For Some, The Life does Begin with Blindness: A Review of The Year of Free Birds.
I recall sitting in the doctor’s consulting room chair, a really dark man with large, round metal-rimmed spectacle, as he explained the nature of my condition to my keen mother and my rather uninterested self. My hands pressed tightly into my mother’s as he said, very persuasively, that I’d have to wear prescribed spectacles, added to a host of other outrageously expensive drug prescriptions scribbled in that signature cursive of doctors, to improve my terribly poor sight, or — and he said this meanly — risk being able to see. Alarmed by the prospect of resigning my ability to see clearly, properly to some boring spectacle and really bitter pills- and not of possible blindness- my young and naive self bluntly disagreed with the doctor’s opinion, and stormed out of the room. Neither did I wear a correction lens, nor did my impaired vision improve at the time. It grew worse in fact.
So at home I practiced blindness, vaguely, at nights when the power went out. I felt around the rough walls of our flat for edges, for doorposts, anything really that might possibly be in my way, I kicked empty air. I stumbled regularly, hurt myself a few times. It was excruciatingly frustrating, my faux blindness. But I never returned to the doctor’s. I often imagined how my life would be transformed if I eventually did become blind, completely disconnected from the world. What would change and what wouldn’t? Imagining it alone was a thing so fearful.
Lizzy Attree writes in her introduction to this anthology; “the gift of sight is but one of humanity’s five senses, and yet the absence or loss of sight is often considered one of the most life-shattering experiences a person can endure.”
Around the world, over the years, there has been an under- and misrepresentation of blind people. Blindness, when even considered, is done with so much triteness. And blind people, burdened by many terrible narratives and sentiments, are often considered as subhumans, incapable of life, of living normally as any other human would, of contributing anything. In literature, especially the African kind, there has been a constant erasure of blind people, and people with disabilities of any kind. And there are very few stories where blindness isn’t used passively as a plot device or blind characters written with hackneyed, and mostly incorrect stereotypes. The contributors to this anthology, with stories as poignant as they are tasteful, made laudable efforts creating memorable visually impaired protagonists with their moving stories, reimagining and deconstructing stereotypes of blindness.
The first story by Manu Herbstein, Ama, focuses on his blind protagonist by same name, a one eyed slave woman, whose left eye, too, is only good for shedding tears. Ama employs the service of her son, Kwame, who prefers to be called by his baptismal name, Zacharias, to tell her story. But Zacharias thinks of her as unwell, ugly, an old African slave woman, and he resolves to refer to her as “my mother”, if indeed she be his mother. Ama swings back and forth between the days of the protagonist on The Love of Liberty, her days as a maidservant for Senhor Williams, her master, and her retiring days as an old slave at the Engenho de Cima. What Ama does, also, aside the main focus, is to highlight the cruelty of humans(slave masters) to other humans (their slaves) during the days of slavery. This story, subtly, uses blindness as a metaphor, that humans could be overtly blind to their fellow humans' humanity on basis of skin color, race, status, sexuality.
I liked Ama, but only for its beginning, the daringness of the opening sentence, luring, inviting. I did not like the end, it was indefinite. Suspended. It sort of, amidst all of its inbetween rigmarole, ended with an uneventful abruptness; Zacharias listening to his mother’s regular breathing,…kneeling, praying to God to forgive a father he, apparently, never met. There was an incongruous arrangement of the events in this story. I quite understand that the point of a story isn’t really necessarily to be liked, but this is my problem with Ama; I was unable to piece the bits together, it left on my tongue a fleeting taste. Ama read as many disjointed stories in one, when I recalled having read earlier that it really was extracts from Manu’s two novels, I did not know how to feel. But I guess I would prefer the full-length novels from which this story was extracted, because I’d love to know what transpired between Ama and Senhor Williams, if Manu wrote of the events leading to Senhor Williams' allowing of a slave boy to bear his surname, if it had any significance.
However, I think stories excerpted from full-length novels should be able to be read as standalones when transformed into shorts. Like Elnathan John’s Flying from Born on a Tuesday, and Jesmyn Ward’s Given from Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Again, Ama left me with so much questions. I was unable to tell, with the abbreviated story, if Ama was really blind on both eyes, or if she has bad vision with her left eye, which, according to the story, was unaffected by Knaggs' whip. Did she later on lose the vision in her left eye, too? If she did, when? How? If not, then is she really blind? By medical opinion, “If you have good vision in your better eye, then it is usually not possible for people with sight loss in one eye to be registered as blind. The sight in the other eye often compensates for loss of sight in one eye.”
The Centennial Game, was easily my favorite story from this anthology. It was hard not to fall in love with Mykl Snyman’s deft and masterful storytelling.
