Griet skryf ‘n sprokie – Eendag was daar ’n sosiaal kritiese en hermafrodiete heks | Lieselot Tuytens

Griet skryf ’n sprokie is in een notendop het verhaal van een schrijfster met een identiteitscrisis. Die innerlijke worsteling wordt veroorzaakt door een stukgelopen huwelijk, en een lange reeks vruchteloze zwangerschappen, die de protagonist Griet Swart tot een zelfmoordpoging drijven. Haar suïcide, geïnspireerd op de CO-vergiftiging door de oven van de Amerikaanse dichteres Sylvia Plath, mislukt echter. Dat komt niet door de redding door de prins op het witte paard waarvan ze droomt, maar door de lugubere ontdekking van een dode kakkerlak in de oven die haar doet terugdeinzen. Die atypische en anekdotische korte inhoud van Marita van der Vyvers bestseller uit 1992 trok meteen mijn aandacht voor het werk van de Zuid-Afrikaanse auteur (1958). Aan het begin van haar carrière combineerde de romancière uit Kaapstad het schrijverschap met een journalistieke loopbaan als verslaggeefster bij het dagblad Die Burger en het vrouwentijdschrift Sarie. Vanaf 1987 werd ze freelanceschrijfster en -vertaalster, waardoor ze meer tijd had om haar eigen oeuvre vorm te geven (Van Coller 2007:481).

Hoog op de agenda in Griet skryf ’n sprokie staat humor, hoewel door de personages met lede ogen wordt aangezien hoe de “snaakse Afrikaanse roman” op sterven na dood is: “Die hele wêreld is in oproer oor die walvis ’n bedreigde spesie geword het. Fok die walvis, sê ek. Laat ons liewer worry oor laggende Suid-Afrikaners ’n bedreigde spesie geword het” (Van der Vyver 1992:77-78). Komisch is Van der Vyvers roman dus zeker, maar toch is het werk zoveel meer dan een zonderlinge en lachwekkende historie. Achter de tragikomische inhoud en humoristische stijl van Griet skryf ’n sprokie gaat namelijk een maatschappijkritische boodschap schuil, die patriarchale opvattingen over gender, moraliteit en politiek uit het twintigste-eeuwse Zuid-Afrika ter discussie stelt. Die bijgestelde waarden corresponderen met het nieuwe tijdperk van post-apartheid dat het land ingaat. Met dit doel incorporeert en transformeert Marita van der Vyver het in de romantitel vermelde sprookjesgenre en daarenboven meer dan twintig specifieke sprookjes uit de omvangrijke Duitse sprookjescollectie van de gebroeders Grimm, uitgegeven in de negentiende eeuw onder de naam Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Beide bronnen lenen zich goed tot hervorming door hun conservatieve strekking met betrekking tot de drie eerder aangehaalde domeinen.

De theorie: (postmoderne) intertekstualiteit

De maatschappijkritiek wordt door Marita van der Vyver ingebed in de populaire verhalen om die minder nadrukkelijk en prekerig op de voorgrond te laten treden. Hiervoor maakt ze gebruikt van de literaire techniek van de intertekstualiteit, die al eeuwenoud is, maar pas in 1960 haar benaming kreeg van de Franse linguïste Julia Kristeva. Het begrip kent evenveel definities als er onderzoekers zijn (Orr 2003:6), maar omvat in feite volgens het onlinewoordenboek De Dikke Van Dale (2018) “het verschijnsel dat literaire teksten verweven zijn en verwijzingen naar andere (literaire) teksten bevatten.” Belangrijk hierbij is dat de techniek een dubbele werking heeft van enerzijds imitatie en anderzijds transformatie.

Die opvatting draagt ook de Vlaamse classicus Paul Claes (1943) hoog in het vaandel in zijn intertekstualiteitstheorie, die de basis vormde van het masteronderzoek dat ik in 2017-2018 voerde naar de generische en specifieke sprookjesverwijzingen in Griet skryf ’n sprokie. In zijn boek uit 2011, Echo’s echo’s: de kunst van de allusie, stelt hij namelijk dat er een metamorfose plaatsvindt “van grondtekst naar eindtekst”, die hij later benoemt als de “architekst” en “fenotekst” (2011:35-36, 52). Om die modificaties van de oude tekst in de nieuwe op te sporen, introduceert hij onderstaande tabel met vier mogelijke procedés: “additie, deletie, substitutie en repetitie” (2011:54). Die toevoeging, weglating, vervanging of herhaling kunnen zowel van toepassing zijn op de vorm of de inhoud van de tekst als op de combinatie van beide en leiden zo tot twaalf mogelijke transformaties, waarvan de allusie en het citaat de bekendste zijn.

Naast het blootleggen van die wijzigingen in de fenotekst zet Claes ook in op de verklaring ervan. De betekenis of functie moet volgens hem door de lezer of het subject achterhaald en toegeschreven worden aan de tekst, zoals blijkt uit zijn definitie van intertekstualiteit: “Het geheel van relaties tussen teksten waaraan door een subject dat deze onderkent een functie kan worden toegekend” (Claes 2011:49). Zelf onderscheidt hij twee functies, die respectievelijk een positieve of negatieve houding weerspiegelen ten opzichte van de architekst of fenotekst, de “constructieve” en “destructieve functie” (2011:56). Er zijn echter nog veel andere mogelijke functies, waarvan Yra Van Dijk en Maarten De Pourcq in Draden in het donker: intertekstualiteit in theorie en praktijk (2013) een overzicht bieden. Zij spreken evenwel over effecten, aangezien die gecreëerd worden door de uitwerking van de tekst op de lezer en niet zoals functies bewust geïnstalleerd worden door de auteur zelf (2013:10). Ze stellen er vijf voor, waarvan de structurerende, de satirische en de feministische de belangrijkste zijn (2013:9). Het structurerende effect veronderstelt dat de overgenomen architekst indicaties kan geven van de “verborgen structuur in de roman” of fenotekst (2013:9). Het satirische effect omvat een spottende attitude van de fenotekst tegenover de architekst (2013:9). Bij het feministische effect, ten slotte, dienen de transformaties van de architekst in de fenotekst de feministische ideologische agenda (2013:9).

Behalve de intertekstuele verwijzingen kwamen ook de postmoderne eigenschappen ervan aan bod, omdat Van der Vyvers oeuvre volgens H. P. Van Coller (2007:485) bekend staat om de gehanteerde “postmodernistiese denkbeelde en tegnieke”.  Net zoals intertekstualiteit doelt de postmoderne pendant op het bekritiseren van de architekst en het verstoren van het westerse homogene wereldbeeld dat daarin vervat zit (Hutcheon 1985:80-81, 2005:179) . Daartoe worden technieken gehanteerd zoals taboedoorbreking, parodie, genrevermenging, metafictie, en excessieve fictionaliteit en narrativiteit (Vervaeck 2014a:72). Het openlijk aankaarten van taboes, het kritisch bejegenen van de oude én de nieuwe tekst via parodie, en de vertroebeling van de grens tussen ‘elitaire’ en ‘populaire’ genres zijn veel voorkomende kenmerken van postmoderne intertekstualiteit. Daarnaast wordt er door metafictie op metaniveau gereflecteerd over fictie, waardoor ook de scheidingslijn tussen fictie en realiteit minder duidelijk wordt. Verder worden het fictieve en verhalende karakter van de postmoderne roman extra in de verf gezet door de evocatie van een netwerk van bestaande vertellingen.

Zowel intertekstualiteit als postmoderne intertekstualiteit werden als theoretisch kader gehanteerd om een antwoord te bieden op drie vragen, opnieuw ontleend aan Paul Claes: “een wat-vraag, een hoe-vraag en een waarom-vraag” (1984:32). Als eerste werd onderzocht welke componenten wel of niet overgenomen werden uit de generische en specifieke interteksten in Griet skryf ’n sprokie. Vervolgens werd nagegaan hoe die geïncorporeerde interteksten getransformeerd werden. Ten slotte ging het onderzoek in op de betekenissen van die modificaties, die gekarakteriseerd werden aan de hand van hun functies of effecten.

De praktijk: de transformatie

Nu de wellicht abstracte, maar noodzakelijke theorie achter de rug is, kan ze geconcretiseerd worden door over te schakelen op de praktijk. Enkele voorbeelden van de toepassing van (postmoderne) intertekstualiteit op Griet skryf ’n sprokie worden besproken, net als de resultaten die dat heeft opgeleverd, zowel wat het sprookjesgenre betreft als één uitgelicht sprookje van Grimm, met name Doornroosje.

Op generisch vlak werden de microstructuur, de macrostructuur, en de belangrijkste personages en rollen die ze aannamen onder de loep genomen in Van der Vyvers roman. Daarna werden die drie onderdelen vergeleken met de stand van zaken in het traditionele sprookje, zoals in kaart gebracht door Jack Zipes (1991, 2000, 2006), Maria Tatar (1987) en Gunther Pakendorf (1992). De geselecteerde casus situeert zich op het niveau van de microstructuur en omvat één specifieke episode uit het verhaalverloop: de transformatie.

Volgens Zipes (2000:xvii-xviii) ligt de essentie van het sprookjesgenre in de evolutie die de protagonist doormaakt nadat die door omstandigheden uit zijn vertrouwde familiekring wordt weggerukt. De hoofdfiguur leert zo op eigen benen te staan en gaat op zoek naar zijn identiteit. Die metamorfose gaat vaak gepaard met de groei van zijn sociale mobiliteit, zoals in de typische ‘Rags to riches’ verhalen waarin een vagebond zich ontpopt tot welgestelde prins, hoewel de transformatie van velerlei aard kan zijn (Zipes 2000:xvii-xviii). Toch vormt de gedaanteverwisseling de gemeenschappelijke kern van alle sprookjes, aangezien ze onontbeerlijk is voor de held om te overleven. Dat is letterlijk het geval voor Griet, die haar zelfmoordneigingen voortdurend moet onderdrukken en omdat haar kentering ligt in de genezing van haar depressie. Die overeenkomst wijst op een constructieve allusie op of inhoudelijke herhaling van de sprookjesepisode, omdat Griets levensloop geënt is op de structuur van het klassieke sprookjesgenre (Claes 2011:55-56). Tot zover wordt het basispatroon dus grotendeels overgenomen.

Desondanks krijgt de transformatie een unieke invulling, want Van der Vyver verbindt de persoonlijke ervaring van haar protagonist met het parallelle proces dat Zuid-Afrika doorloopt. Van Coller (2007:482) spreekt naar aanleiding hiervan over “die interaksie tussen persoonlike traumas en die politiek-ideologiese situasie in Suid-Afrika” als een hoofdkenmerk van haar oeuvre. Niet enkel Griet zet een nieuwe koers in, zich verwijderend van de lonkende oven, maar ook het land geneest van de officiële rassensegregatie, die geschetst wordt aan de hand van een ziektebeeld. Er is namelijk een samenloop van Griets psychische bevrijding met die van Nelson Mandela en Zuid-Afrika uit de klauwen van het apartheidsregime in 1990 (Van Coller 2007:486). Zo vermeldt Griet Mandela vaak rechtstreeks, maar soms maakt ze ook subtielere toespelingen op de gelijklopende politieke situatie, bijvoorbeeld wanneer ze na het verlies van haar huis door een echtscheiding haar nieuwe woning betreedt. Ze maakt dan de metaforische vergelijking met een gevangene die bijna vrijgelaten wordt, doelend op Mandela en zijn jarenlange opsluiting op Robbeneiland in de Victor Verster Prison, die bijna ten einde komt: “[…] ek voel baie beter vandat ek eergister my eie woonstel gekry het – soos ’n gevange wat weet haar tronkstraf is amper verby!” (Van der Vyver 1992:121). Volgens Pakendorf (1992) “[…] word die verhaal van Griet se ontreddering in ’n sekere sin ook ’n metafoor vir die nagmerrie wat hierdie ‘veelkleurige land’ teselfdertyd beleef.” Die inhoudelijke additie van de staatkundige context resulteert in Claes’ termen (2011:54) in een “uitdieping” van het sprookje, dat zich normaliter niet inlaat met het politieke landschap, maar focust op de wereld van de magie. De toevoeging heeft een constructieve functie, want het genre wordt opengetrokken door het te vermengen met serieuze materie, die gewoonlijk toebehoort aan een meer ‘elitair’ genre zoals het ideologisch traktaat. Daardoor wordt aangetoond dat er ook een diepere betekenis en politiek engagement kunnen schuilgaan achter de zogenaamde kinderverhalen. De architekst wordt bijgevolg opgewaardeerd door er in de fenotekst nieuwe waarden aan toe te kennen en er een kritische insteek aan te geven.

De praktijk: Doringrosie

Wat de specifieke interteksten aangaat, kwamen er veertien sprookjes van Grimm aan bod, waaronder het alom bekende Assepoester en Hans en Grietje, maar ook minder vermaarde vertellingen zoals De twaalf jagers en Het kind van Maria. De verwijzingen naar deze verhalen in Griet skryf ’n sprokie werden vergeleken met de tekstfragmenten uit de Afrikaanse vertaling van het Duitse origineel door Marita van der Vyver uit 2007, Die volledige sprokies van Grimm. Door het gebruik van die versie konden de vormelijke metamorfoses gemakkelijker opgespoord worden, omdat de taal van de architekst en de fenotekst dezelfde is.

Terwijl bij de transformatie uit het sprookjesgenre vooral wordt ingezet op het politieke domein, verschuift de focus bij het specifieke sprookje Doornroosje, of in het Afrikaans Doringrosie, naar gender-gerelateerde en morele kwesties. Het verhaal wordt namelijk over een heel andere en erotische boeg gegooid, wat voor heel wat controverse zorgde in het twintigste-eeuwse Zuid-Afrika. Van Coller (2007:485) beschreef Van der Vyvers roman daarom dan ook als “’n werk wat die behoudende Afrikaanse literêre wêreldjie tot in sy fondamente skok.”

