On the Making of African Literatures

Abstract

Manuscripts and songs. Letters and archival scraps. Inscriptions and book collections. Maps, machines, and crude oil. Each of the essays in this special issue looks to get a handle on an author, text, or set of texts by taking hold of something solid, tangible, sensuous. In his essay on Christopher Okigbo, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma attends to the poet’s compositional practice with an ear to his passion for music. Rachel Bower combs through editorial archives and correspondence to examine the ways in which Nigerian poetry has been made by anthologies. Asha Rogers re-reads Richard Rive’s short story ‘The Bench’ after looking into the author’s personal library and opening its books to closer inspection. And in her account of Kojo Laing’s bewildering fiction Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars, Christine Okoth assesses the impact of industry on mapping – real and metaphorical – and on how we imagine Africa’s futures. Does this interest in sensuous objects and tangible things explain our use of the phrase ‘materials of literature’? Not entirely, though it is certainly striking that the essays elicited by our call for papers are all concerned with the ‘stuff’ of verbal arts – with voice, paper, ink, body, machine – when, in the initial call, we glossed the term simply as ‘matter to hand’: as that which is put to work in acts of literary making. Similarly, though we gave no special weight to archival research, this is central to three of the four essays, while the fourth, Okoth’s, reflects on the means by which books are transported and stored. Perhaps this unanticipated congruence has to do with the fact that, for many literary critics, knowledge about the making of stories, poems, plays, and novels emerges most readily from archives, whether these consist of small book collections at prestigious institutions (the case with Richard Rive), curated editorial records (such as the Howard Sergeant archive explored by Bower), or personal papers held by relatives (the case with Christopher Okigbo – at least at the time of Suhr-Sytsma’s research). This is not because such archives are deemed repositories of foundational truth, but because contact with physical stuff, which can be handled, photographed, watched, and heard (and which often parches the throat, dries the hands, leaves eyes and neck aching) produces a particular sense of the materiality of the verbal arts.