Dayo Won

Birther of Volcanos

Bernadine Evaristus, Aminata Forna, Jennifer Makumbi. Nneka Arimah joins these conjurers of words with an accomplished collection of shorts that steal repeatedly across the crepuscular boundaries between earth and the spirit world...with characters that clutch to a sanity that might just be madness.

She shapes and reshapes themes around filial (and familial) fidelity, marinating her fragments of tales in absence and loss yet keeping them suffused in a humanity that doesn't succumb to dystopian despair. She effortlessly bends time and space, reimagining creation and invoking distant futures.

In the best of fiction, short fiction especially, possibility reverberates long after the words end. Nneka Arimah may just be a Nigerian Lee Scratch Perry — a master of rhythm, deep melody and futuristic echoes. A magician.