VS Pritchett Memorial Prize: Sahel by Peter Adamson

This lyrical tale of life on the edges of the Sahara desert was unveiled as the winner of this year's VS Pritchett Memorial Prize

by Peter Adamson / October 29, 2013 / Leave a comment

Peter Adamson’s short story Sahel has won the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize 2013. The award, which has a winner’s pot of £1,000, was founded by the Royal Society of Literature and recognises the best unpublished short story of the year.

The day that Kadré has waited for through the long months of the dry season had broken without the usual blinding light. He sits up, and within a second his heart has begun to pound with the weight of all that the day might bring.

He rolls his head to loosen a crick in his neck. Just outside the door a chicken scratches. The sound of pouring water. And something else. The months of morning dryness have gone from his throat. He swallows, pleasurably.

“When will you go?”

His mother has placed a bowl of tamarind water by his mat in silent acknowledgement of anxiety. She is moving around in the shadows of the hut, setting things straight, squaring up his school books, pulling the rush door to one side, letting in the day. The light is opaque, muted, as if seen through a block of salt. He tastes the moisture in the air, pulls the damp into his lungs.

“Straight away.”

When he has washed he scrapes out the last of the porridge, pushing in sauce with a shard. She hands him his shirt, eyes brimming with concern.

Usually, on such a morning, there would be only one topic. For a week the skies above Yatenga had been heavy with promise. And yesterday, towards evening, the first warm drops had spilt over onto the dust of the compound. Soon the whole village had been crouched in doorways, whooping relief from hut to hut in the dusk as the rain, hesitant at first, had begun to insist. “Yel-ka-ye” they had shouted – “no problem” – eyes drinking in the dark blots exploding in the dust, darkening the thatch, patterning the jars outside each door. Later, after the meal had been eaten and the youngest children put to bed, a silence had settled on Samitaba as the adults and elders had returned one by one to squat in their doorways, hypnotised by the rhythm of the rain, awed by the completion of the earth’s slow stain.

But this morning the talk is not of the night’s rains, or of the seeds being sieved from the ashes,…

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John Marzillier
October 29, 2013 at 18:44
This is a wonderful and moving story. Brilliantly depicted, the boy, his family and, more than anything else, the searing, terrible and beautiful land of the Sahel. A worthy winner.
naomi layish
November 5, 2013 at 11:46
The author of the story has clearly visited the Sahel and what he saw would make a very interesting documentary film. But is this really a story? I also found the style strained for effect, overwritten. Aren't these phrases pretentious rather than evocative: the new ploughs 'waiting for customers, their naked prows pointing to an invisible future'. (Try substituting 'London taxis' for the ploughs, and 'their rain washed bonnets pointing to an invisible trajectory' to see what I mean.) And what about 'the sweet smelling belly of the granary' lines on a mans face 'cut there earlier than he can remember',. Were the boys watching the rain really 'awed by the completion of the earth's slow stain'? or worried by the possibility of floods, since the author describes a shrub washed away as 'a small clot in the haemorrhaging blood of the land'. I'm irresistibly reminded of Cold Comfort Farm? Anyone read that ? Unimpressed
Albert Rea
November 8, 2013 at 15:42
I agree more with the comment of naomi layish. This is more a creative writing exercise with comfortable sounding phraseology than a story told. The essentials of the story could have been told in sharper focus with more effect and fewer words. I have been to the Sahel with a charitable organisation as guest of the Toubou tribe and believe me, existing is hard enough there without painting pictures of it. I've never heard a swallow's beak click there. The Harmattan blowing would drown it out and keeps your head down as it parches your throat. The raw essentials of life are more to the fore than imagined by someone comfortably tapping at a keyboard in designing a post card. That's not to say that there is a lessening of human emotion in harsh environments, they are more intense but reserved and there is a wonderful resilience and joy for life in the Sahel that puts most in the West to shame, but the emotions in this story are overshadowed by the author's stylistic wish to impress.. It's all to do with the judges. Their experience is probably of imagined painted pictures of foreign exotic places whilst practising creative writing. There seems a lack in the literary world of understanding blood, guts, pain, and raw experience..
Helen Yendall
May 18, 2014 at 08:59
Am just wondering whether Naomi Layish and Albert Rea could please point me in the direction of the international short story competitions that they have won, so that I can compare their stories with this one? Thank you.
bo
May 3, 2015 at 14:04
Goodness, what sarcastic, discourteous comments here. Stories come from the imagination, from an individual voice. If the writer had given you what you wanted, it would have been your voice coming back to you, not his. As for the criticism of his choice of language/metaphor, the has created tone and atmosphere and it's naive to say that the metaphors he uses are pretentious. As for the bit about it being a "creative writing exercise" - well, you're right. It IS creative writing, it's a STORY!