"Honor of a Woman" by Dipita Kwa Project 196 Cameroon

"Honor of a Woman" by Dipita Kwa Project (2008, 8 pages)

Project 196

Country 9 of 196
Week Two

Cameroon
Dipita Kwa

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 
6. Haiti
7. Trinidad and Tobago 
8. Ukraine
9. Cameroon

f you are an author and want to represent your country, please contact me.  If you want to do a guest post on your favorite story for the feature please contact me also.  

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

At first I thought I was setting myself an impossible task but a bit of research has made me optimistic  that I can find a short story from all 196 countries in the world.   I feel this part of the project will be completed.   In a much more challenging perhaps impossible project, I also hope to publish on my blog a contemporary short story from an author from each of the 196 countries.  

"My daughter, roving the neighborhood from one room and off-license to another like an evil spirit, will yield you nothing but dishonor and destruction...Look, this world is fast becoming the proverbial calabash of diseases.."

"Honor of a Woman" by Dipita Kwa  is a very moving beautifully written and marvelously told retelling of the parable of the prodigal son.   This time it is a prodigal daughter, the setting is  the village of Mukunda in Cameroon which is  in West Central Africa.  The story is told in the first person by a sixteen year old girl, living in an economically poor part of the city with her mother and her big sister, Muto.  The father died six years ago.  There is a great tension and rancor between the mother and the 18 year old big sister.  Most of the very real issues center around the fact that the daughter stays out very late at night.  As the story opens the mother is out on the veranda waiting for the daughter to come home.  The more she waits the madder she gets.   Any parents of teenagers can relate, I have three teenage daughters so this story spoke very directly to me.

The narrator does not understand why her big sister stays out late almost every night.  The mother has her guilt anxieties,   when her husband died she left the girls in the care of one of her husbands older sister for four years.  The daughter thinks back as to how peaceful things were before her mother took over care of them.  There is a very dramatic telling of a terrible fight between the mother and the older daughter.   The mother has a past of her own, another woman's husband died in her bed and Muto when mad enough throws this in her mother's face.

After one terrible physical alteration Muto disappears. The aunt comes and says to the mother

"you lived a dirty life that you never thought could rub off on your daughter.  When your own mother complained and begged you to slow down, you beat her and dragged her about like a dog with a deadly disease."  

The mother is told that her daughter is paying the mother back for the way she treated her own mother.   The mother is told, very rightly, that she is caught in "an endless cycle of curses".  It will be a miracle if Muto is not soon pregnant and begins the cycle again.  

Every night the mother, trying to do it in secret, peeps into Muto's room in hopes she returns.  When the younger sister complains toere her aunt that the mother worries more about Muto than her the aunt reminds her of the story of the prodigal son.   

The story ends beautifully.  I do not want to do anything to deprive first time readers of "Honor of a Woman" by Dipita Kwa from the wonderful very moving final pages of this story.   I recommend this story to anyone.  Those with teenage daughters will be made to think by this story.   It is about forgiveness and the true meaning of the love of a parent for their children.   This is a deeply felt very honest story.  I for sure would like to read more of the work of Dipita Kwa.  

Cameroon, in central west Africa, has a population of 20,000,000.  It is a former French colony which achieved independence in 1960.  The official languages are French and English.  Forty percent of the population is under 15.  The bulk of the literary output of Cameroonian writers is in French.  

Dipita Kwa Dipita Kwa was born Tiko. After obtaining a B.Sc in Economics from the University of Buea, he taught Commerce and Finance, Economic Geography and Economics at Regina Pacis College Mutengene where he co-edited The Galery, the college magazine before moving on to Maersk Cameroun. He won a silver trophy in short story writing during the second edition of the University Festival of Arts and Culture in Dschang (UNIFAC2001). His short stories,Honour of a Woman, The Wages of Plunder, The Fall of a Hunter, A Mother’s Heart, When All is Lost, etc. have been published in e-magazines: British Council Crossing Borders Magazine, Ken*Again, AuthorMe, Palapala, among others. His first novel Times and Seasons was published by Cook Communication USA in February 2008. He was recently published in an Anthology of short stories entitledOne World alongside Literary Greats like Chika Unigwe, Petinah Gappah (Elegy of Easterly), Henrietta Rose-Innes (winner of the 2008 Caine Prize for African Writing), Jumpa Lahiri (winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). Dipita is currently working on his second novel Pieces of Silver. Dipita enjoys writing, watching movies and is looking forward to contributing his portion towards the rebirth of the Cameroonian literary landscape.

