Out of Eurocentrism
African literature shakes up book market
The Senegalese Mohamed Mbougar Sarr received the French Prix Goncourt in 2021, the Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah the Nobel Prize for Literature in the same year: Many contemporary African authors have been awarded internationally renowned literary prizes in recent years. Why has the global West not noticed them for a long time? A search for clues.
Allegra Mercedes Pirker
"When the call came, I was just outside the door to catch my breath because the pressure was so great," Sarr says. The 32-year-old was at his Paris publishing house when he found out: he was the first author from Senegal to receive the 2021 Prix Goncourt, France's most important literary prize, for his novel "Man's Most Secret Memory." The translation will be published in November 2022.
For the international press, Sarr's win was a sensation. Sarr, who was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1990, grew up in Diourbel, 150 kilometers away, and later studied at the elite EHESS university in Paris, was hailed as an exceptional talent. The predominant question in many interviews about his victory - with a view, for example, to the Tanzanian author Gurnah, who had received the Nobel Prize for Literature in the same year - was: Is African literature experiencing a boom in the West?
"Remarkable advance" of African literature
The fact that he and Gurnah stand out among all authors is something Sarr finds problematic. "We are not experiencing a boom or renaissance of African literature; our canon has always existed. But the literary world is shaped by Western structures," says Sarr in an interview with ORF Topos.
The Austrian literary critic Sigrid Löffler says that one has to see this in a differentiated way. For a long time, books by African authors were published primarily by niche publishers. Now, she says, there is a "remarkable advance of African literature into the mainstream of the Western literary scene." Over the past 20 years, he said, publishers have caught up. "Today, every self-respecting German-language publisher has at least one African author in its program," says Löffler in an interview with ORF Topos.
"I soon got bored with Eurocentrism".
Löffler, a longtime discussant in the "Literary Quartet" and former head of the feature section of the German weekly "Die Zeit," is considered one of the most important literary critics in the German-speaking world. The 80-year-old critic is also the most important German-language expert on "world literature"; with "Die neue Weltliteratur und ihre großen Erzähler" (The New World Literature and its Great Narrators), she has written an anthology of texts by migrant literary figures who emerged after decolonization and have received international recognition. "I soon got bored with Eurocentrism. I'm interested in the view of Europe and the West from the outside," says Löffler.
Only translation leads to "discovery"
Sarr's view of the global West can now be read in many languages, as the Goncourt victory brings with it a flurry of translations. Previously, none of his novels had been available in German. Literary critic Löffler knows: Many African literary figures would only be discovered through translation, and usually only translated at all once they had already achieved a certain notoriety. The works of the 74-year-old Tanzanian Gurnah were largely unknown before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Sarr deals with the reception of African authors in the West in his winning novel, "Man's Most Secret Memory." At the center is protagonist Diégane, a young Senegalese writer living in Paris. There, he comes across the last existing copy of a cult novel and sets out to track it down: his compatriot and fellow writer Elimane published a book called "The Labyrinth of the Inhuman" in 1938, causing an uproar in the Parisian literary scene.
A "masterpiece by a young black African would not have existed in France like this before," according to the fictional French press that Sarr sketches in his book. It continues, "Who would believe that an African could be capable of writing a book like this in French?" Contemporary Parisian literary critics accuse Elimane of writing a collage of quotes from world-famous white writers. A story based on the fate of the real-life Malian author Yambo Ouologuem.
Between market adaptation and African narrative tradition
While Sarr's novel was celebrated in France and, at the latest since the Prix Goncourt, throughout Europe, the reception in Senegal was critical, Sarr says: "That I accept a prize from the former colonizers was interpreted by some as a betrayal of my homeland." That also had to do with the fact that Sarr, who speaks four different African languages, writes in French.
"There are radical voices in Africa that don't want to adapt to the ways of writing accepted in the West, but want to write in their own original voice," says Sigrid Löffler. For many authors, she says, it is part of their postcolonial self-awareness not to write in the language of the former colonizers. As an example, the literary critic cites the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who is one of the most important representatives of contemporary African literature. He published his novel "Lord of the Crows," for example, a satirical book about a fictional country in Africa, in 2006 in his first language, Kikuyu, but then translated it into English himself due to a lack of international awareness. "When African authors are marketed globally and write in English or French, it also means that they deny part of their autochthonous culture," says Löffler.
Not only is their literature linguistically dependent on the West, but also on its genres, Löffler says. "The West imposes itself with its literary perceptions. Many books are often not perceived otherwise," Löffler says. And, "Maybe African ways of writing will also prevail one day." Sarr weaves such, informed by orally transmitted narratives, into his multilayered novel. The 32-year-old author incorporates fairy tales about the life of the enigmatic author Elimane and ancient legends from Senegal.
David Diop and French Colonialism
Author David Diop also refers to Africa's oral narrative tradition. Born in Paris in 1966, the Franco-Senegalese, who teaches literature at a French university, also writes in French. "At Night Our Blood is Black," whose original edition was published in Paris in 2018, has won several literary prizes in France and the 2021 International Booker Prize.
