Chimurenga Chronic, Out: March 2013.
I’ve just received my review copy of Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them. I’m not sure I can stomach it all the way through, still less write about it. The tome lies on my table, a lead weight too heavy to consider. There has surely been too much war and violence in the stories African men have chosen to write of late. I think back to last year’s Measuring Time, by Helon Habila, and of course, to Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone.
I hardly have the energy to sigh. Where is the hope? Where are the dreams? Where is the demotic counterpoint? Instead of reading the good priest’s book and bashing out my piece, it’s prompted me to reflect on where we are with African writing. But rather than stay at the level of the text, I think we need to consider the context in which African writing takes place. That’s to say, we need to think about how Africa gets published.
The first thing to say is that almost all African creative writing that gains any level of worldly significance, no matter how ephemeral, is published by a Western publishing company. Even when a writer is first published on the continent, their success is ultimately measured in terms of how effectively their work gets a foot in the Occidental door. This should not be surprising to anyone on a moment’s reflection. The West has been the centre of capital accumulation for the past 400 years or so. Fiction writing is simply another form of capital whose value is formed and transacted in London or New York (for the English-speaking world), like copper and coffee. Everything else is marginalia and mere froth on the daydream.
African publishers are not even minnows swimming in the shark tank in comparison. They leave little or no imprint in the minds of readers and writers. African writers often view African publishers as printers to make their books available in their home country. Demands that would not be made of Western publishers are insisted upon. Typical requests are: “This is the title I am using” (never mind its meaninglessness in the local context); “I am not happy with the choice of paper used to print my book”; “Why is my book not available in other African markets which you have rights to?” (As if the Western publisher with world rights would also care about those markets).
Africa’s marginal status in terms of the history of capitalism is, of course, a convenient fiction. Africans were the first wave of ‘commodities’ to support modernisation and industrialisation in the West via the Middle Passage and the plantation. And as the economic model of transatlantic slavery waned in the late 19th century (thanks as much to the spinning jenny as to the abolitionists), the export of palm oil, cocoa and groundnuts from West Africa in industrial quantities began.
Palm oil lubricated the train wheels of western modernity. Africa, and West Africa in particular, was always the other side of globalisation and industrialisation – the shadow cast by the factory. It seems redundant to say it, but the West wouldn’t have become what it became (a triumphant surplus) without expropriation of commodities from West Africa on a massive scale.
The theft continues apace today. Africa has one-third of the world’s mineral resources. Nigeria alone supplies the US with a quarter of its gasoline, none of which is refined and value-added on the continent. The multinationals take tax avoidance to its limits through transfer-pricing and other accountancy/tax haven tricks. What can be taken is taken, as quickly and as cheaply and as quietly as possible.
It’s the same with African writers. Their stories are exported raw, with value-addition the work of a network of agents and editors over the ocean. It is only when the finished products are imported back onto the continent that they can be valued and bought. Until then, the African writer is a raw commodity, bought wholesale, sold retail only later. African readers are complicit in the trade – what I call a ‘tokunbo logic’ is in play: only if the goods come from abroad can they have value. University lecturers ask if the book has won international awards, not awards granted on the continent. Local awards confer no value. Even when a book is published in both the West and in Africa, the media will often stick slavishly to Western publication dates, rather than local launch schedules.
It’s the same as it ever was. Since the Great Exhibitions of the 19th century, the West has been the epicentre of the production of global images. Back then, Polynesians and Africans were made to stand under cathedrals of glass, at the birth of anthropology. Then came Hollywood, and the image factory went into overdrive. Black people have been the minstrels, the baddies, or died young ever since. The equivalent of the Hollywood Studios in publishing today are the multinational publishing corporations, such as Hachette, Harper Collins, Bertelsmann (which owns Random House) and Pearson (which owns Penguin). In the UK, these four companies combined capture more than 50 per cent of the total market share of the publishing industry. Pretty much the same goes in the US.
It is little wonder then that, since the middle of the 20th century, the successful African writer’s career trajectory has been defined by the migration from ‘margin’ to centre. The writer says goodbye to Lagos or Nairobi and takes the metaphorical steamer to London, Paris or New York. Success could hardly have been defined in any other terms. Even if only 1,000 copies of the book are sold and the remainder is quietly pulped, it doesn’t matter: a corporate publisher has published, and perhaps a Hollywood studio has acquired the rights to a film that will almost certainly never be made.
