Really Daddy: A Collection of Stories

Abstract

Really, Daddy is a collection of twelve stories that explore the dynamics of racial, intra-racial, gender, and religious power clashes. In narratives that range from realistic to postmodern, characters move through conflicts on a path to self-realization. Ostensibly the responsible ones, the protagonists’ identities are elucidated in the context of the burdens that they carry. At the center of this collection are women and fathers in crisis, as they attempt to save their families or to nourish their own spirits. Whether the character is an African-American Muslim mother shocked into indecision when the Qur’an doesn’t lead her family in its crisis, or an enslaved woman torturing other slaves out of anger over losing her female love, fabulist techniques are combined with realism to unfold the haunting and humorous tales of the imposition of family responsibilities on the lives of the most vulnerable. Here, the reader will find the lapsed Catholic and her wife seeking help from African religion devotees who don’t approve of lesbian relationships, the maid who sacrifices her daughter to a lecherous boss so the rest of her family can eat, and the gay Muslim brother and his lesbian sister in conflict over what to do with his baby. Reflecting the contemporary world in which people live in overlapping marginal spaces of society, these are the stories of America’s forgotten subcultures.