Akpan uses dialect to strong effect. (“Joy full my belly today because my broder and wife done rewarded me, say I do deir children well well,” the treacherous Fofo says of his value as an uncle.) Throughout this collection he succeeds far better in summoning individual voices than in capturing more generalized conflict. In An Ex-Mas Feast, which is still this author’s most audacious story, the matriarch of Jigana’s street family comes fully to life only when the family starts fighting. “This boy has grown strong-head,” she says of her son. “See how he is looking at our eyes. Insult!” Akpan also sets his scene vividly with “loose cobbles that studded the floodwater like the heads of stalking crocodiles in a river.”
The most ambitious story is Luxurious Hearses, a crowded microcosm of Nigeria in turmoil. The title refers to the bus on which the teenage protagonist, a Muslim named Jubril, hopes to escape into Niger. But to travel safely, he must pretend to be a Christian. Jubril’s disguise is compromised as much by his aversion to secular influences like television and “hell-destined women” as it is by the fact that he has had his right hand cut off as a form of Sharia punishment.
When Akpan stalls the bus in limbo and loads it with a cross-section of passengers, many of the forces that roil African nations are represented. Religious war, tribalism, the power of the military and the influence of oil money are among the many facets here; conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone are among those specifically invoked. Despite such dramatic density, the arc of the story is as self-evident as the epiphany that comes to Jubril.
“He felt connected to his newfound universe of diverse and unknown pilgrims, the faceless Christians,” Akpan writes. “The complexity of their survival pierced his soul with a stunning insight: every life counted in Allah’s plan.”
Akpan makes the lives of children count most of all. In the title story a Rwandan girl of mixed Hutu and Tutsi lineage witnesses the most horrific sight any child could ever see. In the face of an encroaching bloodbath, “Say you’re one of them” is a command from a desperate parent. The girl is being told to do what, in these stories, is all but impossible: Find a way to stay alive.
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