Will We Better Off in MTVBase Was Available Around the World?

Africa’s image problem, I submit, is more of an issue of Western media’s trouble with nuance than any real malice. It is hard, it turns out, to portray that people can be more than one thing at the same time -- that one can wear fancy Italian shoes with traditional garb; that there can exist in the same country a place where people drive SUVs to the supermarket and a place where some people have to walk miles for clean water in the same damn city. If one must be true, it seems, surely the other cannot. And relatively few consumers of media will really go to African countries themselves. And the few high-profiles ones that do go (looking at you, Kristof) tend to go to confirm their own biases, not challenge them.

And that’s where MTV Base comes in.

MTV Base’s shows an Africa that does not see itself as a problem, but as a party. We are young and sexy. We have style. We go to clubs and drink and laugh and rap and sing along with the best of them. This is us: Our Advertised Version. The "Monkey sweats but you can't tell from its fur" version. In terms of reality, it is not much different from the advertised version of what we are told that we are: overly-reliant on Western generosity, potential atrophying from lack of initiative or care, clay resting too comfortably within the grubby hands of greedy autocrats. In a sense, MTV Base's Africa is as mono-dimensional as the Africa that we see in Western media. It’s just a different dimension, a dimension that we would rather see.

It is not that music video Africa is any more “real” than the West’s version of Africa. Reality, in fact, is beside the point. It’s just another representation as simple as the one that is currently all the rage. The genius of indulging this fantasy of an MTV Base Africa all over the world – I’m fully aware this will never happen – is that it recognizes the need for simple narratives of Africa, and delivers on this. And by countering one simple narrative with another, it adds shade and color to the already-existing simple narrative. In so doing, It brings simplicity and nuance. And what is more African than that?

Poem for Sunday

Ogaga Ifowodo is criminally slept-on. Something that jumps out at you at every poem of his (my favorite is Homeland) is his use of imagery. He makes you want feel it all, like tiny earthquakes in your head. If you must rhyme a poem, this is how it must be done.

And those final lines "Unmarked days quench their suns, black into nights/ and dreams enact weighted hearts in free flights".... the music of that. Goodness.

This one's a favorite from his wonderfully-titled collection God Punish You, Lord Lugard.

Unmarked Hours Beat their Hands Against the Wall

Unmarked hours beat their hands against the wall

grieve for wings plunged in a waterfall.

Outside the window, a woman's shoulders

quake in tribute to a scene of soldiers:

teeth, fragments of flesh in warm blood painted

the picture she sees of those that fainted.

A single call to prayer, amplified

to all of Sin Town, brings mortified

legions to banal rites of righteousness.

As the minister swears his piousness

birds blessed with greater freedom flee our skies

abandoning us to death and muted cries.

Philosophies of suffering dress the walls

of this cell, make the fate of dead seagulls

happier than of failed hearts that bled and wept:

"If men were God!" that mocked the cliff and leapt,

crying out their grief: "Let Nigeria end now!"

No one will inquire who, why or how,

an old or new decree has sanctified

all wrongs in duty personified.

Unmarked days quench their suns, black into nights

and dreams enact weighted hearts in free flights.

Ogaga Ifowodo

November 1997

The Trouble With the Caine Prize

The Caine Prize has a new winner. From the press release at the Caine website.

Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled ‘Hitting Budapest’, from The Boston Review, Vol 35, no. 6 - Nov/Dec 2010.

The Chair of Judges, award-winning author Hisham Matar, announced NoViolet Bulawayo as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday 11 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Hisham Matar said: "The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles. Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho, a gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these are children, poor and violated and hungry. This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language."

Hisham Mattar, writer of the amazing In the Country of Men that I just finished last week, said that? Well, that's another story. You can read my review of the story here.

One of the most depressing things about being from an African country, and I suspect it is the same for being from any post-colonial society, is the need to seek validation abroad or by Western standards. You can be the best writer ever, but if a bunch of white guys in academies don't see it, you're not. This applies to disciplines outside of literature as well. It's really as simple as that.

That is what is so extraordinary about the Caine Prize. Folks call it the "African Booker Prize", and with the mantle of premier African literary award comes the weight that The Booker, The Pushcart, The Pen or any other literary award doesn't have - the burden of representation, of validation, of choosing by dint of one's position the face of and state of African literary scene.

If you so much as scroll through the blog, you would see my reviews of each of the five stories that made up the shortlist for the prize. I tried not to absolutely skewer things in reviews (unless, of course, it's really that abominably bad), but as a whole I'm agree with Ikhide Ikheloa from 234Next on the quality of this year's shortlist:

The good news is that the Caine Prize is here to stay. The bad news is that someone is going to win the Caine Prize this year. This is a shame; having read the stories on the shortlist, I conclude that a successful African writer must be clinically depressed, chronicling in excruciating detail every open sore of Africa. Apologies to Wole Soyinka. The creation of a prize for “African writing” may have created the unintended effect of breeding writers willing to stereotype Africa for glory.

