Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

THE STATUS OF THE WRITER IN THE WORLD TODAY: WHICH WORLD? WHOSE WORLD?

A few months ago I was a participant in an international gathering in Paris to evaluate the status of the artist in the world. There we were on an elegant stage before a large audience; among us was a famous musician, a distinguished sculptor, several poets and writers of repute, a renowned dancer-choreographer. We had come together literally from the ends of the earth. At this stately opening session we were flanked by the Director-General of our host organization, the representative of a cultural foundation funded by one of North America’s multibillionaire dynasties, and France’s Deputy Minister of Culture. The Director-General, the representative of the multibillionaire foundation, and the Deputy Minister each rose and gave an address lasting half an hour; the session, which also was to include some musical performance, was scheduled to close after two hours. An official tiptoed along the backs of our chairs and requested us, the artists, to cut our addresses to three minutes. We humbly took up our pens and began to score out what we had to say. When the bureaucrats had finally regained their seats, we were summoned one by one to speak in telegraphese. All did so except the last in line. She was — I name her in homage! — Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer-choreographer from India. She swept to the podium, a beauty in sandals and sari, and announced: ‘I have torn up my speech. The bureaucrats were allowed to speak as long as they pleased; the artists were told that three minutes was time enough for whatever they might have to say. So — we have the answer to the status of the artist in the world today.’

This experience set me thinking back to another that I have had, on a deeper and more personal level.

In my Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, given in 1994, which subsequently were published under the title Writing and Being, I devoted three of the six lectures to the writing and being each of Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz, and Naguib Mahfouz. Edward Said, himself another writer whose work is important to me, reviewed the book extremely favourably in a leading English paper, while yet taking me to task for my indignant assertion that Mahfouz is not given his rightful place in contemporary world literature, is never mentioned in the company of such names as Umberto Eco, Günter Grass, etc., and certainly is not widely read even by those whom one considers well-read; I know that a number of my friends read his work for the first time as a result of my published lecture.

Mahfouz neglected? — Edward Said chided me.

Mahfouz not recognized for his greatness in world literature?

What world did I define him by, what world did my purview confine me to in my assessment? In the literature of Arabic culture, the world of the Arabic language, Mahfouz is fully established in the canon of greatness and, in the populist canon of fame, while controversial, is widely read.

Edward Said was right. What I was conceiving of as ‘world literature’ in my lecture was in fact that of the Euro-North Americans into which only a few of us foreigners have been admitted. Naguib Mahfouz is recognized as a great writer in the world of Arabic literature, of whose canon I know little or nothing.

But wait a moment — Said, I saw, had hit intriguingly upon a paradox. He was placing the concept of another ‘world literature’ alongside the one I had posited with my eyes fixed on Euro-North America as the literary navel-of-the-world. In the all-encompassing sense of the term ‘world’, can any of our literatures be claimed definitively as ‘world’ literature? Which world? Whose world?

The lesson Edward Said gave me, along with the lesson provided by Mallika Sarabhai at the gathering in Paris, is a sequence, from the situation of artists in general, on the one hand, to the question of literary canons, on the other, that becomes the naturally relevant introduction to my subject, here among my brother and sister African writers: our status, specifically as writers, in the worlds-within-’the world’ we occupy.

Status. What is status, to us?

First — it never can go without saying — the primary status must be freedom of expression. That is the oxygen of our creativity. Without it, many talents on our continent have struggled for breath; some have choked; and some have been lost to us in that other climate, the thin air of exile.

Suppression of freedom of expression by censorship and bannings was in many of our countries a feature of colonial regimes — I myself was such a victim of the apartheid government, with three of my own works, and an anthology I collected of South African writers’ works, banned. Suppression of freedom of expression has continued to be a feature of not a few of our independent regimes, leading outrageously and tragically in one of them, Nigeria, to the execution of one writer and the threat of death sentence placed upon another. But thankfully, in many of our countries, including mine now, South Africa, freedom of expression is entrenched.

Freedom to write. We have that status; and we are fully aware that it is one that we must be always alert to defend against all political rationalisations and pleas to doctor our search for the truth into something more palatable to those who make the compromises of power.

Quite apart from the supreme issue of human freedom, our claim to freedom to write has a significance, a benefit to society that only writers can give. Our books are necessary: for in the words of the great nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol they show both the writer and his or her people what they are. The writer is both the repository of his people’s ethos and his revelation to them of themselves. This revelation is what regimes fear, in their writers. But if our status as writers is to be meaningful, that fear is proof of our integrity. . And our strength.

