Of Hoffman, Othello, and Obama

"To my mind, Iago actually loves Othello. And it's hard not to think of Obama when you read 'Othello' now." -- Philip Seymour Hoffman in Hirschberg's New York Times Magazine article.

MOOLAADE

About a year and a half ago, while living in sleepy Hightstown, NJ, I was writing film reviews for a soon-to-be-launched website on new African media. The website never materialized, but I received four films in total, each of which I watched and then wrote about in 500-word reviews. Ousmane Sembene's Moolaade was by far the most memorable one for me, especially because the great filmmaker had died early that year in 2007. Here is the long-languishing review:

Powerful and vibrant, Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé brings unwavering focus to female circumcision, one of the many plights of women in Africa. Filmed in Senegal, Moolaadé reveals the harsh realties of familial conflict, as village elders are challenged repeatedly, a young man refuses to wed the eleven-year-old bride picked for him, girls drown themselves in protest, and the defiant Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly) takes a public flogging for her stand against female circumcision. In his final, beautifully filmed masterpiece, Sembene does not fail us as usual, offering steady but moving images of daily life and ritual in a Senegalese village, and wide-ranging emotions portrayed by an impressive cast of African actors; and finally, a sobering but hopeful glimpse at the challenges ahead for African women everywhere. Moolaadé is not for the faint of heart, yet it unfolds brilliantly, responding with a clear, defiant answer to those who continue to insist on female circumcision in Africa.

Graphically Speaking

There are probably just a few times in one's life when blatant self-promotion is actually excusable -- and this tool we call the internet comes in very handy at those exhilirating moments. I'm posting the introductory part of my interview with Ivorian writer Marguerite Abouet which has recently been published in the beautifully illustrated graphic novel,Aya of Yop City. The interview itself first appeared on Wild River Review and was subsequently picked up by Canadian publisher Drawn + Quarterly for reprint in the second edition of Abouet's first work, Aya. I've already linked to it under "Some Writings" on this blog. For more, cast your eyes toward the top right corner of this virtual page.And herewith the intro to the interview:Too often, it is easier than we realize to forget the intimate details of a childhood, especially one lived thousands of miles away in a different country. As the years pass by, distance and time make fading memories more difficult to recall. Slowly, a new — and hopefully better — life takes over our days, making it even harder to remember little details. 
 
Like Marguerite Abouet, I left West Africa at an early age. And like her, I too, long to remember and write about what it was like then, for in the back of my mind West Africa is always present. It comes as no surprise to me that Abouet’s only comic book in English, Aya, is her very powerful visual and literary expression of this longing, this deep need to hold onto childhood memories filled with “unbelievable” stories about neighbors, families, friends — all in an Ivory Coast that had recently gained independence from France and was enjoying a new middle class society. 

Set in a bustling city in Ivory Coast, Aya is a witty, urban story. One, Abouet says, could have taken place anywhere in the world. She is right, in theory, for there is a universalizing force that seems to drive Marguerite Abouet, the writer. 

So come along and let her show you why, and literally through pictures, how, just as they might do in Europe or America, young girls sneak out to meet guys at night — or go to a party and flirt with the most attractive guy there. This is no different worldwide, really. 

And yet,Aya is also an urban story that takes place, specifically, in Ivory Coast — a country which now experiences what many other African countries have faced after decades of colonial rule: political corruption, disease, civil strife, and staggering poverty. 

Days after I finished this interview with Abouet, I realized that in it I had brought attention to the current harsh realities for Africans in Ivory Coast, and for those who migrated to Europe. Perhaps, as someone who was raised in Africa, I felt I had to... and it was the responsible thing to do. Perhaps it may always remain so; I don’t know. Thankfully, Abouet was generous and warm in her response to my questions, always unapologetically reaching for honesty in her own reflections. 

