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Business Stationary Mart - Say You're One of Them
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List Price: $23.99
Our Price: $13.84
Your Save: $ 10.15 ( 42% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780316113786
ISBN: 0316113786
Label: Little, Brown and Company
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 2008-06-09
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Studio: Little, Brown and Company
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Joyce meets Flannery O'Connor meets Chinua Achebe?
Comment: You can read other Amazon reviewers and the synopsis from the Washington Post here for an overview of the themes and their author. What no other previous entry has conveyed is the power of Akpan's language. He rarely pauses from dialogue or moving the story along often intricate lines, so when he does notice the landscape, it's for a telling detail. These scenes allow the narrative to "catch its breath" and to pause for dramatic effect. Since most of the stories included here rush along often into truly harrowing scenarios, these momentary shifts towards the horizon only intensify the punch of these unflinchingly brutal, poignant tales.
My favorite comes on p. 74, about thirty pages into the novella (130 pp.) "Fattening for Gabon." The children do not know yet why they are being fussed over and threatened alternately. But, note how the details compress traditional with globalized Africa near the border that separates them from their fate, and match the transition from pastoral safety to menacing journey under powerful forces-- a trail that Yewa and the narrator Kotchikpa follow unwittingly:
"The fisherman at sea spangled the water with their lanterns, like stars. Yet there was no sea, no sky, no land, only points of light dangling in a black chasm. The night had eaten the coconut vistas too, except when the canoe lanterns, moving, were periodically blotted out behind the trees. The sea blew a strong kiss of breeze, warm and unrelenting, through our neighborhood. In the distance, we could hear the hum from the no-man's-land market fizzling out for the night. We could also hear the semitrailers and trucks coming and going from the border, backing up or parking. Sometimes, from where we sat, we saw the beams of their headlights sweeping the skies of neighboring villages, like searchlights."
Akpan's skilled at what his Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius, called the practice of "discernment." The author's able to imagine himself into the scenes he depicts, and they unfold from his imagination weighted on imaginative levels that deepen their immediate references. They convey a spiritual gloss that reminds me of many of the stories of similarly "paralyzed" youngsters and adults in Joyce's "Dubliners." Perhaps the difference is that Fr. Akpan believes in what James Joyce sought to transmit by literary rather than salvific means to the reader seeking, along with the characters, enlightenment. For both Akpan and Joyce, we get the machinations of the grown-up world filtered often unbearably through the perspectives of those too young, too powerless, or too overwhelmed to cope with pure evil and utter chaos.
In each story, often subtly and deftly, he manages to refer to Christian themes that his characters briefly recall within their terror or wonder. I only gave this four stars because "What Language" to me while a good story fell short of the mark set by the other four, and out of these, the other novella, "Luxurious Hearses," appeared at times to be too schematic, almost as if "Things Fall Apart" by his predecessor Chinua Achebe (also reviewed by me) needed to be updated within a framework either too long or too short for the pages given to it. Yet, the story ends as gracefully, or as awfully, as most of the others here. Akpan spares no sense in making you feel, as potently as did the Jesuit preacher in Joyce's "Portrait," the hold the imagination can have over the pinioned and gibbering soul.
Other places in his fiction, luckily, Akpan shifts towards a degree of grace, if often tempered with irony as the expectations of faith are always tested to their utmost, and many of the characters find their fate one of flight, exile, or a kind of martyrdom for their convictions. The earlier Amazonian comparing Akpan to Flannery O'Connor hit the mark. A quick example later in the story: "The plantations and sea loomed behind the road, and sometimes it looked as if the plantation were on the sea or as if the people on the road were walking on the water, like Jesus." (130)
This writer, I predict, will only improve with his next stories, and a five-star rating will surely be earned. The stories demand attention, and the unfamiliarity that Western readers will have with the Africanized syntax, loan words, French and untranslated native dialogue, plunge you in, appropriately, to the dilemmas of a continent undergoing dramatic upheaval. His characters may not find much luck; but we are lucky that Fr. Akpan can convey their drama to us in stories that often prove to be, despite the risk of cliché, ones you cannot put down much as you wish you could forget their carefully described patterns of darkness and light, despair and hope, grace and damnation.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Electrifying and Harrowing
Comment: Uwem Akpan has created an astonishing collection of five short stories; two of them are over 100 pages and can easily be termed novellas. Each employs a different tone, but all of them have one thing in common: they focus on young children and how they're faring in the endless conflicts that define many countries in Africa.