The mostly lazy, predictable stories that made the 2011 shortlist celebrate orthodoxy and mediocrity. They are a riot of exhausted clichés even as ancient conflicts and anxieties fade into the past tense: huts, moons, rapes, wars, and poverty. The monotony of misery simply overwhelms the reader. Fiammetta Rocco, the Economist’s literary editor who chaired last year’s judges, crows that the stories are “uniquely powerful.” The stories are uniquely wretched. The chair of this year’s judges Hisham Matar declares presumptuously that the stories “represent a portrait of today’s African short story: its wit and intelligence, its concerns and preoccupations.” Really? Is this the sum total of our experience, this humourless, tasteless canvas of shiftless Stepin Fetchit suffering?

I hope to goodness that this applies only to this years, but judging from Olufemi Terry's Stickfighting Days, pathetic stories seem to be their thing. Emmanuel Iduma, publisher of Saraba Magazine, responded to Ikheloa's comments, which seemed to cause quite the firestorm on the internet and, I hear from someone present, was even talked about in the discussion part of a Caine Prize event that happened in London today:

I believe what is more important is the objective of the story. I assume it is unhelpful to draw a line on what a writer’s process/objective is by his story. Granted, critics do this continuously – yet in the final analysis if we can define a “grand” objective of “the story” we can go past these questions of stories that dance to a Western tune. And what is the West, anyway? And what is even human? So our grand objective must transcend western lines, become human, and take a more particularized stance. Can this grand objective be grasped? I propose that memory, fraternity and essence are merged, so that every writer, of whatever African descent, plugs his narrative into this fusion. Hopefully.

Knowing my own writing process and how much is involved, I'm wont to agree with Iduma. I'm not willing to be cynical enough to say that these writers are, as Ikheloa says, "willing to stereotype [Africa] for glory". I have no idea what led NoViolet Bulawayo to write the story she did, chockful of such familiar tropes on woe-is-me African literature (IMF street? Really??) And I should say here that this is what annoys me the most about the counter-argument to this brand of literature. Writing about Africa does not absolve one from writing well, and bringing complex characters to life, and, indeed, having a plot and creating a believable world for a reader from which (s)he can take away something of value. It really does not.

Writers write. Readers have opinions. It's really that simple. One has a right to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and churn out just whatever (s)he pleases. I certainly did not like Hitting Budapest, a plotless story that does not seem to have a point beyond "these kids are poor and live squalidly and you should pity them", but I do not really care about Bulawayo; she can write whatever she wants. I'm madder at the Caine Prize for seeming to favor stories of a particular strain, the ones that are less about characters and the network of trip-wires that make up their humanity and more about flattening characters to render them tools to make a political point, and absolving them from the basic responsibilities that come with writing a good story. I'm madder at them for not asking for complexity, and buying into an oversimplified narrative of Africa - poverty, war, disease, starving/fighting children -- just like most Western media does. I'm madder at the Caine for saying that this collection of stories is the best they could get out of Africa. I'm mad because I and so many people out there know that that is not true.

Caine Prize for African Literature - Story Blogging Week III

In an initiative hosted by Aaron Bady (ZunguZungu), I am joining a coterie of awesome bloggers in reading and reviewing entrants for the Caine Prize for African Literature this year. You can read along with us -- all the stories are available online in PDFs and linked from the Caine Prize website. This week's story is South African Tim Keegan's "What Molly Knew". Here is my post on the first story and the second.

This is another story that slow-drips on detail - you don't know immediately that Tommie is "more black than white" and that he's an ANC member. You don't get a full picture of dead Sarah Nobrega and why she left until pretty much the end of the story. While Molly pretty much tells you early on that she's with Rollo because, well, where else is she to go, nothing in the beginning prepares you for what happens in the end. I wish the story was more vivid, that the imagery was "painted" as opposed to having the surroundings reeled off like lists, but this seems to be Keegan's style: you're told only what you need to know at this moment. You will know more when the time is right, and it works.

I like the characterization of this very much. The voices are very distinct, and Molly is very well-drawn. You know, right from the onset, her fears of being alone and her regrets, the single-mindedness with which she carries on her tasks about the house, and even feel some pity when watching her maneuver the minefield that is living Rollo. And we are told everything we need to know about Rollo, except that one important thing -- I'd hate to spoil it for whoever hasn't read the piece yet -- but you can almost hear the gruffness of his tone, and the reason for the self-righteousness with which he talks about Sarah in the beginning becomes all to clear at the end of the story.

For outsiders to South Africa's post-apartheid society like me, it is nice to have the scene at the hairdressers where one gets some insight into what the big deal was about Tommie being black and an ANC person. He is colored, but he's picked a side, and the parallel is made quite clear that Tommie bringing his black-power ANC life into the neighborhood is not unlike Tommie bringing his, well, blackness into Sarah’s family. I like how the race issue is layered with resentment for his apparent role in Molly losing her daughter (we think this until the end of the story) and Rollo not getting along with Sarah. Race here reminds me of what we are seeing in parts of the U.S. polity in the Obama era: while not the sole cause for animus, race acts as a sort of amplifier of difference that further sours discourse and deepens resentment. In the case of this story, race makes more stark the differences between the kind of the life she led in her marriage, and the life she left behind with her mother.

