Valerie Tagwira Guest Blogs at PETINAGAPPAH
"In March, I was one of 20 writers invited to attend the 12th Time of the Writer Festival in Durban, South Africa. The event ran from 9-14 March and was hosted by The Centre for Creative Arts, University of KwaZulu Natal. It was a fun-filled, educational and informative week, during which I interacted with experienced writers from other countries", says Valerie Tagwira in a blog post at PETINAGAPPAH, where you can read the full entry.
As Petina pointed out in her introduction of the post, Valerie Tagwira is one of the busiest writers. Even as she was working full-time and studying for my Masters in Public Health exams in London and preparing to travel to South Africa for the conference, she managed to prepare her short story submission, "A Walk in the Night", which is now featured in the March/April issue of Munyori Literary Journal.
Perhaps when she is done with her exams, we may start asking her about the possibilities of a sequel to Uncertainty of Hope, a novel which raises a disturbing question at the end, about how Zimbabwean structures are going to achieve any normality when there are those who might wish that the chaos continues, for their personal benefit.
Here is another excerpt from Valerie's post:
"An important question raised by another writer in the audience was why we wrote in English and not in our native tongues. My response to that was that I write in English to reach out to a wider audience. Writing in Shona, which is my native language would restrict the audience that I can reach. I suggested translation of English novels into vernacular where funds are available."
The question of language in African literature is an old one, but it keeps coming back and sometimes makes for delicious debates. What I am happy about though, is how the native languages are now used by contemporary Zimbabwean writers to decorate, infiltrate, or even violate the space of, the English language. We are fast drifting away from those apologetic and courteous glossaries, opting to challenge readers by asking them to gain contextual meaning.
To see what I mean, read Petina Gappah, Brian Chikwava, Chimamanda Adichie, and others. The product is often a rich, even mysterious, prose, where the untranstalated or unstranslatable does not interfere with the overall meaning of a paragraph, etc. Remember those days when American writers went to spend some writing time in France? They often came back with novels or short stories whose prose was infused with untranslated French phrases.
Sometimes when I read Henry James, I want to see more of those French phrases which I don't understand, because, remember, if the prose is well-written, you are really not supposed to pay attention to or notice the English language in which the story is told; language is supposed to dissolve, as Jhumpa Lahiri has argued in a New Yorker interview, to allow the reader to hear the story without any distractions by some sexy, little adverbs and idiomatic expressions.
English this, native that, some of these are arguments to distract people from what matters--story telling. But to language teachers like me, they are lovely. Very lovely.
As Petina pointed out in her introduction of the post, Valerie Tagwira is one of the busiest writers. Even as she was working full-time and studying for my Masters in Public Health exams in London and preparing to travel to South Africa for the conference, she managed to prepare her short story submission, "A Walk in the Night", which is now featured in the March/April issue of Munyori Literary Journal.
Perhaps when she is done with her exams, we may start asking her about the possibilities of a sequel to Uncertainty of Hope, a novel which raises a disturbing question at the end, about how Zimbabwean structures are going to achieve any normality when there are those who might wish that the chaos continues, for their personal benefit.
Here is another excerpt from Valerie's post:
"An important question raised by another writer in the audience was why we wrote in English and not in our native tongues. My response to that was that I write in English to reach out to a wider audience. Writing in Shona, which is my native language would restrict the audience that I can reach. I suggested translation of English novels into vernacular where funds are available."
The question of language in African literature is an old one, but it keeps coming back and sometimes makes for delicious debates. What I am happy about though, is how the native languages are now used by contemporary Zimbabwean writers to decorate, infiltrate, or even violate the space of, the English language. We are fast drifting away from those apologetic and courteous glossaries, opting to challenge readers by asking them to gain contextual meaning.
To see what I mean, read Petina Gappah, Brian Chikwava, Chimamanda Adichie, and others. The product is often a rich, even mysterious, prose, where the untranstalated or unstranslatable does not interfere with the overall meaning of a paragraph, etc. Remember those days when American writers went to spend some writing time in France? They often came back with novels or short stories whose prose was infused with untranslated French phrases.
Sometimes when I read Henry James, I want to see more of those French phrases which I don't understand, because, remember, if the prose is well-written, you are really not supposed to pay attention to or notice the English language in which the story is told; language is supposed to dissolve, as Jhumpa Lahiri has argued in a New Yorker interview, to allow the reader to hear the story without any distractions by some sexy, little adverbs and idiomatic expressions.
English this, native that, some of these are arguments to distract people from what matters--story telling. But to language teachers like me, they are lovely. Very lovely.
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