At a panel discussion at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, Abouet spoke of how she often feels a certain responsibility as an African writer because she wrote the book Aya. It was unclear to me whether this feeling of responsibility, like mine, had everything to do with addressing the current crisis in many parts of Africa. But I secretly wished it didn’t, and that part of it also meant continuously drawing attention to the universal and relatable aspects of Africa, which Abouet has indeed successfully done in her engaging work, Aya — and in her interview with me.

Worl' Do For Fraid

Over the past few months, I have had the fortune of working closely with the brilliant Sierra Leonean playwright, Nabie Yayah Swaray, on his play, The Rape of Fatimah, which was published in the 80s as Worl' Do For Fraid. It isn't often that the press publishes plays because they are rather hard to market unless performance is somewhat guaranteed. The last play I worked on, as editor, was by Rashidah Ismail back in 2004, I believe, and it was called The Ricekeepers.  As I contemplate both plays, I must say that they are different in several ways. Yet they both deftly explore aspects of the sad demise of Africa's societal cohesion with some powerful and accessible metaphors. If you are inclined, do pick up a copy of one of the plays, if only to engage, via a different literary form, the minutia of the "African condition" as we know it even today--and as it is legitimately explored through the past in these two plays.

*Of course, all books that I have worked on can be purchased through Africa World Press at www.africaworldpressbooks.com. 

Floral Consumption

If I just wrote or read more, I'd post frequently. I was away again and in northern California for six days. With my new LG shine, I took photographs (this is one of them) which may reveal an untapped and consumptive disposition toward the Visual.

Of Black, White, and Red

Over time, this blog has become more of a personal project, and this is mainly because I have had little time to read books or on books lately.  Last weekend, however, en route to New York City, I began reading Lauretta Ngcobo's and they didn't die, which I will review briefly for the blog. So far, it intrigues with its authorial directness (occasionally much harsher than I am used to in prose) and its rather powerful storyline which is set in the barren Sabelweni valley in South Africa.

Meanwhile, as the summer days in Princeton come and go with surefire rapidity, I have taken to writing again, and below is an excerpt from a lengthy piece I am working on called "Half-Caste." It is my hope that it will become a mighty book project one day. And I must say this: It cometh to fruition quite slowly, as have many of my curiosities and more realistic dreams.

---

At about the age of nineteen, a year after I arrived for college in the United States, I stopped thinking of myself as “half-caste.” The word, so loaded in its literal meaning and with its colonial roots, was used with frequency and ease to refer to those of us who had European mothers and African fathers in Nigeria.

For a long time—from early childhood to late teens—I accepted the word, not giving it much thought since it wasn’t necessarily used in a negative way. In fact, if you were “half-caste,” you were different in a way that was usually considered interesting and more attractive. The “half-caste” women, for instance, were often sought after and desired by Nigerians for love affairs; the men deemed good-looking. Or so I observed, growing up in Plateau State, Nigeria, where more than a handful of mixed-race families lived.

In the first decades following Nigeria’s independence from the British in 1960, many Nigerian men received scholarships to study in Europe and the former Soviet Union. They left for their studies—and some of them returned, after many years, with foreign wives. My father was one of these men who came home with a European wife. While studying veterinary medicine in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, he met my mother and married her in a heady time of some discrimination and racial prejudice against black students in the Soviet Union.

At that time, the generalized reactions to the African male in the Soviet union involved a few strongly-held beliefs, most of them informed, arguably, by circulating racist imagery not only in the visual form (picture books) but also in the literary one as well (poetry, nursery rhymes, etc). And there was also the ideologically-driven desire to communize the African, which in and of itself masked an impulse that was not only patronizing but perhaps in some ways very misplaced given that little was known about Africa in the Soviet Union. In fact, at that time, most Russians had been cocooned in their comradeship; very few had traveled to Africa and had gleaned most of their knowledge from biased televised programs, books, stories, and songs. It was said that my grandmother had never laid eyes on a black person before she met my father—and she was not amused by my mother’s decision to marry my father. She is noticeably absent in all photos taken at the wedding ceremony in Kiev.