Diop's novel is written in a lyrical style and contains constant repetition of phrases such as "by the truth of God." It is about the protagonist Alfa, a Senegalese soldier who loses his comrade during World War I and then embarks on a campaign of revenge against German soldiers. Diop's book focuses on the fate of the 180,000 "Senegalese riflemen" who fought for the French army during the First World War.
In his current novel, "Journey Without Return" (2022), Diop also devotes himself to historical material, the slave trade of the French colonialists in 18th-century Senegal. The protagonist is modeled on the French ethnologist and botanist Michel Adanson, and Diop fleshes out his travelogues from Senegal with a love story. The fictional Adanson in Diop's novel fell in love with a young Senegalese woman during his ethnological research trips. Diop does not only deal with colonialism in his novels. As part of his university work, he heads a research group on the European colonization of Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries.
NoViolet Bulawayo with African "Animal Farm
Löffler is not surprised that colonialism is also a major theme in current contemporary literature. "Contemporary literary figures from Africa see what colonialism has done to their respective countries. They are still struggling with its legacies." Post-colonial corruption, corporations encroaching on their homelands, or terrorist threats from radical groups like Boko Haram would all shape the lives of the writers and are certainly reflected in their books as a result.
Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo, for example, takes the corruption in her homeland for a ride in her current novel, Glory. She already attracted attention in 2013 with her debut "We need new names," a coming-of-age novel that earned her a place on the Booker Prize shortlist - as the first black author from Africa.
"Glory" is easily recognized as a reference to George Orwell's "Animal Farm." Like the British writer, Bulawayo has set the scene in the animal kingdom. In the fictional kingdom of Jidada, the animal inhabitants tremble in anticipation of the end of the reign of an old horse that has ruled for decades, only to discover that his successor, an equally old stallion, is no better and violently nips any political protest in the bud. With her political satire, the 42-year-old Bulawayo denounces the rule of Zimbabwe's long-term dictator Robert Mugabe, who died in 2019 and whose brutal regime from the 1990s at the latest was reminiscent of his colonial predecessors.
New ways of looking at the world
Sarr's, Diop's and Bulawayo's books show that writing is a deeply political act for many African authors. Only today, after many decades under the Western radar, are they being awarded internationally renowned prizes. Sarr takes up a fundamental question in his book, Man's Most Secret Memory: What is literature?
He reveals what he personally thinks of it in a TV interview with the French-language channel TV5 Monde. For him, life and literature merge, and literature is nothing more than a way of looking at the world. If one follows Sarr, one can conclude: With their books, African authors open up a view of the world that has gone unnoticed for far too long due to the predominance of the Western literary canon.
Allegra Mercedes Pirker (text and design), Michael Barthelmess (camera), Kafeela Adegbite (editing), all for ORF Topos
Source (Austria)
Allegra Mercedes Pirker
"When the call came, I was just outside the door to catch my breath because the pressure was so great," Sarr says. The 32-year-old was at his Paris publishing house when he found out: he was the first author from Senegal to receive the 2021 Prix Goncourt, France's most important literary prize, for his novel "Man's Most Secret Memory." The translation will be published in November 2022.
For the international press, Sarr's win was a sensation. Sarr, who was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1990, grew up in Diourbel, 150 kilometers away, and later studied at the elite EHESS university in Paris, was hailed as an exceptional talent. The predominant question in many interviews about his victory - with a view, for example, to the Tanzanian author Gurnah, who had received the Nobel Prize for Literature in the same year - was: Is African literature experiencing a boom in the West?
"Remarkable advance" of African literature
The fact that he and Gurnah stand out among all authors is something Sarr finds problematic. "We are not experiencing a boom or renaissance of African literature; our canon has always existed. But the literary world is shaped by Western structures," says Sarr in an interview with ORF Topos.
The Austrian literary critic Sigrid Löffler says that one has to see this in a differentiated way. For a long time, books by African authors were published primarily by niche publishers. Now, she says, there is a "remarkable advance of African literature into the mainstream of the Western literary scene." Over the past 20 years, he said, publishers have caught up. "Today, every self-respecting German-language publisher has at least one African author in its program," says Löffler in an interview with ORF Topos.
"I soon got bored with Eurocentrism".
Löffler, a longtime discussant in the "Literary Quartet" and former head of the feature section of the German weekly "Die Zeit," is considered one of the most important literary critics in the German-speaking world. The 80-year-old critic is also the most important German-language expert on "world literature"; with "Die neue Weltliteratur und ihre großen Erzähler" (The New World Literature and its Great Narrators), she has written an anthology of texts by migrant literary figures who emerged after decolonization and have received international recognition. "I soon got bored with Eurocentrism. I'm interested in the view of Europe and the West from the outside," says Löffler.
Only translation leads to "discovery"
Sarr's view of the global West can now be read in many languages, as the Goncourt victory brings with it a flurry of translations. Previously, none of his novels had been available in German. Literary critic Löffler knows: Many African literary figures would only be discovered through translation, and usually only translated at all once they had already achieved a certain notoriety. The works of the 74-year-old Tanzanian Gurnah were largely unknown before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Sarr deals with the reception of African authors in the West in his winning novel, "Man's Most Secret Memory." At the center is protagonist Diégane, a young Senegalese writer living in Paris. There, he comes across the last existing copy of a cult novel and sets out to track it down: his compatriot and fellow writer Elimane published a book called "The Labyrinth of the Inhuman" in 1938, causing an uproar in the Parisian literary scene.
