prominence. Yet in the background of his
lengthy prose grew just as rich a mastery
of brief fiction. With Minutes of Glory and
Other Stories, Ngũgĩ assembles the quintes-
sential collection of short stories spanning
the length of his literary career.
Just as the scope of Ngũgĩ’s craft encom-
passes a myriad of Kenyan culture, so too
does this anthology channel an equally
broad spectrum of emotions and ideas.
Divided into four major movements, Min-
utes of Glory includes the nearly sixty-year-
old short story “The Fig Tree” alongside the
much more recent “The Ghost of Michael
Jackson.” Such a wide gamut likewise offers
a biographical peek into Ngũgĩ’s career
previously unavailable through his novels,
albeit not entirely assembled chronologi-
cally.The first two overarching subjects of
the collection are also its most permeat-
ing as Ngũgĩ wrestles with trials of family
and faith. “The Village Priest” details the
titular priest’s struggle to conjure rain and
maintain his spirituality against a far more
prolific rainmaker. Throughout his text,
traditional practice rallies against Western
influence seeking to assimilate if not render
the bulk of Kenya vestigial. At the heart of
each tale pulses the rhythm of an individual
as Ngũgĩ finds the agency to prevail against
any social influence. Even so, and such is the
case with “The Black Bird” and “Goodbye
Africa,” Ngũgĩ acknowledges the quest for
agency is often tragic.
Though the collection’s third part also
contain its eponymous story, the preceding
movement, “Fighters and Martyrs,” carries
the most weight. Minutes of Glory’s final
three pieces seem almost auxiliary, as if
to only give one a better sense of Ngũgĩ’s
musings in retrospect. This aside is not
inappropriate but would have perhaps
been better woven into the text’s earlier
works.
Structural weaknesses aside, Minutes of
Glory is still a necessary staple of Kenyan
literature. Ultimately, the text offers an
insight deeper into Ngũgĩ himself than
any other form of his prose possibly can.
Daniel Bokemper
Oklahoma CitySinan Antoon
The Book of Collateral DamageTrans. Jonathan Wright. New Haven,
Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2019.
303 pages.So many books have been written about
the Iraq War (2003–2011) from both sides
of that conflict, but Sinan Antoon’s The
Book of Collateral Damage is unique in
that it chooses to represent the human and
environmental cost of that war. Nameer,
an Iraqi American intellectual, visits his
home country after the war and is trau-
matized by the hurt and damage he wit-nesses. Navigating the divide of his home
and host cultures’ views of the war, he col-
lects pieces of American news stories of the
war and files them as “collateral damage.”
Wadood, his narrative double, imagines
and documents the detailed history of the
war as expressed by “colloquies” of the
people, places and things damaged by the
war. The two meet at al-Mutanabi Street,
the historical cultural hub of Baghdad.
Nameer is hired by American filmmakers
to help document the devastation of the
2003 invasion of Iraq. Wadood, an eccen-
tric bookseller, sends him a manuscript of a
narrative catalog, “a circular history” of the
war as experienced by the victims and the
things that the war has destroyed. Nameer
reads Wadood’s narrative as he navigates
his life in the post-9/11 United States.
The manuscript transfers Wadood’s trauma
to Nameer, who is diagnosed with PTSD
but refuses the bourgeois psychoanalytical
approach to his condition.
Wadood’s colloquies lead to the central
moment of an explosion that took place in
al-Mutanabi Street in 2007. The moment of
the explosion crystallizes the story of the
war, bringing past and present together,As Shiferraw gives space to the
messy multiplicity of a self born from
trauma, again she offers a rebuke to the
demand that she silence the complicated.
Throughout the collection, the poet’s lens
expands beyond the self to other women,
most movingly her mother. In “The Fruit
Mother,” Shiferraw returns to the symbol
of cactus fruit, also found in her 2016 col-
lection, Fuchsia. With the beles, the reader
is again plunged into a violent invasion of
the domestic. “My mother is a cactus fruit,
but her thorns / have been plucked out
carefully, and when / they cut her open,
she bleeds a sweet blood / and squirts out
quickly from her coat.”
“No story ever happens alone,” author
and fellow Ethiopian American Maaza
Mengiste said of the refugee experience.
As Shiferraw refuses silence, rejects era-
sure, she braids the pain of women she
loves into her poetry. Indeed, the poet
writes on a continuum, refusing boundar-
ies. And in so doing, Your Body Is War
gives the reader stunning poems that re-
create the pain and triumph of women the
world would rather unsee.
Mary Catherine Ford
Queens, New York
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