It is very difficult to not think of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning Disgrace when you read this story, and compare the way race is handled in both. Both paint grim pictures on race relations in South Africa, and the tension that follows when black and white "worlds" collide. The collision in this story, at the funeral service at the church hall with Tommie's black ANC friends, is much less violent than the rape in Disgrace, but still hostile and the discomfort of the two whites, Rollo and Molly, was very telling.

Below is the major quote of the story, and it comes early on:

He knows that all citizens are equal in the new South Africa, but he can’t help but feel some people’s pain more than others’. That’s just the way he is, and the newspapers and television people seem to think the same way, to judge by the posse of reporters and cameras outside Sarah Nobrega’s flat in Goodwood when he left.

There is a certain, for lack of a better word, selfishness in this quote that permeates the entire story. Molly is more concerned about her sense of normalcy than putting her daughter’s killer to justice. Rollo is more concerned about himself than anyone else and, as is hinted, even killed Molly’s daughter out of this selfishness. Sarah didn’t much care about how Tommie would received in her family; she went ahead and married him anyway. It is not for nothing that the only one who made a move that would affect the lives of everyone else in the most positive way was shot dead. It’s an insightful, quietly damning portrait of the people depicted in the story, and perhaps of South Africa's new society at large.

Check out ZunguZungu for updates on what other bloggers had to say about the story as they come.

Caine Prize for African Literature - Story Blogging Week II

This is round two of the one in which I join a gang of awesome bloggers in reading and blogging on the entrants for the Caine Prize for African Literature this year, in an initiative hosted by Aaron Brady (ZunguZungu). You can read along with us -- all the stories are available online in PDFs and linked from the Caine Prize website. This week's story is Beatrice Lamwaka's "Butterfly Dreams." My post on the first story is here.

There was a nice minimalism to Butterfly Dreams that I liked. As in Hitting Budapest one sees the desire to withhold, to not say things outright. We're not told from the outset, for example, that they live in a refugee camp. We're not told, though we can gather, that, though they were probably not rich, they were definitely far from poor before "it" happened.

The point of view Lamwaka chose for the story is also worth praising. Butterfly Dreams is told by someone in the middle of the story who remains unnamed -- a family member, perhaps -- and this gives the appropriate mix of sadness towards Lamunu, a touch of defiance (like when the person was talking about the father and the food they now eat), quietly adamant denial, and mournfulness that permeates the entire story.

Unlike Hitting Budapest, though, I can see why this was written. There would be no story without the return of Lamunu, and she brings the people to which she returns into confront their own violent history. It is a history that no one will want to live through again, and one wonders why they are so welcoming of Lamunu, why they sought her out, listening for her name on the radio every day for five years. Yes, she is family, but no one should be forced to want something simply because it is theirs.

The story’s background is grim, but not without some subtle attempts at hope. The burying of the tipu served as foreshadowing of a new life for the family, a new future. The dream of the return of Lamunu is a butterfly dream. And Lamunu is the butterfly about the house that they watch in somber awe. Calling the story Butterfly Dreams, though, calls to question what the writer is trying to say. Are the characters mad for thinking that Lamunu’s return is necessarily the salvo they think it is? Can a figure of a horrible, violent past coexist in the house of a nation of people who survived its past? We end with Lamunu attempting to live a normal life, go to school like a girl her age, albeit with other children scarred from the same experience that she has had. But it’s an attempt at normalcy nonetheless. It will have to do.

You could probably tell that I quite liked the story, but I am not unaware of sensitivity towards stories of its kind. I’m generally in the camp that says we capped on the need of child soldier stories around the time when Ahmadou Kourouma wrote Allah N’est Pas Oblige, not because these stories are untrue and I don't trust a Western audience to read these stories and nothing else (OK, it's part of it). And even as I can discern clearly what the writer is trying to say about this family and, much broader, about the situation in the country, I'm actually quite ready to forgive that for the subtlety with which I think the story was told. There were no headless bodies on the streets, no raped girls and drugged up children with uzis, no gratuitous appeals for pity. Most of the all, there was a story. Perhaps I'm setting the bar a bit low, but I appreciate all these things.

It does bear repeating that we need more stories of contemporary, heavily-urbanized, not-a-giraffe-in-sight Africa. It's probably fair to say that African countries' citizens are not the same people as they were 50, 25, even 10 years ago. We deserve a literature that reflects our dynamism. While recognizing this, I don’t have a political point to make on the story, because whatever one may think, the story has a point, it has a reason that it was written, and it was indeed written very well. I am consciously staying away from the counterargument that effectively puts down literature like this, because I cannot deny its validity. Hell, I even agree to it myself. I will, however, put this forward: stories like this need being told, and I think this is actually a good way to do it.

Check out ZunguZungu for reviews by the rest of the bloggers.

In Which I Aspire to Questionable Heights of Shameless Self-Promotion

I debated putting this up here, but I figure I may as well.

An essay of mine on moving back to Nigeria got published in the awesome blog-magazine called This Recording. Here's a bit of it:

Back in Lagos now, I have an older pair of eyes. Nigeria is no longer a place of childhood imagination and birthday parties. Though I do not see this as where I came of age, the fact that it is my home has become more true than at any other time in my life.