De seksualisering van het sprookje begint al bij de hoofdstuktitel van het achtste kapittel uit Griet skryf ’n sprokie, die als volgt luidt: Doringrosie sukkel om te slaap (Van der Vyver 1992:50). Die titel vormt door middel van een humoristische wending een parodie op Doringrosie, omdat de gelijknamige protagonist in Grimms versie juist 100 jaar slaapt. De verdraaiing of inhoudelijke substitutie heeft daardoor een satirisch effect en ze wordt gebruikt om het probleem rond vrouwelijke masturbatie aan te kaarten. Griet identificeert zich namelijk met Doornroosje, maar kan de slaap niet vatten omdat haar naaktheid haar seksuele driften losmaakt: “En omdat sy vanaand kaal is, dink sy aan seks” (Van der Vyver 1992:50). Ze bevredigt haar eigen lusten, maar stelt dat masturbatie enkel geaccepteerd wordt bij mannen, terwijl het bij vrouwen een taboe blijft:

Maar vir Griet en al haar ordentlike susters was seks ’n dubbelpad waarvan jy amper per ongeluk na die eenspoorpaadjie van masturbasie afgedwaal het – nie andersom nie. (Van der Vyver 1992:51)

De vervanging heeft verder ook een feministisch effect, omdat ze – zoals dat in postmoderne en feministische werken ook gebeurt – speelt met taboes over vrouwelijke seksualiteit en zelfbevrediging, die normaliter gebannen worden uit sprookjes (Hutcheon 1989:152). Door zulke gevoelige onderwerpen aan te snijden, wil Marita van der Vyver ze, met haar hoofdpersonage als spreekbuis, normaliseren en het taboe doorbreken waarmee ze gewoonlijk geassocieerd worden. Bovendien verstoort ze ook het stereotiepe en patriarchale ideaalbeeld van de vrouw als passieve en zedelijke engel in het huishouden door Griet dezelfde rechten als mannen te verlenen en haar een actieve seksuele rol aan te meten (Gilbert en Gubar 1984:20). Op die manier kunnen postmoderne technieken, waaronder intertekstualiteit en parodie, de verstikkende effecten van sprookjes op de vrouwelijke identiteit bestrijden en de preutse prinsessen omvormen tot sterke en stoutmoedige heldinnen (Zipes 2000:157, Stone 2014:229-30).

Daarnaast actualiseert Van der Vyver de architekst Doringrosie door het beruchte “vigs-motief” onder de aandacht te brengen, dat frequent opduikt in de Zuid-Afrikaanse literatuur (Van Coller 2007:485). Het ‘verworwe immuniteitsgebreksindroom’, beter bekend als aids, boezemt de protagonist Griet veel angst in, aangezien ze het beschrijft als “’n monster wat Jaws soos ’n goudvissie laat lyk” (Van der Vyver 1992:53). Net als masturbatie is het een taboeonderwerp, want ze bestempelt het als een vloekwoord (Van der Vyver 1992:51). Die beschouwing leidt haar ertoe om de geslachtsziekte te verbinden met de vloek die Doringrosie treft in het gelijknamige sprookje.

In Grimms verhaal houdt de koning een groot feest ter gelegenheid van de geboorte van zijn dochter. Hij nodigt zijn hele familie uit, alsook vrienden en de wijze feeën, zodat die de prinses kunnen beschermen en zegenen met geschenken (Grimm 1857, geciteerd naar Van der Vyver 2007:122). Bij gebrek aan voldoende gouden borden voor de dertien feeën bij het diner wordt er één niet geïnviteerd. Tijdens de zegeningen verschijnt de dertiende fee toch nog en ze neemt wraak door de prinses te vervloeken tot de dood. Die vloek zal ingaan als ze zich in haar vijftiende levensjaar aan een spinnenwiel prikt (Grimm 1857, geciteerd naar Van der Vyver 2007:122). De tragedie wordt afgewend door de twaalfde fee, die nog geen wens had uitgesproken voor de prinses en de doodstraf wijzigt naar een 100 jaar durende slaap (Grimm 1857, geciteerd naar Van der Vyver 2007:122, mijn onderstreping).

In Griet skryf ’n sprokie wordt er gealludeerd op dat patroon, maar er is een verdraaiing van de vloek. Het sprookje wordt geseksualiseerd, want Griet schildert de dertiende fee af als een jaloerse maagd en de doodstraf door het spinnenwiel wordt gesubstitueerd door aids ten gevolge van geslachtsgemeenschap:

Niemand het meer duiwels nodig nie. Die vrees vir Aids het elke sondaar se eie hel geword. Dís die vloek wat die dertiende fee oor die moderne mensdom uitgespreek het. ’n Afgunstige maagd wat sterflinge wou straf waar dit die seerste maak: seks, wat aardbewoners van feë onderskei. In die laaste twee dekades voor die jaar tweeduisend, het hierdie bose fee bepaal, sal seks ’n gevaarliker wapen word as wat die spinwiel ooit was. (Van der Vyver 1992:53, mijn onderstreping)

Op dit punt gaat er in Doringrosie 100 jaar voorbij, waarna de prinses gewekt wordt door de kus van een sprookjesprins, die de vloek verbreekt. Van der Vyvers versie kent daarentegen een heel verschillende afloop: Griet neemt de rol van Doringrosie op zich, maar moet niet rekenen op een redder. Die inhoudelijke deletie of afvlakking heeft een feministisch effect als gevolg, want Griet moet zichzelf behelpen door masturbatie omdat de vloek niet opgeheven wordt en aids een gevaarlijk risico blijft:

En hierdie keer sal Doringrosie haarself maar moet red. Met haar eie hande. Wat bly oor, behalwe hoop en masturbasie? (Van der Vyver 1992:53, mijn onderstreping)

Op basis van de generische en specifieke casussen kunnen we dus besluiten dat sprookjes in Griet skryf ’n sprokie intertekstueel ingezet en getransformeerd worden om de rigide mentaliteit en het hokjesdenken betreffende politiek, gender en moraliteit te bestrijden. Die drievoudige maatschappijkritiek wordt geformuleerd door de onconventionele, androgyne, maar sterke heldin Griet Swart: ‘’n sosiaal kritiese en hermafrodiete heks’.

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Met dank aan het Zuid-Afrikahuis (Amsterdam).

Lieselot Tuytens (Ghent University)

This article was published in: Africa Book Link, Fall 2018: Afrikaans Literature

“…the future literary direction is…about the receded as it is about what is at hand”: A Review of The Gods Who Send Us Gifts: An Anthology of African Short Stories | by Nancy Henaku

Last year (2017) was the fifty-fifth anniversary of the historic African Writers Conference held in June, 1962 at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. The conference which, as Obiajunwa Wali (1963: 14) rightly suggests “was faced with the fundamental question of defining African literature”, brought together many of the writers who will go on to influence African literature and criticism in significant ways. In celebration of this historic event and its central figures, Ayebia Clarke published The Gods Who Send Us Gifts: An Anthology of African Short Stories which, according to the collection’s editor, brings together “some of our most eloquent and able voices” who, through their stories, “pay their respects to those before them” (p. ix). The collection can therefore be considered as a celebration of Africa’s literary past and present as well as the continuities between them. This idea is, in fact, further reinforced by the cover of the collection which presents not only the iconic photograph of participants of the 1962 conference but also the Sankofa, an Akan Adinkra symbol that reinforces the need to look back at the past in order to pick for the present that which is good so as to forge for the future (see Kayper-Mensah, 1976). Here, it is significant to recall Agyeman-Duah’s explanation of the anthology’s title and justification for the choice of stories. The title is credited to the Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko who in an email exchange with Agyeman-Duah indicated: “The gods who send us stories, choose their own time” (p.4). This become an important basis for the envisioning of a fictional anthology with multiple themes. As an open collection, the anthology is characterized by a diversity of stories set in various parts of the continent. Through the diversity of its narratives, the collection provides us with a good blend of the old and new African literary flavor even as it points to the many uncertainties and possibilities about living in postcolonial Africa and in the process, raises critical questions about the politics of African literature itself.

Besides the seventeen short stories that make up its main section, the collection opens with three forewords written by Wole Soyinka, Baroness Valerie Amos and Pinkie Mekgwe respectively. There is also a prologue that features Kofi Awoonor’s poem “Those Gone Ahead” and finally, an introduction by Ivor Agyeman-Duah. I refer to these sections because of the ways in which they foreground the purpose of the collection and shape how readers engage with the short stories in the collection. In the first foreword, Wole Soyinka provides an insider’s perspective on both the 1962 and 1998 African Writers Conferences. Significantly, Soyinka’s narration seems to begin with a sense of nostalgia but ends with a sense of disillusionment that allows us to see the progression from what may be considered a more cultural African literary event (in 1962) to more political one (in 1998). Soyinka’s reflections provide behind-the-scenes details that allow readers to see in a new light those cultural pathfinders present at the 1962 conference. Of course, it was easy to imagine these rather romantic and enthusiastic young writers pontificating about African literature into the dead of night. It was, however, unexpected (and humorous too) to read about the quintessential Christopher Okigbo and his insistence on bringing a bargirl he nicknamed “The Muse of the Makerere Conference” to serve as hostess even as he ensured that “no one got fresh with her” (p. xvi).

Through Soyinka’s narration, we also learn details of the literary as well as the socio-political situation of 1960s Africa. For instance, we learn of the tensions in the Congo after the death of Patrice Lumumba and how the Nigerian delegation had a little fracas with a Congolese soldier who roughly pushed Frances Ademola for apparently not obeying his orders. It was insightful to learn that Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clarke and Okigbo “got physical” (p. xv) because as Soyinka suggests “you don’t just shove a member of the Nigerian delegation, and a woman at that!” (p. xiv). These minor details may seem insignificant; however, by the time one reads Soyinka’s reflection on his experience in 1998 at a museum memorializing the Rwandan genocide and his subsequent decision not to return to Kampala in search of the historic office of Transition, one begins to see the connections he has been drawing all along between morality (or a respect for humanity) and the role of the literary arts. The melancholic closing of Soyinka’s foreword somewhat causes us to wonder: what good is the literary arts in the face of overwhelming evil? Interestingly, the connection between politics and literature seems to be a central theme within the collection and this is confirmed by Mekgwe who, in the third foreword, suggests that the stories are “a basis for questioning cultural values that impede progress” and that “there is a need as well for preservation of literary history and the efforts of the elders” (p. xxv). In this sense then this collection could be considered as mainly “political” and perhaps fits into what may be considered as an instrumentalist view of the function of African literature.

Significantly, Soyinka’s recollection could be juxtaposed with Sefi Atta’s short story “The Conference” which gives a contemporary twist to long-standing debates on the politics of African literature. Through humorous and animated dialogue between characters, Atta zooms in on the complex politics surrounding the state of contemporary African literature. The story, which is set in an African Literature Association conference in Illinois, foregrounds the conversations and actions of two central characters, the firebrand Ranti, who is an associate professor of African literature in the United States, and the more ambivalent narrator, who has only recently moved to the United States and is in search of an academic position after a stint in the banking world. Through Atta’s narrative, readers begin to see the differences between the politics underlying the 1962 Makerere conference and the fictional conference presented in the short story. Most significantly, by setting Ranti and the narrator as foils to each other, Atta exposes readers to the varied perspectives on the issues under discussion and leaves room for reader’s personal judgement. Among other issues, the story brings to the fore the ironic implications of convening an African literature conference in the West rather than continental Africa as was the case for the 1962 conference and significantly, through the words of Professor Imana, one of the characters who is vehemently challenged by Ranti in the course of the narrative, readers are asked to ponder this state of affairs. As she says: …remember the standard that was set at the conference at Makerere University in 1962…Now here we are today, in 2000, holding an African literature conference in Illinois. Ask yourself why. Give that your time and consideration (p. 20).

Sefi Atta’s narrative further highlights the politics of geopolitical and linguistic representation at the fictional conference, an issue that has been the subject of critique even for the historic Makerere conference (see Wali, 1963; wa Thiong’o, 1986). It was therefore surprising to notice the absence of stories in African languages within the collection especially when other more recent collections like the New Orleans Review’s African Literary Hustle featured some stories in African languages. Another issue that seem central to Atta’s narrative is globalization and more specifically, the politics of international literary awards and their implications for African literary production and consumption. Here, the discussions between the characters about an award received by one Osaro was insightful as it reminds readers of critiques of the complex global factors framing African literary awards and how these ultimately result in what some have considered as the “aesthetics of suffering” (see Habila, 2013) in African literature. In relation to the issue of globalization, the short story causes us to reconsider the politics of defining and categorizing African literature. For instance, through narratorial commentary, Atta shows how writers like Gordimer and Coetzee are sometimes eliminated from the category African literature because they are sometimes classified as world literature. Critical questions are also raised about the fraught relations between scholars and producers of African literature, the question of African feminism and its representation in literature as well as the differing readings of African literature on the continent and outside the continent.

Besides the obvious discussions on African literary conferences, the anthology explores the connections between politics and African literature through its many other themes. Here, Ama Ata Aidoo’s “Gravisearch”, the first story in the collection, is especially significant. As a story written by an older African writer, “Gravisearch” reminds us of the explicit ideological underpinnings of earlier African literary writing. Narrated by a postgraduate student researching The Origins of Ghanaian Flora and Fauna, this story has as its main themes the politics of food, the politics of naming and the politics of knowledge production as evident in the excerpts below:
I was very happy with my research, although quite a lot of the stuff I came across was rather cruel, scary or just plain nasty. But as everyone knows, in research as in life, sometimes the journey is the thing; and I was extremely happy.
Until one day. You know what I discovered? You won’t believe it…I was on the internet chasing after ‘aboboe’, aka bambara beans, aka Congo goobers aka ‘gurjiya’ aka ‘okpa’ and literally hundreds of other names by which it is known across Africa, when I came upon some research paper produced in a U.S university in which they claimed that unlike the bambara bean, the peanut was imported to Africa from the United States of America…How about all those people aboard those truly wretched schooners, chained, whipped, starved, who against all odds, had hid the peanut in unmentionable parts of their anatomies throughout the horrors of the Atlantic Crossing, I kept asking myself.
That’s how come I lost my happiness (p. 8).

As with many of Aidoo’s narratives, the story interrogates coloniality of power in its varied forms. Here, she draws connections between her main themes and issues related to colonialism, slavery, transnationalism, gender– ideas that have been central in Aidoo’s previous works. Indeed, “Gravisearch” shares many of the characteristics of Aidoo’s narratives including the foregrounding of female characters as well as representations of the grandmother as a repository of knowledge. In “Gravisearch”, it is the grandmother’s explanation of naming practices for Ghanaian flora and fauna that ultimately informs the narrator’s future research. In many ways, Aidoo’s narrative is steeped in the past, through its connection with her earlier works, but it also engages with the present in two significant ways. First, though a brief portion of the story, the narrator’s engagement with the internet as a political tool reminds us of new aesthetic forms defining contemporary African literature. Here, Ifemelu’s blogging as a way of writing back at the center in Adichie’s Americanah comes to mind. Moreover, by ending the narrative with a recipe which the narrator publishes online, Aidoo’s work further contributes to ongoing interests in food writing in African literature although, this is, in fact, not the first time Aidoo has written about food politics (see for example the short story “Nutty” in Aidoo’s The Girl who Can and Other Stories).

