“Whatever else it may be about,” wrote US critic Leo Steinberg in 1972, “all art is about art.” One of the great pleasures of engaging with works of art is discerning the artists’ embedded reflections on their craft — whether wry or sincere, rigorous or whimsical.
In the visual arts, this usually entails a self-conscious approach to “ways of seeing”. Theatre and film emphasise how performativity is central to identity. Literary texts regularly describe the act of writing, usually variations on Ernest Hemingway’s observation that it is easy: all you have to do is sit at a keyboard and bleed.
To introduce Midnight in the Morgue, the 2024 Caine Prize anthology recently published by Jacana Media, Chika Unigwe and Karen Jennings draw the reader’s attention to metaliterary considerations. The Caine Prize is awarded each year for a short story by an African writer published in English. The AKO Foundation, which sponsors the prize, also supports an annual writers’ workshop.
Unigwe, who chaired the 2024 judging panel, opens her foreword by tackling the perceived threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) to the vocation of writing. Ultimately, she affirms that the authors selected for the anthology — including those shortlisted for last year’s prize and those who participated in the workshop — are a reminder of “the irreplaceable value of storytelling”, in opposition to communication technologies that tend to “drown out the nuances of individual experience”.
In turn, the preface by Jennings (who, with fellow workshop facilitator Femi Kayode, co-edited the volume) considers different paradigms for writerly experience. On the one hand, there is isolation: writing as shouting into the void, a kind of imprisonment that brings delirium and suffering. On the other hand, there is fellowship: writing as communion, a search for mutual understanding and the resolution of conflict.
Jennings thus invites us to “think of the writers … their lungs bursting as they bellow into the night, as they writhe in torment” — but also to imagine them at the workshop, “coming together, eating cake, gossiping, laughing, giving advice and support”. In other words, “think of them as wonderfully human, both flawed and brilliant”.
This is an apt framing of a collection that is likewise flawed but contains moments of brilliance, and that has the great virtue of showing characters in all their messy humanity demonstrating forms of artistry as they wrestle with the stuff of life.
The most obvious example is in Nadia Davids’ deft piece, Bridling, the deserved winner of the 2024 prize. Here the narrator is an actor in an ensemble of women who, under the direction of a man, recreates on stage a series of famous images in which female subjects are the focus of an implied male gaze. As Davids subtly reveals the layers of hypocrisy and self-deception in this situation, her protagonist reaches a moment of liberation.
Notions of artistry are not, however, always redemptive. In Samuel Kolawole’s Adjustment of Status, a Nigerian immigrant to the US finds himself working in a morgue. He tries to reconceptualise the abjection of washing dead bodies as a sacred ritual, then compares his mortician boss to “a sculptor remodelling a stone or an artist touching up a painting”. Yet he is not welcome in the US, and after he is deported he is too ashamed to return to his family.
Like Foster Benjamin’s tragicomic tale of haunting, Midnight in the Morgue (which lends its title to the collection), Kolawole’s emphasis on the gruesome corpse itself makes explicit the undercurrent of morbidity and illness that connects a number of the stories. Bodily dysfunction is mirrored in a diseased body politic: interpersonal and intergenerational relationships are broken, or at the point of breaking.
There is sickness, injury, psychological pain — but there is also healing. Sibongile Fisher’s Shadow Fever, Tryphena Yeboah’s The Dishwashing Women and Pemi Aguda’s Breastmilk, for instance, feature women who make a brave decision or attain a moment of clarity. This may destroy a friendship, reconcile spouses or embolden others to resist patriarchal force; we are left to ponder uncertain futures for these characters.
Colonial legacies, class divisions and gender inequality remain. Yet equally vivid, after we close the book, are the writing humans to whom Unigwe and Jennings have directed our attention.
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