Fiction Friday: Extract from “Ezekiel” by Segun Afolabi
An excerpt from the story, a haunting tale about migrants leaving Dakar in the cramped confines of a small boat, has been made available on The Kenyon Review website, while the full story can be read by downloading the free Kindle digest version of the journal.
Afolabi is the author of the novel Goodbye Lucille and the short story collection A Life Elsewhere. He is currently working on a new novel. Read the excerpt from “Ezekiel”:
You sail at dusk, not knowing one from the other. Moonlight leaks across the water like an oil spill. You see their faces bathed in the greasy glow: children, infants, women, mostly men. You cannot count how many people are in the boat, but you estimate at least thirty, perhaps forty. When it lay near-empty you couldn’t imagine how all of you would fit inside. But here you are, bumper to bumper, as Gertrude says of the downtown Dakar traffic, its hot-city stink, the sweat of a million bodies.
“Move your leg,” the woman beside you says in English. She sits, knees akimbo, sheathed in a wrapper the color of flowering pineapples. She wears a mauve shawl tugged up to her neck as if the sea breeze is too much of a balm for the heat. The shawl fails to mask the extent of her condition — six or seven months, you think. You couldn’t envisage Gertrude like this. You wouldn’t allow it. Not on this boat, alone, without her people around her. Then you remember — it will be roughly only one week before you reach dry land; this woman will not give birth between now and then.
Book details
- Goodbye Lucille by Segun Afolabi
EAN: 9780099485193
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- A Life Elsewhere by Segun Afolabi
EAN: 9780099485186
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Image courtesy London Evening Standard
Apr
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