Vitabu Review | GraceLand and Talking Slums

Three phrases from the opening paragraphs of Chris Abani's GraceLand took me to my familiar: Heavy rain...wooden shutter...rickety lean-to made of sheets of corrugated iron roofing and plastic held together by hope. Abani's award-winning book, removed from a Florida reading list in 2010 because of the sexual content of a torture scene, is a searing insight into violence: Rape, war, lynching, kidnapping, and the gory business of selling human body parts. Chris Abani "gets a little dirty" with a troubling look at darkness, but it's his "unpatronizing record of life" in Maroko, a slum outside Lagos, that stirs my nostalgia: Abani's fictional Maroko is much like that of the real wharf communities which Sierra Leone's Muctaru Wurie immortalizes in his A Day in the Eastern Slums of Freetown . From the wharves of Kampala, Susan's Bay, and Marbella, Muctaru Wurie introduces us to 14-year- old Abdul Mansaray. With his mother dead and father ...