She’s a 12-Year-Old Girl and Also a Spirit That Can See Into Her Family’s Past

THINGS THEY LOST
By Okwiri Oduor

Some novels demand you learn each phrase with nice care, making the expertise certainly one of cumulative depth. “Issues They Misplaced,” the astonishing debut from the Kenyan author Okwiri Oduor, is such a novel. Oduor has produced web page after web page of beautiful, elegiac prose. Dense and wealthy as a black Christmas cake and alternately whimsical, candy and darkish, “Issues They Misplaced” is a posh work, brimming with uncompromisingly African magical realism, concerning the ambiguity of poisonous mother-daughter relationships and the urgently restorative nature of friendship.

The novel is about in a fictional place in East Africa, Mapeli City, and explores the lives of 4 generations of ladies, all members of the Brown household, who reside on its outskirts. Mabel Brown, the matriarch, is a sadistic missionary spouse whose position within the city’s founding is shrouded in thriller. However the novel is instructed principally by the household’s youngest, a 12-year-old named Ayosa.

Ayosa’s photographer mom, Nabumbo Promise, abandons her daughter for months within the household home, with its decapitated angel statues and boggy moat. She has spent years in a painful state of ready, passing the time by nurturing bees and chickens, throwing stones on the milkman and making an attempt to forgive her neglectful mom.

After we meet her, Ayosa is on the cusp of change. She appears a traditional woman, however she is definitely a wandering spirit, a “wriggling factor,” and as she will get older, she experiences fugue states throughout which she relives centuries of brutal historical past, significantly her mom’s elusive, abusive previous, which includes a lifeless brother and an estranged twin sister. In the meantime, everybody on this group sees spirits: Nabumbo rationalizes her absences by stubbornly believing that Ayosa’s lifeless grandmother, Lola Freedom, drops by to babysit; Ayosa’s solely playmates are crying sister-ghosts within the attic; and decided “wraiths” seduce the residing into committing atrocities.

When Nabumbo subsequent returns, she guarantees to remain. She was all the time mentally weak, however again dwelling, Nabumbo has a number of breakdowns, “descended into that crimson metropolis,” which compels Ayosa to nurse the sick and manipulative mom she loves. The 2 start to confide what they know concerning the previous. Ayosa reveals her roving spirit id. The mom heals. Or appears to.

In “Issues They Misplaced,” Oduor means that the physique is sickened by secrets and techniques; the whole lot should come up and out. There isn’t a lazy epiphany right here. Oduor’s world-building feels partially like a metaphor for colonialism and its results. Mabel Brown is a most cancers on this stolen land, capturing kids and animals with equal relish. Her daughter Lola Freedom epitomizes performative white saviordom. Nabumbo will get wealthy from the artwork she makes out of Black our bodies. The household has harmed the inhabitants, and a long time later, when Ayosa and Nabumbo want the very Christian group their merciless ancestor formed, that collective can’t let itself forgive. Solely the outliers — these odd ladies who stand up in each human group to defy expectation and provides one of the best of what little they’ve — present succor to what’s left of the tattered Brown household.

Regardless of its heavy themes, this isn’t a tragic ebook — it’s filled with young-girl laughter, decadent meal-taking, beloved animals and ridiculous near-drownings. Oduor has written the sort of novel the place a girl casually props up her personal collapsing larynx with a speculum. It’s an African “Alice in Wonderland.” You’ll by no means go down one other rabbit gap like this, with its crazy-birds within the yard screeching “Jolly anna ha-ha-ha.” Because the novel unfurls, Oduor asks many times: What’s it to be needed and wanted, what’s it to be necessary to a different human? In the end, Oduor suggests that there’s all the time a possibility for change; one doesn’t should repeat the trauma. Life, when you combat for it, turns into gloriously out there.