You can read a very moving story by Kwa "A Mother's Heart" here

I also want to recommend that anyone who takes a multicultural approach to understanding the world to study the offerings and thoughts on the webpage of the publisher of the anthology in which I read this story, One World, New Internationalist. New Internationalist is   strongly devoted to global justice and does all it can to provide its readers with the truth.  I have been following their webpage, which is more than just a wonderful collection of publications, ever since July 2010 when I began to blog on the Caine Prize stories, which they publish in anthology form.

New Internationalist can be found here.

"Crossing the Dunes" by Ruth Quinlan

"Crossing the Dunes" by Ruth Quinlan (2012, 2 pages)

A Collection of Poetry and Prose from the 2011-2012

National University of Ireland at Galway MA in Writing Class

Edited by Maya Cannon

Ruth Quinlan

My Prior Posts on stories from Abandoned Darlings

"The threats of pain and ruin to despise,

To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,

And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes,The threats of pain and ruin to despise,

To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,

And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes"  Thomas Gray

Not long ago I read and posted on all of the short stories in 30 Under 30:  A Selection of Short Stories by Thirty Young Irish Writers edited by Elizabeth Reapy.  One of the very big benefits to me, aside from the pleasure of reading some great stories, is that it created a base of young Irish writers whose careers I could begin to follow.    My thinking was if this is done for a relatively long time you could develop a sense of the way modern Irish literary culture works and I could see how writers develop themselves or how they abandon their craft.   

Abandoned Darlings, edited by Maya Cannon (2012) is an anthology of short stories and poetry by the MA in writing class at National University of Ireland at Galway.  I have never been to Galway but I know for a city of under 100,000 people it has produced more great writers than many a city with over five million people.  You can find  countries with a population of over 100,000,000 million whose literary output would be put to shame by Galway writers.  I will review and post one at a time on all of the short stories in the collection, fourteen in my quick count.

 I do not especially like posts on anthologies of short stories that just rave on about them in general.  When I visit a forest I do not just like to see the trees, I like to see the moss that grows on them, the vines that climb them and listen to the birds that make them their home.  I like to peel the bar from the trees to see the insects that bore into the trees, I like to study their roots. Sometimes I like to climb to the top of the trees and survey the environment   once in a while I build a tree house and stay awhile.    I  prefer to post on short stories one at a time rather than generalize about a collection.


There are lots of poems in the collection, I have already read several.  I liked them all.  I have posted on collections of Eastern European poetry but generally speaking I do see much point in posting on short poems one at a time.   The only poets I have read extensively are Yeats and Whitman.  I have read broadly in older English language poetry but not much contemporary work.    I will thus be posting only on the short stories in the collection.  

"Crossing the Dunes" by Ruth Quinlan is a beautiful work that in just a few words makes us feel the immense pain the death of her father causes a woman.    One of the things I really liked about this work was how the later part of the work forced you to rethink your reading of the first part and in so doing made you see the sad beauty of the Irish countryside.   As I read it I was brought to mind "Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray.  The narrator of this story walks along dunes along the Atlantic, near the great cliffs of the shores of the West of Ireland.   She, I am just assuming the narrator is female, recalls a man who once walked the dunes with her.  The woman is walking barefoot among the stones, she wants to feel pain to be sure she is still alive, she wants to feel the cold of the ocean, maybe she wants physical pain to over-mask her heartbreak.  

This story is only two pages, just as I would not try to "sum" up Gray's magnificent poem, I will let you discover this for yourself.  It really must be read several times so you can fully whole the story in your mind and she how the parts connect.  This is a wonderful very moving story that speaks with the verisimilitude of lived pain which may show the beginning of real wisdom.

