Maaza Mengiste: ‘We’ve become a very visual society. How many photographs can we take?’
Interview
Maaza Mengiste: ‘The language of war is always masculine’
The Ethiopian-born novelist on her book about the female fightback against Mussolini’s invasion of her homeland, why Instagram blurs the vision, and the lure of Moby-Dick
Alex Preston Saturday 18 January 2020
Maaza Mengiste’s second novel, The Shadow King, is a reimagination of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Told from a range of perspectives, it focuses on the experience of the Ethiopian women who played a vital role in winning the war, as well as that of the Italian soldiers and the exiled king, Haile Selassie. Mengiste was born in Ethiopia in 1974, but her family fled the Ethiopian revolution when she was a child (a history she explored in her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze). She lives in New York and spoke to us from Zanzibar.
Top from left: David Diop, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Abdulrazak Gurnah. Bottom from left: Nadifa Mohamed, Damon Galgut, Karen Jennings. Composite: Getty, Andy Hall, Suki Dhanda
From the Booker to the Nobel: why 2021 is a great year for African writing
This year’s key prizes have gone to writers from Africa and the diaspora. Damon Galgut, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Abdulrazak Gurnah and others explain what winning means to them
Alex Clark Sat 20 Nov 2021 09.00 GMT
This has been a great year for African writing,” announced Damon Galgut, accepting the Booker prize earlier this month for his multilayered novel, The Promise, which tells the story of an Afrikaner family amid the political and social upheaval that followed the end of apartheid. “I’d like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard from the remarkable continent that I come from.”
It was not an overstatement. Galgut’s Booker win comes at the end of a year when many of the literary world’s major awards have been scooped by writers with origins and heritages in the countries of Africa. In June, David Diop’s second novel At Night All Blood Is Black, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis, won the International Booker prize, its visceral story inspired by the accounts of Senegalese riflemen’s experiences in the first world war. In the last few weeks, Senegal has again come to the fore, as Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men) won France’s Prix Goncourt, making its author the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to do so.
Last month, the Nobel prize for literature was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Zanzibar-born novelist who came to Britain in 1968 following his country’s revolution, and who has explored themes of displacement and dislocation over the course of 10 novels. Gurnah’s work, which includes the novels Paradise, By the Sea and, most recently, Afterlives, has gained critical respect for the subtlety and potency with which it examines what he calls the “tragic havoc” that has affected so many in the post-colonial era. Now that work is likely to reach new readers.
Along with Galgut, fellow South African novelist Karen Jennings was also on the Booker longlist this year for her novel An Island, about a lighthouse keeper’s encounter with a refugee. As with Gurnah, the prize will radically widen her readership – An Island had a print run of just 500 copies until the Booker nod, when thousands more were ordered. Meanwhile, Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed was shortlisted for The Fortune Men, about a Somali sailor wrongly accused of murder in Wales, based on a real-life miscarriage of justice in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay.
Reading the runes of these triumphs is a task that requires caution, however, and begins with important caveats. These are European prizes, with all that that implies: their histories are intertwined with the valorisation of the novel as a European creation, adopted and curated over centuries as, it might be argued, a bourgeois art form; if its self-appointed custodians are now concerned to recognise its wider potential, and to widen its parameters, who shapes that process and decides who is allowed to speak? Which readerships are they addressing? And, in speaking of both “African countries” and the “African diaspora”, which identities are privileged and which are marginalised?
Literary prizes are the visible tip of an iceberg formed of writers’ careers – often long, diligent and unsung – the endeavours of publishers and booksellers, and the creative ecologies of countries, languages and regions. As Ellah Wakatama, editor at large at the publisher Canongate and chair of the AKO Caine prize for African writing, notes of this year’s victories: “It’s not a moment that suddenly happened. It’s a moment that’s happened because of lots of work to open up the spaces.” And that work won’t be finished, she says, “until you get to the point that writers are being published in enough volume that they can contend for the Booker prize as part of our culture, not as something strange and unique.”
The final point of an intricate process, prizes are indicators of something – the constitution of the panels that bestow them, changing tastes, responsiveness to different kinds of work – but that something is complex and not always immediately obvious. Speaking to the writers in question, two elements recurred: that any discussion of a “phenomenon” must encompass the variousness of literary cultures with African heritage, and that this should be seen as the beginning of a conversation rather than its culmination. In Galgut’s words: “What I would hope is that conversations such as this will focus people’s thinking on it in a particular way, so that it does crystallise into being noticed, and being taken into account.”
I ask Gurnah whether he has any sense of a wider world beginning to listen to stories to which it has been resistant in the past. “That could be so,” he replies. “I hope so, of course. But I think that it’s maybe as a result of a great many things that have happened recently. There is perhaps a greater sense of what’s going on elsewhere; not just what is reported in the newspapers. I think there is a kind of counter narrative that’s also going on; not quite as much reliance on the established story, as it were, or the approved story.” He points to responses to events in Iraq, Syria and Libya – countries that have experienced heavy involvement from the US and the UK: “All of those have demonstrated the ugliness of the policies and the cruelties that are inflicted on weak governments. I think also the Black Lives Matter movement, and the business that’s been going on in Britain over the last few months, culture wars, statues and so on … all of these things probably do generate a kind of a greater awareness, but I doubt very much that they are what leads to literary prizes. I would like to think that the reason these prizes have been awarded is very much to do with the work that these writers have produced.”
