Items

• The Times Diary: Poetic Justice

  [Full text]: "The prosaic difficulties of a troubled world have complicated work on an international reference book on poets who write in English. With a preface by the Poet Laureate, C. Day Lewis, Contemporary Poets of the English Language is the first book on the subject for more than 10 years and the only one to include non-white poets from Asia and Africa: it will be published in October by The St. James Press of Chicago and London. Its American editor-in-chief, Mrs. Rosalie Murphy, says she ran into many problems. In Nigeria, the questionnaire sent to Wole Soyinka was not passed on to him in prison, where he has been for two years; while the entry on Christopher Okigbo had to be dropped after Mrs. Murphy had confirmed a report that he had been killed in the civil war. Then there were many black South African poets who have escaped from or otherwise left the country and still move from place to place: Bloke Modisane, believed to have left South Africa on foot in 1950, was traced to London. Minor racial complications occurred in this country, too. Most poets from Wales put down "Welsh" as their nationality, although some admitted to "Anglo-Welsh." Most Scots preferred "British," while some northern Irish put "British-Irish." In America, nearly all Negroes called themselves "Black," although LeRoi Jones added exotically "African-American-Ancient Egyptian."
• The Bishop's move

  No particular African poet is mentioned, but, when speaking of literary history, critic Landeg White writes: "There are moments in literary history (arguably in eleventh-century Andalusia, giving rise to troubadour poetry, demonstrably in modern Africa and Caribbean poetry in English) when popular culture challenges literacy and raises the most basic questions about peotry's subject-matter, forms, language, and means of dissemination; in short, about who poetry belongs to."
• The allusive traditions of Africa

  Book review of Ruth Finnegan's work; briefly mentions of p'Bitek: "Clearly, we shall have to move not only towards the acceptance of aesthetic standards in the collection of [African] oral literature but towards the acceptance of two partially separate standards. For the indigenous collector, like Okot p"Bitek of the Acoli or J. H. Nketia of the Adan, a standard based on deep and intimate knowledge of the particular culture and its chief literary artists must be adopted."
• The African Renaissance

  The article frames the question of whether or not Africans can be held to the same esteem as Europeans; it suggests that Europeans have tried to assimilate African nations by having African nations adopt British public school systems, by requiring the learning of Latin, by teaching Hume and Ayer, Descartes ad Gilson. "It wears academic dress, or drinks vermouth in cafes...when this elite wants to write poetry, or do scientific research, or run a business, or make political speeches, or philosophise, it is obliged as a rule to use a European language." The article then asks: "How can we make use of European ideas, institutions, and techniques, without becoming their prisoner--without ceasing to be African?"
• Stranger's Voice

  Hugo Young interviews Oswald Mtshali on his poetry collection, "Sounds of a Cowhide Drum," which sold over 16,000 copies. Young writes that Mtshali is "the poet of oppression--humorous, often bitter-sweet, rarely vengeful but still a unique chronicler of apartheid from the black underside of it."
• Stirring a sense of common purpose

  "The interdependence of academia and creative writing was the theme of this year's four-day annual International PEN Conference, which drew about 150 members from forty-five PEN Centres to Cambridge... Geoffrey Haresnape, a South African poet and professor at the University of Cape Town, gave a more heartening description of the attempts of English-Language universities in South Africa (whose existence depends on financial subsidy from the State) to move beyond a colonialist cultural stance, for example by including indigenous writing on their courses."
• Sounding the Sixties--2: The Commonwealth

  Derwent May considers the state of the Commonwealth, mostly through its production of literature: "The emergence of an African literature in English is undoubtedly the most extraordinary and significant development of the past five years...He has, however, been followed by other more discplined and less extravagent writers, of whom Mr. Chinua Achebe is unquestionably the chief; and other countries besides Mr. Tutuola's native Nigeria have made their contributions, the latest being Kenya, in the person of Mr. James Ngugi. Everyone is now conscious of the African writer; in poetry but especially in prose... Wonderful Africa has replaced the West Indies as the centre of interest."
• Songs from the grasslands

  Gerald Moore praises Okot p'Bitek's collection of Acoli traditional songs. He suggests that the songs and poems collected here have merit on their own accord, rather than to be used as only ethnographic material "to be eviscerated." Of Okot p'Bitek himself, Moore writes, "Those familiar with his own poetry, especially The Song of Lawino, will recognize here the indigenous poetic tradition in which that fine work is embedded. The bitters of Lawino's sense of betrayal is not a personal but a cultural bitterness."
• Sheer ingenuity of Soyinka's plot

