Review: Rise of A Queen by Chanta Rand

3.5 stars
I received a free copy of this book from the author. My opinion is my own. 
TW: Male rape

Chanta Rand's West African historical romance Rise of a Queen was intense. It began with a male rape, and included a lot of treachery, death and destruction, reminiscent of old school romance sagas. While that wasn't necessarily to my tastes, it was also intertwined with fascinating characterisation and a wonderfully detailed setting, both of which I really enjoyed. 

The book opens with the heroine, Nabeela, being married to a prince much older than her in order to ensure her family's security. However, the overweight prince has a heart attack on their wedding night, and so she, her mother and their confidantes have to find another man to consummate the marriage and - hopefully - provide Nabeela with an heir, or the whole thing will be for nought. 

A year or so later, Rafan - of the rival Sahaja people - is sent on a diplomatic mission to form an alliance between Rafan's cousin, a Sahaja king, and the de facto ruler of Nabeela's kingdom, her power-hungry former stepson. Rafan recognises the woman who held him captive and "stole his seed", and everything begins to unravel as Rafan upsets the delicate balance of power between Nabeela and her stepson. 

As I said, the plot itself is a bit old school. There's a long set up with many separate conflicts and then the denouement comes very suddenly, and then is resolved quite quickly. I would have liked to see this more fleshed out. For example, it's never mentioned why Rafan turned around from the mission he is sent on, or the hows and whys behind the revelation of a plot against Nabeela. (I am being purposely vague here because I did enjoy this book enough that I don't want to spoil it for others). 

I found Nabeela to be a very well-executed heroine. Circumstance - and her mother - have taught her that power is the only security a woman can have, and this defines her actions. However, Rand does very well at highlighting that desire for power and position is not a result of naked ambition, self-absorption or callousness - although other characters see it this way - but of the turbulent socio-political context. 

In of itself, I think I probably would have only given the story 3 stars, but the way the author handled the setting bumps it up another .5 stars. Rand wove her research about the Empire of Ghana into the story so skillfully, without ever info-dumping. There was also a wonderful Author's Note at the end, which laid out everything that I had on my 'to Google' list in just the right amount of detail, complete with maps and pictures. 

It is thanks to that I realised that the Empire of Ghana is in no way geographically commensurate with the modern nation-state of Ghana, but was instead located in what is now southeastern Mauritania, western Mali and eastern Senegal. 

This was a good thing to know since I, you know, picked The Rise of a Queen as a Beyond a Single Story read for Ghana. So that's a valuable lesson for me. Don't rely on nomenclature and slack off on your research when picking books from countries where your knowledge is sadly lacking. If anyone knows of any historical romances set in modern-day Ghana or, before that, in the colony of the Gold Coast, I'd be grateful if you let me know.

In the meanwhile, I'm leaving Rise of a Queen under Ghana on the Beyond a Single Story page, because I think it points out the exact reason I started doing this back in January (and how little progress I've made). However, in doing so, I don't intend to imply that there is a common or interchangeable culture between the current Ghana and the other West African countries that once made up the ancient Ghana Empire. 

Review: His Princess by Kiru Taye

3.5 stars

His Princess is the third story included in Kiru Taye's Men of Valor boxset. I enjoyed the setting of pre-colonial Southern Nigeria so much that I read straight through all three stories in a day, but His Princess was the stand-out for me, for a number of reasons. 

Firstly, it was longer, which meant more time for character development. Our heroine, Ezinne, is a slave/servant. When her mistress returns to her home kingdom to visit her father, she gifts Ezinne to her husband, Prince Emeka, as a 'companion' while she is away. Ezinne is resentful of the arrangement, but she's irrevocably bound to her mistress, and intrigued by the kind prince. Emeka has long been interested in Ezinne, but he's not about to take her as a concubine, nor as a second wife. Emera is an upstanding man and I thought Ezinne was an excellent heroine, who was strong but vulnerable, and who had secrets that needed protecting. 