It is always understood when you leave Nigeria as a Nigerian that you will return at some point. There is family, after all, probably weddings or, worse still, funerals. And it's not like every minute you are away you aren't wondering what new club has opened, what new slang people are using, what new artist is making waves. Diaspora Nigerians fresh from weeks of partying in Lagos return to regale you with stories of change and mobile phones, of parties that could make Fitzgerald dizzy with jetsetters and entrepreneurs. Nigeria is an escalator of a country, forever moving upwards towards another level that is shinier, more luxurious than the one we left behind. We are a people in transit, living our lives as though forever stuck in the London-to-Lagos terminal in Heathrow. We always seem to be going somewhere, always seem to be moving.

Read it all here. It was also featured in Longform.org, which is every shade of awesome.

There's really no reason why there's the music video of Siji's awesome song "Ijo" below. Almost no reason - Black Looks recommended it to me a long while ago, and I fell hard for the song. Consider this a good use at my Machiavellian powers.

Poems for Sunday

I couldn't decide on which of these two to put up, so I'm just going to throw them both on here.

One Art gets the most press out of Elizabeth Bishop's work, but this one is one of my favorites. It's an untitled poem for her lover Lilli, a woman who only had lesbian relationships after her husband's death, and their time in together in a small village in Brazil called Ouro Preto. I know less about the history of You Are Happy, but I love the imagery in both. You Are Happy especially makes you want to get out a sweater. Bishop's has an intimacy to it that suggests it had only one person in mind to ever read it, even though it was published in the New Yorker.

And, yes, I love a poem with a subtle innuendo.

[Untitled]

Dear, my compass
Still points north
to wooden houses
and blue eyes

fairytales where
flaxed-haired
younger sons
bring home the goose

Love in hay-lofts,
Protestants, and
heavy drinkers
Springs are backward

But crab-apples
ripen to rubies,
cranberries to
drops of blood

and swans can paddle
icy water,
so hot the blood
in those webbed feet

-- Cold as it is,
we'd go to bed, dear,
early, but never to keep warm.

You Are Happy

The water turns
a long way down over the raw stone,
ice crusts around it

We walk separately
along the hill to the open
beach, unused
picnic tables, wind
shoving the brown waves, erosion, gravel
rasping on gravel.

In the ditch a deer
carcass, no head. Bird
running across the glaring
road against the low pink sun.

When you are this
cold you can think about
nothing but the cold, the images

hitting into your eyes
like needles, crystals, you are happy.

Is Art a Desirable Goal?

Over at Bombastic Element, a really cool piece up on music in the work of African cinematic masters like Sissako and Absa. Of course, the term "African Cinema" is loosely applied here. Nothing of this applies to Nigerian film. From the piece he linked to from Beatriz Leal Riesco at Buala:

Since the early days of African cinema, music has formed part of a (self) conscious discourse concerning the problematic realities of Africa. Its use has rarely been gratuitous and goes far beyond the traditional—and much less experimental—Western customs of dramatic punctuation, of evocation of place, of establishing an emotional relationship with the spectator in which the image is almost always predominant, or as accompaniment to the never-ceasing rush of action that hardly leaves one time to think… In African cinema, music is stressed in terms of its cultural, poetic, and artistic functions in relation to oral tradition, with reference to such figures as the griot; it is used to critique the reductive commonplace of tradition versus modernity employed by partisans of a fabricated, purist, and ultimately nefarious—in its insistence on the notion of an “unadulterated essence”— “return to the roots”; it is blended into narration as an essential component and as a marker for critical moments; it works to evoke spaces where time slackens and opens up, giving way for ambiguity and reflection; and it mirrors the continuing urbanization of every aspect of African life, its constant contact with a West for which music is often a tool of domestication, of modernization, and of cultural imperialism.

This post got me thinking about the goals of art, if there need to goals at all, or even if art is a desirable end in itself. Music in Nigerian film, of course, is mostly a hodge-podge of often pop ballads, even jingles, that do little to heighten the mood, if not worsening the scene with sickening heights of melodrama. No high-mindedness preoccupies the filmmakers, and this often is enough for their audience.

It's not like Nigerian films cannot be studied; far from it. They tell you a lot about the collective mindset of country today, but one cannot study Nigerian cinema as a unique way that Nigerian filmmakers approach film in itself. To study an approach to film would imply that the idea of making a film was to produce art, not a product. Yes, there is a thin line between art and product (Art is often sold for profit, after all), but for my money, an art form is qualified as such because what drives the artist something beyond the material gain. An artist makes money, yes, but that's not entirely the point.

I was into books and creative writing long before I started watching film, so maybe my lenses are a bit tainted here and a "good" film should not be defined the same way "good" literature often is. Still, I wonder what it says about Nigerian film that we cannot study aspects of the filmmaking by many Nigerian directors the way we can work by Ousmane Sembene and the like, particularly since our industry is so huge and so well-received. I think the ability of a culture to create and present art, and for it to be appreciated and even find an audience from where it can make money is healthy, even desirable, in any society. I think a society should have a healthy appreciation for artistic expression, and have individuals capable of thinking outside their wallets. I don't even think that there needs to be a split between entertainment and art -- I have read a lot of books lately that blur that line (Lola Shoneyin's "The Secret Lives of Baba Segy's Wives" comes highly recommended). Increasingly, though, I wonder if this line of thinking just shows my own bias and nothing more.

