Commonwealth Writers Research Articles

Tourists, travellers, refugees: An interview with Michelle De Kretser

Michelle De Kretser was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and moved to Australia in 1972. From 1989 to 1992 she was a founding editor of the Australian Women’s Book Review. She is the author of several novels, including The Rose Grower (1999), The Hamilton Case (2003 – winner of the Tasmania Pacific Prize, the Encore Award [UK] and the Commonwealth Writers Prize [Southeast Asia and Pacific]) and The Lost Dog (2007). Her most recent novel, Questions of Travel, won the 2013 Miles Franklin Award, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for fiction. In this conversation, which took place by telephone call from Melbourne to Sydney in August 2015, De Kretser discusses Questions of Travel in relation to travel and tourism, the Sri Lankan diaspora, and postcolonial and neocolonial politics.

Entering Apartheid's History in Johannesburg

photos : laura hernandez 112 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 Outpost Entering Apartheid’s History in Johannesburg by Laura Hernandez LOCATED IN BUSTLING Johannesburg, South Africa, the Apartheid Museum traces segregation along with the diversity of its people. As they enter, visitors experience a split entrance—those issued a white racial classification must enter one way, while those issued a nonwhite racial classification come in a different entrance. The cards are distributed randomly but serve as an example of apartheid separation. The architecture and outside structures tie into the museum’s portrayal of history and culture. Visitors walk along an outdoor path lined with mirrored structures of images showing the diverse descendants who came to South Africa in 1886 after the discovery of gold in Johannesburg . The museum winds through more than thirty rooms, each telling a piece of the apartheid story and giving examples through video, photography, firsthand accounts, and artifacts. Delving into the history surrounding South Africa’s tumultuous past isn’t easy, but the museum offers a look at the major historical events leading up to apartheid and the changes that brought reconciliation. One of my favorite rooms showcased documentary photography by Ernest Cole, who recorded what it was like to be black in a repressive government. The photographs were pulled from his book House of Bondage, banned in South Africa during apartheid but now being publicly displayed for the first time. Apartheid affected the entire framework of South Africa, including the literary landscape . Breyten Breytenbach, an Afrikaans poet, spent several years in prison because of his political beliefs. Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer published July’s People in 1981, which depicted white-minority rule and its collapse. Miriam Tlali was the first black woman to publish a novel in South Africa with Muriel at Metropolitan. J. M. Coetzee also achieved fame during apartheid and received the Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. Conceived with the specific purpose of showing the rise and fall of apartheid, the museum opened in 2001. Pillars outside the main entrance depict the seven fundamental values of South Africa’s first fully democratic parliament after apartheid ended in 1994: democracy, equality, reconciliation , diversity, responsibility, respect, and freedom. Laura Hernandez lives and writes in Brooklyn. ...

The Daring Fictions of Bilingual Lindsey Collen

South African-born Lindsey Collen, based for most of her writing years on the Indian Ocean Republic of Mauritius, has been propelled to fame in the postcolonial English-language sphere for twice having gained the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa region. Best known for her first winner, the breakthrough novel The Rape of Sita (1993, 1995, 2001), she has nevertheless also published several other works, notably in the local Kreol language. She is hailed there as an activist publicising advanced causes through the medium of her innovative short and long fictions, as this summary demonstrates afresh.

