USA Africa Dialogue Series - The book is dead...

"Many times I will go on Facebook or Twitter and read something utterly profound, zany, funny as hell and as indigenous as ogbono soup cooked from the earth of my ancestors and I find myself wondering: How will this play out in a traditional book or short story? How will the West understand this, without some major footnotes and sly explanations? And the answer always comes to me from my dark side in question form: Why do you always worry about what the West thinks of your stories?  Write, just write.

The question nags? Who is writing our stories? Where should we go looking for our stories? My verdict is that we are looking in the wrong places for validation or affirmation of our stories – and our humanity.  Increasingly, thanks to advances in technology, those who decide what is contemporary African literature are disconnected from those who really write African literature with their blood daily. This disconnect has created a yawning chasm and a huge dysfunction, much of Africa's story and history is being distorted because today's gatekeepers are looking only at the book as the signifier of what is contemporary African literature. We must change this paradigm.

I was at a conference the other day, and the only contemporary writers many of the panelists could come up with were Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, and Helon Habila. Coming from professors of African literature, this is deeply distressing. Many had not heard of the Caine Prize, many knew of something called YouTube and not one of them had a social media account (Facebook or Twitter). They scoffed about the negative side of social media and at any attempt to make them see that much of Africa's stories are being written on social media, in blogs, online magazines, etc."

Read the rest of my rant here...

http://www.sabinews.com/all-news/book-dead-long-live-facebook-twitter-ikhide-ikheloa/

- Ikhide