A literary scholar interested in reading the works of the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera in the United States will quickly become aware of the unavailability of these works in bookstores and most libraries.  While Damduzo Marechera was well-received in places that the United Kingdom, and while his influence is spreading rapidly in Africa and other places, he is not as famous in the United States as he should be. For one, Marechera emerged as a writer after American literature had gone through its interesting phase of avant-gardism, and had just entered the phase of post-modernism, which thrives to this day. This might have contributed to Marechera going un-noticed. Another reason might be the fact that when Zimbabwean literature was marketed outside the country, and especially in North America, focus was given to writers who were deemed representative of African literature, like Chenjerai Hove, Musaemura Zimunya, and Charles Mungoshi. These writers have had an opportunity to serve in fellowships and residences that Marechera, due to his premature death, did not have a chance to participate in.  Writers like Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera have penetrated ethnic, literature, gender studies classes that find the works relevant. While the presence of such works in the United States leaves a lot to be desired, it far surpasses that of the works of Marechera. Perhaps the 2009 UK conference on Marechera will create interest in his work across the Atlantic.

I studied V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas in my first year at the University of Zimbabwe.  I found the book engaging and enlightening, rich with its characters’ unique experiences. Later, I browsed other books by Naipaul, such as A Bend in the River, but none seemed to surpass the talent displayed in A House. So I can safely say I know one or two things about the works of Naipaul. But I am a new comer to Derek Walcott’s works, although I have always known about him being one of the Nobel Laureates. A few weeks ago someone mentioned Walcott’s facility with poetic style and the first opportunity I had I bought his Selected Poems and Tiepolo’s Hound.  That was last week.

Then today I woke up to find out these  Nobels have an on-going dispute in which they doubt each other’s talent in writing. Naipaul is reported to have labeled the poetry of Walcott as “full of emptiness”. Sometime in 2007. Now, actually last weekend, Walcott made a public attack of Naipaul at the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica, in his poem “The Mongoose”. As he started his reading, reports The Statesman, Walcott announced, “I’m going to be nasty.” Here are the opening lines of the poem:

“I have been bitten. / I must avoid infection./ Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.”

Here is a longer extract as transcribed by The Statesman:

“So the old mongoose, still making good money

Is a burnt out comic, predictable, unfunny

The joy of supplements, his minstrel act

Delighting editors endorsing facts

Over fiction, tearing colleagues and betters

To pieces in the name of English letters

The feathers fly, the snow comes drifting down

The mongoose keeps its class act as a clown

It can do cartwheels of exaggeration

Mostly it snivels, proud of being Asian

Of being attached to nothing, race or nation

It would be just as if a corpse took pride in its decay

After its gift had died and off the page its biles exude the stench

of envy, “la pourriture” in French

cursed its first breath for being Trinidadian

then wrote the same piece for the English Guardian

Once he liked humans, how long ago this was

The mongoose wrote “A House for Mr Biswas”

The UK’s Telegraph  reports that Patrick French, Naipaul’s biographer, said “Knowing Naipaul, he’ll say nothing and then at some point he will lash out. He said to me once, ‘I settle all my accounts.’” Whatever happens, literature wants to see moments like these.

“Back home, our very own Zimbabwean sister Tsitsi Dangarembga displayed the same mentality in her movie Kare Kare Zvako. She shows Africans as savage cannibals who literally eat each other. She won a Western-sponsored award for her efforts. That is also another catch used to lure the misguided African filmmakers — the proliferation of Western-sponsored awards. These serve as external motivation, and for the desire of international fame, the black filmmakers from Africa — to borrow James Weldon Johnson’s Ex-coloured man’s words — sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. Films such as Hotel Rwanda and Tsotsi from South Africa win international acclaim because they portray the negative aspects of Africa,” writes Kamurai Mudzingwa in his 2006 Op-ed entitled “African Movies Spiteful”.

The article critiques African film production, which Mudzingwa argues is sponsored by the West and for this reason tends to represent stereotypes its sponsors want to portray about Africa. These films are damaging since some of their viewers worldwide tend to interepret Africa based on what they depict. I remember that during my early days in the United States I repeatedly answered questions about whether or not things “back there” were like they are in Chaka Zulu, the five-hour movie. Of course, back then I hadn’t even seen the movie, but judging by the hidden messages in the questions, I knew what the implications were. When, years later, I bought my copy of the movie for a dollar at a Blockbuster clearance sale, I just wondered how someone could ever think to use that movie as a way to learn about present-day Africa.

