False Calm: A Journey through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia by María Sonia Cristoff

Abstract

The new literary tree would comprise three branches: the pre-Makerere South African writers (e.g., Mofolo, Jordan, Plaatje [the first black African to produce a novel in English, Mhudi, 1930]), who published chiefly in indigenous languages later translated into English; the Makerere, named for the 1962 conference that assembled them (e.g., Achebe, Ngũgĩ, Soyinka), who chose the realist political novel in English as a tool to unify indigenous elites against colonizers and critique neocolonialism’s “national bourgeoisie”; and the post-Makerere (e.g., Adichie, Bulawayo, Forna), who portray, in English no longer chosen but internalized, what displaced Africans face within today’s global transnationalism. Ngugi’s cogent evidence demonstrates that the EME and EME-educated national bourgeoisies—Fanon’s black skins in white masks—subjected all African culture producers to colonial binaries that privileged Western aesthetic norms. Thus, the chapter “Amos Tutuola: Creating the African Literary Bogeyman” reveals that the West championed Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) as a quaint anthropological text by a half-educated indigene. In fact, when Tutuola asked his editors to correct his flawed English, they declined, preferring to market the more “authentic” original as an entrée into the “African mind.” Stereotyped as the colorful but always inferior African, Tutuola drew hostility from African literary historians and critics: their internalized Western standards obliged them to label him a “cul-de-sac.” The Makerere, meanwhile , whose canonized novels and prizes, including Soyinka’s 1986 Nobel, earned them membership in the EME (which later, through “Commonwealth Literature ,” would seek to appropriate canonical postcolonial writing in English), distanced themselves from Tutuola, excluding him from their conference. This dynamic underlies the erasure to which Ngugi points. Showing allegiance to EME values, EME-indoctrinated African historians and critics categorized the pre-Makerere, barred from the EME because they used indigenous languages, as a bridge from African orature, which the EME considered a lesser form, to Western literature. As for Fanon’s “anticolonial artists ,” the Makerere found the pre-apartheid synthetic visions of their South African forefathers politically inappropriate. To resolve its identity crisis, Ngugi (whose father became a major voice on both sides of the dispute, writing canonical works first in English as James Ngugi, later in Kikuyu as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) asks that African literature embrace colonial and indigenous languages, realist political and other novel forms, theater, poetry, science , the Black Atlantic, slave narratives, etc., all within a nonhierarchical structure. Aware that African journals and presses have begun to extend their linguistic and generic offerings but that most actors in cultural production still resist large structural changes, Ngugi ultimately invokes Achebe’s “Don’t fence me in,” calling for a “borderless” African literature that opens itself “to its past literary history, to its present rooted transnational state, and to a future where roots are everywhere and the center nowhere.” Michele Levy North Carolina A&T State University María Sonia Cristoff False Calm: A Journey through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia Trans. Katherine Silver. Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2018. 225 pages. Far south of Buenos Aires lie the isolated steppes of Patagonia, Argentina’s southernmost region. For Argentines, Patagonia is considered a backwater dotted with occasional tourist attractions such as the Swiss-influenced ski town of Bariloche ; foreigners may remember it as the endpoint of Paul Theroux’s train journey across South America. Today, the region is sparsely populated, and its few residents struggle to find work. María Sonia Cristoff’s False Calm aims to tell the stories of the tiny, far-flung towns scattered throughout Patagonia through the eyes of their residents. Cristoff is herself a native of the region who left for the big city while still young; now, returning as a writer, she spends her time in these towns walking and waiting for their stories to reveal themselves, and sooner or later people begin talking. Cristoff journeys from one small town to the next, among them Santa Cruz, where the story of an amateur pilot is intertwined with the history of Patagonian aviation; Maquinchao, where she recounts the story of immigration to Argentina through the lens of the mysterious disappearance of early twentieth-century Arab merchants; and El Cuy, where...