Nataliya's Reviews > Nightmare Magazine, Issue 80

This review is only for the Hugo and Nebula nominated short story Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen:

“A hungry woman is dangerous.”

This is a very short story written as a fictional annotated bibliography. On the surface, it’s about the cannibalism that women engaged in on the colonized Ratnabar Island, and a few instances of cannibalism by their descendants as well as society’s reaction to it over about a century. The message being, I guess, that women need to rise up against the oppressors.

Creative story structure to say the least. But the theme and the message both have been done before, and better. Or maybe I just don’t get it. Perhaps I’m too simple of a creature, but it failed to do much for me.

2.5 stars, rounding up for the creative format.

But for some reason now I crave barbecue. Uh-oh.

“We are all cannibals at birth, and our mother-tongue is the language of the mouth. When the Ratnabari eat of their dead, they embrace what Kristeva calls ‘the abject’—the visceral, the polluted, the blood and bile and placenta and the unclean flesh we associate with the female body. Return to us, they say to their dead, be with us always. [ . . . ] Science has yet to explain how it is that they almost never bear sons, only daughters, but it is scarce to be wondered at that their society is matriarchal in nature, for they spurn the clean, rational world of the patriarchal symbolic, remaining locked in a close, almost incestuous relationship with the maternal semiotic instead.”

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Read it here: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fic...

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My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Recommended by: Tadiana