Items

• Uprooting the malignat fictions

  [Excerpt]: "The critical work represented in the selected essays of the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee and the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe is of a new and superior order, mobilizing the best creative and criticla energies of two writers as committed to their craft as they are to exposing what Achebe calls the 'monster of racist habit.' In both cases the critique of a 'white' culture (whether European, American, or South African)--its assu,ptions, blind spots, abuses of language, logic or humanity--is based on a scrupulous examination of evidence, as it emerges within early travel writing, anecdotes, or the work of individual authors who appear to be transmittig the 'truth' of a continent and its indigenous peoples, but are often perpetuating Western conceptual grids... [Achebe's] collection begins with his analysis of Conrad and ends with a tribute to James Baldwin. Along the way there are speeches on broad topics, such as 'The Truth of Fiction' and 'Thoughts on the African Novel,' a personal tribute to Christopher Okigbo, and passing reflections on the present needs of his own society..."
• Tracts for the times: Art, Dialogue and Outrage by Wole Soyinka

  Andrew St. George reviews Wole Soyinka's essay collection, suggesting, "Soyinka sparkles and delights. He carries his credentials lightly but likes the sound they make when they drop...But criticism for Soyinka travels both ways down a broad street; these essays foster a taste for the inordinate and mischievous which works with and against Nigerian culture."
• The people who are Africa

  [Excerpt]: "Chinua Achebe is often called the father of the modern African novel, as Bernth Lindfors attests in the introduction to Early Achebe, his perceptive collection of essays on Achebe's output between 1951 and 1966. While this praise may seem exaggerated, it is not unwarranted -- though to regard Achebe's first and most famous novel, Things Fall Apart, published in London in 1958, as an "African" novel only underplays its status as one of the most influential post-war novels in English, one that still possesses the power to startle the reader with its vivid description of a complex society in the throes of momentous change. It was the first in the African Writers Series, the Heinemann Educational Books project that revolutionized the field of of anglophone African writing by providing literature for African readers by African writers.... Ike Osodi, the journalist character in Anthills of the Savannah (modelled in part on Achebe's late poet-fighter friend Christopher Okigbo), is a spokesman for this middle ground..."
• Specialist issues: Literature

  [A review of Research in African Literatures, volume 18.] It may be that there are "already too many little magazines and academic journals in existence, more than any of us can read or subscribe to, even in our own disciplines". This is how Sheila Roberts opens a review of a new English-language journal from an Afrikaans university in the spring 1987 issue of Research in African Literatures. The new journal sounds all too supernumerary, indeed. But where else might such a publication be knowledgeably noticed? More important, where else would such a notice be found jostled by reviews of Volume Four of the Unesco General History of Africa, Spracher, Geschichte und Kultur in Afrika (papers of the third conference of African linguists held in Cologne in October 1982) and Monica Wanambisi's Thought and Technique in the Poetry of Okot p'Bitek (1984)? These are only five of the twenty-five reviews which--as is usual in this journal--make up close on half the contents...
• Nigerian traditions

  This review of John Pepper Clark's collection of critical essays suggests that Clark's "critical writing is free from academic jargon or heaviness, but does sometimes lack clarity," and that his essay "Themes of African Poetry of English Expression" in particular should "overall...be welcomed as a contribution to the slender body of African literary criticism, and as bringing some illumination to the practice of one of its most talented poets."
• 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."
• Gestures of yearning, acts of faith

  [Excerpt]: Peter Batchelor reviews Geoffrey Hill's Clavics and Odi Babare. "Geoffrey Hill's essays and Oxford lectures frequently return to the two brief appearances Sidney Godolphin makes in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan... Odi Barbare, Hill's subsequent book, initially appears even more forbiddingly mediated. Its title comes from a book by the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giosue Carducci, whose use of Classical metres may have led Hill to cast this sequence of fifty-two poems in sapphics. Each of Hill's poems originates in associations stemming from his title, so the book teems with references to Italian poets (Dante, Petrarch), political thinkers (Gramsci, Croce), theologians (Joachim of Fiore, Hugh of St Victor) and famous visitors (Henry James, Ezra Pound). Hill finds room for Sir Philip Sidney, who also used sapphics, and there are "praise-songs" for many other figures whose connection to the title is less clear, such as Christopher Okigbo, Thomas Masaryk and the Cambridge mathematician Frank Ramsey..."
• At the crossroads of cultures

  [Excerpt]: Nadine Gorimer reviews Chinua Achebe's collection of essays Morning Yet on Creation Day. "Named by Christianized parents after Queen Victoria's beloved; master of the colonial master's tongue, splendidly appropriating it to interpret his country's and people's past; bold user of freedom won by Africa against white domination; Albert Chinualumogu became Chinua Achebe is himself the definitive African experience... Alternatively, there are writers who regard the category "African writer" (with its concomitant, African critic?) as a patronizing relegation to literary provincialism. Achebe quotes Nigeria's finest poet, Christopher Okigbo: "There is no African literature. There is good writing and bad writing--that's all." ..."
• A World of Riches

  Putting novels, plays, verse, essays and so on into literary categories is an important but not very impressive exercise. It matters because the written word is so huge, various, and surprising that some sort of mark is needed for tourists--and we are all tourists. But one category that does not work is that of "black African literature." Africa is too rich and too varous for that box to hold very much...
• A Guide to Twentieth-Century Women Novelists

  Excerpt: "The Guide contains 135 entries on individual English-language authors from five continents, each entry written by Wheeler herself. A resulting unevenness is understandable but, in some cases, mystifying... Writers famous for their critical and essayistic work -- Elizabeth Hardwick, Dorothy Parker, Susan Sontag -- are included, alongside canonical giants -- Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf -- and important Third World authors -- the South African Bessie Head, the Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, the Indian Shashi Deshpande.
• Paperbacks

  "A collection of essays on South African Literature."
• Main Channels Wednesday14 May

  "The Essay. Christopher Hope links Sputnik with rock'n'roll (R)"
• Walking a step with Soyinka

  When Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian novelist, playwright and President of the Movement for the Salvation of Ogoni People were was hanged on November 10, 1985 following a rigged and rushed trial, the machinery of execution has rusted from disuse.
• Next Week

  Africa-- recent memoirs and collections of essays by Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton and Wole Soyinka.
• Born again in Africa

  From Another Africa, photographs by Robert Lyons, essays and poems by Chinua Achebe.