From the African writer’s perspective, it is tricky to see what the issue is. He (until recently, it has most often been a he) wants to be read and discussed as widely as possible, and wants to be as well paid as possible for his efforts. Ideally, he will sell sufficient books to be able to live off his ink. He expects a generous advance and a book launch downtown. The more he is paid, the more he can write. The more he can write, the more the world will benefit. Moreover, he doesn’t believe writing by African writers should be deposited in a black writing ghetto in the bookshop. Good writing is good writing, wherever it came from.
At the very worst, after having been invited over, someone, somewhere really should invite him to teach at a university or teach an MFA programme. Even if only a few hundred take his book to the till, he will expect to be granted rooms in the shade of a leafy plane tree, somewhere not far from a clock tower. His days will be filled with teaching eager students, almost all of whom will be earnest, white Americans who have already dog-eared their Achebes. Some of them will grow dreadlocks for the duration and ask difficult, yet earnest questions.
The writer will live for a year or two on borrowed time; words rented from experiences fast receding. A novel, or perhaps two, will emerge. Each will detail times from an Africa that is sinking beneath the horizon. The work will be feted, but less so each time. The African writer will be little irked by how much publicity his Western publisher asks him to do: set up a Facebook account, regularly ping twitter followers with updates, visit out of the way places on cold days for an audience of 10. The third book, if he gets that far, will likely be pure anachronism. The African writer will sense that times have changed back home, but will by now be helpless to address the contemporary.
Meanwhile, his western readership, looking for the next African star, will be wondering what happened. Even being thousands of kilometres away from the action, he will sense something no longer of the present. In rooms with cityscapes for views, or across the tables of chichi restaurants, executives will be leafing through someone else’s manuscript. A new tale of African horror (or sometimes, African ‘lushness’ and ‘vibrancy’) will be required in time for the run up to Christmas.
Our African writer will look in the mirror, and notice grey hairs for the first time. There will be only one thing for it: to return home and find some more stories. And with this return, the African writer may finally realise what has been gained and lost through migration. He might then begin to see history at work.
The African writer who links migration to success (and to expectations of material well-being) is part of an ageing post-colonial condition – not a “sign of the African academics’ confident universalism”, as Paul Tiyambe Zeleza comments, “but of their insecure provincialism… [their] desperate search for legitimation from … systems and … traditions that have historically dismissed and infantalised them”.
This is the CNN worldview that Africans complain about. Of course, violence and instability have been a core aspect of many realities across the continent. However, and it’s tiring that this needs stating, so too are the delights of everyday life: love, ceremony, celebration, creation and redemption. Barring certain catastrophic exceptions (the DRC in the past two decades for instance), violence is just as much part of any society, at any time, as it is anywhere in Africa.
What is to be done? How does one ensure one’s dutifully collected shelf of African books is not ever more replete with child soldiers, AK47s and rapists? There are, I think, two parts to the answer: First, African writers should realise that there is a price to pay for a suburban existence in a sedated part of the world. Situation is critical. To engage with the world in writing, it is seldom enough to read of a world from afar. Even the most meticulous research will miss out on the subterranean processes that are continuously at work in a society; the gaps and tensions in speech and behaviour that point to unmet desires and a world in transition. It is the work of the writer to bring these silences to voice; it is an almost impossible task when the only source of information is internet news sites, visitors from home and the occasional trip back to the motherland.
Writers who complain of the difficulties of returning home (a common moan) do so on the basis of bourgeois assumptions. They expect to live in the manner to which they have been accustomed, as if material comfort were an index of, or prerequisite for a writer’s success. They also assume that moving home to write should be a full- time occupation. Yet, how many successful writers in history have had that luxury? Many writers have had a non-academic day job. Kafka was an insurance clerk, lest we forget. On the continent, we might consider Alaa Al Aswany in Cairo: collecting stories as a dentist by day, transmuting his work into stories by night.
However, African publishers also need to become more than what they are now. We need to collaborate, across our differences. We need to rave about our authors, and introduce them directly into each other’s markets, without recourse to a European detour. We need to help build a publishing infrastructure, which innovates and adapts to the opportunities continent provides. African publishers also need to spell out the reality of working on the continent and what is at stake.
But African publishers can only do this with support of and respect from writers. For as long as writers view African-based publishers as dogsbody printers whose editorial opinion they consider as secondary to their Euro-American publisher, or people they can commandeer to consider their manuscript two months before it is due out in the Western market, publishers would rather work more actively with writers who understand the ideological imperative and the struggle for symbolic legitimacy at stake in the ownership of the means of production. We need to define what we cannot do alone and lobby government for support.
Most of all, we need to realise that we have currently lost control of the African story generation. We can hardly remain friends with those who try to take the stories away. We publishers should realise that there is semiotic warfare at work and that she who owns the story, owns the story.
