Professor Biko descended on what he believed to be my interpretation of Soyinka's The Interpreters and, as if writing for a tabloid declared: "Chielozona Eze Misinterprets The Interpreters." For those who have not yet read the chapter five of my book, this is the very paragraph that contains my mention of Soyinka:
"Some of the narratives that deal with homosexuality in Africa engaged with the topic rather indirectly, in some cases to mock African denial of this aspect of being human. Wole Soyinka's novel The Interpreters is one such narratives. In this story, Joe Golder, an African American professor teaching in Nigeria is the one who informs his Nigerian interlocutor, the journalist Sagoe, that homosexuality exists in Nigeria, providing him with convincing anecdotes, and yet Sagoe responds in a typical denialist way: "You seem better informed than I am. But if you don't mind I'll persist in my delusion" (Soyinka 1996:199). Chris Dunton and Neville Hoad have done excellent readings of Soyinka's text.
OA's claim to categorical knowledge seems to be what it is—categorical one-dimensionality. Only heaven knows what Americanized consciousness means. Is homosexuality an American invention?
"Soyinka and myself" I had to chuckle when I read the above line. Are you implying that every Yoruba person is already overdetermined by what you believe to be the gluing might of their society/culture? I hope you know that it is not a compliment to suggest that individuals are irredeemably structured by their culture? Anyway, I know at least two Yoruba people who are gay. And they write about it, hoping that people will understand and accept them for who they are. This ought to be simple.
"Not all African societies are monocultural." And, no culture is a monolithic bolus. There are innumerable tensions and internal differences within every given culture/society. The same goes for families and individuals. That is actually what we mean when we talk about the human condition. It is what it is. Humans come in different colors, shapes, dispositions, and orientations. All we can do is live and let live. As my people would say: let the eagle perch, and the kite too.
Chielo
Chielozona Eze
Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor
Professor, Africana Studies, Northeastern Illinois University; Extraordinary Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.Fellow - Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 5:39 AM OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--
Ken.
All I can categorically state regarding Soyinka's position on gay rights in the Interpreters no matter how that treatment is interpreted are that:
1. This discussion. ( on this listserv) is heavily influenced by the Americanised consciousness of discussants.
2. Soyinka's position is influenced by the Yoruba society from which he and myself come. Yoruba society does not encourage gay marriage ( male or female) the gender distribution inequality was perhaps what led to the institution of polygamy.
3. Soyinka was ( and still is) a macho man, so whats wrong with that? Are all men supposed to be effeminate?
4. Not all African societies are monocultural, so the idea that titanic gay right struggles are going on in Kenya or Uganda does not mean it is time for a continental- wide decree to be passed one way or the other. Africa unlike America is not one country that is one continent. Isnt the abhorrence of such totalising concepts that the scholarly community fought valiantly in the last 50 years of the 20th century after the calamitous debacle of the second world war? Does anyone still wonder why the outbreak of HIV in West and East Africa is not comparable, even when there had been unfulfilled calamitous predictions for West Africa?
5. I cannot believe that I read from Ken the statement that the time is right for all of Africa to promote gay rights. That is naked American imperialism transplanted in one fell swoop on Africa. No, the time is not right for any such gamble!
OAA
Sent from my Galaxy
-------- Original message --------From: "Harrow, Kenneth" <harrow@msu.edu>Date: 01/04/2021 02:55 (GMT+00:00)To: 'Ayotunde Bewaji' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chielozona Eze Misinterpretes The Interpreters
soyinka openly and clearly mocked the gay character in The Interpreters; there was no real concern over laws. anyone familiar with soyinka's masculinism of that period would not have been surprised. he was the most hostile to feminism, also of that period, of most authors one could think of, and that continued for decades. where he is now, i do not know.djibril diop's charley, in touki bouki, was nother classical case of homophobia, where charlie was mocked in every which way, as a gay figure.
