Honest, unflinching and strikingly bleak.
This is the ethos that pervades Shut Up You’re Pretty, new author Téa Mutonji’s debut collection of short stories about a young Congolese woman growing up in the suburbs of Scarborough.
Named “Loli” after a river in her mother’s native Congo, our hero makes her way through the pitfalls of Black womanhood in the tight confines of urban sprawl through a series of rough-edged snapshots. Her hardships come in gentle, yet inevitable swells of hurt: the familial grief of a father’s suicide, the painful dullness in romances of convenience, the fearful uncertainty of exploring sexuality.
Most of the time, Loli doesn’t make the best choices. Most of the time, she is simultaneously infuriated and frustratingly passive with the people in her life.
All of the time, she is scared, lonely and utterly raw.
Soaked in a surprising gentleness and wrapped in insightful prose, Mutonji presents readers with an epic anthology of the heartbreakingly mundane in Shut Up You’re Pretty.
Published in April 2019 and shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust top fiction prize, this collection is Mutonji’s first book. It’s also the inaugural piece with the new imprint, VS. Books, founded in 2017 by Canadian artist Vivek Shraya to support young writers of colour.
From the beginning of our hero’s tumultuous journey, it’s clear that Mutonji takes the complexity of humanity seriously. Much like our hero Loli, she too is Congolese, having immigrated to Canada as a young girl. So, when we witness the precarious balance of removal and acceptance struck by those in Loli’s social circles, there is something almost bitterly personal to it. It is deeply confrontational, grabbing the reader and pulling them into the callous world that is disturbingly our own.
What’s more, Mutonji also grew up in Scarborough’s Galloway neighbourhood. It is then with first-hand precision that the writer sketches out the landscape of the low-income housing of her childhood and the defiant community pride of the residents that accompanied it:
“We were the kids of Galloway and they were anyone who judged us for it.”
In addition to the themes of race and class, the book explores ideas of femininity and sexuality. Loli comes to know herself in part through her sexual experiences with men, punctuated by her struggle to understand her own bisexuality. Tasteful but uncompromising, Mutonji dares us to dismiss it as trivial by weaving it into the fabric of the characters. It does not make them stronger for having it or weaker for possessing it, but simply human.
It is an ingenious literary subversion on Mutonji’s part to ignore the standard plethora of short story protagonists, and instead focus her narrative energy on one proxy so as to avoid universalizing the Black female experience. By Mutonji’s own admission, the book isn’t the “end-all-be-all” for Congolese immigrants or queer women of colour.
In this way, having one character’s tale opens up the literary field for a rich tapestry of voices while avoiding essentialism. Sure, our narrator is shaky, imperfect, and at times, unreliable; but she is relatable in her flaws, diverse in her essence and vulnerable in her experiences.
It is precisely this quiet vulnerability that makes Shut Up You’re Pretty one of the most stunning realizations of contemporary womanhood to surface on the Canadian literary horizon for some time.
Feature image by Meaghan Brackenbury.
