PT Data wrangler

Tag: Africa

  • The Achebe I Knew

    Ahead of the Africa Writes festival 2013 (5-7 July) PEN Atlas hears from African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on his friend and mentor Chinua Achebe. Ngũgĩ will appear in conversation with his son Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ on Saturday 6 July at the British Library.

    A version of this article was originally published in The Nation in March 2013.

    I first met Chinua Achebe in 1961 at Makerere, Kampala. His novel, Things Fall Apart, had come out, two years before. I was then a second year student, the author of just one story, Mugumo published in Penpoint, the literary magazine of the English Department. At my request, he looked at the story, and made some encouraging remarks. What I did not tell him was that I was in the middle of my first novel for a writing competition organized by the East African literature bureau, what would later be published as The River Between. 

    chinua-achebeMy next encounter was more dramatic, on my part, at least, and would impact my life and literary career, profoundly. It was at the now famous 1962 conference of writers of English expression. Chinua Achebe was among a long line of other literary luminaries, that included Wole Soyinka, J P Clark, the late Eski’a Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane. The East African contingent consisted of Grace Ogot, Jonathan Kariara, John Nagenda and I. My invitation was on the strength of my short stories published in Penpoint and in Transition. The novel most discussed in the Conference as a model of literary restraint and excellence was Things Fall Apart.

    But what most attracted me was not my being invited there as ‘writer’ but the fact that I would be able to show Achebe, the manuscript of my second novel, what would later, become Weep Not Child. It was very generous of him to agree to look at it because, as I would learn later, he was working on his  novel, Arrow of God. Because of that and his involvement in the conference, he could not read the whole manuscript, but he read enough to give some useful suggestions.

     More important, he talked about the manuscript to his publishers, William Heinemann, represented at the conference by June Milne, who expressed an interest in the work. Weep not Child would later be published by William Heinemann and the paper back by Heinemann education publishers, the fourth in the now famous, African Writers series, of which Achebe was the Editorial Adviser.

    I was working with the Nation newspapers when Weep not child came out. It was April 1964, and Kenya was proud to have  its first modern novel in English by a Kenyan African. Or so I thought, for the novel was well published in the Kenyan newspapers, the Sunday Nation even carrying my interview by de Villiers, one of its senior feature writers. I assumed that every educated Kenyan would have heard about the novel. I was woken to reality when I entered a club, the most frequented by the new African elite at the time,  who all greeted me as their Kenyan author of Things Fall Apart.

    Years later at Achebe’s 70th
    birth day celebrations at Bard College attended Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka among others, I told this story of how Achebe’s name had haunted my life. When Soyinka’s turn to speak came, he said that I had taken the story from his mouth: He had been similarly mistaken for Chinua Achebe.

     The fact is Achebe became synonymous with the Heinemann African writers series and African writing as a whole. There’s hardily any African writer of my generation who has not been mistaken for Chinua Achebe.

    I have had a few of such encounters. The last was in 2010 at Jomo Kenyatta Airport. Mukoma, the author of Nairobi Heat, and I had been invited  for the Kwani festival whose theme was inter-generational dialogue. Mukoma, my fourth son and I fitted the bill perfectly. As he and I walked towards the immigration, a man came towards me. His hands were literally trembling as he identified himself as a professor of Literature from Zambia.

    “Excuse me Mr Achebe, somebody pointed you out to me. I have long wanted to meet you.”

    “No, I am not the one,” I said, or words to that effect, “but here is Mr Achebe,” I added pointing at my son.

    I thought Mukoma’s obvious youth would tell him that I was being facetious. But no, our Professor grabbed Mukoma’s hands, before Mukoma could protest, grateful that he had at last shaken hands with his hero. The case of mistaken identity as late as 2010 shows how Achebe had become a mythical figure, and rightly so.

    He was the single most important figure in the development of modern African literature as writer, editor, and quite simply a human being.

    As the general editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, he had a hand in the emergence of many other writers and their publication. This meant sheer investment in time, energy, commitment and belief. He never bragged about it, even refusing the unofficial title of ‘father of African literature’. As a human being, he embodied wisdom, that comes from a commitment to the middle way between extremes, and, of course, courage in the face of personal tragedy!

