Chimamanda Adichie,
Helon Habila and
Binyavanga Wainaina
Discuss Their Literary Heroes
In The Africa Report, three of today’s top African writers discuss the authors that have inspired them the most. Below you will find short essays by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (The Thing Around Your Neck), Helon Habila (Oil on Water) and Binyavanga Wainaina (One Day I Will Write About This Place).
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Ama Ata Aidoo:
The Nigerian writer says she feels a "deep gratitude to" Ghana's Ata Aidoo in the second of our mini series asking African writers to pay homage to their literary legends.
When I first discovered Ama Ata Aidoo’s work – a slim book on a dusty shelf in our neighbour’s study in Nsukka – I was stunned by the believability of her characters, the sureness of her touch and what I like to call, in a rather clunky phrase, the validating presence of complex femaleness. Because I had not often seen this complex femaleness in other African books I had read and loved, mine was a wondrous discovery: of Anowa, tragic and humane and many dimensional, in Aidoo’s play set in the 1800s in Fantiland; of Sissie, the self-assured, perceptive main character of the ambitious novel Our Sister Killjoy, who wryly recounts her experiences in Germany and England in the 1960s; or of the varied female characters in No Sweetness Here, my favourite of Aidoo’s books.
In these stories of Ghana in the 1960s, the characters lie uneasily between old and new, live in rural and urban areas and struggle to deal with the unpleasant surprises of independence. There is a keen but understated longing for the past. But Aidoo is too good a writer to paint with overly broad brush strokes. She does not suggest that the past was perfect, and there is no romanticising of culture. Instead, she bears witness to the realities of the time, her vision clear-eyed and pitiless, her role simply that of a truth-teller. Aidoo has a fantastic sly wit and humour. She never hits you over the head with any ‘message’, but after you have greedily finished each story, you sit back and realise that you have been through an intellectual experience as well.
And her writing itself. Words strung together with the quiet rhythm of unselfconscious poetry. Lucid, clear sentences that remind me of George Orwell’s quote that prose should be as clear as a window pane. Aidoo is a writer of subtlety, one willing to engage with ambivalence, one confident enough to submerge her writerly ego, to sacrifice it for her characters and stories.
I occupy the space of a ‘Black African Happy Feminist’ because writers like Aidoo came before me. Her storytelling nurtured mine. Her worldview enlarged and validated mine. I feel a deep gratitude to her for her writing and for her wisdom.
Helon Habila on Dambudzo Marechera:
Zimbabwean novelist Dambudzo Marechera is a "new post-nationalist writer", says Nigerian writer Helon Habila, author of Oil on Water.
Such was the complexity of Dambudzo Marechera’s work that he defies easy categorisation. Most African writers can be comfortably classified as first generation, second generation and so on, based on their thematic focus, the time when they wrote their most important works or even the time when they were born. Born in 1952, Marechera would ordinarily have fitted into the second generation, with the Ben Okris and the Meja Mwangis, until one comes to the little problem of his thematic concerns.
House of Hunger is of course about Zimbabwe, the house in the title, and yet it is not about the ‘nation’ in the style of the nationalists like Chinua Achebe or even Wole Soyinka. It is first and foremost about the individuals in the nation, how poverty, lack of freedom and other existential factors distort their lives. There isn’t that sometimes-obligatory nostalgia for the traditional. In fact, the past is often confronted with derision: “Where are the bloody heroes?” he asks over and over.
But then one is confronted with the most nationalist of themes in a poem like “Pledging My Soul”:
Shall I not kneel to kiss the grains of your sand
to rise naked before you – a bowl of incense?
and the smoke of my nakedness shall be
an offering to you
pledging my soul.
If an author is mostly placed by how much he keeps returning to a particular theme, the idea of exile would perhaps explain Marechera more than any other. This is important if one considers the fact that he did not only write about exile as a conceit or abstract symbol, but because he was an exile in London for about nine years. Though this separation inspired poems of longing like “Pledging my Soul”, where home and the past are idealised in a mother/lover imagery, it also solidified his focus on the individual, confirming him as a post-nationalist writer, perhaps the first truly post-nationalist African writer.
Binyavanga Wainaina on Kojo Laing:
In the last of our mini series asking African writers to pay homage to their literary legends, the Kenya writer says Ghana's Kojo Laing makes a world like no other: intimate, urgent, strange.
I picked up Search Sweet Country in a flea market in London. I had never heard of the novel before or its author, Kojo Laing. It is a difficult book, but I could not stop myself from dipping into it randomly for months. I carried it everywhere – the language is extraordinary. Even before I had read it, I know it had that thing that I look for so much and increasingly rarely find. Laing makes a world like no other: intimate, urgent, familiar and very, very strange. I have read it 11 times.
It fits no known category. It isn’t magic realism, but it has magic. It is unashamedly and lyrically poetic, but is a working book of prose fiction. It is bawdy, talkative, funny, deeply wise, shamelessly romantic, utterly unsentimental, and every single scene is like nothing I have read before.
It is his ability to build the city of Accra through a cast of characters that is his strongest achievement. He does not separate the city from its people, its people from its other people, people from the land, body from history. Each character is presented in a unique way, each one has a metaphysical life, a spiritual life – it is as if we are able to look into the lines of invisible energy that connect the city, the very spirit of the residents of a city, their dreams and urgencies, their links to each other, to space and time and markets and food and love. We see them at once as individuals and always as part of a larger organism.
Accra is really the main character of this novel – it is not the setting, it is a breathing, throbbing creature. Yet the internal life of each person as an irreplaceable individual is fully achieved. It is a towering book. I am glad the African Writers Series is finally releasing it as a classic.
Book details
- The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
EAN: 9780007306213
- African Love Stories: An Anthology by Ama Ata Aidoo
EAN: 9780954702366
- Oil on Water by Helon Habila
EAN: 9780241144862
- House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera
EAN: 9780435895983
- One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina
EAN: 9781555975913
- Search Sweet Country by Kojo Laing
EAN: 9781936365227