Gurnah is acute – and also drily amusing – on the culture wars he alludes to, describing them as a “pointless conversation going on between people who are, it seems to me, mindlessly resisting things that are going to sweep them away anyway” (he is at pains to point out the sweeping away is purely intellectual) and maintains that he doesn’t give them too much headspace. “I don’t have a problem with them battling and contesting, it’s their business, but the argument, it seems to me, has been lost for at least a century and a half. In the sense that there is no moral position that such arguments can defend any more. And yet to continue somehow, they have to find another little platform to stand on and shout the same old rubbish. So, let them talk, I’m not bothered about it.”
Nonetheless, it’s clear that novelists are affected by the political and social climate in which they create their work, and in particular by how literary culture is regarded. For Galgut, the recognition of the Booker jury has yet to be echoed in South Africa; he hasn’t, for example, heard from the department of arts and culture, not an omission he takes personally, but one that is indicative of the regard in which writers are held in the country. If it does come, he suspects it will be a matter of optics; a bright spark to seize on in a gloomy political landscape. “The more cynical side of me says that most politicians in South Africa just don’t give a damn,” he says.
Like many writers, Galgut is keen to underline – as he did in his Booker acceptance speech – the need to support and strengthen literary culture through concrete practices, including addressing the prohibitive cost of books by removing VAT on them, a campaign that has been waged in South Africa for some years. Though it might seem a technical point, it’s one that is key to fostering reading and writing, and to ensuring that literature is not seen as a pastime of the elite – which, as The Promise explores, often equals the white population. “You have to create a culture in which reading and writing is valued,” Galgut says, “before people are going to invest the many, many hours required to be able to start doing this well. And that’s just not a priority.”
Talking to Timothy Ogene, a poet, academic and author who grew up in Nigeria and now lives in the US, yields fresh perspectives. His forthcoming satirical novel Seesaw is the story of an obscure and failing Nigerian novelist seized upon by a rich white American and brought to Boston to “represent” his country. Like Galgut, Ogene is acutely aware of the wealth and privilege inherent in western literary ecology, from publishing and distribution to the funding of prizes. But he also believes that recent prize successes highlight the variousness of voices from both within Africa and the diaspora, drawing attention to, for example, the cultures of Asian and Arab Africans and of the Indian Ocean. The question we should be asking, he says, is what constitutes African writing: “We’ve had a very narrow definition, and that comes from the 1950s and 60s when the Chinua Achebes and the Soyinkas began to emerge,” he argues. “You know, the anti-colonial national; those trends have become what we now see as African literature. But it’s beginning to change, I think. A lot of contemporary writers that begin to explore various strands of ideas, how to be African, look at different epistemologies.”
Fundamental to creativity is agency; and agency includes the ability and power to resist external expectations and constraints. For Ogene, who says that he tries to go to “places that are not typically frequented by African writers”, and thereby to open himself up to “new ways of approaching race or identity or being African in the world”, the challenge is to escape binaries. “It’s time to begin to move beyond that and find connections that are not just ideological and political.”
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men, which focuses on a “forgotten” writer nicknamed “the black Rimbaud”, who is discovered years later by a young Senegalese novelist, is a narrative that is powered by “the ambiguous reception of black African writers in the western literary field,” he tells me. It’s striking that his novel is based on a real writer, Yambo Ouologuem, a Malian novelist who, having been feted, was accused of plagiarism and subsequently dropped out of view, and whose work raises fascinating questions of authorship and authority.
For Sarr, his latest novel brings into focus the apparent “anomaly” of becoming the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to win the Prix Goncourt since its inception in 1903. It’s an exclusion that raises “structural questions and issues of literary sociology linked to colonial domination and its consequences (racism, editorial contempt, ignorance, a lack of interest among the literary milieu and the French public in the output of novels coming from the [global] francophone space of French-speaking writers, particularly African).” While this anomaly may appear to have been “corrected” with this recent award, he says, “I think it would be a mistake to interpret it as a rare and precious stately grace. If it’s seen as an exception to the norm, that would still mean that nothing has changed, that this prize is a simple exemption of the rules and we’ll soon be back to the old order.”
Plurality and empathy are characteristics of this year’s prize-winning novels. The crucial impetus for the future is to keep spaces not only open, but expanding. As Sarr says: “The Prix Goncourt is a tremendous encouragement for me in the construction of my work, but also for African writers, especially young people. The future is theirs … Above all, I don’t want to be an exception. I must not be. I am not.”
In the summer of 2002, I walked into a hair salon in New Jersey and asked a stylist to cut off all my hair. I was done having hair. Enough with the pain of straightening it with a chemical that scalded parts of my scalp and left others in blisters. Enough with the discomfort of braiding it – eight hours of tugging and wincing followed by painkillers to ease the soreness, or a full day of not being able fully to turn my head.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, posing from his home in Canterbury, England, following the Nobel Prize announcement
Can the Nobel Prize 'revitalize' African literature?
