Bush Meat

For Sarah's family, memories of Sixties Aba in south-eastern Nigeria are scorched onto their hearts. As that time and place are scattered like bleached bones, Aba acts as centripetal force on their imagination. Mandy Sutter's small town is as innovative as any of Tim Winton's. Her themes are substitution, racism, and how the spirit can survive transaction.

Review :
For Sarah’s family, memories of early Sixties Aba in south-eastern Nigeria are scorched onto their hearts. A days-old burial mound exposed as an ‘exploded diagram’ of bones picked clean by beasts. Adaku the Barbary duck with a ‘melted face’, who was conscripted into friendship by six-year-old Sarah in the first of a lifetime’s unlikely alliances, forged by necessity and relocation. The narcotic puff let out from the freezer in the meat-man’s shack off the Ikot Ekpene road, where Maureen, Sarah’s lonely mother, gave up aspirations to be a ‘proper oil company wife’ to Jim, and risked buying ‘bush meat’. The dry ‘snakeskin’ bark of the old iroko tree on the bend of the town’s river, under whose shade Jim sought sanctuary from people, and whose ‘two long white catkins the tree one day bestowed onto his head like confetti.’ Back home, Jim swaps adventure and agency for woodwork and more whisky. Maureen, denying her love of Igbo crafts and cloth, considers reinventing herself as an Oxfam shop assistant. In the days before her grandmother’s funeral, Sarah finds the platitudes of her father evasive compared to the wisdom and ritual taught by servant Chidike while burying the household monkey. Sarah’s hard-won Nigerian barter goods, a silver thumb-ring and a dare taken to eat fried-fat market ‘snack’, become devalued. At Aba’s Sancta Maria, unaccustomed food was a cone of hot roast groundnuts paid for by a penny with a hole. In Britain, ‘unaccustomed’ means milk with a ‘thickened band of yellow’. Now, the currency is a dare Sarah first honours, then refuses. As people of that time and place are scattered like those bleached bones, Aba acts as centripetal force on their imagination. Today’s city was a small town the like of which Tim Winton gnaws at from different angles in The Turning. Mandy Sutter’s approach is similarly innovative. Her themes are substitution, racism, and whether the spirit can ever survive transaction. "[The chapter] 'Seed' is an atmospheric tale whose ending is foreshadowed and yet wonderfully unexpected; the final image is simultaneously disquieting, touching and darkly humorous." Alison Moore "'Bush Meat' triumphs, in its lean prose and true dialogue, in its disarming humour [and] in its evocation of a family divided by sexism and racism in 1960s Nigeria. In her story, Mandy stitches together the threads of memory to create a moving tapestry of lost life, building bridges of understanding across time and place, enhancing literature's ever-changing, ever-supple genre." Rory McLean, prize co-judge "Written in lemon juice as zesty as a latter-day Martha Gellhorn, [the 'Bush Meat' section of this novel] gives voice to the author’s mother’s expat life in Nigeria and her own child’s-eye take on its complications. With striking images including a Barbary duck with a ‘melted face’, and an economy of style of the stiff-upper-lip variety, this [work] presents a world where animal, child, bushman, black servant and white employer know his or her place and may seethe in it, or attempt to wriggle around it. " Gwen Davies, prize co-judge "‘[The chapter titled The Sea Spirit] demonstrates within itself the power of story. A seven year old child is told by a family servant about a mermaid and willingly suspends [his] disbelief in order to overcome [his] fear of water. The story captures something of the magic and bewilderment of a child’s perceptions yet allows a ‘glimmer of fear, a shiny edge’ to glint through the fabric of the prose." Lesley Glaister "In [the chapter] 'Munachi Bones', Mandy Sutter depicts the sidelining and silencing of older ways of life in an African village. We discern, in a microcosm, what has happened and is happening in macrocosm in much of the developing world. The story uses powerful dialogue and the characters spring to life with immediacy, attesting to this writer’s accuracy both of ear and eye. The strange names given to people in the story are witty and apt, reminding us that there is a particular art in naming. The prose style is clean, full of impact, fast-paced, balancing the story at the cusp of past and present. The evocation of village sounds and smells is wonderful – I love the market especially – and there is a deep understanding both of human wisdom and un-wisdom." Penelope Shuttle ‘There’s a laconic relish about Sutter’s best work that makes it always readable.’ John Lucas, Stand Magazine. ‘Sutter’s observation of human foibles and the complexity of both romantic and family relationships is spot on’ Yorkshire Post REVIEWS OF BUSH MEAT 'It's the quality of the writing that really makes the book sing. Sutter's understatement and restraint, her wonderful handling of place, atmosphere and emotion made me trust every word... Despite tragic happenings, comedy and absurdity are never far away. Like one of the juju practitioners in her stories, she injects magic into everyday life and conjures up time and place and texture by focussing on a single object.' amazon.co.uk ('Kelpine') '[In] what is essentially a literary novel [there is] the page-turning quality of a good thriller.... From a very specific time and place, Sutter has fashioned a book that quietly and compellingly reminds us of our common humanity.' Yvette