Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture

When the suspect in the attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina was identified, the authorities circulated a photograph of him wearing a jacket adorned with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and post-UDI Rhodesia.

The symbolism isn't subtle. Like the confederate flag that flies over the South Carolina capitol, these are flags of explicitly white supremacist governments.

Rhodesia plays a particular role within right-wing American militia culture, linking anti-communism and white supremacy. The downfall of white Rhodesia has its own sort of lost cause mythic power not just for avowed white supremacists, but for the paramilitarist wing of gun culture generally.

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)

via The Paris Review

Nadine Gordimer has died at the age of 90, a significant age to reach, and yet, as always with the loss of a major figure (particularly one who stayed active and known) it feels like a robbery. We are greedy, we living people.

Writers satiate some of our greed against death by leaving us with their words. Gordimer's oeuvre is large (she began publishing fiction in South Africa in the late 1940s), and her fiction in particular will live long past this moment of her body's death.

Because Gordimer was so active in the anti-apartheid struggle, and her writing so often addresses the situation in South Africa at the time of its writing, it is easy to fall into the trap of reducing her to a political writer and to ignore or downplay the artistry of her work. She sometimes encouraged this view in her essays and interviews, but she also understood that she was not a propagandist, telling Jannika Hurwitt in 1979, "I am not by nature a political creature, and even now there is so much I don’t like in politics, and in political people—though I admire tremendously people who are politically active—there’s so much lying to oneself, self-deception, there has to be—you don’t make a good political fighter unless you can pretend the warts aren’t there."

Submergence by J.M. Ledgard

People ask, what kind of writer do you want to be. I say, I want to be like Brancusi. I want my writing to have that rigour, that beauty, and that ability to see the world in a new way.
—J.M. Ledgard

Coffee House Press is one of the very few publishers whose books I will buy simply because Coffee House published them (another, in case you're curious, is Small Beer Press. Apparently, I am partial to publishers with beverages in their names). At this year's AWP conference, I happened to pass the Coffee House booth, and I was curious to see what was new. On a table at the front of the booth, J.M. Ledgard's Submergence grabbed by eye: a novel partially about events in East Africa, with a cover blurb by Teju Cole, published by Coffee House ... how could I resist? I could not. Life caught up with me, though, and I didn't have time to read the book until this week.

I begin by writing about where and why I bought the book because I'm trying to stay specific and concrete when what I most want to do is enthuse and exclaim, and I fear hyperbole, and I fear overselling the book, setting up expectations that can't be met by anything written by a mortal. I want to say: This is the best contemporary novel I have read in a long time, and I've read some excellent contemporary novels this year. I want to say: If you can only read one book in the next week/month/year, read this book. I want to say: We need more books like this book, and yet how can other books be like this book? I want to say: This book could change your life.

I won't really say any of that, though, because it all sounds jejune, and anyway, different readers respond differently. For instance, at The Guardian, Todd McEwen had a generally negative response to Submergence. Reading his review made me think terrible things about Todd McEwen, I will admit, but it also reminded me that some people are blind stupid illiterate unimaginative willfully ignorant willfully narrow in their aesthetics stupid stupid stupid opinions vary. Rather than foaming at the mouth like a madman, I shall try instead to describe a few of the many qualities I find so admirable in this extraordinary book.

(If you would rather judge for yourself, Bomb published a good excerpt.)

Reading In the Heart of the Country

I create myself in the words that create me.
—In the Heart of the Country

I've recently completed a draft of a paper on J.M. Coetzee's second novel, In the Heart of the Country, writing about the book and its contexts (with regard to trauma theory and Afrikaner Nationalism), but as I read various scholarly analyses of it, as well as reviews of the novel when it was first published, what struck me was the book's relative neglect compared to Coetzee's other novels, and the general lack of enthusiasm for it. When I first read it some years ago, I found it befuddling and often tedious. But it stuck with me, even haunted me, and that's why I decided to take some time digging into it. Older now, more experienced in reading Coetzee, I found it immensely rich and a powerful reading experience. Though I've spent a few months reading and re-reading it closely, I still feel like I'm only beginning to get a grasp of all it's up to.

