Book Review: Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

 In a dystopian version of the future Botswana, where the government has the power to issue bodies to dead souls, Nelah, a woman entrepreneur and the wife of a policeman, lives in the body of a former criminal. As is the procedure, her life and thoughts are monitored through a microchip and periodically evaluated for purity, with the help of her husband, so that the former criminality of her body doesn't influence her soul. She finds this intrusive as it threatens her upcoming motherhood, which she is eagerly looking forward to.

Still, she finds ways to conceal many secrets, including an illicit relationship. But one night she gets involved in a hit-and-run incident and has to bury the victim, a young woman, to escape the consequences. To her horror, the victim re-emerges in her life as a ghost, starts killing off her dear ones, and threatens to ultimately destroy her unborn girl child, who is being developed inside an artificial wombcubator. To prevent the ghost, Nelah has to uncover many dirty secrets of the past that bind her with the victim and figure out how all of them tie up with an ages-old Botswanan ritual of blood.

Womb City is the debut novel of Tlotlo Tsamaase, an award-winning Botswanan writer. It is a futuristic Afro-dystopian science fiction novel that explores themes like sense of identity, maternal love, systemic oppression of the weak, and manipulative authoritarianism that pits victims against each other for its own benefit. It touches on several misogynistic behaviours, including racial profiling and gender bias, and tries to build a bridge to the present social structure in its effort to understand them deeply from an assumed surveillance state of the future. I received a review copy of the book from the publisher, Kensington Books, through Netgalley in exchange for my honest feedback about it.

The main theme that the novel focuses on is the identity crisis that one has to go through when you have to inhabit another strange body. In today's world, where AI and metaverses are beginning to take baby steps and where one has the opportunity to assume a different identity away from one's own body or to alter self-identity as per their own self-perception, the novel puts forward some interesting questions. It reminded me of an old Indian folktale about the dilemma of a woman who has to identify who her real husband is when a demon interchanges the bodies and souls of two men.

In the novel, the receptor of a new body doesn't have any agency in choosing their body. On top of that, the government removes all traces of the memories from their previous lives while making them responsible for the traces of criminal tendencies from the past that their bodies display. The novel displays how the instant an authority decides to intrude into the lives of civilians, even when the pretext is that of protecting them or creating an equal utopia, the existing social structure expands and engulfs that decision, causing the existing fissures in society to widen. It shows how such measures automatically give more advantages to the already corrupt strata of society and favour them while making life hell for the underprivileged.

Womb City is a novel that has an intense plot and dense prose. It uses elements of science fiction, African culture and folklore, dystopian fiction, and body horror. The writer never pulls back any punches, and the result is a reading experience that shakes the reader. The novel explores various issues of inequalities and oppression that exist in present-day societies and tries to find a solution by going back to the roots and reclaiming the cultural ancestry from the authorities who claim to be its custodians.

The novel succeeds mostly due to its evocative prose and a strong sense of purpose. The main characters are written well, and their personalities connect with the reader. But the antagonists are very poorly written. They fail to create dread or despise in the minds of readers and fail to make an impact on the overall narrative. The narration is brilliant most of the time and brings the reader along with the travails of the protagonist.

But it seems the writer forgot the importance of showing instead of telling. There are a lot of chapters dedicated to characters sitting around and explaining and then over-explaining themselves. I especially had an issue with the pre-climax meeting that spans around three chapters, where nothing happens and all the characters sit around and talk about their pasts. It reminded me of the water cooler discussions at work and diluted the overall impact of the novel for me. Overexposition is the main antagonist of Womb City. But the climax is brilliant, where every element of the plot nicely ties together, creating a unique spectacle.

Womb City is a dense and intense science fiction horror that tries to offer a perspective on systemic issues in our present societies. The novel is a violent narrative that is meant to disturb its reader and certainly achieves the intended effect, though certain structural flaws tend to minimise the effects.