There will never be an end to stories already told, they will be seen with new eyes and wrapped and re-wrapped by different hands finished up with ribbons tied in bows of an inclination particular to the artist. The important thing is to look deep into the wells of our creativity and at Life and capture the essence of our innermost feelings as writers, irrespective of the pull of the markets that dictate the direction stories should take. I say this as one who recently started writing (apart from tentative trials a very long time ago); I’ve only just found out that my short story ever so slightly mirrors aspects of an archetype. It has the words ‘timeless’, ‘drums’, ‘grasslands’ and a certain character craved crickets for a snack! It feels as though I am been caged and pruned by the dictates of others.
At the end of the day, there are about one billion people in Africa; surely a dearth of a reading culture is partly to blame for the status of Publishing in Africa. The solution is a two pronged approach 1. Stimulate the interest of everyday people by nudging them into a lifestyle of reading for pleasure i.e. creating ‘Demand’ 2. Raise the profile of the Industry by supplying a lusty demand with well-crafted and varied stories causing it to be self-sustaining; a very tall order.
This is a significant wake up call. Besides the erudite postulations, this piece cuts through the thickened murk of the problem of How Euro-America Underdeveloped African Writing. But I will have to task you sir, to also expantiate the point of the role of the African writer and publisher in this impasse. Thank you.
My dream which I have attempted to pursue is to find a publisher in as many countries as I can in Africa and have my books published here, in a network created by me. I’ve not been that successful, sadly. But I completely agree that African writers and publishers working together are the only way for African writing to truly be African writing instead of African writing ala European tastes.
what a button-pushing piece! I do have to say, however that Mr Weate introduces the concept of commerce and the Middle Passage with great effect, but then the argument peters out for me because instead of proposing to abandon capitalistic models of distributing books, we must just jump into the machine, give it more grease, write books and promote them, win the market battle by just giving more. Shame on us for taking a break from the sometimes very chaotic life on the continent. We have a chance to reflect and work solidly in a house with electricity, with enough food for the kid who can be taken care of in a system which has more infrastructure than we can access back home, (unless we’re comfortably middle class). The writer who takes this opportunity gets discouraged in a most cynical way. but I have to admit that I couldn’t go into Say You’re One of Them, I was unable to go the whole journey, possibly like the author of this piece, possibly for the same reasons. I find it interesting the way that African writers are expected to understand enough about the political economy of our continent as well our own personal narratives in order to be experts on why things are as they are. Why can’t we just write? Also, are stories of abuse and poverty only ones that are authentic? I myself am wrestling with these issues and I don’t know the answers. Surely it’s only by getting those stories out there that we can discover their impact. I was very impressed with Shailja Patel when I met her at Poetry Africa in 2007. She carried her own self-published books which were also poems, so people could access them orally as well as literally. The books were very cheap. Maybe it’s too slow, and doesn’t enter the mainstream market but I’m strongly attracted to taking back MY story, and getting out there the way that I can.
Kelvin O, and Ebele: good to hear your responses. Thank you. And I would welcome more writers from outside Europe (be they African, Asian, Latin American etc) writing about the European country to which they have migrated. I think more journalism should follow that path. Much more.
However, often, for a writer of non-fiction or fiction, the only way to write about something is to absent or distance yourself from it. It doesn’t surprise me at all that people who write about their countries have to leave and get away from it first. Sometimes, you can be too close. And the comment by Jay above is apt here: just look at Joyce. I am against prescriptions for writers, although I fully accept that part of the problem for ‘African’ writers today is that the Western publishing industry wants them to write about ‘Africa. However, that is beginning to change. Teju Cole’s Open City, for example.
A highly provocative piece. It shows the African writer’s situation is a pathetic one. Fixated with themes of war and violence, savagery and debauchery, he finds himself ill at ease with contemporary issues. I find this more appropriate to modern African drama that is not ‘modern’ but anachronistic. What has going abroad done to our literature? Achebe has never released a single literary work since he left the shores of Nigeria in 1991. Maik Nwosu too has not released any novel since he migrated.
To an extent I agree with what you have stated. Yes, Africans writers are only considered successful when they have either won an international award or been published in western countries.
However, what you fail to realize is that we are moving forward and although we are yet to claim that we have reached anywhere in terms of having local publishing houses making an impact in the international scenes, there are hundreds of budding writers, unpublished but with acess to the internet, blogs and websites and these writers will one day come out of Africa either through african publishing houses or the net
But there are loads of writers currently writing in Africa, except of course you are suggesting that only those who manage to get published outside are any good then Publishers in Africa should have their hands full with those writing from it now.
