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.