The strongest of the stories, I believe, is My Parent's Bedroom, written in first person from a Rwandan girl who is the child of a Tutsi mother and a Hutu father. Within the course of the story, her father is forced to make an excruciating choice and she will need to gather all her courage to survive. The sheer power of this story took my breath away and made me cringe about the unspeakable acts that humans do to other humans.
Fattening for Gabon -- the novella -- is also an astonishing literary achievement, partially because Akpan pieces together the various dialects -- English, French, and African dialects -- to create characters that are distinctly memorable. Here, a ten year old brother and his five year old sister slowly realize that their uncle is attempting to sell them into slavery. As the story unfolds with all its horrors, the young boy must make decisions that someone three times his age would struggle with. It's survival...but at what cost?
The reader meets young Kenyan children in makeshift shanties who are forced to sniff glue to quell their hunger and prostitute themselves to survive; young Christians and Muslims who must sacrifice friendship because of forces they don't understand; a Muslim amputee who has only his faith and his wits to survive.
In this story, Akpan writes, "This was not the time to think about Islam or Christianity or God too much. It was a time just to be a human being and to celebrate that. What mattered now was how to get people to lay down their weapons and biases, how to live together." As it is throughout history, a belief that one's religion is right and the other is wrong leads to agonizing conflicts. Combine poverty and chaos and situations arise that defy the human brain.
These immersions into children's minds in the worst of situations will stay with me and haunt me for a long, long time. This author writes with a perspective that is rare, a humanity that is great, and an openness that is authentic and harrowing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Contribution
Comment: This collection of stories introduces the horrors of the wars in Africa to a public largely ignorant of the details. The most moving was In My Parents Bedroom, in which the people come alive in a vivid and terrifying manner. I found most of the others a bit too heady and felt they could have had more impact.
Customer Rating:
Summary: May the children's voices be heard!
Comment: "Say You're One of Them" is a powerful collection of five short stories written by a Jesuit priest, Nigerian-born Uwem Akpan, who is currently a seminary teacher in Zimbabwe. The five stories contained within this book are all narrated by children, and it is a credit to Akpan that he is able to tell us these incredibly poignant and heartwrenching stories through the points of views of children, and to be able to so in an authentic manner.
Among the stories that really affected me emotionally was "An Ex-Mas Feast", the story of a family that suffers from poverty [as is the case in most parts of Africa], a family where the mother resorts to giving her kids glue to sniff just to stave off hunger, and where the main source of income is through prostitution by the 12-year-old daughter. We know these things happen, yet reading about it here just makes it all the more real and cries out for some sort of action. The stories in this book cover a myriad of problems in Africa - poverty, hunger, AIDS and its repercussions, the sexual exploitation of the young,genocide etc.
It is my fervent hope that this book will help give a true voice to the children of Africa, and be a call to action to help the people in Africa move from suffering and hopelessness towards a future with hope.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Say You Are One Of Them
Comment: I was attracted to this book after hearing an interview on NPR with the author. The interviewer mentioned that it was written in the voice of the children, as children. I was not disappointed. Here we see a child's eye view of some of the horrific political situations in Africa without the politics. It is written from the perspective of those who remain innocent in a world that is not innocent, even when they are swept up in the horrors themselves and become part of it.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.
In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa.
Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent. (2008)
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