It is impossible to sum up In the Heart of the Country through a simple phrase such as, "This novel is about _________." That blank is full of possibilities. Those possibilities are, in fact, primarily what the book is about: the possibilities (and limits) of meaning.

Mandela

11 February 1990

I was 14 years old on the day Nelson Mandela walked out of prison. I remember the television I watched it on, the room I was in, the couch I sat on. I was a white kid in rural New Hampshire, and I remember being overwhelmed with inexpressible hope, inchoate happiness.

*

I knew that there was widespread interest in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, in the United States of America, but to see that reflected in the conduct of the people when I arrivedd in New York was something very encouraging, very inspiring. The excitement of the people, the remarks they made which indivated unwavering solidarity with our struggle — in the street, in buildings, offices and resident ... flats — it was just amazing; it swept me from my feet completely ... To know that you are the object of such goodwill makes one humble indeed. And that is how I felt.

—Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself p. 377

*

Mandela's death yesterday was certainly no surprise — indeed, obituary writers have had their copy prepared for some time — and yet I was deeply shaken. Though I have some South African acquaintances, I've never been there. Mandela's death has no practical effect on my life, because the Mandela I know is an image, a recording, a representation, something beyond his body's life or death. And yet it is wrenching to think that we now live in a world without Mandela.

There have already been countless tributes, of course, some excellent. (Keep your eyes on Africa Is a Country for some of the best. See also Timothy Burke's excellent "Be Nelson Mandela". And Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Apartheid's Useful Idiots".) Here, I want to note the moment, to remember just how sad it felt to live in the hours after Mandela had gone, and then to replace the sadness with the memory of the hopeful happiness I felt that day when I was 14.

*

When I was among the crowd I raised my right fist and there was a roar. I had not been able to do that for twenty-seven years and it gave me a surge of strength and joy.

—Long Walk to Freedom p. 491

Zulu by Caryl Férey

This review originally appeared in the print edition of Rain Taxi in the fall of 2010. I didn't realize until I read this post at Africa is a Country that the book was being made into a film starring Forrest Whitaker and Orlando Bloom. I wrote as restrained and fair a review as I could; I hated the book. But since the movie is coming out, perhaps this review is of interest.

ZULU

Caryl Férey

Europa Editions ($15)

French writer Caryl Férey's Zulu isn't likely to win any awards from the South African Department of Tourism, for though the novel is as full as a guidebook with information about the country's history and culture, the story it tells is a relentlessly brutal one, and the South Africa that emerges from the narrative is a place of chaotic violence, rampant drug traffic, densely-populated slums rife with doom and disease, and corruption bursting from every level of society.

The novel is a police procedural portraying an investigation into murders that have a connection to a new and particularly potent drug that has entered Cape Town.  The narrative drifts between various characters' points of view.  One of the protagonists, police officer Ali Neuman, chief of Cape Town's homicide division, is of Zulu ancestry, and Férey peppers the story with information about the decades of tension during the time of South Africa's white minority rule between the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party and the most prominent anti-apartheid organization, the African National Congress.  To Férey's credit, the brutality in Zulu is not portrayed as inherent to some sort of universal, barbaric African nature, but is linked to complex social and political forces, many of them the byproducts of apartheid.  (Nonetheless, at the end of the story, only whites are left standing.)

A Decade of Archives 7: 2006

This is the seventh in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

Miami Vice

K: There are times when I'd really love to live in your world.
M: It's full of existential crises, but not a lot of headaches.
K: I've already got the existential crises, so it might be a nice change.
M: There's a reason the first album that ever made a strong impression on me was Stop Making Sense.
K: So that's your aesthetic credo?
M: No, I don't have a credo. It's just something I thought of and so I said it. It's probably not even true.

—"A Conversation After Miami Vice"

2006 seems to me an ideal year of The Mumpsimus, not because all of the posts are high quality (they aren't!) but because the diversity of posts covers just about everything I think of as Mumpsimusian. In other years, the balance has been in one particular direction or another, but if anyone were to ask me to sum up the most dominant ideas and concerns of this blog, I'd tell them to roam around in the 2006 archives.

I'm not one for taxonomy, but it's occasionally useful, so let's taxonomize.