A Fragment

A Fragment Ben Okri (bio) There is an island in the South Pacific where giant stone images of the human head stand inexplicably on the rocks. Many legends surround these imposing images, but no one really knows how they came there, why they were made, or what they mean. They remain one of the great enigmas of man’s passage on this hieroglyphic territory of the earth. There is in France a cave where images of bulls leap on the stone walls, vivid as if limned there by modern masters. There are bulls and horses, but it is the bulls that shake the imagination. To see these images you have to go deep into the caves, without light, and traverse the steady dripping of water and navigate the slow forming stalagmites and stalactites. And then in the dark the cave walls writhe. The smallest light on them draws a heave of wonder. These are not natural images. These are not mere reproductions of bulls playing in the field. They compel one to a soul-stirring aesthetic contemplation. Why did those ancient artists choose to paint their bulls on a wall so deep in the caves, so deep in the dark? These are enigmas of man’s passage through the dark riddle of the earth. There is in Lagos a museum where the most potent images are not inside the museum, but outside it, growing like dark koans from the museum earth. They are oddly shaped stones, with curious markings that conform to the typography of the human face but extending this signification to the whole form of the body without separation among the parts. It is a gnomic image of the human form. These images appear to give birth to themselves. They have their home in Cross-rivers state, but they sprout here in Lagos. No form of sculpture anywhere in the world approach their strangeness. They are the magic form of nightmares. Children love them, love their incomplete forms which the mind completes. No one knows how they came to be created. There is a legend that they are the leftover forms when the great god exhausted his creative matrix. They are the addendum to creation, God’s last thoughts. Wherever we are faced with a puzzle older than tradition, which not even stories can domesticate, we are dealing with the depth-charge enigmas of our obscure passage across the face of the stars. Before humanity knew what it was, it made art. Making art helped humanity glimpse what humanity was. Our remotest ancestors shaped stone for reasons beyond productive use. They liked the elliptical shape of things. Our farthest ancestors were abstract sculptors, minimalist painters, and compressed riddlers. The oldest objects we know of bear testimony to our unfathomable need to shape, to create, to bend form, to hint at the thousand ways that the world can be mirrored and distorted, with each distortion being more true about that which is distorted. It seems that the impulse for art runs parallel with the impulse to live. [End Page 1041] Ben Okri BEN OKRI—novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and essayist—was born in Minna, Nigeria, but spent his early years in London, while his father studied law. Okri later returned to the UK to study at the University of Essex. He is author of more than eighteen books, including Incidents at the Shrine, The Famished Road (winner of the Booker Prize), An African Elegy, In Arcadia, Starbook, Tales of Freedom, and The Age of Magic. He has also received such literary prizes and awards as the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Booker Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, and the Premio Palmi. From 1991 to 1993, he was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1987 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2001 he was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire). In addition to being a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre, he is also a Vice President of the English Centre of International PEN. He lives in London. Copyright © 2016 The Johns Hopkins...

The Book of Negroes’ Illustrated Edition: Circulating African-Canadian History through the Middlebrow

Abstract: This article examines the 2009 deluxe illustrated edition of Lawrence Hill’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize– and Canada Reads–winning novel The Book of Negroes , originally published in 2007. It relates the story of Aminata, a West African girl kidnapped and sold into slavery, and her experiences on an indigo plantation in the American south, followed by further displacements to Charleston, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and London. In New York, as the Revolutionary War comes to a close, Aminata becomes the scribe for the Book of Negroes, documenting the Black Loyalists, as well as the slaves and indentured servants of white Loyalists, granted passage by the British to Canada. Hill has commented that the Book of Negroes is an important document about which Canadians are largely ignorant. This desire to circulate knowledge about African-Canadian history through the novel is particularly manifest in the illustrated edition of 2009, where a photograph of the Book of Negroes features prominently, along with countless other images and captions which supplement and interrupt Hill’s narrative. This article considers the significance and implications of this “keepsake” or “souvenir” edition, particularly its circulation of knowledge about African-Canadian history through visual pleasure.

Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present (review)

