November 5, 2024
LIES I TOLD MY SISTER and WHO WILL BURY YOU?
Lies I Told My Sister, by Louise Ells
Louise Ells has become a friend since we “met” in 2019, after I read her story collection NOTES TOWARDS RECOVERY, and so it’s a real delight to be able to pick up her new book, the novel LIES I TOLD MY SISTER. The entire novel takes place over the night protagonist Lily spends with her younger sister Rose in a hospital emergency room after Rose’s husband is in a catastrophic car accident, the hours and the tension finally bringing to the surface years of secrets, resentments, and unspoken things.
The novel moves between the current moment in the ER in 2014 and incidents from the past—a traumatic loss from Lily’s childhood, a difficult marriage with painful struggles with pregnancy loss and infertility, Lily’s years living abroad when her husband was posted overseas, and the years the sisters lived much closer but were still worlds apart, each with secrets and pain in her life that the other would never know about. Until that night in the hospital, when the words are finally spoken.
It’s a tricky narrative set-up (how can one night contain an entire lifetime?) with so much of the novel told in flashbacks, but it works, mostly because Ells chooses to make the real journey Lily’s internal one as she finally faces her own reality, including the painful fact of her beloved second husband’s young-onset dementia. There’s a lot of love and forgiveness in this very moving story, and I enjoyed it all so much.
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Who Will Bury You, by Chido Muchemwa
“Who will bury you?” demands Timo’s mother, the question woven throughout the story “This Will Break Your Mother’s Heart,” Timo “a late leaver, a decade behind all my friends who left straight after high school for the US, the UK, Australia, anywhere they’d have a better chance of thriving.” The story focusses on the distance between Zimbabwean Timo’s experiences in Toronto, the beginning of her first same-sex relationship, and Timo’s mother’s expectations of her daughter, conveyed mostly through stories of women at her church. “Don’t you think it’s time you started thinking about marriage, Timo? If you wait too long, who will bury you?”
Although Timo’s mother is also asking, “Who will bury ME?” With a child so far away, and the collection shows readers both sides of this exile, Zimbabweans far from home as their parents die or become lost to them in other ways. The collection begins with Timo and her mother, centred in Toronto, and then takes its reader back home to Zimbabwe, to other characters who are leaving their homes or preparing to leave, and characters who are left behind—in “Paradise,” Wiki maintains his family’s graves at the Paradise Cemetary.
In “The Snore Monitor,” Hamu finds work in a delicate job in Johannesburg. The next three stories are fascinating and involve the lore and history of the Kariba Dam, a major project from colonial Rhodesia. “Rugare” is the story of a boy whose big dreams don’t get him as far as he wants to go in Harare. And finally, “The Last of the Boys,” set in a Rhodesia beset by civil war and impossible choices as Zimbabweans waited on her verge of independence, as story especially resonant in such a moment of global strife and warfare. These are stories most specific, but universal at the very same time.