Black Star Nairobi by Mukoma wa Ngugi

Last year, I wrote about Mukoma wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat, seeing it as an interesting, if flawed, first novel. Now Melville House has released Mukoma's second novel, a sequel to the first: Black Star Nairobi, a political thriller that begins as a detective story and ends up taking us from Kenya to Mexico to the U.S. and then back to Kenya at the time of the election crisis of 2007/08.

The writing in Black Star Nairobi is more assured than in Nairobi Heat, and the plot and structure are more ambitious. The ambition is also the novel's curse, because the text is not up to the task of portraying and dramatizing the richness of its worlds and ideas — it's a book that needs to be twice its length or half its plot.

Some Writing About What We Wrote About When We Wrote About The Caine Prize

Though I decided at the last minute not to join the third annual Caine Prize Blogathon after having  participated in the first two, I am still interested in the Prize, its effect(s), and its complex relationship to the idea of "African literature". Thus, I read with great interest an article about recent reactions to the Caine Prize that has been published in the latest issue of the venerable journal Research in African Literatures.

The article, "The Caine Prize and Contemporary African Writing" by Lizzy Attree, includes a discussion of the first year of the Caine Prize blogathon, a discussion which at first was very exciting for me, because it's nice to have an endeavor you've participated in noticed.

Once I actually read all of what Attree had written, though, I became annoyed. The trouble is, I don't really recognize the actual discussion in the discussion that Attree says we had. Or, rather, I recognize parts of it, but because Attree focuses on those parts at the expense of the whole, it feels distorting.

I think there are quite a few problems with the essay overall, but I'll leave it for other people to look at the entire piece. (Her characterization of postcolonial theory is especially problematic.) Here, I'm going to reply to one part — just four paragraphs — and I am only going to speak for myself and use evidence from my own posts, though I think a lot of the writing of other people involved in the Caine Prize blogathons also stands up against Attree's claims.

Since the essay is available only via academic databases, I will place here the four relevant paragraphs one by one as I discuss them, so that my analysis and response to their claims can be fairly assessed. I won't pretend mine is an impartial analysis.

Achebe

Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013

It's going to take me a while to have anything coherent to say about Chinua Achebe now that he has died. Not just because he was a great writer — and he was a great writer, as Aaron Bady says, "full stop". But because, right now at least, I can't think of a more deeply influential writer in our era. Not just for Things Fall Apart, though that book certainly did a lot. But for so much else — his work as an editor for the African Writers Series, his essays on Conrad, his championing of Amos Tutuola after Tutuola's work had gone out of fashion, etc. etc. (If you ever needed evidence of the irrelevance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fact that Achebe never won it is Exhibit A.)

The best writing I've seen so far on Achebe in the wake of his death comes from Keguro Macharia. You should read the whole, beautiful essay, but here is a taste:

His departure now – euphemism must be used, if only once – feels much like an encounter with his work: it was unexpected because it had been possible to believe that he was beyond mortality. Achebe simply was. He existed in the world and the world existed because he did. I could afford to take his existence for granted, could afford not to teach or discuss or write about his work, because he simply was. His being in the world made certain things unnecessary. Because he was. Certain figures inspire a kind of faith that they have transcended death, and their deaths hit all the harder – most recently for me, Adrienne Rich who, like Achebe, simply was. When they die – euphemisms can no longer work – we continue to call their names, hoping that they will return to us, that their ghosts will continue to energize the labor they started and sustained and that we now feel unable to continue. So it is that we continue to call for Audre Lorde. Believing, as we must, that she can still provide the right words, the necessary words, the transforming words.

Simon Gikandi has written that Chinua Achebe “invented” African literature. This is not a claim about who wrote first – other Africans wrote before Achebe. Nor is it a claim about the volume of his work – others have written more. It is a claim, I think, about Achebe as an institution builder, as one who made possible a certain kind of imagination and, in his role as editor with the African Writers Series, made possible many other imaginations for African literature. Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be given to a writer is this: that a particular book has been written. A particular imagination explored. A room populated. And multiple other rooms made possible.

Few contemporary Africans, if any, feel the need to write another Things Fall Apart. Indeed, by the mid-1960s, Things Fall Apart could not be written again. Achebe’s work had given African writers the permission to pursue their geo-histories, to take multiple paths, to pursue the mystical and the routine, the profane urban and the perverse rural, the unending past and the foreclosed future. Things Fall Apart had been written, and African writing pursued its multiple afters, with Achebe as inspiration, as guide, and as champion.

