A classic of everyday goading. The narrator’s family watch TV together, and their reactions to the shows are a proxy for arguments.
The mother laughs at The Jeffersons because the “short, bald and clumsy” Mr Jefferson resembles the father. The father starts coming home late to avoid The Jeffersons but makes sure to catch Love and Hate. The narrator watches a quiz show and gives the correct answers out loud, because “I wanted to make [the family] feel brainless and annoy them”. Each of the family members has a distinctive laugh, which they use as an extra weapon to annoy the others.
Munene’s neat wry prose produces a subtle but definite tellyish feel, while the atmosphere ‘flicks’ between sitcom, soap opera, and serious drama. When the TV breaks, the repairs take three weeks. The narrator reads “Emotions, a pornographic magazine”. The parents quarrel about having affairs, and the mother leaves the family.
When she returns, she brings a new TV, to everybody’s relief. The real-life quarrelling is over, the proxy-quarrelling can resume. The TV is a chattering object that emits a kind of stabilising wave.
Included in A Life in Full and Other Stories, the Caine Prize for African Writing 2010, New Internationalist, 2010
A Personal Anthology 