The Silence of the Wilting Skin

TLotlo Tsamaase
Completed 2/21/2022, Reviewed 2/22/2022
3 stars

This was a surreal novella about colonization, segregation, and loss of culture.  It had beautiful language but often it got in the way of understanding what was going on.  I understood the beginning pretty well, but then it went some really strange places.  It also prevented me from really identifying with the main character, who was also the narrator.  Still, I could feel the gravity of the plot and understood the terror and despair of characters.  This book was nominated for a 2021 Lambda Literary Award for SF/Fantasy/Horror.

The unnamed main character lives in a city that is divided by a railroad line.  One side has black residents, the other white.  The railroad is spectral, that is, it comes through once a month carrying the dead and stops to pick up the newly dead.  The white side cannot see the train.  For the black side, it is part of their cultural ritual of death and dying.  One night, her grandmother’s dreamskin come to her instead of to her dying grandmother, warning her of her future.  After her grandmother dies and is sent off onto the train, her skin begins to peel off.  Then we find out that the white side is coming in and “revitalizing” the wards of the black side with new tall buildings.  Soon everything changes, even her relationship with her girlfriend, as people become translucent.

There’s a ton of surreal imagery in this book.  The train, the peeling skin, the translucence, all of it is strange and intense.  The lesbian content is also notable for the reactions to it.  In the main character’s culture, it is seen as something western, but the society on the other side of the tracks sees it as not being heteronormative.  The invasion of their culture even affects the language of their relationship.  The girlfriend says I love you in their language, but the main character can only say it in the white people’s language.  

I give this short novella three stars out of five.  I liked the power of it and the prose.  However, the narrative was just too complex for me.  There were times I really loved it and times I was simply lost.  But when I did get it, it was pretty powerful.  This book is not an easy read, but it is quick at about seventy-five pages.  I recommend it if you are into surrealist speculative fiction with an Afro-futurist bent.