After an interview I gave to the Guardian in 2009 in which I stated what I thought was an uncontroversial proposition, namely that I really dislike the term "African writer" as I see myself as just me, I received some rather frightening emails. Let’s just say there are a LOT of people out there who seem to derive their sense of worth from how people completely unrelated to them see themselves. A friend told me that quite a few posters on the Nigerian literary list-serve Krazitivity were up in arms because they thought that I was rejecting by black African Nubianess. And all the while I have been queuing before the "African Passports" counters at Oliver Tambo airport and getting my hair braided in Stall 90 at Kenyatta market in Nairobi! I even, as a declaration of my deep-felt Nubiosity, named my son Kush - if I had a daughter, she would be called Egypt then I could proudly say my children are named after the old African kingdom of Egypt and Kush. Or not.
Anyway, after the initial emails, I tuned out of the whole thing and privately swore that the next time anyone asked me about this, I would respond by quoting all of Jabberwocky.
But that was then. As part of an application for a fellowship that is hugely important to me, I have in the last two days been compiling a huge dossier of my reviews and published profiles and have been gasp, googling myself. By the way, I am not one of those writers who claims they do not read reviews - I read them, I love them, and I respect people who take time to read and write honestly and with sincerity. I have, however, for the last 12 months or so, stopped reading anything to do with Easterly. And as I did not read much around the whole African Writer thing, today was the first time that I read the short comment below from Nigerian philosopher and writer Chielozona Eze, which I found on Pambazuka.
I am deeply grateful to Chielo. He has very simply, but eloquently, captured exactly what it is that I meant. If I accept his division of writers on the continent into Achebeans and Soyinkans, I would definitely agree with him that I write in the Soyinkan tradition. I am honestly not interested in writing for the edification and education of the West. Nor do I write to correct historical wrongs. Just as there are stereotypes about Africans, there are stereotypes about Asians, about South Americans, heck, about any group if you come to think of it. To stereotype is human. If I set up my ambition as the correcting of what Chimamanda Adichie calls the "single story", I would go demented.
There are writers who have chosen to take on this burden. I read them, I cheer them on, I celebrate them. But that is not how I see myself or my writing. I do not want always to be writing back or answering back. It would mean that I am forever responding to agendas set by others. Instead of telling others what plants they should not grow in their gardens, I want to cultivate my own little plot, plant the things I love, and watch them grow. I want to write stories that mean something to me, and hang the West. Hang Zimbabwe too. Hang tyranny, including the tyranny of the loudest voiced ones. Hang censorship, hang any kind of silencing. I want to write about anything that takes my interest, with no agenda other than to write it well.
Before I became a writer, I was a roving, curious Afropolitan (I so love that term), rooted in my continent but inspired by the world. I love people, I love travel, I love ideas, I love discovering inspiration in the most unexpected places. This was my life before I became a writer, and it is still my life today. So I write the way I live: taking in everything that inspires, discarding everything that does not. My name is Petina Gappah. I am a Soyinkan. And a million other things besides.
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In her first interview after winning the Guardian First Book Prize, Petina Gappah vehemently objected to her being labelled the voice of Zimbabwe. Rightly, so, one would say, for she is a voice, a very confident one for that. She is a voice that, like others before her such as Yvonne Vera, Marechera, Tsitsi Dangarembga, addressed the human condition from a given position, Zimbabwe. All literature is local.
Since her interview, various internet discussion groups have devoted considerable attention to what is perceived by some as a betrayal of her African roots.
The title of her interview, ‘Petina Gappah: “I don't see myself as an African writer”’, is provocative enough to make one ask whether she had contracted Michael Jackson’s ‘yellow’ fever. Is it possible to create art that is not rooted in some place? Is she merely a copycat to her famous dead compatriot, Dambudzo Marechera?
Not so fast, friends.
To start with, it is abundantly peculiar even to a troubling degree, that only African writers appear to be burdened with the seemingly annoying issue of identity, whether they are writers from and of the continent. As one writer, coming to Gappah’s defense, said, you don’t ask water whether it is wet, do you? Yet, the writer rightly pointed out the tricky issue of identity. Thank God, identity is not as settled as the wetness of water.
It has to be born in mind that the issue of the African writer is fraught with contested meaning. If other writers from other continents do not face the same niggling problem – which I doubt – it might have to do with many factors, one of which is that writing in Africa, literature as belles-lettres is closely associated with liberation struggle and the definition of self. Chinua Achebe gave this type of writing a definitive form with Things Fall Apart and his subsequent essays and interviews and interpretation of his own book. Thus since the publication of his epochal book, African literature has largely been seen as a mode of writing-back, fighting the West’s misrepresentation of the African image.
Achebe cannot be identified with the Negritude movement, but his project is not far removed from Negritude’s redefinition of the maligned image of the African. The subtle difference might lie in the Senghor’s lionisation of the past and Africa’s perceived essence.
This century has witnessed a robust renaissance of African literature, thanks in large part to Caine Prize. This rebirth boasts of such fine writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Sefi Atta, Brian Chikwava, Chika Unigwe, and of course Petina Gappah. Reading their works, one discerns their allegiance to what could be termed, for lack of available terms, the Achebean and Soyinkan schools of thought.
The Achebean school functions much like Negritude, and sees its role as primarily redefining the African. It does this among other things, by challenging the West’s ‘single story’.
The Soyinkan, however, is of course different from the first in the sense that it appears to ignore the gaze of the white man, and explores the human condition as it is found in the African towns and villages. It does not even shy away from employing Western concepts and idioms to elucidate African native ideas. Doing so, simply telling normal stories of normal people, is understood as engaging in a deeply universal exercise.
Among the new crop of African writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie unapologetically positions herself as the torchbearer of Achebean tradition. This is evident in her writings and speeches, the most renowned of which is ‘The Danger of a Single Story.’ Chris Abani and Sefi Atta appear, at least, temperamentally to have sided with Soyinka, caring little about the burden of meeting the gaze of the white man. I put Gappah in this group. I don’t know her in person, but based on what I could glean from some of her writings, formal and informal, she seems to be completely opposed to the tradition of addressing the white man’s single story. She said somewhere that she is rigorously against Negritude, quoting Soyinka’s well-known critique of Negritude.
When Petina Gappah says that she doesn’t see herself as an African writer, I think it is important to note that she never denied being African, or black. Nor does she contest her being Zimbabwean. She, I think, avoids being holed in a given, transcendental role of saving the African, by telling his or her story.
Until it becomes obvious that African literature pursues no cause, many more African writers with broader cast of mind will always deny being African writers.
Perhaps one day the term ‘African writer’ will lose its Achebean stamp when it becomes obvious that writings from that continent will be read also for their aesthetic wealth and not for their apology. The day has actually arrived, and reading Petina Gappah’s short stories, you feel as aesthetically fulfilled and as morally confronted as you would be.
Hopefully, her little controversy goes a long way to instruct interviewers and commentators of African literature that the question of who is an African writer is as redundant as the medieval problem of wanting to know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or, to use a better example, setting up a symposium to determine whether Ian McEwan is European.
