In the days and weeks following her death, mama’s bones were everywhere—I excavated dried mango pits from the depths of her purses and from in between couch cushions; I found them scattered in the car and on her nightstand. When I was younger, I didn’t catch mama’s mango fever, much to her horror. “Dinkinish, yuh mus’ eat mango,” she exclaimed with Holy Ghost fire, kissing her teeth in disapproval. “Iz yuh culchah.” But after she died, as if by magic, I started craving the fruit, peeling them with my teeth, tearing through the flesh, sucking the pits. Mangoes followed me everywhere. Strangers offered them to me in parking lots and in the aisles of department stores. Once, a supermarket manager who had countless mango trees in his backyard slipped a bunch into my shopping cart, relieved to be rid of them.
The fullest day I know of begins with taking a portrait of a stranger in the middle of nowhere by 10 a.m. I do this while walking the historic roads of my home country, Japan. At 8 a.m. I set off with the goal of clocking some 20-40 kilometers, and by 9:50, I usually still haven’t taken that portrait. So I manically duck into whatever shop might be along the road (a tatami mat weaver, a gardening tools shop, a convenience store), or I’ll yell out to a farmer working their field: Good morning! Uhh, can I take your photo?! More often than not, they’re bemused (me, my quite obviously non-Japanese face, the fact that I’m in the middle of nowhere) and are happy to chat, and soon thereafter they’re happy to be photographed.
The novel is concerned with why people write; what it means to be an “African writer,” if that means anything at all. It is loosely but precisely engaged in conversations on the workings of writing to perpetuate or interrupt colonial narratives. But this is not the subject of the novel: rather, one facet of its writers’ experiences as writers. A writer writing writers (writing writers), the novel is a meditation on constructed worlds. Spared from the deluge and isolated from the world at large, craft and creation mingle into and revise the texture of the island. It is not always clear who are the living, and who are the rest.
At the heart of Gunk is a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family, and a suggestion of possible alternatives. It’s a radical thought, one that Sams is well placed to articulate, and she does so with tenderness. I am certain that with room to experiment, if she leans into her instinct for the eccentric and the uncomfortable, there will be much more acclaim to come.