Abdularazak Gurnah is the fourth author from sub-Saharan Africa to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Is the tide turning for African writers?
Date 08.10.2021 Annabelle Steffes-Halmer
Two writers from sub-Saharan Africa are honored with prestigious literary prizes this month.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, an author who was born in Zanzibar and has lived in Britain since the late 1960s, is this year's Nobel Prize for Literature laureate. His award brings the total number of laureates from sub-Saharan Africa to receive the prestigious prize to four.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o: 'I don’t think we were meant to come out alive'
A vicious attack upon returning to Kenya after 22 years has not deterred Ngugi wa Thiong’o from believing in its democratic prospects; his new book deals with despotism, he tells Maya Jaggi
rowing up in the “white highlands” of colonial Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong’o was enthralled by flying ace Biggles. But as a teenager during the state of emergency in the 1950s, when his brother joined the Mau Mau uprising against British rule, he lived a “drama of contradictions”. The RAF, on whose side Kenyans fought in the second world war, was the same force, he later wrote, “dropping bombs on my own brother in the forests of Mount Kenya”.
"Striving for the wind" mainly narrates the relationship between Baba Pesa and Baba Baru, who are neighbours. On the one hand, the former is proud and pompous and known to be the father of money. The largest, richest man on his hill and the next and the next. Who is constantly on the look-out for any situation that would tarnish his reputation. Disgracefully enough, he has a well learned son called Juda [name given to him in weird circumstances] who due to his constant drunkenness was popularly labelled as the village drunkard. Juda, whose principles differs from that of his father is fond of haranguing the villagers on the greater values in life.
In the East African Kwatee Republic of the 1990s, the dictatorship is about to fall, and the nation’s exiles are preparing to return.
Series: Modern African Writing Series
Hardcover: 200 pages
Publisher: Ohio University Press (July 8, 2015)
Language: English
One of these exiles, a young man named Kalumba, is a graduate student in the United States, where he encounters Mrs. Shaw, a professor emerita and former British settler who fled Kwatee’s postcolonial political and social turmoil. Kalumba’s girlfriend, too, is an exile: a Puerto Rican nationalist like her imprisoned father, she is an outcast from the island. Brought together by a history of violence and betrayals, all three are seeking a way of regaining their humanity, connecting with each other, and learning to make a life in a new land. Kalumba and Mrs. Shaw, in particular, are linked by a past rooted in colonial and postcolonial oppression, yet they are separated by their differing accounts of what really happened.
Jula saw her as she stood hesitating in front of the big black iron-sheet gate; the entrance to his compound. Something about her physical attitude resonated in his breast. The late morning drizzle that had accompanied his walk back home from Marumi town, where he ran several businesses, had intensified. The woman at the gate adjusted the headscarf over her head to protect her face from the drizzle and the chilly breeze. Then she, perhaps on hearing his footfalls, turned her gaze away from the gate and faced him. They looked at each other, the familiar in the other etched vaguely against the haze of time, which gradually cleared, and they stood exposed to mutual recognition. Still, time had left its sadness. He sensed it in the crow's feet at the corners of her feline eyes, above the high cheekbones. She now had a mellow beauty, and the way she was dressed – black boots, a raincoat over a dark polo-neck sweater, and the scarf on her head and around her neck – made him think of a widow. The face of a widow, he said in his mind. She had always made him say phrases in his mind. She eyed him, trying to gauge the ravages of time on him. His face, still ruggedly handsome, was now a little gaunt. There were specks of grey in his hair and in the stubble on his chin. But she thought he wore his fifty-five years with a somewhat sad dignity.
The Zambian-born writer published 49 books and sold more than 140 million copies worldwide
Agence France-Presse Sun 14 Nov 2021 03.29 GMT
Author Wilbur Smith died at his home in South Africa on Saturday after a decades-long career in writing, his office said. He was 88.
With 49 titles under his belt, Smith became a household name, with his swashbuckling adventure stories taking readers from tropical islands to the jungles of Africa and even Ancient Egypt and World War II.
On Thursday, 13 October, Bob Dylan was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Academy cited the musician for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Kenyan writer Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o who was among the hotly-tipped names to take home this year’s Prize, lost out again. Yet he remains as one of Africa’s greatest voices is already assured.
Stephen Williams 5 September 2016
We bring you a 2013 interview with the celebrated writer where he talked to NA’s Stephen Williams on his writing process, his inspirations, the need for a language policy in Africa and so much more.
Gail Collins outlines the growth of African literature, from the 18th century to modern times.
15 April 2021
In 1761, a small child, Phillis Wheatley (as renamed by the family she worked for) was captured and taken from her home in West Africa to Boston in the US. Fortunately, she landed in the arms of a benevolent family who taught her to read and write but they would have been totally unaware that this would lead her to become the first African to have work published in the UK and US with her collection of poetry – Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral – in 1773.