I don't know for sure that "art" is the best goal, if it's even the most desirable goal. I think it is, but I can't give any cogent reason for that. All I know is that in Nigeria only a handful of our films can qualify as art, and precious few of our filmmakers are interested in making good art. I wish I had more than my knee-jerk aversion to this fact, but all I know is that I don't like it one bit.

Fela!

I'm off to see Fela! this weekend, original cast and all, in Lagos.

*insert excited squeal here*

It only adds to the experience for me that Femi Kuti, the song of the great man himself, has only good things to say about broadway show, and is pleased now after having insisted the show be performed in Lagos.

By the way, Seun Kuti was interviewed in the Guardian recently. Check that out here. He said he once did a cover of Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" when he was in school, but I couldn't find it on YouTube. Oh well...

Via OkayAfrica, Femi Kuti got the cast of the show to perform live with him at the Shrine in Lagos recently. Wish I was there; this must have been a real treat to see.

African Film Fest Begins - Guess Who's Got Trailers!

A still from the film Restless City, by Andrew Dosunmu.

The prestigious Pan-African film Festival FESPACO (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou) began on the 26th, and I hope to heaven above that I actually get to see some of the movies.

Yes, hope. You'd think it would be fairly easy, but good African films -- as opposed to the ubiquitous Nollywood home videos -- are very difficult to get your hands on. Distribution is rubbish on a lot of these films, so there's an entire list of movies out there that no one ever gets to see. The only reason I've seen L'Homme Qui Crie is because Air France had it in its selection on my flight from DC to Paris. Shame, that.

The good people over at Shadow and Act have a list of the film entries for this year's awards. I'll be looking to them and Bombastic Element for any news and analysis on the events as they happen between now and the 3rd of March.

However, I did manage to find some trailers (sadly, inexplicably, Andrew Dosunmu's Restless City is as yet without one, and I couldn't find anything on Moloch Tropical). I'm particularly psyched about Wanuri Kahiu's short film Pumzi and Hors de Loi. The second Nigerian-directed entry, The Figurine, looks well-acted at least -- I'm wary about anything that has to do with hocus-pocus.

And this is where I casually mention that Restless City has shown at Sundance, Pumzi has shown at Berlin's Film Festival, and Hors de Loi is nominated for a foreign-language Oscar. Awesome!

Anyway, on to the trailers!

Movie poster: www.ethnikka.org

Photo of women: Still from Restless City.

For All Aspiring Revolutionaries

I haven't had it in me to comment on the recent uprisings sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, because somethings are just awe-inspiring, and the best thing to do is to allow oneself to be awestruck by the sheer bravery, the sheer humanity of it all.

Of course, I'm still holding on to my prayer beads for the people of Libya and keeping my eyes glued to the Al-Jazeera twitter feed like everyone else. I can't be the only one who can't wait to see the effect of this new Mexican wave of democracy across these countries on the foreign policy calculus of the U.S. and the EU, even as the emerging leaders may not be as West-friendly as Ben Ali or Mubarak, but that's another blogpost.

For now, I have a poem for you. Change is hard. Revolution is difficult. Both words are deceptively easy to say.

Ad-Watching, Nigeria Style

If you live in Nigeria, are female and have not gotten funny looks upon going to a bar and ordering something even slightly alcoholic, you haven't lived.

Accordingly, Nigerian ads for beer are blatantly male, with blatantly male slogans like "Ultimate Man" (Gulder) or "For the Real Man" (Legend Extra Stout). But this Star Commercial, taking you on a journey through Nigeria with Sir Victor Uwaifo's "Joromi" playing in the background, is a beauty.

What's the Point of Nollywood?

The other day, I was watching an episode of a show on the Yoruba movie cable channel (with that, you should already know there would be no embed link to this – sorry!) where Yoruba filmmaker and actor extraordinaire Saidi Balogun was saying how the purpose of his movies is to spread wisdom to Nigerians on how to behave to each other and spread love to their fellow man and roll around in meadows and have flower parties with dolphins and puppies. Or something.

Yes, I know.

It has to be said, hearing a Nigerian filmmaker tout usefulness and wisdom as the point of his movies cannot be a surprise to anyone who has ever seen a Nigerian film. This isn't a direct hit at Saidi Balogun. If anything, I'm actually a big fan of his specifically, and of Yoruba movies in general. Where I find the sanctimony of their storylines to be quite grating and the often-poor quality of the production to be, well, poor, one can easily see the great quality of the acting and a real sense the filmmakers are speaking of a people they know well. Where English actors tend to be stilted, Yoruba actors are fluent, not just in the language, but in the tradition of those who they seek to depict, and this gives their films a sense of ease and color. I would argue that Yoruba filmmakers know Yoruba people in a way that English filmmakers, in the broadness of their intended audience and their lack of mastery even of the language of their art, do not their intended audience. What I'm wondering about is this notion that art must serve some utilitarian end.

