On this episode of The Lonely Voice, super special guest, Rémy Ngamije, joins in to discuss his story, “Nine Months Since Forever” found in his collection Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space: A Literary Mixtape. We also share a short bonus conversation about another story, “The Giver of Nicknames.”
Rémy Ngamije is an award-winning Rwandan-born Namibian author.
He's also the author of the award-winning The Eternal Audience of One and the book we’ll talk about today.
Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space is his collection of award-winning fiction. The subtitle of the book is “A Literary Mixtape.”
The first story we’re discussing is “Nine Months Since Forever.”
It puts us in the mind of stories by Raymond Carver that explore the themes of friendship and marriage among the working class and characters who struggle with disillusionment and communication that sometimes falls short.
We imagine people always make comparisons between Ngamije and other great authors.
But these stories are in a class by themselves, partly because they are set in Namibia, a country on the southwestern coast of Africa.
But even for American audiences the characters and situations can also be very familiar.
Case in point, “Nine Months Since Forever.” The parenthetical subtitle of this one is “(Cicero’s Interlude)”.
Cicero is our protagonist and first-person narrator. He tells us about the ways that “marriage gives you someone to blame” when you have to miss a night out with the friend group.
The thing is Cicero loves his wife, Nicole. She is his friend. His person. But Cicero is torn between this reality in his life and another one—the grip that his friends have on him. Nicole seems true blue. Loyal.
But this is also how Cicero describes Rambo. He’s a guy who “keeps showing up to serve in the trenches of our lives, throwing himself on grenades and carrying the wounded across mine-ridden marshes with bullets zipping past him,” says Cicero.
It’s also Rambo, out of all the guys in the group, who really knows that Cicero loves Nicole. And it’s also Rambo who says that Nicole makes Cicero feel “loved.”
“That’s why we call Rambo the Sage,” says Cicero, because “he’s the only one brave enough to use cataclysmic words like love."
Rambo was his best man when he married Nicole. And he invited the “other guys” to the wedding “to keep the peace.”
It’s the other guys who perhaps don’t have the words or the understanding about this big life transition that Cicero has made. And their inability has a gravitational hold on Cicero. It’s a part of him he has trouble shaking off. He recognizes that even though they are past the games and carefree days of childhood and are men now, they were “still in the same place” in many ways.
Cicero is still growing into his married life. But he doesn’t mind it at all. He really enjoys it. There are things he cannot admit to his friends about this part of his life.
Says Cicero in the story, “I found myself with Nicole, and now I’m not so sure if the squad and I are still down for life. I mean, I’ve already promised this life and the next to my wife.”
And yet, in the critical moment when Cicero must defend his wife and his new role as her husband, Cicero does something that shows this dilemma, this duality that continues to bring tension to his friendships, his marriage.
Listen in as The Lonely Voices discuss two stories by Rémy Ngamije.
Rémy Ngamije is an award-winning Rwandan-born Namibian author, editor, publisher, photographer, literary educator, and entrepreneur.
His books include The Eternal Audience of One—which was honored with a Special Mention at the inaugural Grand Prix Panafricain De Litterature and won the inaugural African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora—and Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space, his collection of award-winning fiction.
In 2021 he won the Africa Regional Prize of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was shortlisted for the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021 and 2020. He was longlisted and shortlisted for the 2020 and 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prizes respectively. In 2019 he was shortlisted for Best Original Fiction by Stack Magazines.
Rémy is the founder and chairperson of Doek, an independent arts organization in Namibia supporting the literary arts and the editor-in-chief of Doek! Literary Magazine, the country’s first and only literary magazine. He is also the founder and director of several literary initiatives such as the Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards, the Doek Literary Festival, and the Doek Anthology.
His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in The Johannesburg Review of Books, Lolwe, American Chordata, LitHub, Granta, One Story, and Best American Essays 2024 among many others.
More of his writing and complete publishing history can be found on his website: remythequill.com
