.

Meryl slammed her hands on the table and moved up. He slid into the booth, gripping a dictaphone in his mouth. I thought he was crazy and clenched my hands into fists, warily. His eyes glinted with lust as he explained it was an electric cigarette. I’d never seen one before. It had an orange electric flame that even stoked itself when he inhaled. I retaliated by smoking my Camel, harder. I didn’t get what men had to do with lesbians. They were unlikely saviours. He wasn’t my type. He’d live and die in this town. A boy in his dad’s shoes. He had on a beige shirt worn one day too long and a dusty navy blazer with the lapels fraying at the corners. He talked and talked but didn’t ever say what he meant. Worst of all his canned pheromones stung my nostrils. We said no names.

He was an adequate human being. Not adequate at anything in particular. Just adequate. No qualifiers. I doubted he knew he was making a foray into an imploding relationship, and that even if he had, he wouldn’t have been sorry about it.

I was resigned. Disappointment weighed down my throat. I retreated, into my usual posture of bitterness. Betty walked ahead of me, arguing with Meryl. Anger was their foreplay and I didn’t intervene. She pushed open the door to my own residence block and tramped up the stairs as if she knew where the communal government-issue condoms were kept. I hung back and let her arrogance tire itself out. Eventually she’d have to concede only I knew where they were and that I was good for something. They were in the phone box on second floor, affectionately called Slag Row for girls that lived there. I opened the box and there was one left. I briefly considered lying, saying that all the slags had gotten there first and the box was empty. But that wouldn’t have stopped anything. I picked it up, walked over and handed it to Meryl.

We walked through the hallway, down the main stairs and back to the car in silence. Someone shouted through their wall that we should “STOP BANGING THE FUCKING DOOR!” The night was calm and unusually bright. I hadn’t noticed it before but it could have been day. We stepped on to the avenue lined with trees, as sturdy and leafy as the admissions brochure had promised. Betty’s blue car was parked underneath them, Meryl and my doors still left open. The wind blew half-heartedly making the leaves above quiver.

Only then did I look up at the moon. This strange ghost fruit hanging in the night.

I felt like time and space had buckled under the weight of it and that was all this night was. I got a good look at it before it ducked out of view. Its power radiated anyway. Thick fingers of moonlight shot through the navy clouds and illuminated everything below. The clouds exited my gaze, stage left. A bit of the moon was revealed. Then another cloud swept over. Exit stage left.

I could sense something coming in the distance though I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the drama of the sky. The blood in my head drained to the back of my skull as I kept looking up for an answer to a question I hadn’t really asked. Something somewhere rustled. But maybe not. I brushed it off as a hallucination. My senses running wild and overstimulated. Set alight by drugs and the moon’s cool fire. My senses running sticks along my cage. But then I was sure I could feel it. That night I had felt it all and was sponge, saturated by the life bursting around me. I could feel it even though it was still far away. The freedom, the rush. The friction of bodies moving. The stick and release of damp skin on damp skin. Life bristling rebelliously in the night when all should be still. Sounds of screaming and laughing and jeering and whooping and slapping feet reached my ears. A crowd of boys approached. Unbridled and naked. Thundering towards us. Possessed by an unnameable desire. Swinging and running they came up the road like a pale white wave. Like a flock of white geese. Like I sign I couldn’t understand. They ran down the avenue, and glowed with lunar energy. All of a sudden I started laughing and laughing and laughing. Peals of laughter and tears. These boys. They were flying. These boys were flying.

Efemia Chela was born in Zambia in 1991, but grew up all over the world. She studied at Rhodes University, South Africa and Institut D’Etudes Politiques in Aix-En-Provence, France. When she grows up she would like to be a better writer and literary translator. She enjoys eating pizza, reading graphic novels and watching black and white films.

Her first published story, ‘Chicken’ was nominated for The 2014 Caine Prize For African Writing. Efemia’s subsequent stories and poems have been published in places like Brittle Paper, Jalada,  Prufrock and PEN Passages: Africa. Efemia is currently a fellow of the inaugural Short Story Day Africa / Worldreader Editing Mentorship Programme and continues to write fiction whenever she can find a moment on the train and a working pen.

"I think it’s a way for me to assert a kind of order in a very disordered world." An Interview with Efemia Chela.

