Writer, Critic, Father @ikhide
Our World According to Binyavanga Wainana
by Ikhide R. Ikheloa
Book Review: One Day I Will Write About This Place. By Binyavanga Wainaina. Graywolf Press; 272 pages
Every African thinker should find a copy of Binyavanga Wainana's new book, One Day I Will Write about This Place and read it carefully from front to back. Scratch "African," every thinker should read this enigmatic book by one of the most enigmatic thinkers I have never met. Wainana entertains and educates with his brilliance and lunacy as displayed in the many exhilarating chapters of this unusual memoir. One is reminded repeatedly that there's no fine line between brilliance and lunacy; Wainana is a brilliant lunatic. Let me just say that he has written the memoir that many writers are too chicken to write. This memoir is a delightful and important coming of age book that describes Wainana's world (and our world) with riotous clarity and shimmering brilliance. Wainana pulls no punches, he lays it all out there, self-absorbed warts and all. Indeed there are several issues in this book that would make for robust all-night drunken debates. It is a good thing. Who is Binyavanga Wainana, you ask? It is now a cliché to say that in 2005 Wainana wrote the half tongue-in-cheek, angry essay How to Write about Africa – a seminal piece that confronted the complicated relationship between the West and what is or what should be African literature. In that essay he famously wrote this about the West's expectations of an African story, "Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment."
Enjoy the rest of my musings here.
- Ikhide
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