Mudzingwa also discusses The God’s Must Be Crazy. I own both volume 1 & 2,  and I watch them once in a while to see, well, to see the landscape, and to hear the Shona man in volume 1 singing, “Mai Vachauya”. Recently, I was able to connect him to a Marechera character who is exiled in some kind of desert and seems to be going through a cleansing ritual for having offended his mother in some way back home. I had to force that connection, of course, because at a symbolic level, what this unnamed Marechera character says is that he was in political exile, but was also waiting, if not suffering for, his wife who had left the place with a promise to come back or not, so the reader sees him in a miserable existence in this desert away from home, perhaps singing (we are not told), “Mai Vachauya”, just like the Shona man in The Gods Must Be Crazy  (Of course, many viewers, intrigued by the clicking language in the movie, may barely notice the Shona man, may not ever know that he is Shona because that’s not the movie’s purpose: just focus on the funny guy taking the bottle back to the Gods).  The Shona man’s song could be considered (even where I exaggerate) the one positve ( and it’s really negative, come to think of it) message I get from the two volumes of what Mudzingwa calls a “highly offensive movie”.

But Tsitsi Dangarembga too? Well, she stated in a recent interview with Per Contra that film-making helps her make a living, something that her very consciousness-driven literature has failed to do. Perhaps our main hope is in emerging film-makers like my former student Marian Kunonga? I know at one point she was in Malawi filming “positive” documentaries in the villages, documentaries that show happy, laughing Africans. More of that attitude is needed.

Anyway, Mudzingwa goes on to quote  University of Zimbabwe scholar, Memory Chirere, who has said we should: “put our money where our culture is.” In this regard, the films, especially when produced by Africans, should give a balanced, not biased, depiction of Africa. I think the literature, novels, poetry, etc, is performing well; now let the film industry learn to be self-sufficient and to boldly present an Africa that’s full of hope and progress–something like that, if I am reading Mudzingwa right. In fact, why don’t I link to the original article here?

Sometime in 1986 Dambudzo Marechera wrote a series of poems entitled “There’s a Dissident in the Election Soup”. These poems make up Chapter 11 of the post-humously published Cemetry of Mind, compiled and edited by Flora Veit-Wild. Since Zimbabweans are voting on Saturday, March 29, it is important to ponder upon what Marechera had to say about the voting process, that is, if the poems are even about elections.

In “A Strong Case for Crap Artists by One Againsts Them”, Marechera writes:

The soil we cherish as country or continent
Is but humanity turned to dust, to grass, to tree
And many a tear shed for fallen friend returns next
As admired landscape wrenching a dewy drop in the cause
of Art.

Was he talking about the underdevelopment of Africa that makes the continent appear like it’s regressing while others are progressing? That we cherish being African is indeed true and sound, a valid assertion. “Humanity turned to dust” alludes to death, perhaps the deaths occuring in the continent, be they the result of starvation, genocide, and HIV-AIDS, or just the death other continents imagine Africa experiences. Focus your camera on Zimbabwe: rapid migration to neighboring countries and beyond– some of these exiles have been passed dead by their relatives back home, or they feel dead, faced with challenges of starting life anew, or choosing to kill the Zimbabwean identity to become American, British, Canadian, to become these new identities in a deliberate and intentional way (”Where are you from. You’ve a nice accent”. “Me? Oh, Atlanta, sometimes Kentucky!”). Now elections are happening back home and we are not there to vote, enabling or increasing the chances of the current regime to continue clinging to power.

The other part of the poem I like is the mention of humanity turning to tree or grass, both of which are forms of transformation or transition into another life form. Yet the transformation is still some kind of death;it is possible that Marechera knew about reincarnation and embraced it. In fact, were I in Harare’s Africa Unity Square now, I might have been tempted to ask: “Which one of you trees is Marechera?” Next,I would look at the grass around me and see which one would inspire a poem, especially one about elections.

The poem then ends with what could even qualify as a prophetic statement about how things turned out for Marechera, a fallen friend of ours whom we remember conveniently, starting by publishing and praising his works post-humously, writing theses and dessertations that claim to raise his influence to grand proportions, and once every year meeting somewhere in the Avenues or Harare Gardens (if we still do)to read from his works and watch Olly Maruma’s film adaptation of House of Hunger. In most cases though, based on what I know as tributes paid to our fallen artists, there is that which is painfully selfish on the part of those memorializing Art; that is to say, our memories (the tears we shed) return as
an “admired landscape wrenching a dewy drop in the cause/of Art.”