Quinlan has another longer story in the collection, "Moon-Kite" and I will post on it soon.

I will follow her writing career as best I can from the other side of the world.

Author Data

Ruth Quinlan is from Tralee, County Kerry. She worked in IT before taking a break in 2011 to try and scratch the writing itch and she has just completed the MA in Writing at NUI Galway. She was shortlisted for the 2012 Cúirt New Writing fiction prize and longlisted for the Over the Edge New Writer of the Year competition. Her work has been published by Emerge Literary Journal,Thresholds, SIN, Scissors and Spackle and as part of the current Irish Independent Hennessy New Irish Writing series. She has also recently contributed towards two group anthologies, Abandoned Darlings (fiction) and Wayword Tuesdays (poetry).

She blogs here.    She talks about the personal genesis of "Crossing the Dunes" and I suggest you read it after you have read the story at least twice.  

"Elijah the Prophet" by Shalom Aleicham Project 196 Ukraine

"Elijah the Prophet" by Shalom Aleicham (1910 in translation 1922, 12 pages)

Project 196

Country 8 of 196

Ukraine
Shalom Aleichem

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 
6. Haiti
7. Trinidad and Tobag 
8. Ukraine

f you are an author and want to represent your country, please contact me.  If you want to do a guest post on your favorite story for the feature please contact me also.  

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

At first I thought I was setting myself an impossible task but a bit of research has made me optimistic  that I can find a short story from all 196 countries in the world.   I feel this part of the project will be completed.   In a much more challenging perhaps impossible project, I also want to publish on my blog a contemporary short story from an author from each of the 196 countries.  

Shalom Aleichem (pen name of Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich, Ukraine 1859 to 1916) is the most famous writer in Yiddish.  (Yiddish is started as a language in what is now Germany when elements of Hebrew and Aramaic were added to the German dialects of the time. It evolved into a trans-national language for Eastern European Jews).  He is most remembered now for his creation of a character on which the father in Fiddler in the Roof is based.    (There is a good article on his life and importance in Wikipedia)   He left the Ukraine to escape the pogroms directed against Jews but his huge body of work is devoted to cherishing and keeping alive the cultural traditions of the Jewish communities of the Ukraine and Russian.

Shalom Aleicham is very much an old fashioned story teller, his work contains no traces of modernism and it will probably be cherished long after many of the modern masters are relegated to academia.  "Elijah the Prophet" is based on the folklore of the Eastern European Jewish culture.  The story is told by the only son of a wealthy man-his parents had seven children but they all died so he is completely doted over and way overprotected, or at least he thinks so.   His father is a money changer, swapping the currency of one country for another.   The worse thing a boy can do is to fall asleep during Seder, a feast that marks the start of the holiday of Passover.   Children are told that if they fall asleep during Seder then Elijah the Prophet will come and take you away forever in a large bag he carries just for that purpose.  Our narrator does fall asleep and Elijah shows up just like the legends says he will.   The story ends in a very open ended way and the boy is left with a moral dilemma.

You can find this story and others by Shalom Aleicham at Project Gutenberg.  

The Ukraine, with a population of 45 million has a long history of being controlled by stronger neighbors.  The country has long been under the domination of Russia from which it declared independence in 1990.  During WWII there were vicious enthusiastically  supported by the Ukrainians extermination programs aimed at Jews and Roma.



I think Project 196 will next stop in West Africa, in the Cameroons.

"Death Road" by John Duffy

"Death Road" by John Duffy (2012, 6 pages)

A Collection of Poetry and Prose from the 2011-2012

National University of Ireland at Galway MA in Writing Class

Edited by Maya Cannon

/

John Duffy

My Prior Posts on stories from Abandoned Darlings

Not long ago I read and posted on all of the short stories in 30 Under 30:  A Selection of Short Stories by Thirty Young Irish Writers edited by Elizabeth Reapy.  One of the very big benefits to me, aside from the pleasure of reading some great stories, is that it created a base of young Irish writers whose careers I could begin to follow.    My thinking was if this is done for a relatively long time you could develop a sense of the way modern Irish literary culture works and I could see how writers develop themselves or how they abandon their craft.   

