Two Africa is a Country contributors–Neelika Jayawardane and Kathryn Mathers–have pieces in the latest issue of Transition, the Harvard creative writing magazine. That’s the cover above with the theme “Blending Borders.” Neelika’s article “Everyone’s got their Indian,” (you need a subscription) is on racial politics in postapartheid South Africa. Though she’s been meaning to write about this topic for a while, I know this visit to South Africa let to the piece. Kathryn’s has a similarly provocative title, “Mr Kristof, I Presume.” (Hers you can read in full. The link takes you a PDF of the article.) Here, before you click away, is the first page of Kathryn’s article: [Read more...]
Shameless Self Promotion
February 9, 2012 By 5 Comments
JM Coetzee’s Cricketing Life
February 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment
It was with some intrigue that my J.M. Coetzee google alert recently informed me that the elusive author had published something new; this time, apparently, in a contribution to a book celebrating, of all things, Australian cricket.
Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo
February 1, 2012 By 1 Comment
Days after “The Economist” decided no-one in the “Middle East” reads books (I’m serious, read the piece here), Ahdaf Soueif dedicated a short piece to Cairo in Newsweek. Just like Youssef Chahine’s Cairo, beautifully expressed on film, Soueif identifies the ugliness that exists alongside the lovely in al Qahira. If the following is a taste of what the novelist’s new book, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, will express, I am eager to continue reading.
What you should be reading
December 22, 2011 By 6 Comments
I wasn’t pleased with the selection of short stories listed for the Caine Prize this year. That list made African writing look bad. Truth be told, the problem associated with such collections is hardly applicable to the Caine committee alone. Lists like that makes it seem like African writing remains subpar, and is simply being given a charitable helping hand by the largesse of nice prize-giving people.
Happily, the list below, including some of the most absorbing books of 2011, will convince you otherwise – read them all if you can (and please add those you’d recommend in the comments area below). I received several of the books for birthday presents/random presents from my partner, and read them on the journeys we make between New York City (where he works) and upstate New York (where I work). On those long train rides along the Hudson River–flowering trees, the ‘V’s of returning Canada geese, and kayakers in springtime to ice floes and 19th century industrialists’ castles, revealed among trees shorn of foliage during mid winter – there’s been more than one instance that someone sitting near us asked to have a look at the book I was reading. And surprise: their pleasure, from the first pages, was so obvious that I let these random strangers keep the book for the journey, re-learning what they know about African intellect, African poetics, African multiplicity in thought, ways of being, and life experience.
“The Somali Neurosis”
December 12, 2011 By 9 Comments
14-minute clip from a recent TV profile by Norwegian television of a visit by Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah to that country. I never imagined book TV could look this good and informative.
Zoo City to be turned into a film
December 7, 2011 By 6 Comments
Zoo City, the award-winning novel by South African Lauren Beukes, is to be turned into a film. Producer Helena Spring, also a South African, won the rights, and will be looking for a director.
Spring’s credits range from the Oscar-nominated “Yesterday” and “Red Dust” (a not so good courtroom drama about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) to the silly, but lucrative, Leon Schuster comedies Mama Jack (he’s in blackface for most of the film) and Mr Bones. Her most recent film is “The First Grader”, which is winning awards all over the place. So she seems to be in good company with Beukes, who earlier this year won the Arthur C Clarke award for Zoo City. The book also won a British Science Fiction Award for best art work – for designer Joey Hi-Fi. It is a great cover – far better in my view than the one on the North American edition.
Zoo City is a ‘cyberpunk thriller’ set in an alternate Johannesburg, where criminals or those who have serious moral failings, get landed with an animal familiar as a permanent attachment. They also get the added benefit of a psychic power. The book’s protagonist is Zinzi December, a former journalist and drug addict, who ended up with a sloth on her back after causing her brother’s death. She spends her time writing copy for 419 scam emails until she gets roped in to searching for a missing singer (her talent is being able to find lost things).
Translating Angola
December 5, 2011 By 6 Comments
By Megan Eardley
Rhett McNeil’s translation of Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes’s “The Splendor of Portugal” received a lot of attention from the literary world when it was released earlier this fall. And with good reason. McNeil has interpreted Lobo Antune’s thick, cruel prose beautifully. But so far English-language critics have focused on the technical challenges of translating Antunes, as though they were somehow isolated from the text’s socio-political and ethical questions. Overall, many of these critics miss the edge of McNeil’s translation, which turns on Antunes’s language in order to address the reproduction of colonial violence on a global scale. We might go further to question why certain kinds of war stories–such as Antunes’s–are embraced by critics, and go on to find an international audience, while other finely written stories do not.
‘The greatest issues in Africa’
December 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment
If you are to ask me what are the greatest issues in Africa, I would say it is that people love, people fuck, people kiss, people speak.
Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina talking to The Guardian Book Podcast.
Black France
November 18, 2011 By 4 Comments
By Alain Mabanckou*
A few months before the presidential elections in France appears this ‘beautiful book’, La France noire, Trois siècles de présences (‘Black France, Three centuries of presence’ (eds.) Pascal Blanchard, Sylvie Chalaye, Eric Deroo, Dominique Thomas & Mahamet Timera, La Découverte, 2011). Since immigration has become an issue of politics and demagogues, many black people in France believe they would be better off in the English-speaking countries — the situation of their “brothers” living there seems to them more bearable… Yet, before the French Revolution and, to some extent, during the colonial period, it was better to be a black person in France than anywhere else. One sees it with the massive arrival of African-American intellectuals in Paris, victims of racial segregation in their home country. “It wasn’t until the 1980s that this feeling, this attraction to France declined, and that a black person would think himself more free, more accepted and more recognized in Britain, the United States or in Johannesburg, even if his citizenship was a fully vested right in France.”
The presence of black people in France spans the last three centuries.
Of blood & tears, ink & screen
November 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
By Abdourahman Waberi
What is the fil rouge running between Algeria’s unforgettable freedom fighter and film producer Saadi Yacef (‘The Battle of Algiers’, shot by Gillo Pontecorvo in 1966 in the Casbah, was adapted from his true story), Somalia’s poet and academic Ali Jimale Ahmed, Congo’s notable novelist Emmanuel Dongala, French reporter and author Anne Niva and novelist and former former Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India Shashi Tharoor, to name but a few among the phenomenal team of writers, journalists, photographers, visual artists and activists assembled ? They all appear in the first issue of a brand new remarkable online magazine called WARSCAPES « motivated by a need to move past a void within mainstream culture in the depiction of people and places experiencing staggering violence, and the literature they produce ».
