The Brooklyn Rail

We first discover any text via its small commingling of sound and flow and reference, the elements loosely bagged as style⎯and I’ve rarely enjoyed such a head-tipping discovery as in the fiction of Rémy Ngamije.

He finds the funny in filth: “It was his tongue that cursed people with swear words that could scour the grime and funk off a dirty pavement.”

Or renders the pain amid the beauty: “…your guilt gushed whenever she showed up at your place looking six kinds of pretty and seven kinds of broken.”

The loss of a loved one delivers fresh shock: “Her passing was like ripping North from a compass face. The needle of your life spun around recklessly…”

And a woman’s joy is tempered with savvy: “He loved his music too much. He was not suited for the kind of life that being a father entailed. But I knew I could be a mother… I let him pluck every string in my body in exchange for letting me take the parts of him I needed⎯a fair trade.”

Yet while this author’s a gymnast, gold-medal level, I’m uneasy about confining him within comparisons. I saw Donald Barthelme wink through a sentence or two, but then, I’m a white boomer raised around New York. Ngamije was born in Rwananda and lived in Kenya before his family moved to Windhoek—Namibia’s capital—when the author was still a boy, and the prose of Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space swaggers across cultures. It’s got a judicious sprinkle of Swahili epithets, it calls a gang beating a “niggadämmerung,” and it puts a girlfriend’s encouragement online: “she helped me fill up my crowdfund for courage.”

Similarly, these stories embody the American concept, from early hip-hop, of the subtitle: “A Literary Mixtape.” Fictions take on different genders, races, wallet sizes, and stages of life, while employing a likewise broad range of techniques⎯ the points of view include a ghost⎯ yet it all coheres, not just in its pervading catchy beats, but also as a triptych coming-of-age. We come to know a city that bristles with threats and promises, a family contending with tragedy, and a young man making his way, in fits and starts, towards mature love and an artistic vocation.

This protagonist, however, proves only another sample in the mix, handled as inventively as the rhetoric. He opens the collection, in a story that also introduces his family, his homies, and his writerly dreams, yet he leaves out basics like his name or just where everyone’s living. The story’s narration is at a remove, in second person, and the foreground is all those dreams, among them a transcontinental fling with Zadie Smith⎯but these stand in glaring contrast to the “fokol” (sound it out) of what the wannabe’s done. Other details do emerge: a clatch of buddies making upbeat talk but no concrete help, a girlfriend he should’ve held on to, and a brother and father stunned, like him, by the recent death of the mother. In short, Ngamije’s playful surface doesn’t hide the deepening gloom, the same tension as in the title: “The Hope, The Prayer, and the Anthem (Or, the Fall So Far).” Some twenty stories follow, alternating “A Sides” and “B sides,” the shortest a few pages and the longest thirty-plus⎯ with an impact that justifies the extra⎯ but the whole thing hangs on one question: Where does a guy find fulfillment? Tellingly, the mystery of his name is never solved. All we know is, his mother claims it means “hope” and his street handle starts with the same initial: R.

As in Rémy? The name does have a faint connection with “hope,” Biblical, but this book’s palette can’t be limited to a portrait of the artist as a young man. The second story is one of several to feature a woman, and she too lives at odds with herself, deeply conflicted over falling for a married man⎯ a man who could be, later stories suggest, the wannabe writer’s father. Not all the affair’s specifics fit the case, but undeniably, the office scandal adds one more perfect dab of color to the developing pointillist canvas.

Soon the setting emerges: Windhoek, Namibia’s capital but no megapolis like Lagos. We spend time among its scavenging homeless and come to know⎯ more distantly⎯ the old colonial families, “white as snow, rich like whoa.” In the uncertain middle, R. and his family turn up again and again, seen from different angles and under different pressures. Immigrants from a place itself nameless⎯ “the Small Country,” most likely Rwanda, Ngamije’s own birthplace. In the 1990s, his family fled the hostilities in that country, and in 2021 his publishing debut, the novel The Eternal Audience of One, named names and developed a more conventional initiation story, with plenty of humor but fewer pyrotechnics.

The family in Only Stars Know tends to be accepting of its new home, if in no way blind to its downsides. Play-spaces are measly and any decent school demands a wheelbarrow of tuition, yet in nearly every such story these people notch some new benchmark in wholeness. In one piece, R. forges lifelong friendships, and in another enjoys the first thrills of adult sophistication. With that begins his encounters with the local girls, building to “wild years at university… acclimatizing to the sexual schedules of certain lecturers.” These halcyon days yield one of the funniest incidents, with a couple of scrumptious literary puns⎯but the story winds up a tragedy, with a young woman of depth lost to criminality.

Crucially, too, R. has less dramatic learning experiences. A key case in point would be his discovery of a “haven,” the public library, which “welcomed me with its generous street-postal-address-telephone-number-spell-your-surname-please-okay-just write-it-for-me arms.” Even filling out a form becomes, for a writer like this, another trapeze act⎯yet it’s an ordinary transaction nonetheless, and in this way illuminates what’s outstanding about Ngamije’s contribution.

Only Stars Know… has one hair-raising tale of mercenaries, brilliantly structured, and a number of narratives mention government-gangster collusion, or racism’s toll: “it seemed to me as though sanity was the only true possession a black person could own and even it was under attack every day from whitewashed glossy magazine covers.” Nevertheless, the problem isn’t expressed with a bloodbath. Rather, the millennials of this text frame the problems in the quotidian, the news-rack, and so these narratives serve up their Africa: à la Rabbit Angstrom. Updike’s man, too, was never at ease with what his life offered, and yet his dramas concern the flotsam and jetsam of that life, including the mundane side of sex. In R.’s bedrooms as in Rabbit’s, people talk of condoms or other protection, impotence or failure to orgasm, and everyone’s got to puzzle out those “sexual schedules.”

And if those schedules click, might they lead to fulfillment? I can say that the text comes full circle, in a clever matchup between opener and closer. I’d point out further that, while a woman early on concludes, gloomily, “love doesn’t have any legislation. No rules,” in the penultimate story, the title piece and one of the longest, the grownup R.⎯never named in the piece, but by now we recognize him⎯tells the woman who offers his best chance at partnership that she’s “the prism through which life is refracted.” In the hands of an author so gifted as this, a prism reveals both a magnificent portrait of Africa and a fresh, particolored celebration of storytelling.