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Sofia Samatar: Tender
Jan. 31st, 2018 08:37 amSofia Samatar’s collection of short fiction, Tender, is a feast. Some of these stories I had read before, but most were new to me. The interesting thing is that, in rereading the stories I had read before, such as “The Ogres of Africa,” I found new insights. These are stories that contain multitudes. They are about monsters and outsiders (which are often the same thing, at least in the minds of those who define what is inside and normal). Or about people who have placed themselves outside, beyond, alone. They are about stories within stories, and things which are not the things they seem to be.
Many of these stories can be seen as part of a conversation with literature or history, an examination of assumptions and premises, a twist on a genre. “The Ogres of Africa,” for example, is structured as a bestiary cum travelogue, with marginalia to rival anything that bored monastery scribes have incorporated into their endless recopying of classical texts. But though the beasts are as fabulous as anything in the medieval catalogue, the marginalia tell the truth, of colonialist arrogance and indigenous resistance.
“Selkie Stories Are for Losers” is again a conversation with a genre of folk tale, one which at the sane tine respects the hidden truth of the source material, that of the compelled woman, who takes her chance at freedom no matter the cost, but also examines the cost in intergenerational pain.
“Those” is in conversation with history, specifically the history of European colonialism in Africa, but also with the tropes used to dehumanise the colonised in descriptions if that history.
Included in this collection is a short novella, “Fallow,” set in a colony of pacifists who left earth, an earth seemingly suffering from ecological breakdown, to avoid persecution brought on by their refusal to fight in endless wars. The colony of Fallow is an intentional community, a religious community, one that values conformity, that imagines it has a manifest destiny that justifies all manner of things. A woman named Agar presents the narrative as a series of stories, drawn from memories of her youth, which slowly reveal the oppressive attitudes and policies of this “peaceable kingdom,” yet still holding a dream of more.
In these and other stories, Samatar seeks to open up new ways of seeing old narratives, master narratives that centre the perspectives of the dominant, the privileged, the ones who create those narratives. “An Account of the Land of Witches,” for example, offers a text, then a refutation of that text, then an account of academic study of text and countertext that unravels with the circumstances if the academic. In some stories, such as “A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals” and “The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle” Samatar subverts Western classical ideas about the firm and structure of narratives, asking us to consider linkages that are not temporal or causal, not based in any of the classical unities.
These are layered stories, stories that challenge on multiple axes, that use language and allusion with grace and precision and complexity and fluidity, and draw on history and traditions of multiple cultures, giving comparable narrative weight to African and Asian sources as to European ones. They are subtle things, whose meanings shift and deepen the more you look at them. Samatar is a craftsperson of the highest degree, and this collection contains some of her finest work to date.
