African love stories

African love stories? Is that an anomaly? We are tempted to ask this with Ama Ata Aidoo of the book that she edits. As we ask, we wonder what will happen to us if we step into this world. Will we meet the people we expect to meet: the drunken, cheating husbands and the cowed, abused wives? The stereotypes?

Leave your expectations aside. Bring with you nothing but a healthy amount of curiosity. For stretching from Sudan to South Africa, with Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and much of Africa in-between, we see love in the most diverse ways imaginable.

We meet the beautiful Sudanese bride-to-be of a Scottish man with whom she would love to ride off into the sunset. But she must first obtain a visa. We meet Mrs Mensah, whose marriage is threatened by her niece. We congratulate Moriyike, the defiant love child of a union that is never legitimised. We follow two Ugandan girls, Anyango and Sanyu, whose love for each other forces them apart.

From interracial unions and queer relationships to unrequited love and extra-marital affairs, we begin to see just how multi-faceted African love is. But if the themes are diverse, the authors and their writing styles are even more so.

Ama Ata Aidoo puts her own short story in her introduction to the anthology, giving this unconventional and surprising love story a deadpan tone in simple but effective language.

Chimamanda Adichie comes with her own combination of everyday actions accompanied by deep reflection. Sefi Atta brings to her own tale a slight obscurity that makes us have to work to figure out how it fits in with the overarching theme of love. Tomi Adeaga’s conversational style draws us in, Pidgin English, German and all.

And the superb cast of writers, some well known and others upcoming, give the reader different experiences until we get to Helen Oyeyemi’s 'The Telltale Heart', and here we must stop.

We stop, not because it’s the final story in the anthology, but because 'The Telltale Heart' is a most striking story. The anthology thus far leaves the reader happy to realise that African love stories are very real, unlike the usual perfect-protagonists, perfect-timing, ride-off-into-the-sunset tales we associate with love stories.

Oyeyemi’s piece is the closest we come to 'unreal', but not in the sense of fake. Instead her powerful imagery take us into a very different realm, that of the surrealist rendering of a story that leaves us wondering why we ever thought love was only about the mundane.

This piece carries us along and wraps us up in words that we have to read twice, three times over only to realise that we cannot form complete images of the characters or the places or the story even.

We cannot rely solely on our imaginations to visualise things, her words must be our crutch if we are to understand the young man born with eyes like a famine and the young woman who must leave her heart in a love shrine, for it is too heavy for her.

'The Telltale Heart' stands out as a strangely oppressive yet beautifully written story that leaves us floating in the abstract clouds of love and pain and death.

And then as we move on to Veronique Tadjo and Chike Unigwe, and eventually close the anthology with Wangui wa Goro, we realise that our notion of 'African love' as existing only in the harsh realities of life is in itself a stereotype.

* Annie Quarcoopome is a student of comparative literture at Williams College in the US.

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