Reviewed by: Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present Kathleen Maloney Kuchta, Todd . Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 264 pp. Cloth $59.50; Paper $24.50. The title and the introduction of Todd Kuchta's Semi-Detached Empire provide a clear description of the argument that follows by playing on the idea of a semidetached home in order to communicate the sense of how suburbs replicate empire. The cleverness of the title and the image it creates are used as the guiding metaphor throughout the book. The metaphor also works as a description of the book itself; [End Page 250] whether intentionally or not, Kuchta's text is also semi-detached from the main argument, considering white male writers with the postcolonial writers confined to the epilogue. In the introduction, Kuchta explains why there are few female authors considered in the book: "As this description of suburban male degeneration suggests, my study takes up a distinctly masculine problematic" (15). So although the body of the text studies this "masculine problematic" in the works of H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and George Orwell, the discussion of commonwealth writers is ghettoized in the epilogue, which gives a reading of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia in the context of a range of commonwealth writers and popular culture representations. Kuchta also mimics his topic in the sense that like the Victorians who lived in the suburbs in the 1880s, the book is acquisitive and does not confine itself to one type of collection. Instead, Kuchta examines literature, culture, architecture, ethnography, psychology, population studies, language, and economic practices in order to make his point. The endnotes and the bibliography are excellent and reveal an amazing variety of sources. While each of these topics is fascinating on its own and the combination is enticing, there is not enough depth to any of the exploration to make it feel foundational. But perhaps if you are writing about semi-detachment, the point may be to make it difficult to find a footing. The book is separated into sections: "Foundations," "Facades," "Semi-Detachment." And like a work of architecture, this book works to build and scaffold its own argument. In the "Foundations" section of the book, Kuchta sets out his argument and begins a reading of H. G. Wells that he continues later in the book. This first section introduces the argument: that imperialism is central to both real and imagined suburbs. The relationship of the city and the country as a kind of semi-detachment and the idea that suburbs work to intervene between city and country is overlaid with the idea that the suburbs become the new slums as the slums become totally unlivable. The complications of the spatial identity of the suburbs are further explicated in the sense that the suburb is simultaneously seen as the new wall/fort around the metropolis and also often inhabited by colonial peoples new to England. Therefore, the suburb is both English and not English. This introduction leads to the first argument about literature, Wells's The War of the Worlds, where Kuchta makes a nice argument about reverse colonization and the role of the suburbs in the destruction of culture; "Fusing the novel's instantaneous rural decimation and reverse colonization tropes with an optical illusion of residential growth, the tripods serve as otherworldly surrogates for the suburban development invading Britain" (47). Kuchta suggests that Wells' novel and, I would add, the argument in Semi-Detached Empire, call for a new theory of the suburb. The "Facades" section of the book examines the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and E. M. Forster in an effort to depict the struggles with defining and describing colonization and the after effects of imperialism once the previously colonized become citizens. The suburb becomes the location of overexposure to colonization and to foreign influence and therefore becomes a danger to Englishness. In the analysis of The Sign of Four, suburban degeneracy links "physical degeneracy to bodily, architectural, and economic problems of circulation" (79). As in...

Brave Music of a Distant Drum by M. Herbstein

Herbstein, Manu. Brave Music of a Distant Drum. Markham, ON: Red Deer Press, 2011. Print. This is a powerful and thought-provoking novel, which offers remarkable insights into one of the darkest chapters in human history. South African author Manu Herbstein was awarded the 2002 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and in Brave Music of a Distant Drum, Herbstein re-imagines Ama’s story for a younger, North American audience. The novel chronicles the meeting between an elderly woman at the end of her life and the son who does not remember or understand her. It soon becomes clear that the divide which separates mother and son cannot be overcome until he listens to her story. Kidnapped as a teenager by Bedagbam slave raiders, young Ama was traded several times by powerful slave owners in Africa before she found herself on a slave ship bound for South America. Now elderly and blind, Ama needs her son to write her history down so that it will not be drowned “in the swamp of lost memories.” It is a heart-breaking story, but one that is filled with courageous acts of resistance and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of hope. Following in the tradition of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) and Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negros (2007), it is apparent that Ama’s son needs to understand his parents’ history before he can make sense of his own life in the present. This novel is recommended for young adults (16+), and this is an important guideline for two reasons. First, readers who lack sufficient literary and historical knowledge will have trouble interpreting the clues that reveal that the novel is set in eighteenth-century Brazil. More importantly, although the novel’s realistic depictions of horrific violence serve an important purpose, this violence is challenging for even a mature reader. Recommended: Four stars out of fourReviewer: Linda QuirkLinda is Assistant Special Collections Librarian at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta.

