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A review by drdreuh
Call and Response by Gothataone Moeng
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
3.5
The geographic scope of "Call and Response" is about the distance from Serowe to Gaborone, Botswana. And after reading this compilation of short stories, I now feel like I know every personality type there is to know there. I enjoyed "Call and Response" for the same reason I enjoy short stories generally. I like dropping into someone's life drama long enough to figure it out and then out again before it gets boring. And there were some stories and characters that I really loved. But, overall, "Call and Response" felt a bit undercooked. Less like an intentioned compilation and more like Moeng was experimenting with writing the same themes from multiple characters point of view or within different social arrangements. Some of these themes are really interesting, though. The men, for example, are virtually all absent. Their presence looms larger in characters' minds than they do in the story. And there's a lot on the juxtaposition (transition?) between traditional (African) values and modernity that I find really interesting, alongside more typical themes around immigration. Some stories ended too fast; others dragged on too long. All of this is well within the realm of what I think is fun about a compilation of short stories. I'll be curious to see what Moeng can do with a novel.
Lines I Loved:
We have all been there. Being good for our fathers and uncles and brothers, even our cousins and boyfriends. They have no idea who we are.
... a man is an axe to be lent around.
His cardinal sin was what she called his SRB - strong rural background - which manifested itself in his coarse accent and his continuing distaste for any food unlike what he had grown up eating.
Nametso drives around the city, ghosts of her past emergent everywhere.
My jaw got tired of speaking all that English.
Tumo's beauty was cultivated now for a particular trajectory she was planning for her life.
I met a man my sister introduced as her husband.
One who had decentered men from her life once she had exhausted their uses.
She had felt the beating of her foolish, hopeful heart, still refusing to cede its monthly hope to the inevitability of her age.
She had needed her family to think, despite everything, that she had at least done well for herself.
You can learn your way around a forest, but never around a person.
She was from the generation whose love was shrouded in fear and bewilderment at the whims of a God who took just as easily as He gave.
With the work of her own two hands, a woman could slink past some certain calamities of this world and fashion her own kind of life.
It felt simultaneously too trivial and too grand to tackle.
It wasnt the place they missed, nor the people. Their nostalgia was solely for the status of their lives there.
Lines I Loved:
We have all been there. Being good for our fathers and uncles and brothers, even our cousins and boyfriends. They have no idea who we are.
... a man is an axe to be lent around.
His cardinal sin was what she called his SRB - strong rural background - which manifested itself in his coarse accent and his continuing distaste for any food unlike what he had grown up eating.
Nametso drives around the city, ghosts of her past emergent everywhere.
My jaw got tired of speaking all that English.
Tumo's beauty was cultivated now for a particular trajectory she was planning for her life.
I met a man my sister introduced as her husband.
One who had decentered men from her life once she had exhausted their uses.
She had felt the beating of her foolish, hopeful heart, still refusing to cede its monthly hope to the inevitability of her age.
She had needed her family to think, despite everything, that she had at least done well for herself.
You can learn your way around a forest, but never around a person.
She was from the generation whose love was shrouded in fear and bewilderment at the whims of a God who took just as easily as He gave.
With the work of her own two hands, a woman could slink past some certain calamities of this world and fashion her own kind of life.
It felt simultaneously too trivial and too grand to tackle.
It wasnt the place they missed, nor the people. Their nostalgia was solely for the status of their lives there.