Huddleston, The Yorkshire Post 'Hard-drinking, easy-living father, overanxious, nervy mother and dreamy child, all are permanently affected by their African experience, by those they encountered and what they found themselves trying to become.... Plenty to think about.' Jenifer Dixon, Amazon 'Packed with charm, mystery, and with its immersive quality, Bush Meat is a story from many perspectives.' May, Amazon 'Skillfully evoke different eras and cultures with Nigeria as the touchstone.' DD, Amazon 'Right from the [start] I was hooked.... A poignant and absorbing composite portrait of a family spanning several decades and traversing continents. The sense of place - whether Nigeria or London - is particularly evocative. But what elevates this book to a higher plane is the author's wise, sensitive and acute insight into human nature and relationships.' Mib B, Amazon 'A world a million miles away and yet only yesterday. Sutter captures it in aspic. Bush Meat is a sensitive, haunting collection that sets personal stories against a background of historical change. It is thoughtful and perceptive. And a real joy to read.' Suzy Ceulan Hughes, gwales.com 'Told with great wit and insight into the human heart, and with language that betrays [the author's] previous life as a poet. A triumphant combination of concrete detail and unsettling magic.' Simeon, amazon.co.uk 'Beautifully atmospheric in the way it captures memories of place.... One of the best books that I have read this year.' M C Apper, amazon.co.uk 'Interesting and original.' Linda, amazon.co.uk 'Couldn’t wait to finish it.... Sarah is a character that stays with you after you’ve read the book.' Anon, amazon.co.uk 'Magnificently-understated laugh-out-loud moments that creep up behind you like the monkey on the cover and tap you on the funny-bone.... Spear-sharp perception to cut you neatly to the quick. A centre of gravity - all the characters bearing more than their share. Not many books will make you think so much about the real human contrasts to be tasted in our lopsided world, and I don't think any will do it with such heartfelt laughs or such aching humanity.' Mollowen, amazon.co.uk 'The simplicity of the telling… is peppered with… metaphors which… give the language an emotive and sensory strength… A wonderfully constructed and engrossing book, at times poetic, funny and moving as each character is caught in the tension and release game which memory plays with experience.' Sue Bonnett, Urthona journal of Buddhism and the Arts, Issue 34 Bush Meat, which won the New Welsh Writing Awards 2016, is a finely balanced collection of short stories that travels between Nigeria and England, from the 1960s to the present day. Each story stands alone; together they form a subtle family history that tracks some of the significant social and cultural shifts that have taken place over the past fifty years. Mandy Sutter’s expats in Africa are not the stereotypical upper-class, or wannabe-upper-class, migrants of Empire, shored up by an aggressive sense of superiority; they are ‘ordinary’ people – teachers, engineers and manual workers, and the wives and children who sometimes accompany them. They are working people dislocated, full of uncertainty in a country they do not understand and no longer rule. ‘I don’t know what to do. The rules are different here.’ The men might occasionally come up with some of the old bluster – ‘The trouble with this country is the black man thinks he owns it’ – but this is the newly independent Nigeria of Chinua Achebe; the balance is shifting; these migrants are ‘just another mzungu passing through’. Their time there will have little impact on the country, but they will carry it with them for the rest of their lives, in memories and keepsakes and shattered selves who fail to make the readjustment to returning home to England, to working in offices and living in drab new-build boxes on suburban cul-de-sacs, leaving the colour and vibrancy of Africa behind them. The stories centre on Sarah and her parents, Jim and Maureen, who move to Nigeria in the 1960s when Sarah is a child. Sutter is strong on generational and gender-based differences in attitude. While Sarah embraces her new world and accepts the servant Chidike and his pet monkey as friends, and regularly spends time in the home of her schoolfriend Omo, Jim holds to the fear of Otherness. Maureen bridges the gap, constantly questioning, ever uncertain. And yet, when they return to England, it is Jim who seeks to take Africa with him – a crate made of beautiful iroko wood, packed with carvings, tables, pots and trays that he cannot bear to part with. The stories towards the end of the collection, which portray Jim in later life, are especially moving. British culture of the 1960s is brought to life here: Crossroads, Top of the Pops and Dixon of Dock Green, free school milk, beehives and winged spectacles, and green chenille tablecloths; children’s hands rapped with a ruler, board rubbers thrown at children’s heads, the absolute veto on any discussion of sex or death or things that matter. Things might be changing in Britain but, as expats in Africa, the men work; their wives spend their time sewing, mending, keeping house, instructing servants and looking after children; children mostly keep their heads down and their mouths shut and have a lot of secrets. It’s a world a million miles away and yet only yesterday. Sutter captures it in aspic. Bush Meat is a sensitive, haunting collection that sets personal stories against a background of historical change. It is thoughtful and perceptive. And a real joy to read.