What Africa Does the African Writer Write About?

Demands are made of an African writer that are not made of a European or American writer.  Insistence is made on proof of authenticity. Questions are asked about the degree to which it is ethnically genuine. No one questions whether José Saramago represents Portuguese culture. It's irrelevant to know whether James Joyce corresponds to the cultural standards of this or that European ethnic group. Why should African writers have to show such cultural passports? This happens  because people persist in thinking of the production of these African writers as belonging to the domain of anthropology or ethnography. What they are producing isn't literature but a transgression of what is accepted as traditionally African.

The writer isn't just someone who writes. He’s someone who produces thought, someone capable of pollinating others with feeling and delight.

More than this, the writer challenges the basis of thought itself. He goes further than challenging the limits of political correctness. He subverts the very criteria that define what is correct, he questions the boundaries of reason.

An excerpt from the rousing essay "What Africa Does the African Writer Write About?" by 20 Neustadt Prize-winner Mia Couto, published for the first time in English earlier today on the BITSblog. The piece is also forthcoming in Pensativities: Selected Essays, Couto's first collection of non-fiction in English, forthcoming from Biblioasis in April. 

Translation Tuesday: Birth of a Bridge excerpted on the BITSblog

Site meeting – sometime after seven o’clock in the morning and Diderot is talking, standing mountainous at the end of the oval table. Bare room, thin partitions, thin carpet hastily placed, smell of glue, smell of new, freeze-dried coffee, classroom chairs dragged in. These accommodate some fifty individuals, among them Sanche Cameron, the crane operator, and Summer Diamantis, the girl in charge of concrete – Diderot watches these two surreptitiously, the boy with the dazzled face, the girl who takes notes without lifting her head. He directed the comment at them when he said, fingers joined in a bouquet over his chest, hey, rookies, call me Diderot. 

He clears his throat and begins in a loud voice. Okay, let’s get started. Plan of action: one, dig the ground – he lifts his thumb; two, dredge and clear the river – he lifts his index; three, get started on the concrete – he lifts his middle finger. Turns to pull down a wall-mounted screen, starts up a laptop, turns back, slowly surveys the audience, and then slams down the first words.

Just a taste of Maylis de Kerangal's 2010 Prix-Médicis-winning novel Birth of a Bridge, excerpted today on the BITSblog. Happy Translation Tuesday!

"Singing is also a foreseeable insufficiency, and so is beauty"

"Beauty is an absence and it is what is absent, it is what we have a right to and what is constantly being subtracted from us. But it is also what is absent for order—a cosmos—to be complete. Beauty sacrificed in the name of equilibrium. And also love, which is ‘madness’. Yet what is important is the instrument that generates the absence: the gaze. We must keep an eye on this: it is not blindness, which also has had its cultural prestige throughout time, that foretells what shall come, away from the world of things that clutter our sight. It is the gaze." 

Eduardo Milán on the myth of Orpheus, the origins of song, and the gaze that prompts disappearance. Translated by Antonio Ochoa, on this week's #BITSblog.

System Crashing Fidelity Upholder

In his thoughtful personal-reminiscence-cum-review for Underground Book Club, Michael Bryson praises Zachariah Wells's new essay collection Career Limiting Moves all the while clarifying certain misconceptions about its author: 

I have heard him called an asshole. I've heard him called right wing. I've heard him called a misogynist. In the book he notes he's been claimed and rejected by both the populists and the elites. In truth, he has always been what his letter to TDR in 2002 perhaps should have made clear: a jury of one. An iconoclast. One who rejects systems. One who seeks a genuine, unpredictable deep connection with the wildness that is existence and also, therefore, literature [...] He praises poems that press against the outer boundaries. He praises poems that pressure language until it reveals its limit. Then he asks it to go further.

For an example of Zach at his thought-provoking, counter-intuitive, and polemical best, we recommend checking out this week's #BITSblog post, in which he grapples with Goran Simić's From Sarajevo With Sorrow and the importance of journalistic fidelity when translating the poetry of witness.