Proverbial Space and the Dialectics of Place and Displacement in Sade Adeniran’s <i>Imagine This</i>

Literary scholarship on proverb usage in Nigerian literary discourse had focused mostly on canonized writers and the nature, structure, form and context of proverbs in literature. Little work has been done on Sade Adeniran, her novel and the effect of place and displacement on proverb usage. This study is concerned with Adeniran‘s use of proverbs in her debut novel titled Imagine This. The novel, which won the Best First Book award for Commonwealth Writers‘ Prize (Africa Region) in 2008, has not received much critical attention because of the relative newness of the writer and the novel. The current paper examines Adeniran‘s attempt at creating a large proverbial space through her conscious use and structural arrangement of proverb in language. It foregrounds the dialectic of place and displacement, and location and dislocation as a crucible for her identity formation and major factor in appreciating her proverbs in the novel.Postcolonial theory served as the theoretical framework for the paper. Through the reading of the cultural features, Adeniran‘s techniques of writing which demonstrate her use of proverbs were purposively selected and subjected to content analysis in order to discuss the dynamics of language change in the novel. Proverbs are graphically enacted and foregrounded and Yoruba and English overlap in Imagine This. Through an examination of the implication of location and dislocation on proverb usage in the novel, the novel reveals an abundant usage of techniques of postcolonial writings such as code-mixing, pidginisation, use of proverbs, untranslated words and other language variants through which Adeniran creates a cultural space for herself. Geographical place and displacement as a feature of postcolonial writing imposes a gap that produces linguistic displacement. Therefore proverbs and other language variance and identity as in their literary contexts are areas of postcolonial study that require further research.

Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State via Regional Indigenous Roots? Kim Scott talks to Anne Brewster about That Deadman Dance

This interview focuses mainly on Kim Scott’s new novel That Deadman Dance which won the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize (Southeast Asian and Pacific region) and the Miles Franklin Award. The topics of conversation include Scott’s involvement in the Noongar language project (and the relationship of this project to the novel), the novel itself, the challenges of writing in English, the resistance paradigm and indigenous sovereignty and nationalism.

Celebrating David McLauchlan's Contribution

This article serves as an introduction for this issue of the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review celebrating Professor David McLachlan's 40th anniversary as a faculty member. This foreword celebrates Professor McLachlan as one of the leading Commonwealth writers of contract law, as a colleague, and as a lecturer.

An interview with Mohammed Hanif

Writer and journalist Mohammed Hanif has received much critical acclaim for his debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the inaugural Shakti Bhatt Award, the Corine Prize, and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. Centring on the mysterious death of Pakistan’s military dictator Zia ul‐Haq in 1988, the novel casts a satirical eye over a defining decade in Pakistan’s history. Hanif’s writing spans themes of religion, class anxieties, global politics, masculinity, sexuality, and forms of patriarchy and oppression. His contextualization and representation of Pakistan provide a remarkable insight into how it has come to be the nation that it is today. Hanif was born in Okara in 1964. He graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy, but left soon afterwards and became a journalist. He worked for Newsline, The Washington Post and the BBC and headed the BBC Urdu service in London for several years. He also graduated in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He has written several stage and screen plays and now lives in Karachi. This interview was conducted in Karachi, Pakistan, on 22 April 2010.

Women from Ghana: Their Urban Challenges in Ama Ata Aidoo's Novel Changes: A Love Story

