Harare Review of Books

224 pages.

Expected publication date: June 6, 2023 (W. W. Norton & Company)

Fiction anthology.

Innards, synonyms: entrails, guts, intestines, viscera, vital organs. The inner parts.

There’s a touch of the fever dream in the stories collected in Innards. Many of them are in the form of a stream-of-consciousness, the characters relating, remembering, or rambling. A few of the narrators are unreliable, humans impacted by poverty, trauma, war, oppression—from Apartheid, and otherwise. Some characters are recurring, or referenced in linked stories. One narrator is a house, and becomes a character in a different story. And I loved the wonderful stories narrated in dialect by children.

In this collection, oaMphela Makhene lays bare the ugly, steaming viscera of lives. There is little that is pretty, or light. This is the grim stuff that most people would rather not see, the stuff we try to get away from. It’s the plumbing, the sewers, the gritty and grimy parts of life.

And yet, in that grimness is the unmistakable ring of reality. The big woman with a get-rich-quick scheme in the township turns out to be beholden to even bigger people. The fake freedom fighter turns into a fake PhD. An irascible old patriarch dies at the age of 106, causing ripples in the lives of many. People are displaced. Children die. In one story with a sci-fi element, a former fighter in the South African Border War against Namibia (Namibia’s War of Independence), the author so thoroughly inhabits the psyche of the character, it feels otherworldly.

Innards are sometimes considered food of the poor, but in southern Africa, they are a delicacy. This is what this collection is: the author exposing and giving voice to society’s insides, and also—when you’re not thinking too deeply about it—delivering juicy, tasty morsels of story. While Innards is quite unsettling, it is because the prose draws you into its maw, threatening to swallow you. This collection is grounded in place, the South Africa at the edges of what many of us see.

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene is a fantastic writer, one gifted with the power of making words sing. Innards disturbs and delights in equal measure.

Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company and to Edelweiss for the DRC.