What African Fiction Is Good For

So Penguin is starting up a line of African fiction titles. Great news, right? Not according to Akin Ajayi in The Guardian, who says the first 5 titles are far too old to be useful, since none of them were published in the past 15 years.

Matt Cheney has other thoughts. In the process of highly recommending Black Sunlight (brought back into publication as one of the first 5), he offers his opinion on Penguin’s choice to start its new African writing series with five older titles:

Ajayi makes the case that the five books being released in the U.K. to inaugurate the new series are all at least 15 years old (a sixth book, Karen King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game, is part of the series in South Africa, but not available [yet] in the U.K. or U.S.; it is more recent), and this presents an odd contrast to the accomplishments of the original African Writers Series from Heinemann, which made hundreds of contemporary African works available to a wide audience. . . .

There’s lots of great writing happening on the continent right now, and that’s one of the reasons why I hope Penguin will move their primary focus to new works, but Ajayi’s view of what books should do or be seems to me an awfully narrow one, and the idea that African writers are primarily valuable because of the up-to-the-minute content of their writing is ridiculous. A book like Black Sunlight will not tell you what is happening in Zimbabwe right now, no — for that, you need journalists and eyewitnesses. For a whole lot other than that, you need Black Sunlight.

Ajayi’s statement is a variant on the tried and true argument that books in translation (or books being written in English in foreign places) are valuable because when we read them we can become better people by sucking up important socio-political details. Of course if that’s all you wanted you can stream a newscast on YouTube, or Google up some photos and reporting, or rent a documentary movie, or any number of other things that will get you the goods with much less time and effort on your part. Those things will also probably be a lot less boring than a novel that takes as its job to inform you about a distant place.

Beyond the strange idea that we read foreign fiction as a civics lesson, Ajayi’s argument doesn’t hold water because good books never get old. Case in point: I love virtually everything I read from NYRB Classics, but you’ll scarcely find them publishing any “new” books. Yet oddly enough, I’ve never put down a NYRB Classic and thought, “My God, why am I reading this old book when I could be finding out about hot-button issues of my day with a newer novel?” In fact, few books I’ve read in the past 6 months have seemed so contemporary as Stoner from NYRB Classics. On the face of it the story of an inter-war farmboy who goes to college and becomes a professor wouldn’t seem to have much bearing on an Internet-crazed urbanite making his way through a soft depression. And yet, just a couple of weeks ago I was talking to a friend who read Stoner on my recommendation and who had been going through tough times. We agreed that Stoner was a perfect book for what he was experiencing.

It’s nice to see people like Ajayi actually taking note of a new series of literature from Africa, but it would be nicer if they went all the way and managed to understand these books as something more than a chance to learn about a foreign place. What about the opportunity these books offer for U.S. writers to read fiction from outside the sphere of MFA-novels currently being produced in abundance over here? What about the enrichment to U.S. English offered by reading writers working in a different dialect of English or a different language altogether? What about the chance to interlock with a consciousness and a narrative from someone living on the opposite side of the globe?

Given a choice between reading an entire novel to weed out a few points of interest about life somewhere else or reading an AP story, most sensible people are going to choose the latter. There is a very valid argument to be made for reading fiction from all around the world, but it doesn’t have to do with getting today’s headlines through fiction. A paper like The Guardian should be able to find writers who understand this and can report on world fiction accordingly.

UPDATE

At The Constant Conversation, M Lynx Qualey happens to quote Arabic author Sinan Antoon, who expresses much the same sentiments:

“I don’t want to be the native informant,” he says. “There is increased interest in the Arab world. But I call it forensic interest. For the most part it’s bad, because it’s assumed that novels and poems are going to explain September 11 to you. For example, I got a phone call from someone who says, ‘I want you to speak about agriculture in Iraq’. I was like, ‘Why would I know anything about agriculture in Iraq?’ But it’s assumed that as an oriental subject I would just know everything about my culture and civilisation.”

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