His Princess is one of those rare stories where I had no inkling as to how the complications were going to resolve themselves. That was partly because the characters are at an impasse, but also because - to my shame - I have no knowledge of pre-colonial Igbo culture (Even after some Googling, it's a guess that the stories are set in Igboland - someone correct me if I'm wrong). In settings and time periods I'm more familiar with, I know the rough likelihood of a divorce or annulment, and I might be able to speculate on other ways the author would resolve hero married to a woman that isn't the heroine, but here, I literally had NO CLUE what the socially acceptable options were. 

The ending was even more of a surprise than I expected - a bit melodramatic and fairytale-like, but in a good, Brothers Grimm way. The road to the HEA was rougher than the other two stories, and so, in the end, the pay-off is bigger.

His Princess also featured slightly better editing than His Treasure and His Strength, where there was some inconsistent first/third person narration. It was minor - all that was needed was to italicise the first person sentences so that it was clearer that they were thought processes - but still annoying. 

However, I'd still recommend all three stories; the other two are probably 3 star reads for me. Throughout all three stories, Taye weaves certain historical realities, such as slavery and polygamy,  throughout and yet never alienates a modern reader used to different social norms. This is undoubtedly her strength. Again, though, His Princess gets a special mention: because it's set at the royal court, it features the most interesting socio-political context. 

Reflection: #WNDB & Beyond a Single Story

Whether they realise it or not, most Australians are familiar with the concept of a single story. It's when foreigners ask us, unironically, about keeping kangaroos as pets. Its the entire sub-genre of Australian Outback romances. I've been polling all my romance reading friends about these, and none of them have ever read an Outback romance. Even though these books are (sometimes) made and distributed in Australia, they are primarly meant for external consumption. It's the advertisements on my cable television provider for a program in which some minor British personality goes bush to search the "real Australia". Cue images of horse-wrangling, cattle stations and crocodiles, and British Guy patronisingly explaining everything despite having a day's experience of the place. It's not that the stories of rural Australians aren't worthy or important - in fact, in our internal media these are often sidelined - but their presentation to international audiences invalidates the 85% of Australians who live in urban environments. 

And countries and regions all around the world have similar experiences. Often, we even encourage the stereotypes of the outside world to brand ourselves for tourism and business purposes, Australia's Where the bloody hell are you? ad campaign being a prime example, but this doesn't make them any less alienating or dangerous.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talks about how we are often lead to believe that one story about a particular place or people is the only story in her influential TED talk entitled The Dangers of a Single Story. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching it, or reading the transcript.

She recounts how, on coming to America for university, she realised that people saw Africa as a place of "beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS", and related to her through this lens. It was not their fault; this is what the media and popular culture presented to them with little differentiation between nations, regions, cultures and religions. Adichie, however, was not in the same boat. She says:

...because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.

I thought of this quote when I was reflecting on my #WNDB Challenge as it comes up to the end of the year. Despite the fact that I had sought out books featuring characters of varying ethnicities, religions and sexualities, I have realised that 14 out of the 20 books I read were set in the US, and all but two took place in either the US or UK (and when I say the UK, I really mean England with the odd Scottish setting thrown in; Wales and Northern Ireland don't get a look-in). I undertook the #WNDB Challenge to counter hegemony, but ended up perpetuating it in another form. Unless they had immigrated to the US or UK, the people of the periphery were still silenced. No doubt about it, the fault was in my selecting skills, but this also reflects what I was exposed to on Goodreads, Amazon and other blogs.

I'm always loath to buy into romance/'light' fiction vs. 'literary' fiction binaries, but I do feel like the romance world is dragging its feet in this regard. The Man Booker prize has opened itself up to writers from all over the world and novels from all over the world are feted as literary masterpieces (this is has it's own set of problems as well, don't get me wrong). In contrast, all of the 2015 RITA Winners were set in the UK or US. 2014 had more diverse settings: one Outback, one partially set in Bangkok and one set in various European locations (but with the characters based in London). In 2013, we were back to all US or UK, excepting two fictional locations.

I have no doubt there are many romance novels set outside these conventional locations out there, but they are not making it past the literary gatekeepers and so languish in the dusty corners of the Kindle Store. In 2016, I'm making it my mission to find them. The aim is to review books from countries around the world in an aim to help myself see beyond the single story, and I would be grateful for any recommendations. 

As always, there will be an element of working this out as I go along. For example, should the author have to be from the country in which the book is set? The only things I'm sure about is that I would like to read more than one book from each country. After all, it would be pretty useless to counter a single story with a single story.