Other themes explored in the collection include sexual abuse (as in Ogochukwu Promise’s “What Could the Matter Be”), the complications of transnational relationships (as in Ivor Agyeman-Duah’s “”The Good Ones”), intrigues of succession politics (as in Boubacar Boris Diop’s “Goodnight Prince Koroma), the violence of war (as in Zukiswa Wanner’s “Upon this Handful of Soil), institutional corruption (as in Maliya Mzyece Sililo’s “Damn the Receipt”) and so on. One significant aspect of many of the narratives is how they highlight the precarity of living in post-colonial African societies. Many of these narratives are characterised by violence in its myriad forms. For instance, Diop’s “Goodnight Prince Koroma” ends with the assassination of a prince by a government official and Richard Ali A. Mutu’s “A Labour of Love and Hate” presents a rather bizarre narrative involving killings and sexual violence. While Ivor Agyeman-Duah’s narrative centres on the complexities of transnational relationships, a significant section of the narrative zooms in on the reaction of the protagonist to the horrors of the Rwandan genocide once again reminding us of Soyinka’s reflection in his foreword. Rwanda seems to feature in quite a number of the narratives. Njabulo S. Ndebele “Death of a Son’ points to the violence of soldiers and police in a South African township and how this led to the killing of the son of a reporter. However, to reduce the narratives to a certain emphasis on precarity alone is to ignore the many complex emotions that run through the stories and what these suggest about the spirit of survivance that underscores the dynamism of life in African contexts. For instance, while “Death of a Son” gives insights into institutional brutality under apartheid South Africa, the narrative is also very much about the ways in which the main character and her husband Buntu deal with the tragedy that befalls them. Melancholia and desperation are obviously the dominant emotions in this narrative; however, these emotions are presented with a kind of literary subtlety so that in the end, readers come to appreciate that even in the face of such tragedy, there is a possibility “to be free to fear” (p. 121).

In spite of the centrality of violence in many of the stories, not all of them are about tragedy. Some like Mary Ashun’s “African Connection”, Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire “In the House of Mitego” , Maliya Mzyece Sililo’s “Damn the Receipt”, Louise Umutoni’s “The Proposal” and Mukuka Chipanta “The Lady, the Dreamer and the Blesser” provide a different view into life in African contexts. In fact, Mary Ashun’s narrative is, for instance, not about violence at all but about the stress that comes with her position as the Vice Principal of a small International School in Accra. When the story begins, the narrator seems to be enjoying what she calls her “sanity day” so as to “rejuvenate those brain cells that have died in the course of the school term” (p. 104). In a flashback, the narrator foregrounds the stress that comes with her work by recounting the actions of one “been-to” mother who seem to have a problem with the school’s shift from paper to electronic report cards. Like the other narratives, this story also has a political twist as it highlights a struggle for power between school authorities and a parent (evident in the discourse of the emails exchanged between the narrator and the principal of her school). The story is also a critique of the actions of a supposed “been-to” who as the narrator suggests is one of those people who, “after several years of being treated like second class citizens in another country…”, think “they have the God-given right to abuse those amazingly good things that are happening in Africa” (p. 108). In Maliya Mzyece Sililo’s “Damn the Receipt”, readers see the frustrations of a grandmother who refuses to do ‘the right thing” (that is pay bribe) when she is initially stopped by the police. This story too contains some violence but this remains marginal to the overall narrative and for many African readers, some aspects of the narrative may be hilarious. Told from the perspective of a young boy who lives in a barracks, Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire “In the House of Mitego” draws attention to police brutality through the main character’s actions with his friends at playtime but the narrative is perhaps more about the child’s relationship with his disciplinarian mother and the absence of his father. Beyond this, the stylistic features of Mwesigire’s story draws attention to the question of language in African literature. By mixing indigenous linguistic expressions like “kanayfu”, “kibuunu”, “kapere” with English, Mwesigire creates what Zabus (2007) have called a palimpsest because “behind the scriptural authority of the European language, the earlier, imperfectly erased remnants of the African language can still be perceived” (p. 3). Depending on the reader, this stylistic move could be considered decolonial as Mwesigire’s linguistic choices, like those of earlier African writers, causes the English superstrate to bear cultural imprints of an African language.

Finally, most of the narratives explore the intricacies of human relations. There are stories like Louise Umutoni’s “The Proposal” that explore human relations through love but there are also those like Mary Ashun’s “African Connection” that explores this themes mainly through conflicts. Agyeman-Duah’s narrative is as much about the love between the protagonist and her boyfriend as it is about the relations between the protagonist and her mother. Ntasano’s “Recipe for an Escape” shows us the fraught relation between a father and a supposed homosexual son, Seki, whose way of life, we are told, challenged “the integrity and moral fabric of his family and Burundian society” (p. 136). Seki’s ultimate purpose was to prove to his father that he was “worthy” but while still in exile, his father died and this singular event will affect this good-natured chef, who though had never shed a tear in spite of all the experiences he had gone through, “let out a tear” because as the narrator suggests “things have come full circle…all roads lead to the past” (p. 140). This emphasis is also evident in Wame Molefhe’s feminist piece “A Woman is Her Hands” which shows the intergenerational relations between the protagonist, her mother and grandmother and her ultimate suggestion that “…when you have a daughter of your own, she will not become you or your mother or your mother’s mother…You’ll make sure that she become more than her hands” (p. 182). This aspect of many of the narratives evokes all kinds of pathos. This is, for instance, evident in the melancholic tune that the narrator of Monica Arac de Nyeko’s “Grasshopper’s Redness” hear in her grandfather’s humming or when her mother sings:
Water has taken
Water has taken
My friend
Water has taken
Water has taken
My friend (p. 150)

In one of the forewords, Pinkie Mekgwe suggests that “the future literary direction is…about the receded as it is about what is at hand” (p. xxv). This is evident in the many African stories featured in The Gods Who Send Us Gifts. Together, these stories remind us of where African literature has been before, where is it is at present, where it might be going in future. But by focusing fundamentally on the connection between politics and literature, the collection also poses an important question: what should African literature do? Here, we are reminded of earlier debates about the function of African literature. Significantly, many of the narratives underscore the uncertainties of living in contemporary Africa. While precarity is obviously a dominant motif in this collection, the authorial voices behind the various stories seem too self-conscious to perform an “aesthetic of suffering” for the West. This collection is, in many ways, a literary revisioning of a better Africa and this is perhaps a reason for its emphasis on varied relations whether between lovers, parents and children, school authorities and parents, state institutions and citizens etc. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise because all narratives are deeply relational and for a text that’s deeply invested in forging a new society, this element in The Gods Who Send Us Gifts allows readers to see themselves anew.

References
Agyeman-Duah, Ivor. (2017). The Gods Who Send Us Gifts: An Anthology of African Short
Stories. Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke

Habila, Helon (2013, June 30). “We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo – Review.” The
Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review

Kayper-Mensah, A. W. (1976). Sankofa: Adinkra Poems. Ghana Publishing Corporation

Wali, Obiajunwa. (1963). The Dead End of African Literature? Transition, (10), 13-15

Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature. Nairobi: East African Publishers

Zabus, C. J. (2007). The African palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African
Europhone Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi

Nancy Henaku (PhD Candidate /Graduate Teaching Instructor Rhetoric, Theory and Culture, Michigan Technological University)

This book review was published in: Africa Book Link, Summer 2018

La fabrique des classiques africains. Écrivains d’Afrique subsaharienne francophone | Une critique d’Ewout Decoorne

En 2007, Le Monde des livres publiait un manifeste intitulé « Pour une littérature-monde en français ». Une quarantaine d’auteurs célèbres y réclamait de mettre fin à l’idée de la francophonie comme espace littéraire français hors de la France. Les écrivains voulaient « réagir contre la définition d’une littérature francophone dont le centre, la littérature française, est exclu. »º1, ceci en mettant en question l’opposition inégale entre un centre et une périphérie dans les lettres francophones. L’abandon du terme francophonie en faveur de la phrase « littérature-monde en français » pourrait ainsi mettre en valeur toutes les productions littéraires écrites en français, n’importe leur provenance géographique.

Cependant, le manifeste confirme ce qu’il vise à dénoncer : la domination de l’infrastructure culturelle de la métropole. La majorité des signataires présente un œuvre couronné de succès, grâce à la parution chez les grandes maisons d’édition parisiennes comme Gallimard. Le lieu du combat, le journal Le Monde, fait également preuve de la dépendance aux voies de promotion partant depuis Paris. Ceci exemplifie les maintes asymétries qui structurent la circulation intellectuelle et littéraire entre l’hexagone et le reste du monde francophone. Malgré une unité linguistique, les textes littéraires font face à des opportunités de distribution inégales. Tandis que le Canada, la Belgique et la Suisse se débrouillent sur le plan littéraire grâce à une infrastructure éditoriale avancée, l’Afrique subsaharienne francophone semble mal pourvue de support institutionnel.

Dans La fabrique des classiques africains, Claire Ducournau reconstruit d’une façon aussi innovatrice que provocante les étapes menant à la consécration des œuvres littéraires africaines. En faisant ceci, Ducournau stimule le lectorat à découvrir les processus sociologiques et les mécanismes économiques qui déterminent les apparences de la littérature francophone dès les indépendances. Ceux qui croient toujours que ce sont avant tout les auteurs qui conçoivent la littérature font preuve d’une confiance naïve qui remonte aux idéaux romantiques du créateur artistique souverain. Cette étude, le résultat d’une thèse de doctorat, combine des méthodes multidisciplinaires afin d’illuminer la trajectoire de la genèse du classique africain. Avec une enquête à la fois statistique, ethnographique et documentaire, Ducournau réussit à démontrer les multiples aspects extra-littéraires du processus éditorial.

Dans son prologue, l’auteur reconstruit les origines contextuelles du manifeste. Selon elle, la rencontre des auteurs francophones à Bamako lors du festival Étonnants voyageurs a marqué le début des réflexions proposées. Ducournau y distingue deux groupes d’auteurs, dont l’un cherche à atteindre un public international en renforçant le lien avec la France et le français, tandis que l’autre s’aligne avec un public local en mettant en avant une esthétique soi-disant africaine. La recherche des liens entre des données biographiques et les convictions étalées par les partisans et les détracteurs du manifeste élargisse notre compréhension de la crise d’identité des littératures francophones non-françaises, spécifiquement celles de l’Afrique subsaharienne. La controverse éclatée en 2007 permet ainsi à découvrir les différents facteurs sociologiques, économiques et culturels qui accordent ou ignorent la reconnaissance du génie artistique africain. En même temps, elle nous incite à poser des questions difficiles, telles que celle énoncée par Kossi Efoui qui se demande s’il faut vivre en Afrique pour pouvoir écrire sur l’Afrique °2. Aussi la langue dont l’écrivain se sert, le public auquel il se dirige et le sens qu’il attache à l’Afrique comme signifiant font l’objet de controverses perpétuelles.

Les deux parties de l’étude analysent les conditions sociales et historiques qui expliquent les racines du manifeste, et qui ont d’ailleurs pour plus de cinquante ans établi l’espace littéraire africain. En même temps, l’auteur cherche à comprendre pourquoi le lectorat français fait l’éloge de certains auteurs africains peu connus dans leur pays d’origine, tandis que d’autres auteurs sont abondamment étudiés en Afrique, mais restent obscurs hors du continent. Les réponses semblent complexes et confuses. Tout d’abord, l’histoire de la reconnaissance des littératures africaines francophones et la légitimation de ses écrivains, font preuve d’une lutte continue, marquée par des périodes de crise et de réussite. Ducournau distingue « deux vagues transnationales de reconnaissance »°3. La première a été déclenchée en 1983 par la cooptation à l’Académie française de Léopold Sédar Senghor, épigone de la Négritude. Ceci a abouti à une multiplication des structures éditoriales spécialisées en littératures africaines. Dans les années 1990, quand le climat culturel augmente son intérêt pour l’Afrique dans toute sa richesse artistique, comme le témoignent sa musique et son art visuel, les littératures eux-aussi gagnent en prestige. Ceci résulte dans l’apparition de plusieurs nouveaux éditeurs.

Cette historiographie de l’industrie éditoriale transnationale s’appuie sur des données quantitatives et qualitatives. Ducournau rassemble des chiffres sur les prix littéraires, le nombre de traductions, etc. pour quantifier le taux de succès qu’un écrivain peut achever. Des entretiens, des consultations d’articles de presse etc. permettent d’obtenir des informations sur la nature du succès littéraire. En passant, Ducournau fournit des recherches sociologiques impressionnantes du Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire, de l’Association des écrivains de langue française et de la présence – assez faible – des voix africaines dans les revues Le Magazine littéraire et La Quinzaine littéraire. Des recherches sur l’état de la littérature en Afrique-même font généralement preuve de conditions défavorables en ce qui concerne la production et la consommation littéraire : la littérature reste un passe-temps élitaire, vue les taux d’alphabétisation et le coût de vie. La grande majorité des publications dans le continent consiste conséquemment de livres scolaires.

La deuxième partie du livre présente une analyse des caractéristiques sociologiques et géographiques des écrivains socialisés dans les pays francophones d’Afrique subsaharienne. Ducournau dessine un portrait de groupe de deux populations de référence, dont l’une contient 404 écrivains, et l’autre les 151 personnes les plus renommées parmi eux. Les deux populations, représentées dans plusieurs tableaux, sont ensuite soumises à différentes paramètres diachroniques, géographiques, sociales, générationnelles etc. Ainsi, Ducournau sait développer un outil de recherche ingénieux pour examiner des évolutions à travers le temps, à travers des espaces littéraires, ou même à l’intérieur des œuvres individuelles. L’application d’un tel schéma est exemplifié d’une façon convaincante par une comparaison entre les représentations du colonialisme par Amadou Hampâté Bâ et Ahmadou Kourouma °4. De façon collective, les modèles démontrent avant tout une féminisation et une professionnalisation au cours du temps.

En générale, Ducournau réussit à faire comprendre les mécanismes complexes sous-jacentes à l’industrie des lettres francophones. La méthodologie de l’étude est riche et ambitieuse, lorsqu’elle sait combiner plusieurs stratégies divergentes pour arriver à une image peu poétique mais bien clarifiant de la littérature comme une industrie sévère et compétitive. La profondeur et la lourdeur de l’étude limitent son accessibilité pour le grand public, mais celui qui s’intéresse aux processus sociologiques littéraires sur le plan transnationale sera bien satisfait. En même temps, cette étude peut servir comme point de départ pour d’autres explorations extra-littéraires. Des questions plus approfondies sur les développements actuels en ligne, sur le rôle du genre, ou sur les différentes évolutions dans l’Afrique anglophone ou maghrébine peuvent prolonger la route que Ducournau nous a pavée ici.

