In which I am given an opportunity to be the female Dambudzo Marechera

Now here is news. An Elegy for Easterly has been longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. I hope that I make it to the short list, and then to the podium, if only because I want to emulate, and possibly better, Dambudzo Marechera's plate throwing antics from 1979. Those of you who know your Marechera will know that he was the first, and to date only, Zimbabwean to win this incredible award, back in 1979, when it was called the Guardian Fiction Award and Zimbabwe was but a glint in the eye of its progenitors. Legend has it that when he got to the podium, he started throwing plates and things at the chandelier in the posh London restaurant at which the ceremony was held. And instead of deducting the cost of the plates from his winner's cheque, this mayhem apparently confirmed to those who attended that they were in the presence of a genius of unparalleled geniusness.

But seriously ...

I have a friend who lives in Canada, a rather intense poet from an African country most famous for its writers who complains all the time about how these "foreign" prizes build an external canon when we as Africans should be building our own canon. A compelling argument at first sight, expect that it assumes rather a lot. In the case of Dambudzo, if the "foreign" Heinemann African Writers Series had not published him, and if he had not won the "foreign" Guardian Fiction Award as it then was, he might well never have found the path he travelled to be the most influential Zimbabwean writer my country has seen. Is he any less Zimbabwean, any less our own because he was first celebrated outside our borders? There was no Zimbabwean publishing industry to publish and honour him because there was not even a nation called Zimbabwe to publish him. He found honour in his country because he found it first outside.

And what about Tsitsi Dangarembnga, who tried to publish her novel in the new Zimbabwe? She submitted her first novel, Nervous Conditions to the Zimbabwe Publishing House in the mid-eighties, only to be told that it was "too feminist" to be published in Zimbabwe. She was then published by the "foreign" Women's Press, she was awarded a "foreign" Commonwealth Writers Prize, her book was subsequently picked up by the same Zimbabwe Publishing House that had initially rejected her, and we cannot now talk of Zimbabwean literature without her.

So yes, the evil West building our canon externally argument is attractive because it appeals to that deep and emotional and nationalist tigritude in us, but in the case of two of the most influential Zimbabwean writers to whom succeeding generations will owe everything, it does not hold up.

As for me, I say bring on all awards, foreign and local as long as they get people talking about books, buying books and reading books. Especially my book!