Cross-cultural exchanges

The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity.

The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity.

There’s great comedy — and also artistry — in this because almost every story actually describes some degree of false consciousness, wrong-headedness or pathetic illusion. Life is not transparent or legible to Osondu’s characters: it is like a series of painted cloth stage-sets which are repeatedly yanked away, punctured or torn, without ever revealing more than a fleeting glimpse of the real state of things behind.

Osondu is Nigerian. He worked as an advertising copywriter in his native country before moving to America, where he now teaches English at Providence College in Rhode Island. This is his first book, and it’s very good.

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The stories hew closely to a single theme — the relations between Nigerians and America. But they elaborate, with virtuosic inventiveness, countless variations on that theme. The Nigerians feel real, whereas America, even in the stories set in the US, remains an abstraction, a magnet for many hopes and illusions.

Osondu’s titles — ‘Our First American’, ‘Jimmy Carter’s Eyes’, ‘Nigerians in America’, ‘Welcome to America’, ‘Stars in My Mother’s Eyes, Stripes on My Back’ — reinforce the book’s thematic unity, but his characters are wonderfully miscellaneous.

In ‘Waiting’, two refugee boys, hungry and bewildered, kill time in a camp with other kids who wear donated T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like ‘Tell Me I’m Sexy’, ‘Ask Me About Jesus’, ‘Acapulco’ and ‘Got Milk?’.