Marechera is clear about his election thoughts in the poem “Only the Mountainclimber Can Tell Us”, in which he paints a picture of a persona who is bitter about what someone in power has or has not done for him/her. The person, this force, has done so much damage through greed and corruption that the persona’s propects for success are doomed, but, guess what, the perona “will not have you as excuse/To [his/her] failure (Too Easy!)” I can hear the person of power asking, “So what are you going to do? You, insignificant as you are, what can you do?” The persona, who has learned the “neocolonialist”’s “wrestling tactics”, will invite him into the ring and teach him a lesson “blow for blow”. At last the persona will “come out of the ring facing Mount Kenya!” And there you have it, the meaning of the electoral process to Dambudzo Marechera’s persona.

In his Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser advises poets to remember that poetry uses language, which is meant to enable communication with other people. He aptly describes the poet’s job as not involving writing works only the poet can understand, but ones that make sense to the reader.

On the same day I read this advice, I also chanced upon Charles Simic’s Sixty Poems. I think when one becomes a US Poet Laureate, there is really nothing stopping him or her from using titles like Poems, Forty Poems, My Poems, etc. I bought Simic’s book (I have read many good reviews about him and his current title is something to make a reader curious).

So far I have read the first three poems of Sixty Poems. I fell in love with the first two, “Toward Nightfall” and “Against Whatever It is That’s Encroaching”. The third one, “St. Thomas Acquinas” started off strong, immediately arresting me with its first line: “I left parts of myself everywhere”. Then I started going “against whatever was encroaching” when I read the following lines:

” She had traveled to darkest Africa.
She had many stories to tell about the jungle.”

“A black man and I stole a woman’s dress.
It was of silk; it shimmered.”

I stopped reading and started looking for my receipt (that’s the only way I can get a full refund). In Kooser’s view, I was acting like your regular (but most important) readers, “slightly on their guard.” The first-impression stereotypical message in those lines made me lose interest, but that was temporary; I remembered I was one of those readers who actually buy poetry books and read them thoroughly. So I finished reading the poem and watched it climb the heights of grand application to the human experience, and I began to remember that as poets we create personae for our works, and I started thinking….”…traveled to darkest [someone making fun of Conrad?] Africa/….stories about the jungle.” Jungle? Jungle.

I ordered a tea (I aways get tea in this Wi-Fi place), and started editing my own poetry, making sure it grabs and sustains the reader’s friendship, or some such sweet nothing in Ted Kooser’s manual.

So I hear some former and current graduate students of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop are enraged by the university’s plan to digitalize MFA theses. So I hear some former and current graduate students of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop are mad about the university’s plan to digitalize MFA theses. These texts, improperly named “theses” since they are creative works like novels and poetry collections, would be force-published on the university library’s website; they would then become abvailable to all of us through Google and other search engines. The writers, now up in arms, argue this is unfair and should not be implemented since it will lower the commercial value of their creative writing.

Really, is there anything wrong with having one novel (thesis) posted online by an instution like the Iowa Worshop? Isn’t it a way of credibly displaying one’s work? Oh, but the writers are saying the work might be embarrassing, and others think that’s publication without consent.

There has been an increasing trend of authors turning to the internet either to give previews of their works, or to blog their work into existence. I use the latter for my poetry. But the writers have the control of the length of time they want their work to appear online. Some will woe readers, then remove the work and let the readers beg for it to be published in print format. In short, why the digital age might be construed to devalue the art, some authors have found ways to gain value through effective use of the internet.

The Iowa Digital Library displays, however, would be a permanent record of the author’s early, or sometimes immature, hence embarrassing work. Or if the work is marketable, the authors argue that no publisher would be willing to publish it as long as it stays displayed on the Iowa website.

Perhaps Iowa should modify its open access policy by adding that the work will remain displayed until such a time when a publisher is interested in it; then it will be removed to raise its marketability value.

I have said it elsewhere, and I will say it again: I prefer getting my knowledge about nations and their cultures from creative writers. Art is able to capture aspects of life that the popular media has not learned to capture. I often trust that writers delve deeper (they better if they want to have a lasting impact) into the issues of human nature; they go even deeper than the philosopher. So it was with great pride that I read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s latest interview with Per Contra, which reveals some aspects of Dangarembga’s position on life in contemporary Zimbabwe. Below is an excerpt of the interview:

Dangarembga: Zimbabwe is a very complex issue. I think one of the most common misconceptions is that everything would work out in my country if President Mugabe were removed from office. This is a frighteningly simplistic and reductionist way of looking at a problem that has historical antecedents stretching back over a century. It is very unfortunate that some of our major opposition parties take this position because I think that such an over-simplification prevents the level of analysis we require to come up with solutions.To be fair to oppositions, though, it does too often seem as though the attainable goals are goals we set against each other. Nevertheless, there are a host of contextual factors that need to be put into the equation, and these contextual factors also include our own Zimbabwean pre-colonial, colonial, and neo-colonial idiosyncracies. These contextual factors determine a lot of people’s behaviours, including those behaviours that perpetrate abusive and repressive systems.

