CALL AND RESPONSE

A wide range of stories examine family and life in contemporary Botswana.

These stories—set mainly in the author’s hometown of Serowe and the Botswanan capital of Gaborone—illuminate the inner lives of girls and women of varying ages. Idiomatic phrases add texture to the prose, elegantly describing the characters' lives and their internal conflicts. In the opening story, “Botalaote,” Boikanyo tires of taking care of her sick aunt and creates emotional distance by calling her “the patient.” Like all young people, she seeks excitement and would rather, as she says, “eat my youth.” Boikanyo begins dating a boy called Sixteen who helps distract her from her responsibilities. Years later, when she tells her friends the story of her youth, she realizes that death was omnipresent. Her friends are most interested in the “juxtaposition of school and cemetery, [which were] side by side, and a hill cutting them off from the ward. It was as if they thought that, away from our parents, we kids fraternized with the dead.” With death comes the inevitable question of how to live, which many of the narrators of these stories grapple with. In “Small Wonders,” a widow frozen with grief can’t understand how the world hasn’t stopped since her husband’s death. She isolates herself and tries to delay the necessary final farewell ceremony. And in “A Good Girl,” a young woman who as a child strove to be well-mannered goes to university and lives in a way her family wouldn’t approve of as she searches for love. Of herself and her roommates she says, “We wanted love, oh, we wanted love, but we knew, we had been warned, that for girls like us, love was dangerous, a bright-burning flame, it would lick us alive.” Moreover, she recognizes the hypocritical expectations placed on her. Her brother flaunts his infidelity to his wife while she feels it’s necessary to hide her exploits.

A lovely debut brimming with deeply felt and well-rounded stories.