Through new writing, Africa is roaring again

The world needs good reads, and young African writers are at hand to provide riveting stories. Even the famous Nairobi pub called Simmers is now on the global literary map.

Due to my poor eyesight, I had always misread the name of this haunt of mine as “Sinners”, but now I stand corrected after a close reading of the Nigerian A. Igoni Barrett’s Love is Power, or Something Like That (2013). In this book of short stories, the writer tells the world that Simmers is “an oasis of Congolese rumba and modish prostitutes… Welcome to Nairobi, drunks and lovers.”

I go to Simmers almost every day when I’m in Nairobi, but I’ve never seen there the prostitutes Barrett talks about, but — well, well! — writers have a third eye. It is a pity that it takes a Nigerian to come all the way from West Africa to tell us about our watering holes as our artists write safe high-school compositions for possible adoption as set-books.

Since Meja Mwangi took us to the flea pits of the seedy parts of Nairobi in the 1970s with Going Down River Road and The Coackroach Dance, only F. M. Genga-Idowu has given us a really nice peek into what happens in Sabina Joy in Lady in Chain (1993).

Like Barrett’s work, several new African books are doing great in the global literary circuit because of their daring treatment of topical issues and their equally bold use of language.

Led by the Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — author of the beautiful Purple Hibiscus, the committed Half of a Yellow Sun and the dazzling Americanah — these writers tell stories that classical African literature couldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

The new writers brazenly storm where angels fear to tread, offering entertainment while at the same time commenting on profound issues touching on human nature.

The books may never be allowed in Kenyan schools because, to use an expression from one of them, their language is “so... sexy.”

In 2010, Chris Abani’s award-winning Grace Land was banned from a school district in Florida after a parent complained about its depiction of a same-sex scene.

We know Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie well in Kenya because her books are part of the Kwani catalogue and she visits us once in a while. But there is a whole army of new African writers talking on behalf of the continent.

Most of these new books are the works of immigrant writers in the West.

Some of the books are not even set in Africa (e.g., Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas and Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man). A question that will come, then, is whether these works are African literature. And to answer that question, we may have to answer first a similar one from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges: is Shakespeare’s Hamlet now Danish literature just because it is set in Denmark?

Some of the new-generation writers (e.g., Taiye Selasi and Mengestu Dinaw) have disavowed being African writers. But even Chris Okigbo, Ben Okri, and Buchi Emecheta have said similar things before about their works being “not really African.”

African American literature had a similar argument in the 1920s, with George S. Schuyler arguing that there is no such a thing as “Negro literature” while Langston Hughes demonstrated its existence, specificity, and special burdens.

AFRICAN EXPERIENCES

Between Schuyler and Hughes, it is clear whose legacy is still more alive than the other’s. Indeed, among the new generation of African writers, Adichie has higher chances of survival than the other artists because she anchors herself firmly in Africa or among African experiences abroad.

We know that, in claiming to be not African writers, African artists just mean that they shouldn’t be vacuum-packed as ethnic writers in the metropolitan academy, which has perfected these tendencies whenever it encounters any writing that is not white.

Through the new writing, Africa is roaring again as loud as it used to during the days of Leopold Sedar Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah.

However, there is a downside to this celebrity. It is the West that invented Africa. You can ask the philosopher Valentin Mudimbe to elaborate that argument if you doubt my authority.

The famous Congolese philosopher and professor of literature at Duke University in the US, explains in his 1988 scholarly masterpiece, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge how knowledge of Africa is produced from elsewhere usually in the form of distortions. The book is considered an African equivalent of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Even the word “Africa” is not African, just as much as “Kenya” is not a Kenyan word. “Kenya” is a European mispronunciation of Kirinyaga, the pre-colonial Bantu name for Mt Kenya.

In a situation where Africa is defined from outside through the work of hegemonic institution, the Western academy is quickly redefining African literature in a way that would shock African institutions that take Euro-American universities and presses seriously the way we do.

When I landed in America to teach African literature fresh from Africa, the only African writers taught there that I could recognise were Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton, J.M. Coetzee, and the author of Things Fall Apart, “Kinua Akibi” (sic).

In moves that may appear fraudulent to Africans, the publishing outlets in the West seem to be out to create their own version of African literature, which the academic institutions take up and canonise as “African literature” even if nobody in Africa reads these writers.

Unlike the classical African literature or works in indigenous languages, this new brand of writing will never criticise the West openly. You’re not likely to encounter negatively drawn white characters. White people are the saviours of the world, protecting Africans from fellow Africans. That is life, I guess. Even foundational African writers — Leopold Sedar Senghor, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Amos Tutuola — are all inventions of the West, published and canonised in European and American metropolises before being exported back to Africa as the quintessential of African writers.

Therefore, it would be advisable to read the new African writing in conversation with works produced in Africa, especially those in indigenous languages, to avoid a skewed image of the continent and its peoples.

Here are some of the works, apart from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s, I’ve really liked and would recommend to anybody trying to understand the new trends in African writing. Alongside Adichie’s, these books rock my world.

The Secret History of Las Vegas, by Chris Abani

This is a thriller about identity and the best book I’ve read in my life so far. It tells the story of Salazar, who is determined to solve the mystery of the spate of deaths among homeless people in Las Vagas. He encounters conjoined twins — named Fire and Water — who are members of a circus. One is handsome and the other deformed. When Fire and Water can’t explain a container of blood found near their car, Salazar seeks help from a South African-born Indian, Dr. Singh, who specialises in the study of psychopaths.