Ewout Decoorne

°1 C. Ducournau, La fabrique des classiques africains, Paris: CNRS Editions, 2017, pp. 39
°2 Ibid., p. 75
°3 Ibid., p. 83
°4 Ibid., p. 340-1

This book review was published in: Africa Book Link, Summer 2018

Thirsting for Sunlight: Testing for Light, Tasting of Myth | A Review by Isidore Diala

Christopher Okigbo 1930-67: Thirsting for Sunlight. By Obi Nwakanma. Suffolk, UK: James Currey, 2017. pp xxviii+276. £17.99, paperback. (ISBN 978-1-84701-179-4)

Christopher Okigbo’s generally acknowledged charm, intrepid exploits in sports, breathless adventures, penchant for imaginative self-portraits, gallantry as well as his enchanting, if often misunderstood, poetry rendered him larger than life in the imagination of his contemporaries and cut him out as a virtual figure of myth. Countless colourful anecdotes about Okigbo’s life and his lionization in a folk war song upon his heroic death in battle during the Nigeria-Biafra war played a role in the creation and sustenance of that mythic image.

Obi Nwakanma’s biography of Okigbo, Christopher Okigbo 1930-67: Thirsting for Sunlight begins the process of understanding and demystifying the poet. Thus, Nwakanma identifies the primary aim of the biography as “placing Okigbo in time” (x), no doubt by providing a compelling account of the ascertainable facts of Okigbo’s life and death and subjecting them to sober reflection, as opposed to the ethereal light of myth. However, by casting himself in the obvious image of a worshipful acolyte at the enchanted feet of the great poet with the declared intriguing purpose not only of locating Okigbo in time and place but “of clothing him with spirit” (xi), Nwakanma can perhaps only ultimately reify the canonical myths of Okigbo’s life and reinforce our image of an inscrutable poet.

Thirsting for Sunlight is a powerful portrait of the poet as a rebel. Rigorously researched, breathless in its revelations, stylistically absorbing and often humorous, the biography is driven by the crucial insight that particular “influences . . . conspired to shape [Okigbo’s] life and poetry” (x). In eight chapters, Nwakanma zealously scrutinizes both Okigbo’s cultural and Catholic family backgrounds, circumstances of his birth, his Igbo culture, education, his astonishing reading in the world’s literature, and Nigeria’s volatile political landscape for clues of formative literary influences. Notably, Nwakanma’s focus is the totality of contexts and movements, cultural, intellectual, political, indigenous, and international that nurtured Okigbo’s consciousness and art. On occasion, though, the handling of international politics seems rather artful.

Following a chronology of events in Okigbo’s life, thirteen photographs in black and white, two maps and the Okigbo family tree, the first chapter of Nwakanma’s book focuses on the first fifteen years of his growing up in his hometown of Ojoto. The careful and detailed mapping of the geographical terrain of Ojoto pales in significance only beside the even ampler examination of Igbo worldview, especially the worship of the river goddess Idoto, which Okigbo’s poetry so powerfully brought to world consciousness. Okigbo’s famed priesthood to Idoto is fully set in the context of the Igbo belief system of reincarnation and presented as instructive for the poet’s self-portrait as a prodigal. But Nwakanma is keen to foreground Okigbo’s “double consciousness,” and highlights the equally deep impact of Catholicism on Okigbo’s early life as the son of a father who was a pioneering Catholic schoolteacher. Nwakanma clearly considers the death of Okigbo’s mother Anna when he was five years old the single most important experience of his early life capable of explaining his entire complex personality from his remorseless womanising to his daredevilry; a mindset Nwakanma hints at as a search for that lost ‘mother’.

Okigbo’s Western education at the elite Government College Umuahia and thereafter at the University College Ibadan, where he studied Classics, constitutes the main focus of the second and third chapters respectively of the biography. Nwakanma’s attention is still keenly focused on Okigbo’s cosmopolitan background and the hybridity at the core of his writing. He is equally fascinated by Okigbo’s leisurely attitude towards his school work which was in sharp contrast to his outstanding intellectual gifts and wide reading. Nwakanma highlights the deep impact of some of the extraordinary individuals such as William Simpson, Saburi Biobaku, Charles W. Low and Ben Obumselu that Okigbo met at Umuahia and Ibadan on his intellectual and artistic growth. Okigbo’s political discipleship to Dr Chike Obi, a mathematician at the University College, Ibadan, gave him a first-hand knowledge of the distinctive terrain of Nigerian politics and no doubt prepared him for the central roles he played later in national events. In this book, the crucial subtext of the biography is the temper and potentials of Okigbo’s generation and their contribution in shaping the nature of Okigbo’s poetic fervour. By constantly linking Okigbo’s career with those of his contemporaries and providing regular and extensive catalogues (occasionally repeated) of Okigbo’s peers and their profiles, Nwakanma aims not merely to set in relief the catholicity of Okigbo’s friendships but even more importantly to foreground his thirst for the limelight by imagining the poet as a nexus of connecting lines of intellectual influences. Thirsting for Sunlight is a multi-layered narrative of the poet’s generation and times, with the poet at the centre.

Nwakanma’s characterisation of Okigbo as a deviant is at the core of the biography. His habitual tantrums as a child and deviations from family norms, as well as his disregard for authority, demonstrate for Nwakanma the enigmatic temperament of a genius. Typically indulged and granted generous concessions, Okigbo trudged through school with modest grades and had to re-write his degree examination at the University of Ibadan before he passed it. Nwakanma painstakingly shows how Okigbo’s contempt for the conventional and orthodox and his bohemian attitude to life meant that his careers in the civil service and in business ended disastrously. Okigbo resigned his appointment as Regional Sales Manager at Nigeria Tobacco; left his position as Trainee Manager at the United African Company; was sacked from his post as Administrative Officer in the Federal Ministry of Information and Research because he ran a private company while still in the civil service. At any rate, his business enterprise was soon to go bankrupt too because he lacked both the competence and commitment required to succeed in a business venture. Leisurely and self-indulgent, Okigbo clearly envisaged work as the primordial curse.

The rest of the book highlights the paradox of Okigbo’s discovery of poetry through adversity, the growth of his art, and both the multicultural character of his work as well as his increasing involvement in national and African political experience. Offered a job as a Latin teacher and Vice Principal of Fiditi Grammar School by his friend and principal of the school, Alex Ajayi, Okigbo gradually recovered a zest for life and the therapeutic value of poetry after the trauma of the loss of his job in the civil service. Nwakanma emphasises Okigbo’s discovery of the Muse of poetry in Fiditi and notes the influence of Virgil and T.S. Eliot, and a reflection of his childhood experiences on Okigbo’s earliest poetry.

Leaving Fiditi in 1960 for the new University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he worked as acting University Librarian, Okigbo was unusually absorbed by the challenges of his new position (even while his womanising became even more adventurous). Greater access to international poetry and the intellectual vibrancy of the university environment had a beneficent effect on his art. Nwakanma especially emphasizes the influence of the Welsh poet Peter Thomas on Okigbo’s poetry at this period. Similarly, on Okigbo’s return to Ibadan in January 1962 as the West African Regional Manager for Cambridge University Press, the intellectual stimulation provided by the university of Ibadan and the intense cultural and political developments in the city led to the maturation of Okigbo’s art. The Mbari Club played a pivotal role in the cultural life of the city and Okigbo soon became its secretary as well as the editor of Mbari publications. 1962 saw the publication of his seminal collections, Heavensgate and Limits.

Nwakanma examines in considerable details the national political crises leading to the military coup and the counter coup of 1966, and remarks Okigbo’s involvement with these issues through his association with the key figures, such as Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, one of the leaders of the first coup d’etat in 1966. The biographer documents the gory details of the pogrom against Igbo people resident in northern Nigeria, the onset of the civil war, Okigbo’s audacious undertaking to procure arms for Biafra, and his enlistment in the Biafran Army. Nwakanma’s speculations on why Okigbo enlisted into the army are legion and insightful and his documentations of Okigbo’s gallantry as a guerrilla soldier, fighting without training and in defiance of personal safety and conventional rules of warfare, are impassioned. The portrait of Okigbo as a soldier is a culmination of the colourful legend of the hero, hitherto believed and publicised in the historization of the war. The headstrong child who risked death in jumping from a tall tree for the adulation of his peers; the outlaw with a penchant for raiding the school orchard even when he was not particular about oranges; the stuntsman toying with electrocution in the name of a sentimental attachment to an ancient ghost radio: all these anticipate the daring Biafran guerrilla soldier killed in a lonely confrontation with an armoured tank.

Thirsting for Sunlight is a boon to the reader of Okigbo’s poetry even when Nwakanma claims he “does not aim to raise critical or philosophical questions about the value of the literary text” (x). The crucial contexts of many of the poems are exemplarily highlighted. For example, Nwakanma’s inscription of Okigbo’s anguished recollection of his mother’s funeral as the background to the solemn sequence, “The Passage” in Heavensgate, enriches our understanding of the poem by foregrounding its autobiographical source; he thus clarifies the intensity of the poem’s sobriety through his evocation of the gripping image of the poet as he “grapples with the terrifying scene as it unfolds in a child’s vision” (11). Crucially also, by Nwakanma’s acceptance of the challenge of reading up the enormous intellectual background that nurtured Okigbo’s art, he is typically able to guide Okigbo’s readers. Many intriguing phrases and allusions are contextualised. “The stone surface” of Siren Limits, for example, is traced to the architecture of Cambridge House, Ibadan. Besides, some of the enchanted figures of romantic legend in Okigbo’s poetry are given a local habitation and historical names. Kepkanly is clothed in human flesh. The nature of Okigbo’s mystical relationship to Idoto is examined in details, with Okigbo revealed as the reincarnation of his maternal uncle who had been the priest of the deity, a duty the poet inherited; Okigbo’s aunt Eunice is identified as a source of his passion for music, and an element of his satiric wit is traced to the historically ascertainable character, Jandum. Nwakanma places Upandru in this category, identifying him as “Up Andrew,” a “travelling minstrel,” “a gifted, handicapped performer from Achina” whom he likens to Tiresias, the blind prophet, and considers a model of the prophetic element in Okigbo’s poetry (26). However, unusually, Nwakanma cites no reference to authenticate this kind of claim.1 Occasionally also the reader is offered a poem’s background as its meaning.

Moreover, one feels that such statements as “Hart Crane[’s] . . . influence is also obvious in Okigbo’s poetry” (203); “Okigbo’s admiration for this poet [Tchicaya U Tam’si] is reflected in the echoes of U Tam’si’s Bushfire [Feu de brousse] in Okigbo’s Path of Thunder written at that period” (222) and many other such claims would have been more insightful with even the slightest substantiation. And when Nwakanma pronounces Peter Thomas’s poetry the irrefragable source of the title of Okigbo’s sequence, Heavensgate (158), he ignores Okigbo’s considerable critical heritage, and especially the exemplary labours of some of Okigbo’s most distinguished scholars such as Obumselu and Dan Izevbaye on the subject in their own published works.

Thirsting for Sunlight is a poorly proofread work. Repetitive, digressive, littered with grammatical blunders and misprints, it is also rather indulgent in its attitude to its subject. It should be noted that Nwakanma’s exaltation of Okigbo’s gallantry does not completely erase his hero’s thousand other faces. After all, Nwakanma’s relentless documentation of Okigbo’s womanising is a fixation perhaps only comparable to Okigbo’s own obsession with sexuality. Pleading the deep impact of Okigbo’s early loss of his mother and making the Beat poets the flagrant offenders for teaching Okigbo their radical moral vision, Nwakanma recurrently invokes Freud to no avail to absolve Okigbo of the stain of what this biographer calls his “immoderate infidelities” (117). For sure, some of the many women that Okigbo toyed with, even when they were sincerely devoted to him, are unlikely to be among the entranced devotees at Nwakanma’s Okigbo shrine.

Many of Nwakanma’s interviewees for this book strain to indulge Okigbo even in complete disregard of evidence pointing otherwise: Nwakanma’s biography of Okigbo perpetuates his myth. The reader is asked to accept Okigbo’s irresponsible extravagance as “disdain for money” (185); his aversion for enduring relationships with women is presented as an “affirmation of the transcendence of the imagination” (190); and we are asked to see his casual indiscriminate liaisons as “democratic, determined by neither class nor status” (190) and, moreover, as “emblematic of his courage” (161). Even with his wife Safinat Atta, the Igbira princess he wooed for long because her family had deep reservations about Okigbo’s lifestyle, and their daughter, Obiageli, Okigbo preferred a long-distance arrangement because, according to his biographer, Okigbo “felt distracted by continuous feminine presence in his space and could not perform his artistic and creative functions” (190). Appraising the controversial topic of “plagiarism” in Okigbo’s poetry, Nwkanma praises Okigbo highly for “stealing with genius and originality”! (135). On occasion, the biographer indeed seems taken in by his own myth-making. When Nwakanma reports with no sense of irony that Okigbo “wrote the best essay on Greek tragedy ever submitted by any student in the Classics department of his time at Ibadan” (95), did he perhaps forget that he actually used a euphemism when he noted earlier that Okigbo and his friend Obumselu “collaborated” (82) on the said essay?

Nwakanma could count only two biographies of African writers—Armand Guibert’s of Leopold Senghor and Ezenwa Ohaeto’s of Chinua Achebe—when he was at work on Okigbo’s biography, and when the cloth edition was published in 2010. Since then, several biographies of Nigerian writers have been published. Among these include Ezechi Onyerionwu’s Ahmed Parker Yerima: The Portrait of an Artist as a Dramatist (2017) as well as his Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo: Life and Times (2017), and Sule Egya’s Niyi Osundare: A Literary Biography (2017), to mention a few. However, even in this august company, Thirsting for Sunlight remains preeminent. It is hoped that the recent paperback edition will place this invaluable work in the hands of the many readers thirsting for knowledge of Christopher Okigbo, gifted poet and fascinating man of action.

Isidore Diala, Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria

1. Notably, in his introduction to his A Concordance to the Poems of Christopher Okigbo, MJC Echeruo considers “Upandru” a pun on Ezra Pound and notes that in describing him as the “village explainer,” Okigbo adopted precisely Gertrude Stein’s phrase for describing Pound.

This book review was published in: Africa Book LInk, Spring 2018

A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | A Review by Sola Adeyemi

Ernest N. Emenyonu (ed.). A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. England: James Currey, 2017. Cloth. ISBN: 978-1-84701-162-6 (Africa only paperback ISBN: 978-1-84701-163-3). pp. 300+xii. £25.00 hardback

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is undoubtedly one of the most engaging literary figures to have burst onto the world’s literary landscape in recent times. Her writing has introduced new motifs and narrative styles which have invigorated contemporary African fiction as well as posed challenges to the multicultural nature of our modern life. Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003) launched the writer as a serious commentator of human relationships and a notable new voice.

