Say You're One of Them

Title of short story collection by Nigerian writer, Uwem Akpan, which is Oprah's latest book club pick.

I'm thrilled for him. Akpan is a Jesuit priest who's worked his guts out to get his stories down. Until he was given a laptop as a gift, he had to write on seminary computers, after 10pm. Much of his early work was gobbled by viruses.

Over on HuffPo, though, Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House magazine, is not feeling Akpan's work.

I met Spillman in Kenya, 2006. I was surprised by the nastiness of his review. My friend Petina Gappah, puts it well:

Rob is a nice guy, but hardly an expert: his recently published Penguin Anthology of African Writing very curiously included writers who have not published a single book. A couple of years ago, he wrote a Vanity Fair article about African literature sprinkled with embarrassing errors ..

To describe a book as "maudlin, sappy, pedestrian, plodding" - without a single specific example, or reference to the excoriated content, is lousy reviewing.

Spillman says:

The stories in Say You Are One of Them are drawn directly from the well-known African headlines, but with little added imagination. They have nothing of the power of Akpan's countryman Uzodinma Iweala's searing novel about a child soldier, Beasts of No Nation.....

Ummm....Iweala was born and raised in the US. Has never lived on the African continent. His invented "pidgin" narrative voice in Beasts of No Nation is bizarre, irritating, and utterly unconvincing. It was a struggle for me to get through more than a page of it.

Equally bizarre: Spillman's suggestion that a single African writer should somehow cover the whole spectrum of African experience. Akpan has written the stories he wants to tell. More power to him. I'm delighted that Oprah's pick offers a platform for voices, lives and daily survival strategies of of Nairobi's street kids and slum dwellers.

Thousands of other talented African writers are putting out other stories. It's up to Spillman to seek them out. Publish them, even. And no, Akpan's book will not "stand for all of African fiction". Any more than Spillman's anthology does. Any more than other Oprah picks stand for all of American fiction. It's a single book, and should be reviewed on it's singular merits and weaknesses.