Efemia Chela is an Editor for Parrésia and Content Creator for Short Story Day Africa. After being grilled by Efemia last week, Helen Moffett had an opportunity for revenge. She picked her brain about her fingers-in-many-pies attitude to literature, her personal migrations and the experience of editing.

Tell us about your interesting and illustrious history of short story writing. OK, I’m going to start, with the fact that leaps to the top of any Google search of your name: that your story “Chicken” made you the youngest ever person to get on the shortlist for the Caine Prize. But you haven’t slowed down, and you’re still a baby (bear with me: I’m thirty – THEERRRTY – years older than you). Tell us all, and supply links to your published stories, please.

EFEMIA: You’re too kind. I’m only a wee writer, about 3 years into writing consistently and for publication. I’ve always wanted to write but reading too much good literature as a lonely teen convinced me for many years that I had nothing to contribute. Which is silly, if you are a young writer out there thinking that; don’t think that. There’s always more that needs to be written. Everything can be retold and approached in a different way by a new fascinating person...or artificial intelligence nowadays apparently.

I’m mostly anthologised but a couple of my stories are available, free to read online. "Chicken" was originally published in Feast, Famine and Potluck, the SSDA anthology, then in The Gonjon Pin. A flash fiction I wrote "Petty Blood Sport" was taken up by PEN America. Most recently "The Lake Retba Murder" has been republished in the October issue of New Internationalist. It was originally part of Water, last year's SSDA collection.

My newest story, "Mont De Venus" will be in Issue 88 of Wasafiri, coming out this December.

"He said it was to be goodbye. I didn’t know what that meant. For our petty blood sport to be over. No more bruises to pepper my pallid body" -  "Petty Blood Sport" 

In an interview with Nick Mulgrew, you confess that “there is an entire novel in the bottom of my handbag written on the back of receipts”. Is this true? Details, please.

EFEMIA: It is true. I am the most disorganised, scatterbrained writer in the the world. I have a notebook but it always seems to be half empty or not to hand. The receipts tend to get smoothed out and collated every three months or so and then get put into a Word doc. Then I work from a line that strikes me from the ravings and half-baked thoughts. From that a story emerges quite slowly. I really want to write a novel but at the speed I write I don’t think that will be before I turn 30.

Somewhere I read that you once wanted to be a literary translator. True or false? What languages do you speak? And seriously: editing entries for the Short Story Day Africa anthology (or any collection of works from the continent) teaches us (me, anyway) how vital it is to be multilingual or at the very least to have an ear for the the patterns, shapes and idioms of the languages that lie beneath the Englishes used. Your thoughts?

EFEMIA: Your intell is good! I speak French and English fluently and I’d like to be a literary translator of work that pushes the boundaries in terms of content and form. I salivate at the kind of stuff Deep Vellum is doing and finding le mot juste - what most people call nit-picking. Fingers crossed I will be busy with my Master’s next year.

It is handy, having lived in a couple of African countries because I know a bit more about what the local turn of phrase is in a couple of places. I can edit for what’s correct in that context instead of using “blanket editing” and ruining the distinctive flavour of a piece.

I think if you’re not multilingual you’re missing out on some of the best African fiction - much of which isn’t being written in English. A lot of people have slept on Scholastique Mukasonga, JMG Le Clézio (originally Mauritian, we’ll claim him), Mia Couto, Alain Mabanckou and Marlene Van Niekerk for that reason, until they got translated into English. And that process takes a couple of years or worse never happens.

"The guards in our gated community were paid off to pre-empt noise complaints, as were the local police. Our racist neighbours were invited in time for them to book a night away." - “Chicken” 

This is probably a good place to ask you about your rolling stone childhood and education, and how that’s shaped your writing.

EFEMIA: My parents are very ambitious so we moved around a lot as a child and then I grew up to love travel too and so have upped and left a couple of countries myself. UK, Malawi, Zambia, Ghana, South Africa, France, Botswana, Japan are all places I’ve lived. Its shaped my writing because I like to write trans-national stories, and explore ideas of place and identity. People always ask where I’m from and ethnically I’m half-Zambian, half-Ghanaian but that doesn’t even begin to explain who I am. There’s a disconnect between who I am online, who I am on paper and who I am in real life. I think a lot of people feel the same way - I like to explore those kind of contradictions in my fiction.

Your favourite writers. No more than five. Okay, six.

EFEMIA: This is always the hardest question. But today, let’s see. I’ll go with Daniel Clowes, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Douglas Coupland, Chinua Achebe (we share the same birthday!) and Sylvia Plath.

