Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Empire Talks Back

Thanks, Farooq, for that. I forgot about the iconic God's Bits of Wood, which in fact made us nickname one of our classmates Sembene to this day. I recall that it was taught to us by a specialist in Francophone literature, a bi-lingual professor who would have read the novel in its original French edition.

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:
Moses,

What of God's Bits of Wood by Semebene Ousmane? We read that in our second-year African lit class, right? It was also originally written and published in French.

Farooq

Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/farooqkperogi

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will



On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
To second Kwabena and others, I grew up on the pacesetter series and the AWS. And, yes, we read a few translations of Francophone novels. I remember reading Camara Laye's African Child in my first year of secondary school and seeing myself in that autobiographical story. I also remember it as a semi-spiritual experience. I was an African child myself going through some of the transitions described in vivid imagery in the novel. We also read Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter--the English translation, of course. I can't remember reading anything from Lusophone Africa.



On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 10:11 AM, Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com> wrote:
This is not a direct response to the below, but perhaps clarifying an earlier post. I have in the past several decades immersed myself in what would be called African literature, for lack of a better term (I do think the term is too limiting, a lot of it the fault of African writers too eager to limit themselves to that umbrella for various reasons, one being to satisfy for profit, the West's hunger for African exotica).
 
In the process, I have reflected on the two eras that Kwabena has referred to. In my writings, I tend to compare the older era with the contemporary as defined by an elite group of African writers that the West sees as the voices of Africa. I think that while that may have been fair in the past, today, that mindset has to change. The literature of Africa continues to be defined by the book. I propose that this mindset should change. In my activism I have promoted the literature of Africa as I have seen in books, and online on the Internet, in blogs, Facebook, Twitter, online magazines, etc. I understand that time is of a premium and I appreciate Kwabena acknowledging that he has not followed these works. It is a lot of work and that is part of the challenge; taking down the gates has unleashed a flood of voices. Separating the crap from the good is a huge challenge, but it is still work that needs to be done.
 
The Western gatekeepers are still looking at our literature the old way and in the process, distorting our stories and our history. That is one of my central issues in all of my works. The good news is that despite the challenges, things are improving. I am seeing many good writers emerging from the mayhem, celebrating Africa, warts and all, not just the single story hawked for profit by some in those God awful books that I have gleefully skewered. Africa is not all about wars, constipated Generals, rapes and mayhem. Those are important; we live and love too. Despite many of our "African writers." So, if all you are reading about African literature is in books, you are making a huge mistake. Many of the books do not even qualify to be novels, they are mostly social commentary on a certain (diseased) condition. I would respect them more if they simply wrote essays. That is why I so admire folks like Okey Ndibe, Moses Ochonu, Pius Adesanmi., etc. They do not seem constrained to write the novel. They sit down and write to is the way they feel. You don't have to worry about dozing your way through a wretched story ;-)
 
I have said it again. Sue me.
 
. 
- Ikhide
 
Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide

 

Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 8:26 PM

Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Empire Talks Back

Ken:
 
Yes. we read African literature in English. Although, we studied French, our reading skills were rudimentary, and as you argue, Francophone works were scarce and hard to come by.
 
Kwabena.
 
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of kenneth harrow [harrow@msu.edu]
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 6:15 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Empire Talks Back

this is an interesting, and enormously complicated story.
i notice how much kwabena frames his answer in anglophonic terms. and i remember back then, in the 70s, the bookstore in bamenda, west cameroon, that had the aws proudly displayed, and enormously important. but the francophone zone had nothing of it, and pidgin english writers like bole butake were getting their start there in a zone that moved between the francophone and anglophone.
who was the audience? there were clearly more african, or local,  audiences for things like theatre in those days, which was very very popular. that apparently is not the case, and theatre in french or pidgin has faded.
the francophones did not have the aws, did not have london publishers like heinemann, with achebe and the english editors seeking to create a "series" for a certain "africa," which they both envisaged and loved. think about the world of ulli beier and soyinka and twins 77, etc at that time.
the francophones had presence africaine as the heart of a francophone intellectual world, and its headquarters were in paris, as were the cafes of the writers of negritude and then postnegritude writers. on the more radical side mongo beti created a publishing house, and on the conservative side were french publishers some of whom were invested in the colonial enterprise, and in publishing authors like camara laye.