Generally speaking, one of the saddest things to me about African artistic expression has always been this need to be 'useful'. Forget the obvious examples of the gorgeous printed design that gets used for clothing and stories in folklore used to spread wisdom. Take literature. Writers in French and English in the independence movements across Africa used their stories and poems to raise consciousness about freedom and political struggle. Then came women like Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, and Ama Ata Aidoo, who used their work to talk about women's experiences. This is not just in Africa, of course; James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston's works, for example, were not exactly P.G. Wodehouse-style fiction, after all. The thing is, I love all these writers. Their work was deep and heart-wrenching and difficult. Above all, their work was necessary.

But is this kind of work still necessary?

It is as though, having seen no knowable, physical enemy against which to write our movies, like there was for writers in new pre- and immediate post-independence literature, we have chosen some abstract monster of depravity and corruption and dressed them up like ourselves. I join in the chorus of complaint too often to say that Nigeria isn't that bad, but I think I can say that Nigeria is not all bad. We are a complex lot, and we all know that. And if we are so complex, and fimmakers seek to capture us on-screen, are we not worthy of that complexity by those who seek to depict us?

And if “mega-church Christianity meets Yoruba proverb” morality is really all we can hope for, then it cannot be too much to ask to get some simplicity. Just once, it would be wonderful if someone wasn't trying to preach to me and instead just told me a story about a man who wanted to get a girl and did all sorts of wacky things to make her go out on a date with him. That's it. No juju, nobody giving their lives to Christ at the end of the movie, no Ifa priest and prayer beads, no sudden coming of age. Just so – well-acted, maybe even funny, with characters more fleshed-out than clapboards.

The more I think about it, I wonder if the magic of Hollywood for so many of us non-Americans is this ease to create such movies as they do, movies that do not reach any further than the world that they are seen to create. While I love ambition in any artwork, there is something to the simple romantic story, the action movie with nothing beyond its gunshots and gore, the comedy that seeks nothing but your laughter, that speaks to a level of comfort in one's skin. There is nothing to parse in Titanic and Iron Man for knowledge. It just is. For reasons beyond my ken, the single-mindedness to make such films comes with a certain kind of cultural ease by people no longer driven with a need to ask questions of themselves. For now this is a privilege that it seems Nigeria cannot yet afford, and I hope that one day we can.

Really, Hollywood?

Another South Africa movie. Jennifer Hudson as Winnie Mandela. Ha. Ha. Ha.



That's the trailer. I'll have more to say about this whole shenanigans, I suspect. Right now, though, I'm just stuck wondering what the heck is the Hollywood fascination with South Africa. This is a bit like how Edith Wharton is granted a voice in U.S. literary royalty, when most women writers are not. I don't understand how certain places, certain things, certain situations get singled out for special attention.

Paging Derek Walcott

V.S. Naipul -- yea, that one -- has a new book on African traditional religions titled The Masque of Africa. In his review of the book, Johann Hari is righteous on the right to speak of African religions. Cue the sighs.

I have stood in a blood-splattered house in Tanzania where an old woman had just been beaten to death for being a "witch" who cast spells on her neighbors. I have stood in battlefields in the Congo where the troops insist with absolute certainty they cannot be killed because they have carried out a magical spell that guarantees, if they are shot, they will turn briefly into a tree, then charge on unharmed. I have been cursed in Ethiopia by a witch-doctor with "impotence, obesity, and then leprosy" for asking insistently why he charged so much to "cure" his patients. (I'm still waiting for the leprosy.)
Where do these beliefs come from? What do so many Africans get out of them? Can they be changed? These are questions that are asked in Africa all the time, but we are deaf to the conversation. It's not hard to see why. The imperial rape and pillage of Africa was "justified" by claiming Africans were "primitive" and "backward" people sunk in a morass of voodoo, who had to be "civilized" in blood and Christianity. Just as there are legitimate and necessary criticisms of Israel but nobody wants to hear them from Germany, any legitimate and necessary criticism of the problems with Africa's indigenous beliefs will never be welcome from Europeans or their descendants. And yet there they are, ongoing and alive, waiting to be discussed. Must we ignore it?

Later on in Hari's review, he says that African religions "can bring both sweet, illusory comfort and intense terror" to Africans who adhere to more traditional beliefs. Muslims and Christians -- who make up the vast majority according to this Pew Religion in Africa poll -- also "retain these traditional beliefs not far beneath the surface." I found this interesting for several reasons: Don't the practice of religions get affected by the worldview of its adherents? How did the social evolution of Western society, for example, affect the interpretation of Christianity? Is it possible to consider traditional religions without considering the founding philosophy of respective African societies? I ask these questions, not of Naipaul's book (which I plan to read) but of this review and what it says about religion and tradition. I wouldn't have thought that V.S. Naipul would take this on, but I'm curious to see what he has to say.

(Photo Credit: Slate)

Islamic Superheroes?