I have plenty friends in Warri, Awka, Sapele, Benin, with manuscripts…. looking for publishers, home or abroad.
Almost all the modern American writers I admire lived abroad for a bit, a lot preferred to write from abroad. James Joyce left Ireland in his 20s and never lived there again permanently, yet almost everything he wrote was about Dublin..
I agree about what academia does to writers though. I suggest they all do the grown up thing and take a desk job in a bank and write at night and weekends, that way they can purloin stories from real people. Jesus Christ!
Lara, I think Mr Weate is speaking of a particular kind of ‘African writer’- a phrase useful for its convenience- arguably the commonest kind: he’s speaking about the type that insists on writing about his own country long after leaving it, which, to say the truth is what a lot of African writers do.
Not too long ago, a Nigerian reviewer pointed out an anachronism that could only have resulted from this needless insistence on writing stories from the ‘motherland’ long after the memory has receded and the place of origin ceased to matter to the writer. He can’t write about his current realities because that is not what the West wants, since they have their own writers chronicling their own lives.
Perhaps Mr Weate has not made it clear enough, or maybe I’m reading too much into his text. Nevertheless, it is a real problem, to my mind, that you don’t see too many African writers tell of the immigrant experience- an area Asians have managed to capture effectively. It is beautifully rendered and rewarded for its truthfulness. Ishiguro, Lahiri, Desai, Ali have all written about this and the ‘third book phenomenon’ Mr Weate speaks of here does not seem to affect their (literary) standing.
The African writer has to learn this. He has to write the truth, even in fiction; especially in fiction.
Lara, I think Mr Weate is speaking of a particular kind of ‘African writer’- a phrase I find no real problem with: he’s speaking about the type that insists on writing about his own country long after leaving it, which, to say the truth is what a lot of African writers do. Not too long ago, a reviewer pointed out an anachronism that could only have resulted from this needless insistence on writing stories from the ‘motherland’ long after the memory has ceased to matter to the writer. He can’t write about his current realities because that is not what the west wants, since they have their own writers chronicling their own lives. Perhaps Mr Weate has not made it clear enough, or maybe I’m reading too much into his text. Nevertheless, it is a real problem to my mind that you don’t see too many African writers tell of the immigrant experience- an area Asians have managed to capture effectively. It is beautifully rendered and rewarded for its truthfulness. Ishiguro, Lahiri, Desai, Ali have all written about this and the ‘third book phenomenon’ Mr Weate speaks of here does not seem to affect their standing.
The African writer has to learn this. He has to write the truth, even in fiction; especially in fiction.
@Lara P, I do not think the writer is suggesting Africans should not migrate to Europe or that the suburbs are bad for writing. He is argues a more prosaic point – distance from African realities dims the literary senses if you wish to write about Africa; and that this distance helps create the CNN African stereotypical literature of rapists, gunmen and misery. All emigre writers face a variation of this problem when they write about the place they left, predominantly for an audience who have never lived there.
I really appreciate this provocative piece. But I have a couple of inevitable ‘buts’. First up, you say, ‘Good writing is good writing, wherever it came from.’ Yet you seem to insist that for an ‘African’ to write well, they must be writing ‘in [er, out of...] Africa’. You also insist that there is ‘a price to pay for a suburban existence in a sedated part of the world’, which again undercuts your point that Africans should stay in Africa. This is kind of problematic on a personal level and a literary one in my view. One of the best writers of the late 20th century – not African I grant you – was JG Ballard. He lived in the most sedate suburbs on the planet: Sunbury. The idea that the burbs can’t produce good writing is flawed… and implies a kind of exoticisation of the (entire) African continent. And a rather limited approach to ‘the West’ – is it all sedated? Or just the suburbs? Or are you also referring to ‘African’ suburbs?
I guess what I’m partly pointing to is a heaped generalisation on your part of Africa, African, Westerner and Western. People are moving about a lot, going back and forth, up and down, south to north, east to west etc etc… and long may it continue. I think an ‘African writer’ (oh, must they really be pinned to their continent forever?) should move to where the hell he or she likes, just as a, er-hum, European/Western consultant. You seem a bit stuck on what makes an ‘African’ *authentic*, which seems incredibly old-fashioned. Is there really a way of being African? Is there really such a thing as ‘an African writer’? If a writer’s a writer, and good writing is good writing, let those writers be free to go where they like when they like. And if they end up in, say, Chingford, may they write the best fucking novel on the planet! It shouldn’t stop them, and may even provoke a fabulous piece of work.
Or have I misunderstood something here…??!!
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