"Bombay's Republic" Wins the Caine Prize

According to the Caine Prize on Twitter, the winner of this year's award is Rotimi Babatunde for "Bombay's Republic".

You can read the story as a PDF via the Prize website. It was the first of this year's nominees that I wrote about as part of the Caine Prize Blogathon, and my post also has links to other bloggers' (quite varied) takes on the story. It was certainly among the top of the stories for me, though I'm glad I didn't have to make the choice, as this year's group of nominees was generally impressive overall. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Catching Up with the Caine Prize

This is my fourth post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.)

With 2 stories remaining for our Caine Prize Blogathon of Wonder, I fell behind.

Thus, this post will be about the last two stories, "La Salle de Départ" by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo and "Hunter Emmanuel" by Constance Myburgh.

Both are solid stories with their own virtues and are, much to the jurors' credit, utterly different from each other.

Blogging the Caine Prize 2012: "Urban Zoning"

This is my second post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.) I'm coming a little late to Billy Kahora's story "Urban Zoning" (PDF) because it was finals week at one school where I teach and the last week of classes at another, so I haven't had much spare time, and then when I did finally start writing this it kept growing, and I disagreed with myself frequently, and I couldn't make anything cohere, and finally I gave up and just tried to salvage some of the maelstrom of questions and doubts that plagued me as I wrote. There are some thorough and excellent posts about this story up now, so I highly recommend following some of the links to them, which this week I will put first rather than last, because really if you do want to know about the story, you should read those...

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Other writers' posts about "Urban Zoning" by Billy Kahora:
Black Balloon
Stephen Derwent Partington
The Reading Life
Backslash Scott
Ikhide
Loomnie
ndinda
City of Lions
zunguzungu
Practically Marzipan
bookshy
Cashed In
aaahfooey

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Thinking his way through (or toward) "Urban Zoning", Aaron Bady digs into a bunch of provocative questions about what it means for something to be an African story and/or a Kenyan story, and Stephen Derwent Partington, City of Lions, and Ndinda at Inkdrops, among others, have all placed "Urban Zoning" within its specifically Kenyan cultural context. It is a story very much of a particular setting: Nairobi (and, according to Kahora himself, a specific time: the '90s). That does, and should, raise the questions Aaron and others have asked about the story's resonance and even intelligibility to an audience that is not deeply familiar with the specific reality from which it is drawn.

In many ways, though, all fiction (all art! all everything!) depends on the knowledge, experience, and assumptions each audience member brings to it. This is also true for aspects of the story that have nothing to do with its setting — I think we saw with last week's story how each reader's assumptions about what a story should be and do affected people's appreciations for the actual story in front of them. My own preferences for fabulism and metafiction led me to notice, emphasize, and value those elements of the story more than other readers generally did, and my relative indifference to gritty realism in some respects got in my way with "Urban Zoning", a story I admired (there's some excellent writing in it) but was, after two readings, pretty much indifferent to.

It's entirely possible that my indifference stemmed from my having only superficial knowledge of Kenyan culture and Nairobi in particular. I've been there, but as a tourist, and not for an extended period of time. I've read more Kenyan fiction than the average American, but that's not saying much. Nonetheless, the setting felt less alienating for me than a story set in, say, Eastern Europe, a region about which I know almost nothing, have never traveled to, and have only occasionally read about. The characters, situations, and allusions were far easier for me to understand, or at least recognize, I think, than just about anything in The Illiad. At least with "Urban Zoning", I could think, "This feels like a sort of update of Going Down River Road..."

Blogging the Caine Prize 2012: "Bombay's Republic"

This is my first post in this year's Caine Prize for African Writing blogathon, organized by the ever-awesome Aaron Bady (Zunguzungu). Our participant numbers have grown exponentially this year, which is very exciting. If you don't remember from last year, the basic idea is that a bunch of us bloggery people write weekly posts about each of the short stories nominated for the Caine Prize, so helpfully provided in PDF form to anyone who wants to read them at the Caine Prize website. We will do our best to keep our posts updated with links to each others' posts, creating a giant hyperlinked conversation. The virtues of this are many — none of us feels obliged to be comprehensive about the stories, there's the potential for extremely different viewpoints to be offered, and, no matter what, a bunch of people are writing and reading about African short fiction. I'll post the links so far at the end of this post, and keep it updated as more appear over the next few days. 


