The Danger of a Single Story

In a very interesting lecture in the excellent TED series, Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie, talks about the danger of misunderstanding which can arise when we only hear a single story about another person or country.



(Thanks, Reza, for the link.)

Uwem Akpan - Writer Priest

... my writing, I’d say too, is an extension of the pulpit … it reaches folks who don’t care for organised religion in a different way

Nigerian author and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan is interviewed by Grace Talusan for the Ubud edition of Quill magazine, and the piece is up on Eric's blog. Akpan's short story collection Say You’re One of Them won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa). His stories of children caught in dire situations are set in Rwanda, Nigeria, Benin and Ethiopia.

He is one of the authors appearing at this year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

A Window on Biafra

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, got a thumbs up from every member of our book club at our meeting last night. The novel was discussed up and down and inside out after a lovely supper cooked by Shashi (though it did seem a little wrong to be discussing a book in which the characters are literally starving to death, with comfortable full tums.)

I think the novel profoundly affected all of us.

Renata and I who had grown up in Britain, remember the shocking footage of the war in Biafra shown on the television news, and especially the images of starving children with bloated bellies. It was the first time ever that such a thing had been shown. (Ethiopia ... Darfur ... haven't we just got so blase about the images of starvation since then?) Our Malaysian friends, and Naho in Japan who joined in our conversation via Skype (ah the miracles of modern technology!) had not heard of the war at all, or only heard it mentioned in the vaguest terms and so were grateful to learn about it.

I lived in Nigeria in the early '80's and can attest to the fact that the war was not a topic of conversation.*

I was living in the North of the country, so far away geographically from what was then Biafra, so perhaps that was part of the reason. One of my closest friends there was an Igbo - a physics graduate from Nsukka called Frederick, who was posted to my school as a "Youth Corper" - and a handful of the girls I taught were too, so I learned much about the culture of the Igbo from them. But I can remember only one person really talking about the Biafran war with me - a taxi driver who had been a soldier with the Nigerian forces during the conflict and who had returned home badly wounded.

Adichie gives the conflict a very human face by taking her time to create a cast of characters we really care about - especially the twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, and the houseboy Ugwu who comes to lives with Odenigbo, (an intellectual of revolutionary persuasion) and Olanna's love interest. (The group felt that Adichie had probably struggled much harder with the wimpy British journalist, Richard, Kainene's lover, who decides to throw his lot in with the Igbo people .) There are a number of very well realised minor characters including the twins' wealthy parents, and Richard's comic houseboy Harrison, who delights in concocting British dishes.

The main events are seen from the vantage point of these Olanna, Richard and Ugwu in turn.

"Unputdownable" was a word that was used rather a lot, last night. As I said before, I was a bit thrown initially by what I felt were strong similarities (probably imagined?) to Romesh Gunasekera's Reef, but was quickly drawn into the book by all the human drama - love, infidelity, sisterly rivalry, family tensions, black magic. Then, when the war came, for me the physical book in my hands melted and became an open door. I wasn't watching Biafra in black and white news broadcasts - I was there. Yes, there were of course harrowing scenes, but it is the story of day to day survival in the face of starvation that Adichie portrays so well.

You can read an excerpt from the novel here, and do check out Adichie's website. You might also like to revisit Janet Tay's excellent review of the novel from Starmag.

I was wondering how the novel (first published in the US) would be received in Africa, and was very moved by the comments left by Nigerians invited to tell their own Biafra story, particularly those who mention that reading the novel gave them their first opportunity to talk about their own experiences or to find out from their parents what really happened. This is an episode in Nigeria's past that very much needed to be written about and Adichie makes that history highly accessible.

(*It isn't in the school textbooks either.)

Anthony Isoh for Readings

Meet Anthony Isoh, one of our readers for Seksan this Saturday. Currently a law student at Help Institute, this Nigerian author has written two novels. The first Mugu Hunters is a group of Nigerian fraudsters who set out to swindle gullible western men while the second, Black Banana is set in Malaysia and inspired by the humiliation and abuse of domestic workers.

He is profiled by Henry Akubuiro in Nigeria's Daily Sun.

Breakfast Book Sale, Tea Time Reading

Reading is sexy, promises Daphne Lee, and invites you all to a book sale at Dram Projects in Section 17 tomorrow morning. (Click poster for details). Proceeds go to the Malaysian-UK exchange Project.

