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Vanessa Onwuemezi

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Dark Neighbourhood (2021) 34 Exemplare

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Granta 156: Interiors (2021) — Mitwirkender — 34 Exemplare
The White Review 26 (2020) — Mitwirkender — 2 Exemplare

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I was reluctant to read this because “surrealism” but I found that label a bit of a red herring. Far more prominent in this collection is an effort to find a new way of using language, resulting in a much more abstract construction of prose and imagery than one would be used to. It’s a different way of seeing, like an Impressionist painter producing quite a different image of a subject than a Realist painter would. Of course poetry would quite often use impressionistic language and, no surprise, Onwuemezi is a poet.

These stories require more concentration I think given the unfamiliarity of the prose style, and sense-making benefits from reading them more than once. You’ll notice repetitions of certain phrases and objects; I’m not sure if these are intentional or an accidental artifact. For instance, the phrase “love is the hardest thing” occurs in the first, fourth, and fifth of the seven stories. “Shadows fold neatly around corners” appears in the fourth and seventh stories. Nice phrase, that one, I’d use it more than once too I suppose.

My favorite stories are I think the first, “Dark Neighbourhood”, the fourth, “The Growing State”, and the last, “At the Heart of Things”.

Opening the collection to “Dark Neighbourhood” one quickly realizes the story is experimental in form, prose giving way to poetry and back again, extra gaps inserted between words seeming to seek an extra emphasis, and yes, it is somewhat surreal. Phrases like “All is lit with a blaze of shine-yellow” fired up my enthusiasm. Sometimes it read to me like an AI was tasked with creating lines of dialogue but more often it left me intrigued with the way language was being used to make us see in a new light, which worked well with the allegorical shape of the story’s plot.

Which is: encamped with a multitude of others before a closed gate, the narrator and his partner wait to pass through to imagined bliss on the other side, spending their time amassing the highest pile of somewhat random goods. I interpreted this as a Buddhist sort of story, warning us that centering our desires and attachment to material things in the belief they will lead us to happiness, a belief that our societies often encourage, is a fatally flawed model. Our combined efforts in this direction are in fact creating a wasteland unfit for forming the natural human connections that would truly allow us to thrive.

When the gate finally opens for the narrator at the story’s end, he realizes with horror that his desires and material things have not led to bliss, and he is left only with his unexamined self staring back at him. Too late, he wonders if there wasn’t another path he should have explored, rather than be swept along with the stream of mass conformity all around.

“The Growing State” seems to be about a dying man. One’s dying moments are conceivably quite surreal, so if ever surreality could be Realist, here we go. This story shares themes with the first. The narrator is a wealthy businessman known as “Winner”. He is dying in his office after a drug overdose, after a lifetime of failure in his relationships with wives and children and other people. He is ushered out of life by the office cleaning woman, who observes the unmet thirst hovering over his body. “I bleat like a body without a head, an open throat,” he agrees.

In a vision from his grave he sees what he has missed, imagining a more successful rootedness:

Strange how the light towards the end of the day presses a change in my mood. Long light and shadows fold neatly around corners, two-toned rocks, branches slick with under-shadow, pointed reaches of grass. Hello family, pushing roots into the earth they settle themselves here to keep me company. My closest friends and children and grandchildren sprout from the ground, just before my eyes melt. What shame. All throughout my life, there were trees, shrubs, and without looking I walked past.


The final story “At the Heart of Things” is about a woman who has hit her head and is having dreams/hallucinations/experiences of being underwater. Her relations with various family members play out in silence down in the depths. Really this is just a story for the pleasure of reading its language and images, though near the end it does seem to have some kinship with the previous stories mentioned:

After then, my travels down the tube rails seemed the stranger thing. Travelling into the city with the rest of them, sliding down the . Eye contact eyes snap away. The city demands a certain kind of contact only. It demands suspicions. Changes the meaning of a glance or a look of love, to yourself you keep your looks only to your own chest. It begins with everybody and nobody. People flashing lights they shoes, make up, rats’ tails and so on hinge-necked bulb-headed bug-eyed. We are all alike in this strangeness. But I was accustomed to the dark pressures of the water oh I’m no longer accustomed to this.
… (mehr)
 
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lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |

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