And now, to the story: "Bombay's Republic" by Rotimi Babatunde, which you can read in PDF form via this link.




The first thing you should know is that "Bombay's Republic" is a delightful story, a story that, for me, fit all the requirements for that old cliché: a pleasure to read. I say that because this is not always true of Caine Prize nominees, or, to be honest, nominees for all sorts of literary awards — there can be, with some nominees, a certain sense of ... dutifulness. Stories dutifully written and dutifully read.

And yet I wonder about that statement, now that I've typed it. Where, exactly, does dutifulness live in a text? Where would I get the perception that a writer was writing dutifully rather than passionately? How would I respond if the writer were suddenly beamed into my living room and said, "Hey, you! I wrote that story because it's a story I had to tell, a story that burned at my fingertips, a story that, if I didn't tell it, would have caused me to spontaneously combust! There's nothing dutiful about it!"

While it is the word that most quickly comes to mind when I think of many (not all, certainly) past Caine Prize nominees, I am also suspicious of it, because it seems to hide an utterly subjective evaluation behind a somewhat objective-sounding statement and also to close down a discussion of what, exactly, caused the evaluator to have such a feeling: what in the text failed to evoke a response in a reader due to that reader's expectations of texts, knowledge of contexts, and experience of life and reading.

Therefore, what I will consider here is the way I perceived "Bombay's Republic" to be very much different from a dutiful story, to be, in fact, the sort of story where the first word that comes to mind when I think of it is delightful.

A Good Sign for the Caine Prize?

I've voiced my qualms about the Caine Prize for African Literature before, particularly in terms of the stories that often end up winning the award, and so I found this statement by this year's Chair of Judges, Bernardine Evaristo, encouraging:

I’m looking for stories about Africa that enlarge our concept of the continent beyond the familiar images that dominate the media: War-torn Africa, Starving Africa, Corrupt Africa — in short: The Tragic Continent. I’ve been banging on about this for years because while we are all aware of these negative realities, and some African writers have written great novels along these lines (as was necessary, crucial), isn’t it time now to move on? Or rather, for other kinds of African novels to be internationally celebrated. What other aspects of this most heterogeneous of continents are being explored through the imaginations of writers?

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with individual Tragic Continent stories — I like tragic stories! — but rather with the accumulated, repetitious weight of them, the monotony and predictability. (I wouldn't say "time to move on" — that implies we've "covered" the wars, the child soldiers, etc., and now we can read about happy things; I think it's vastly more complex than that, and I'm sure Evaristo does, too.) There have certainly been plenty of tragedies and atrocities that need to be represented and explored in fiction, but Evaristo voices my concerns exactly: why does African fiction have to be less diverse and heterogeneous than any other fiction? Is it because that's what publishers think European and American readers will read? Should the Prize really be governed by European and American stereotypes of the continent? The great potential of the Caine Prize is that it doesn't have to adhere to publishers' opinions about what Europeans and Americans think is "proper" African fiction.

Evaristo's final paragraph almost had me jump up out of my seat to exclaim, "Yes!":

For African fiction to remain more than a passing fad on the world stage it needs to diversify more than it does at present. What about crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, more history, chick lit? To be as diverse as, for example, European literature and its myriad manifestations. Imagine if the idea of ‘European Literature’ only evoked novels about the holocaust, communist gulags and twentieth century dictatorships. I’m looking forward to the time when the concept of ‘African literature’ also cannot be defined; when it equates to infinite possibilities and, as with Europe, there are thousands of disparate, published writers, with careers at every level and reaching every kind of reader.

Now that's an idea of "African literature" I can get behind.

The White Savior Industrial Complex

Teju Cole:

The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

See also Aaron Bady's excellent collection of reading material: "On the genre of 'Raising Awareness about Someone Else’s Suffering'".