We'll start setting up at 9 and be ready to sell books by 10!

she says.

Quite apart from from feeding your reading habit, you can feed your hungry appetite with a lovely big breakkie at Food Foundry next door.

Baked Beans, Sautéed Mushrooms, Toast, Bacon and Sausages with Scrambled or Fried Eggs choice of coffee or tea RM18.90

French Toast with apple fillings 9.90

Pancakes with honey and jam 10.90

Scrambled eggs with salmon on toast 13.90

Also on tomorrow, a reading by Nigerian author Anthony Isoh from his self-published novel Black Banana at Silverfish from 5.30pm to 7.00pm .

Achebe's Book Hits 50

Celebrations are planned in cities across the US to celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of the twentieth centuries greatest novels, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times pays tribute, and looks at how it has influenced other African authors.

Chris Abani, a nigerian author based in Los Angeles calls the book :

... inescapable. ... You're either working against it or within it; you're rejecting it or you're accepting it. But the conversation has to include it.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton University professor of philosophy points out that :

The book establishes a series of conventions on how things are to be written about . . . that had never been represented before. ... No one had taken the stately cadences of traditional African speech into English.

And Half a Yellow Sun author Chimamanda Adichie says the novel led to:

... a glorious shock of discovery. It taught me that my world was worthy of literature, that books could also have people like me in them.

I count myself very lucky to have had the opportunity to teach the novel to a class of very enthusiastic Form Five students in Nigeria who made my experience of reading Achebe even more special.

Adichie's Desks

I wrote at the dining table when I could not use my father's desk because he was working or because a sibling was on the phone. The table, light green and long, was the family dumping ground -- of newspapers, university circulars, wedding invitations, bananas or groundnuts bought on the way home -- and the tiny ants that lived underneath it appeared after breakfast to crowd around bits of sugar or bread. I always cleared a space for myself at one end, opposite the grand old wood-paneled air conditioner, used so rarely that a puff of dust always burst out before cool air followed. It was noisy and, during birthdays when the parlor was filled with friends and food, graduations, baby showers for my sisters, the celebratory party when my mother was appointed registrar, there was always a loud vacuum-like sound of the air conditioner in the background.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminisces about the writing desks where she learned to write in this wonderfully atmospheric piece from The Washington Post.

(Photo taken from Adichie's website.)

Achebe Honoured

I'm very happy to see Nigerian author Chinua Acebe honoured with this year's Man Booker International Prize worth £60,000 .

Says John Ezard in the Guardian:

In choosing to give the award to a man who is regularly described as the father of modern African literature, the judges have signalled that this new global Booker has achieved the status of an authentic world award in only its second contest.

By honouring Achebe they have redressed what is seen in Africa - and beyond - as the acute injustice that he has never received the Nobel prize, allegedly because he has spent his life struggling to break the grip of western stereotypes of Africa. One of his most famous essays is an onslaught against Joseph Conrad's masterpiece Heart of Darkness, a novel about a European's descent into savagery in Africa.

The Guardian website also has a guide to Achebe's life and work and you can read an extract from Things Fall Apart (which is one of my favourite novels) here.

Acebe himself says in the Times:

It was 50 years ago this year that I began writing my first novel, Things Fall Apart. It is wonderful to hear that my peers have looked at the body of work I have put together in the last 50 years and judged it deserving of this important recognition. I am grateful.

It has, of course, been an amazing week for Nigerian authors (and not just Nigerian - Igbo!) with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie winning the Orange Prize a few days earlier. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian she talks about the need to get right away from stereotyped views of Africa:

We have a long history of Africa being seen in ways that are not very complimentary, and in America ... being seen as an African writer comes with baggage that we don't necessarily care for. Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe Aids. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations. I was told by a professor at Johns Hopkins University that he didn't believe my first book ... because it was too familiar to him. In other words, I was writing about middle-class Africans who had cars and who weren't starving to death, and therefore to him it wasn't authentically African. ... People forget that Africa is a place in which class exists," she says. "It's as if Africans are not allowed to have class, that somehow authenticity is synonymous with poverty and demands your pity and your sympathy. Africa is seen as the place where the westerner goes to sort out his morality issues. We see it in films and in lots of books about Africa, and it's very troubling to me.