Women from GhanaTheir Urban Challenges in Ama Ata Aidoo's Novel Changes: A Love Story Ginette Curry (bio) I called the book Changes, because I see primarily a character like Esi the protagonist as being a part of those who are trying to define, or even redefine woman as a lover, as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter, even as a granddaughter…. That's why I called the book Changes. In the meantime, it was fascinating to note that, for instance, my Dutch publishers titled the Dutch version of the book Choices. So, they saw her as somebody who had to deal with the issue of choices. "Interview with Ama Ata Aidoo," by Ada Uzoamaka Azodo Introduction Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo stands out among today's many talented and prominent African women writers for her widely acclaimed novels depicting the role of African women in a changing world. Like many people of her generation Aidoo witnessed Ghana's 1957 transition from British colony to independent state, as well as the conflicting interests and competing power bases that emerged in its post-independence years. Specifically, in the 1980s Ghana went through changes of governments, military coups, and economic downturns that affected not only the rural but also the urban populations. In an era of growing globalization and a new world order such turmoil brought about a new set of changes. This paper analyzes the various social, economic, and cultural conflicts and challenges Ama Ata Aidoo's female characters experience in her 1991 novel Changes: A Love Story, which takes place mainly in urban environments in West Africa and Europe in the 1980s. It has been praised by many literary critics for its thought-provoking portrayal of African women's redefined roles in their post-independence urban environment, and in 1993 it won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa region. [End Page 179] The story line is about three Ghanaian professional women, Esi, Opokuya, and Fusena, who deal differently with family issues and make attempts to juggle their many obligations toward their husbands, children, and careers in the 1980s. Nevertheless, their husbands are impervious to their feminist thinking and remain unsympathetic. Esi chooses to divorce, prioritizing her career and willingly entering a polygamous marriage—which ultimately becomes an exchange of one set of challenges for another. On the other hand, Opokuya stays in her monogamous marriage despite her many overwhelming wifely duties. Finally, like her counterparts Fusena feels trapped in a marriage that stifles her career aspirations. Ultimately, she ends up sharing her husband with Esi. Through the portrayal of her three major female characters Ama Ata Aidoo conveys an intimate and gender-focused perspective on the themes of love and female celibacy, African women's marriage, sexuality within marriage, and motherhood in urban Ghana during the 1980s. Interestingly, although there are many similarities in the dilemmas the three women face, their individual choices are totally different. Being Single in Accra, The Capital of Ghana In "Sugar Daddies and Gold Diggers" (1983) Carmel Dinan analyzes the plight of educated and middle-class women in Accra, Ghana. She explains that "even when women attain economic independence and self-sufficiency, they are still expected to have husbands."1 Furthermore, a study entitled "Pleas for Domestic Relief: Akan Women and Family Courts" (1997) reveals that African urbanization changed the fabric of Ghanaian society. Some women are heads of households and therefore subvert traditional situations, where conjugal and lineage ties prevail.2 In Changes: A Love Story Aidoo's literary representation of urban Ghanaian women shows Esi living as a single woman for a few weeks before she becomes Ali's wife. Keenly aware of the societal changes affecting Ghanaian women in the 1980s and 1990s and the new dilemmas they faced, Aidoo creates female characters such as Esi, who claims that in the cultural, ideological, and social context of post-independence Africa, there is no place for single women: OPOKUYA: "It is even more frightening to think that our societies do not admit that single women exist. Yet …" ESI: "Yet what?" OPOKUYA: "Single women have always existed here too," she said with some wonder. ESI: "Oh yes. And all over...

Interview with Gambian writer Lenrie Peters

Lenrie Peters, poet and novelist (b. 1932), was educated at the universities of Cambridge and London. A practising surgeon, he has been a journalist (African programs with the BBC), President of the board of directors of the National Library of The Gambia and Gambia College, and member of the jury for the Commonwealth Writers Prize competition. His first poems were published in 19641 and his first novel in 1965. The Second Round (London: Heinemann) is about a British-trained African physician, a victim of the 'massacre of the soul' wrought by Westernization, who returns to the capital city of his native land full of 'noble ideas about progress in Africa' but ends up taking a post in a remote bush hospital, thus immersing himself more deeply in the traditional experience. In 1967, Peters published Satellites (Heinemann), a collection of fifty-five poems where intimate emotion is combined with a deep meditation on human dignity and justice. Four years later, he published another collection of sixty-nine poems under the title of Katchikali (Heinemann), which is a sacred crocodile pool in Bakau, in the Greater Banjul Area. In 1981, he published his Selected Poetry. The new poems in the collection castigate the corrupt greed of tribalized leadership elites and balance nostalgia for a pastoral past with cautious assertions of hope for a future built on that past. He is generally regarded as one of the most intellectual poets of his generation. Ideas about politics2, evolution, science, and music inspire his images in the form of debates. The interview took place in Banjul on 3 June 2005.

