Under African Skies

Charles R. Larson edited and introduced the first major collection of African short stories called Under African Skies. It contained stunning fiction by black writers from a continent whose fiction is marked by a struggle for independence and a confrontation with the residues of white colonialism. When the countries had thrown off the yoke of the colonial master, they were then ruled by local leaders who seem to be the same, if not worse, than the original white masters. This seems to be the fate of many formerly colonized regimes, as epitomized by the famous line from the Philippine Commonwealth President Manuel Luis Quezon: “I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by the Americans.” Well, you certainly got your wish, Mr. President, judging by the way the Philippines has been governed from 1946 to the present inefficient Duterte government, hounded by allegations of massive corruption and human rights violations.

The editor notes: “Undoubtedly, the most extraordinary aspect of African literature – and particularly the fiction – of the past half century has been its resiliency. The ability of the African writer to overcome enormous obstacles and continue creating has been nothing less than astonishing – to borrow an important word from the title of one of Ben Okri’s visionary novels. From near-total invisibility on the world literary scene four decades ago, African writers have moved to centerstage in a remarkably short time. A Nobel Prize (Wole Soyinka), a Booker Award (Ben Okri), an internationally praised novel that has sold in the millions (Chinua Achebe) – and, most encouraging, the majority of them on the African continent – these are some of the impressive accomplishments garnered by black Africa’s highly visible writers during the past two generations.”

As in the Philippines and in many other developing countries, there were also issues with the National Book Policies and government production and support for publishing – who approves the textbooks, who produces them, who profits from their marketing – but as much as anything, the question centers on the most basic one of all: money. There is also the question of the high cost of paper and printing machines.

The book’s introduction also notes the genesis of the African novel and how it entered the mainstream of global publishing. Chinua Achebe recalls how he published his now-iconic novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). He paid 30 pounds to have someone type his handwritten manuscript before it was sent to England. This was an exorbitant amount then, since it was equal to what the average Nigerian lived on for one year. Just when he thought the manuscript had sailed on and was on its way to London, the manuscript got almost lost in the mail.

There is also the legendary story of another Nigerian writer, the pioneer Amos Tutuola, who had scarce funds to send his novel to the colonial centers of publishing. As Bernth Lindfors has noted, Tutuola’s novel was lost for 30-some years because the writer miscalculated his choice of publisher. How would an unpublished African writer in the 1950s know which British publisher would be most sympathetic to his work?

How many African writers in that era gave up their dreams of seeing their works in print after the lengthy delays in submission via colonial mails, after the loss of the only copy (most likely handwritten) of a manuscript, or after rejection by a publisher or two? There is also the apocryphal story of the writer from the continent who received a letter of rejection from a European publisher with the blunt comment: “Not African enough.”

The Filipino writer experienced the same travails with Western perception. For many years, Western publishers would reject the Filipino novels sent to them for publication as just a poor-man’s version of a Latin American novel. They do not know that the same layers of colonial experiences have shaped (or distorted) the imagination of Filipinos and Latin Americans: a foundational layer of animist and pagan cultures, then Spanish, then American, then Japanese and, in the case of the Philippines, the influences of China and India, as well as Malaysia and Indonesia, occasioned by the crosswinds of maritime commerce through the centuries. Another comment from Western publishers before was that the Philippine novels they received were not “Asian enough” (which meant the triad of India, China and Japan): no scenes set in Hindu temples or lotus ponds or with characters like flying samurais fighting over ancient and “exotic” kingdoms.

The stories in this collection cover nearly 50 years. The book moves from Amos Tutuola’s spontaneous surrealism to Véronique Tadjo’s The Magician and the Girl. Similarly, the movement has been from colonial to postcolonial, and from writing by men to women’s writing. The women’s stories are shorter, more lyrical, dealing with their inner worlds. They seemed to be writing indeed from the body, following the dictum of “ecriture feminine” by the three French feminist critics Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig.

Larsen is a perceptive editor and he traces stylistic shift in the writing. “One immediately thinks of the oral tradition out of which Amos Tutuola and the earliest writers began their careers, assuming incorrectly that that fine tradition of storytelling has somehow slipped away during the post-colonial era. But that is not true, as recent works by Ben Okri, Véronique Tadjo and some of their peers demonstrate. The oral tradition is never lost, as cultures move from being oral and literature becomes written, as griots are complemented by highly educated writers with international and cosmopolitan backgrounds.

He also notes the increased presence of female characters by younger African writers who happen to be men. Mzamane Nhlapo’s story identifies with women’s issues. Azaro’s incredible mother (as well as her loving portrait) in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road or Songs of Enchantment will be etched in readers’ memories. Camara Laye’s homage to his own mother The Dark Child has not aged. “The art of African storytelling is as old as our common paleolithic ancestor Lucy’s presence on the continent itself. What this collection hopes to demonstrate is the richness and wisdom of some of the most recent expressions of African writing.”

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Email: [email protected] Penguin Books has published Danton Remoto’s novel, “Riverrun.”