Purple Hibiscus is a multidimensional novel set in the Igbo region of Nigeria and deals with issues related to celibacy in the Catholic priesthood, the legitimacy of traditional Igbo religion and the resilience of a citizenry faced with political instability and the acute poverty in a wealth nation. The novel was followed a few years later by Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), one of the most important fictions written about the Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-1970).

Numerous works of fiction, faction and biography, including drama and poetry, have been written on the war by popular Nigerian writers and historians such as Elechi Amadi (Sunset in Biafra: A Civil War Diary, 1973); Wole Soyinka (The Man Died (1972), Madmen and Specialists (1970), Season of Anomy (1973), and Poems from Prison (1969; republished as A Shuttle in the Crypt, 1972)); Chinua Achebe (Beware, Soul-Brother, and Other Poems (1971), Girls at War and Other Stories (1973)); Cyprian Ekwensi (Survive the Peace (1976), Divided We Stand: a Novel of the Nigerian Civil War (1980)); and Ken Saro-Wiwa (Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985)). Adichie lists thirty-nine similar texts as being influential to her writing Half of a Yellow Sun. However, none of the texts on the list had been written by someone who was not directly involved in the war. Adichie’s Yellow Sun is therefore unique in the sense that it was written by someone who was not involved in the war. In fact, Adichie was not born until 1977, seven years after the end of the war, yet Half of a Yellow Sun exposes the pathos and anguish of the period in a refreshing way. Her latest novel, Americanah (2013), ‘blends ingenious craftsmanship with extravagant and versatile innovations’ (Intro, p. 1) and probably inspired the compilation of a Companion to examine and expatiate the writing of this important writer.

A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu, is an attempt to ‘examine, explore, and analyse the ramifications of Adichie’s creative outputs from a variety of perspectives that demonstrates a thorough understanding of her art, ideology, and vision as writer’ (p. 4).

Explaining the initiative for the Companion, the editor hinges it on an attempt to complete ‘unfinished conversations’ between Adichie and participants at the “Renowned African Writers / African and African Diaspora Artists Visit Series”, a forum organised in September 2014 at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA as a collaborative project of the Department of Africana Studies and the Flint Public Library to specifically discuss the writer’s work. The Companion is composed of seventeen research essays, plus an Introduction by Emenyonu. Despite the wide scope and depth of the discourse presented in the essays, the organisation is simple, with the chapters arranged to address Adichie’s works in the chronological order of the publications to date, beginning with Purple Hibiscus and ending with Americanah. There are six chapters devoted to Purple Hibiscus; four on Half of a Yellow Sun; two on The Thing Around Your Neck (2009); with the last four chapters on Americanah. Apart from the Introduction, there is a ‘lead’ essay by Louisa Uchum Egbunike, which tries to define the ideological premise of Adichie’s writing.

In “Narrating the Past: Orality, History & the Production of Knowledge in the Works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie” (pp. 15-29), Egbunike outlines the Igbo worldview out of which Adichie emerges and which informs and influences her writing. This first chapter is important in understanding Adichie’s novels as well as the discourse in the other chapters because it identifies aspects of the Igbo oral tradition and history from which Adichie draws her literary vision and inspiration. Though this chapter is introduced as authenticating the originality of Adichie’s narrative forms and techniques, this is a speculative assertion as the chapter in fact invokes and affirms the indebtedness of Adichie to Igbo oral forms and narrative techniques popularised by writers such as Chinua Achebe. Egbunike refers to overt intertextual references between Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1959) and Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) (p. 23), especially the short story “The Headstrong Historian”, which she remarks as bearing a striking resemblance to [that of] Things Fall Apart, and which deals with subjects connected to the Purple Hibiscus (pp. 23-24). This chapter therefore expands the vista through which we not only view Adichie’s work, but through which we can evaluate the other chapters. Egbunike helps in this by locating Adichie’s literature within a long tradition of Igbo literary cultural production (p. 28), and connected to modern fiction of Chinua Achebe, among others.

The six chapters on Purple Hibiscus focus on various critical perspectives on the novel. Janet Ndula in “Deconstructing Binary Oppositions of Gender in Purple Hibiscus: A Review of Religious / Traditional Superiority & Silence” (pp. 31-43) hints at the novel as the establishment of Adichie’s brand of feminism which she adumbrated in her pamphlet, We Should All Be Feminists (2014). Ndula is of the view that Purple Hibiscus endorses individual efforts over gender dispositions or aspirations, and that validating gender and gender-based constructions end in dislodging the hierarchies so constructed, therefore transforming unequal societal structures into recognised equality. This summary encapsulates the direction of the argument in the remaining five essays and adequately points at the importance of Motherhood in the face of stark, unyielding masculinity, as explored in Iniobong I. Uko’s “Reconstructing Motherhood: A Mutative Reality in Purple Hibiscus” (pp. 57-71).

The chapters on Half of a Yellow Sun explore and examine the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-1970 more than they do Adichie’s intertextual narrative on the war. Understandably, this is a relevant thrust for several reasons: Adichie’s novel is a fiction based on oral and literary narratives about the war and therefore needs to be contextualised in the discourse. Further, the intertextual relationship of Adichie’s novel to the war deserves precise complications to provide a basis for a deep discourse on Half of a Yellow Sun. Emenyonu in his Introduction to the Companion asserts that the ‘great Nigerian novel’ on the war did not exist before Adichie because earlier writers could not ‘detach themselves enough to bring their imaginative vision to bear’ (p. 7) on the event. However, this statement does not properly consider the immense contributions of Cyprian Ekwensi, especially in Survive the Peace, or the works of Buchi Emecheta among others. Adichie’s novel may have been nouveau by being one of the first to be written as a popular fiction – this excludes the dramas of Chukwuma Okoye, Dele Oladeji and John Iwuh – by someone not involved in the war, but it is a novel that exists upon the imaginative construct of the thirty one texts listed at the end of the novel, and more importantly, on the recollections of Adichie’s parents. This is not denying the position of the novel in recuperating the events of the war, but it is yet another in recent works on the war, and the essays in this collection underline that. As the four contributors on Half of a Yellow Sun agree, Adichie’s contribution is important because it prods the collective amnesia on the Nigerian political stage about the war, history of which is neither memorialised in public discourse or taught in schools. More particularly, as the contributors impress on us, especially Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo (“‘Fragile Negotiations’: Olanna’s Melancholia in Half of a Yellow Sun”, pp. 115-127) and Chikwendu Paschalkizito Anyanwu (“Corruption in Post-Independence Politics: Half of a Yellow Sun as a Reflection of A Man of the People”, pp. 139-151), Adichie’s focus on characters and characterisation, historical importance of the war, intertextual engagement, and representation of gender imbues a special relevance to the work, and makes this Companion a necessary reader.

The tact changes with the contributions on Americanah. The essays in this section of the Companion interrogate Adichie’s notion of mobility and migration as they apply to women, and how the sense of location and dislocation is not dependent on physical territoriality but could be more universally placed and identified with gender oppression, mental imperative and psychological attitude.

In support of Adichie’s idea of feminism, which espouses harmonious mutual relationships across genders as a means to creating a better world, with relationships defined along capabilities, Gichingiri Ndigirigi (in “‘Reverse Appropriations’ & Transplantation in Americanah, pp. 199-211) concludes that deterritorialized females with ‘flexible citizenship’ (p. 207) emerge as autonomous ‘objects of appropriation’ (p. 211) able to traverse traditional cultures and borders. In several interviews, including her 2012 TEDxEuston Talk (later published as We Should All Be Feminists, 2014) and lately as a guest at the annual La Nuit Des Idees (A Night of Ideas), hosted by the French government in January 2018, Adichie re-members her hairstyle and the position of maintaining that style as she wants, as an emblem of feminine independence, and a symbol of created identity. The last chapter in this book, “‘Hairitage’ Matters: Transpositioning & the Third Wave Hair Movement in ‘Hair’, Imitation & Americanah” by Cristina Cruz-Guthiérrez (pp. 245-261), recuperates this point and contextualises Adichie’s hair as a representation of personal and political identity, self-perception and ‘a sign of black women rejecting previously internalized discourses of normalized femininity and appearance’ (pp. 253, 258); and transforming the women’s identities from a position of controlled submissiveness to that of empowerment.

The essays in this Companion informatively present Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s artistic vision, ideology, and intertextual engagement. Helpfully for those not very familiar with the work by or the writing of Adichie’s, the Companion concludes with an appendix of her works between 2004 and 2016, compiled by Daria Tunca (pp. 263-290), with a listing of nine books and key references, forty four short stories, ninety three essays and lectures, one hundred and eighty four interviews, and more than sixty other sources and resources that provide further insight into the writing of this important literary voice.

With her rising profile and importance as one of the major world writers, this Companion on Adichie could not have come at a better time.

Sola Adeyemi, Goldsmiths University of London, UK

This book review ws published in: Africa Book Link, Spring 2018

An Interview with Abubakar Adam Ibrahim | by Elizabeth Olaoye

Questions for the author of Season of Crimson Blossoms, a book that blew my mind.

EO: Recently in Nigeria, in a dramatic turn of events, an Igbo grandmother was caught having sex with a much younger man shortly after her husband’s death. The community shamed her by parading her on the street and banishing her after making her pay some fine. The internet was agog with the news, as people wondered how a bereaved grandmother could be engaged in sex with a younger man. The first thing that came to my mind was your novel and the fascinating way it deals with the sexuality of older citizens. Do you think the collective unconscious of Hausa people among whom the story is set, and by extension that of Nigerians, accommodate female sexuality outside marriage for older citizens? What does your response say about the way Nigeria is positioned in a global order of things?

AAI: I was made aware of that incident through social media when people drew my attention to it because—in a case of life imitating art—it echoed what Season is about. I think it was an unfortunate occurrence from all perspectives. The fact that in the 21st century, people could be subjected to public shaming in this manner for what effectively was a private act is symptomatic of all that is wrong with our society. I don’t think this woman was shamed for indiscretion. That was only an excuse. That woman was shamed for being old and for being poor. If she had been wealthy, that wouldn’t have happened. If she had been male, that wouldn’t have happened. What this shows, for me, is that people are often their worst enemies, and that society that shamed, the individual members of that community that participated in this primitive melodrama, are not without their own indiscretion.

If you change the names of the characters involved in this incident, and change the locale, it could fit perfectly into any place in Nigeria, irrespective of religious inclination. This is not about the unconscious mind of the Hausa people. This is about the prevalence of these practices across ethnic and religious lines on the continent. The suppression of female sexuality has been one of the greatest psychological accomplishments of all time, and both men and women played active roles in this tyranny. In some cases the females are the most active agents in perpetuating this culture, but that is a subject for another discourse.

With regards to our positioning, I think that has been determined by other factors such as our history and our race, among others. Practices like public shaming have helped to maintain this position when other cultures and people have evolved and continue to do so. I think it is important to retain certain aspects of our cultures and values, as these form our identity as a people, but this is certainly not one of them.

EO: In Freudian psychoanalysis, a clear distinction is made between the ego, the super ego and the id. In Freud’s formulation the id is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires and impulses. Freud believed that the id acts according to the “pleasure principle”—the psychic force that motivates the tendency to seek immediate gratification of any impulse. It seems to me that in Season of Crimson Blossoms, Hajia Binta, the major character in this novel, struggles to impose her ego on the id to no avail. Are you suggesting that there are desires that cannot be tamed?

AAI: There are seeds that are, by the constitution of our personalities, implanted in the id. External circumstances, such as society, peer pressure or other forms of socialization may impair the growth of this seed, but some of them persist over a lifetime. Sometimes there are things we want to express or experience, but because of the nature of our upbringing we are forced to curtail those desires. For Binta, the notion of right and wrong was clear, had been clear all her life, up until the point she meets Reza and the opportunity that encounter brings along with it. He watered the seed that had been implanted in her from the very beginning. So to answer your question directly, I have long come to the conclusion that the only battle one is certain to lose is that one fights against himself. And sometimes when desire is innate, deeply implanted in one’s id, it is only the unavailability of opportunity that will prevent the expression of this desire. Not many people succeed in getting away with these things.

EO: Are you familiar with Freud’s theory of Oedipus complex? The character of Reza seems to be forever longing for reconciliation with a lost mother. Is it coincidental or are you aware of the psychoanalytical implication of the relationship between Reza and Hajia?

AAI: I am aware of the Oedipus Complex and the reverse, the Electra Complex. I find them both strange and intriguing. What I find even more intriguing is the circumstances that lead to the manifestation and expression of such complexes. For a writer that is the greatest point of interest, because that is where the story is.

In terms of Binta and Reza, I am, as they are, very conscious of the lines and the certainty that there is no blood relation between them, but then again, both of them acknowledge the strangeness of that relationship because it is a thought that occurs to both of them. At the same time, as if to reemphasize to himself and Binta, Reza says to Binta, “You are not my mother.” For me, that was something he had always had in his head, even when he thought about the strange borderlines of their relationship.

EO: Now to trauma. Hajia’s niece, Faiza, cannot stand the colour red. It is interesting how Hureira links this to genies. I have heard of this a lot. Nigerians, especially Hausas, seem to believe this so much. The trauma theory explains Faiza’s predicament, but seems to repudiate the seeming superstitious aspects of genies. I am afraid that we are explaining away aspects of our existence that are inexplicable, using Western philosophy to nullify some strong mythical aspects of our existence as Africans. Why, for example, do people frequent ritualists if they are completely ineffective? Don’t charms work at all? Are there no demons for real? Why do our people continue to pray about these things?

AAI: The belief in the supernatural is pervasive and universal. It is not the preserve of African societies, as some people want to believe. The belief in Djinns spreads across parts of Africa and the Orient. The myths of genies, for instance, are prevalent in Africa, the Arab world and in India. In other cultures and climes they are called by other names, like shadow people, or shape-shifters. But closer examination will show that these entities share similar characteristics, regardless of what names they are called or in what part of the world they are thought to manifest. I have said before that my point of interest is not necessarily in the proof of their existence, not of djinns or other supernatural beings, but in interrogation of peoples’ belief in their existence and how they act and behave as a result of these beliefs. I am not trying to prove or disprove their existence. I am only trying to mirror how people behave because of the belief they have or don’t have about these things. Are there logical explanations for strange occurrences? Yes, sometimes there are. Sometimes there aren’t. And that makes them all the more intriguing. Is trauma real? Does it affect people in these parts of the world? Does the constant stream of assorted violence that people here are subjected to have an impact on their psyche? Yes. They may be mentally stronger but they do suffer, a lot, and the sooner we acknowledge this the better.

