Where Soyinka and new bold writers with sexual themes meet

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. PHOTO| FILE 

In Summary

• 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.

By Evan Mwangi
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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.