Caine Prize Blogathon: Chicken

Efemia Chela was twenty-one years old when she wrote Chicken (find it here). It is her first published work. It won third place in the Short Story Day Africa’s “Feast, Famine and Potluck” Short Story Competition in 2013. And now it has been shortlisted for the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing. Has a new literary star been born?

It does seem so. In Chicken, she tells the story of an independent-minded young woman who feels disconnected from her well-to-do family, and who pursues studies of her choice, one which her parents disapprove of. However, upon completion of her studies, she finds it difficult getting a job; financial support from her parents dwindles, and she resorts to becoming an ovarian egg donor.

Narrated in the first person, Chicken is vivid, keenly observant, and reflective. It is a story about life’s contradictions. It begins with a departure, marked with much fanfare and a feast (hence the title), but not really a departure as Kaba, the narrator, feels she had already felt apart from her family for years:

“It was a departure of sorts, last time I saw them. Or maybe not at all. I had left sigh by sigh, breath by breath over the years. By the time my leaving party came, I was somewhere else entirely.”

Reference to her family as “them” signifies how deep Kaba’s disconnection is. Despite the fanfare, feast, credit cards, “a bulb of white wine”, Kaba declares: “The people, the scale, the grandeur. It wasn’t really anything to do with me at all.” And yet from this departure from material comfort she descends into a world of want and desperation.

In the midst of her desperation, Kaba doesn’t reach out to her parents, perhaps as a fault of pride, or as a form of rebellion against a life being prescribed for her. She is proud enough not to let slip her desperation – on the day she decides to visit the egg donor recruiter, she takes a hardback book “big enough to hide my face in case I saw someone I knew.”

Such is her feeling of having failed, despite having a university distinction “no one asked about”, that she finds it refreshing, “the only truth I had dealt with in a long time”, that she cannot fail at being an egg donor. Yet, faced with the donor application form, she wonders why the blank lines are so easy when life is so hard; in other words, how her own description as demanded by the blank lines – healthy, 65kg, brown-eyed, non-smoking, with regular periods and taking no contraceptives – do not constitute a sum of her life, her choices and the consequences of those choices. She declares: “Broken into sections, I barely recognized myself.”

After the extraction, she feels “less lost”, yet now she has to face the anguish of not knowing where her child would be. Her wish that “my donation would just be fiction” signals the depths of her angst and perhaps a desire to put it behind her, to forget that it ever happened.

Chicken therefore is a deep, visceral and masterful portrayal of a character. It takes us inward into Kaba’s mind, and from there we see life’s contradictions, our motivations, the choices we make, and their consequences. Perhaps it is also a story about unrewarding idealism. Whatever the case, it is a great story, with nice, descriptive and reflective prose firmly anchored in definite environments.