I read Ellah Wakatama Allfrey’s new edited volume Africa 39 immediately
it came out in September, but I didn’t know what to say in public about
a book in which the word “sex” appears 10 times, “underwear” and its
variants equally frequently.
Taboo words are uttered liberally here, including the word “effing” (spelt the proper dictionary way).
This
is a collection of short stories and excerpts from new novels by young
African writers, and flamboyance is its hallmark. The variety is
astonishing. I met in the volume a galaxy of gifted writers I’d never
heard of before — Eileen Almeida Barbosa, Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, Sifiso
Mzobe, and several others — whose other works I’ve now started
reading.
Subtitled New Writing from
Africa South of the Sahara and “introduced” by eminent writer and
Nobel-Prize winner Wole Soyinka, the collection is a Hay Festival and
Rainbow Foundation project that, as expected, is bold, breathtaking, and
fresh.
However, the editor abdicates
her duty by allowing the materials to be introduced by someone else, a
male, bigger than her. Soyinka’s “introduction” says nothing about the
new writers; he’s likely not to have read any of them. If he must have
been included for the sake of publicity and marketing stunts, his piece
should have been in the appendix and titled “Irrelevant Here, but
Handsomely Paid For.”
As the title of
the collection of the 39 pieces suggests the authors are below 40. The
Kenyan writer and founder of the literary journal Kwani?, the
peerless Binyavanga Wainaina, helped in choosing the texts, and literary
veterans Elechi Amadi (author of The Concubine), Margaret Busby, and
Osonye Onwueme put together the 39 best selections.
With
my training at the University of Nairobi, I’m the conservative
Leavisite type, a prick who puts a premium on moral decency and
reverence of literary monuments.
But
after realising that there is no way you’re going to bar new African
writers from using “underwear” and similar motifs today, I’ve come to
see sexual references in literature as a crucial site upon which new
identities can be reassembled and subversive politics performed.
The
writers in this volume include the spectacular Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie, whose amazing story “The Shivering” is a marvel of lyricism and
humour as it explore themes of race, religion, and unconventional
sexuality among African immigrants in the US.
I can read Adichie again and again because she is skilful in her use of language and subtle in her critique.
Of
the writers in this volume, Adichie, Dinaw Mengestu, Tope Folarin,
Zukiswa Wanner, Nii Ayi Kwei Parkes, Chika Unigwe, are among those that
are assured of a successful career because even if they explore the
so-called new themes, they don’t suck up to imperialism and racism or
embrace the art-for-art’s-sake philosophy, a ploy young writers use to
avoid the western roots of problems they depict.
Kenya
is fairly well represented. We have Stanley Gazemba’s “Talking Money”, a
story about land ethics, which suggests that there is a link between
disrespect for land and avarice and domestic violence.
Like
the American philosopher J. Baird Callicott, Gazemba has an
unfavourable view of machines like four wheel-drive cars, which Henry
ole Kulet seems to still admire in Vanishing Herds, in spite of his
similar concern about the destruction of the environment and
dispossession of the poor.
Gazemba’s
story stands out because, while the other writers pretend to be rootless
cosmopolitans addressing sophisticated classes of people different from
the ones Soyinka derides in the introduction as “simple
proletariat/peasants”, Gazemba portrays the anxieties of simple people
like you and me.
I liked Linda
Musita’s story, “Cinema Daemons”, too. It portrays joblessness
sensitively and satirizes the evil Christian manipulation of the poor.
Although her heroes in life include David G. Maillu, we don’t get in her
story lines like Maillu’s in My Dear Bottle: “Yesterday I saw a nice
girl... one night I would love to eat her... turning her from every
side.”
Of course, because Musita’s
story is published in a venue that doesn’t care about the local too
much, it misspells “Buruburu”. I cry whenever I see such typos in these
sleek books that claim to be African.
The
other Kenyan writers in the collection are Clifton Gachagua, Mehul
Gohil, Ndinda Kioko, and Okwiri Oduor. They are all innovative in their
use of language and characterisation. You will enjoy their prose.
I
was quite flattered last week when a young man came up to me and,
taking a deep bow, thanked me for teaching him how to look for queerness
and erotic triangles in texts.
In
response, I advised him never to look for queer themes (or any other
theme or technique) in a text. You let the work speak; you respond to
what it says, in a mode of reading that the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick calls “reparative”, in which you’re non-aggressive and not so
thesis-based in pursuit of clues.
The
only unforgivable sin a critic can commit today is to snub featured
queer themes in a text under study, the way postcolonial novels that
openly present gay issues (e.g., Alfred Herbert Mendes’s 1935 Black
Fauns and Patricia Powell’s 1994 A Small Gathering of Bones) are either
ignored or have at times been discussed without any reference to their
homosexual themes
There are various
reasons you’re not likely to find the kind of overt sexual descriptions
found in Africa 39 among these young writers’ foundational predecessors,
such as Mongo Beti, Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Trained
in church-sponsored public schools in the 1950s, the early writers talk
about sex only obliquely and in heterosexual terms that privilege the
missionary position. Today elite educational institutions where these
young writers are likely to have studied are mostly secular, offering a
western curriculum. They feel an urge to experiment.
To be sure, Africa 39 does not dream to be a set-book in an African public school as, say, Soyinka’s Poems of Black Africa (1975) or the other pedagogical books published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series.
The
earlier writers also shunned treating sexual themes to avoid
compounding the Eurocentric stereotypes that painted the African as
over-sexed. Today there is no need to convince the westerners that we’re
not the walking phallic symbols they think we are.
Stylistically,
the earlier stories, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child
(1964), were usually told from the perspective of children and ended
when the young narrator or the focalising protagonist was on the
threshold of puberty and still knew very little about sex.
Adichie
is not the only writer in the volume who deals with gay themes. Her
fellow Nigerian, Okumaka Olisakwe’s “This is how I Remember it” is a
hilarious yet deeply philosophical meditation on lesbian desire.
Whenever
I read a good book, I shake all over with desire. But your sexual
orientation (queer, straight, or book-sexual) is not the only thing the
world cares about. You should read representations of sexual practices
in the context of other socio-economic circumstances or risk sounding
trivial.
Despite her remarkable
success in the experimental use of the second-person narrative voice in a
non-verbalised, non-epistolary address to an absent object of desire
that signals the inaccessibility of her elusive erotic wish, part of the
lesbian narrator’s failure in Olisakwe’s short story is the fleeting
way she treats strikes, campus sex-for-grades corruption, and civil
strife in Nigeria.
Even if the
self-deprecating narrating girl here were to fulfill what she seems to
recognise as obsessive sexual proclivities, it is unlikely that she
would attain wholeness as a human being.
Like
Soyinka’s “the interpreters” of the 1960s, this university student has
her priorities all wrong by focusing too much on raw sexual desire.
She
even risks fuelling the stereotype that practising lesbians are evil
(like the prefects who connive to have straight girls expelled from
school) and that gay people like the narrator herself are sick
individuals suffering attention hunger, stalkers that will pursue people
who have already declared hatred for gay practices.
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