Reflection: Don't Judge a Culture by its Cover

My awareness of the ways book covers can reflect and reinforce stereotypes of gender - which I touched on in the last post - has come largely from those who seek to point out the way race or 'foreign' locales are represented on book covers.  The cover of a book tells somebody what to expect in reading it, but what happens when the cover doesn't reflect the content, but rather a preconceived stereotype of the setting, characters or content?

Here are two specific examples where entire cultures have been essentialised down to a single image or trope.   First, we have the classic I'm-a-book-about-an-Arabic/Islamic-woman-therefore-I-must-be-oppressed-and-have-no-individual-identity:

Source: arabglot.com

There are some excellent discections of the 'Veiled Woman' cover, including 'Translating for Bigots', 'Don't Judge Books By Their Cover - Especially Arabic Works in Translation', 'Why So Many 'Saving Muslim Women' Book Covers?' and 'Book Covers Promote Orientalist Portrayal of Muslim Women'.  All of them touch on the book covers as a vehicle for Orientalism, which: 

"...considers the way that the Middle East and Asia are represented in Western novels, biographies, and artworks.  Commonly, these depict places lost in times past, inclined towards despotic rule, and prone to odd cultural rituals that can be both pleasurable and symptomatic of weakness....The Orient was a powerfully pictured but vague location that the Westerner believed he could control and enjoy, penetrate and posess, and  hide in....The implicit goal, which repeats across time in politics, media and the popular imagination, was to reaffirm cultural difference and render things 'Oriental' marginal to the West and subordinate to Western international relations."   

-- Extract of 'Post-colonialism' by Christine Sylvester in The Globalization of World Politics, edited by Bayliss et al.

The ways small cultural artifiacts, such as book covers, can reinforce hierarchies of power between countries, communities and individuals in the international arena can be demonstrated using the I'm-a-book-set-in-Africa-so-I-must-feature-a-sunset-over-the-savannah:

Source: 'The Dangers of a Single Book Cover:The Acacia Tree Meme and "African Literature"'

The 'Acacia Tree' covers exemplify Sylvester's first example; that Africa exists within a timeless bubble of primitiveness (none of the examples feature any buildings other than small, mud huts).  As with the Arabic example, this image is developed prior to knowledge of the book's content and the views of the author (both often trying to subvert stereotypes, not reinforce them).  With regards to Africa, this is sometimes called 'Black Orientalism' or 'Afro-Orientalism', but it can also just be classified as Orientalism because of its commonalities with the ways Asia and the Arab world is stereotyped.  No matter what the region, these stereotypes have real-world effects.

In this case, they establish Africa as a homogenous place and thereby illegitimate the experience of being Xhosa or Yoruba, Shona or Kikuyu, from urban Africa or a particular region of the continent.  As a prime example, I just googled Kikuyu to make sure I was spelling it right, and except for one Wikipedia page listing all the pages that Kikuyu might refer to (5 out 7 were related directly to the ethnic group), all of the other options on the first page of my Google results refered to a species of grass.  The Kikuyu make up 22% of Kenya's population - the largest of any single ethnic group - and yet the Western world is more concerned with a native Kenyan grass that was named after them.  

Ebola illustrated the real world implications of such ignorance beautifully.  Although Europe was closer to the Western African outbreak than Southern Africa, tourism in the South took a seroius downturn.

Secondly, the Africa-as-timeless trope denies the reality of the continent's colonial history and the impact this continues to exert today.  Surely, if a Western country doesn't recognise the Rwandan genocide as a partial byproduct by colonial hierarchies that turned Hutu and Tutsi from fluid ethnic groups to castes, then making a decision about whether to intervene becomes simpler.  Ditto the coming African Debt Crisis and many other international affairs issues.  The flip side of this, I suppose, is that the depiction of Africa as primitive and backward allows for neo-colonialism; the West (and other powers, such as China, which has developed massive oil, crop and other interests in African nations) can intervene without international condemnation.  

So, while it might seem that covers featuring acacia trees or veiled women are fairly unimportant in the scheme of things,they are one small cog in a very big machine that determines the way we think about the world.