“Each New Disaster, More Poetic”: A Review of Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood
In Vanessa Onwuemezi’s debut collection, Dark Neighbourhood, disaster has already come and turned out the lights. The sun has gone home early in most of the stories, and with the sun, the world; the familiarity of a home, and a boundary. Take, for example, the title story. An event has taken place and we are dropped in, aimless and alien, and offered a list of products: a bottle of water, a baby bottle, ginger ale, bank statements, a half-pint of blood. After the list there is a voice, one we learn is identifiably of Onwuemezi’s world. “Now GG’s got a gun and she ah adds it to the pile, rolls onto her backside and smokes. Later, I’ll tell you about how she dies.”
It isn’t for another six or so pages that we learn any concrete history of the setting or society. Until then, the place is more of a sense—a brooding, bruised feeling, where possessions are hoarded and traded as currency, and there is nothing to do but wait. Eventually we hear a broadcasted message, and “there are floodlights high above… illuminated both day and night erase the moon.” Onwuemezi has a talent for world-building that a genre writer would kill for—organic, lived-in, where toys are bartered by a human waste pit. By the end of the story, when you’ve arrived at some understanding of the situation, you realize that the great, interminable queue, where memory and lives have ended, could be anything at all, or nothing.
But then, disaster is written into Dark Neighbourhood. Like the trauma of real life, language here is erratic, forgotten sometimes. On the page this translates to gaps, broken phrases, poetry, and pauses. Things stutter and shatter, sometimes there are no words, and narrators are rarely provided with names at all. Combined with the often claustrophobic, fluid environments these stories take place in, there is something Beckettian about them, particularly in “The Growing State.” Here, like Malone, the narrator is thinking his last, drooped over his office floor. The story is his life in the process of melting: “All the smokes are smoked. God is on the edge of a knife, the cutting blade. So off with my hair. Off with the shirt and tie and trousers. Let me be naked, thank you. And quickly, go.” Onwuemezi works with a confidence not only in her own writing, but in the reader’s intelligence. She does not provide a tourist guide to this neighbourhood. Instead, she asks us to enter a highly idiosyncratic dialogue, one that makes each new story, each new disaster, more poetic and interconnected than the last: “A red light. Legs kicked I held the lamp with one hand, plug dipping into the lagoon. I followed the red light, just like the eel moved, undulating my legs as if they were swinging ropes.”
This left of field image-making that Onwuemezi works in, where almost any line could be verse, runs the risk of exhaustion. There is always the potential of laying the enigmatic on too thick and losing touch with the story. If anything, though, Dark Neighbourhood only loses momentum when Onwuemezi steps towards the conventional.
“Heartbreak at the Super 8,” a pastiche of the all-American short story, leaves behind too much of what makes the others so interesting. The dialogue, whether tongue in cheek or not, sticks in the throat in contrast to the other stories, where it sings. However, “Heartbreak” succeeds as a vehicle for Onwuemezi’s fantastic turning of phrase: “Waiting for money to come in was like being made to count every full stop in the Bible,” the narrator tells us. “When the money did come it was in crisp rolls of cash that smelled like drywall.” Elsewhere in the book, there are cucumbers “long as cold running water,” and an estate “hummed the fluorescence of city asleep with one eye open.” The effect is something like a bible-verse Philip Marlowe, both hymning and hard-boiled.
That last quote is from arguably the best story of the collection, “Green Afternoon.” The narrator, reading on his front lawn, finds himself at the end of a boy’s murder. The boy has been stabbed, “bleeding from his side, eyes of gathering water,” and the attackers are long gone. What forms is a haphazard detective story: a murder victim, a man outside the law, and a culprit. But of course, things are not so narrow as that. There is also a mother, now childless, whose quote from the paper, “—————,” encapsulates the trauma language that Onwuemezi has explored throughout the book: her on-page breaks, where words count for less than silence, and in her drastic, anxiety-formed imagery. Within “Green Afternoon,” this is not only in the mother’s loss—her speech is both a mystery and the same as every mourning parent in the news—but also in a wider inability to speak. Nobody can or will provide the narrator with a name, a culprit, and so the hole at the centre of the story remains. “I’m sorry,” the narrator says to the mother, “I looked for answers and I’ve found none. But I will collect, if I may, what you have told me in tears.”
These characters must endure a world of the local mythos and the distinctly modern. Because while they might carry around a pot of coffee that survives a beating and stores tears, and teenagers speak “in sentences broken between three mouths, like a ball being batted between them and kept from touching the ground,” there is still—finally, simply—a dead boy, a dead world. And if in the wake of every disaster there is grief, then Dark Neighbourhood lives at that wake. Or, to put it differently, as another of Onwuemezi’s nameless narrators does: “at the heart at the heart at the heart of things there is no sense.”
Vanessa Onwuemezi (@onwuemezi) is a writer and poet living in London. Her work has appeared in Granta, Prototype, frieze, and Five Dials. Her story "At the Heart of Things" won the White Review Short Story Prize 2019.
Connor Harrison (@HarrysunSee) is a British writer based in Montreal. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, The Moth Magazine, Hinterland, Review31, and Poetry Wales, among others.