I thought he’d see me as a cold, wet, miserable thing to be dispatched to the bathroom, but it was as if he didn’t notice anything different. Once, I got home soaked and feeling like a drowned rat, caught in a downpour on my cycle back from work. His approach and attitude to life were so different to mine. Not truth, but her trying to capture it.” She said she was trying to capture truth, but it seemed to me too obscure a concept to understand. All their faces were detailed but smudged grotesquely. “The pencil outline seemed unable to contain their charcoal filling. I stare at the ceiling and try not to think much. “I get into bed but sleep doesn’t come easily.
You said it was a complication you could do without, and then you smiled.” “I kissed you on the mouth three days after we met.
“Hell, said Dominee Boonzaier, would have so many skelms from the bank that there wouldn’t be room for the Tswana and the English, and the godless people from Johannesburg.” If they’re better than me, they will pity me they will want to help me they will want to save me. If I sound bush, the people will think they are better than me. Having dog-eared this fascinating collection of stories I strolled back to collect my markers and celebrate that love with excerpts from each story. “ Queer Africa is a collection of charged, tangled, tender, unapologetic, funny, bruising and brilliant stories about the many ways in which we love each other on the continent,” writes Gabeba Baderoon in her foreword to this anthology edited by Karen Martin and Makhosazana Xaba. We learn much in these gloriously achieved stories about love and sex, but perhaps more about why we hurt and need one another. In these unafraid stories of intimacy, sweat, betrayal and restless confidences, we accompany characters into cafes, tattoo salons, the barest of bedrooms, the coldly glinting spaces into which the rich withdraw, unlit streets, and their own deepest interiors.
Phrases like Wamuwi Mbao’s ‘She looks like you, when nobody’s watching her’ and Sello Duiker’s narrator’s ‘gentle sadness that doesn’t take you all at once’ share with us not only the aftermath of sex, but moments where the world opens itself. Sello Duiker, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Beatrice Lamwaka and Richard de Nooy – as well as new voices that map out a haunting, intricate, complex Africa. The collection includes exquisitely written work by some of the great African writers of this century – K.
Queer Africa is a collection of charged, tangled, tender, unapologetic, funny, bruising and brilliant stories about the many ways in which we love one another on the continent.
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