How She Left
‘Happiness, Like Water,’ by Chinelo Okparanta
By LIGAYA MISHAN
Published: September 13, 2013
The stories in Chinelo Okparanta’s first collection are quiet, often unnervingly so, in the manner of a stifled shriek. Hints of menace — a reference to a robbery, an illness, a drop of blood on peeling linoleum — are delivered blandly, matter-of-factly, as if resisting the urge to dramatize were a kind of survival mechanism.
HAPPINESS, LIKE WATER
Stories
By Chinelo Okparanta
196 pp. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Paper, $14.95.
This is deceptive, for the plots in “Happiness, Like Water” are heated where the prose is not. A woman waits with a gun pointed at her head as a thief commands her husband to hand over his beloved Peugeot, suddenly aware that the car is worth more to her husband than her life; a spinster plans to murder a pregnant friend and steal her unborn child; a virginal college student, desperate to send her ailing mother to a private hospital, agrees to go out with a rich “patron,” deluding herself that all he wants is a pretty date who can “discuss budget and political issues.”
The first (and more powerful) part of the book is set in Nigeria, where Okparanta grew up, and the second part in America, where she immigrated at the age of 10 — a bifurcation whose tidiness belies how messily the tentacles of heritage continue to grasp after and trip up her characters. In “America,” a visa applicant professes interest in studying oil spills in the United States and returning to apply her knowledge in the polluted Niger Delta. In fact, she simply wants to be reunited with her girlfriend in a country where their relationship would not be condemned by law. But the lie takes root in her mind, making her reconsider her allegiances and even her mother’s longing for a grandchild.
Throughout these stories runs a suspicion of the power of storytelling itself. A husband eager for a child mishears his wife’s moans of pain during sex, interpreting them as pleasure, as does her mother, eavesdropping at the door, both of them in thrall to the narrative of lineage. A young immigrant, beset by marriage proposals that arrive from Nigeria by mail, starts to question the literal reading of the Bible, particularly the verse that casts homosexuality as an “abomination.”
At times a theme is pushed too hard. Men here tend to be abusers, women chattel for whom procreation is destiny. (A wife who fails at this task is cast off as an mgbaliga, or empty barrel, and a new wife is acquired.) In “Fairness,” a schoolgirl is repeatedly urged by her mother — a dedicated reader of Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Elle — to lighten her skin. She concocts a bleach solution and then, frightened, makes a servant test it first. Afterward, she can’t help feeling jealous of the ruined but pale skin under the servant’s scars. There is little dimension to these characters beyond their obsession with skin tone, but perhaps that’s the point.
Absent are the overly lush, dazzled-tourist descriptions that often afflict stories set in exotic locales. Still, vivid images flare up occasionally: a “runs girl” — who lives off “Yahoo Boys,” enriched by Internet fraud, and mugus (easy marks) with petro-naira (oil dollars) — stalks by with “her stilettos making tiny dents in the earth”; a lipstick “rises from the container slowly, steadily, like a lizard cautiously peeking out of a hole.” August brings “the scent of crushed millipedes.”
But Okparanta seems wary of showing off too much with flashy prose. One character notes the silences that fall between her and her mother, “as if we no longer valued spoken words, as if spoken words were gaudy finishes on a delicate piece of art, unnecessary distractions from the masterpiece, whose substance was more meaningfully experienced if left unornamented.” If this is Okparanta’s goal — the distillation of experience into something crystalline, stark but lustrous — she is well on her way there.
-- kenneth w. harrow faculty excellence advocate professor of english michigan state university department of english 619 red cedar road room C-614 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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