You may remember that Doreen Baigana said something very similar some time back.

Thank goodness for all those authors, Achebe in the forefront, who have managed to break the mould.

Orange-Flavoured Fiction

The 2007 Orange Broadband Prize goes to .... (drumroll, please, while I open the envelope) Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (left, at the Guardian Hay festival).

And the Orange Broadband Award for First Writers goes to ... (another drumroll) Karen Connelly for The Lizard Cage.

Am longing to read both ... the first I have, and it's shouting at me from my TBR shelf. The other I haven't seen in the bookshops here yet.

Do check out the author websites. Chimamanda has set up a site especially for the book which includes a board for readers to post their memories of the Biafran war. Karen Connelly's includes her journal.

Beasts and Bollocks

So what are you reading this week?

I didn't get a whole lot of reading during the litfest, with so many events to attend and people to talk to. And over the past week I've been a bit of a nibbler, dipping into several different books.

One book I did finish was Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of no Nation. It was high on my must-read list anyway, especially as it is written by a Nigerian author (albeit one who is also an American author) and Nigeria's a part of the world I know and care about. And then Ms. D declared it her favourite book of last year, and I respect her opinion. And then it won the John Rhys Llewellyn Award.

I can't recommend this little book (142 pages) too highly. It's the story of a child swept up into the chaos of Nigeria's Civil War, abducted by a rag-tag group of rebels and forced to become a child soldier. Agu narrates his own story in broken English: the voice is very well done, capturing the essence of Nigerian pidgin without ever slowing the writing down.

The book addresses a very basic human question - how can an individual be drawn in to committing inhuman acts? Poignant flashbacks of family and school days show us Agu's life before the war. But his descent into hell is rapid and fueled by starvation, drugs and the sure knowledge that if he does not kill, he will himself be killed. Soon he is slaughtering innocent victims along with the rest, and even deriving pleasure from it. Despite the setting , the book could actually have been set anywhere in the world where children are recruited to fight.

I could write a whole lot more about the book but will save that for a review I'm writing for Off The Edge.

I must also add that I love this particular paperback edition from HarperPerennial for its handfeel, cover design, the flexibility of the spine, the weight of the pages, the size of print ... and all the add-ons at the end including an essay by the author talking about how the book came to be written. This is how I would like all paperbacks to be.

I've been dipping into a couple of books that I acquired at the last Big Bookshop warehouse sale, among them Bollocks to Alton Towers is a sort of alternative travel guide to places in UK. Most books of this sort direct you to the famous tourist spots (like the amusement park, Alton Towers, in the title), this quirky little book recommends day trips to all kinds of obscure places which also guarantee a dose of fun. Here's a pub built like a pack of cards in Devon, the David Beckham trail in North London, a village on Salisbury Plain abandoned during the war when the army wanted to test weapons, the Cumberland pencil museum ... and much much more. The pieces by Robin Halstead, Jason Hazely, Alex Morris and Joel Morris are amusing and informative and I'd love to follow up some of these unusual day-trips next time I go back to dear old Blighty. (I'm getting homesick!!)

Actually I've several more books I want to talk about but I'm afraid I'll be sucked into the black hole of this blog for the rest of the morning when my typing fingers are demanded for elsewhere things.

So I kick the ball to you, and promise to post about other reads later.

Tale of Child Soldiers Wins Llewellyn Rhys Award

The John Llewellyn Rhys award for debut writers was won by Uzodinma Iweala's for his Beasts of No Nation, described by Michelle Pauli in the Guardian as:

a brutal but surprisingly poetic novel about an African child soldier ... an intensely moving story, as well as a horrifying one, all the more so for tackling an issue of our time ...

The issue of course being child soldiers and as the Pauli points, Save the Children estimates that around 300,000 children around the world are currently fighting in wars.

Nigerian born Iweala is just 23. He grew up in the US and studied at Harvard where his novel grew out of the thesis he was writing. His mum Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is Nigeria's finance minister (and hailed as "a great reformer").

You can read with him about his writing and about his views on Africa in this very interesting interview from the Morning News.

And as this article from the Herald Tribune points out, there is a whole new generation of Nigerian writers taking the literary world by storm. Some names to watch out for Sefi Atta, Helen Oyeyemi, Chris Abani, Segun Afolabi, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

All of which makes me very happy. Not least because a part of my heart still lives in Nigeria.

