Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Women's Writing

"I loved this book. I don’t really like short stories . I just never understood the form. Even as a writer, I find them very difficult to write. They’re very challenging. I feel you can’t just write a story that’s not long and call it a short story: it has to have a certain technique to it. I’d read some short stories, but it was never pleasurable for me until I came across this anthology. Suddenly, there were good stories. There were stories about women that I knew, stories that I heard in my everyday life, women in spaces that I inhabit. I liked that it was contemporary, it appealed to my sense of who I am as a woman in African spaces. I remember particularly liking a story by a Zimbabwean writer, Melissa Tandiwe Myambo. This was before I started really writing contemporary fiction (I used to write children’s stories and fantasy fiction ) but I knew her. Her story is called “Deciduous Gazettes” and the title alone I loved, the way ‘deciduous’ rolls off the tongue. It’s such a fantastic word. It’s a story about women and regular scandals in Harare. I read it and it was like someone was telling me the story and it was written well. That’s the thing, a lot of writers today, especially younger ones, think they can just write a story and say it’s good because they’re a writer. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s also Leila Aboulela’s story ‘The Museum’. I love her style of writing: very mature, very nuanced, very elegant. There’s a quiet beauty in her writing. This book introduced me to her and I actually went and bought her collection, which I also really loved, called Coloured Lights . I felt that it was a very apt title— Opening Spaces —because that’s exactly what it did. For me, it opened up the space for women’s voices. I felt I wanted to start writing these kinds of stories because I’ve got a lot of them I would like to tell. This book is how I got started writing, it prompted me to look at short stories as a form, I think specifically because Zimbabwean writing was included. I just thought it was a good collection overall. I did question my loyalty. I thought to myself, ‘Am I obliged to pick a Zimbabwean novel because I’m a Zimbabwean?’ A lot of people would have probably picked a Dambudzo Marechera or Yvonne Vera herself. If I was going to pick one, it would be Nervous Conditions , and maybe I should have. But it’s also about the mental space I was in when I started seriously reading African novels. I think that affected my choices: how much impact these novels had because when they came out and what was happening in the world of African literature at the time. I won’t pander to popular opinion by saying, ‘So-and-so is a great writer’ if I don’t feel their work spoke to me. It’s not so much that he is too well-known, but it becomes obligatory at some point. I think we can all agree that Chinua Achebe’s books are classics, and they’ve been talked about a lot. So I think if I was going to bring them up as part of a list, I would want them to have had a specific impact on my own literary journey or to mean something to me in some personal way. I don’t dispute everybody who says they’re great, and love them, and they should be up there. I don’t dispute it at all. But if we’re talking about my personal choices, I will speak to what I personally enjoyed the most and what informs my own personal reading journey. Only This Once Are You Immaculate by Blessing Musariri is published by flipped eye on 18th November."