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.

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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]