Status, like charity, begins at home. The modern movement of African writers to define their status in this century was within our continent itself. With the impact of colonialism and its coefficient industrialisation, the traditional status of the griot, the keeper of the word — which is the generic for one marked for expression of the creative imagination with the ‘ring of white chalk round the eye’ by Chinua Achebe’s old man of Abazon, in Anthills of the Savannah—came to an end. It was not, could not be adapted as a status for one whose poetry and stories were disseminated to the people-become-the-public at the remove of printed books, remote from any living presence of their creator in the flesh. The keeper of the word became invisible; had no ready-defined place in society.

I am not going to reiterate the history, including the influence from the African diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean, that both preceded and coincided with the first Congress of African Writers and Artists in 1956. And it is significant, in terms of progress, to recall that it was not held in Africa at all, but in Paris.

I am looking at the modern movement from the distance made by events between then and now; from the epic unfurling of Africa’s freedom from colonial rule in its many avatars, way back from Ghana’s, the first, in 1957, to South Africa’s, the latest and final one.

In the broad sweep of hindsight one can see that Kwame Nkrumah’s political postulation of Pan-Africanism had its cultural equivalent in the movement of negritude. Negritude, as a word, has long become an archaism, with its first syllables — although coming from the French language — suggestive of the American Deep South. But the other invented word, with which the young Wole Soyinka cheekily attacked the concept, has remained very much alive because over and over again, in the work of many African writers, Soyinka’s iconoclasm has been proved mistaken. ‘A tiger doesn’t have to proclaim his tigritude’, he pronounced. But as each country on our continent has come into its own, in independence, the expression of Africanness, the assertion of African ways of life, from philosophy to food, has intensified: Africa measuring herself against her selfhood, not that of her erstwhile conquerors.

Africanness is fully established. So what status do we writers have, now, right here at home, in our individual countries?

Is it the kind of status we would wish — not in terms of fame and glory, invitations to dine with government ministers, but in terms of the role of literature in the illumination of our people, the opening up of lives to the power and beauty of the imagination, a revelation of themselves by the writer as the repository of a people’s ethos? Alongside the establishment of African values — which in the case of our best writers included no fear of questioning some, thus establishing that other essential component of literature’s social validity — the criterion in almost all of our countries has been the extent to which the writer has identified with and articulated, through transformations of the creative imagination, the struggle for freedom. And this, then, indeed, was the role of the writer as repository of a people’s ethos. Today the status, if to be measured on the scale of political commitment, is more complex.

Yes, economic neo-colonialism is a phase that threatens freedom, in a people’s ethos. Yes, the greedy wrangles of the Euro-North American powers to manipulate African political change for the spoils of oil supplies and military influence are concerns in a people’s ethos. Yes, the civil wars waged by their own leaders, bringing appalling suffering — these are all part of a people’s ethos to be expressed, for now that our continent has rid itself of its self-appointed masters from Europe the sense of identity in having a common enemy has eroded and in many of our countries brotherhood has become that of Cain and Abel.

Between writers and the national state, the threat of death by fatwa or secular decree, from Naguib Mahfouz to Ken Saro Wiwa and Wole Soyinka, has become the status of the writer in some of our countries. Yet these and less grim political themes tend to be the mise-en-scène of contemporary writing on our continent rather than its centrality. Africanism itself is an economic and cultural concept rather than an ideological one, now. For writers, the drama of individual and personal relations that was largely suppressed in themselves, and when indulged in was judged by their societies as trivial in comparison with the great shared traumas of the liberation struggle, now surfaces. There is so much to write about that was pushed aside by the committed creative mind, before; and there is so much to write about that never happened, couldn’t exist, before. Freedom and its joys, and — to paraphrase Freud — freedom and its discontents, are the ethos of a people for its writers now.

So we have lost the status of what one might call national engagement we had. Some few of us take on the responsibility to become writer-politicians and diplomats. But there are unlikely to be any future Léopold Sédar Senghors, poet-presidents. And I ask myself, and you: Do we writers seek, need that nature of status, the writer as politician, states-person? Is it not thrust upon us, as a patriotic duty outside the particular gifts we have to offer? Is not the ring of chalk round the eye the sign of our true calling? Whatever else we are called upon to do takes us away from the dedication we know our role as writers requires of us. As the cultural arm of liberation struggles, we met the demands of our time in that era. That was our national status. We have yet to be recognized with a status commensurate with respect for the primacy of the well-earned role of writer-as-writer in the post-colonial era.

How would we ourselves define such a status?

What do we expect, of our governments, our societies, and — in return — expect to give of ourselves to these? I have personally decisive convictions about this, constantly evolving as the country I belong to develops its cultural directions, and I am sure you have your convictions, ideas. And we need to exchange them, East — West, North-South, across our continent — that, indeed, is my first conviction. We need to meet in the flesh, take one another’s hands, hear one another.

