Abstract
Much of what constitutes postcolonial theory has been the effort of making the subaltern speak, of resurrecting the attenuated forms buried under the constraining authority of the colonial episteme and culture. Edward Said was the first to give new life, through postcolonial theory, to what in the African context was pronounced dead by Wole Soyinka in his interview with Biodun Jeyifo: the idea of “writing back” as a form of Prospero-Caliban syndrome. One of the key distinctions of African postcolonialism is the disarticulation of the very condition of postcolonialism as writing back, the most radical form of which is Ngugi’s imperative to write for his mother, in a language that she could understand. The language question is important as a factor in the calculus of producers of culture in determining what they are willing to risk their capital on.
Thus, all works of the mind contain within themselves the image of the reader for whom they are intended
(Jean-Paul Sartre: What is Literature?)
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Notes
- 1.
Wole Soyinka and Biodun Jeyifo, Conversations with Wole Soyinka (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 128.
- 2.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 73.
- 3.
V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
- 4.
Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism.
- 5.
Mbembe, On the Postcolony.
- 6.
Here one thinks of James Ferguson’s Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order; Charles Piot’s Remotely Global.
- 7.
Thiongʼo Ngũgĩ wa, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
- 8.
Wole Soyinka, Of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
- 9.
This is the title of Wole Soyinka’s keynote address at the 2009 ALA conference in Vermont. Wole Soyinka, The Creative Pursuit in Global Time, 2009.
- 10.
Said, Orientalism.
- 11.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1994).
- 12.
Emphasis mine, Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 66.
- 13.
Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 13.
- 14.
Emily S. Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 66.
- 15.
Soyinka, Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir, 1946–1965, p. 27.
- 16.
Achebe, Home and Exile, p. 98.
- 17.
See Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980) by Onsucheka J. Chinweizu and Ihechukwu Madubuike.
- 18.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, 1993.
- 19.
This question invokes Derrida’s “What is a “Relevant” Translation?”.
- 20.
Ngũgĩ wa, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, p. 39.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 60.
- 22.
John 1:48.
- 23.
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (Routledge, 2002).
- 24.
Ibid., p. 176.
- 25.
Henry Staten, Tracking the ‘Native Informant’: Cultural Translation as the Horizon of Literary Translation (2005), p. 114.
- 26.
October 12, 1964, James Ngugi to Keith Sambrook.
- 27.
Analogies to Pierre Marcherey’s notion of the implicit and the explicit and to Mudimbe’s notion of gnosis are appropriate here.
- 28.
Sartre, “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays, pp. 133, 260.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 132.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 133.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 109.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 132.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 71.
- 34.
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 60.
- 35.
Wa Thiong’o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, p. 23.
- 36.
Much of the first section of Paul Bandia’s Translation as Reparation fall in this category.
- 37.
Ngũgĩ wa, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, p. 17. Ngugi’s turn to Gikuyu has been assessed within the context of Kenya and Africa, where critics claim it excludes as much as it includes. The argument goes: Non-Gikuyu speaking Kenyans, and the rest of Africa, are excluded more than they would be if he wrote in English. Ngugi rejects this position by refusing to abdicate his responsibility as a writer to language, and especially as he sees it, to the Kikuyu audience, in search of the non-Gikuyu speaking Africans who he claims are already well served by their own writers. The second related point of course is that his position on language is not in real fact exclusionary because it is predicated on the necessity of translation. His hope is that the texts would be translated for a much wider readership, regardless of whether he writes in English or Gikuyu. The political stance of turning to Gikuyu is also philosophical. With language as with existentialism, subjectivity is the starting point.
- 38.
My emphasis, JN for James Ngugi. Interview by Alan Marcuson, Mike Gonzalez, Sue Drake, Dave Williams, Union News, Friday November 18, 1966).
- 39.
Sartre, “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays, p. 73.
- 40.
While it may be true that Sartre is addressing the question of writing and audience for a nation whose national language is spoken by all citizens; his conclusions are nevertheless instructive as the help to underscore as he would later argue what it means to write for a split audience that is not homogeneous. The diversity of Africa has been cited as the greatest obstacle for the adoption of African languages. It is self-evident that it would be meaningless for Sartre to write in German for a French audience. But that sense of incongruity is never carried over to an African context when a writer writes in English for an African audience that comprises equally of a variety of non-English speaking Africans. In other words, the problem of heterogeneity is not resolved by the adoption of English.
- 41.
Sartre, “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays, p. 73.
- 42.
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 114.
- 43.
Ngũgĩ wa, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, p. 42.
- 44.
My emphasis, ibid., pp. 43–45.
- 45.
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 96.
- 46.
See the chapter “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” in Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination.
- 47.
Ngũgĩ wa, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, pp. 58–59.
- 48.
This is a term that Walkowitz uses to describe contemporary Anglophone novels in Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
- 49.
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 97.
- 50.
Sartre, “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays, p. 76.
- 51.
Here I am rephrasing George Bush’s soft bigotry of low expectations.
- 52.
Ngũgĩ wa, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, p. 56.