Some sections are told in the second narrative voice in a way reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying. But references to maps also reminds us of Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, the first African novel to use the second narrative voice in a sustained way. Both use “you” as employed through a child’s narrative perspective.

Indeed, Farah’s Maps is the first African novel to argue, if we may use an expression from Abani’s novel in a different context, that “children can be cruel.”

The 1966-born Nigerian author is a distinguished professor of English at Northwestern University. His other books include Grace Land and the The Virgin of Flames.

‘We Need New Names’ by NoViolet Bulawayo

This is a remarkable debut that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It is the story of a young girl’s journey out of Zimbabwe and to America.

The 10-year-old Darling travels to America in search of famous abundance only to find the place not as welcoming for an immigrant.

My best sentence in the novel comes from a description of the movies (some porn) that the narrator has watched so far. But let me quote something different from what the narrator’s uncle Kojo reportedly says about the Zimbabwean President Mugabe, and what happens when he posts his thoughts on Facebook about Mugabe:

“That there, boys, is the only ... with balls on our continent… Later, when I got to onto Facebook, he told the story there and there were so many likes and LOLs on his wall.” Published by Little, Brown and Company, the novel has been received with acclaim. The 1981-born NoViolet Bulawayo (pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele) was the winner of the Caine Prize in 2011. She is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (2012-2014).

‘Love is Power, or Something Like That’ by A. Igoni Barret

This is a collection of nine short stories, one of which is set in Simmers, a popular Nairobi bar. At Simmers in the book, we see a Maasai-Kikuyu girl with hips that stretch for a mile and has a child called Chinedu, fathered by a Nigerian.

The book is published in Minnesota, USA, by the Graywolf Press, who also published the Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011).

Teju Cole, the renowned New York-based new-generation Nigerian writer, praises the stories as “artful, unsparing, and unsentimental.” They plunge right into the heart of contemporary Africa, he adds, “and we would rather be nowhere else.”

Most of the stories are about Nigeria, though. Michela Wrong, the author of the book on corruption in Kenya titled It’s Our Turn to Eat, praises the book as portrait of Nigeria that, “like the country itself is a bewitching juxtaposition of the grotesque and uplifting, rotten and humane.”

Binyavanga says the book left him in tears, adding that the author “has an incredible range, a unique voice, and has the power to move.”

Born in 1979, he is the son of a Nigerian mother and the Jamaican novelist and poet Lindsay Barrett. He won the BBC World Service short story competition for 2005. His other collection of short stories is From Caves of Rotten Teeth, first published in 2005 and reissued in 2008.

‘Ghana must Go,’ by Taiye Selasi

This debut novel is a story that celebrates the power of love despite the many betrayals in a family.

In it, renowned surgeon and failed husband, Kweku Sai, dies suddenly in his home in suburban Accra. This forms an occasion for the family he abandoned years before to come together.

The author is a symbol of multiculturalism: born in London and brought up in Massachusetts, Selasi is the child of a Ghanaian father and a Nigerian mother of part-Scottish origins.

Selasie burst to the literary scene with her short story The Sex Lives of African Girls published in Granta in 2011.

Selasi says that the novelists that have influenced her most include Arundhati Roy and Toni Morrison, and she doesn’t believe there is such a thing as “African literature”.

‘Dust’ by Yvonne Awuor

Highly poetic, this novel by Kenya’s Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor would read to some as a bit over-written. But it is by far the best novel to come out of East Africa in many years.

The 1968-born author won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story ‘Weight of Whispers’, a depiction of the experiences of Rwandan refugees in Kenya. One of the bravest novels and a classic of modern times, Owuor’s Dust is a cross between the frankness of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the lyrical flourish of Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins.

It revolves around the family of Odidi Oganda, who is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi. His sister Ajany’s experiences and memories as she mourns him, exposing the reader stories of power, betrayal and unrequited love.

It is not just a personal story, but a national one too, in which the author meditates upon the many political murders that have happened since Kenyan independence in the 1960s.

Published by Penguin and available in Kenya from Kwani Trust, this is the novel you’re likely to catch me reading over and over again.

Unlike Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, Owuor’s Dust doesn’t appear to be addressing a Euro-American audience. It does not translate Dholuo and Kiswahili words whose “meanings” we can get from the context.

The best sentences in Dust appear towards the end of the 16th chapter: “Restless, insomniac, and pissed off, Isaiah wants to start a fight. He is irritated by the existence of a pebble-spectacled, weedy Swiss man who plows through the night’s women like a predatory combine harvester.”

‘The Hired Man’ by Aminatta Forna

This is the third novel from Aminatta Forna, a winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Set in Croatia, it depicts a society’s dark wartime secrets. Of Sierra Leonean origins, Aminatta Forna has established herself as an uncompromising chronicler of war. Her other two novels, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, both revolve around African civil wars.

About setting the new work in Croatia, she says that people should not write only about the places they know, but also about the things and places they would like to know. Those who want to read a story about war in Seira Leone, Ishmael Beah’s Radiance of Tomorrow (2013) would be a perfect read. It is about the challenges of resettlement after a decade-long civil war.

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