The State of African Literature Now

There is an abundance of it on US soil; it seems American publishers have discovered African writers (never mind that that haven't discovered me yet, because I haven't given them a chance to). I remember in the 90s, when I came to this country, I would scour book shelves, in bookstores and libraries, but it was hard to find many books by African writers. Yes, there was Achebe, and of course Ngugi, Soyinka. I needed more though. I couldn't find Marechera (I came to the realization that he had not penetrated the American market). I couldn't find Nervous Conditions, nor Why Don't You Carve Other animals. I couldn't find Bones, The Harvest of Thorns; I couldn't find  The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born; I couldn't find Song of Lawino, nor even The Breast of the Earth.

I was okay I guess, because then I made it a mission to find more Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Charles Johnson and others in the African American canon. It was good that three years  earlier, Toni Morrison had been labelled Nobel material, so her work was everywhere; in fact, you could find it under Fiction, not in that special section called African American literature/Studies. She alone--Toni Morrison--was a lot to occupy one's time with, but there were other dreams: i was finally finding all the books I hadn't been able to find in Zimbabwe. Some had been banned there for some reason (The Satanic Verses comes to mind); and I was reading all of William Faulkner, and deepening my Hemingway, Melville, Hawthorne, even discovering whatever American writers thought they were doing when they wrote those journal entries in the seventeenth century. Emerson was there; Thoreau was there; Jonathan Edwards was there, Emily Dicknson was there; and there were many others; many many others.  It was easy to forget about African literature altogether; to forget too that I once wrote; in fact, I fell for the journal entry approach, wrote and wrote about how America was treating me, vice versa.

Things seem to have changed just recently; I cannot keep up with work by African writers, and I am reading it too. Sometimes it is the only thing I get to read (but of course I am always reading American things )I teach this stuff, you know). I am reading many other things, and find that American publishers have given the nod to African writers. I don't though, if the readership has discovered the new literature that's being published for it....but I am part of that readership, and I can say, in short, we are getting there.