i would worry that the notion that these writers had western audiences in mind would reduce things too much. there are authors who need to explain terms and concepts to outsiders, and that actually marks THings Fall Apart all the time, but the non-igbo reader need not be western, just not igbo. achebe was a guide to outsiders, but he himself was an outsider to the world he attempted to recreate as well. soyinka's The Interpreters did not strike me at all as aiming to give outsiders an african world, but rather was like the work of james joyce, the young man interpreting for us--african or western, no matter--his new world, a postindependent exciting nigerian world with the city as its center, not the village.
there were writers who seemed like imitators of achebe, whose attempts to mediate their african village world for outsiders seemed too openly "sociological." they were there on the early list of the African Writers Series, and have mostly fallen into oblivion. but even some of the interesting, non-typical novels from cameroon of that period are largely forgotten (e.g.Dipoko), and the classics that we all taught in the 70s and 80s gradually went out of print (almost all of them, including Dark Child, Suns of Independence, Mongo Beti's works, etc).
the audiences have changed over and over, and african audiences include a wide range of people from university to urbanites interested in african or their own national cultures. The aim of publishers, esp heinemann, was to reach audiences in africa, as well as in the UK, US, and France. it makes almost no sense to me to decide what was in the mind of a given author about an audience, except when it is clear that the author is acting like a guide who explains terms and customs to people who are unfamiliar with them. (who was tutuola's audience??)
and after a while, those explanations become hackneyed, as with the instantiation of terms like griot, abiko, fadenya, badenya, etc., that become fixed stereotypes, signifiers of africanness, instead of living realities.
and now we have examples of the current industry, published in the states, aiming at a "world" audience, written by 2nd generation africans, whose audiences are a whole nother thing--and whose others might invent entire languages just to make child soldiers seem adequately african....
at that point, we have to write "african"
ken

On 3/23/12 5:08 PM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena wrote:
We need to periodize and summon nuance as clarifying tools regarding the position that African Writers wrote/write for Western audience, and I am not suggesting that chronology is always synonymous with causation. In the 1970s and 1980s, African writers had a large readership in Africa. I was involved in the Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School (Legon, Ghana) as a student and a member of the teaching staff in the late 1970s and 1980s. During this period most students voraciously read the African Writers Series. In sum, it was not the type of cars that one's parents drove, or which of 50 Cent's rap songs one knew that defined one's recognition among his (her) peers. Rather, it was about the uncountable number of African writers one had read that put him (her) on a pedestal of peer recognition and celebration. My colleagues, Femi Kolapo (Nigerian) and Ismail Rashid (Sierra Leonean), told me about similar experiences in their respective countries. Looking back, my acquaintance with the African Writers Series empowered and conscientized me in so many ways. My favorite authors were Achebe, JP Clark,  Laye, Beti, Nwapa, Okara, Ngugi, Armah, Okigbo, Abrahams, Oyono, Amadi, Aidoo, Sutherland, Awonoor, Ekwensi, and others. Today, the tyranny of time prevents me from vigorously following the works of the new generation of African writers: it may be true that they are pandering to some "Western" constituencies!
 
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Rex Marinus [rexmarinus@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 11:13 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com; ifuemia@googlemail.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Empire Talks Back

"The end of dictatorships has spurred rather than slowed the flight of writers from Africa. Virtually all African writers of stature live in the West. Some of them flee with dog-eared reams of foolscap paper in which they have stored what they imagine will sell in the West. And it does. Made-in-Africa misery sells like hot cakes in America. Thanks to lavish Western funding, there is now such an animal called African writing. Africans created it. In their works, Africa is a morbid museum, romanticized in perverse ways that would be racist were they to be penned by white writers. Yes, the West should start calling African writers on their hypocrisy. Virtually all African writers of stature beginning from pre-colonial times have been nurtured by Western aid. It bears repeating: The paying reading audience is in the West. No writer can live on what passes for a reading culture in Black Africa."
 -Ikhide
 
The problem with equating a critique of the "west" with ingratitude by African writers suggest that one feeds on the other. This amorphous "West" is nice to African writers so these African writers must be nice to an amorphous and benevolent "West." I think this suggestion in itself is insulting both to the West and to the African writer. I do not think the good and benevolent people of the west are so crass as to ask African writers, as a condition to their benevolence, to squat in perpetutal gratitude. There is certainly an unequal exchange between the piper and whomever pays for his pipping, and the suggestion is made not without some justification by Ikhide Ikhelola, the African writer must repay the benefactors of African writing with sanitized praise-songs that would no doubt justify their debts and make the "West" sleep more soundly. One such way of repaying this debt is to shape an image of Africa suitable to the audience in the west. The other is sustained adulation - a high praise of the west. The African writer must, in Ikhide's very wise ways, become either a panegyricist for this West or remain silent; eat your humble pie African writer; either signify like the monkey, according Henry Louis Gates, or dance... indeed sing in loud gratitude to your "western savior" who embraces you when you run from tyranny and hunger, clutching only dog eared foolscaps of prose or poetry otherwise unpblishable in Africa. Very profound indeed.
 