EO: To what extent should we call to question the morality that traps women like Hajia Binta? And to what extent should we allow our questioning instincts make us transgress the unwritten codes of culture?

AAI: It is our ability, as humans, to ask questions of existence, reality and morality that makes us a higher class of animals. It is not because we are stronger physically or faster than other animals, it is this ability to ask questions that distinguishes us. And, throughout human history, the greatest moments of change have been motivated by periods of intense questioning of morality and values. Today we find ourselves in that place once again, where tough questions are being asked of morality as humans seek to redefine themselves, their identities and what is acceptable or not. And that is why today we have people who twenty, thirty years ago, would be considered pariahs, assertively, in some cases belligerently, hurling questions that make the established order uncomfortable. So today we are reconsidering definitions of sexuality and gender roles, religion and generally what is considered right and wrong. Christianity and Islam were entrenched because men like Jesus and Muhammad (PBUH) questioned the norms of the day. This is how societies have evolved. In as much as society must evolve, however, there must be a certain level of stability, and I think people who are in a hurry for society to be more open or liberal take it for granted that the absence of any kind of moral fibre by which society is defined is as dangerous as the values they are battling to overthrow.

EO: At the end of the novel, I felt so bad for Reza, and for Hajia’s son, and for Hajia. The catharsis was too much for Hajia. I kept on telling myself, it is just a story, it is just a story. But do you think our realities are any better than the stories we tell? How do you see the relationship between the Nigerian society and fiction?

AAI: For me this is a reflection of how I see society, especially the Nigerian society, in which one gives a lot to be compliant, to flow with the norm and then at the point of divergence, and I think we all feel the urge to stray occasionally, how viciously intolerant our society could be. The Nigerian society is one that is governed by some strict codes and these codes have a way of reasserting themselves through the agency of people who often don’t realise the impact of what they are doing. Fiction is a tool that could and has been used to interrogate our relationship with society and how various little individual acts serve to preserve the pervading powers of society. In this instance, Binta and Reza were the tools I chose to explore this phenomenon.

EO: I would like to refer to an article I just read on Literary Hub about the need for authors to protect the inner life. You can read it here: http://lithub.com/writers-protect-your-inner-life. What is your idea of an inner life and how have you fared since winning the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) prize for literature?

AAI: I have always been a private person and have always wanted to keep my private life private. Today, reality shows are the norms where public figures bare it all on TV shows. And the non-public figures have social media to showcase the daily dramas in their lives. The consequences are that, in order to have greater appeal, some people go an extra length to fabricate dramas in their lives and showcase them to the public to remain relevant. This is not something I particularly fancy. And since I started writing, there have been all sorts of intrusions in one’s life. There are strangers who genuinely want guidance or advice or just someone to look at their manuscripts. After the NLNG Prize, things have escalated significantly, to the point where people who don’t even read have seen one’s face in the papers and on TV. In a way that has hampered the liberties one enjoys. There are instances when it is nice, like when you go to the airport and the officers recognise you and don’t hassle you, or when people who have connected with the characters in your books, and thank you for writing the story as if you had done them a personal favour. But there are also instances where one just wants to walk quietly into a public space and enjoy some kind of normalcy, coffee with friends or just a normal conversation. Those days are increasingly hard to come by now. Sometimes you go to do normal things and someone shouts, I know you. It all means I have to be careful what I do in public, because I never know who is watching. And so I guard my private space a lot because that is where I am free to be myself.

Elizabeth Olaoye, independent researcher currently based in Nigeria. She has taught at universities in Nigeria including Ajayi Crowther University in Oyo

Season of the Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Cassava Republic Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-911115-00-7, 320p.

This book interview was published in: Africa Book Link, Spring 2018

The Day Ends Like Any Day | A Review by Sola Adeyemi

Timothy Ogene, The Day Ends Like Any Day. Berkshire, England: Holland House, 2017, pp.264. ISBN: 978-1-910688-29-8 (paperback); 978-1-910688-30-4 (kindle)

The Novel that Ends like None Else

There is no sun today,
save the finch’s yellow breast,
and the world seems faultless in spite of it.
Across the sound, a continuous
ectoplasm of gray,
a ferry slits the deep waters,

bumping our little motorboats
against their pier.
The day ends like any day,
with its hour of human change
lifting even the chloretic heart.
– “A Half-Life” by Henri Cole (http://www.theartdivas.com/2014/02/a-half-life-by-henri-cole.html)

The ninth line of Henri Cole’s poem is an inspiration for the title of Timothy Ogene’s novel, The Day Ends Like Any Day, published by independent publisher Holland House in 2017.

The novel is divided into three parts, with an epilogue. Part one is about the early years of the protagonist; part two is the coming of age years at the university; while part three is devoted to the relationships that Sam, the protagonist, forms during his university years and how they influence his life and experiences. The epilogue is ‘written’ by one of these friends, Osagie, who presents a revealing commentary about Sam’s life.

But, I am getting ahead of myself.

Growing up in Nigeria is always a multicultural experience as most communities are hubs of diversity. Recuperating experiences of living in such communities can be an amalgam of the amazing, the bizarrely wonderful, as well as fabulous tales. This can make a bildungsroman emerging from those experiences both credulous and incredulous, familiar and strange, but writing that the reader can identify with; and adventures that rouse a reader’s memories of their own childhood.

Timothy Ogene’s The Day Ends Like Any Day is a bildungsroman with familiar adventures and surreal experiences. This is a lyrical, vibrant, and challenging coming-of-age account of the multiple identities and multiple personalities of a young Nigerian growing up in a period when everything around him is changing but who refuses to accept that his life has been formed by the traumas and dependencies of his life and past. What makes the tale striking is that our hero grows up in Nigeria trying to find a new direction under dictatorship of the 1990s, after years of wilful neglect of the needs of its citizens.

The above are strong statements that require unpacking through an analytical review of the book. But before I continue, let me confess that The Day is one of the most interesting and unputdownable books I have read in the past several months. It resonates powerfully with my experience of growing up in Nigeria – even though the setting of the book is more than 600 kilometres from my childhood area – and some of the incidents described are not only familiar, but they seem to have happened to people whose acquaintances I had.

After that self-declaration, let’s look at what makes this book good, readable, or perhaps even tedious.

The Day is about Sam. It starts with Sam growing up in Oyigbo, near Port-Harcourt, a vibrant community only identified as O. in the book. The author’s choice of “O” could be a distanciation technique, as there are several towns around Port-Harcourt with names beginning with O, such as Okrika, Ogbogoro, Old Bakana, Onne, or Ogoni, to mention a few. However, the description of the blocks of residence and the environment recognisably describes Oyigbo, “lying east of Port Harcourt, south of the new highway [A3 motorway] that runs from Aba to Port Harcourt, and west of the murky Imo River” (p. 8). This is where the author grew up, and where our protagonist also grew up in a “room-and-parlour affair”, a two-roomed apartment in Block V, Room 7, a place with leaky roofs and cracked walls which are bordered by clogged drainages. This is the environment where Sam the protagonist weaves a vista of narratives that introduces us to exciting and unforgettable characters: his sceptical sister, Ricia; Pa Suku whose mentorship capability moulded Sam into a book lover and thinker; the cantankerous Ma Ike; Dan, the mysterious tailor’s son who has the knack of appearing at eventful moments and vanishing before trouble erupts; the enigmatic and incorrigible womaniser Jide, the only resident with a television set; and pregnant Dora who one day walked naked into a lake, drowning herself. The traumas of life follow Sam from O. to Delta State University where encounters with lover Margaret and musician friend Osagie question his sexuality and sanity.

The narratives constantly shift between the past and present, through metaphors and imagery that traverse the spaghetti routes of memories. Sam’s journey through life is described as it progresses forward whilst still rooted in the past and presents vignettes of emotions in cyclical and repetitive moments. For the author, this is more of a coming-of-language novel than coming-of-age, as he finds new imagery and new language to define Sam’s experiment with life. As the title of the novel suggests, the days become not a flow of time-limited sequences, but an eternal present that shrinks or expands through the power of our own mind. Our understanding of identity is challenged as we battle with factors that shape and define Sam but are reflected in his various encounters and unspoken thoughts. We are convinced that personalities are never identities that are built and fixed but are combinations of several identities; some belonging to us and many belonging to others; our dreams and aspirations; and our past, especially moments that tweak our imagination, such as the suicide of a teenage friend. In the end, we realise that we can never escape ourselves or the components that define our personality. And that is what Sam realizes in this psychological novel of formation.

This is a highly recommended book though description of places and landscape sometimes interrupts the action and the flow of the story. Perhaps this can be excused in a first novel. What however distracts are the grammatical errors and anachronism. For instance, an example of anachronism relates to Pa Suku: “…by the time I was in senior secondary two, that fantasy was swept away by literature” (p. 59). This is in reference to the Universal Basic Education programme in Nigeria – locally termed 6-3-3-4 – whereby pupils spend six years in primary education, followed by three years in junior secondary and three years in senior secondary, and concluding with a four-year university education. However, this programme was introduced in 1988, and given Pa Suku’s age inferred from his war experience and gap to Sam’s he would have studied under the old system of a five-year secondary education without a demarcation.

“Ricia continued to bounced along…” (p. 16); “Those where the good old days…” (p. 60); and “I awoke to Mama’s face staring down at me. had been kicking…” (p. 95) are some of the errors (in bold) that the editor missed. And, I can even pretend to understand what this is supposed to mean: “I have alternativeiivenge viewsay through Agbor, c.meant:April, 2017.I work views on everything” (p. 138).

Nonetheless, this is a highly lyrical – although not described as a memoir or an autobiography – and refreshing prose that paints the past in layers of memories. It certainly announces Timothy Ogene as a new literary voice from Nigeria.

Sola Adeyemi, Goldsmiths University of London

This book review is published in: Africa Book Link, Spring 2018

“African literature is a question…an open question that invites…” | A Review of “The African Literary Hustle” (New Orleans Review, Issue 43, 2017) by Nancy Henaku

Last summer, the New Orleans Review, a journal of contemporary literature and culture housed in the Department of English at Loyola University, published their recent issue titled “The African Literary Hustle.” The journal, which has featured several writers including Pablo Neruda, Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Olen Butler, is entering its fiftieth year in 2018 and “the African Literary Hustle” is a celebration of their last printed volume as they move completely digital. The publication of “The African Literary Hustle” at this pivotal moment in the history of the journal is both symbolically and practically significant. Just as the New Orleans Review, African literature finds itself in this liminal space between the past and future and is at this present moment, recreating itself in a manner that requires us to engage with it in more dynamic ways. The symbolic significance of the collection is reinforced by the cover of the collection which features a figure that is neither human nor non-human. Through this cyborg figure, the collection envisions African literature beyond the human (or real) and opens space for speculation about its future. From a practical perspective, the volume provides a rare opportunity to center African writing which, despite the current emphasis on world literature, continues to be highly marginalized and marketed through the prism of the “anthropological exotic” (see Huggan, 2001). The issue itself is ambitious and critical, raising significant questions about the “hustle” of African writing (and writers) as well as the nature and reception of African literature. This volume is undoubtedly a physical manifestation of what Ngugi and Murphy, in their introduction to the collection, describe as African literature: that is, “an open question that invites, and has to keep inviting, different geographies, languages and forms” (4).

The anthology is huge. With four hundred and forty-two (442) pages, it reflects the diversity of African writers and literature. It features thirty-four (34) emerging and established writers from different African backgrounds. The varied background of the writers suggests a vision of an African identity, and in essence an African literary tradition, that is vast and fluid, expanding beyond the continent to include African diasporic communities and the many spaces in-between. The author profiles – and the content of the writings – suggests that African literature is as much about “writing the world from Africa” as it is about “writing Africa into the world” (Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004). But the collection itself weaves an interesting narrative about the current state of African literature. Unsurprisingly, the collection is skewed in favor of Nigeria that has thirteen (13) writers represented. The country with the second highest representation is South Africa which has four writers represented. Countries like Ghana that have not made as much influence in the literary scene recently have only one writer represented. More strikingly, the collection features only two writers from North Africa, represented by the Sudanese writers Safia Elhillo and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin. This cursory survey somehow points to the constraints of creating a more inclusive African literary collection. And in the case of the fewer representation of North Africa, which is mainly a French/Arabic territory, language may have been a significant factor. The editors are not oblivious to the politics of language in African literature and engage with the issue through the publication of both the originals and translations of stories such as A. Samwel’s “Malaika” (translated by Koenings) and Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire’s “Susu” (translated by the author) – a move that simultaneously alienates and invites readers while opening up a space for comparative reading and appreciation.

“The African Literary Hustle” presents an eclectic mix of literary genres: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, speculative fiction but many – if not all – of the texts are intentionally experimental, defying easy categorizations. For instance, though D.M. Aderibigbe’s “Someday we will be beautiful” is written in poetic verse and is condensed, the text also employs elements of drama such as dialogue, stage directions, prologue, acts and scenes. Bernard Farai Matambo’s “Cinema Verite: Scenes from the City” tells the story of the protagonist in the form of a
PechaKucha, a Japanese public speaking genre that also emphasizes the use of images presented in the form of PowerPoint. The result is a combination of features of the oral, visual and written modes. This technique creates a kind of presentation-like narrative that aligns with the effects of distanciation and immediacy enabled by the second person narration. In terms of content, significant comparisons can be drawn between “The African Literary Hustle” and other recently published African literature collections. The ones worth mentioning include Ivor
Agyeman-Duah’s edited collection The God Who Sends Us Gifts: An Anthology of African Short Stories and Saraba’s “Transition” issue which was published in October this year. The God Who Sends Us Gifts, which will be released in January 2018, commemorates the 55th anniversary of the first conference on African Writing held in 1962 at Makerere University College. Unlike “the African Literary Hustle”, The God Who Sends Us Gifts seems to prioritize the short story form. Saraba tends to publish an ecclectic mix of genres often based on a theme and this is reflected in the “Transitions” issue. Interestingly, while “The African Literary Hustle” was published as New Orleans Review moves digital, Saraba has been publishing online and it was just this year that its first printed version, the “Transitions” issue, was published.