But you and I know that the best there is in us, as writers, is in our books. The benefit and pleasure of personal contact is, in any case, limited to a fortunate few. Much more important, we need to read one another’s work. We and the people of our countries need natural and easy access to the writings that express the ethos of our neighbouring countries: what they believe, what they feel, how they make their way through the hazards and joys of living, contained by what varieties of socio-political and cultural structures they are in the process of pursuing. Four decades after the first country to attain independence, in the libraries and bookshops of our countries you still will find, apart from works by the writers of each country itself, only a handful of books by the same well-known names among African writers from other countries of our continent. Every now and then, there may be a new one, a Ben Okri who comes to us by way of recognition in Europe, along the old North — South cultural conduit. Without the pioneering work of Hans Zell, and the invaluable Heinemann African Writers Series, the publication of journals, ’from the old Présence Africaine to those bravely launched, often to a short or uneven life, by writers’ organizations or publishers in our various countries, the cross-pollination of literature in Africa would scarcely exist where it should: among ordinary readers rather than the African literati we represent, here. The best part of two generations has gone by since the African continent began its inexorable achievement of independence that has now culminated: a priority in our claim for the status of writers and writing in Africa surely is that there should be developed a Pan-African network of publishers and distributors who will co-operate — greatly to their own commercial advantage, by the way — to make our writers’ work as prominently and naturally available as the Euro-North American potboilers which fill airport bookstalls. This does not mean that we should export potboilers to one another! It means that writing of quality which readers in your countries and mine never see, unless they happen to have the resources to come across and mail-order from specialist book catalogues, would be beside our beds at night and in our hands as we travel on buses, trains, and planes.

You will say that the old obstacle of our Babel’s Tower of languages rises before an African network of publishing. But the fact is that colonial conquest, with all its destruction and deprivation, ironically left our continent with a short list of lingue franche that have been appropriated to Africa’s own ends in more ways than pragmatic communication for politics and trade. English, French, and Portuguese — these three at least are the languages used by many African writers in their work — for good or ill in relation to national culture: that is another whole debate that will continue. These three languages have virtually become adjunct African languages by rightful appropriation; and the translation into them of African language literature, which itself is and always must be the foundation and ultimate criterion of the continent’s literature, is not an obstacle but an opportunity. Where are the translation centres at our colleges and universities, where young scholars could gain deep insights into their own languages while learning the skills of translation? Here is a field of cultural advancement, cultural employment in collaboration with publishers, waiting to be cultivated. We have an OAU uniting our continent, sometimes in contention as well as common purpose, on matters of mutual concern in international affairs, governance, policy, and trade; we need an OAC, an Organization of African Culture, to do the same for Pan-African literature and the arts. Only then should we have a ‘world literature’: the world of our own, our challenge to the title each culturo-political and linguistic grouping on our planet has the hubris to claim for itself.

Professor Lebona Mosia, an arts academic in South Africa, recently reflected on our Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s concept of an African renaissance of roots, values, and identity, remarking that our people are emerging from an ‘imaginary history. . whose white folks believed that South Africa is part of Europe, America (the USA) and Australia. Blacks have always recognized that they are part of Africa’. The same ‘imaginary history’ of course applies to Pan Africa, to the thinking of all ex-colonial powers.

Does Thabo Mbeki’s renaissance sound like a renaissance of négritude?

I don’t believe it is. Or could be. Circumstances in our countries have changed so fundamentally since that concept of the 1950s, when liberation was still to be won. The reality of African history has long begun to be recorded and established, from where it was cut off as anthropology and prehistory and substituted by the history of foreign conquest and settlers. One of the dictionary definitions of the wide meanings of renaissance is ‘any revival in art and literature’; as we writers take to ourselves the right to vary or add to the meaning of words, I would interpret the meaning of renaissance in Mbeki’s context not as reviving the past, whether pre-colonial or of the négritude era, but of using it only as a basis for cultural self-realisation and development in an Africa that never existed before, because it is an Africa that has come through: emerged from the experience of slavery, colonial oppression, the humiliating exploitation of paternalism, economic and spiritual degradation, suffering of every nature human evil could devise. A continent that has liberated itself; overcome.

Africans have established, beyond question, that our continent is not part of anyone’s erstwhile empire. Secure in this confidence, and open-eyed at home as I hope we shall be to the necessity to apply ourselves to developing Africa’s literary variety to-and-fro across our own Pan-African frontiers, it’s time to cross new frontiers on our cultural horizon, to turn the literary compass to measure whether we still should be pointing in the same direction towards the outside world.

