Sometimes I wish my life had been more tragic ...... writes Nigerian writer Doreen Baingana in this article from yesterday's Guardian.
This is because my audience expects me, as an African writer, to regale them with tales of hunger, war and catastrophe. ... felt as if I had been invited under false pretences. I should have been born in a poverty-stricken village, brutally circumcised with a blunt, unsanitised knife with other five-year-old girls, then, a few years later, kidnapped by child soldiers, becoming a sex slave of a rebel commander before escaping dramatically and trekking through the dry bush for miles and months until I was rescued by foreign aid workers, "rehabilitated" and adopted by a gracious American family. I would end up triumphant and grateful in the US and living to tell my story; which is, of course, a story worth telling.Writers from the "developing world" are too often expected to support myopic western views of what their part of the world and their literature is supposed to be like: Africa is impoverished; Asia is "exotic"; all Latin-Americans write magical realism.
Baigana says that African writers should counterbalance the view of the continent given in media portrayals:
As an African writer, I pluck what I know and throw it into a pot with what I don't and what I conjure out of nothing and dreams. I shake in all sorts of spices, grains, water, salt and lies, African or not, and try to create a new stew with new flavours every time. I ask my audience to demand this much of me and other African writers. To expect so much more than yesterday's leftovers: the newspapers' diarrhoeic stream of problems and problematic stories. Let's imagine together all the possible and impossible ways individuals try to make sense of themselves and their worlds, African or otherwise.I'm glad that she also questions that tired old label "postcolonial", so beloved of literature departments and used to describe literatures from all those parts of the globe that were once coloured pink.
Even here in cosmopolitan London last July, at events for the Caine Prize for African Writing, students and others posed questions within the same framework, using the word "postcolonial" like it was going out of style. I wish. Is there any other way we can view and talk about the multiplicities of the African experience? We need to, desperately.
12 comments:
Can't be denied though, that the "after suffering a whole lot in a foreign country we ended up in the US and lived happily ever after" stories sell. I mean, look at Amy Tan's "Joy Luck Club". Plus hardship, I think, is what people want to read, I don't know why that is. Who reads books aobut happy people ? suffering, struggle, conflict, war is what people want to read about. No one wants to read about shiny happy people. When's the last time you read a book about people who were happy and content ?
You're quite right - all fiction starts with conflict - but the sources of conflict can be many and various. but just becasue you are a writer from a particular part of the world doesn't mean that you have to conform to someone else's idea of what you should write about and how. That's a kind of cultural straightjacketing.
I'm interested in African writers and their worlds.
Please email me
scratchy888@iprimus.com.au
I think though that a name lends credibility to a story. Suppose that "Joy Luck Club" was written by someone called "George Llewellyn-Davies" or something, would that not make you less inclined to throw yourself into the story ? I don't know.. I'd be thinking "what does he know about the culture ?" as a reader (of fiction) if I read about Africa I'd likely not want to read about offices and high-rise apartments. I'd want to read about lions and forests and the people who still live there. Would Amy Tan still be popular if she wrote about the type of American Chinese who have been totally assimilated ?
It's true that "just because you are a writer from a particular part of the world doesn't mean that you have to conform to someone else's idea of what you should write about and how" but what if the "someone else" is all your readers ? there's "what you want to write" and "what sells" and sometimes the twain never meets.
Porty - really laughed about what you said about names! Here's my tuppence worth re. the rest:
What anyone should write is what the need to write, and keep their integrity. Once you start writing because you know something sells, you'll sell yourself short.
Writing about a modern, urban middle-class africa is every bit as true as writing about the starving-kids-with-bloated belly Africa. It's like the blind men and the elephant story ... everyone's reality is different and valid.
I found Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby fascinating, not becasue it was a good read(ye gods, it dripped with the kind of adolescent angst I grew out of decades ago!) but becasue it totally blew apart all my mao-suited-pushbike-riding preconceptions of China.
sorry - my fingfers get dyslexic when I try to type becasuse ... becasue ... because
"Once you start writing because you know something sells, you'll sell yourself short."
Let's try this again :
"Once you start writing because you know something sells, you'll be able to pay your bills and not have to live on the street where it might just be a tad difficult to find a socket to plug your laptop into."
That's easy to say if you're independently wealthy, that you want to write about anything you want.. but in the end if you don't give the people what they want, they won't buy it. And if they don't buy it.. what do you live on ?
You don't HAVE TO write you know. You could do something else for a living that will be much much much more lucrative! (Almost anything else!)
The writing I get paid for (articles) though, is not the writing I enjoy most(fiction/memoir). I earn more money from training and the other things I do ...
It seems cynical to put earning money at the top of your list of priorities when talking about writing. But hey, I'm not the one to judge. I wish you all the best selling your work, and hope that you will be prompted to start a blog because you have interesting opinions and a witty way with words.
Response to:
"Once you start writing because you know something sells, you'll be able to pay your bills and not have to live on the street where it might just be a tad difficult to find a socket to plug your laptop into."
There are 2 types of writers - those who do it for money and those who do it for the love of it. Any reader can tell the difference. The cold harsh fact is that writers who are true to themselves need to find another way to earn a living.
The main problem in this world today is that most people sell out. How many of us (myself included) are really living the way we really want to live, how many of us have shut up instead of speaking our minds, how many of us choose not to write about something we feel strongly about, because we fear repercussions. You can find this self-fear everywhere - in the media, politics, at educational institutions, the workplace, marriages.
We all have the choice, to be true to ourselves, or live our lives as dicated by others.
This is the "prostitute" archetype as labeled by Jung - its in all humans to varying degrees - we all have to confront our inner prostitute at some stage.
Animah
"There are 2 types of writers - those who do it for money and those who do it for the love of it. Any reader can tell the difference."
If they can, why do they keep buying the bestsellers ?
"The cold harsh fact is that writers who are true to themselves need to find another way to earn a living."
That's true.. but why is that ? why should that be ?
"...how many of us have shut up instead of speaking our minds, how many of us choose not to write about something we feel strongly about, because we fear repercussions. You can find this self-fear everywhere - in the media, politics, at educational institutions, the workplace, marriages. "
You too need a blog of your own Animah! I think you're right here ... generally Malaysians are a self-censoring lot, and this is reflected in the fiction produced (or rather, not produced!). The question is whether there really would be repercussions if you chose to write what needed to be written
about.
(Maybe you should be the writer to find out!)
If they can, why do they keep buying the bestsellers ?
Porty - (Wearing teacher's hat.) Probably because they've never been encouraged to tackle anything more challenging. A certain amount of reader education needs to go on ...
That's true.. but why is that ? why should that be ?
Few writers even overseas can live from their writing alone ... they teach and review to make ends meet. In an ideal world it wouldn't happen.
Yup, not every writer can be like Stephen King or JK Rowling.
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