TITLE: Unfit For Society
AUTHOR: Munira Hussein
PUBLISHER: Writers Guild Kenya (2018)
AVAILABLE AT: Amazon, Writers Guild Kenya
COST: Kshs 700/=
REVIEWER: Alexander Nderitu
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| The author brandishing her book (Photo: Circute Photography) |
Unfit for Society was the first book by Munira to be published. It
is a work of prose, a short story collection, which surprised me because I
previously knew of her purely as a poet. In fact, it’s too bad that (unlike
cities such as London and Massachusetts) Nairobi doesn't have an official position of City PoetLaureate of because Ms. Hussein would have deserved to hold that title
at least once.
But let’s get on with the
analysis. Since there are only seven stories in the collection, we can examine
them one by one.
Hanging from the Edge of a Half-Moon is the title of the first
tale. In it, the female narrator reminisces about her childhood friend, Sofia.
Growing up in the vast but marginalized northern part of Kenya, the two girls
had a normal enough childhood that included gossiping about boys, discovering
pop music, and fantasizing about their futures. But even then, Sofia had begun
showing signs of religious fanaticism. She attended a madrassa, always wore a hijab,
preached like an Imam, and had a vague desire to ‘fight for Islam’. Their path
of destiny forked after primary school, with the narrator continuing with her
education while Sophia gets married. A few years later, the narrator is shocked
to see a picture of the hijab’d Sofia
‘in every local paper’, believed to be a member of the dreaded Al-Shabaab
terrorist group.
Oblivion centres on family dynamics in a conservative society.
Things have never been easy in the narrator’s extended family, particularly in
matters involving her Uncle Diba. Unlike her father, Diba is not a responsible
man. He’s lazy and quarrelsome. He loses his parcel of inherited land ans has
to move in with relatives, a serious retrogression in fortunes. He flunks in
business and his marriage fails. But when his brother, the narrator’s father, dies
after falling violently ill, Uncle Diba is once more in a position of authority
which casts an ominous cloud over the fate of the narrator, her siblings and
mother.
A Chance at Life, the third tale in the book, flashes some romance
over the dark happenings in most of the book. In it, the female narrator meets
a writer named Ben David in downtown Nairobi and is immediately attracted to
him. The fact that ‘his eyes had an angelic appearance’ probably helped! They
start dating and gradually move in together. Alas, this being a Munira Hussein
Production, you can bet that there’s a tragedy waiting just around the corner.
The Acceptance Letter started out as a lengthy Facebook post. It’s
in the form of a letter, by a girl called Amara, to one ‘Uncle Latif’. Written
in bitterness and brimming with shock and emotion, the ‘niece’ in this saga
accuses the dreadful Uncle Latif of sexually abusing her when she was young and
vulnerable. What outrages Amara the most about her villainous Uncle is that
he’s a religious figure, a respected man in the community. Amara writes:
‘Every passing day, Uncle Latif, I think of
you and your filthy hands cruising the curves of my body. Whenever I see any
sign of religion, I see hypocrisy covered in a white shroud.’
Story No. 5, A Woman Like Me, reads
more like a novella than a short story because it’s 41 pages long. In it, Leyla
- the daughter of a strict and hyper-religious man - discovers that she’s
pregnant for her live-in town boyfriend, Joseph. This development prompts her
to examine the men in her life, including her violent ex-boyfriend Victor, and
fret about her future.
In Dawn of Death, set in the semi-arid northern parts of Kenya, a
family man takes a short trip and returns to find a tragedy of unimaginable
proportions has occurred in his homestead. This drama highlights the difficult lives
of pastoralists in the modern world. It can also be interpreted – what do you do when you lose something that was central to your existence - be it a
person, a business, dignity, faith etc? Do you give up or attempt to re-build
your life?
The title story, Unfit for Society, rounds up the
collection. Here, we meet Ruffo – a strong-willed young lady trying to live
what many would consider a normal life. But Ruffo comes from a patriarchal and
rather backward region where women are second-class citizens by default. Young girls
exist for the express purpose of getting married, and their education is
therefore not important. Even less important for girls is inheritance which
fathers consider a total waste because their daughters will leave for their
marital homes, eroding generational wealth. When it comes to making decisions,
women may as well be part of the furniture. In one incident, a group of uninvited
male visitors call on Ruffo’s father one morning and just like that, she’s
betrothed to some man she’s never heard of. Bucking the trend in this rigid
backwater community is easier said than done, as Ruffo soon finds out! As one
might say in Kiswahili, ‘Ruffo anakumbwa
na changa moto chungu nzima!’ (‘Ruffo faces overwhelming odds!’) In the
end, the readers must ask themselves whether Ruffo is failing her society or vice versa. This story, and the volume in general, shows
what true feminism is all about: not male-bashing, or women becoming more
‘masculine’, but addressing historical injustices and bringing equality to all
sexes. The author speaks for a lot of women and girls, not just in Africa but
around the world.
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Munira Hussein at a recent event in
Nairobi city (Photo: Munira Hussein)
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My friend and fellow writer Temo Buliro argues that ‘the short story is not
inferior to the novel.’ Unfit for Society
proves this by bringing to bear a wide-range of themes: parenting, feminism,
patriarchy, terrorism, love, friendship, death, nationalism, and religion. Every
gender-based and feminist organization in the country (especially the
ubiquitous ‘girl-child’ NGOs) should purchase a copy of this work. It’s only
‘fiction’ in quotes – the issues are as real as the African sun that scorches
most of the locations described in this text. As Martin
Greenberg wrote in The Robert Ludlum
Companion:
‘Writers of popular fiction are much more important than they're given credit for. It's not just that they entertain but they reflect their times.’
As I pointed out earlier, the author is a poet. She manages to
sneak in some poetry, which adds to the overall ‘literariness’ of the book.
Here’s an excerpt from an epitaph on Pg. 93:
When Yusuf says, “I know your father and
mother and I want to marry you,”
it is not a request, it is not a
question, it is more of a statement,
a declaration, a notification to
me about a future plan for me
that has already been made
without consulting me’
This being a debut book published by a
bludgeoning agency, drawbacks were unavoidable. My first issue is with the
uninspiring cover art. It depicts the sketched figure of a lone woman
approaching what appears to be some villagers standing under a tree. It’s not
attractive to the casual browser. It doesn’t ‘pop’. I’ve spent almost 20 years
in the book business and I can tell you for free that covers are very important
in the marketing process. Any poor cover design is a wasted opportunity to
seduce a potential reader or buyer. The cover of Unfit tells me nothing of interest.
Editing is an even bigger issue with the text.
There are several types of editing that go into book production and each one of
them is important. The editing here is not ‘tight’ at all. For example, in Dawn of Death, the word ‘goat’ appears three times in a single sentence. Ideally, one does not repeat any
form of a word in the same sentence. You either restructure the sentence or cut
it up into smaller bits. All you need to drive a narrative, in the English language, is a
‘subject’ and a ‘predicate’: what/who you’re talking about and what it/they did
eg. ‘Little Jack Horner sat in a corner’. Some philosophizing could also have
been done without, especially in A Woman
Like Me, making the text shorter and more crisp, and allowing the reader to
reach their own conclusions. The editor might have over-indulged the scribe.
Still, it’s good to see young Kenyan writers continuing
the contemporary short story tradition of Ngumi Kibera (The Grapevine Stories) and Sam Kahiga (Flight to Juba). Munira’s peers include Tom Mwiraria (The Land of Bones) and Eunniah Mbabazi
(Breaking Down). Unfit for Society is a bold and thought-provoking read. Here we
have an author and a book that that are quite fit for literary society.
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