This seems to have been on for awhile, but I'm only just hearing of this U.S.-based entrepreneur Dr. Naif al-Matuwa who is making a book of Muslim Superheroes called The 99. From the Guardian:

[That] conviction is that nobody from the outside is going to save Islam from its more extremist elements – it's going to have to save itself. And The 99, featuring 99 characters based on the 99 attributes of Allah, is, he hopes, that means: a way of focusing on the positive aspects of the religion, of inculcating peaceful, life-giving virtues in children and of presenting a peaceful, tolerant, multicultural version of Islam to the rest of the world.

It's a conviction that has seen him so far raise in excess of $30m in three rounds of funding from private investors, fight off a ban in Saudi Arabia (he's subsequently been re-banned but he's fighting it again), and persuaded Endemol, the company behind Big Brother, to produce a multimillion-dollar, 26-part animated series, which in the new year will be shown on Hub, the US network previously known as Discovery Kids that goes into 60 million American homes.

Interesting, huh?

I've always seen action heroes as a creation of myth that appeals to young boys, especially - a way of thinking of their new "superpowers" that come with their newfound maturity, maybe, or an amazement with physical ability that men are taught from an early age to prize. It's weird, then, seeing religion, especially a monotheistic religion, using such modern myths like action comics to launder it's image.

It's not like the marketing of Jesus didn't/doesn't have a comic book-like quality to it, though. The one thing that has always separated the religion from Judaism and Islam has been the Coca-Cola nature of its marketing. By accident of history, Christianity has been able to align itself with Western modernity, and has therefore excused itself of its more turbulent history and disturbing interpretations on now-touchy subjects that's no less violent, oppressive to women, discriminatory to sexual minorities and accepting of such things that we do not accept today (slavery, for example) than its monotheistic counterparts.

Unlike Coca-Cola, though, I'm not sure that growth in number of "consumers" of a religion should be the goal. There should be nothing wrong with religions maintaining a certain severity, even aloofness to mainstream culture. Judaism, for example, even goes as far as being unfriendly to the idea of new recruits, and Islam does not disguise its time-intensiveness, what with encouraging Hajj, encouraging headscarves for women, praying five times a day with ablutions each time. Were I more sternly religious, I'd worry about the omissions that inevitably happen when one puts one's religion in the make-up chair, airbrushes it for its close-up and puts it on a stand for mass consumption.

More generally, I think it's depressing that there are so many efforts these days to absolve the ignorant of the burden of their ignorance. This is where I have to remind myself that the ignorant among us are often the ones who have power. This is also where I get all the more exhausted. Yes, there is truth to the ranting against misinformation of the larger public about all minorities, religious and otherwise, but it scares me to think what it says about people who are so ready to believe such inanities about other people they, in most cases, have no experience with or idea about. And isn't that what we all we are, people?

Then, suddenly, someone thinks that putting an action hero with a Muslim name on a comic book would make Islam more relatable. Good luck with that.

(Photo: The Washington Post)

I Only Write of My Slice of Humanity

In the most recent issue of Granta that focused on Pakistan, they asked the writers featured how to write about Pakistan. Nadeem Aslam answers, "anyhow you wish."

In real life, and in my writing, I can’t pretend that all Pakistanis are angels any more than I can pretend that all Pakistanis are deceitful. (When they hear the name of the English town Tipton, most people will think of the Tipton Three – the three young men who were imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. I do too. But I also think of a mosque in Tipton where a mullah was sexually abusing the children who came to learn the Koran from him: when one of the parents found out about it and decided to go to the police, the members of the mosque organisation pulled a gun on the father.) As to the question of what to put into a book, and what to leave out: a good deal is said about the ‘clichés’ that are to be found in sub-continental writing – the mangoes, the monsoon and the spices, the verandahs and the mosquito nets and the extended families. But I would not wish ever to be told that these things are out of bounds to me. Who will tell Derek Walcott that the blue of the Caribbean Ocean is a bit of tourist-board cliché? The palm trees, the warm sands, the beauty of the black women and the beauty of the black men: every page the great man has ever written is full of these things. ‘Verandahs, where the pages of the sea / are a book left open by an absent master …’

This is not to say that these are not tourist clichés – but they must remain available to the artist as well as the non-artist. The genuine artists will bring human warmth and longing and complexity to what is two-dimensional in other, lesser hands.

He's talking about Pakistan, but it can really be true of everywhere. I'm still thinking about the topic of my previous post -- the issue of creating a governance index that I feel is more in response to Western perception of Africa that many Africans have internalized and defensiveness thereof than any wishes to actually change governance in Africa -- and it gets me thinking of how best to react to negative perceptions of where one is from. I like Aslam's approach to this topic. Still, I'm never going to stop being irritated by the quest for a definitive narrative from non-Western writers. It adds to the weight of importance of every news article, exhibit, novel that broaches the topic of Non-Western nations, and I'm beginning to wonder if it is not grossly unfair to the writers as well as to those who are being represented. No one asks Gary Shtyengart or Jonathan Franzen or Dave Eggers to write a piece that sums up the American experience, after all, and that is as it should be. No one should ever have to shoulder that responsibility.

Poem for Sunday - Venus Hottentot

The story of Saartjie Baartman is a gruesome one about human beings' ability to objectify so willfully as to render one incapable of being anything except what we want them to be. I'm not going to rehash it - read the Wikipedia entry here.

