bookshy: January 2018

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I would love to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love for her nation.

The quote above is from writer, women’s rights activist and Arts Director, Yvonne Vera. One of Zimbabwe’s best known writers, Vera was born in 1964 in Bulawayo - to parents who were both teachers - and she was educated at Mzilikazi High School, before becoming a teacher of English literature at Njube High School, Bulawayo. Vera later moved to Toronto in the late 1980s, where she enrolled at York University and completed her undergraduate and master's degrees. Vera also she earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature in 1995. And in all that time she wrote and published works. Vera returned to her home city in the mid-1990s to become Director of the National Gallery in Bulawayo.

Vera passed away in 2005, at the young age of 40, but in her lifetime she published: a short story collection, Why Don't You Carve Other Animals? (1992), and five novels - Nehanda (1993), Without A Name (1994), Under The Tongue (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998) and The Stone Virgins (2002). Vera also edited Opening Spaces – an anthology of contemporary writing by African women. Her last novel, The Stone Virgins was described by critics as her most accomplished and accessible work to date. It washer first novel to be published in the United States.

She also won numerous national and international awards, including the Zimbabwean Publisher’s Literary Award for best novel in 1996 and 1997, the 1997 Commonwealth writer's prize for best novel, Africa region, for Under The Tongue, the Macmillan writer's prize for Africa, for The Stone Virgins in 2002 and the Tucholski prize awarded by Swedish PEN in 2004.

Majority of Vera’s novels were published by her Zimbabwean publishers, Baobab Books in Harare - something Jane Bryce notes in her fascinating 2000 interview with Vera when she writes:

It is the fate of African writers who choose to publish their work on the continent to be less well-known internationally than those whose work is taken up by metropolitan publishers.

The interview is really one that should be read as we get a glimpse into the mind and thoughts of a writer Bryce described as ‘a woman who knows her mind and is not afraid to express it, in a context where women’s voices are all too often intimidated into silence.’ Indeed, Irene Staunton, her editor for 15 years, described her as 'an author who dared to voice the unspoken and hidden with a scrupulous sensitivity and courage'.

In the interview, Vera described herself as someone who has ‘always been visually oriented’ with her largest influence before working at the National Gallery being film, ‘and how images are prepared, constructed and made to move. I also have a strong leaning towards photography’.

I also really loved getting a sense of Vera's confidence with her writing when she explains how

Writing is much easier the more I do it, and much more enjoyable as well. I’m much more conscious of what I’m doing as I do it. I’m my own best editor and that’s wonderful. I know what to throw out even as I write it, which line, which paragraph, which one to keep and polish, which to discard.

But also her own relationship and feelings towards writing

I would not write if I weren’t in search of beauty, if I was doing it only to advance a cause. I care deeply about my subjects, but I want to be consumed by figures of beauty, by story and character. It must be about perfection. Like a basket-maker or a weaver or a hair-plaiter, you are aware of what you are trying to accomplish from the first sentence. I must be able to taste the words on my tongue.

Yvonne Vera was working on a new novel, Obedience, when she passed away, and I read that around 2010, Trent University would get the chance to house Vera's personal papers for a period of ten years. In an interview with Catherine Hobbs and Sarah Kastner on the Yvonne Vera Project, Kastner talks about taking on the project as a Masters thesis and interviewing 'key persons about the archives' creation to provide context for the archives'. Kastner explains how important 'the circumstance of Vera's death' would for the archive, but also relying on 'Vera's literary executor and dear friend, Mary Polito, and Vera's ex-husband and long-time close friend, John Jose, to help ... navigate and interpret the papers' as she 'could not speak directly with Vera'. Kastner notes:

While Jose explained that none of the material was intended or envisioned as an archive, he also helped me to understand its context and his effect on Vera's record-keeping activities at various stages of her life. He informed me about some documents that he and Vera had created together, like their wedding album, and others that began as collaborative projects but that shifted as time went by.

I end with a quote from Vera's unfinished novel, Obedience, which is set in the city of Bulawayo in the week before the 2002 presidential election. Indeed, Bulawayo was a city she depicted with love and affection, as she explained in her interview with Jane Bryce, 'when I wrote 'Butterfly Burning', I just wanted to see my city in a book, just to see the name Bulawayo'. The excerpt is via No More Potlucks:

However, they are not a people of returns. In this they are nomads. Their most supreme fear is confusing the gods. Not being inanimate objects, but brimming with contradictory impulses, they dare not adhere to a muteness however serene — in them such a satisfaction would be complacence, a suppression of futures, a type of forgetting. To remember, they must be away from the tangible forms they have created. Whom do they obey, and why is it so necessary?

