Callaloo’s Oxford Stew

Abstract

Callaloo’s Oxford Stew Fred D’Aguiar (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fred D’Aguiar Michael K. Taylor © 2013 [End Page 563] “The novel has nothing to do with language,” Nurrudin Farah intoned in the hotel bar around midnight, in a conference crowd which included Ngugi wa Thiong’o, his son Mukoma (also a writer), and Booker Prize winner Ben Okri. We had left a successful reading earlier that evening as part of the line-up for the Callaloo Conference staged in Oxford. After the reading (one kind of sustenance) we were famished (the need for the more obvious kind). Farah’s remark was food not found on any menu, but the kind of intrigue cooked up among writers still on a high from reading and responding to a vigorous Q&A from an engaged audience. Farah meant that the novel was an emotional construct before it declared itself in spoken language (or was heard aloud in some pristine interior of the mind). The novel’s independence from language left the writer in a drawing room of recollections indebted to a primary source where the novel resided in a complete shape and form and where it waited patiently for yet another manifestation of it, this time as a language construct. We took turns arguing against Farah’s notion while he leaned back in his chair and thinned his eyes and gazed down each of us with his rebuttal. To his mind the language that we know and venerate invariably came after the emotion (though he admitted that the language frequently arrived enshrined in emotion). There was no way to disprove his thesis. Intuitively, we knew it to be true. Looking around the table it occurred to me that this conversation could only happen at a Callaloo gathering. Charles Rowell and his team had shepherded a format for unbridled intellectual ferment and cross-fertilization of disciplines that would have made the original gathering of twenty-five nations at the Bandung conference of 1955 proud. Bandung firmly opposed colonialism’s continuity by other means among newly independent nations. Callaloo heard Ngugi’s theory of linguistic colonialism among Africa’s nations whose native languages were being eroded by a political, commercial, and creative preference for English. To reverse the process he advocated a flowering of creativity in those African languages first, with an English (or other language) translation second. I first came across this theory in Ngugi’s “decolonization of the mind” activism in his 1970s collection of essays, but hearing it again in Oxford the theory had lost none of its appeal. As an opening salvo for the conference there could have been no better reminder of a creative approach to the big cultural questions affecting us all. Carol Boyce Davies announced the launch of her new essay collection, and her paper united Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States in a newly feminized body of resistance narratives. Professor Davies is famous for at least two things, one, her retrieval of women elided from the male-narrative histories and, two, for her grassroots activism [End Page 564] (See her work on Claudia Jones). Davies thinks like a poet—accustomed to chronology and linearity she peppers her scholarship with quantum and lateral thinking. The poets won the day at the closing reading at Goldsmiths where US poets shared the stage with UK poets. The range of voices accounted for all the trends of current poetry: autobiography transmuted into fictions amendable to scansion; songbirds of the postcolonial apocalypse heralding a new day of the performance body in unparaphraseable display; the local, in David mode, aiming a slingshot loaded with a rhetoric of poetics at the Goliath of globalization. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone about the poet who, after a splendid reading by his peers at the Oxford venue, got up to comment on the event, stood before the podium, hesitated as if lost for words (as we, the audience, surely were having just witnessed some spellbinding presentations), and pulled out a mouth organ and gave us all a rendition of the blues that brought the house down. Nuff said. [End Page 565] Fred D’Aguiar...