Sofia Samatar, Keguro Macharia, Aaron Brady in
The New Inquiry:Is “African Literature” a genre or a curse, a tradition or a cordoning off?
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| image via google plus |
(Aaron Bady: This conversation began, as conversations sometimes do, on twitter. Keguro Macharia and Sofia Samatar are two of the most brilliant thinkers I know, the sort of people that think thoughts that make new thoughts possible. Both are writers and critics at the same time; both are deeply invested in what African literature can be, and for that reason, are both usefully grumpy about the boxes it gets put in, contained, and constrained, and have a whole lot to say about why and how it might be otherwise. In this dialogue, they say some of these things, and I say a few things as well.
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| image via the Guardian |
This conversation occurred over email–nearly a year ago, now–and has been edited and polished and cleaned up. Over email, Sofia likes to use “&” instead of “and,” but in a high class publication like this one, we’re not having any of that. Some emojis may have been harmed in the process of producing this dialogue. But as a dialogue, as a conversation, this text retains the basically irritated grumpiness of an email exchange between friends with stakes in the question; this is not a position paper or even a debate, but a collective expression of idealistic dissatisfaction, the feeling that “African literature,” as it is imagined to be in academia and publishing, could use a collective re-think, and is, in fact, getting one, if we’d figure out how to listen.)
SOFIA SAMATAR: Lately I have been thinking about African literature as the literature that becomes nothing.“African subjectivity…is constituted by a perennial lack: lacking souls, lacking civilization, lacking writing, lacking responsibility, lacking development, lacking human rights and lacking democracy. It is an unending discourse that invents particular ‘lacks’ suitable for particular historical epochs so as to justify perpetuation of asymmetrical power relations and to authorize various forms of external interventions into Africa.” (Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Empire, Global Coloniality And African Subjectivity)This was kicked off when I read Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni on lack. We know that all literary works are copies, but African literature is a copy in a way that obliterates it (Ouologuem, Camara Laye, whatever, choose your plagiarism scandal). All literature is political, but African literature is political in a way that makes it cease to be literature (it’s “too political,” “didactic,” etc.). All literature is produced to suit a market, but African literature is produced to suit an illegitimate, inauthentic, outside market (it’s always in the wrong language). Its market also makes it nothing…
KEGURO MACHARIA: What a wonderful provocation! Yvonne Owuor wrote an article in the Kenyan papers—or was it in the East African?—where she provided a bibliography of women to read against and with, a wonderful situating of her own work. Her bibliography—provided in December—has all been ignored by people writing about her work.
I find this fascinating, the “void” from which she then must write, a very gendered void where she must always “respond to” Ngugi-Binyavanga, even as her work conjures up worlds neither could envision.
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