‘“POSTCOLONIAL” DESCRIBES YOU AS A NEGATIVE’

Born in Calcutta in 1956, Amitav Ghosh studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria, and did fieldwork in Egypt and Cambodia. He worked for a newspaper in New Delhi, and currently lives in New York where he teaches at Columbia University. He has published five novels so far: The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004). The Sahitya Akademi Award 1989 (for The Shadow Lines), the Arthur C. Clarke Award 1997 (for The Calcutta Chromosome), the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International eBook Awards in 2001 (for The Glass Palace) and the Hutch Crossword Book Award 2004 (for The Hungry Tide) are among the prominent prizes he has won. In 2001, he withdrew his novel The Glass Palace from consideration for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, questioning both the relevance of ‘commonwealth literature’ as a category and the policy of excluding non-English language writing from the purview of the Prize. (Read his letter to the Commonwealth Foundation and the Foundation's response at <http://iaclals.8m.com/nl/01jul/01jul08.htm>)

Surviving History: Kerri Sakamoto interviewed by Pilar Cuder-Domínguez

Japanese-Canadian writer Kerri Sakamoto is the author of two novels. The Electrical Field (1998) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book award and the Canada-Japan Literary Award. One Hundred Million Hearts followed in 2003. In this interview she talks to Pilar Cuder-Domínguez about how she started writing and about her current projects. She discusses the topics and issues she is most concerned with–particularly the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II and its lasting consequences, and how they came together in the two novels she has published to date. Sakamoto mentions those writers whose work has most influenced her own and describes what it means to be a Japanese-Canadian Sansei writer.

An Interview with Zakes Mda

[End Page 62] Click for larger view Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, better known as Zakes Mda, is an internationally acclaimed South African poet, playwright, novelist and painter. Born in 1948 in the Eastern Cape, Mda spent his early childhood in Soweto. By 1977 his poetry was being regularly published, and in 1978 his play We Shall Sing for the Fatherland won the first Amstel Playwright of [End Page 63] the Year Award. The following year he won the same honor for his play The Hill. In 1983 Mda graduated from Ohio University with an M.F.A. in theater and an M.A. in telecommunications. Mda has since taught at the University of Lesotho and been awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Cape Town. Mda's first novel, Ways of Dying (1995), won the M-net Book Prize. The Heart of Redness (2002) won the prestigious Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa Region. His novel The Madonna of Excelsior (2004) was selected as one of the Top Ten South African Books Published in the Decade of Democracy. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux will publish his new novel, The Whale Caller, in October 2005. Mda is currently a full professor at Ohio University. This interview was conducted in the spring of 2004. INTERVIEWER : You are a black South African who grew up during apartheid. In J. M. Coetzee's memoir, Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life, we learn of his growing awareness of apartheid and himself as an Afrikaner. He reflects on who he is and why he writes as he does. Your experience of apartheid must be very different from Coetzee's. What was your childhood in Soweto like? MDA: Yes, it will be different in many respects. I grew up in Johannesburg in a township known as Soweto, which was an urban environment. Soweto was a black township because according to apartheid laws even residential areas were separated. Black and white. Soweto is a number of suburbs. It means South Western Townships. It's a sprawling area of about a million people. My own suburb in Soweto was Orlando East. I went to school there. My mother was a nurse, and my father was a primary school teacher. Later, my father left our suburb and went to the [End Page 64] Eastern Cape to study law. My mother and brothers and I moved to another suburb called Dobsinville, where my mother continued working as a nurse at a clinic. It was in Dobsinville that I became a juvenile delinquent, joining street gangs, giving my mother lots of problems at a time when my father was away studying law, serving his articles. That's what it's called in South Africa when you have completed your law degree and are working as an apprentice with a practicing lawyer before you can practice as a lawyer on your own. He was serving his articles in the Eastern Cape, which is a different province, more than a thousand miles away from Johannesburg. As a gangster, that's when I actually earnestly became an artist as well. I had already been writing since the time I was six years old. When not fighting in the street, I would be somewhere painting pictures, writing poems, playing truant from school. My parents decided to save me from gangsterism by taking me to a rural area in the Eastern Cape, which is where my father originally came from. I lived with my grandmother. I continued to write. I wrote in my own indigenous African language, Xhosa. When my father completed his law studies, we moved to a small town in the Eastern Cape called Sterkspruit, where I completed my primary education. Soon thereafter my father was arrested because he was a political activist in the underground political movement fighting against apartheid. He escaped and went into exile in a neighboring country called Lesotho, which was then a British colony. A year later I joined him...

