Forceful, challenging and entertaining, this selection of stories brings together an extraordinary range of new and established women writers writing in English over the past fifty years.Dealing with the lives of women from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, the stories are told from perspectives sometimes distant or ironic, sometimes highly intimate and emotionally charged; and while the larger political landscape in the form of apartheid and the colonial and post-colonial struggle impinges on the experiences of nearly all the women in these stories, it does so in very different ways. There are narratives which etch out landscapes of pain – tales of physical and emotional dislocation, violence and poverty – and then there are tales of love, intimacy and newly discovered paths beckoning freedom.Tradition, as well as the notion of warm, caring families and communities, is often questioned as women find their personal and physical spaces violated and must struggle to find spaces to call home in the face of disruption or displacement. They have to use whatever inner resources they have to create new identities in what Karodia calls ‘fishbowl’ environments. In the stories these new spaces come in such diverse shapes as an airport, a tent, a jail and a supermarket. The issues raised in these stories are in many ways universal, in others unique to the African subcontinent.
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