98 pages. Published November 12, 2024 by Atthis Arts. SF novella.
Ntumy doesn’t wait for you to catch up: she drops readers right into the action of Shad-Dari’s storyworld. Formerly known as Sha’dar’dar (see the echoes?), Shad-Dari, reeling from loss, leaves her home world of Ekwukwe for Órino-Rin, where she finds work as an excavator of old-world sounds (which are cultural artefacts, in a pocket universe where sound is wonderfully material). Shad-Dari is as oblivious as most of us are to the things driving her, and seems to have a death wish. It takes an unexpected and disorienting fall through time to correct her path, but the story will not go in the direction you expect.
This dense and lovely novella made me think a lot about one of my favourite subjects, the circularity, or non-linearity, of time in many African worldviews. I also found it really clever to centre on sound as material heritage because of the centrality of orality in the transmission of knowledge and stories in many African cultures. Western civilisation has considered Africa and Africans outside of history supposedly because we have not been able to produce enough written records of our existence, not enough to satisfy the standards of their ways of seeing the world. They have not valued our oral traditions as we do. Imagine if we could have and had physically captured the sounds of all we’ve known here, on the continent? If we had libraries of those, that did not reside in frail and death-prone humans? However, Songs of the Shadows, while making me think, is not at all concerned with proving anything in this direction: the ones who value these artefacts, the only people that matter in this novella, are the people of these worlds, and never outsiders.
It’s always such a pleasure to read SF outside of Western worldviews and imaginaries; partly, the ideas presented in Songs are ones I’m familiar with in the core of me, but also, humanity should never depend for visions of the future on one hegemonic (and historically oppressive) culture. If we do, how are we going to imagine our way into an expansive and inclusive future? There are other ways of seeing, other imaginaries; and this fraction of the Sauútiverse presents one, through the arc of this singular character, Shad-Dari.
Highly recommended. And very many thanks to Atthis Arts and NetGalley for early access.
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Bonus: Here’s a chat between Cheryl, Wole Talabi, and Stewart C. Baker.
Mystery, Meaning, & Mortality https://www.youtube.com/live/iUZ5EXUdHbg?si=Co8nq1lUySf_rXLY
Harare Review of Books 
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