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‘Each of my books is a step towards the understanding of the North African identity and an attempt to enter modernity.’ - Assia Djebar

Image Source: World Literature Today

Algerian writer, filmmaker and women’s rights activist, Assia Djebar is one of North Africa’s most influential writers, but as noted by NYT in 2015 article,

'In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro in 2005, Ms. Djebar reflected on her status as a female author in the Arab world. “I am not a symbol,” she said. “My only activity consists of writing.” She added, “Like many writers, I use my culture and I collect several imaginary worlds.”'

Born Fatima-Zohra Imalayen in Cherchell, Algeria in 1936 Djebar (the pen name in which she wrote under as a veil of discretion for a woman publishing in a Muslim society) published her first book, La Soif (translated in English into The Mischief) in 1957, at the age of 21. La Soif focused on the treatment of women in Islamic culture with a story that centred on a young woman from an upper-class French-Algerian family who seduces her friend’s husband to alleviate her boredom.

Assia Djebar (Assia meaning 'consolation' and Djebar meaning 'intransigent') passed away in 2015 in Paris at 78. In June 2017 there was a google doodle to honour Djebar who, in her lifetime, published novels, as well as plays, poetry and short stories. Her bibliography comprised over 15 books, which been translated into more than 23 different languages.

Google Doodle from June 30, 2017

This includes her acclaimed collection of stories Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in their Apartment) published in 1980 - a collection of short stories,which took its title from Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 painting and depicted the cloistered Algerian women, who are still imprisoned in the harem, as well as L'Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade) published in 1985. Winner of the Franco-Arab Friendship Prize, the novel mixes Djebar's personal history with the history of Algeria. It was also the first volume of the 'Algerian quartet' about Maghrebian women followed by Ombre Sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade) published in 1987, and Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison) published in 1995 - only three were published.

Djebar's other works includes a volume of poetry, Poems pour l’Algerie heureuse published in 1969, the novel Loin de Medine (1991), La Femme sans sepulture (The Woman without a sepulchre) published in 2002, the short-story collection The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry (2006) and her 2007 book, Nulle Part dans la Maison de Mon Père (Nowhere in My Father’s House)- her last book to be published and first novel to be published in Arabic.

Highly acclaimed, in 2005, Djebar became the first Algerian woman to be elected to France’s most prestigious cultural institution - the Academia Francaise. Djebar was the fifth woman to be honoured and the first and only one from the ex-French colonies. Her other numerous awards - in 1996 winning the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for contributions to world literature, in 1997 taking home the Yournecar Prize and in 2000 becoming the first female Arab writer to be awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Assia Djebar was also the first Algerian woman to make a film within a national cinema that only began after Algeria’s independence from France in 1962. Djebar’s achievements as a director were also recognised: in 1979 she received the International Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival for her movie La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua (The Party of the Women of Mount Chenoua). The filmed combined fiction and documentary and told the story of an Algerian expatriate who returns to her country sixteen years after the end of the independence war. Her second film, La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (Zerda and the songs of forgetting), a documentary juxtaposing French newsreels of World War I and II and Algerian women singing traditional songs, won the prize for the best historical film at the Berlinale in 1982.

Still from La Nouba des Femmes du Mont

Yet, while her films were winning awards, Fatma Alioua writes,

.... critic Ahmed Bedjaoui noted in his blog of January 2013, Algerian (male) filmmakers of the time blocked the film’s (La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua) wider exhibition. Djebar had hitherto been teaching a module on cinema and theatre at the University of Algiers, so was clearly a film expert, but she was also a published author of five novels and a play. They resented her entering ‘their’ domain, and attempted to stop the film being shown at the prestigious Carthage Film Festival in Tunis in 1978. When it went on to share the 1979 Venice Film Festival International Federation of Critics’ prize (FIPRESCI), the news was met with silence in Algiers.

