The Silence of the Wilting Skin

Motswana author Tsamaase debuts with a lyrical and incisive allegory about personal identity and cultural loss set in an unnamed, phantasmagoric African city. The nameless narrator, an artist, lives next to the railway that carries the spirits of the dead. The train passes once a month, drawing crowds of people hoping for a glimpse of their departed loved ones. One night, the narrator’s grandmother’s dreamskin—a harbinger of death—visits the narrator, and the next day Grandmother joins the spirits of her already deceased husband and children aboard the train. This brush with the dreamskin physically changes the narrator: her hair goes gray, the color peels from her skin, and her grasp of language starts to slip. When the rich, white government of her segregated city decides to tear down the railway line, and with it the narrator’s connection to her family, she stops sleeping, hoping that “staying woke” will help her marshal whatever power the dreamskin gave her to fight for her home. Through magnetic prose, dream logic, and lush imagery, Tsamaase delivers a fierce political message. Suffused with both love and righteous anger, this atmospheric anticolonialist battle cry is a tour de force. (May)