When Darkness Looms, Relatively

Mama says she was lost,
says she asked directions from my father
and doesn’t know how they ended up in bed,
[…]
When I look in the mirror
sometimes I think I can see his face
imposed over mine,
although it’s only an outline really
with a bare fact, a detail
my mother doled out grudgingly.
I truly only see what he left
going faster than any E=mc2 formula
could take him,
escaping fatherhood like any other man
who hadn’t planned on staying long,
my otosan, traveling light,
traveling at the velocity of darkness.
-“Relativity” (2003), From Ai's Dread

I do not remember when I first came across poetry by Ai, but I know that it was summertime and I was attending college in Michigan. I had already stumbled, deeply, upon the work of Anne Sexton, then Sylvia Plath, and finally, Ai. In that all-things-unhinged order--and I could not turn away. Against the conservative calm of my mid-western campus, I took in the unfettered consciousness of the radical poet Ai. She is at once dark, and darker. Hers is a reality soaked in starkness, with little emotion, if any at all. There is never enough light in her poetry; often, the darkness is already too much, overpowering what even then, from my early years, had formed as the always-possible "cloud-free" ideal, which would slowly become eroded by living more. Her world still fascinates me to this day--as it may you.

Walking Naked

At the press, I have been head-deep in the final details of wrapping up a prodigious poetry anthology called Temba Tupu (Walking Naked): Africana Women's Poetic Self-Portrait. This invariably means that I am combing every page of the latest proof to make sure all is in good order--and since this is poetry, it is at once easier to do so and more difficult as well. Minor textual anomalities in poetry books occur often and if you are used to looking at prose, as I am, then reviewing an anthology of poetry by some of the world's foremost women poets (like Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Rita Dove) presents a few challenges. For one, there is more creative energy on the formatted page. Experimentation is rife.And it remains tempting to read some of the poems over and over again. Yes, they are that good. That brave.

Apropos of Nothing (1)

Once in a while, without warning or reason, I will forgo the quote and brief commentary on books and try my hand at some "regular" blog writing, most likely on a familiar subject matter. It may be, for instance, on the minutia of a book project I am working on, or simply, a day in the life of a book editor at an African publishing house. Either way, it will serve to break the stream of quotes-plus-commentaries and add another layer of material-type to the blog.

Just Like It Had Been Then

For all that it mattered, the depression of the early thirties did not seem on the surface to add an ounce of pressure more to the poverty of the Black man.

We still had one tarred street for the police to patrol and for the white superintendent of the location to drive his sleek shining car along. There were still a few electric lights dotted about street corners and none in the houses; the smell from the sewerage centre in the plantation below us still came in a suffocating wave. Of course fewer of us went to the Dougall Hall bioscope because the market and the golf links were scantier and the white people didn't want to pay as much as they used to. They brought the price down from nine pence to six pence for carrying vegetables five miles to Sunnyside suburb. Children still squatted in the street to relieve themselves, chickens still came to peck at the stools with relish.

There was much less to eat at home, and boys and girls of our age group raided Indian hawkers' backyards for discarded fruits, bread and vegetables in garbage bins. But then we had always done that after school. We planned our strategy of entering through the back gate. Some of the hawkers were vicious with the sjambok, especially Cassim Hassim. Some of the women connived at our acts; others poured rice crust and water on us from the balconies, just to have a laugh. Often we looked up to the balconies and laughed with them while we shook down rice grains from out of our shirts. We returned to rummage again. Little Links and Danie, the noisiest boy down Second Avenue whom we could seldom trust to 'pull off a job' with a sense of duty becoming a Fox, raided one yard....

--From Down Second Avenue, by EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE

It has been a good ten or so years since I read Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue, an autobiography, often narrated in wry tone, about the eventful life of a poor boy growing up in a South African township. Despite the ever-present and ominous "shadow" of apartheid and its woeful effects on the lives of the black and colored people of South Africa, the reading usually feels breezy, and you are humored again and again. In this book, despair and humor collide, resulting in an excellent read for the heart--and, if you believe in its existence, the soul.