Besides its varied content, “the African Literary Hustle” also transgresses the restrictive expectations of the African literary canon in its older (represented by Achebe, Ngugi, etc.) and newer (represented by Adichie, Bulawayo, etc.) manifestations and as Ngugi and Murphy rightly indicate, “they have left African literary criticism behind” (2). The entries interrogate the logic of realism that, as Andrade (2008) suggests, has become the definitive critical approach to African literature. For instance, Unathi Slasha’s “The Unlanguaged World: Reflections on Contemporary South African Fiction” draws attention to the limitation of the logic of rationality and linearity that underlies the realistic mode of writing literature. He emphasizes the uncanniness of life in (South) Africa and the ways in which this blurs the distinctions between the real and the unreal. Unathi’s work suggests that the uncanny is not an exception in Africa. It is not a defamiliarizing literary mode. It is, in fact, an everyday reality. Ngugi’s “Publisher’s Deposition: The Famished Dick and the Wicked of the Earth” is simultaneously aware and wary of the African literary canon. This is evident in the following excerpt from the text where the author’s attitude to the canon seems more obvious.

Let me try and make sense here. I am not who I thus far seem to be. You see this book from afar, its glossy cover beckoning you, or perhaps you have heard about it from a friend and you think it is published by a house with a good reputation like Heinemann, or perhaps by a radical house like Kimaathi Publishing. These are two publishing houses where this book would have found a good home. You might think that if you wrote a good novel or biography, you would send it to the publisher of The Broken Lives of Joseph Kamau. Depending on who you are, there is a good chance our relationship begins and ends with this book. Allow me to tell you why.

Does the name Sunny Side Up Publishing mean anything to you? How about the following titles from the “AFRICAN SERIAL LOVER CLASSICS?”
The Famished Dick
Maps: Tracing Your Lover’s Body
Redemption Thong
Stirring Love in an African Pot
Things Fall Inside
No Longer with Ease: Viagra and Old Age in Africa Petals of Honey
The Honey Between
The Beautiful Ones are not Yet Born: Let’s Get It On
Nervous Conditions: Fifty Ways to Get It On for the First Time
(424-425)

The biting irony, sarcasm and playful intertextuality of the excerpt above produces an iconoclastic tone that sheds off every romantic idea the reader may have about the African literary canon and brings to the fore the politics and economics of the “hustle” of publishing in Africa. Central in this excerpt are the sexual innuendos that unapologetically cast slurs at “what African literary critics call High Literature” (427). Written as a paratext – a publisher’s introductory preface to a novel – “The Famished Dick” on the whole makes a joke of the distinctions we make between fiction and nonfiction.

The entries are not anthropological narratives of African lives and cultures. This does not mean that the texts have no socio-political significance. In fact, the collection’s emphasis on the African literary hustle is itself a very political decision. However, the writings in the collection are not political in the same sense as Things Fall Apart was political. They invite readers to give as much attention to aesthetics as they give to themes. And if you are looking for the usual themes, the ones that have become the defining characteristics of postcolonial Africa – war, corruption, coups d’état – you won’t find them in this collection and when you think you have found one, you should be prepared for some surprises. For instance, when we encounter the protagonist of Obi Calvin Umeozor’s “The Marvel in the Storm”, he is a man who seems to have all the characteristics of a greedy politician – he cheats on his wife, fights in public and embezzles public funds. Yet readers are surprised by the situational irony at the end of the narrative that enables us to see this politician not just as a caricature but as one with the capacity to feel love and regret. And like the protagonist’s son, the reader comes out of the reading almost forgiving the protagonist’s misdemeanors.

As indicated earlier, “hustling” is the dominant motif in the collection. It manifests itself in myriad ways, viz the hustle of language, the hustle of living, the hustle of writing and reading. Consider Novisi Dzitrie’s poem “Getting Down to Business” which explores the hustle of writing through its succinct description of the labor and ritual of writing. The poem is as much about the struggle to make meaning, to express the unknown as it is about “the way the mind conducts business”, which finds expression in the constant shifts in the persona’s consciousness: from the weather, to the writing, to the food, to the news portal, back to the writing and finally to “the fury of your [a lover’s] bouncing bottom” (292). Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire’s “Susu” is about the hustle of living in an African city. The story centers on the frustrations of a protagonist in search of an appropriate place to urinate in a city that has limited public toilet facilities. Politics is important in this story too and is reflected in the commentaries on the annoyances of mobility in the African cityscape, the state of public toilets and the general political condition. But what we don’t have is some moralizing authorial voice intent on diagnosing the problems of a failed state.

The entries are as much about the hustle of living in Africa, as they are about the hustle of living in a precarious world. This is evident in Salawu Oladjide’s “Remembering Bouazzizi”, Stephen Derwent Partington’s “I am offered a Praline while Syria is Bombed” and Adefolami Ademola’s “No Dancing in Syria.” But writing about the hustles of the world also calls for an engagement with worldly aesthetics. This is obvious in the hybridity of stories such as Iheoma Nwachukwu’s “Sirrin Mata” and Olufunke Ogundimu “The Armed Letter Writers” that capture the cadence of African speech via English. It is in the jazzy flavor in Makambo Tshionyi’s “Slo Girl, Jazzy, and Me” as well as the bluesy undertones (intermixed with humor) and the intertextual reference to Odetta in Tsitsi Jaji’s “Blue Note”. It is in the hustle of communicating with “an other” without sharing a common language in Akin Adesokan’s “A Chair Named Stalin”. And it is in the otherworldliness of Dilman Dila’s “The Taking of Oleng” and Ngwah-Mbo Nana Nkweti’s “It just kills you Inside”. As the examples indicates, the aesthetics of the entries are as varied as their subjects but most importantly, the aesthetics of each text aligns with its subject. Consider the following excerpts from Makambo Tshionyi’s “Slo Girl, Jazzy, and Me” for instance:

The first time I come to know what I know about him, I feels like I’m swimmin’ on the quiet side of the never before. I wriggles my toes, struggles to get free. But there he be: starin’ at me proper; a wolf’s grin pinned to his ears. I feels then that I looks like I knows somethin’ that maybe I shouldn’t. Because I seen the Man and the Man seen me. He whistles sharp into the dark, and his words drift down like dust, an’ I can’t do nothin’ but listen. His mouth comes to full circle and he grins. My knees buckle easy into the quiet. I feels stone in my legs, drift weight in my calves. You hear him, I ask Jazzy an’ Slo Girl? Singin’ up our supper? Uh course we does—they reply—Uh course we does… (155-156)

Besides being characterized by linguistic features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the rhythm of the narrative adds a musical feel to the prose which effectively aligns with the centrality of music in the text. Moreover, the text’s delicious descriptions engage with the reader’s senses in significant ways. The brief excerpt above, for instance, appeals to the reader’s tactile, kinesthetic, visual and auditory senses and allows the reader to vicariously experience the sensual pleasures that the characters (that is Jazzy, Slo Girl and the narrator) seems to be experiencing in the excerpt.

These works are universal. They confound temporal, historical and geographical boundaries. They invite us to engage with them for the mere fact that they say something beautiful and insightful about being in the world whether as humans, non-humans or hybrids. They teach us to reimagine African literature beyond the real. They show us that African literature is like the cyborgian figure on the cover of the issue, with its eyes both intense and intimate, challenging as well as inviting us — writer and reader alike — to reassess our engagements with African literature. The collection tells us that African literature is not homogenous. It is a question, an open-ended question — the kind that confounds and defies straightforward answers. And it is a hustle for both writer and reader.

References
Ngugi, Mukoma wa and Murphy, Laura T. (2017). The African Literary Hustle. New Orleans
Review, 43.

Andrade, Susan Z. (2009). The problem of realism and African fiction. Novel, 42(2), 183-189.

Huggan, Graham (2001). The Post-colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York:
Routledge.

Mbembé, J. A., & Nuttall, S. (2004). Writing the world from an African metropolis. Public
culture, 16(3), 347-372.

Nancy Henaku (PhD Candidate /Graduate Teaching Instructor Rhetoric, Theory and Culture, Michigan Technological University)

This book review was published in Africa Book Link, Winter 2017-2018, December 2017.

Stanley Gazemba on mermaids and how to prevent us from turning into robots | An interview by Elke Seghers

I interviewed the Kenyan author Stanley Gazemba on the occasion of his 2002 novel The Stone Hills of Maragoli being republished in the U.S. under the title Forbidden Fruit (June 2017). In April 2017, we had a conversation about his work and the Kenyan literary landscape at the Go Down Arts Centre in Nairobi, where Gazemba is the editor of Ketebul Music.

ES: As I understood it, Forbidden Fruit is going to be published soon.

SG: Yes, although in fact, Forbidden Fruit is not a new book, but was published in 2002 as The Stone Hills of Maragoli. The whole thing was quite an adventurous journey. It was first published by Acacia Publishers, which was at the time newly founded by someone who had left East African Educational Publishers. I had actually first submitted the manuscript to the latter publishing house, but Acacia picked it up. From the very moment it went to print, I started hearing rumours that the judges of the Jomo Kenyatta Prize had taken a liking to it. The book was competing neck to neck with a submission from East African Educational Publishers. However, the judges liked the book and in 2003, The Stone Hills of Maragoli won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature.

ES: What did winning the Jomo Kenyatta Prize mean for you?

SG: It helps your reputation as a writer, but it also creates problems. When I won, I received 50 000 shillings. But everyone had seen my face in the newspaper. So, if you walk into a pub, you have to buy the drinks. Your friends and your neighbours look at you differently, they think you are rich, when in reality, not much has changed.

ES: Do you think there should be more initiatives for Kenyan writers?

SG: I think, first of all, there is a need for sincerity. It feels as though publishers manipulate these prizes. I am told East African Educational Publishers were really rooting for their guy to win. As my publisher was small and was a competitor that had branched off from East African, there were a lot of things playing against me. I am told that publishers also pay bribes to the Kenya Institute for Curriculum Development to have their books accepted for the school system. Of course there’s no evidence to support this. All the same it is a rotten system and it is hard for authors to operate in such an environment. Maybe this is something that happens all over the world in publishing, but I think it is very discouraging. You cannot build a proper literary culture based on people pushing brown envelopes. Writing can only grow when the guys at the top are there because they deserve it. There is also the problem of piracy. There are a lot of pirated books on the market and the fines are relatively low.

ES: What happened after you won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize?

SG: Unfortunately, Acacia Publishers went bankrupt. After some time, Kwani? Trust decided to publish the novel. As Kwani? is an NGO, everybody had a fixed salary rather than a commission. I felt as though they did not make much effort to sell the book and I got frustrated with them. I was doing a lot of marketing myself. Publishing in Kenya is all about getting a book into the school system, so I was going to classes to talk to the students and sell some books. The book became a set text in quite a number of universities, mostly around Nairobi. But when my royalties started coming in, they did not reflect my efforts. That is why I decided I needed to find a serious commercial publisher.

ES: I understand you did not have an easy relationship with your publishers.

SG: I have had the same problems with almost all of my publishers. They are keen on putting books out but do not make much effort afterwards. Furthermore, they do not pay people on time and do not invest in promotion. That is the reason why I reached out to an American publisher. I met my American publisher last year at a festival in Uganda. At the very last day of the event, I decided to show him my book. He read the book on the plane home and he liked it. I immediately got an email to say that he was very interested and wanted to publish it. Things started moving very fast and I think it is now in print.

ES: How do you feel about reaching a new audience?

SG: I meant to break through internationally this year. Right now as we speak, I was supposed to be in Venice to launch a collection of short stories called Dog Meat Samosa. There had been plans for activities in the media over there. Unfortunately, I could not get the visa to go to Italy. This was not the first time I was invited to go to Venice, I was also invited in 2013 but had similar visa problems. The book has been published, but I do not know if it is going to sell well without me being there.

ES: What kind of audience do you target?

SG: I think my prime target is the average person, although I know that you cannot survive without elitist readers, because those are the people with the money; the average reader would most likely access your book from a public library. But that tiny middle class audience is not enough to make something a commercial success either. The reality on the ground is that you cannot survive in Kenya unless you are part of the school curriculum. Ultimately, I want to be successful internationally. I am sure that there is no writer who just wants to be read by his village.

ES: How does that affect your choice of language? You write in English, but use a lot of Luhya words in The Stone Hills of Maragoli. Do you think the only way to be read is to write in English?

SG: I think that is a tricky question. Language is something political. In Kenya, we have no choice but to write in English. English has become a global language and if you really want to be read by a cross-section of readers around the world, you cannot avoid English. But having said that, I find that, although English is widely used in Kenya, there are certain things that we can only communicate amongst ourselves, be it in Kiswahili or Luhya or Lulogooli. I will express the things that I feel deep inside in Lulogooli. The question is how to express oneself in that deep way to someone who does not understand Lulogooli or Kiswahili. Achebe was writing in English but he had his own version, a certain English that can be understood by a British reader, but that is clearly not British English. The challenge on the African writer is to use the tools available to him, but in a way that certain things are twisted to make it convey what he wants to say. If I would use phrases or expressions that I have read in a book by George Eliot, I think I would come across as a fake. The only solution is to use that language but use it in such a way that it is Africanized, bent to suit one’s own. That is why I said language is something political.

ES: Let’s talk a bit about the book itself. I noticed The Stone Hills of Maragoli focuses on life in the countryside and the perspective of the labourers.

SG: I set The Stone Hills of Maragoli in a fictitious village modelled on the village in which I grew up in Western Kenya. It was a deliberate decision. Although I now live in Nairobi, I chose to set my book in the village because that is the only place where you can have a taste of authentic Kenyan everyday life as a visitor to the country. It is very important to me to tell the Kenyan story from the point-of-view of an ordinary Kenyan who walks the dusty streets of the small back-wood towns. It is the reason I choose to root those stories I set in Nairobi deep in the ghettos of the city. One such book is a collection of short stories about Nairobi called Nairobi Echoes. I like to think that the soul of any city is buried in those ghetto places. They are rarely highlighted, but that is where the majority of people live. I am also deeply attached to labourers because I believe they are the engine of any economy- the guys who roll up their sleeves and put the greasy wrenches to the machine’s nuts and bolts, crawling into the belly of the machine to fix what is bothering it. The farmhands who tend to the coffee and the cows are the people who really drive an economy. And they are very open folks too. In middle class Nairobi, for instance, there is a façade; people try to put up a front. They eat their food with knives and forks like white people, whereas if you go to these other places, people wash their hands and eat in the traditional way. It is more interesting for me to observe and write about these ordinary people who are more accessible.

ES: So you want to show life as it is in your writing?

SG: Yes, I want to capture it in its basic form. I came to find that people in the village are much more real, just like in the ghettos. In the kind of stories I write, I create characters from the people I interact with. As a writer, I am always keen to know about someone’s fears, joys and aspirations, about what makes them who they are.

ES: I was also interested in the depiction of the seductive Madam Tabitha. She is described as a creature half-woman and half-fish. Where does this image come from?