A "masterpiece by a young black African would not have existed in France like this before," according to the fictional French press that Sarr sketches in his book. It continues, "Who would believe that an African could be capable of writing a book like this in French?" Contemporary Parisian literary critics accuse Elimane of writing a collage of quotes from world-famous white writers. A story based on the fate of the real-life Malian author Yambo Ouologuem.
Between market adaptation and African narrative tradition
While Sarr's novel was celebrated in France and, at the latest since the Prix Goncourt, throughout Europe, the reception in Senegal was critical, Sarr says: "That I accept a prize from the former colonizers was interpreted by some as a betrayal of my homeland." That also had to do with the fact that Sarr, who speaks four different African languages, writes in French.
"There are radical voices in Africa that don't want to adapt to the ways of writing accepted in the West, but want to write in their own original voice," says Sigrid Löffler. For many authors, she says, it is part of their postcolonial self-awareness not to write in the language of the former colonizers. As an example, the literary critic cites the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who is one of the most important representatives of contemporary African literature. He published his novel "Lord of the Crows," for example, a satirical book about a fictional country in Africa, in 2006 in his first language, Kikuyu, but then translated it into English himself due to a lack of international awareness. "When African authors are marketed globally and write in English or French, it also means that they deny part of their autochthonous culture," says Löffler.
Not only is their literature linguistically dependent on the West, but also on its genres, Löffler says. "The West imposes itself with its literary perceptions. Many books are often not perceived otherwise," Löffler says. And, "Maybe African ways of writing will also prevail one day." Sarr weaves such, informed by orally transmitted narratives, into his multilayered novel. The 32-year-old author incorporates fairy tales about the life of the enigmatic author Elimane and ancient legends from Senegal.
David Diop and French Colonialism
Author David Diop also refers to Africa's oral narrative tradition. Born in Paris in 1966, the Franco-Senegalese, who teaches literature at a French university, also writes in French. "At Night Our Blood is Black," whose original edition was published in Paris in 2018, has won several literary prizes in France and the 2021 International Booker Prize.
Diop's novel is written in a lyrical style and contains constant repetition of phrases such as "by the truth of God." It is about the protagonist Alfa, a Senegalese soldier who loses his comrade during World War I and then embarks on a campaign of revenge against German soldiers. Diop's book focuses on the fate of the 180,000 "Senegalese riflemen" who fought for the French army during the First World War.
In his current novel, "Journey Without Return" (2022), Diop also devotes himself to historical material, the slave trade of the French colonialists in 18th-century Senegal. The protagonist is modeled on the French ethnologist and botanist Michel Adanson, and Diop fleshes out his travelogues from Senegal with a love story. The fictional Adanson in Diop's novel fell in love with a young Senegalese woman during his ethnological research trips. Diop does not only deal with colonialism in his novels. As part of his university work, he heads a research group on the European colonization of Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries.
NoViolet Bulawayo with African "Animal Farm
Löffler is not surprised that colonialism is also a major theme in current contemporary literature. "Contemporary literary figures from Africa see what colonialism has done to their respective countries. They are still struggling with its legacies." Post-colonial corruption, corporations encroaching on their homelands, or terrorist threats from radical groups like Boko Haram would all shape the lives of the writers and are certainly reflected in their books as a result.
Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo, for example, takes the corruption in her homeland for a ride in her current novel, Glory. She already attracted attention in 2013 with her debut "We need new names," a coming-of-age novel that earned her a place on the Booker Prize shortlist - as the first black author from Africa.
"Glory" is easily recognized as a reference to George Orwell's "Animal Farm." Like the British writer, Bulawayo has set the scene in the animal kingdom. In the fictional kingdom of Jidada, the animal inhabitants tremble in anticipation of the end of the reign of an old horse that has ruled for decades, only to discover that his successor, an equally old stallion, is no better and violently nips any political protest in the bud. With her political satire, the 42-year-old Bulawayo denounces the rule of Zimbabwe's long-term dictator Robert Mugabe, who died in 2019 and whose brutal regime from the 1990s at the latest was reminiscent of his colonial predecessors.
New ways of looking at the world
Sarr's, Diop's and Bulawayo's books show that writing is a deeply political act for many African authors. Only today, after many decades under the Western radar, are they being awarded internationally renowned prizes. Sarr takes up a fundamental question in his book, Man's Most Secret Memory: What is literature?
He reveals what he personally thinks of it in a TV interview with the French-language channel TV5 Monde. For him, life and literature merge, and literature is nothing more than a way of looking at the world. If one follows Sarr, one can conclude: With their books, African authors open up a view of the world that has gone unnoticed for far too long due to the predominance of the Western literary canon.
Allegra Mercedes Pirker (text and design), Michael Barthelmess (camera), Kafeela Adegbite (editing), all for ORF Topos
Source (Austria)
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