Reviewer: Catriona Troth
What We Thought of It:
In her introduction to this collection of short stories she
has curated, Sareeta Domingo remembers how: “Between the pages of my beloved
books, it soon became apparent that neither tales of romantic woe, nor the sexy
bonkbusters I’d eye curiously on the shelves {…}, nor even those sophisticated,
classically revered literary tales of love and honour, featured any people who
looked like me.” Did that mean, she asked herself, that love and desire were
not for young people of colour like her?
In response to that, and because she loves the romance genre,
Domingo curated this anthology “to create space for British women of colour to write
about romantic love in all its many guises.”
If Bolu Babalola’s short story collection, Love in Colour,
reached back into folklore for its inspiration, these stories are contemporary –
or in some cases futuristic. In Varaizo’s ‘Long Distance’, a love affair with a
heart-breaking twist blossoms over a near-future vision of social media. ‘No one
is Lonely’ by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan takes place in a London that has been engulfed
with floods, “where wilting bunches of flours are tied to posts where the drowned
were lost.”
There are gay characters and straight, cis and trans. Sara
Collins ‘Brief Encounters’ brings the classic tale to present day London with
new energy, while in Daniellé Dash’s ‘The Row’, a woman fleeing a
relationship gone wrong finds solace in the tender touch of a hairdresser’s
fingers. Dorothy Koomson’s ‘My Heart Beats’, features a couple whose
relationship seems to be a sequence of missed opportunities – can they finally
connect?
Domingo’s own ‘The Waves Will Carry Us Back’ features a
refugee rescued from the sea by a surfer, while Kuchenga’s ‘Rain … Doubtful’ gives
us a transwoman finding unqualified love and acceptance.
The stories travel the world too. Returning to Iran for a
mother’s funeral results in a meeting of hearts and minds in a wholly
unexpected location in Sara Jafari’s ‘Motherland’. In Kelechi Okafor’s ‘The
Watchers’, a kind of guardian angel drawn from Nigerian cosmology watches over
a pair of souls who meet time after time as they are reincarnated into
different lives. In Amna Saleem’s ‘Rani’, a grandmother’s tale of love during Partition
interweaves with her granddaughter’s.
These are tales with an edge to them. The women in them are empowered – they choose love, or reject it, on their own terms. There are stories that are tender, erotic, funny and tragic. They are rich with sentences that distil and capture emotion, whether it is Sara Collins on being assailed by grief:
“There is nowhere in the train station where she can scream
or pound her knees or keel over, nowhere to make cow-like noises, why don’t
they build somewhere like that – like public toilets, but for grief?”
Or Amna Saleem on a child carrying the weight of family
expectations:
“Conspicuously linking me to a rich ancestral tapestry where
growing up, I half expected to discover I was a latent vampire slayer waiting
to become the brown Buffy Summers of Scotland”
There is something, surely, to appeal to everyone. Certainly
a heartfelt demonstration that, as Domingo says: “Love is inside us –
all of us.”
You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Love In Colour by Bolu Babalola, The Nearness of You by Sareeta Domingo
Avoid If you Dislike: Love in all its shapes and sizes
Perfect Accompaniment: A chilled glass of your favourite bubbly
Genre: Romance, Short Stories
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