'Voicing the Text': The Making of an Oral Poetics in Olive Senior's Short Fiction

Long before West Indian literature became a legitimate category of writing— brought about mainly by support for and publication of novels by West Indians living in Britain in 1950s and 1960s—among new literatures in English, West Indian writers had already begun to produce an impressive body of short fiction; short fiction is, indeed, as Kenneth Ramchand describes it, the founding of West Indian literature (2). The rise of small magazines in 1930s and 1940s in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Guyana, and existence of influential Lon- don-based Caribbean Voices Programme (1945-1958) helped to support a regional creative writing community in which short story writing thrived. The emergence of West Indian novel in 1950s and 1960s somewhat overshadowed short story writing, but since 1980s, shorter genre has been enjoying a renaissance. The publication of Olive Senior's first short story collection Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986) —the inaugural winner of Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1987— is generally regarded as point at which West Indian short story re-emerged from literary underground. Since then, single-authored collections been published with encouraging regularity, as short story anthologies. The re-emergence of West Indian short story has also brought a revival of interest in oral traditions in region and promotion of local oral contexts as artistic resources for creative writers. Speaking of recent trends in West Indian short story writing, Stewart Brown and John Wickham note in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories that many, probably most, West Indian short story writers been conscious of, and to some extent influenced by, those oral forms and stories spun around figures like Anancy, West Indian trickster, or Amerindian spirits like Ol' Higue or Mantop (xvii). E.A. Markham makes a similar observation in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, noting that West Indian short story writers have taken stories and characters out of oral and reimagined them in a literary context (xviii). The making of an oral poetics or development of an aesthetic of orality, as it is variably termed, in modern West Indian fiction turns on transposing folk figures into literary works where they function as tropes for a number of conditions and issues pertinent to postcolonial period: wily spider Anancy and his significations often form metaphoric center of works—from authors as diverse as Andrew Salkey, Pauline Melville, and Narmala Shewcharan—highly ambivalent about political achievements and climate of postindependence West Indian nations; and

Teaching about the Atlantic Slave Trade and Reparations

TEACHING ABOUT THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE AND REPARATIONS Manu Herbstein. Ama, A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: E-Reads, 2001. Distributed by E-Reads, 171 East 74th St., New York, N.Y. 10021. Online at http://www.ereads.com. Supported by a Web site, http://www.ama.africatoday.com/. $15.37 at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585869325/ama-20/1041818852-6958338. Paper. Winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for the best first book, 2002. "Who are you, homo sapiens?" is a question that resonates through a history colored by cruelty. When historians try to formulate the meaning of the human past, what is their conclusion about the Atlantic slave trade? We know that millions died in Africa and at sea during thirty-five thousand slave voyages; three hundred to six hundred shackled humans were crammed into the stinking bowels of slave ships. The numbers alone are numbing. But can historians think about human lives in terms of numbers, let alone describe the pathos of individual lives? How can historians describe the mysterious loss of a daughter, son, father, or mother? How can historians persuade students that they should not only feel this overwhelming sadness, but also carry these feelings beyond the conclusion of a college course? Historical fiction may help. This review essay describes the result of a project on the Atlantic slave trade and the question of reparations that I carried on in a semester-long history of Africa class for advanced undergraduates, in this case thirteen male and seventeen female students from ethnically diverse backgrounds.The course focused on Ama, A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, which is available both in hard copy and online. As a supplement to Ama, I used primary and secondary sources: David Dennard's "Historiography of Reparations" (SERSAS fall 2001 conference, Oct. 13, 2001); The Middle Passage (an HBO, Kreol, and Raphia film); Ali A. Mazrui's "Global Africa: From Abolitionists to Reparationists" (African Studies Revieiu 37:3, Dec. 1994); selected speeches from the "Millions for Reparations" rally (N'COBRA, Washington, B.C., Aug. 17, 2002); and Congressman John Conyers's proposed legislation to investigate federal government involvement in slavery (101st Congress, 1st Session, H.R. 3745 [often referred to as H.R. 40 to recall "Forty Acres and a Mule"]). To assist students, I also provided a glossary, character list, and several maps, the latter created using Rand McNally's splendid New Millennium World Atlas Deluxe software. These are all available on the Web at http://www.ama.africatoday.com. Ama, who is the eponymous heroine acting among historical characters and events, introduced the difficult issues raised in the project. All students agreed that Ama gave them entry into the mind and heart of a courageous female slave. Ama became their sister, their universal family member-we are all Africans; she touched them. Ama chronicles the tribulations of a young girl who was born in the late eighteenth-century in what is now northern Ghana. Originally named Nandzi, she is enslaved by Africans, renamed Ama (Saturday) by her Asante masters, and sold to Europeans. …