the resistance to changes in gay attitudes is still at the level of open warfare in much of africa, where laws and attitudes are often super hostile. in kenya the film rafiki was essentially banned by the govt, and only released briefly on international outcry. uganda has been notorious for its persecution of gays. even in senegal, where l'homme-femme, from st louis, was lauded, attacks also were and are common enough.it is a struggle, and the courage of those now fighting for gay rights is enormously laudatory. i believe the time for change is here, finallyken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chielozona Eze <chieloz@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2021 10:41 PM
To: 'Ayotunde Bewaji' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chielozona Eze Misinterpretes The Interpreters--Well, Biko, I'm not sure we'll be better served investing our intellectual energy in conjectures. Please read the book first, or at least the chapter in which Soyinka's book was mentioned.If you still intend on responding, then please do provide the context in which I mentioned Soyinka. I'm sure I'll benefit from that.
In that particular chapter, I mentioned established scholars who have done excellent job discussing Soyinka's representation of homosexuality. I then went on to discuss the contemporary generation of writers and activists challenging Africa's attitude to people of alternative sexuality.We could actually avoid the fallacy of the straw man if we provided the contexts of our responses.
Take care.C
Chielozona EzeBernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor
Professor, Africana Studies, Northeastern Illinois University; Extraordinary Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.Fellow - Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
--On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 8:43 PM 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
--By way of congratulations, I could not wait to dig into the creative commons copy of Chielozona Eze's treatise on Human Rights and creative narratives in Africa. I like soft copies because they are easier to search for discourse analysis. I noticed instantly that references to the work of Emecheta are plentiful and I look forward toi reading the book in detail. But I have a preliminary question:
I was shocked to find only one passing reference to the work of Soyinka and it looks like a misinterpretation of that piece of work, The Interpreters. Of all the works of Soyinka with relevance to human rights, why did Chielozona Eze choose The Interpreters as the exemplar of the representation of Human Rights by Soyinka? Not The Season of Anomy which represented the pogrom against the Igbo, not The Man Died, not his entire body of work in all genres?
The answer is that Soyinka raised the question of homophobia in that book and Chielozona suggests that Soyinka was using the representation to debunk the idea that no African can be gay. If that was the case, then the character who was suspected as being pro-gay in the novel would have been an African character and not an African-American character suspected of introducing a foreign habit that the protagonist was happy to reject as a primitive African who preferred to be left alone in his alleged backwardness.
A different interpretation is that Soyinka was pointing out that there was no indigenous primitive law against same-sex relations whereas such relations were criminalized in the US at the time he wrote the novel in the 1960s. In other words, Soyinka was indirectly returning the charge of primitivity to the American cultural warrior given that there is no evidence of homophobia in indigenous African societies until foreign religions introduced their hysteria in the form of legal prohibition against same sex relations. When Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu announced the 1966 coup by decreeing that homosexuals will be shot, people wondered where such moral panic came from.
Chiel;ozona read it literally to suggest that African Americans must be more civilized or wiser than stupid Africans because African Americans are more tolerant of homosexuality while African Africans are not. He could have used case law on the 2014 recognition of marriage equality by the US Supreme Court under Obama's presidency to contrast the fact that Africans still allow women to marry other women as Female Husbands (Amadiume). Yoruba men play Gelede and Igbo men play Agbomma masquerades as cross-dressers without any prejudice or violent attacks against the performers to show that Africans are not as homophobic as Chielozona implies.
Many Africans are led to hate Obama because his administration refused to argue in support of the Defense of Marriage Act but they do not know that it was the decision of the Supreme Court to strike down the law as unconstitutional long after the Constitutional Court in South Africa legalized same sex marriage under Mandela. The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality because it is a matter of property rights more than sexual rights given that same sex relations were no longer criminal. Without a marriage license from the courts, same sex couples who were duly married in churches would still be taxed as unmarried individuals and that is against the 5th Amendment right to be secure in their properties.
African countries have bigger fish to fry than to retain the colonialist legislation against adults based on the sex of who they choose to fall in love with as consenting adults. That was the point of Soyinka, it is a matter of consent and dissent by adult individuals.
Biko
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