Are African writers ungrateful to the West? Is the west - a single "whiteman" - against whom the ingrate African writer asserts complex animus? If an African writer points to much of Western journalism and literature as perpetuating and constantly reproducing dangerous and unneccessary myths about the African continent, does that suggest a lack of appreciation for the real moments of amity with this amorphous West? I think there is, above every thing else, a terrible lack of rigor in much of Ikhide's thought on this matter which makes a response both neccessary and frustrating.
 
I will leave an analysis of the a priori factors that have conditioned the last fifty years of African life, and merely suggest, as I have frequently done in various other situations, that in historical terms Postcolonial Africa is mere sappling. It is in a transitional and demonic phase of history, and is yielding, by the very condition of that history, a form of ghostly literature - what I call the phase of the African gothic. The shattering of time in the last five hundred years in Africa makes quite inevitable this search, through our imaginative enterprise, either in literature, the plastics arts, music or architecture, a certain level of the perverse until Africa and its global footprints reconnect and re-emerge from its current Dantesque hole. It is an image suggested to me most powerfullly in the psychic descent and re-emergence of John Edgar Wideman's character, Eye, siezed by ambiguity in Cattle Killing. So, the image of Africa as a "morbid museum" is a current and neccessary phase of its life and imagination, what is hypocritical is to suggest for African writers to live to outside of that reality. Some have certainly found a calling in merely constructing a linear, essentialist view of Africa - at the center of which is this western missionary angel who saves Africa from itself and its people. It is "western" - and not neccessarily "white," we must point out. This is the kind of imagery that publishers in London and New York consistently seek to publish by writers from Africa. This is the point that Teju Cole and Wainana argue against, but which Ikhide insists is a churlish self-regard, and an ungrateful response by African writers. Those African writers unwilling to write to measure, either stay silent in exile, refuse to hawk their manuscripts, or if they try, have the doors shut to their faces. It is a price you pay for your conscience. It is not ingratitude against the west. It is engagement with it. Every African writer published, marketed and canonized in London and New York in the last 15 years often has stuck in-between their story, that view across the bend. Africa remains this strange place for child soldiers; journalists who are jailed, women who are abused; children who are left on the streets; scam artists who have not come to you with empty hands, and so on. There is no love story in Lagos. 
 
So, most Africa writers write for the west? well, years ago, the Macmillan series had a fantatsic young readers series which in the 1980s sold cheaply - between 70k and N1:00. Every secondary school kid I knew went to the bookshops when new prints come from kalu Okpi, Agbo Areo, etc. Not any more. Something changed between then and now. This is where our search must begin - that condition that exerted such powerful changes that made it imposible to sustain the reading culture, the Langston Hughes prize first awarded in 1966 in Dakar, the President's prize for Nigerian writing first awarded in Nigeria in 1962 to Achebe, etc. Yet, we have the ANA prizes and the LNG prizes which continue to be awarded and have been sustained. The problem is with the Ikhide's of Africa and the crossroads; the only prizes worth anything, and worth worrying about for them, are the prizes awaredd to some strange African book in London and New York retailing some crazy western savior and validated by some ghetto prize funded with the hard currency of blood diamonds or blood oil for which we must all be grateful. It is a symptom of the dispossessed. It is the Naipulization of Ikhide Ikelola.
Obi Nwakanma
 
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Empire Talks Back
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; ifuemia@googlemail.com
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:19:50 +0000

Thanks for your question. Here is a simple request: Google "The Wole Soyinka Prize." Trace its inception every year, report back to us what you find, its history, consistency in awarding prizes every year, etc etc. I am tired of doing the research. You help us by contributing something ;-)

Have a great weekend!

- Ikhide
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:08:59 +0000
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Empire Talks Back

There is not a single award in the arts in Black Africa by Africans that has been sustained for more than a few years.
Ikhide

i thought the Wole Soyinka Prize can be described differently?

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 3:27 AM, Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com> wrote:
"... Quite a few African writers of stature have been supercilious and condescending in their engagement with the West. They feel entitled to the generosity of their hosts. However, virtually every penny they have earned has come from the West because they write exclusively for the paying Western audience. Back home no one cares much. African governments only scan through books to see who is criticizing them after which they hunt down the poor chap. The writer is lucky to escape the continent into the arms of the waiting West."

 
- Ikhide
 
Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide

 

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--  kenneth w. harrow  distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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---Mohandas Gandhi

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