Nairobi Heat by Mukoma wa Ngugi

I read Mukoma wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat (part of Melville House's International Crime series) a few weeks ago, but haven't had the time to write much about it, so what I say here is likely to be more general than it would have been before. Though I think the novel has some significant flaws, those flaws are mitigated, for me at least, by a number of real strengths, and in the weeks since finishing it, moments from the novel have scratched through my thoughts and memory. For that reason, I think it's a book well worth reading.

First, to get unpleasantness out of the way, here's what I see as the novel's flaws: Events often feel like they exist for the sake of the plot's convenience and not for any reason organic to the narrative; some moments that should evoke an emotional connection from readers are not set up in a dramatic way that would allow such emotion to come to the surface and are instead sped through (a particular fault in the romantic relationship that propels some of the major events of the second half of the book); some of the characters are little more than hardboiled detective novel clichés in their general outline, if not their particulars.

However, I would not write about a small press publication of a writer's first novel if I didn't think its virtues were greater than its flaws, and it is the virtues I think worth spending time with here.

Report Realism

At Gukira, Keguro has posted some provocative thoughts on "report realism" in Kenyan fiction:

Over the past 15 years and more specifically the past ten years or so, Kenyan writing has been shaped by NGO demands: the “report” has become the dominant aesthetic foundation. Whether personal and confessional or empirical and factual or creative and imaginative, report-based writing privileges donors’ desires: to help, but not too much; to save, but not too fast; to uplift, but never to foster equality. One can imagine how these aims meld with traditional modes of realism and naturalism and also speak to modernist truncations and postmodern undecidability. However, report realism names a more historically accurate way to name a genre indebted (very literally) to NGOS in Kenya.

The report aesthetic goes beyond citing NGO facts and figures. It is concerned, above all, with a search for truth and accuracy and is threatened by imaginative labor.

I cannot comment on the specific accuracy of Keguro's observations, because I'm not in Kenya reading aspiring writers' work. But I was interested in the observations because when I was in Kenya (over five years ago, now) and talked with some young writers there, the sorts of contemporary writers they cited as inspiring them were people like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. Indeed, that's mostly what was available for fiction in the bookstores, with most stores putting Kenyan and African fiction, if they stocked it at all, in dusty corners. Yet the writers who cited these inspirations to me were, with one exception that I can think of (someone who'd spent quite a bit of time in the U.S., in fact), writing in a very realistic, documentary manner. That can happen anywhere, though, if you only talk to a limited sample of people; I hoped (and assumed) that there were other writers out there aspiring to different sorts of writing, whether fantastical in its content or experimental in its form, because aesthetic diversity makes for healthy reading-writing ecosystems. And there is some such work being written (heck, Ngugi's Wizard of the Crow is a good example); it just seems hard for it to get attention or to be celebrated in the way documentary realism is.

I'm a dedicated (if undisciplined) reader of African fiction, and particularly Kenyan fiction, but I'm very much an amateur and obviously an outsider, so I'm wary of saying anything other than, "Go read Keguro's post," because anything I say could easily be taken as a white American guy telling African writers what to write. My desire is not to tell anybody anywhere what they should write; instead, I would hope to encourage us all to do what we can to create the space for people to write what most compells them. Great writing of all types happens when writers find the forms and styles that allow them to express their own unique experiences and imaginings.

The danger of report realism is its normative power — if writers think this is what they should write, or this is the only type of writing that will get them an audience beyond their closest friends, then it is not just limiting, it is insidious and harmful.

Those of us outside of Africa who want to encourage more attention to African writing and more opportunities for African writers sometimes reinforce such harmful assumptions. The Caine Prize is a perfect example. In my Rain Taxi review of Ten Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing, I said that the Caine Prize judges' narrow tastes are helping to limit the possibilities for writing from the continent. That was born out again during this year's Caine Prize. I don't blame the writers for that.

J.M. Coetzee was criticized (rightfully, I think) for lending his name and fame to an African fiction prize/anthology that ended up including, it seems, only white writers. It looks like Coetzee only read the 21 finalists and then was tasked with choosing winners from that group, and that the reading was anonymous, so his opportunities for knowing much about the background of the writers was limited, but still, he's a hugely famous Nobel winner and could, at the end, have pulled his name or said something publicly. He didn't, but he did write the most reluctant introduction to such a book that I've ever read. The very first paragraph reads:

The 21 stories that made it to the final round this year are of a generally higher standard than the finalists for the last award, which suggests that the standard of entries as a whole may be higher. If so, this is a promising development. On the other hand, the kind of short-story writer we are all hoping that an award of this magnitude will attract, recognize, reward, foster, and perhaps even launch into the wider world — the newcomer with naked talent, a feel for language, and a fresh vision of the world —stubbornly fails to arive.

