By Jeanne- Marie Jackson
From The Herald, 15 May 2019
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| Jeanne-Marie Jackson |
African literature is the object of immense
international interest across both academic and popular registers. Far from the
field’s earlier, post-colonial association with marginality, a handful of star
“Afropolitan” names are at the forefront of global trade publishing. Books like
Chimamanda Adichie’s “Americanah” and “Half of a Yellow Sun”, Teju Cole’s “Open
City”, Taiye Selasi’s “Ghana Must Go” and Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing” have
confounded neat divisions between Western and African literary traditions. The
Cameroonian novelist Imbolo Mbue captured a million-dollar contract for her
first book, “Behold the Dreamers”. That’s even before it joined the Oprah’s
Book Club pantheon this year.
Such commercial prominence, though, has attracted
considerable and unsurprising push back from Western and Africa-based critics
alike. Far from advancing narratives with deep roots in local African
realities, such critics fear, many of Africa’s most “successful” writers hawk a
superficial, overly diasporic, or even Western-focused vision of the continent.
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| NoViolet Bulawayo |
The most visible of these critiques has been directed
at the Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo’s “We Need New Names” (2013). The
Nigerian novelist Helon Habila worried in a review in the London Guardian that
it was “poverty-porn”. The popular Nigerian critic Ikhide Ikheloa (“Pa Ikhide”)
frequently makes a similar point. Fellow Nigerian writer Adaobi Nwaubani
critiqued the West’s hold on Africa’s book industry in a much-circulated New
York Times piece called “African Books for Western Eyes”.
Such debates about African writing could, and likely
will, go on forever. Questions about Africa’s place in the current global
literary marketplace broaden some of the most urgent queries of the
postcolonial era. Who gets to document African realities? Who are the
“gatekeepers” of African publishing traditions?
It goes on: To what sort of audience does African
writing cater? What is the role — and what should it be, if any — of Western
institutions in brokering cultural prestige?
All these issues merit concern.
Between the default poles
Too often, though, African writing ends up volleyed between two default poles
of “corporate global” and “activist local”. Some onlookers, as in a recent
essay by the Canadian scholar Sarah Brouillette, go as far as to name the
biases of even Africa-based print outlets. Kenya’s Kwani Trust is exposed as
“Western-facing” due to a web of donor relations. “West” here is code for
neoliberal. “Western-facing” is for complicity with a market that skews toward
British and American interests.
Faced with a “world system” argument like
Brouillette’s, African literature would seem trapped between a rock and a hard
place.
But, in fact, this tells only a small part of the
story of how African writing now makes its way through the world. It is
incomplete to the point of being outdated, given the boom over the past five
years in new, globally conscious small US literary presses collaborating with
African writers.
A “West subsuming Africa” brand of critique works fine
for scholars with no real skin in the game of literary publishing. It also
denies real agency to a lot of African writers and other literary
professionals. On the ground the literary field is far more forward-thinking
and diverse.
There is an entire new body of African writing that
escapes this closed circuit of damning truisms. A wave of new or recently
galvanised independent literary presses in the US and the UK are working in
tandem with some of Africa’s most generative outlets. Together they are
publishing and promoting work by young and adventurous African writers.
Labours of love
Books published originally by presses like Umuzi (South Africa), amaBooks
(Zimbabwe) and Kwani (Kenya) find second lives with international publishers
working to defy the constraints of profitability. They’re mostly labours of
love with skeleton staffs that speak to a transcontinental commitment to
innovative African writing.
Here are a few key examples of African texts published
by independent American outlets — “independent” here refers to presses beyond
the “Big Five” US trade publishers (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins,
Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster.
These include Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Ugandan
epic “Kintu” which was originally launched by Kwani. It was the first
Anglophone novel put out by the brand-new Transit Books based in Oakland,
California. The press seeks maximum visibility for translated fiction alongside
texts originally written in English. They advocate for more ethical legal and
financial dealings with translators, as well as international writers.
A number of similarly tiny, ambitious ventures have
published some of the most acclaimed recent African writing in translation.
Deep Vellum Publishing was behind the English translation of Fiston Mwanza
Mujila’s Etisalat Prize-winning “Tram 83”.
Also dedicated exclusively to works in translation,
LA-based Phoneme Media in 2016 published the first ever Burundian novel in
English, Roland Rugero’s deeply contemplative “Baho!”. Phoneme’s tagline,
fittingly, is “curious books for curious people”.
In a similar vein, Brooklyn’s Restless Books was
founded to combat “parochial, inward-looking, and homogenised trends in
American publishing”. Among their forthcoming titles, translated from the
French is Naivo’s “Beyond the Rice Fields”. It’s the first novel from
Madagascar to see its way to English.
Veteran nonprofit press Archipelago Books is also in
Brooklyn. In 2015, it published the translation from the Portuguese of Angolan
writer Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s “A General Theory of Oblivion”.
Every one of these throws a wrench in a clear, cynical
sense of what kind of novel Western presses prize. That is not to mention the
many African writers, publishers, and editors working in concert to promote
these same texts.
Small, focused channels
It applies to the Anglosphere too. Books that offer a decidedly more locally
textured experience than those of the “Afropolitan” rock stars have made their
way abroad through small, focused channels.
These works might include Tendai Huchu’s “The Maestro,
the Magistrate, and the Mathematician” (published originally by amaBooks, and
in the US by Ohio University Press); Imraan Coovadia’s “Tales of the Metric
System” (from Umuzi, and again by Ohio University Press); and Masande
Ntshanga’s “The Reactive” (also Umuzi; in the US by family-run Two Dollar
Radio.
Clearly, this collection just scratches the surface. But
what these works have in common is an investment in stylistic and structural
experimentation that confounds rather than caters to an international taste for
“digestible” fiction, or to mostly Western points of cultural and institutional
reference.
This counter-current of transnational African literary
life complicates the equation of culture, geopolitics and economics in more
useful ways than stale materialist critiques.
As such titles and presses continue to gain acclaim
and recognition by an international readership that is aware of and hostile to
shallow representations of Africa — and who crave engagement with challenging
fiction, regardless of its origin — critics will need to rethink some of their
orthodoxies.
There
is more to both African literature and Western publishing than meets an eye too
practised in its suspicion. If literature is doomed only to echo the failings
of globalisation, then why bother? On the contrary, a new generation of writers
and publishers deserve our awareness of the “global literary marketplace” as a
meaningfully multidimensional space. — Africa Conversation.
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