    Achebe bestrides generations and geographies.  Every country in the continent claims him as their author. Some sayings in his novels are quoted frequently as proverbs that contain a universal wisdom. His passing marks the beginning of the end of an epoch. But his spirit lives on to continue inspiring yet more African writers and scholars of African literature the world over. 

    About the Author

    Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a Kenyan author, dramatist, essayist, translator, academic and political commentator. Born in 1938 his first novel Weep Not Child was published in 1964, followed by The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat in 1967. After performances of his play I Will Marry When I Want – highly critical of Kenya’s ruling political regime – he was imprisoned for a year. Whilst incarcerated, Ngũgĩ wrote Devil on the Cross, a coruscating critique of the poverty, corruption and greed that he believed had infected Kenyan society. His short memoir, Detained, describes the time he spent in prison. After his release, Ngũgĩ returned to his teaching role at Nairobi University where he produced his highly influential pamphlet Decolonising the Mind – an argument that African authors should write in their own languages. This is something that Ngũgĩ himself continues to do – writing in his mother tongue, Gikuyu, before translating into English. After a twenty year gap between novels, in 2006 Ngũgĩ published the sprawling satire Wizard of the Crow – a comedic masterpiece and magical realist interpretation of the post-colonial state. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s memoir Dreams in a Time of War received a Writers in Translation award in 2010. 

    Additional information

    Africa Writes 2013 takes place between Friday 5 July and Sunday 7 July at the British Library.  Africa Writes will hold a tribute event for Chinua Achebe on Saturday 6 July at 3.30pm. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o will appear in conversation with his son Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ on Saturday 6 July at 6.30pm. 

    Please visit the Africa Writes website for more information about the festival and to see the full programme of events.

  • Turning up the volume

    Yasmine El Rashidi, contributor to the PEN-award-winning title Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus, tells PEN Atlas about growing up learning English: exile and community, being alienated and finding her voice

    I am asked, frequently, what it means to be a woman in the Arab world; what it means to be a woman writing, expressing herself, making statements – often contrarian – in a context so dominantly male. I often choose not to respond, not to write those pieces people ask of me, not to feed an assumption of difficulty and struggle associated with gender. But occasionally, I succumb – offering editors and audiences a response to what, from their view, must be the most pressing question, the greatest struggle, for me as a female writer in Egypt.

    It’s not easy being a woman in the Middle East, and much less so today, in Egypt, with all the tumult and rising conservatism that has come to pass in the months – or years now – after the uprising. It’s not easy, but one finds ways to deal with the challenge, of the invasion of privacy, of space; of the objectification and the patriarchy that interferes and takes liberties on both the superficial and intimate levels of one’s life. There are challenges, but we find ways of tending to them and after a lifetime of it, waste little energy lamenting; we either carry on with our lives and put on blinders and trudge along, or, we take up the rights of women as a cause and calling. I know many women who take up this fight each day.

    The greatest challenge, and struggle, for me is a different one – it is the one of language, of voice. I made the decision years ago, as a teenager, to be a writer, and my parents had made the decision even years before that their children would go to an English school. It meant, without any choosing of my own but merely fluke – default – that I found my writing voice in a language not native to my country, and I struggle, often, almost daily, with this – with the sensation, or sense, of being muted.

    “It is the cause of significant disquiet.”

    “Feeling I’m on mute.”

    (excerpt from panel discussion – Berlin Festival of Literature, 2012)

    In ways, I am not the only one – I watch my generation of young Egyptians grapple with trying to find their form, their language. The product of a flawed and less than adequate school system that gave you either a foreign language, or a sub-par schooling in your own native language along with one or two others of your choice, we seem to be a generation whose volume is turned down, to varying degrees; a generation without a real mastery of any single language. Or that is, many of us at least – our Arabic is okay, our English is okay, our French comes in bits and pieces.

    To write in English, in particular at this moment of change and possibility, is to sever myself from community – from the people who matter, who affect change, who are building – or rebuilding – the country. To write in English, is to be exiled in the place in which you are from. To write in English is to write for the world, and to be subjected to the standards and expectations of editors, and readers, who demand something particular from writers of, and in, that language. To have written that same text in Arabic and have had it translated into English, would be to have it received with an alternative eye, with more space for “difference” – difference of style, difference of syntax. The “difference” of being “foreign”, a non-native speaker of the English language, a writer of a language perhaps more florid, more hazy, more idiosyncratic by its very nature of difference, of the so-called “other”.

