Dialogues: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chielozona Eze Misinterpretes The Interpreters

Biko:

There was a conversation around this in the 1980s, so Ken locates the context.

You can fight for human rights and still run into those issues---the MLK movement, for instance.

You will soon have the opportunity to ask him.

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 9:18 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chielozona Eze Misinterpretes The Interpreters

Ken, you are the literary theorist. All I can say is that Soyinka is a giant in human rights struggles and you will have to prove your charge that he was among the most homophobic African writers who was also against feminism in spite of the strong female characters in his work.

Everyone knows that the author is not always represented autobiographically by the characters in his creative writing. Some characters are based on other people that the author may not even agree with. Is it possible that Soyinka represented a homophobic character as part of empirical realities instead of whole-heartedly agreeing with the views of such a character?

I believe that Soyinka, whatever his limitations as a person, has been redeemed by his sacrifices in the struggle for human rights worldwide. He is imperfect as we all are but he cannot be trashed by anyone on human rights struggles.

Biko

On Wednesday, 31 March 2021, 21:45:05 GMT-4, Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

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, finally

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

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.

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

My latest book: Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination.

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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Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chielozona Eze Misinterpretes The Interpreters

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