I first heard of this story in college. A drama professor made us read "The Black Venus" by one of my favorite playwrights hands-down Suzan Lori-Parks. I saw an award-winning rendering of her play Topdog/Underdog, and became interested in her other work. Prof. Harris -- that was his name -- told me that the one of the few plays to ever make him cry was Suzan Lori-Parks' The Hottentot Venus.

This play has been turned into a film. Check out the trailer for it here. Tambay over at Shadow and Act saw it at the NY Film Festival and already has a review up, though I've been made to understand that festival versions are not always the final cut.



Elizabeth Alexander wrote an amazing poem about Baartman called The Venus Hottentot. It's your poem for Sunday.


The Venus Hottentot (1825)

1. Cuvier

Science, science, science!
Everything is beautiful

blown up beneath my glass.
Colors dazzle insect wings.

A drop of water swirls
like marble. Ordinary

crumbs become stalactites
set in perfect angles

of geometry I’d thought
impossible. Few will

ever see what I see
through this microscope..

Cranial measurements
crowd my notebook pages,

and I am moving closer,
close to how these numbers

signify aspects of
national character.

Her genitalia
will float inside a labeled

pickling jar in the Musée
de l’Homme on a shelf

above Broca’s brain:
“The Venus Hottentot.”

Elegant facts await me.
Small things in this world are mine.

2.

There is unexpected sun today
in London, and the clouds that
most days sift into this cage
where I am working have dispersed.
I am a black cutout against
a captive blue sky, pivoting
nude so the paying audience
can view my naked buttocks.

I am called “Venus Hottentot.”
I left Capetown with a promise
of revenue: half the profits
and my passage home: A boon!
Master’s brother proposed the trip;
the magistrate granted me leave.
I would return to my family
a duchess, with watered-silk

dresses and money to grow food,
rouge and powders in glass pots,
silver scissors, a lorgnette,
voile and tulle instead of flax,
cerulean blue instead
of indigo. My brother would
devour sugar-studded non-
pareils, pale taffy, damask plums.

That was years ago. London’s
circuses are florid and filthy,
swarming with cabbage-smelling
citizens who stare and query,
“Is it muscle? bone? Or fat?”
My neighbor to the left is
The Sapient Pig, “The Only
Scholar of His Race.” He plays

at cards, tells time and fortunes
by scraping his hooves. Behind
me is Prince Kar-mi, who arches
like a rubber tree and stares back
at the crowd from under the crook
of his knee. A professional
animal trainer shouts my cues.
There are singing mice here.

“The Ball of Duchess DuBarry”:
In the engraving I lurch
towards the belles dames, mad-eyed, and
they swoon. Men in capes and pince-nez
shield them. Tassels dance at my hips.
In this newspaper lithograph
my buttocks are shown swollen
and luminous as a planet.

Monsieur Cuvier investigates
between my legs, poking, prodding,
sure of his hypothesis.
I half expect him to pull silk
scarves from inside me, paper poppies,
then a rabbit! He complains
at my scent and does not think
I comprehend, but I speak

English. I speak Dutch. I speak
a little French as well, and
languages Monsieur Cuvier
will never know have names.
Now I am bitter and now
I am sick. I eat brown bread,
drink rancid brother. I miss good sun,
miss Mother’s sadza. My stomach

is frequently queasy from mutton
chops, pale potatoes, blood sausage.
I was certain that this would be
better than farm life. I am
the family entrepreneur!
But there are hours in every day
to conjure my imaginary
daughters, in banana skirts

and ostrich-feather fans.
Since my own genitals are public
I have made other parts private.
In my silence, I possess
mouth, larynx, brain, in a single
gesture. I rub my hair
with lanolin, and pose in profile
like a painted Nubian

archer, imagining gold leaf
woven through my hair, and diamonds.
Observe the wordless Odalisque.
I have not forgotten my Xhosa
clicks. My flexible tongue
and healthy mouth bewilder
this man with his rotting teeth.
If he were to let me rise up

from this table, I’d spirit
his knives and cut out his black heart,
seal it with science fluid inside
a bell jar, place it on a low
shelf in a white man’s museum
so the whole world could see
it was shriveled and hard,
geometric, deformed, unnatural.

Poem for Sunday

Goodness me, I didn't even know Amiri Baraka wrote poetry. I was too busy falling in love with his amazing play "The Toilet" to check out his other mediums. I'm glad I found his poetry, or I would never have read this.

And I'm putting this up quite late. Yeesh.

Ka'Ba

"A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will.

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.

We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy,and create. What will be

the sacred word?

Relentless

Via the good bloggin' people over at Shadow and Act, a trailer for a Nigerian movie I -- and here's a shocker -- actually want to see.

RELENTLESS from Lluís Prieto on Vimeo.

I'm excited about this. It's got the ubiquitous Nneka, yes, but it's also got Andy Amadi Okoroafor. I can't tell much about her acting job from the trailer, but I just love the quiet expressiveness of Okoroafor's face. As Rilke would say, not everything is as 'sayable' as people would often have you believe.