  Royal Court Theatre: The Lion and the Jewel by Wole Soyinka. This is the third play by Wole Soyinka to appear in London since last year, and this work alone is enough to establish Nigeria as the most fertile new source of English-speaking drama since Synge's discovery of the Western Isles. Even this comparison does Soyinka less than justice, for he is dealing not only with a rich folk material, but with the impact of the modern world on tribal custom: to find any parallel for his work in English drama you have to go back to the Elizabethans...It is tempting to linger over the sheer ingenuity of Soyinka's plot. But what comes over even more strongly in Desmond O'Donovan's production is his originality of scene construction (a sparring match in proverbs, reflected in a simultaneous wrestling bout), and the richly expressive range of speech idioms...
• Seventy-five years on

  "[This study] by Professor Cory, of the Rhodes University College, Grahamstown, approaches more nearly to a high standard of historical writing than any book we have yet seen on South African history...After a brief sketch of the origin of the Dutch settlement at the Cape this volume, the first of four contemplated, is almost entirely concerned with the fortunes of the eastern province... There is, however, one curious ommission. Thomas Pringle, the only South African poet known to the outside world, is but twice mentioned, and on both occasions in a manner depreciatory of his testimony with regard to controversial matters. Pringle undoubtedly after his return to Cape Town took a bitter view of all dealings of South Africans with the natives, and he may have been as wrong-headed as Professor Cory represents him; but at any rate his experiences as one of the earliest settlers on the Baviaans River and his enthusastic poems on the life he and his companions led should have awakened a sympathetic chord in so great a lover of the eastern province as Professor Cory..."
• Scorning the Sonnet

  Carlin writes of Goodwin's collection: "The strength of the book is not Ken Goodwin's criticism...but the arrangement and explication of these ten poets according to a scheme which forms a socio-cultural description of African poetry. In this respect, Professor Goodwin is enlightening and instructive, for he places his poets... roughly in the order of their Africanness, their independence of European models."
• Quiet and disquiet

  Dennis Walder discusses three African poets in his review "Quiet and disquiet." He compares and contrasts the work of Patrick Cullinan, Douglas Livingstone, and Oswald Mtshali. Walder suggests that Cullinan "sidesteps the factional rhetoric of his native land, preferring subtelty, irony, and indirection," while Livingstone is a "confident meditation on the vicissitudes of desire," though it is detached and lacking "point." Walder points to Oswald Mtsali's collection Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971) for "urgent voices" on the urban black experience, though he is critical of Mtshali's latest work, Fireflames, which he sees as "abandon[ing] the quieter, ironic mode of his earlier work for rhetorical expostulation" that "lie inert on the page."
• Praise poet in Paris

  Sheila Mason reviews a collection of poetry, translated by Melvin Dixon, of Leopold Sedar Senghor. Mason writes, "From Senegal's indpendence, in 1960, until 1980 when he relinquished the Presidency of his nation, Leopold Sedar Senghor dominated the West African political and cultural scene as Maecenas, political philosopher and literary theorist and, not least, as a practising poet. Since his elevation in retirement to the Academie Francaise in 1983 and his move to Paris, the turmoil of his continent's political fortunes have so dimmed this renown that reappraisals of his writing now seem overdue. Melvin Dixon's English rendition of the definitive body of his poetry will, it is to be hoped, encourage this process." Mason traces the history of the negritude movement and Senghor's involvement. She also criticizes some of the translation by Melvin Dixon, but ultimately praises the collection: "Thus, while inadvertent infelicities occasionally muffle the poetry's African voice, nevertheless Melvin Dixon achieves that rarest of feats in the translation of poetry: he recreates Leopold Senghor in our own tongue, exhibiting with unflagging good faith his universality as a poet of love, of nature, of war and, rarest of modern accomplishments, of praise.
• Poetry: African Folk Poetry

  African Folk Poetry: Jeni Couzyn introduces recordings of African folk poetry and music made in a South African township.
• Poet of Senegal

  Gerald Moore reviews two selections of Senghor's work; one with an introductory essay from Armand Guibert, wherein "he offers a good deal of material on the poet's origins and the formation of his style" followed by a collection of his work; and the second as Senghor's first new book of poetry for five years, which Moore calls "a disappointment." Moore ends the review by suggesting that "Africa has moved into a new era...of more direct self-expression free from obsessive reactions against assimilation, colonialism, and so forth" and that Senghor has "failed to make a new exploration of experience and his poetry has lost some of its relevance."
• Playwright in Search of a Role

  Wole Soyinka has had a knack of getting into political deep water. That is why the writer, who in 1986 became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature, has spent long periods of his life in exile. Now, at 68, he is in the gradual process of moving back to his home country, fired up with the idea of becoming more active in Nigerian politics...
• Ironies of exile: Post-colonial homelessness and the anticlimax of return

  Lewis Nkosi reviews the book The Rift by Hilda Bernstein and comments with his own personal experience on exile in South Africa. Nkosi suggests that "In Africa, too, the moment of modernism is invariably associated with displacement, imprisonment, and exile"; he suggests that leading African writers have been imprisoned and banished in their countries, such as Wole Soyinka, Kofi Awoonor, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nurrudin Farah, and Dambudzo Marechera. Nkosi himself was exiled from South Africa; he writes that "for many South Africans [exile was] the very condition of their existence."
• In search of a subject