SG: The image of a mermaid has always been the centre stage of the discourse of the village and by extension the ghetto. There are always stories of farmers who make money and want to make up for lost time after the harvest season. The farmer moves to the market centre or the local town and books himself into a hotel with a commercial sex worker. The story always ends with the poor farmer losing all of his money to the lady, who oftentimes comes from Nairobi, or, even worse, Mombasa, and is much more wily and street-smart. This narrative of people losing their sanity and wealth to a flashy and attractive lady who drives them mad has never changed. And that agrees with the image of the mermaid who is very beautiful but not quite human. I think Madam Tabitha, as a character, feeds off of all of those stories.

ES: Are there any writers that influenced you?

SG: Chinua Achebe, who I studied in High school, although the experience was a little unpleasant as the system made you cram passages from his books instead of reading for pleasure. The early Ngugi wa Thiong’o used to write very well until Marxism went into his head. I enjoy Meja Mwangi. I also like John Steinbeck’s style although I am told he is an old-fashioned American writer. Ken Follet is very good at creating characters. When it comes to contemporary African writers, there is Ben Okri, Chimamanda Adichie and Nadifa Mohamed, to mention but a few.

ES: As a final question, why do you think literature is important?

SG: I think we cannot do without writers. I do not think there is any society that has developed scientifically without that growth being fuelled by the arts. I think the arts give direction to the other spheres. On that note, I believe the arts are not just, as they are derogatively called in universities, humanities. They are much more. You cannot be a good creator if you do not understand other spheres of life. You need to be an informed person in order to write. Most importantly, if it were not for the arts, we would become robots. What would people look like without culture; without good books, music and theatre? I also believe it is very easy to strike up a conversation with a stranger, for example from a foreign country, if both of you have read such or such a writer or if both of you are interested in the same musical instrument. Those are some of the things that make me believe that the arts are important. Even in politics it is usually a musician who is hyping up the crowd before the politician mounts the stage.

Stanley Gazemba, Forbidden Fruit (Astoria, NY: The Mantle 2017). ISBN 978-0-9986423-0-7. Available from The Mantle; 286 pages

This interview was published in: Africa Book Link, Fall 2017: Eastern Africa

Writing beyond borders: Kwani Trust as an ambitious African LINGO | An article by Ewout Decoorne

Hidden behind a leafy courtyard off Nairobi’s Riverside Drive, Kwani Trust houses one of Kenya’s (and perhaps Africa’s) most fascinating literary contributions of the last decades. The small, cosy shop can hardly reveal the magnitude of this movement, which since its inception in 2003 has adopted an increasingly influential voice within Africa’s intellectual and cultural arena. Kwani Trust has developed into a literary hub that assembles an ever expanding community of writers, poets, journalists, academics, photographers etc., who showcase a great variety of work in an impressive range of literary products and happenings. Apart from its role as a publishing house, Kwani Trust provides training opportunities for upcoming talent, organises literary festivals (the last edition of Kwani LitFest dates from 2015, the next one is to be expected in 2018), holds numerous projects dedicated to the promotion of contemporary literature, and, perhaps most importantly, comments upon current social, political and cultural affairs through its magazine Kwani?. As a compilation of prose fiction, poetry, literary experiments, journalism, interviews, articles, and photography, this journal offers a selection of today’s best and brightest literary talents in Kenya, the rest of the continent, and beyond. In this contribution, I will consider the role that Kwani assumes today within Kenya’s literary field through the most recent issue of its magazine: Kwani? 08, and by referring to the ground-breaking study by Doreen Strauhs on Kwani Trust and similar initiatives past and present.

Literary organisations in Africa that situate themselves outside the regular commercial publishing circuit and, at the same time, do not operate within or thanks to state-funded (academic) institutions are neither extraordinary nor new. In her book African Literary NGOs: Power, Politics, and Participation, Doreen Strauhs has studied Kwani Trust together with the Ugandan organisation FEMRITE as two examples of African LINGOs. LINGO, as Strauhs has coined the term, stands for literary non-governmental organisation. Strauhs defines this as “[f]irst and foremost, […] a non-governmental organisation with a focus on the production and promotion of literary talent, events, and publications that is situated in the nonprofit sector.”[1] Naming various examples from Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Nigeria and Ghana, Strauhs indicates that LINGOs exist throughout the continent.[2] Also within Kenya several other initiatives that dedicate themselves to the written word situate themselves in this non-profit sociocultural sphere. Jalada, Twaweza Communications, Storymoja… they all operate independently from governmental guidelines or strictly commercial agendas. Moreover, these various initiatives are embedded within a tradition that stretches back for over more than half a century.

Consequently, Strauhs suggests that LINGOs such as Kwani Trust and FEMRITE are not as new or revolutionary as they like to stage themselves. According to Strauhs, the first LINGOs surfaced at the beginning of the 1960s, elaborating on and responding to the literary networks that were rooted in colonial cultural and academic infrastructures. As such, LINGOs have been driven from their very first beginnings “by networks of people spanning across and beyond transnational borders, triggering contacts and synergies between writers as well as critics from around the world.”[3] Chemchemi Creative Centre, established in 1963 in Nairobi and directed by the South African writer Es’kia Mphahlele was directly influenced by Ibadan’s Mbari Club, and, as such, prefigured the cosmopolitan and hybrid nature of today’s Kwani Trust. The Kwani? magazine, in its turn, is a direct heir to the late Transition magazine, a literary journal that in the sixties and seventies echoed the equally legendary Black Orpheus magazine. From the very beginning, literary associations looked beyond the borders of the nation and adopted transnational perspectives on literary creativity in the continent and the diaspora. After two difficult decades at the end of the 20th century due to political, economic and social upheavals, the LINGO and its editorial appendages re-entered Africa’s literary stage. Kwani? 01 appeared in 2003, its first editor being Binyavanga Wainaina, who had been awarded with the Caine Prize for African Writing the year before. An acclaimed author arriving from South Africa, establishing an ambitious literary project in Nairobi: Es’kia Mphahlele’s course seemed to be repeated.

Does this suggest that Kwani Trust will face the same challenges as Chemchemi Creative Centre, its defunct predecessor? Strauhs considers the history of LINGOs in the 1960s and 70s in order to indicate some of the main issues that threaten today’s organisations survival in volatile African book markets. The author identifies two conditions which can nurture or harm the institutionalisation of the LINGO: the one is socio-political, the other sociocultural. A stable social and political climate that allows limited forms of free speech in a fairly democratic environment is necessary for LINGOs to function, although FEMRITE demonstrates in Uganda that organisations can be surprisingly flexible to adapt to unfavourable political conditions. Visibility and funding opportunities open up along with the international recognition that is awarded to the LINGO and the writers involved. Here, sociocultural factors come into play: literary networks and prizes heighten the author’s and publisher’s prestige. However, (foreign) funding and (international) recognition are double-edged swords: they can stifle creativity as much as they can boost it. Given these multiple challenges, Strauhs identifies several threats and weaknesses that limit the influence and sustainability of African LINGOs. Non-African funding structures that limit the organisation’s independence, the fragile right of free speech and the infrastructural limitations of publishing distribution networks are major threats. Possible weaknesses are a too outspoken political commitment that might trigger repressive measures from political regimes and a lack of resources to implement crisis management when necessary.[4] Nevertheless, the Concerned Kenyan Writers’ response to the crisis following the electoral tragedy of 2007 has proven that literature can become a tough opponent to political authority and socio-economic challenges. For its survival, the LINGO faces obstacles that are more persistent and profound. Strauhs concludes that “the dependency on funding in the light of limited local markets for creative writing and the lack of government support probably remains the most prominent challenge to the LINGOs sustainability.” [5] For the time being, however, Kwani Trust seems to flourish, unhampered by the apparent curtailing of free speech and artistic freedom in many parts of the world. It’s magazine, again, provides convincing evidence.

With several hundreds of pages and a remarkably wide thematic and stylistic range, Kwani? journal is undoubtedly the organisation’s flagship publication. In a way, it serves as a sample of what the organisation stands for, and how it opens up an intellectual space for social, political and cultural debate. Every issue has its principal theme. The most recent one, Kwani? 08, appeared in 2015 and takes the 2013 general elections as starting point. Today, as the consequences of the 2017 general elections are still taking shape, the journal seems more relevant than ever. Even though the last issue appeared two years ago, it still provides profound insights into Kenya’s political landscape, and the ways in which Kenyans cope with the country’s principal challenges. Besides, little has changed since the previous elections anyway. The main competitors in 2017 are the same as back then. The socio-political context in which the elections have taken place are strikingly familiar as well: fear of a repetition of the 2007 post-election violence, the public opinion’s critique on the tendency in Kenyan politics to mobilise ethnic-based alliances, and, ultimately, the general distrust in the election’s procedures.

Given its length and scope, tackling every contribution to Kwani? 08 is an impossible task. Instead, I would like to single out some interesting features. First of all, there is the immense variety in genres, voices and modes of narration. The extensive table of contents announces following sections: short takes, long takes, elegy and verse, map and journey, revelation and conversation, spectacle and invention, electoral meanderings, scenarios, the other, and photo essays. This diversity in narrative media reflects the multitude of voices and perspectives the issue offers. This edition’s unifying theme, the 2013 elections, are examined through a prism of testimonies, pamphlets, analyses, reports, poems, interviews, text messages, plays and photographs. The magazine shows how literature can become a complex play that works in several directions. Strauhs, who draws theoretically from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach towards literature, appreciates the LINGO’s configuration strikingly as follows: “[T]he bottom-up promotion of information is exactly what again shows the LINGO’s ambivalent role as both producers of literature as well as agents participating in the process of public opinion making.” [6] In his editorial, Billy Kahora criticises the “Peace Industry” that followed the post-election tragedy in 2007. The peace campaign was so deafening it led to the critique “that [it] forced the making of certain choices and curbed real scrutiny into things.” [7] The eighth Kwani? issue therefore looks behind smoke-screens set up by political parties, the official authorities, and the media.

In the first contribution, entitled “Moving on to what?”, Patrick Gathara compares concerned Kenyans to the wife of Lot, who, against premonitions, turned around to face the destruction of her native Sodom and got instantly transformed into a pillar of salt. Gathara likens the biblical flight from Sodom to the general exodus in 2013 in Kenya from “the flames of five years before that and the iniquity of the last 50 years”. [8] Lot’s wife looked back out of rage, which is exactly the same reason why some Kenyans do look back in 2013. Most of them, however, did not look back. They followed authority’s almost Biblical guidelines instead. Gathara is “outraged at the lack of outrage”. [9] In 2013, accepting the status-quo was considered as the only alternative to anarchy. Gathara laments how “Kenya has become a country of official truth with very few daring to challenge the official narratives.” [10] In an exemplary contribution that fuses opinion making and literary prose, the author foreshadows the issue’s main conceptions. The magazine and its contributors do look back, even if this means taking the risk of provoking divine powers. Kwani Trust offers a space for critical judgement, and, as such, fills the moral gap that other media leave open.

The magazine defies dominant narratives by opening up spaces where as many voices as possible can be heard. The section “SMS Politikal” consists of text messages sent during the election week, [11] Tom Maliti’s interview with Philip Ochieng includes questions from an audience,[12] Ngala Chome introduces excerpts from a Pwani elections observer’s diary, [13] and Usama Goldsmith’s extensive oral history of the Mombasa Republican Council questions identity, assumptions about Kenyan nationhood and official narratives through an elaborate selection of testimonies, documents, news items etc.[14] Some contributors, such as the poet Kate Hampton, invite the reader to react via Twitter, thus including social media in a literary setting.[15] The magazine raises a platform where personal, official, academic and fictional narrations by authors, readers and other instances get transmitted. As a result, the election theme expands to more universal subjects such as love and identity (see for instance Abdul Adan’s story “The Somalification of James Karangi” on forbidden love in a tribal political configuration),[16] or to other places in Africa and the diaspora. Examples include “Skin Parliament” by Chike Pilgrim, a writer from Trinidad and Tobago,[17] Dele Meiji’s poem “Cueta” referring to the refugee crisis on the Mediterranean,[18] and Jennifer Huxta’s report on the first free elections in Tunisia.[19]

Kwani Trust’s authors evidently write beyond borders. First of all, they transcend Kenya as a nation. Although the LINGO’s signature remains undeniably Kenyan, both its literary input and its distribution network are transnational. Secondly, the writers deliberately refrain from traditional stylistic, thematic or linguistic categorisations. Fact or fiction, written or oral, print or digital, text or image, English or Swahili; Kwani Trust rejects easy qualifications. African literatures in general tend to defy rigid and stubborn conceptualisations of what literature ought to be, and Kwani Trust skilfully reminds us of this. In doing so, the LINGO points perhaps in the direction in which literature’s function lies in our times and the next. That is: in being critical, daring and diverse. With its stylistic, thematic and social inclusiveness on the one hand, and its self-reflexive institutional goals on the other, Africa’s LINGOs in general – and Kwani Trust in particular – serve as noteworthy examples of literature’s ongoing relevance. In times of fact-opinion blending and diminishing space for nuance and diverging perspectives, magazines such as Kwani? show that the transfer of ideas can be ingenious and dynamic, which is reflected in the journal’s variety in narrative modes and genres. When old menaces such as social polarisation, contestation of freedom of speech and nationalistic fervour regain influence, Kwani Trust proves that literature, as a space for (transnational) dialogue and exchange, is resilient and powerful.

Ewout Decoorne

Kahora, Billy (ed.), Kwani? 08, Nairobi: Kwani Trust, 2015.
Strauhs, Doreen, African Literary NGOs: Power, Politics, and Participation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

[1] D. Strauhs, African Literary NGOs : Power, Politics, and Participation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 22.
[2] Ibid. p. 31.
[3] Ibid. p. 42.
[4] Ibid. p. 76.
[5] Ibid. p. 90.
[6] Ibid. p. 167.
[7] B. Kahora, “Editorial” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, Nairobi: Kwani Trust, 2013, p. 8.
[8] P. Gathara, “Moving On To What?” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 14.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., p. 19.
[11] “SMS Politikal” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 38.
[12] T. Maliti, “An Interview With Philip Ochieng” in B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 40.
[13] Chome N., “Diary of a Pwani Elections Observer” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 118.
[14] U. Goldsmith, “An Oral History of the MRC”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 44.
[15] K. Hampton, “Seeds of Democracy”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 413.
[16] A. Adan, “The Somalification of James Karangi” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 352.
[17] C. Pilgrim, “Skin Parliament”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 540.
[18] D. Meiji, “Ceuta”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 560.
[19] J. Huxta, “On Tunisian Elections”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 586.

This article was published in: Africa Book Link, Fall 2017: Eastern Africa