    My struggle, then, is as a writer, to be aware that my audience is dominantly a global one, aware that my work has less of an impact in affecting change in my home country as it does in perhaps altering perspectives and shedding light and nuance on Egypt for readers around the world. This particular point – this reality – I agonize over. I wish, at this moment, that I were writing for my own community – locally – rather than for the world.

    My struggle, is also about freeing myself, creating time and space to write about things beyond the borders of my own country; liberating myself from the consciousness of “audience” and “expectation” and “validation” and “publication”. My struggle as an Egyptian female writer is, then, ultimately not about gender or nationality or place, but of motive – of intent – regardless of outcome.

     

    About the Author

    PhotoyasmineYasmine El Rashidi is a Cairo-based writer. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a contributing editor to the Middle East arts and culture quarterly Bidoun. Her writing has also appeared and is forthcoming in publications including Frieze, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, and The Happy Hypocrite, to which she contributed a work of fiction in an edition guest-edited by Lynne Tillman. A collection of her writings on the Egyptian revolution, The Battle for Egypt, was published in 2011, and her essays feature in the anthologies Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus and The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage. She is currently a fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, working on a nonfiction book about Egypt, as well as a novel set in Los Angeles.

    Additional Information

    Writing Revolution is a winner of an English PEN Award 2013

    You can catch writers, editors and contributors to Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus at the following events.

    Monday 27th May: Guardian Hay Festival, 2.30pm
    Tuesday 28th May: Frontline Club, 7.00pm
    Wednesday 29th May: Mosaic Rooms, 7.00pm
    Thursday 30th May: Oxford Student PEN, 5-7.00pm
    Fri 28th June: The Rich Mix, Shubbak Festival, 7.00pm

     

     

  • Stolen Eyes

    In advance of his UK tour this week, acclaimed writer and painter Mahi Binebine treats PEN Atlas readers to a short story about young people in Morocco and the ‘art’ of sleeping. Mahi will visit Oxford and London this week to discuss his new book, Horses of God, winner of an English PEN award.

    Translated from the French by Lulu Norman

     

    “You want to leave? But why?”

    Morad inspected his babouches and replied:

    “Because I can’t see my city any more.”

    “How come?”

    “The foreigners have stolen my eyes.”

    Then he stared at me as if to show that his gaze really was empty. Without a glimmer of hope. Devoid of all ambition. They were disillusioned, old eyes; any plan or prospect had been washed away.

    The scene took place one night in a café opposite the French Consulate. Morad was waiting for his usual time to go and queue in front of the studded door. This was his job: every evening, he’d arrive at the elegant building and spend the night there; the next day, he’d sell his place in line to people applying for visas. The price varied, depending on the length of the queue and the vagaries of the weather.

    “How did foreigners manage to steal your eyes?”

    “Ever since we’ve had satellite dishes on our roofs, we have eyes only for the other world. The medina looks like a ruin to us now.”

    “What they show you on TV isn’t necessarily the truth. I’ve lived in Paris for twenty years and, you see, I’m back.”

    “So what makes you think you can give me advice? You left, didn’t you? If I were you, I wouldn’t have come back.”

    A smile played over Morad’s regular, slightly African features.

    “Why do you queue for other people?”

    “It’s my livelihood.”

    “Yes, but you could queue for yourself.”

    “I’ve been refused a visa three times. I’ve given up. In any case I’ve found a job. I sell people info on how to get papers sorted and useful contacts for fake IDs… You see, I’ve got used to the satellite dish, and it does me good, living on the edge of a mirage.”

    “That must be so frustrating!”

    “Not at all. During the day, I’m in Europe or America… and at night I continue my travels in my dreams. Do you know, I can sleep standing up?”

    “Standing up?”

    “Yes, or even while I walk. Sleeping is one of this country’s great arts. From the cradle on, a kind of lethargy is instilled in us which, once we’re adults, gives us a phenomenal talent for sleeping.”