The authors who have influenced you the most (if different from the above list).

EFEMIA: Martin Amis, he sneers, his whole oeuvre sneers. He creates these awful, morally reprehensible characters and doesn’t shy away from their dirty little crevices. He excavates them, lays them out and it makes for fascinating, revelatory reading. From him I learnt truth and filth.

Georges Perec. He’s perhaps the most well-known of the Oulipo, a group of writers who write under self-imposed constraints. Maybe his most well known work in translation is La Disparition, or A Void  a post-modern mystery novel about a private detective, without a single "e" in it.  He’s didn't write for accessibility. He wrote for beauty, intricacy and to entertain himself, which was selfish but turned into a gift for the readers. He cared tenderly for his work, his craft and detail - I like to think I picked that up from him.

One more, Elena Ferrante, the newest person to influence me. I think she’s freed me from thinking that any topic can be trivial in fiction. Often writers want to write about these colossal ideas. But those ideas are no more important than say the discomfort of what it’s like to pick up a call while on the loo and have to stand around awkwardly waiting until the call is over so you can flush without embarrassing yourself. Her focus is narrow: Neapolitan working class women but she does it exceptionally, with nuance, without shame. I have learnt bravery in subject choice from her.

I know this is predictable, but I always want to know: what are you reading at the moment? What’s stacked up on your bedside table/e-reader?

EFEMIA: Patience by Daniel Clowes. I love a good graphic novel and I’ve been waiting to savour this one for a while. I’ve just finished Kim Gordon’s Girl In a Band, which is out of character for me. I never read non-fiction but I’m getting into memoir nowadays, especially of my heroes and she is one of them.

Ali Smith’s How To Be Both and A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James await me as does this lovely book called Africa Writes Back by James Currey. The latter surveys the African Writers Series and the history of it.

Which reminds me, how do you feel about e-readers?

EFEMIA: This is an official open call for anyone to feel free to buy me a Kindle with an Amazon gift certificate too. (laughs) I think they’re really handy for traveling. I have books stranded all over the world that haunt me because I’ve had to leave them behind. So a Kindle would be great to carry around my perennial favourites and new things I want to pick up.

That said, I don’t think I’ll ever stop buying “real” books. Reading’s a nice timeout from screen time. Plus I find folding the pages and the marking up of hard copy books therapeutic. The different typography, the pretty covers on my shelf, falling asleep with pages on my face. 

So both preferably. Does that make me a medium whore?

"He understood the physics of her. Her body and how she liked to be tossed, folded and bent on the bed. In sex he was gloriously tethered to her lurid kinetics." - "The Lake Retba Murder"

How did you get involved with Short Story Day Africa?

EFEMIA: I won 3rd place, (if that’s winning) of Feast, Famine and Potluck, the 2013 competition and that kind of launched my writing career. And then I got more involved in writing and the Cape Town literary scene and seeing Rachel Zadok around.

One day I plucked up the courage to ask if I could work for her and she said yes. I was always interested in how such a small group of really passionate people could get so much work and such great work done and I wanted to be a part of that.

Along with Bongani Kona, you’re one of the editors for the 2017 SSDA anthology, Migrations. This year, SSDA is running an editing fellowship programme, with me as the mentor. What makes you interested in editing? How do you handle the tension between being an editor and a writer (believe me, I really REALLY want to know if you have answers to this one). Or don’t you feel that tension?

EFEMIA: I think it’s a way for me to assert a kind of order in a very disordered world. You know, Brexit happened and the Great Barrier Reef is nearly dead but we’ve fixed the plot hole in page 31 about the parallel universe and the nuclear squirrel. I think it comes down to me really liking helping people and this is being the only way I know how to.

I struggle very hard with balancing the writer and editor sides of my personality. Sometimes part of me wants to rewrite the whole piece. But that would be pointless. I don’t want to erase the writer, I respect their work and vision. Editing is a lot like being a sounding board. I’m really just there to make the writer find in themselves something that was always there, that they didn’t know was and then use it to improve the story.

Through the mentorship I’m learning to hear the story in the author’s voice, slip into their mind. It’s helping me become a better editor and bodysnatcher. I’m also learning more about rigour - check, check and check again. The buck stops with you.

Efemia Chela was born in Zambia in 1991. She studied at Rhodes University, South Africa and Institut D’Etudes Politiques in Aix-En-Provence, France.