Which world? Whose world? The North — South axis was the one on which we were regarded so long only as on the receiving end, and which, latterly, we have somewhat culturally reversed: African writers have won prestigious literary prizes in England and France, and even Nobel Prizes; African music has become popular abroad, the international fashion industry presently has a vogue for somewhat bizarre adaptations of African traditional dress — well, Africa dressed itself up in Europe’s three-piece suits, collar, and tie; now haute couture Europe wraps itself in a pagne, a dashiki, a bou-bou. .

Of course we do, and should, retain our freedom of access to, appropriation of, European and North American literary culture. I believe we have passed the stage, in the majority of our countries, of finding Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Voltaire and Melville, ‘irrelevant’. I believe that, as writers and readers, all literature of whatever origin belongs to us. There is an acceptable ‘world literature’ in this sense; one great library to which it would be a folly of self-deprivation to throw away our membership cards.

What has happened is that the works of our own writers, imparting the ethos of our peoples, have firmly and rightfully displaced those of Europeans as the definitive cultural texts in our schools and universities.

But if you place the compass on a map you will see not alone that South — South and not North — South is our closer orientation, but that if you cut out the shape of South America and that of Africa you can fit the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa together, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle making a whole — the lost continent Gondwana, sundered by cosmic cataclysms and seas.

This romantic geographical connection is merely symbolic of the actual, potential relationships that lay dormant and ignored during the colonial period when our continent of Africa was set by European powers strictly on the North — South axis. Climate and terrain are primary experiences for human beings; many South American and African countries share the same kind of basic natural environment, which determines not only the types of food they grow and eat, but the myths they created, and the nature of city life they have evolved. Both continents were conquered by European powers, their culture over-run and denigrated. Both have won their freedom from foreign powers through suffering, and suffered subsequently under brutal dictators in internecine wars among their own people. Both bear a burden of their people’s poverty and confront neo-colonialism exacted in return for their need of economic aid. Finally, there is the strange reciprocal bond: with those communities in South America descended from slaves brought from Africa.

All this in common, and yet we know so little of South American writers’ work and life. Aside from some few big names, such as Borges of Argentina, Machado de Assis of Brazil, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Gabríel Gárcia Marquez of Colombia, we do not know the work of the majority of South American writers, with whom, in many ways, we have more existential ties than with writers in Europe and North America.

Industrialists and entrepreneurs are opening up their South — South routes of trade, matching the exchange of raw materials, processing, and expertise which countries in South America and Africa can supply for one another. They are giving more than a side-glance away from the fixed gaze of North — South development. Recently the poet Mongane Wally Serote and I visited Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and there met writers from other South American countries, as well. All were eager to grow closer to their recognition that our literatures are reciprocal in the ethos of our many shared existential situations, from the colonised past to the development problems of the present, both material and cultural. If the industrialists and entrepreneurs are paying attention to the material reciprocity, why are we, as writers, not looking South — South in a new freedom to choose which world, whose world, beyond our own with which we could create a wider one for ourselves?

In our first concern, which is to develop an African ‘world literature’ as our status, we should keep well in mind the words of the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz. With the exceptions of the pre-Hispanic civilisations of America, he writes, all civilisations — including China and Japan — have been the result of intersections and clashes with foreign cultures. And the Congolais writer Henri Lopes, in his novel Le Lys et le Flamboyant, is speaking not only of the mixed blood of tribe, race, and colour of many of our people in Africa, but of the interchange of ideas, of solutions to a common existence, when he writes, ‘Every civilisation is born of a forgotten mixture, every race is a variety of mixtures that is ignored.’ The nurture of our writers, our literature, is a priority which should not create for us a closed-shop African ‘world literature’, a cultural exclusivity in place of the exclusion, even post-colonial, that has kept us in an ante-room of self-styled ‘world literatures’. Let our chosen status in the world be that of writers who seek exchanges of the creative imagination, ways of thinking and writing, of fulfilling the role of repository of the people’s ethos, by opening it out, bringing to it a vital mixture of individuals and peoples re-creating themselves.

Finally, at home in Africa, in the countries of our continent, let Rosa Luxemburg’s definition be at the tip of our ballpoint pens and on the screens of our word-processors as we write: ‘Freedom means freedom to those who think differently.’ Let the writer’s status be recognized as both praise singer and social critic. Let’s say with Amu Djoleto:

What you expect me to sing, I will not,

What you do not expect me to croak, I will.

— 2nd PAWA Annual Lecture, Pan African Writers Association

5th International African Writers’ Day Celebration

Accra, Ghana, 1–7 November 1997