Contemporary African Writing or the Moments that Inspire Us
So I am not as active on this blog as I used to be. There is a good reason for that. I once used this blog to discuss ideas, hoping to trigger some writing of my own, and to rave about African literature, to feature all the new names in African writing, to bring awareness of the literature, to shout from the top of the mountain about all the wonderful things coming out of African literature. There was a real need for that; I felt African literature (if you believe it exists) needed that kind of help, needed to be announced, to be talked about, to be singled out, to be revealed. And what do you know, a few years later, the literature doesn't need me to do so; it does just fine by itself, announcing, and sometimes rejecting, itself. And the bigger media has taken over the coverage, and now I can just sit back and watch from a distance, right? No.
I will continue to feature things about world writing here: who has written what (and why? or why not?); who has gotten a book deal, who has won an award, who is launching this or that book, and many more topics of interest, to inform (and to drive traffic to my blog), to expand my platform, etc.
I am serious when I say African literature is okay now. Don't worry perhaps about not being constantly on the New York Times Bestseller list; the people who should be reading African writing in the United States are already doing so, and the crowd is growing. A good enough portion of the American society now talks meaningfully about this literature written by writers who could also be called African writers, because the literature often takes one to a specific part of Africa, so that we are no longer just reading generalizations about Africa, but specific works of literature that come with as much diversity as there are diversities on the continent. Once we read in this way, a hunger is created for more African diversities, because when you finish reading a Kenyan or Ugandan or Zambian or Zimbabwean writer, you could also easily realize that you just finished reading a very specific instance of African literature, which thus creates a gap in your reader's curiosity for other specificities. This is the picture I have: but again, I tend to err on the side of optimism.
But African literature is taking care of itself and there is no stopping it now.
This blog is thus going to expand intrinsically (if this is the opposite of 'exponentially', although 'extrinsically' sounds more like it). It is now going to be a true blog, in that it will be more about me, taking the memoir (not confessional) route. For instance, it will cover things like: The year I started A-Level, I was the only student at my secondary school in Mazvihwa who had passed O-Level with at least five subjects, and initially I thought I would go to Dadaya, but my brother (who is late) said no, come to Harare and go to school here, so I ended up attending Highfield High in Highfield. But before I left the village, the minister at the headquarters of my church in Mberengwa, ( we had to travel quite a distance on foot to get there), committed a large potion of his sermon that day to the fact that I was going to A-Level. I was the first one in the whole congregation consisting of five branches to go to A-Level. So there was singing and dancing, dancing and singing. The words that stood out to me on that day were, "He will live a life of success!" "Ameni!" "He will make $400!!" "Ameni!" Those words would be a driving force in my studies once I was in Harare. Although I would quickly discover $400 was not a lot of money, I would still keep my eye on the money as I pursued my goals; I had a whole community back home rooting for me, and sitting in each class at High Field, I felt the importance that comes from one who knows someone has got their back.
Moments like this, now being remembered from Northern California, will fill the blank pages of this blog going forward.
Either this, or I will have to go back to praising African literature again. And that's not bad either.
I will continue to feature things about world writing here: who has written what (and why? or why not?); who has gotten a book deal, who has won an award, who is launching this or that book, and many more topics of interest, to inform (and to drive traffic to my blog), to expand my platform, etc.
I am serious when I say African literature is okay now. Don't worry perhaps about not being constantly on the New York Times Bestseller list; the people who should be reading African writing in the United States are already doing so, and the crowd is growing. A good enough portion of the American society now talks meaningfully about this literature written by writers who could also be called African writers, because the literature often takes one to a specific part of Africa, so that we are no longer just reading generalizations about Africa, but specific works of literature that come with as much diversity as there are diversities on the continent. Once we read in this way, a hunger is created for more African diversities, because when you finish reading a Kenyan or Ugandan or Zambian or Zimbabwean writer, you could also easily realize that you just finished reading a very specific instance of African literature, which thus creates a gap in your reader's curiosity for other specificities. This is the picture I have: but again, I tend to err on the side of optimism.
But African literature is taking care of itself and there is no stopping it now.
This blog is thus going to expand intrinsically (if this is the opposite of 'exponentially', although 'extrinsically' sounds more like it). It is now going to be a true blog, in that it will be more about me, taking the memoir (not confessional) route. For instance, it will cover things like: The year I started A-Level, I was the only student at my secondary school in Mazvihwa who had passed O-Level with at least five subjects, and initially I thought I would go to Dadaya, but my brother (who is late) said no, come to Harare and go to school here, so I ended up attending Highfield High in Highfield. But before I left the village, the minister at the headquarters of my church in Mberengwa, ( we had to travel quite a distance on foot to get there), committed a large potion of his sermon that day to the fact that I was going to A-Level. I was the first one in the whole congregation consisting of five branches to go to A-Level. So there was singing and dancing, dancing and singing. The words that stood out to me on that day were, "He will live a life of success!" "Ameni!" "He will make $400!!" "Ameni!" Those words would be a driving force in my studies once I was in Harare. Although I would quickly discover $400 was not a lot of money, I would still keep my eye on the money as I pursued my goals; I had a whole community back home rooting for me, and sitting in each class at High Field, I felt the importance that comes from one who knows someone has got their back.
Moments like this, now being remembered from Northern California, will fill the blank pages of this blog going forward.
Either this, or I will have to go back to praising African literature again. And that's not bad either.
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