African literature disrupting what Western presses prize

By Jeanne- Marie Jackson

From The Herald, 15 May 2019

https://www.herald.co.zw/african-literature-disrupting-what-western-presses-prize-2/

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.

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.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma's 'Shadows' longlisted for Etisalat Prize

Photograph courtesy Fungai Machirori

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma's debut novella and short story collection, Shadows, has been longlisted for the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature. Novuyo's stories have appeared in several anthologies, including the 'amaBooks anthologies Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices and Where to Now? Short Stories from Zimbabwe. Shadows contains Novuyo's short story, 'Crossroads', which was previously published in Where to Now? and, in isiNdebele, in Siqondephi Manje?Indatshana zaseZimbabwe. Where to Now? was co-published with Parthian Books in the United Kingdom.

This is the second year of the Etisalat Prize, the first recipient of the award was NoViolet Bulawayo for her novel We Need New Names. Both Novuyo and NoViolet come from Bulawayo.

Novuyo first came to the attention of 'amaBooks as a participant in the British Council's ‘Identity and Diversities’ Project, which culminated in us publishing the young people’s anthology Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices, in which Novuyo was first published. At nineteen, her short story, 'Scattered Hearts', published in this anthology, was described by Dr Petros Ndlovu as ‘beautiful and powerful prose which fosters an appreciation of the personality of the young author who is so gifted in thought, analysis, problem-solving as well as English expression’. Novuyo went on to represent the project at the Identities and Diversities Youth Summit in Lusaka, Zambia 2007, and later at the Global Change-makers Africa Youth Summit in Cape Town, South Africa 2009.

Shadows is a winner of the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. bookshybooks.blogspot.com, in her review of the Etisalat longlist, commented, 'With this debut novella and collection of short stories the reader is introduced to a startling new voice in African literature. Novuyo Tshuma sketches, with astounding accuracy, the realities of daily life in Zimbabwe and the peculiar intricacies of being a foreigner in Johannesburg. Vivid, sparse and, at times, tragically beautiful.'

NoViolet Bulawayo Comes Home to Bulawayo

The launch of NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel ‘We Need New Names’ at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo on September 17 was a memorable occasion. It had been a long while since the gallery had hosted such a crowd, with over 300 people packing into the courtyard to welcome NoViolet home and to hear her in conversation with Dr Drew Shaw of the National University of Science and Technology. To use NoViolet’s words:

'Bulawayo came out proper with a crowd of close to 300, i'm made to understand, and gave me the launch of my dreams even as i had been told that folks in the City of Kings don't come out much anymore. very honored by the presence of many people i admire, and the many i do not know, who saw me worthy of their time and ears and hearts. then there was Ericah Gwetai (mother of the late Yvonne Vera, who found me in a room before the launch and sang me a song, dlala nkazana ♥). if you see me walk like i own the earth, forgive me because i'm suffering from too much love, from a small, proud place that came out big to show me who they were, and who i was. that was not a launch, it was a baptism, and Bulawayo, blue eyed city you, home of my girlhood you, you Bulawayo, ngiyazendlala on your feet with gratitude, thank you kabanzikazi.'

The launch was organised by ’amaBooks Publishers, the British Council – Zimbabwe, the Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo and Bulawayo Agenda. The book is published by Weaver Press in Zimbabwe and distributed by ’amaBooks in Bulawayo.

The link to the soundcloud recording of NoViolet Bulawayo's conversation with Drew Shaw during the Bulawayo launch of We Need New Names is below.

https://soundcloud.com/drew-shaw-6/noviolet-bulawayo-in?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=twitter

Photographs courtesy of Lene Lauritsen and Intwasa Arts Festival koBulwayo

NoViolet Bulawayo comes home

NoViolet Bulawayo comes home to Bulawayo to launch her debut novel We Need New Names.
The launch will take place on Tuesday 17 September at 5.30pm at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. The event has been organised and supported by 'amaBooks Publishers, British Council Zimbabwe, Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo and Bulawayo Agenda. All are welcome to attend the launch, there is no admission charge. The book has been longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and has just been shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. We Need New Names is published in Zimbabwe by Weaver Press and distributed in Bulawayo by 'amaBooks.
NoViolet was in Bulawayo a couple of weeks ago, meeting with Jane Morris and Brian Jones of 'amaBooks to discuss arrangements for her launch and other activities to promote an interest in literature in Bulawayo. Before the launch, NoViolet is to facilitate a workshop for promising writers from the city.
Her short story, Snapshots, was published in 2011 by 'amaBooks in the anthology Where to Now? Short Stories from Zimbabwe. The anthology was co-published with Parthian Books in the UK. The collection is being translated into isiNdebele and will be published by 'amaBooks later this year.
NoViolet is a past winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and, for the last two years, 'amaBooks have published the Caine Prize anthology in Zimbabwe.

NoViolet Bulawayo makes Booker long list

from www.parthianbooks.com

Congratulations to all of this year's Booker longlisted authors. We're excited to see NoViolet Bulawayo, a Zimbabwean author whose work previously appeared in Parthian's anthology of Zimbabwean short stories Where to Now? Short Stories from Zimbabwe, recognised for her first novel We Need New Names.

Her longlisted novel, We Need New Names (Chatto and Windus) follows Darling and her friends, living in a shanty called Paradise, which of course is no such thing. They dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and Barack Obama and David Beckham live. For Darling, that dream will come true. But, like the thousands of people all over the world trying to forge new lives far from home, Darling finds this new paradise brings its own set of challenges - for her and also for those she's left behind.

NoViolet was born in Tsholotsho, a year after Zimbabwe's independence from British colonial rule. When she was eighteen, she moved to Kalamazoo, Michi­gan. She earned her MFA at Cornell University, where she was also awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship, and she is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in California. In We Need New Names she writes 'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?'

A previous winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing (the 'African Booker') and also shortlisted for the South Africa PEN Studzinsi Award, judged by JM Coetzee, NioViolet's work has appeared in magazines and in anthologies in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK.

Seven different countries are represented on the Booker longlist, and while there is a strong hand of established authors selected (Tash Aw, Jim Crace, Jhumpa Lahiri, Colum McCann, Charlotte Mendelson and Colm Tóibín) there is also a good representation for first timers.

NoViolet's story 'Snapshots' appeared in Parthian's anthology of Zimbabwean writing Where to Now?, alongside work by Bryony Rheam and John Eppel. Complied by Zimbabwean publishing house 'amaBooks, Where to Now? was printed in the UK by Parthian in 2011.