Yet deeply in love, my parents embraced their stark differences—and their unborn child, my sister, and in the precise moment that my mother fell in love with my father, I believe, her fate was sealed. In 1972, my sister was born into the convoluted world of angst and tears over my mother’s decision to leave Ukraine, indefinitely, for Africa. And so it was that my mother, father, and sister came to live in Vom, once an idyllic colonial enclave, in the northern region of Nigeria. And so it was too that, after I was born in the nearby city of Jos and then raised in Vom, I would come to question the divisive roots of the word, “half-caste.”

More to come...
 

In the Collective We Trust

In the past few weeks, I finished a new piece for Wild River Review on an Umberto Eco lecture I attended in New York City (to be published in their June 4th issue); I wrapped up the Haiti gig; I also took some time to look for a novel by a contemporary African writer that I could possibly review for a prestigious literary journal. The search for the novel proved tedious, especially since requirements were quite stringent -- not by a mainstream publisher, not overly reviewed in the American press, and also published within the past year or forthcoming in 2009. There were times I felt hopeless, in a sense, and angry because I am fully aware of the literary talent coming out of Africa. I concluded that you have to be an insider to know where to go. Otherwise, you may very well find yourself unable to locate RECENT fiction by important African novelists.  But fret not. African Books Collective (www.africanbookscollective.com) is a resourceful conduit --  it showcases worthy titles that are being published by a handful of publishers in Africa and markets them to a much wider readership. You can, as it turns out, get most of these titles on Amazon or through a national distributor.

Brava to collective action.

Keeping the Embers Alive

About a month ago, Africa World Press published a book on musicians from Zimbabwe -- a collection of raw interviews with some of the best of the best from Zimbabwe.   

In addition, the black and white photos by Kristin Capp not only capture the musicians in true physical form, but they are also quite beautiful.

In a time when almost all incoming news on Zimbabwe tries one's human capacity for hope, Keeping the Embers Alive sheds some much-needed light on what some of us can still absolutely love about the country--and Africa--itself.

See www.africaworldpressbooks.com for more details on the book.

[Cover by Sam Saverance; photos on cover by Kristin Capp]

Heidi Holland's Dinner with Mugabe

Increasingly, I enjoy the critical and timely reviews of Percy Zvomuya in South Africa's Mail & Guardian. Thus, for this May 1 post, I select a few choice paragraphs from his March 2008 article on Holland's latest book:

Dinner with Mugabe (Penguin South Africa) is in equal measures touching and enthralling, damning and well-researched, reflective and pacily written. It's a psychological biography of the hero of the 1970s independence war against Ian Smith's government.

And then this, with revealing observation:

The difficulty with this kind of book is obvious: how do you get people to talk about the subject as honestly and truthfully as possibly -- and to a white woman? For, after all, even Mugabe's grip on power grows more tenuous while he still retains that power. I found, for instance, the account by Patricia Bekele, Sally Mugabe's niece, to be fluffy and idealistic. She obviously can't say anything really damning, even though Sally's last days were not particularly rosy especially when Grace Mugabe, then part of Mugabe's secretarial pool, became his mistress. The same criticism could be valid in the parts Holland interviews Donato.

The picture of the early Mugabe is that of a loner, an unambitious person, who is thrust into the leadership of a violent organisation, very much against his will. Tekere says he found Mugabe exasperating, indeed, infuriating whenever Mugabe blocked moves to purge leadership -- even in cases in which Mugabe stood to benefit. "At no stage do you find him doing anything to promote himself to a position of leadership. It's very strange. Even in Mozambique and at Lancaster House he seemed to be almost unambitious."

How little one knows or assumes...sometimes.

Read more at: www.mg.co.za

Of Dares and Progress: A Conversation with Chinua Achebe

While listening to the public conversation between writer Chinua Achebe and scholar Anthony Appiah in Princeton on Wednesday, March 26, 2008, I made a sweeping observation, if you might call it so, about the reason Achebe penned his novel, Things Fall Apart. It had come to be, I believe, mainly because of several "dares," all of them as valid as they were unusual for their time in 1958 when the book was first published.