First published in 2015, The Centennial Game chronicles Abidan Cointe’s life of perceived comforts in the Hodegetria Gardens, a place navigable only by the sightless.
Now completely blind, having forgotten the concept of color or of waning sunsets or the gentle rise and fall of yellow sunflowers in the breeze, Abidan Cointe depended solely on his aural and heightened sensual abilities to navigate through the remaining years of his withering life.
More evidently, the Centennial Game tells the story of blind Abidan, and the game of chess he plays with death, the pale reaper who has come to collect him.
Snyman’s story appealed to my senses for two personal reasons. 1. Popular culture has often depicted death playing cruel games for our lives, from badminton to ping-pong, and mostly, chess. But I have never truly read a story, since the three brothers and the deathly hallows, with death not explored merely thematically or mentioned in passing, but as a point of focus, fully embodied, able to express feelings and gestures, a story that points us to what possibly goes on in death’s mind, were it human. And Snyman captures my expectations perfectly with his compelling description. 2. As a chess enthusiast, I’ve never thought the game of chess could make for a pretty interesting literature till this story. Reading both men, Death and the Abidan, make their well calculated moves out of desperation, tension, impulse, almost felt surreal. I felt transported to the scene, standing by the low table in the gardens, overlooking them go about the game.
There was something really different about The Centennial Game, it was unique. I could feel the tension behind Abidan and Death’s playing. I could see the hasty decisions made, the quickly realized flaws. None of the men wanting to lose, both playing to win, trying to outwit each other. With Abidan clearly running out of luck, propelled by his desire to live much longer, and Death, witty, cunning and quite artful, playing with extreme caution. I was worried for Abidan’s sake. Is this when the blind chess-master loses after nine and ninety wins, and embraces death? The emotions in this story were searing and Snyman writes with so much wit and compassion.
Prosper Makara’s Woes of Hatcliffe Extension narrates Raviro’s travails in a poverty stricken suburb, in Zimbabwe. Raviro depended on her imagination, hearing and the aid of her walking stick to navigate her way through the hospital she’d visited and the big, bustling city.
Prosper’s Woes of Hatcliffe Extension was terse, straight to the point, not overwritten seeing the nature of the story. It knew what it wanted to achieve, and went for it, though not fully, in few pages, with concise sentences. I liked Prosper’s ability to capture the uneasy and incohesive nature of the relationship that comes with living in a place as Hatcliffe Extension; a place where today’s immediate enemies could become even briefly as a result of circumstance, at the dawn of a new day, closest allies.
I felt pity for Raviro near the story’s end as she fled the scene of her livelihood’s demolition, an almost possessed woman. An almost possessed, blind, broken woman. It was hard not to sympathise her fate at the railway line. The story is a beautiful, emotional one, highlighting government cruelty and how the sorry masses take their bitter dose of life’s medicine with wreaked hearts, hoping not to fall apart, to live to fight another day. But there’s an extent to which a person can be stretched. Raviro was stretched beyond her limits, having endured an abusive husband who left her shattered, a preventable eye defect that metamorphosed into full blown blindness, two struggling children, severe financial constraints in uptight Zimbabwe, and the demolition of the only roof over her head.
In Ahmed Maiwada’s Apple, Again, I enjoyed how he took to one idea and developed the hell out of it. It was completely amusing to read, the conversations between a cynical, retired thief and his apostate wife of twenty years. I loved how the story evolved, and the twist near the end almost knocked the air right out of my lungs. It was unexpected. The subtleness of Maiwada’s description, placing blindness and suspicion as well as fear of abandonment side by side, and his crisp language was profound. I held the retired thief in so much esteem as he, well aware of his cynicism and insecurity heightened by his lack of vision, contemplated on how best to take his wife’s life. I wondered what the early years in their marriage had looked like; he, a veteran thief, she, the daughter of a thief with traces of thieving blood. Had they ever been happy together, even fleetingly? What had drove her into the arms of a foreign prophet?
Written brilliantly in the third person, with its confounding end, Apple, Again is my second favorite from this collection.
What the stories in this collection does is imagine the human condition, blindness, in a new, different light, with kindness. It invites us, the readers, capable of reading these words, imbibing these stories, to broaden our narrow mindsets, and discard our preconceived notions of blindness. The writers, even if slightly, have exposed us to a realm often neglected by us blessed with the gift of sight. The stories were pulsating, promising, honest, and completely devoid of traditional stereotypes, stories imagined really, in Basit Jamiu’s words, with a sense of just openness.
The Year of Free Birds is an outstanding anthology, and the four stories you’ll find here will count as some of the most interesting prose of the decade. And Basit Jamiu, too, has done a really awemazing job curating these stories.
The Year of Free Birds is available as free downloadable eBook via witsprouts.com.