Abandoned Darlings, edited by Maya Cannon (2012) is an anthology of short stories and poetry by the MA in writing class at National University of Ireland at Galway.  I have never been to Galway but I know for a city of under 100,000 people it has produced more great writers than many a city with over five million people.  You can find  countries with a population of over 100,000,000 million whose literary output would be put to shame by Galway writers.  I will review and post one at a time on all of the short stories in the collection, fourteen in my quick count.

 I do not especially like posts on anthologies of short stories that just rave on about them in general.  When I visit a forest I do not just like to see the trees, I like to see the moss that grows on them, the vines that climb them and listen to the birds that make them their home.  I like to peel the bar from the trees to see the insects that bore into the trees, I like to study their roots. Sometimes I like to climb to the top of the trees and survey the environment   once in a while I build a tree house and stay awhile.    I  prefer to post on short stories one at a time rather than generalize about a collection.


There are lots of poems in the collection, I have already read several.  I liked them all.  I have posted on collections of Eastern European poetry but generally speaking I do see much point in posting on short poems one at a time.   The only poets I have read extensively are Yeats and Whitman.   I will thus be posting only on the short stories in the collection.  

You might have seen a National Geographic Channel program about the terribly dangerous road through the Andes in Bolivia that the narrator in this story crosses in a bus ride sure to scare anyone out of their wits who is not from there.   The first person speaker is an Irishman out for an adventure in the wilds of South America and he happens to hook up with a beautiful and delightful sounding "French girl of Lebanese extraction".   Some cynics say the reason the English conquered India was because they could do things and have adventures there that they could never do at home.   I think that is part of the deeper theme of this very interesting marvelously cinematic story.    As I read the account of the bus trip on the world's most dangerous road, the slightest miss turn takes the bus over a cliff and the chickens on the bus I thought of the pretty scary and dangerous cross island buses of the Philippines.  

I was able to pretty directly relate to this story as I have also traveled in the back roads of Latin America on roads not much better than the one talked about in this story.

The best part of the story is the wonderful account of the bus trip and the descriptions of the Bolivian Indian women in their bowler hats.   Their description reminded me very much of experiences I have had in the highland of Guatemala, often considered the most beautiful place in the world.

I think one think also sought in this great work is a contact with a wilder, darker, more dangerous beauty than Ireland can provide the narrator.  

Duffy has another story in the collection, "Frightened Hen" and I liked it a lot also.  

Author Data

John grew up in Ballina, County Mayo, Ireland.  He graduated from the National University of Ireland Galway in 2011 with a Bachelor's degree.  His writing career has included poems, short  fiction and travel writing.  He draws his inspiration from the landscape and people of West Ireland.  He is currently working on a collection of short stories.

I hope to one day post on a collection of short stories by John Duffy and will follow his career as best I can from the other side of the world.


Mel u

Angela Carter and Grace Paley Buy or Pass?

"The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter (1979, 6 pages)
"My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age" by Grace Paley (2002, 4 pages)

Angela Carter and Grace Paley

A Test Drive 

Yesterday I was looking in the best book store in Manila to buy collections of short stories, Power Books in Trinoma Mall, to see what they had in stock.   I noticed they had
editions of the  short stories of two writers I have seen mentioned a lot in the book blog world but have never read, Angela Carter and Grace Paley.   I had checked before and there is no Kindle edition of their collections.   I decided I would see if I could read one of their stories online before deciding if I will buy the collections or not. I was happy to find a story by both writers. 

"Children do not stay young long in this savage country".

"The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter (1940 to 1992-UK) for sure pushed me into the buyer category.  It is kind of a very dark fairy tale about a  sinister world.  It is a very occult story no doubt with all sorts of references to English tradition that go over my head.   There are witches, people turned into wolves, evil children and a real sense of the terror of the night.   The story is just so marvelously written I have no ability to retell the plot without trivializing it so I will not try.  I am really looking forward to rereading The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter in 2013.   

