Product Description

Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.

A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family’s struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle’s attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees—a microcosm of today’s Africa—a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear.

Uwem Akpan’s debut signals the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer who gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances in stories that are nothing short of transcendent.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12903 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-18
• Released on: 2009-09-18
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.04" h x 5.22" w x 8.57" l, .74 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780316086370
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Nigerian-born Jesuit priest Akpan transports the reader into gritty scenes of chaos and fear in his rich debut collection of five long stories set in war-torn Africa. An Ex-mas Feast tells the heartbreaking story of eight-year-old Jigana, a Kenyan boy whose 12-year-old sister, Maisha, works as a prostitute to support her family. Jigana's mother quells the children's hunger by having them sniff glue while they wait for Maisha to earn enough to bring home a holiday meal. In Luxurious Hearses, Jubril, a teenage Muslim, flees the violence in northern Nigeria. Attacked by his own Muslim neighbors, his only way out is on a bus transporting Christians to the south. In Fattening for Gabon, 10-year-old Kotchikpa and his younger sister are sent by their sick parents to live with their uncle, Fofo Kpee, who in turn explains to the children that they are going to live with their prosperous godparents, who, as Kotchikpa pieces together, are actually human traffickers. Akpan's prose is beautiful and his stories are insightful and revealing, made even more harrowing because all the horror—and there is much—is seen through the eyes of children. (June) Read a web-exclusive q&a with Uwem Akpan at www.publishersweekly.com/akpan.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School—With the intensity of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Say You're One of Them tells of the horrors faced by young people throughout Africa. Akpan uses five short stories (though at well over 100 pages, both "Luxurious Hearses" and "Fattening for Gabon" are nearly stand-alone novels in their own right) to bring to light topics ranging from selling children in Gabon to the Muslim vs. Christian battles in Ethiopia. The characters face choices that most American high school students will never have to—whether or not to prostitute oneself to provide money for one's homeless family, whether to save oneself, even if it means sacrificing a beloved sibling in the process. The selections are peppered with a mix of English, French, and a variety of African tongues, and some teens may find themselves reading at a slower pace than usual, but the impact of the stories is well worth the effort. The collection offers a multitude of learning opportunities and would be well suited for "Authors not born in the United States" reading and writing assignments. Teens looking for a more upbeat, but still powerful, story may prefer Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One (Random, 1989).—Sarah Krygier, Solano County Library, Fairfield, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

The parents in Uwem Akpan's first collection of stories, set in present-day Africa, make sacrifices and deals that might seem unimaginable to readers in other parts of the world. After finishing this book, I wandered for days staring at my three daughters and countless nephews and nieces, seeing how fragile and dangerous their lives could easily become in a time of war, starvation, and betrayal.

What if even sacrificing our own lives wasn't enough to ensure the survival of our progeny? That is often the case in Akpan's Africa. These five stories - set in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Benin - are all about children and their perilous, confusing lives, their searches for bits of grace and transcendence along with food, family and survival. This link allows a huge, perplexing continent to be known in intimate ways.

The first story, "An Ex-mas Feast," is told by Jigana, an 8-year-old boy living with his parents and siblings in an improvised shack in the slums outside Nairobi. His 12-year-old sister, Maisha, is a veteran prostitute who has amassed a collection of secret treasures inside a locked trunk, which their mother maneuvers around the shack while she tries to take care of her other five children. She sends out the older two with Baby, who is a begging tool, and gives Jigana "New Suntan shoe glue" to kill his hunger. "I watched her decant the kabire into my plastic 'feeding bottle.' . . . The last stream of the gum entering the bottle weakened and braided itself before tapering in midair like an icicle."

Akpan, a Jesuit priest born in Nigeria, teaching now in Zimbabwe after earning his MFA from the University of Michigan, researched the lives of the children he writes about, but no amount of research produces the perfect details and images that he has set down here; only imagination, empathy and a careful ear can accomplish this. The details of street life in Nairobi -- girls who bleach their faces at age 10 to stand on street corners and be picked up by white men and tourists -- and of the way Western ideas have insinuated themselves into every aspect of African life are on convincing display here. These characters speak a lingua franca that changes with each nation, but English words and American capitalism are everywhere.

