Review: "Our Daughter, Who Art in America" (Mukana Press)

 

Our Daughter, Who Art in America
Published April 2024 via Mukana Press
★★★

My dear, she hung up the phone before I could ask her what happiness had to do with the marriage. (loc. 87, "Our Daughter, Who Art in America")

A mother struggles against the reality of a lonely life with her daughters both gone. A girl learns that she is more like her mother than she thinks. A child is unprepared for her brother to grow up without her, and for her friendship with the family maid to come to a forced end. A swimmer witnesses a horror from the underworld of South Africa. A college student learns that your own perceived identity does not always match the identity perceived by those around you.

Our Daughter, Who Art in America takes its title from the first of the ten stories in this collection. I am only rarely a short-story reader (I read very quickly and find it frustrating for stories to end just as I feel that I am getting into them!), but I couldn't resist picking up this collection of diverse voices from parts of the continent and beyond (as far as I can tell, from the author bios: Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the US). Per the editors' note at the beginning, the stories are divided in two, with the lighter stories up front and the darker stories in the second half (to allow for a choose-your-own-adventure style of reading). I have to admit that I struggled to find the distinction; though the characters move through with determination, there is more rawness in these stories than there is joy.

As is inevitably the case with collections, some of these stories resonated with me more than others; I particularly enjoyed "Body Parts," in which the narrator stumbles across an organ-harvesting ring (is it odd to say that I enjoyed that story? It startled me, and of course it was well written) and the understated social dynamics of "The Ripening," in which a girl sees her household fall into upheaval and her brother and the maid, previously her allies, become strangers to her. It's nice to see a mix of settings and contexts, and especially to see some stories from writers I might not have found otherwise. (And for the stories lower on my list: well, that's the good thing about short stories going by so quickly!)

I'm very curious about the selection process for the stories in this book; as other reviewers have noted, it's a pretty slim volume, and—while obviously no one writer is representative of a given country!—it surprised me a bit to see that three of the ten writers are from Kenya. (On the other hand, I guess it's safe to assume that the call for stories was loudest in countries where English is more prominent? So perhaps I shouldn't be too surprised not to see any stories from, e.g., parts of Africa where French/Arabic/etc. are more common.) I hope Mukana Press carries on with this sort of anthology, but I'd also love to see some pieces from farther-flung locales next time.

Thanks to the authors and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.