Who Will Bury You? is up for giveaway until the end of October.
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I lived in America for 9 years, but never wrote a single story set in the US. But just months after I got to Toronto, I wrote my first story set in Canada. Somehow, Toronto immediately felt like home. Part of it was being surrounded by many people like me, immigrants far from where they come from. But also, the colonial architecture of parts of the city felt familiar to Harare, echoes of a similar settler colonial past. My book Who Will Bury You?: And Other Stories is a collection of short stories about Zimbabweans living in Canada and Zimbabwe. They are stories about grief and loss and how identities change as we navigate them. They are stories about what transforms and what remains the same when we leave home and when we come back. What follows is a list of books by Canadian writers that consider loss and home.
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This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
I first encountered Simpson’s work in my academic research. I read As We Have Always Done and several things clicked into place in my mind about the relationship between indigeneity and the afterlives of settler colonialism in Zimbabwe. This Accident of Being Lost helped me see how I could place my academic and creative writing in conversation. A collection of stories and poems, it blends genre in a manner that demonstrated how indigeneity often does not fit neatly into genre and requires a reimagining of the work that genre does. Simpson relies of traditional storytelling methods to create a powerful collection that remains with you for a very long time. The book has a lovely rhythm to it, and I recommend experience both the book and the audiobook, as each experience provides its own insights.
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Linghun, by Ai Jiang
I do not usually read anything with horror elements as it doesn’t take much to scare me. But I am glad I pushed past my apprehension and gave Linghun by Ai Jiang a chance. Linghun is about a town called HOME, where people give up everything to move into houses where the spirits of their dead loved ones can return. The book is intense and asks the question of what you are willing to do to see your dead loved one again. Jiang’s prose is evocative as Linghun meditates on the very strange existence of grieving and how grief can keep you standing still until you no longer recognise the world beyond your grief.
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Shut Up You’re Pretty, by Téa Mutonji
Shut Up You’re Pretty by Téa Mutonji is a collection of linked stories that center around Loli, a Congolese-Canadian girl. I always marvel at the voice in the collection. There are a lot of difficult topics in the book, and Mutonji addresses them with a clarity that resonates. I also love how it is a book that is as much about Scarborough as it is about Loli. I’ll be thinking of this line Loli says as she is thinking about loss and grief for a long time: “Death is like being pregnant and never giving birth.”
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Songs for the End of the World, by Saleema Nawaz
In the title story of Who Will Bury You?, the mother says, “Sometimes I think that maybe when I ask, ‘Who will bury you?’ what I am really asking is who will be there at the end?” For me, Songs for the End of the World sets out to answer who will be there at the end of the world, when crisis strains our connections to each other. I am not an optimistic person, so I appreciate writers who can acknowledge dread and despair, but still find room for hope as well. It is about a fictional novel coronavirus pandemic and has jarring connections to the Covid-19 pandemic, but what really carries the novel for me is that it is scaled to the personal, tracing the lives of different characters before the outbreak to show how we are all connected.
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Denison Avenue, by Christina Wong
I love stories that are rooted in a sense of place and Christina Wong’s Denison Avenue makes place come alive as a character. The book follows an older Chinese-Canadian woman, Wong Cho Sum, in Chinatown–Kensington Market in Toronto. It’s a meditation on loss: the sudden loss of her husband, and the gradual loss of her neighbourhood as it rapidly gentrifies. I think often of this line: “Sometimes, the memory of something can be enough, and sometimes it is never enough. We hold on to whatever we can.”
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Her First Palestinian And Other Stories, by Saeed Teebi
Her First Palestinian and Other Stories is one of my favourite short story collections. This is a collection of stories about Palestinian immigrants in Canada. It is full of fascinating characters in a myriad experiences as they grapple with what it means to be in the diaspora. I have read the collection several times, and it is one of those collections where the answer to the question of which is my favourite story changes every time. It is an engaging collection with delightful writing.
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Learn more about Who Will Bury You?: And Other Stories:
Intimate stories about Zimbabweans in moments of transition that force them to decide who they really are and choose the people they call their own.
Set in Toronto and Zimbabwe, the twelve elegant stories in Who Will Bury You? touch on themes of loss, identity, and inequality as they follow the lives of Zimbabweans who often feel like they are on the outside looking in. A mother and daughter navigate new relationship dynamics when the daughter comes out as a lesbian. Two sisters wonder what will hold them together after their grandmother’s death. A daughter tries to tell her father she loves him as she prepares to leave home for the first time. A journalist takes her grieving mother on a trip to report on girls who are allegedly being abducted by mermaids. A girl born to be the river god’s wife becomes a hero when chaos breaks out in the mighty Zambezi. A group of mothers discover just how far they are willing to go to protect their children during wartime.
Ephemeral yet beautifully satisfying, the stories in Chido Muchemwa's debut collection ask what makes people leave home, what makes them come back, and what keeps them there.
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