Ouch.

I don't know about "naked talent" (what does that look like in a text?), but the feel for language and fresh vision of the world are certainly things that have been, with some exceptions, lacking from the Caine Prize, too. The workshop stories presented in the annual Caine Prize anthologies, though, show that this isn't necessarily the fault of the writers, but of the type of writing that gets rewarded and encouraged.

And that, ultimately, is why I think Keguro's post is important, and why I hope it will not only be read and debated, but that it will help lead to an environment where report realism isn't the only option. Keguro says it better than I ever could:

I want to advocate for wild imaginations—wild forms of writing, non-linear narratives, an obsessive attention to detail, writing that strains at the edges, reaches beyond itself. I’m interested in writing that lives in secret folders on computers, scurries under beds and into drawers when friends visit, worries that it will be deemed obscene, crazy, impossible. I’m interested in writing that dares truth-the truth of feeling, the truth of form, the truth of seeking, the truth of language seeking byways and creating paths. I’m interested in writing beyond report realism.

Notes on Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Petals of Blood, Moses Isegawa calls the novel "the definitive African book of the twentieth century". I would only disagree because I do not think there is any one definitive African book, nor should there be -- one of the problems African literatures face when sampled here and there is the tendency for one or two books to be seen as giving some sort of definitive portrait of a continent of over 50 countries, a billion people, and thousands of languages. Petals of Blood is capacious and brilliant, but it's not definitive.

A lot has been written about Petals of Blood since its publication, and it continues to incite interest both in its portrait of Kenya in the early years of independence and its (and its author's) politics. This was especially true at the time of its release, because it was difficult then to see beyond the novel's critique of Kenya's ruling class to its subtler aspects, and the fact that Ngugi was soon imprisoned without trial added to the political reading of the book. It is, of course, an overtly political novel, a novel that very clearly wants readers to see the government of Kenya as betraying the ideals of the liberation struggle in favor of capitalistic greed. But one does not need to be a Marxist to find great value in Petals of Blood, any more than one needs to be a visionary Christian to find value in Dostoyevsky's novels or a vegetarian to appreciate Tolstoy's.

One of the purposes Petals of Blood serves is to recuperate in writing an unwritten past. We might identify the central narrative of the book as the story of the murder of three prominent men, but amidst that story are many others, and the movement is hardly linear. Were we to create a graphic representation of the novel's many pieces, it would surely require a spiral or two, because the overall sense the various strands of plot and event give is one of moving deeper and deeper through the history of the village of Ilmorog, which is also, at least partially, the history of Kenya. The structure is so carefully constructed, though, that this history does not feel tangential -- indeed, it becomes impossible to see the solution of the murder mystery (the primary concern of the basic narrative) as separate from the history of Ilmorog and of Kenya generally: specifically, the history of its systems of power. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I constantly think of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy when I think of this novel. The murders in Petals of Blood serve similar narrative purpose(s) to the murders in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, or the battles in War and Peace. While certainly this purpose/structure/effect can be interpreted as a result of Ngugi's Marxism (perhaps with reference to Lukács), it's not something we find only in Marxist narrative. It could come from any worldview that is not fanatically individualist.

Blogging the Caine Prize: "The Mistress's Dog"

(This is the last in a weekly series of posts about the short stories nominated for this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. For more information, see my introductory post. Special thanks to Aaron Bady for coming up with the idea for this blogathon. Check out Aaron's post on this story for an updated list of other writers' responses, or follow #cainepr on Twitter.)