Reading, and learning about her life and upbringing was extremely fascinating for me. As written in a 2015 NYT article on Djebar after she passed away: Djebar’s father was the only Algerian teacher of French in a colonial school in Algeria. While she spoke Arabic with her mother and listened to her grandmother's ramblings in Berber, she was educated in French - as teaching in Arabic was forbidden by the colonial authorities. At the age of 10, when her female cousins left school and assumed the veil required by Islam, her father insisted that she continue her education. So for her, French became identified as an ambivalent source of liberty.

This ambivalence about writing in French was captured in an interview with NYT in 2000, and in relation to her 1985 novel, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade' when Djebar said:

The book tells the double story of how the French language arrived in Algeria with violence and the military conquests of the 19th century, and the way I learned French as a child -- my first words and how strange the culture seemed to me. First it was the language of the enemy, then it became a kind of stepmother, in relation to the maternal tongue of Arabic.

With a life of many first's, after studying at the Lycée Fénélon in Paris, in 1955 at 19, Assia Djebar was the first Algerian student and the first Muslim woman to be accepted to the École Normale Supérieure - the elite, state-run French training school for teachers, where she studied history. While Djebar eventually dropped out to join the F.L.N. (National Liberation Front - the Algerian movement for national liberation in Tunisia), it was said that she was one of the first women to embrace the nationalist cause. It was also during this period that Djebar wrote her first novel La Soif. Djebar also collaborated with the anti-colonial FLN newspaper El-Moujahid by conducting interviews with Algerian refugees in Morocco and Tunis. At that time the editor of the newspaper was Frantz Fanon, with whom she befriended.

Djebar later received an undergraduate degree in history from the Sorbonne in 1956. Djebar returned to Algeria after that country won independence in 1962. In Algiers, she taught history, French literature and cinema, where became the first woman to teach at Algiers University. In 1965, Djebar went to live in Paris, but in 1974, longing for home, she returned. However, after directing several films in Algeria, Djebar returned to France because “there were only men in the streets of Algiers,” she told the newspaper Le Monde.

In Paris, Djebar also completed her doctorate in French Literature and Civilisation at Montpelier University. She worked in Paris before moving to Louisiana State University where she was appointed Director of the Centre for French and Francophone Studies in 1995 and then, as Silver Chair Professor of Francophone Literature, to New York University in 2001.

For Djebar's Honourary Degree citation at Concordia University it was said that her

... experiences and interests are varied and intriguing. In 1958, she did research on Moslem mysticism in the Middle Ages. In the late sixties and early seventies, she was involved in theatre adaptations and directing, as well as being a film critic for a Paris newspaper. She turned to cinema to reach those who cannot read ... In the early eighties she was a jury member for film festivals in Paris, Florence, Lucarno and Taormina. Her academic positions were varied as well. Attache de recherches at the Centre Culturel Algerien of Paris from 1985 to 1996, she also held the position of writer-in-residence at the Carrefour Europeen des Litteratures Strasbourg in 1993 - 1994. In 1995, she spend a month as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The following year, she was a visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1997, she became Distinguished Foundation Professor of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge ...

With her very many accomplishments and achievements, one thing that stood out the most for me when putting this post together was how, for Djebar, writing was a form of resistance, but also a way to be exposed. For example, in1957 when she published La Soif it was because, 'In Maghrebian society, women do not write. To write is to expose oneself.'

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A new year and even more exciting times for African literature. So here's a literary calendar of the first half of 2018, which I will be updating throughout the year.

January

It's all about the women in January with three exciting books coming out. First, there's the English translation of Leila Slimani's Chanson Douce, which won the Prix Goncourt. Translated to Lullaby (UK edition)/The Perfect Nanny (US edition), it's the story of a middle-class couple who employ the 'perfect nanny' which leads to very fatal consequences.

Also out in January - the concluding part of Nnedi Okorafor's award winning Binti trilogy. In Binti: The Night Masquerade, Binti has returned to her home planet, believing that the violence of the Meduse has been left behind, and it is left to Binti and her new friend, Mwinyi to intervene and try to prevent a war.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's award winning debut, Kintu, which reimagines Uganda's history through the cursed history of the Kintu clan also gets its UK release date.

February

This month, it's all about anticipated debuts and even more anticipated re-issues. There's Akwaeke Emezi's debut, Freshwater exploring the surreal experience of a young Nigerian woman who develops separate selves within her - the book is told from the perspective of the main character's different selves.

In the realm of non-fiction, there's The Wife's Tale by Aida Edemariam - described as an 'intimate memoir' and 'extraordinary story of an indomitable 95-year-old woman - and of the most extraordinary century in Ethiopia's history'.