    Seeing me frown, Morad went on more calmly:

    “Foreigners think we’re awake but it’s a trick. Most people are numbed by a rare inertia. As if they’re detached from the world.”

    “Hang on,” I said, “I’m no fool. I was born here. I may have spent twenty years away but I’m still Moroccan.”

    “Twenty years! My God! And why did you come back?”

    “To put the pieces back together…”  

    After a pause, he said:

    “The moment you sat down at my table, I could tell you were mad. Whatever you do, don’t repeat what you’ve just told me: you might get lynched.”

    “For what crime?” I exclaimed.

    “The young people you see around you dream of only one thing: storming the Consulate. They couldn’t imagine such a ridiculous waste.”

    Morad stared at me curiously.

    “Now that you’re here – and no one forced you to be – you’re going to have to relearn how to sleep. First, you need a fine pair of babouches so you’re not tempted to walk too fast. And a thick, warm djellaba like mine. Look how snug it is! My mother wove it with her own hands. In this thing, sleep can erupt any time, anywhere! It’s vital to adapt yourself to the pace of the country. The Swiss invented the watch, but we, we have time. And above all, go gently. A man in a hurry is already dead. We’ve managed to appease death. We’ve tamed it, woven its tendrils into the apathy of our lives. We consume it in small doses. You see, this is an immense cemetery, where each man carries his own tomb…we’re proper tortoises.”

    While Morad was speaking (or was it me daydreaming?) I glimpsed something like a light in his eyes. And then nothing.

    I was angry with myself for dozing off in the café. As I opened my eyes, I spotted his purple djellaba in the distance; you could have sworn there was no one inside it. But there was no doubt it was his, leaning against the studded door of the French Consulate. Behind him stretched a long line of petitioners for paradise; or for hell, depending.  

    About the Author

    Mahi Binebine was born in Marrakech in 1959. He studied in Paris and taught mathematics, until he became recognised first as a painter, then as a novelist. Between 1994 – 1999 he lived in New York, when his paintings began to be acquired by the Guggenheim Museum. He now lives in Marrakech with his family.

    About the Translator

    Lulu Norman lives in London. Working from French and Spanish, she has translated Ricardo Arrieta, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albert Cossery, Mahmoud Darwish, and Serge Gainsbourg, and written for the Guardian, the Independent, and the London Review of Books. Her translation of Mahi Binebine’s Welcome to Paradise was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004.
 She also works as a freelance editor and is an editorial assistant at Banipal, the journal of modern Arab literature.

    Additional Information

    You can see Mahi Binebine at an event curated by Oxford Student PEN on Tuesday 23 April, at a film screening and Q&A with Omar Kholeif at the Institut Français on Wednesday 24 April, and in conversation with Ros Schwartz at the Royal African Society on Thursday 25 April.

    You can read more about Mahi and his UK visit on the Arablit blog. You can also find out more about the author and artist on his personal website.

  • Translation, Revolution, and Pedagogy

    Following her appearance at the Literary Translation Centre for London Book Fair 2013, Samia Mehrez writes about working collaboratively on the book Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, which uses multiple perspectives to translate the linguistic and cultural meanings of the recent momentous events in her country

    One of the most remarkable accomplishments of the revolutionary spirit in Egypt has manifested itself in an unprecedented production and proliferation of cultural materials, whether written, oral, visual, or performative, all of which have decidedly remapped and redefined the contours and meanings of both public culture and public space. Since January 2011 there has been a radical transformation of the relationship between people, their bodies, their language, and space; a transformation that has enabled sustained mass convergence, conversation, and agency for new publics whose access to and participation in public space has for decades been controlled by an oppressive, authoritarian regime. This newfound power of ownership of one’s space, one’s body, and one’s language is, in and of itself, a revolution. Indeed, the ongoing culture of revolt and its new forms and media of expression continue to inspire a plethora of publications, both locally and globally.

    Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (AUC Press, 2012) is one such example, representing the collective work of graduate students in a seminar that I taught at the American University in Cairo in Spring 2011, immediately following the fall of Mubarak. The seminar was part of an important university-wide initiative that attempted to respond to an urgent pedagogical need to sustain the students’ engagement in and with the revolutionary moment. The largely improvised seminar attracted Egyptian and non-Egyptian students whose linguistic abilities and cultural competencies and experiences complemented each other in ways that were important and helped them maintain an informed comparative perspective on their task as translators. The participants, here future authors of the collective book, came to the task of translation with their own histories, understanding, and perspectives on translation all of which intersected throughout: there was the poet, the musician, the technical translator, the journalist, the photographer, the security translator, the activist, the creative writer, and the teacher. They had all experienced and lived through the revolution in Egypt and were all motivated by their  desire to engage the layers of revolutionary narratives and to translate these fields of meaning to each other and for each other in an attempt to understand, situate, and contextualize the historic events that enveloped them.

    Given the revolutionary context of the seminar itself, its content and pedagogical format, as well as the projects undertaken by the participants, were decided upon jointly at the beginning of the semester. The participants read, and collectively translated material ranging from chants, banners, slogans, jokes, poems, and street art to media coverage, interviews, blogs, as well as presidential speeches and military communiqués. They predominantly worked in groups and as partners, not as individuals. This is to say that their translations, even in the chapters undertaken by a single author, are the outcome of this collective and perpetual conversation and understanding. The class blog that they had created at http://translatingrev.wordpress.com chronicles the processes of translation in which they were collectively engaged, the myriad of problems, issues and challenges they encountered, how they resolved them, and why they chose such solutions.   Some of their comments addressed the division of labor among participants in each group and how, in working together, they had developed an awareness of the translator’s subjectivity, an appreciation of their difference and diversity that lay at the forefront of decision-making, and the interactive process of translation that remained incomplete without a profound appreciation and navigation of audience. They did all this with the full conviction that they had collective ownership of the translated text and that their collaborative endeavor was not at all final, but, like the revolution itself, was open to more conversation and more reflection. More importantly, they came to confront their task of translation as one that implicated them in an ethics of selection: what gets left out, what is brought in, and why; how does one justify such choices, and how their “visibility” as translators implicated them in the politics of translation. 

    Given the scope of the material and its different linguistic registers, and referential worlds, these documents and manifestations presented a great challenge to any translator not just at the immediate linguistic level but more importantly – and herein lay the real challenge – at the discursive, semiotic and symbolic meanings of revolution at both the local and global levels and contexts. As the participants continued to work as groups they came to realize that behind each text they were translating lay a myriad of other texts that had to be translated before that singular text in the source language could be carried across to the target language. Here, the task of the translator(s) is to “carry across” the different narratives and layers of the revolution as part of a complex set of dialectical relationships with other texts (political, economic, social, and religious) that exist outside its immediate “readable” boundaries. This is what I call thick translation. All the chapters in Translating Egypt’s Revolution engage thick translation in ways that have not only compelled the contributors to re-think the limits of their own disciplines but have equally empowered them in their role as translators re-writing across boundaries and beyond borders, whether these be linguistic, cultural, or disciplinary. Furthermore, the very choices of topics and texts they have translated bear testimony to the politics of selection that implicate them (as individuals and as a group) in a very particular “version” of the revolutionary text in translation, one of many more that have yet to be translated.

    Contributors to the volume: Amira Taha, Chris Combs, Heba Salem, Kantaro Taira, Laura Gribbon, Lewis Sanders, Mark Visona, Menna Khalil, Sahar Kreitim, Sarah Hawas, Samia Mehrez.

    About the Author

    Samia Mehrez isProfessor of Arabic Literature and Director of the Center for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo.She has published widely in the fields of modern Arabic literature, postcolonial studies, translation studies, gender studies and cultural studies. She is the author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-Ghitani, AUC Press, 1994 and 2005 and Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice, Routledge 2008, AUC Press 2010. Her edited anthologies A Literary Atlas of Cairo: One hundred Years in the Life of the City and The Literary Life of Cairo: One Hundred Years in the Heart of the City in which she translated the works of numerous Egyptian writers are published by AUC Press 2010, 2011 and in Arabic by Dar Al-Shorouk, Cairo. She is the editor of Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, AUC Press, 2012. She is currently working on a translation from Arabic into English of Mona Prince’s memoir, Ismi Thawra (Revolution is My Name), forthcoming in 2013, and a book-length manuscript tentatively titled The Making of Revolutionary Culture in Egypt.