"No food, tarling," Mama tells Jigana. "We must to finish to call the names of our people." Jigana's mother commands her husband to help consecrate a ceremony that involves holding the coverless Bible inscribed with the names of their relatives, people dead and disappeared due to razed villages, tribal conflicts, mistaken identity and sexual slavery. Her prayer ends with, "Christ, you Ex-mas son, give Jigana a big, intelligent head in school."

In "Fattening for Gabon," an uncle is charged with the care of his niece and nephew when their parents are sickened by AIDS. He plans to sell them into slavery, but, in an agonizing meltdown, he cannot go through with the deal. The language in this story is a mélange as well, in which yearning and tradition seem painfully melded. The nephew, Kotchikpa, who is 10, meets the Gabon trader for the first time in his uncle Fofo Kpee's yard: " 'Smiley Kpee, only two?' the man who brought Fofo exclaimed, disappointed. 'No way, iro o! Where oders?'

" 'Ah non, Big Guy, you go see oders . . . beaucoup,' said Fofo, a chuckle escaping his pinched mouth. He turned to us: "Mes enfants, hey, una no go greet Big Guy?' "

This story is long, but like the other four it manages to capture a whole nation and how that nation has been affected by border strife, AIDS, international peacekeepers, internal tribal conflicts and even family fights.

"Luxurious Hearses" is a journey into a nightmare world in Nigeria, where Muslims in the north are rampaging against Christians who are fleeing to the south where their religion is more dominant and where the inhabitants are killing Muslims. The buses that ply the highways are now thronging with refugees from both sides, including Jubril, a teenage Muslim boy whose hand was recently amputated when he stole food. He's another child caught between worlds, and the world of this bus is huge, with tribal elders, former soldiers, university students and desperate mothers pressing against every window.

We are soon thrust into another desperate journey, another fateful decision and another world expertly limned by Akpan. On the stalled bus, waiting for fuel, the crowded passengers fight over the televisions showing corpses and fighting from Khamfi, in the south:

"I say everybody shut up," a passenger named Emeka yells. "I dey watch my people do combat! You get relative who dey do Schwarzenegger for cable TV before?"

But then Nigerian police show up and turn off the television. " 'Please, show me my cousin!' Emeka said, tears running down his face. 'Please, return to that channel. . . . I want to see my cousin again! Is he alive?' The police did not even look at him. 'Officer, I'll give you whatever you want later . . .'

" 'Later? We no dey do later for cable TV,' the police said, watching Emeka's hands like a dog expecting its owner to offer something. 'Give us de money now now. . . . Cable TV, life action . . . e-commerce!' "

The final story may be the most devastating of all, in its depiction of a Rwandan family -- Hutu father, Tutsi mother and their two children for whom they make the ultimate sacrifice. It is not merely the subject that makes Akpan's story or his writing so astonishing, translucent and horrifying all at once; it is his talent with metaphor and imagery, his immersion into character and place. The view from a child's eyes carries the reader directly into Africa and the lives of the child narrators. One of these is Monique, daughter of two tribes, in "My Parents' Bedroom." She says of her friend, who is Twa, the smallest, most ignored tribe: "Hélène is an orphan, because the Wizard fixed her parents last year. Mademoiselle Angeline said that he cursed them with AIDS by throwing his gris-gris over their roof. Now Papa is paying Hélène's school fees." After the massacre begins, Monique watches her parents rescue the girl: "Hélène is soaked in blood and has been crawling through the dust. Her right foot is dangling on strings, like a shoe tied to the clothesline by its lace."

Hélène is put into the attic, with the Tutsi relatives of Monique's mother, and when her father's Hutu family arrives, he is forced to make a terrible choice. This choice, as happens so often in this collection, is death for life. Akpan's incredible talent as a writer prevents the story from becoming a polemic, diatribe or object lesson. He is too good for that. The story stays firmly focused on Monique and that house with the desperately crowded attic: "I cry with the ceiling people until my voice cracks and my tongue dries up."

