Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Black Moses by Helen Stevenson

2017; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 91; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2017.0143

1945-8134

Daniel Bokemper,

Cuban History and Society

collection, she molds genre, form, tone, and subject like a master of the craft, wielding the most beautiful, haunting prose this year. Machado’s collection of eight stories— all but one, “The Resident,” previously published—has been anticipated since “The Husband Stitch” was nominated for the 2014 Nebula novelette award. In this rending tale of a woman’s lifelong encounter with the goodness of “good men,” the story-obsessed narrator reminds us before her death, “Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.” Like this urban legend send-up, Machado’s horror fables bend generic forms to, among other things, narrate a viral apocalypse by way of a memoir about the narrator’s sex life (“The Inventory”), chart the slow dematerialization of women whose spirits haunt dresses and other traditionally feminine objects (“Real Women Have Bodies”), or rework the plot of Law and Order: SVU to literalize the ghosts of sex-crime victims and the emotional toll on SVU detectives, blending gothic, fan fiction, and TV recap in a drama that both deepens and purges the violence and pain of such crimes (“Especially Heinous”). With stories like these, Machado’s oeuvre simultaneously defies and attracts categorization. Machado is a revolution. She is at once a funny, dark, terrifying, uplifting antiLovecraft who observes in the everyday oppressions of heteropatriarchy and late capitalism what is truly horrifying, nonetheless finding release in the dark’s nooks and crannies. As a queer Latinx woman trained at both Iowa and Clarion, prestigious credentials for literary and genre fiction alike, she writes from many worlds, not so much breaking down the borders between them as finding in their gaps and necessary contradictions a literary form necessary for the contemporary. Her Body and Other Parties is fiery, mischievous, and elusive. Like the worlds Machado glimpses: brutal and yet life-affirming. Sean Guynes Michigan State University Alain Mabanckou. Black Moses. Trans. Helen Stevenson. New York. The New Press. 2017. 199 pages. A beautiful amalgam of childlike optimism and the harshness of reality, Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses solidifies the author’s status as a modern master of prose (see WLT, Sept. 2016). Possessing an overt tether to Mabanckou’s previous work, The Lights of Pointe-Noire, the text overflows with the rich and illustrious local color the author has made his hallmark. Unlike Pointe-Noire, however, Black Moses adopts a mode of fiction emphasizing the real plight of youth in twentieth-century Africa while simultaneously fostering magical realism reminiscent of the late Gabriel García Márquez. Tracing the adolescence and early adulthood of Moses, an orphan with a full name nearly as long as his tale, the text details personal insignificance to selfactualization and back again. Though the novel’s initial movement explores the protagonist ’s oppression at the hands of a World Literature in Review 70 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017 corrupt director, the latter portion of the text examines Moses’s desperate attempt to secure meaning as his sense of wonder evaporates. From the briefest encounter with a mortician who openly speaks with cadavers to a brothel owner named after a Fiat 500, Mabanckou’s characters pulsate with life. Each page unveils a new face, an additional quirk, or the unfortunate and abrupt end to an established figure. This frequent strategy is rarely overbearing; the impact of each personality is carefully woven into the greater whole of Moses. Despite a momentary , physical presence, no one face is ever glossed over superficially. Black Moses travels in close tandem with its historical context, drawing particular attention to a scientific revolution in its early stages before transitioning into a harsh, ethnic cleansing in the latter . Mabanckou takes care in crafting the extermination of the marginalized while criticizing the hypocrisy of the oppressing class, most notably the mayor of PointeNoire . Moses’s own fluctuation echoes what the novel describes on a national stage as he attempts to harbor hope while doused with depravity and violence. Mabanckou’s recognition of life’s harshness , especially in how it relates to an orphan struck by fantasy, fortunately does not compromise the persistence of optimism . Rather, it fuels his narrative and memorializes Black Moses as a masterpiece ; not only does the...