She enjoys eating pizza, reading graphic novels and watching black and white films. Her first published story, ‘Chicken’ was nominated for The 2014 Caine Prize For African Writing. Efemia’s subsequent stories and poems have been published in places like Brittle Paper, Jalada, Short.Sharp.Stories: Adults Only, Prufrock and PEN Passages: Africa. Efemia is currently a fellow of the inaugural Short Story Day Africa / Worldreader Editing Mentorship Programme and continues to write fiction whenever she can find a moment on the train and a working pen.  

Announcing the SSDA / Worldreader Editing Mentorship Programme

There is no shortage of people to teach you how to write, who want to teach you how to write - a WikiHow article, your primary school teacher, a dying writer anxious about their legacy, a fancy MA Creative Writing degree and Life, itself to name a few. And yet there isn’t the same collective desire to raise an editor, to give birth to the word-hacker, the invisible friend (or foe, depending), the red pen girdle of literary talent. After all, their name doesn’t even appear on the cover. Maybe in the acknowledgments, if the author knows who they are, the person who knows their book as well as they do and helps their vision become best realised. 

So considering this gap, Short Story Day Africa with the help of Worldreader decided to step in. We’re doing something quite different this year so that there are not only African writers for generations to come but African editors to help them along too. People who understand the cultural touchstones of the writers, their audience and can untangle a mess of adjectival clauses to boot. 

Migrations entries will be polished by not one editor but to a trio of them: Helen Moffett, Bongani Kona and Efemia Chela. Helen will serve as a mentor to Efemia and Bongani. SSDA's intern, Catherine Shepherd, will also participate in the mentorship, editing a chapbook of children's stories under the guidance of Karina Szczurek. The paid mentorship will run from September to November and tackle technical editing issues from structural and developmental editing to line editing. The mentorship is designed to transfer skills to those who wish to be career editors. 

Worldreader is the perfect partner for the Editing Mentorship. Way back in 2013, they provided the seed funding to edit the very first Short Story Day Africa anthology Feast, Famine & Potluck, and they have done so every year since. In addition, they have published our stories on Worldreader Mobile to more than half a million readers across the globe. Join  Worldreader Mobile for a library in your pocket.

Now for more about the team. 

Helen Moffett is a writer, freelance editor, feminist activist and recovering academic. She’s compiled three editions of a poetry anthology as well as a guide to academic English for Southern African students, and a collection of South African landscape writings, Lovely Beyond Any Singing. She has toured Canada with her debut collection of poems, Strange Fruit, published by Modjaji Books. Her collaborations include a cricket book and the Girl Walks In erotica series with Sarah Lotz and Paige Nick under the nom de plume Helena S. Paige. Her extensive academic work is published locally and abroad, and she also writes for the Mail & Guardian. She is one of the most experienced editors in anglophone Africa, with a special interest in development editing and the training of young editors, writers, journalists and researchers. She blogs at http://helenmoffett.bookslive.co.za/. 

Bongani Kona is a freelance writer and contributing editor of Chimurenga. His work has appeared in Mail & Guardian, Sunday Times, Rolling Stone (South Africa), and other publications and websites. He is also studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. 

Efemia Chela was born in Zambia in 1991. She studied at Rhodes University and Institut D'Etudes Politiques in Aix-En-Provence, France. Her first published story ‘Chicken’ was nominated for The 2014 Caine Prize For African Writing and her subsequent work has appeared in places like Prufrock, and PEN Passages. She continues to write stories whenever she can find a working pen.

Karina Szczurek is the author of Truer than Fiction: Nadine Gordimer Writing Post-Apartheid South Africa and the editor of Touch: Stories of Contact, Encounters with André Brink, Contrary: Critical Responses to the Novels of André Brink (with Willie Burger), and Water, New Short Fiction From Africa (with Nick Mulgrew). Her debut Novel, Invisible Others, was published in 2014.

Although Catherine Shepherd started writing as a child, it was only recently through projects like Short Story Day Africa and Writivism that she got the courage to put her writing out there. Her short stories have appeared in Holiday Shorts,  published by Black Letter Media, Imagine Africa 500 and the 2016 Writivism Anthology. Catherine has a degree in journalism from Rhodes University. She currently lives in Cape Town, but has plans to build a writer's retreat in Suurbraak.  

 

They can’t wait to meet your words! 
Special thanks to Worldreader for sponsoring the paid mentorship.