In response to a slew of books by non-Africans that portrayed Africa in an inherently exotic light, Things Fall Apart was Achebe's way of "daring anyone who reads about the habits and culture of Igbo people [in the novel, that is] to say, 'these people are not human.'" If one were to read Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for instance, this very dare, put forth this way, makes a lot of sense. An African story, as Achebe knew it, could be told from a perspective that was essentially underutilized at that time -- a non-European/colonial one, with the equally complex humanity of the African firmly intact.

Additionally, there is the issue of language for Achebe. While literature about Africa may have portrayed Africans living in a language vacuum of sorts -- that is, one consisting of sounds, not actual words -- then Achebe's inclusion of the Igbo language in his primarily English-language novel is yet another dare. Surely, he seems to be saying, we do have our own language even though you may not think too much of it or conclude that is has too many dialects and wish to remove some of them.

And then, of course, there is the greatest dare of them all: “the existence of our own story.” As Achebe noted during the event that night, all the stories he had read about him and his people at that time were unacceptable. He wondered, in desperation, why "our story was not read." He then set out to do precisely this, producing a literary masterpiece and becoming what Simon Gikandi aptly called that night, "a cultural institution."

As it were, it is almost impossible to be at an event on Nigerian literature and not discuss Nigeria itself, which according to Achebe, who lived in the country during the bloody civil war and pre-independence period, is "a catastrophic failure" and a disappointment. This is true, no doubt. But what now? One Nigerian story has been told with tremendous skill and success by Achebe, who has, as Gikandi noted, become the conscience of Africa and its talented writers, some of them up and coming.

Scoffing at what he believed was an unfair treatment of his own people in written narratives, Achebe single-handedly put African literature on the map very early on, creating a literary legacy for his now failed nation and its struggling people. His is a success story indeed. Could it be that Nigeria will, too, reach the very depths of its own desperation and dare to come up against its loud, exasperated critics, proving that it too can engage progress head-on, as was the original projection for it? This, of course, still remains to be seen.



Also, this piece will be published as part of a writers-at-large blog by Wild River Review (www.wildriverreview.com) later in the week.

[Photo by Cie Stroud, courtesy of Princeton Public Library]

Measuring Progress in Hunger Unleashed

As a freelance editor, I will, for added pay, take on a book project that has little to do with Africa. Well, directly at least. The current manuscript, forthcoming from a publisher in Princeton, is on Haiti circa 1959 when Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba--and the effects this historic period had on Haiti as a whole. The well-informed writer, Bernard Diederich, a former NYT correspondent and publisher of what was then Haiti Sun, writes brilliantly for the most part, with a keen and sympathetic eye.

Last night, as I put the finishing editorial touches on one of the chapters, I noted something that was gravely disturbing. Then, in 1959, under the dictatorial reign of Duvalier (Papa Doc), the very same issues that plague the Haitian populace today--poverty, severe hunger, inability to buy food--were at a time also rampant in the countryside. Yes, even then: We are talking at least 49 or so years ago. One year shy of a half a century. And little (if any) progress to show for it. Heartrending. One might say the same, in fact, progress-wise (but with fewer years of national liberation) about a certain country in southern Africa where a recent election has been irascibly contested. Despotism, indeed.

[Photo of the desecrated grave of Papa Doc]

And She Was Away

A few days ago, I drove north to Cambridge, Massachussets, covering over seven hundred miles (round trip) of roadway, to attend a Pushkin symposium at Harvard University.  

Surely, this was up my very alley...and the daily sessions engaged me, albeit some of them did so randomly.

I set up shop and sold some of our books, mainly the Africa/Russia volume, lunched and dined at the Faculty Club--and had fruitful conversations about Pushkin, literature, Africa, and books, including this one:

Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness
by Catherine Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny (Editor), Ludmilla A. Trigos (Editor)

Worth a look-at, and a read, too, if there is some time.

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."