Non-fiction also out in February is Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch - a personal and provocative investigation exploring a British crisis of identity centred on Britain's 'awkward, troubled relationship with our history'.

February also sees the reissue of many of Buchi Emecheta's works, including Destination Biafra, Kehinde, In the Ditch and Head Above Water. The new covers have all been designed by Victor Ehikhamenor.

March

This month sees the release of another anticipated book, Tomi Adeyemi's debut Children of Blood and Bone - book one of what sounds like a very exciting fantasy trilogy (that is also soon to be a major motion picture) about magic, the loss of magic and the possibility of bringing it back and bringing down the ruling monarchy in the process.

Nafkote Tamirat's coming-of-age story, The Parking Lot Attendant about a young girl in Boston's tightly-knit Ethiopian community is a tale of 'fatherhood, national identity, and what it means to be an immigrant in America today'.

In Uzodinma Iweala's Speak No Evil, a revelation shared between two privileged teenagers from very different backgrounds sets off a chain of events with devastating consequences.

There's also the UK edition of Peter Kimani's Dance of the Jakaranda, set in the shadow of Kenya's independence from Britain and tracing the lives of three men: a preacher, a colonial administrator and an Indian technician.

Chuma Nwokolo's The Extinction of Menai is also out this month in the US. Set in a village in Niger Delta, the novel is described as encompassing 'bioethics, language extinction and Nigerian history and diaspora'.

April

There's Aminatta Forna's Happiness set in London and bringing together disparate lives and the true nature of happiness after two strangers collide on Waterloo Bridge.

Diana Evan's Ordinary People is also published this month. Also set in (South) London, it is described as 'an intimate, immersive study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, friendship and aging, and the fragile architecture of love'.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's prison memoir, Wrestling with the Devil, which charts the year he was thrown in a Kenyan jail without charge is also published for the first time in the US this month.

She Called Me Woman edited by Azeenarh Mohammed, Chitra Nagarajan and Aisha Salau is a collection bringing together 30 unique narratives on what it means to be a queer Nigerian woman comes out in April.

Cynthia Jele's The Ones with Purpose is also out in April, but I don't have much information on it yet.

May

Ayesha Haruna Attah's The Hundred Wells of Salaga is also out in May. Set in pre-colonial Ghana during the height of the slave trade, it is a story of courage, forgiveness, love and freedom told through the experiences of two women.

Also published in May - Sarah Lotz's Missing Person about a group of amateur detectives infiltrated by the sadistic killer whose case they're investigating.

June

June sees the publication of Novuyo Rosa Tshuma's House of Stones set in modern-day Zimbabwe and spanning thirty years since the overthrow of British rule - described as a story 'about cuckoos in the family nest, the death of colonial Rhodesia and the bloody birth of corrupt Zimbabwe'.

Okay, okay, I said this was for the first half of the year, but a brief glimpse beyond.

July

Moving between Ghana and London, Hold by Michael Donkor follows three young women navigating their way into adulthood.

August

In This Mournable Body out in August, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival.

October

In Diriye Osman's We Once Belonged to the Sea two women - a reclusive queer Somali artist and a gifted Iranian-Somali teenage punk - both have survived extraordinary circumstances and find unexpected solace, inspiration and friendship when their lives intersect.

There are also books that should be out in 2018, but I am still waiting on more information on release dates. These include: Imraan Coovadia's A Spy in Time described as an 'African time travel novel', Emmanuel Iduma's A Stranger's Pose - a book of travel stories, Abnelfattah Kilito's The Tongue of Adam and The Clash of Images, Niq Mhlongo's new collection of short stories Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree, Mphthumi Ntabeni's The Broken River Tent about the life and times of a Xhosa chief who was at the forefront of fighting British colonialism in the Eastern Cape during the nineteenth century, and Sue Nyathi's The Golddiggers about the experiences of Zimbabwean immigrants in Johannesburg.

No idea when these will be published, but also Petina Gappah's The Last Journey of Doctor Livingstone, as well as part two and three in Tade Thompson's Rosewater Trilogy. Further afield - to January 2019 - is the follow-up to Margaret Busby's landmark anthology Daughters of Africa. The new anthology, New Daughters of Africa will bring together the work of over 200 women writers of African descent and 'charts a contemporary literary canon from 1900'.

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