"My father had decided to teach me how to grow old"

"My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age" by Grace Paley (1922 to 2007-USA)  Paley wrote only short stories, unlike Angela Carter who also wrote novels.  Successful short story writers often feel a pressure to write novels but Paley resisted this.    This story, originally published in The New Yorker, is told in the first person and is about a grown woman whose father has decided he wants to council her about how to deal with old age.  The story alternates between the advise he gives her and her reaction to it.   Her mother, the man's wife of decades has died and it was usually her who gave out the parental advice.   They are of Russian descent and of the  Jewish faith, just as Paley was. Her parents were Ukrainian emigrants and spoke Russian and Yiddish at home.  The father is very well read in the Russian classics.   He talks about which of the great Russian writers were probably anti-Semites.  He says in the times they lived most were.  He says Tolstoy was not, Gogol probably was and he did not think Gorky was.  This conversation was enough to push me to a buyer on Paley.  I will say I think her father was wrong about Gorky.   He talks about how his daughter is more in the American world than he is.  I hope to read The Collected Short Stories of Grace Paley in 2013.



You can read the Paley story in the free archives of The New Yorker 

"The Company of Wolves" can be read here.

I also found a 600 page edition of the complete short stories of Issac Singer at Power Books but that will have to wait!  I was also surprised to see they had an edition of the complete short stories of Zola Hurston which is also on my buy if it is still there next Christmas list!

Please share your experiences with Grace Paley and Angela Carter with us.

Mel u

"Bogart" by V. S. Naipaul Project 196 Trinidad and Tobaco

"Bogart" by V. S. Naipaul (1959, 15 pages)

Project 196

Country 7 of 196

Trinidad and Tobago
V. S. Naipaul

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 
6. Haiti
7. Trinidad and Tobago

f you are an author and want to represent your country, please contact me.  If you want to do a guest post on your favorite story for the feature please contact me also.  

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

At first I thought I was setting myself an impossible task but a bit of research has made me optimistic  that I can find a short story from all 196 countries in the world.   I feel this part of the project will be completed.   In a much more challenging perhaps impossible project, I also want to publish on my blog a contemporary short story from an author from each of the 196 countries.  

Trinidad and Tobago is a two island country in the western Caribbean with a population of 1.4 million.    It was a British colony until it achieved independence in 1962.  English is the primary language.  The population is 40 percent of Indian descent, 37 of African ancestory and the remaining of mixed background.   In the 1840s when slavery was outlawed in British colonies large numbers of Indians were imported as indentured servants to work in the sugar plantations.   The area is commonly called the "West Indies".

The decision who to pick to represent the country was not a hard one.   V. S. Naipul (1932) won The Nobel Prize for literature in 2001 to add to the many awards he has obtained in his long very productive writing career.   He did draw some negative reaction in the book blog world when he said a woman could not write as well as he does. 

His most famous collection of short stories Miguel Street, deals with life in the slums of the capital of the country.  I decided it must be an omen for me to read a story called "Bogart"as the last few days The Turner Classic Channel in Manila has been running back to back Bogart Movies.  My favorites are Casablanca (referenced in "Bogart") and To Have and to Have Not, set in the French Caribbean. (To make the omens even stronger, I had 7 people log into my blog yesterday from Morocco.)

"Bogart" is a simple, easy to follow narrative about a man living alone, with few friends in a one room apartment in the slums of the capital, Chaguanas.   He is kind of a man of mystery.   Then he starts to disappear for long periods of time and nobody knows where he goes.  His friends called him "Bogart.  At the time of the story, Bogart's popularity was at its peak and his hard-boiled style was the rage among the young men of the town.  All he ever seemed to do was play cards and he did not even like that.  His friend describes him as the most bored man he ever knew.  People begin to wonder what he does when he leaves as he does not make much money at all from his work as a tailor.  He liked to hang out with "the big men of the streets" but he never said much.  Everybody starts speculating one where he goes, some think nearby Venezuela.  One time when he comes home from a long absence, he finds his friends had been bringing women into his room.   He declines one for himself.  The ending is very interesting and I will leave it unspoiled.   I thought it made a very subtle and powerful comment on the culture of machismo.     

I enjoyed this story and hope to read more of his vast output one day.

