An Ex-Mas Feast Summary

An Ex-Mas Feast Summary Uwem Akpan’s story, “An Ex-Mas Feast” is a story of the struggles that one family goes through to give gifts on their upcoming Christmas season. Akpan introduces the reader to the struggles of the main characters, which directly ties into the details of impoverished town that they live in. Jigana, one of the story’s main characters, starts off as a naïve 8 year old little boy who was anxious to start going to school. In a stark contrast, Maisha, the eldest sister at 12 years old, held her own and prostituted to bring in money for her family. The second oldest, Naema, was closer to Maisha than any of the others, and Maisha gave her tips and tricks of her trade. Akpan begins the story by saying that the family Maisha had never forgiven her parents for not being rich enough to send her to school, and how she avoids them as much as possible. In addition to ignoring them, Akpan describes her actions as that of a “cat that was going feral” (5). Although they are not the main characters, Jigana and Maisha also have a twin brother and sister named Otieno and Atieno, and a baby brother, who they refer to as Baby. Their mother, Mama, seems to be kind of a mess, which could be the result of sleep and alcohol, and their father, Baba, was a lowly pick pocket who could barely provide for his family. However low the parents are, they always push Jigana to go to school, but they do not give him any reasons as to why he should strive to achieve that goal. As the narrator of the story, Jigana states in the beginning that unlike most street families, their family had stayed together, but only until that Ex-mas season. The setting plays a large role in the story, almost as the antagonist because it causes a lot of distress to the family. Their home is hardly what you would call a house; it was a shack with a tarpaulin roof and brown polythene walls and had old dumped cushions for floors and a board as a door. Nairobi, at the time, was having bad