Well written but badly edited

Fresh Paint is about the African woman and her plight in the traditional society. It contains a selection of amazingly inspiring stories and poems about women who have overcome great odds. We are talking about ladies who went through difficult traditions: ladies who were raped, ladies who faced female genital mutilation and many other forms of brutality. The major strength of this book is its boldness to point out some evils that society lets slide under a blanket of false pretences. At the same time, its strongest point also seems to be its weakest; some of the stories lacked the subtlety that one needs when it comes to literature and addressing stories of this nature. When you read this book, you get the sense that the writer is driven less by the storytelling but by the ills that the book was written about.

However, the book’s largest failure wasn’t even in the quality of the stories, not by a long shot. I mean Cologne was an amazing story, and the poem Mine child took me places (and I’m not even a mother). So, yes, if you look through the book there are a couple of very well written stories. My main qualm with this book was in the editing.

I had the pleasure of making it to the launch and heard the participants sing praises about the editor, Tom Odhiambo. Well, I don’t think he did a great job. Several instances you find a lonely ‘am’ just sitting there without an ‘I’ to hold his hand. Many times I found words, either missing, misspelled or were in wrong tenses. For instance, one sentence started in past tense and ended in present; some sentences didn’t make any sense at all. All these flaws played a big role in stealing away the beauty from the stories.

A typical example was the story, Over My Shoulders, which is probably one of the better stories in the book, but it had many errors which turned it into a laborious read. But, this is not a bad book. I’ve seen worse.

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