Project 196 will next visit the Ukraine, then we will return to the warmth of the Caribbean with a story by a brilliant  woman from Cuba.   Then I think we will make our first venture into Africa with a stop at Cameroon.  

Mel u

"The First Man in Space" by Mark Ryan

"The First Man in Space" by Mark Ryan  (2012, 5 pages)

A Reading Life Project

A Collection of Poetry and Prose from the 2011-2012

National University of Ireland at Galway MA in Writing Class

Edited by Maya Cannon

/

Mark Ryan

My Prior Posts on stories from Abandoned Darlings

"And Mulloch the Older began to snore, as if he were in bed in their room at the dingy hotel, filled with Irish tradesmen and laborers  Russian truckers and whores, while the cockroaches climbed all over the squat toilet in utter darkness'"

Not long ago I read and posted on all of the short stories in 30 Under 30:  A Selection of Short Stories by Thirty Young Irish Writers edited by Elizabeth Reapy.  One of the very big benefits to me, aside from the pleasure of reading some great stories, is that it created a base of young Irish writers whose careers I could begin to follow.    My thinking was if this is done for a relatively long time you could develop a sense of the way modern Irish literary culture works and I could see how writers develop themselves or how they abandon their craft.   

Abandoned Darlings, edited by Maya Cannon (2012) is an anthology of short stories and poetry by the MA in writing class at National University of Ireland at Galway.  I have never been to Galway but I know for a city of under 100,000 people it has produced more great writers than many a city with over five million people.  You can find  countries with a population of over 100,000,000 million whose literary output would be put to shame by Galway writers.  I will review and post one at a time on all of the short stories in the collection, fourteen in my quick count.

 I do not especially like posts on anthologies of short stories that just rave on about them in general.  When I visit a forest I do not just like to see the trees, I like to see the moss that grows on them, the vines that climb them and listen to the birds that make them their home.  I like to peel the bar from the trees to see the insects that bore into the trees, I like to study their roots. Sometimes I like to climb to the top of the trees and survey the environment   once in a while I build a tree house and stay awhile.    I  prefer to post on short stories one at a time rather than generalize about a collection.


There are lots of poems in the collection, I have already read several.  I liked them all.  I have posted on collections of Eastern European poetry but generally speaking I do see much point in posting on short poems one at a time.   The only poets I have read extensively are Yeats and Whitman.   I will thus be posting only on the short stories in the collection.  

"The First Man in Space" by Mark Ryan  is a about two Irishmen working on upgrading the Delta Airlines Transit Lounge in the  Moscow airport.    The Irishmen have formed a bond in their efforts to cope with the violent horribly cold city of Moscow.   One of the ways they cope is with drinking and hanging out in hooker bars.   As the story opens they are riding in taxi when men with automatic rifles stop the cab at a check point.   The driver panicked and scream out "Mafia" and the Irishmen take off running, they hear shots.  When they get back to the work site everybody has an idea as to what went down.   Some people think it was the Russian army who took the Irishmen for deserters.   

There is a young man of eighteen and  older fellow, who is trying to help him cope with Moscow.   Heavy supplies of Guinness are part of the coping strategy.  They have even found an Irish bar in Moscow, one with lots of pretty young girls, most all hookers run by the mob.   The young man was not used to strange girls sliding their hands up his thigh and flattering his good Irish looks.   

Ryan does a very good job in just a few pages of showing us how the Irish workers live, how they cope with the very foreign very cold very lonely environment.  They are supposed to stay in a compound set up for non-Russian workers but they have learned how to sneak out, they are so bored and unhappy.     

"The First Man in Space" by Mark Ryan really brings us into the world of Irish workers in Moscow.   It is very much a work of in the tradition of hard boiled Irish noir.

I would gladly read more of his Ryan's  and would like to return to Ireland with the central characters of this story.

Author Data

Mark is from west Clare in Ireland.  In 2006 one of his short stories was published in The Sunday Tribune and short listed for a Hennessay literary award.  He has published highly regarded poems, acted in a film and is working on a novel.  

He has a blog here, it is just in the opening stages of development.

Mel u