David Medalie's "The Mistress's Dog" (PDF) is a subtle, quiet, and profoundly sad story, easily the highlight of the Caine Prize nominees for me. It's a story in which nearly all the events have happened before the time of the first sentence, and this is what allows it a classic iceberg effect -- the story benefits from the characters' lifetimes of experience, yet takes place over the course of only a day and a half. Of the characters, only one has a name -- Nola, the protagonist. The other characters are named by Nola's perception of them: the powerful man, the mistress, the mistress's dog. It's significant that the powerful man was, up until his death, Nola's husband, but that's not the label she uses for him. To her, he represents power more than whatever qualities she associates with a husband.

We know Nola not so much as an individual character herself, but as a reflection of the other characters. She pays close attention to the mistress and dislikes her, referring to her as "blond and blowsy" ("she liked the demeaning effect of the alliteration"). Nola's watching of the mistress gives her some eloquent insights: "It was evident to her that the mistress had become a snob largely because she dreaded the judgement of snobs."

We learn less about the husband, who exists in the story primarily as force, a blast of malevolent gravity. Nola stayed in her marriage to him for forty years because, it seems, she didn't have the will to leave. She bore great resentment of the mistress and of the powerful man, but not enough to break free. She probably had a comfortable living with her husband, and jeopardizing that life seems to have been something she didn't desire. She acquiesced and went along with everything, getting in what little bits of rebellion she could (inviting old, moneyed people to parties with the mistress so that "The mistress, in their company, became heartier than ever, as abrasive as a typewriter in a room in which people were writing on soft vellum with quills and ink.")

But really, her only revenge is to outlive her husband and his mistress. Even then, though, she isn't free of them, because she agreed to take in the mistress's old dog when the mistress moved into a retirement home. This was, she says, one of the few moments in the marriage when she had the opportunity for power -- she could have said no, she could have sent the dog to be euthanized. "It was," she reflects, "an opportunity for revenge such as she had never had before." But no. It was too late. "The powerful man had gout, an enlarged heart, and a flickering memory. The mistress was no longer robust. They would never see each other again. It was too late, far too late, to triumph over them."

She goes on living, and she and the dog survive the people who determined everything in their lives. Though we're repeatedly told that Nola liked cats and not dogs, and we certainly know she had no affection for the mistress, she decides to take in the mistress's dog rather than let it die, and she has kept living with it even though it's past time when many people would have put the dog down. She seems to identify with the dog, but even she isn't sure why she's ended up this way: "Had she chosen him? Or had she ended up with him by default because she had not, during her life, made the wise, the adroit choices? If we are our choices, then what did it say about her that the mistress's dog was her last companion?"

The questions are raised, but not answered, and this is much to the story's benefit, because it allows the story's meanings to widen and open up -- to be not meanings, in fact, but suggestions, gestures of language and image. The story is not simply a domestic one; it has a lot to suggest about power and about regret, about putting up with the status quo until the status quo dies away on its own. There's not much triumph in simply outliving the power you quietly resented throughout your life. There's no moral victory in quiet resistance if that resistance has no effect on the circumstances that make resistance desirable. Nola let life happen to her, and she ends up with nothing more than her husband's mistress's decrepit dog. Both Nola and the dog, though, are not beyond our sympathy, and that's one's of the story's real accomplishments.

The only off moment for me, the only one that scratched against the delicate surface of the story's suggestions, was the moment where Nola takes the dog to the supermarket, the dog vomits on the floor, and a young woman who works at the supermarket comes to clean it up. When Nola says to the young woman (another character who has no name, only a label: she is young, she is a woman), "These things happen when you're old," and "We all get old," and the young woman replies, "They must shoot me first." This exchange seems a bit too obvious to me, a bit too convenient, too on the nose.

It's a minor misstep in a story that is otherwise elegant and affecting.

This brings us to the end of the Caine Prize stories for this year. The award will be announced on July 11. I'm very curious to see which story the judges choose (my own preference is obvious from what I've just written here). None of the nominees are terrible, but a few of them struck me as generally unremarkable, and I fully disliked one.

The good folks at New Internationalist sent me a copy of the Caine Prize anthology for this year, To See the Mountain and Other Stories. In previous years' anthologies, I've sometimes found the stories included from the annual Caine Prize writers' workshop to be more varied and interesting than the nominees, so I'm looking forward to reading the workshop stories in this new collection, though I expect I won't be able to read them for a little while, as I'm behind on some other reading that I have to do. If I discover anything that seems to me of particular interest there, I'll note it here.