288 pp. Published March 2025. Mixed anthology.
Yemoja’s Tears ponders our relationship to water. A few of the contributors were already known to me: Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Mame Bougouma Diene, Alex Jennings, Joyce Chng, Eileen Gunn, Vuyokazi Ngemntu. But this collection has many other gifted authors and some really excellent pieces, including short fiction, scholarly essays, and poetry (as well as the art on the cover by Jenekacy). The anthology was conceived by Joshua Keghnen Ichor and Ekpeki to raise awareness about water scarcity, with the proceeds to be donated to charity (a proposed water safety engineering initiative) on the African continent. The two partnered with the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts to produce it.
As aforementioned, there’s a range of work in here, with poetry from Ekpeki (titled Source, and it was fun to read Ekpeki’s poetry for the first time), Jennings, and AE Fonsworth. There’s very short and evocative fiction from Chng, and more short fiction from Gillian Polack, and Alfonso Arteaga (bilingual in English and Spanish). Solomon Uhaira describes the water problems in Bayelsa, southern Nigeria. There’s also somewhat longer fiction from F. Brett Cox and Wuraola Kayode, and a really good story by Uchechukwu Nwaka, Inmates of Ikenga Point, which is set on a prison space station.
I loved Mame Bougouma Diene’s excellent, atmospheric Doomed to the Storm:
Before there was a sea, people drank their own tears.
It’s about a vampiric child—only he’s thirsty for water, not blood. Gunn’s essay recollects her childhood in semi-rural Massachusetts and parallels that with a friend’s experience with water scarcity while farming in Zimbabwe. (There’s a mention in this essay of Harare, where I live, and where we haven’t seen government-provided water in decades.) Another fantastic story is James Morrow’s deeply poignant The Ship of Sisyphus, set on an impossible ship: Fátima, the main character, may be the almost-Sisyphus of the story, but it’s the greater idea of the futility of human acts and inaction that feels Sisyphean—the curtailment of women’s rights, war, and the refugee problem.
The scholarly works are as mind-altering and knowledge-expanding as their titles suggest: GodIsLove: Signified Sankofarrations, Personified Deities, and Mythatypical Patterns in The Joys of Motherhood and Freshwater by Candice Thornton; Fanon and Soyinka on Traditional African Ecoharmony, Colonial Greed, and the Mystic Functionality of Water by Mingle Moore, Jr.; and Love, Temptation and the Downfall of a Water Rig in Kai Ashante Wilson’s “The Devil in America” by Desireé Y. Amboree.
Water—its provision, its availability and scarcity—is political, and if there’s one story in this collection that emphasised this for me, it’s Lakunle Whesu’s Water for Tears. An excerpt:
“The Drought Machine, as we came to call it, was placed in our major cities. The nano-powered structures were erected in days to everyone’s surprise. It stretched some meters skyward and was holographically manipulated to seem as non-threatening as possible. Somehow it siphoned groundwater, rivers, streams, and even moisture from the air …
“[T]he younger generation came out in droves questioning the erection of something largely unexplained and seemingly ominous. They were dispatched off, quelled mercilessly. Human rights lawyers and advocacy groups fought relentlessly to prove that the protesters had been harmed, but opposing parties dismissed their claims as mere propaganda. The narrative quickly shifted when it was pointed out that the President hailed from the Thoro ethnic group, a group that had never held power since independence.
“Of course, within months the signs were undeniable. It became obvious that something was wrong. Our air grew dry and suffocating, our aquifers depleted, rivers drained, streams transformed into brittle cracked earth, and extreme drought gripped the land. Naturally, the government tried to distract the masses, parading the new institutions they were building from the diamond money. They even handed out bags of imported food, a feeble attempt to pacify the growing unrest. But hunger was not the real issue; it was thirst. And soon, no amount of rations could mask the truth. Our rivers were gone. Our wells empty. Our plants dead.”
Although for now it’s just a third of the world that doesn’t have clean water access, one day soon, everyone on the planet will be in that position. This anthology is before its time in that sense. Read it because the work is interesting. Also to see how many ways the writers in this small sample found to think about water. And, last but not least, get this anthology to support the work being done to provide clean water.
Thanks to ODE for the review copy.
Harare Review of Books 
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