The River Is Eternal: Nature Mysticism and Vedanta Philosophy in Ruskin Bond's Angry River

The River Is Eternal: Nature Mysticism and Vedanta Philosophy in Ruskin Bond’s Angry River Meena G. Khorana (bio) On February 18, 1993, the Sahitya Akademi of India presented Ruskin Bond the award for the most outstanding Indian writer in English. This recognition of Bond’s 35 years as a writer acknowledges his special relationship with India by virtue of birth, experience, and history. Born to British parents on May 19, 1934, in Kasauli, a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas, Bond grew up as an Indian with no division of loyalties, but as the inheritor of a dual culture. Unlike the children of most British colonials who were sent to England to study during their formative years—famous among them being Rudyard Kipling, Rumer Godden, and M. M. Kaye—Bond spent his early childhood in the princely state of Jamnagar, where his father served as tutor-guardian to the royal children; in the Doon Valley in the Himalayas, where his grandparents lived; and at Bishop Cotton School in Simla, the summer capital of the Raj. After completion of his schooling in 1950, like so many colonials at the time of Indian independence, Bond accompanied his relatives to England. However, he was lonely for the Himalayan mountains, and while still a teenager he wrote his first novel, The Room on the Roof (which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize awarded to a British Commonwealth writer under 30), in an attempt to capture the beauty and mystery of the Himalayas and, quite literally, to earn his passage home to India. Ruskin Bond, who has been living in Mussoorie for nearly 30 years now, has made the small Himalayan town a part of his life and work as a writer. He has given up lucrative job offers in the cities and outside India to live the simple, yet spiritually rich life the mountains have to offer, [End Page 253] because, as he says, “when you have received love from people, and the freedom that only the mountains can give, then you have come very near the borders of heaven” (“Writer” 1). He says he has become a part of the mountains, or at least of the particular range on which Mussoorie is situated. The very house in which he lives, Ivy Cottage, hugs the mountains and provides a dual vision of the highest Himalayan peaks towering above like gods and of the plains visible in the distance below. He regrets that in modern times the Himalayan ranges—the world’s greatest mountain mass—which have been celebrated and revered as sacred dwellings of the gods in Hindu, Buddhist, Sikkimese, Nepali, and Bhutanese legends and mythology, do not appear to have given rise to any memorable Indian literature, especially for children (“Writer” 1). While several Indian and Western writers employ the Himalayas as settings for their children’s novels, they (with the notable exception of Dhan Gopal Mukerji) 1 do not explore these mountains in a meaningful way. Ruskin Bond, however, finds endless material for stories in the trees and wild flowers, birds and animals, rocks and rivers, and simple hillfolk who are an integral part of the Himalayas. In writing about nature, he does not give just a pictorial description, but goes to the heart or spirit of the scene by providing an insider’s point of view. As Murli Das Melwani puts it, to Bond, “Nature is not merely a decorative background; it is a power that changes the personality; it is the repository of legends . . .” (39–40). In his many poems, short stories, and novels for children, Ruskin Bond’s characters come to a realization of their spiritual affinity with creation through a single manifestation of nature. Whether it is a cherry tree, a raindrop, a window on the roof from which to view the world, a hidden pool, or an old banyan tree, a single facet serves as a symbol of harmony with nature and a transcendental vision of life. In Angry River—which marked Bond’s transition from an adult to a children’s writer and which he considers his “first and probably best children’s novel” (quoted in Chatterjee 7)—the manifestation of nature is...

The rape of Sita

Winner of the Best Book for the African category of the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize, this novel was banned by the Mauritius Government when it was first published. Sita struggles to remember her own history and her own rape, which comes to symbolize all rapes, all violations, all colonizations.