Related Posts:

Shakespeare the African (15/3/05)
Read and Become Wise (11/5/05)

Living Memorial for Saro Wiwa

A moving memoir in today's Observer by Ken Wiwa.

Ken Wiwa was one of the "stars" of last year's KL Literary festival arriving on these shores courtesy of the Canadian High Commission. Wiwa, of course, is the son of Nigerian writer Ken Saro Wiwa, who was imprisoned, tortured and executed ten years ago for leading protests on behalf of the Ogoni people who were being screwed by oil giant Shell in the Niger delta.

I'd expected Wiwa's book In the Shadow of a Saint it to be an extended song of praise for the great man his father undoubtedly was. It turned out to be an extremely moving and honest account of a sometimes very fraught father-son relationship, and a wider exploration of the legacy of the pain and confusion a political martyr can bequeath his children. (You can listen to an interview with Wiwa about the book and his father's life here.)

Felt very sad reading the Guardian piece that this is the first I've heard about plans to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Saro Wiwa's execution with performance and readings around the world. Couldn't we also mark the anniversary here somehow?

On Not Conforming to a Stereotype

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.

Read and Become Wise

I found one of my books in the bin and rescued it.

"Well you left it lying around for so long, and then the cat pissed on it," Abu explained, as I wiped the cover clean of vegetable peelings.

It doesn't look much - scarcely more than a pamphlet. It's actually a chapbook written to deliver a moral lesson, in this case how to manage your money properly. It's poorly printed with crude black and white drawings. The text is not set straight on some of the pages. But this is one of the most treasured books in my library. I bought it in a bookshop in Nigeria more than twenty years ago and it is a classic of Onitsha Market publishing called Money Hard to get but Easy to Spend: Read and Become Wise. And reading it again I became nostalgic for West Africa.

So here is some of its wisdom and a taste of the delicious style of writing so common in Nigeria.

Jealousy too much nowadays, whatever you do people must jealous you for that and say against you. One wife one trouble, two wives two troubles. Not the person who calls police do win, but the person who is right.

Money is hard to get but easy to spend. Big man big trouble, small man small trouble. Time is money and waits for nobody. Law is no respect of any person, whether rich or poor.

ONE DAY VISIT HOSPITAL OR THE LEPER COLONY AND SEE HOW GOD LOVES YOU.

Men are powerful and do suffer. Women are difficult. You can't win them by lies because you can't feed them on lies. Money hard to get but women do not know. They are the same with children.

MAN PROPOSES GOD DISPOSES

No condition permanent in this world. Big or small, rich or poor, all will die. When some people hate you, some people will love you. Make monkey go England and come back, it will still answer monkey.

Prevention is better than cure. A word is enough for the wise. When an old woman falls down twice, she counts the contents of her basket. My son is tall is not power. That a man talks too much does not mean he knows word. Everyday is not Christmas; You cannot pass me in two ways, if you are taller than me I will be shorter than you. If you are richer than me I will be poorer than you.



Nobody is perfect. A patient dog eats the fattest bone. Not that wrestling started from morning to night is important but who wins. It is true that it is hard to see a man who does not like the affairs of women and that it is also hard to see woman who does not like the affairs of men? … Be a man of your words. Do not say something you don't know about it.

Women like to engineer words so don't agree all that your wife tells you.

There are two major things that kills a man. MONEY AND WOMEN.

These type of men and women dancing are the type of people who spend money too much. They can get 10 Naira a day and spend all on useless things. Give me twelve bottles of beer give me one roasted fowl, tune to Congo, tune to Nigeria, tune to Ghana, put better records, are what their bodies want.

Harlots are dangerous women and should be strongly bewared for. They are commonly found in hotels. They contribute to the existence of holiganism, robber and the deteriorating immoral life of some of our boys.


So now you know.

But amazing what the Internet turns up. I discovered that a writer called Kurt Thometz has compiled a book of some of the best market literature from Nigeria called Life Turns a man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English (Random House) and ordered it from Amazon. It's a wonderful collection of texts, and just goes to show that a nation's most loved literature does not have to be printed on glossy paper, does not even have to couched in faultless English to find a lasting place in the heart of its people.