- 53.
Ibid., pp. 56–57.
- 54.
Henry Chakava, Publishing in Africa: One Man’s Perspective (Bellagio Pub. Network Research and Information Center, 1996).
- 55.
Emphasis mine, Ngũgĩ wa, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, pp. 56–57.
- 56.
My emphasis, ibid., p. 85.
- 57.
Peoria is a small town outside Chicago. There was the saying in Chicago in the 1930s before a musical performance is considered worthy of the interest of big city patrons: “How does it play in Peoria?”.
- 58.
Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, p. 328.
- 59.
Richard Rand, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 198.
- 60.
Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London; New York: Verso, 2013), p. 205.
- 61.
Rand, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 199.
- 62.
Chakava, Publishing in Africa: One Man’s Perspective, p. 63.
- 63.
Bubakar Bóris Jóob, Doomi Golo: Nettali (Dakar, Sénégal: Editions Papyrus Afrique, 2003).
- 64.
Boubacar Boris Diop, Vera Wülfing-Leckie and Caroline Fache, Africa Beyond the Mirror (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2014), p. 117.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
Nuruddin Farah, In Praise of Exile (1990), p. 183.
- 67.
E.W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012), p. 294. The intellectual constellation of this position could be found in Abiola Irele’s “In Praise of Alienation.”
- 68.
Ngugi to Keith, April 7, 1964.
- 69.
Soyinka, The Creative Pursuit in Global Time, p. 19.
- 70.
Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, p. 15.
- 71.
Soyinka, The Creative Pursuit in Global Time, p. 15.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 22.
- 73.
A more relevant critique of Damrosch is the absence of an analysis informed by an understanding of the distinction between formal and informal networks of distribution; or even high culture and popular culture, and the impact that has on other channels of distribution and modes of circulation.
- 74.
Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, p. 329.
- 75.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 269.
- 76.
Achebe addressed the issue of what the elite or intellectuals were reading in Morning Yet on Creation Day and concluded that they do not read much beyond what they read in school, which makes the primary market for African literature the captive market of school children. The question of language is thus not simply that of speaking, but reading as well. And if much of the book culture is in the schools and universities, then it implies both the literature and the language are tied to formal structures of education, which is even more limiting.
- 77.
S.D. Moore and M. Rivera, Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology (Fordham University Press, 2011), p. 138.
- 78.
Sartre, “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays, p. 30.
- 79.
- 80.
James English’s The Economy of Prestige explored how literary prizes have aggregated greater power to confer value from the background of cultural field. Similar arguments could be make regarding the relationship between cultural value and patronage.
- 81.
- 82.
Sartre, “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays, p. 80.
- 83.
Eileen Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
- 84.
His exact words are: “As a result of the divergence between the real public and the ideal public, there arose the idea of abstract universality.” Sartre, “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays, p. 136.
- 85.
For discussions of possessive cultural attachments to native languages, see Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); Michael Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
- 86.
Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, p. 15.
- 87.
This is the central argument of Talal Asad’ piece, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” and Spivak’s response to Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other.
- 88.
Soyinka, The Creative Pursuit in Global Time, p. 15.
- 89.
Ngũgĩ wa, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, p. 57.
- 90.
Karin Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- 91.
Ibid., p. 161.
- 92.
Ibid., The chapter on “Audiences and Publics” is especially useful in thinking about the local context of Ngugi’s engagement at the Cultural Center.
- 93.
Sartre writes of the defining moment in bourgeois literature when the “rising class” became literate and as such was able to provide financial sustenance to the writer: “Thus, for the first time an oppressed class was presenting itself to the writer as a real public.” This moment is equivalent to Ngugi’s moment of epiphany, in his recognition of the necessary requirement for representing the peasantry.
- 94.
Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, p. 325.
- 95.
Nuruddin Farah, “WHEN DID YOU START TO THINK OF YOURSELF AS AFRICAN?” Ivan Vladislavic in conversation with Nuruddin Farah and Robert Kelly. http://lithub.com/when-did-you-start-to-think-of-yourself-as-african/
- 96.
Taiye Selasi invented this phrase in Bye-Bye Babar, http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76, March 3, 2005. For a discussion of the reception of the term, see: “Afropolitanism”: Africa without Africans (II) Okwunodu Ogbechi http://aachronym.blogspot.com/2008/04/afropolitanism-more-africa-without.html; “Afropolitanism” Achille Mbembe in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, by Njami Simon; The Afropolitan Must Go, November 28, 2013 by Marta Tveit.
- 97.
Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, p. 334.
- 98.
Very few are aware that Dennis Brutus was Zimbabwean. He migrated to South Africa, and then fled to the USA. He positioned himself as South African, but was really Zimbabwean. That matters for various reasons.
- 99.
Ibid., p 320.
- 100.
Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, p. 326.
- 101.
Ibid., p. 326.
- 102.
C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary: 50th Anniversary Edition (Duke University Press, 2013), p. 154.
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Ibironke, O. (2018). Ngugi: Language, Publics, and Production. In: Remapping African Literature. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69296-8_6
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