Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

by Frieda Ekotto

Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Genres: LGBT, Fiction, Africa

210 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2019

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review for Don't Whisper Too Much:

This was a really combination of human experience, mythology, and stereotypes used to tell a beautiful story.

9/10

[t · Rating 4 out of 5]

silences stories bodies power and love between women

[Cristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has two parts: the first is a novella and the second is a series of short stories set in an African neighborhood. The first, about young Ada who falls in love with Silki, the legless "witch" of the African village, is as bizarre as that set up sounds. I found this title from a review somewhere about new LGBTQ+ writing that calls it some of the first stories about "women-loving-women" out of Africa (and the author is actually a professor now in the U.S.) I had a hard time getting through the first story because the writing is all over the place with characters at the start, there's the daughter of Silki and some of their mothers, and sometimes Ada is "I" and mostly she's "Ada" and I couldn't deal with the weird structure and writing style. But I persevered and it ended as strange as it began. There was lesbian love but it was just why the women were together and not a major part of the weird story.

The second part with vignettes of an area of a large African city (I know because of another review, not from the story itself), is much more engaging and easy to follow. The characters are again strangely mystical and poetic; the main Pane characters sells some kind of yummy hot bready things in the market but doesn't speak and only sings. A young woman falls for her and that's sweet and spoiler! They end up together (much happier than the first story.) But there's a dead auntie who follows Pane around probably because of the intense trauma Pane survived, and lots of evil villagers.

Very African and definitely lesbian topics, but not super accessible writing. Short though and interesting for the African storytelling fan.

[Antra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't a pair of novellas so much to be enjoyed as it is to be experienced, because besides the stories existing within the hopeful frame of women loving women, most of the rest is horrific, violent and terrible. The enforced silence and violence of everyday life, the brutality that can come out of nowhere, and so on. I'm not sure whether there's a positive hopefulness for the future to be gained from this, or if it is just negative despair that society will never change.

[honor · Rating 4 out of 5]

i absolutely loved don’t whisper too much. this is so beautifully written - i’m obsessed with the writing style. i did find some problems within this text, particularly the representation of disabled people and siliki specifically, but the love between women in this story is so beautiful to witness and tragic to the very end.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot, and especially reading about WLW/women-who-have-sex-with-women, which isnt a group i hear a lot about.

[Rachel Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't Whisper Too Much was hard for me to get through. It was a dense story. It also jumped around a bit, and it wasn't straightforward.

The collection of short stories (Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella) was excellent. Really vivid and evocative.

[Biblibio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't Whisper Too Much / Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella by Frieda Ekotto and translated from French by Corine Tachtiris is a book that I found really hard to rate. So ignore my rating, please, and assume that you should read this book. Because you should!

Comprised of two very tonally different novellas, these two works focus on queer women in different contexts. Specifically African queer women, each in a wholly realized setting. Don't Whisper Too Much is the story of a young girl in a village setting, where love between women and the importance of women's voices/stories reigns supreme. It's a very stylistic sort of story, and to be honest the writing didn't always work for me. The style also changes within the story itself, from somewhat ethereal to a bit more traditionally tight in the later sections.

Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella is, in contrast, much more traditionally written and presented, and I ended up really, really enjoying it. A collection of short stories and scenes, Portrait lives and breathes city life, with brief snapshots of its characters in a way that makes them feel extraordinarily real even within just a few pages. It's short, but so effective. The range of styles within the stories themselves also make it so much easier to recommend the collection on the whole, because I feel confident that just about every reader will find something to appreciate within these pages.

So yes, even though there were a few things that didn't suit my personal taste in Don't Whisper Too Much, I really feel that this book on the whole is so worth reading (even beyond the "simple" benefit of how the book explores queer African womanhood, Western attitudes towards village life, and how narratives are formed!). There's a lot packed into this small book.

[mads · Rating 3 out of 5]

wow. so weird so beautiful. not at all what i expected but the prose is unlike anything else i have ever read