Abyssinian Chronicles.

Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa Alfred A. Knopf, May 2000, $26.00, ISBN 0-375-40613-1

Like the tactile weight of morsels being passed from hand to mouth, Isegawa feeds readers grains of wisdom in the form of well-placed words and deeds. Half a globe away, this gesture resonates and speaks through a diaspora of truth-telling as he delivers a pure philosophy wrapped in the guise of fictive prose. Having come of age within the tightly measured boundaries of a newly independent state, Isegawa's narrator conveys a self-reflective tale of passion and regret that crosses continents and generations. From the conflict-ridden Uganda of Idi Amin and his successors, to the expatriate ghettos of 1980s Amsterdam, the young protagonist, Mugezi is a reluctant witness to the sometimes grisly ties that bind.

The way of rural subsistence and indigenous religion becomes undeniably linked to an internally contentious institution of organized faith and the illusionary trappings of a hand-me-down modernity. The history and politics of postcolonial nationhood are most intimately intertwined with the characters' endangered genealogy, and the clear realities of daily living. Promises are all suspect; love triangles are entangled with the overlapping coordinates of villages turned into battle zones.

The multiple layers of Isegawa's narrative are achieved, and further accentuated, by the careful manner in which he handles the language, shaping gritty images and effective dialogue that blow life into a mundane space. The author moves concisely and adeptly between African idiom and the quick catch phrases of Western popular culture with a deliberate necessity reflective of his own world view. As skillfully, he negotiates the landscape of the human psyche, maneuvering amongst the varied perspectives of several substantive characters who each prove integral to the development of one another. Isegawa's thoughtful storytelling represents an increasingly positive shift in the direction of the written word and a particularly powerful statement on the status of the 21st century African novel.

R. Scott Heath is a poet, essayist, and freelance scholar from Kinston, NC.