[Photo Source: UN]

(In)visible Encounters

Even now, when the age of global interconnectedness has taught us to look beyond the obvious, many express surprise at the very notion of historical links between Russia and Africa. But such links did indeed exist and, on occasion, even proliferated. As demonstrated by a number of contributors to this volume, the Russian presence in Africa can be traced more than three hundred years, when several Russian and Russified adventurers found their way to South Africa. Peter the Great dreamed of an expedition to the “glorious island of Madagaskar,” and only an unfortunate convergence of circumstances prevented the eccentric tsar from realizing his ambitious plan. At the time of the late-nineteenth century European scramble for Africa, Russians enjoyed visibility and royal patronage at the court of the Orthodox Ethiopian emperor Menelik II. Russian advisors and Red Cross volunteers rendered critical military and medical assistance to Addis Ababa during its successful campaign against the Italians in 1896....


--From Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters, edited by Maxim Matusevich, quoted above

It was through birth that I knew there had been Africans in Russia (and vice versa), but few history books I read even mentioned such encounters. And when I picked up Matusevich's unprecedented volume on the historical links between Africa and Russia, I sighed.

A sigh of relief, perhaps?

More likely: A long overlooked "floodgate of history" had just been swung open before me--and I was overwhelmed.



[Portrait of Puskhin, a Russian poet who is believed to have had Abyssinian roots]

She's Come Undone, Almost

The elegant pathways of private thought stretched ahead of her, shimmering with light and undisturbed by the clamour of horrors. She turned and picked up a book from a table beside her bed. It had waited a whole year to be read: The Gift of the Cow, by Permchand. It was a UNESCO publication of the classic Hindi novel which exalted the poor. In their introduction to the novel they wrote that it opposed the basic trend of Indian literature, which seemed to be a literature intended only to 'entertain and to satisfy our lust for the amazing...' a literature of magic, of ghosts, of the adventures of high-born heroes and heroines.

It was quite the opposite in Africa. There was no direct push against those rigid, false social systems of class and caste. She had fallen from the very beginning into the warm embrace of the brotherhood of man, because when a people wanted everyone to be ordinary it was just another way of saying man loved man. As she fell asleep, she placed one soft hand over her hand. It was a gesture of belonging.

--From the ending of A Question of Power, by Bessie Head

I finished reading Bessie Head's A Question of Power one very late night during the summer of 2006, and it had, despite its almost obsessive return to the subconsicous state of its main character, Elizabeth, rather moved me in an unusual way. Bessie Head is one of those complex and bold South African writers whose fiction gets you as close to a deeply troubled place as is possible. There is a fair amount of the absurd and frankly, the mad, in her often curiously brilliant prose.


[Painting by Pegi Smith]

How Continental Ideas Are Conceived

It is easy, too easy, to exploit the exotic representations and categories of Africa as illustrated in, say, English and French literature, and to marginalize Africa in the field of what Bernard Mouralis has called "Contreliteratures." There is, as we know, a tradition which, for centuries, has conveyed this exotic idea of Africa. Instead of grounding this project from within this controversial and controverted literary tradition, I prefer to understand the concept and history of this literature in such a way that I can transcend the continuity and pervasiveness of an exoticist imagination, and at the same time, account for its conception.

--V.Y. Mudimbe, in The Idea of Africa

You have been warned: The Idea of Africa is utterly philosophical at its printed core, given some of its serious and alarming preoccupations.

Colonial Subversions

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive. --Lionel Thrilling

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe's blazing Things Fall Apart. The book was published approximately two years before Nigeria gained its independence from the British in 1960. This to say, without gripe: it is as old as Nigeria has been a postcolonial country that has remained somewhat "insubvertible" in a historical sense.

Critical Angles

Africa, more than most, has been peculiarly prone to the literary as to the political rezoning process, though its "intrinsically post-modernist" qualities have understandably been exploited in colonial and expatriate writing about Africa rather than in African writing itself. --Derek Wright

While I question the scholar's use of the word "understandably" in this quote, I also, in truth, rather think that the quote itself is a very good one. And it is also one that captures at least one of the many angles from which I shall critically engage selected books on Africa. To wit, Afroliterati plans to do its own "rezoning."