Uwem Akpan has given these children their voices, and for the compassion and art in his stories I am grateful, and changed.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Let's Take Care of Our Children
Say You're One of Them is a powerful collection of short stories. Told from the perspective of young children, the collection takes us into the brutality of the childrens' lives in Africa. Each story is a slow awakening to unbelievable horrors for both the child and the reader. The first story, An Ex-Mas feast, looks at a poverty-striken family that must rely on their twelve year old daughter's income to survive. She has to prostitute herself for food and money but she is trying to earn enough money so her younger brother can go to school. The children in "Fattening for Gabon" are being prepared for sale into slavery by their uncle. In "What Language Is That?" two little Ethiopian girls are best friends until their parents suddenly say they cannot speak to each other anymore because one is Muslim and the other is Christian. In "Luxurious Hearses", a Nigerian boy from the north is trying to escape to relatives in the south on a bus filled with the same religious animosity that he hopes to escape. The final story, "My Parent's Bedroom", describes the violence between the Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis as seen through the eyes of a young girl who has mixed parentage.

For me, the most powerful story is the last. I will forever hold the powerful images of a toddler playing in his slain mothers blood. Each story is a work of fiction, but is based on real situations that have transpired. In the Afterword, written by a pastor who knows the author, Uwem Akpan, the writer offers his belief that the publication of these stories is a bold attempt to enlighten readers about children of Africa, which in turn may create a passionate desire to create a safer place for children all over the world. After laying down this book, I know I am one of those affected people, and I thank Pastor Akpan for this powerful lesson.

Art In The Horrific Details
Stories of abused and battered children in Africa are legion, but few cut as close to the bone as this collection by Uwem Akpan. His five tales, two of which are novella length, are told with the uninhibited, truth-filled voices of the children involved. Each one takes place in a different country but the theme is universal: the biggest challenge faced by children in Africa is staying alive.

Akpan, a Jesuit priest with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, piles on details available only to one intimately familiar with the lives described. Be forewarned: some of those details are gruesome to the point of causing distress, which I am sure was his intent. The imagery can range from the droll, like the description of the motorbike loaded with five people, various fruits and vegetables, a rooster and five rolls of toilet paper in "Fattening for Gabon," to the most horrific sight a child can see, a parental bloodbath, in "My Parents' Bedroom." This story ends the book and is the source of the title "Say you're one of them," the command given by a desperate Rwandan Tutsi mother to her Hutu-fathered child as machete-wielding killers approach.

Various dialects are used masterfully to both reveal characters and set scenes. The jargon, slang, and foreign phrases may be off-putting to some readers, but little meaning is lost when the dialogue is read in full context. Quite frankly, the only time many readers can bear to imagine events like those in the book is when they take place on foreign shores. We can be sickened and outraged by horrors on another continent; the same happenings across the street from where we live would paralyze us with fright. Fortunately, Akpan's familiarity with African poetry infuses much of the writing, giving the book a lyrical tone that keeps the more violent passages from slipping into slasher-movie territory.

As a person who has photographed and written about Africa extensively, I must confess I was not shocked by Akpan's stories. Unfortunately, tales like them are all too familiar to me. I was deeply moved by his dramatic intensity, however, and highly appreciative of his ability to put the reader inside the children's lives.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds: A Novel of Scandal, Love and Death in the Congo

You will be a different person after you read this book
Say You're One of Them is a book of five short stories written by Uwem Akpan. All of the stories are set in Africa and are told from a child's perspective. They deal with such topics as slavery, religious conflict, genocide and poverty. These are stories of love and sacrifice. They are stories of compassion and confusion. They make you wonder how children can grow up and survive under such circumstances. Some of the stories will leave you feeling numb.

The story that had the biggest impact on me was My Parent's Bedroom. It's the story of Monique, a young girl living in Rwanda with her Tutsi mother and her Hutu father. There is conflict between the two tribes, which Monique and her brother Jean don't understand. It all comes to a horrifying ending for their family when their mother makes the ultimate sacrifice. I can't describe the horror I felt at the end of this story.

I enjoyed Say You're One of Them and think it's a significant book, but I found some of the dialogue very difficult to read. I think it would have been even harder if I didn't know some French. There were times when I had to read sentences several times to extract their meaning. Here's an example of dialogue, chosen at random:

"My mama no be like dat," Jubril argued. "I say I dey come. I go join una now now. Ah ah, no vex now. Come, pollow me go fark dis cows, and I go join."

This book isn't a fast read, but I think it's an important one. The title of the book comes from the fact that children in Africa sometimes have to deny their identity and say they're one of "them" (another tribe or religion) in order to survive. You will be a different person after you've read this book.