  Sousa Jamba writes critical reviews of both Africa Talks Back, which contains interviews with Anglophone African authors, and The Ordeal of the African Writer, by Charles R. Larson. Of the first, Jamba writes, "Africa Talks Back... reflects the ambitions of a wide range of writers. Some of them, like the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek, are long dead; others have gone into obscure retirement. Some, such as Chinua Achebe, Dennis Brutus, Kole Omotoso, Taban Lo Liyong and Njabulo Ndebele, are still active, thugh mainly in the academic world in the West or in South Africa... Today, the all-powerful Big Men who have dominated postcolonial Africa are slowly being forced out and institutions such as Makerere University are, very slowly, recovering their former glory..." Of the second, Jamba writes, "Charles R. Larson, a professor of literature at American University in Washington D.C. outlines some of the major obstacles facing the African writer. These are the parlous state of publishing on the continent, persecution from political authorities, and consequent exile."
• How do you pull of something like this? Director Rufus Norris talks to Sarah Hemming about the challenge of staging a play by Wole Soyinka

  Sarah Hemming interviews director Rufus Norris about the process of putting on Death and the King's Horseman, by Wole Soyinka. Of the play: "Considered by many to be Wole Soyinka's greatest play, this 1975 drama is based on a real incident in Oyo, Nigeria, in 1946, when the colonial district officer intervened to prevent a local man committing ritual suicide. Soyinka's drama places that man, Elesin, at the centre of the story and follows the disastrous conseqeunces of his being unable to complete the rite."
• Heaven-sent gleams of victory

  The book review by Armand D'Angour regards a collection of essays about classical victory odes. In one essay by Rosalind Thomas, "Thomas draws comparisons with African praise-poetry to suggest that 'performance literature occurring in contexts virtually without writing might have greater need for some kind of density, in order to make the performance more memorable.' She demonstrates how the obscure allusivity of oriki, oral praise-poetry from Nigeria, renders it more striking and 'quotable' than if its style and expression were more quotidian."
• Haitian High Drama

  Moore writes, "Lamine Diakhate's poetry glows with good will and the right political sentiments; it is also something of a technical tour-de-force, for the writer has isolated the tendency of the language towards sonorous emptiness and caried it to the extremes... All the familiar properties of the negritude a la Senegal are here; the nostalgia of the exile, the Ancients with their gnomic wisdom, the long horizons, the rejection of life and the here-and-now in favour of the dim and distant. But the poet fails to handle them with the distinction or originality which alone could make the rehash excusable. A new vocabulary is in desperate need of the younger African poets now writing in French."
• From veld-lovers to freedom fighters

  Lewis Nkosi reviews the collection of poetry by Guy Butler and Chris Mann. The collection features a multitude of African poets, and has been translated into English for those poets whose language is "Afrikaans." This tension is explored by Nkosi, who suggests, "From the very beginning, English-speaking South Africans have struggled, sometimes fiercely, to forge a new identity out of this double sense of belonging." Nkosi then mentions poets such as Kunene, Mtsbali, Serote, Gwala, and Sepamla as "gathered into this poetic enclosure like Zimbabwean freedom fighters brought to makeshift assembly points."
• Europe Looks Outwards--II: Keeping it Dark: "Negritude" in a Changing World

  In this article, Gerald Moore considers the history and creation of the negritude movement of black, French-speaking writers. He cites several African poets as instrumental to the development of the movement.
• Dominion Poets

  E. Wilmot criticizes the reviewer of "Dominion Poets" featured on February 26th; Wilmot suggests that the reviewer is "ignorant" of South African poetry due to his Englishness. Wilmot writes: "I confess myself disheartened by the argument that so long as I remain a South African - a "colonial," as my sophisticated uncles and aunts were in the habit of saying - I cannot become a poet; and that when I achieve poethood, I shall no longer be a South African."
• Behind the lines

  This article covers the two-day "crammed and curious" conference called The Politics of Exile, organized by the Third World Foundation and South magazine at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. "The real politicians had stayed away, offering a wide variety of excuses: they didn't feel like entering this kind of forum, it was too potentially compromising, they'd have to have the authority of a central committee... Instead, it was the writers and intellectuals who jostled for space in the programme to talk about the Latin American, African, Middle-Eastern, and South Asian experiences. So the politics were filtered through very self-conscious lenses." Of African poets, Sage writes, "As someone else pointed out, exiles must always be distiguished from refugees, they don't have the collective innocence of victims... Educated and articulate exiles, said the banished South African poet Dennis Brutus (famed as the inspirer of the sporting boycott), form a new wandering tribe -- the Bintu. They've been to conferences on the nature of exile just about everywhere, even Oklahoma."