Another misconception in my view is that Zimbabweans are victims of one diabolical plot or another. I believe Zimbabweans are responsible for the current deterioration in the country due to crude egoism and materialism, and an inability to conceptualise and work towards a common national good.

Listen to this: “Crude egoism and materialism, and an inability to conceptualize and work towards a common national good.” Vaudze, mwana wamai! This is the dreadful question Valerie Tagwira raises as well towards the end of Uncertainty of Hope, when the narrator wonders whether the country will ever be able to return to a normal state even after the present situation has settled.

The Zimbabwean’s “inability to conceptualize and work towards  a common national good” may even translate to the inability to work towards a common “diasporic good” that seems evident out here. The only time we seem to have a serious natonal interest while abroad is when we do the materialistic Zim Expo chaos often controlled by the Western Unions and whatever other interests; and what’s up with the Miss Canada-Zimbabwe, Miss Britain-Zimbabwe and Miss USA-Zimbabwe craze that takes away from us focusing on issues that matter? Ah, at least we get to kick soccer balls and show off our diasporic acquistions at such gatherings!

Back to Dangarembga. Often very quiet in the literary world (Does she even do book signings?) she surfaces once in a while either with a new novel or the occasional interview, but when she does so, expect a lot of sense to come out her.  Her upcoming novel Bira seems promising, and a reader who will acquire all three of the books in the trilogy would have gotten quite a  treat.

 

When I read Thomas Hardy at a rural secondary school in Zimbabwe, my teachers expected me to relate to the characters, to understand them as part my reality in life. Of course, we were aware that reading these books was a way to travel to worlds far away from ours, but then by the time we finished reading them, we had been made to believe that they talked about our lives. One way in which we related to the characters was through their rural or semi-rural settings (especially Far From the Madding Crowd with its farmlands and plains); our imaginations were supposed to travel far in order to see near; thus, the crackling of embers in our fireplaces would communicate with the stark countryside realism of Hardy’s Dorset. Relating to these strange, but familiar stories opened in us the desire to read and relate that would see me write compositions set in London or New York even though I had not even visited my nearby Zvishavane town.  Such  explorations of foreign but familiar landscapes were even compounded by the fact that later in secondary school we would act Julius Caeser to audiences of proud mothers and grandmothers, to grinning and nodding fathers and grandfathers under a huge, ageless Muunga tree at the school.

But what is the point of all this?

Somehow I came to a world whose reality was that there were literatures one was supposed to read and familiarize with, literatures with strange characters that were meant to typify (without question) the universality of the human condition, characters that defied the label of otherness. What am I saying? I witnessed in this world the distribution of a few literatures presented as the quintessence of everything literary, then later was made to taste and finally accept literatures that were fittingly (and flitingly) other. These literatures, the other, the offshoots of the canonical, these were the literatures that came later when we  at the university, handled by junior professors and adjuncts whose motive seemed to squeeze all the eurocentricism out of us,  only to be shelved as transitory once reached upper division, where we found the tenured faculty smiling out reminders  that only the canonical would take us far (to Oxford where even Marechera with his constricted otherness had been a literature student). No wonder bright students who had for two years been singing Chinweizu’s afrocentricity abandoned Achebe again and exhumed Hamlet. Oh, what a moment that was, a moment to relate again, a moment to write theses that would knock on the doors of Harvard, Oslo, Zurich (at least a few of us left that early, before the mass detachment from the familiar and the desperate attachment to the unfamiliar pursued Zimbabwe).

Now, I have had dreams about teaching Things Fall Apart, Nervous Conditions, or Uncertainty of Hope without so much as cringe at the thought of defamiliarizing my audience from their familiar landscapes. And where I have dared turn dream to reality, I have done a damn good job of helping readers see the familiar in the unfamiliar without, however, seducing them into thinking the unfamiliar is the other to whom they cannot relate; rather, I have sought to help them see a balance between their familiar landscapes and the not-so-unfamiliar, not-even-other, worlds of Dangarembga, Arundhati Roy, Achebe, Ngugi, Valerie Tagwira, and even D.H. Lawrence.

Some readers come to the world of works like Things Fall Apart only when they are getting ready to travel to an African country. You see them at Borders, or Barnes & Noble asking for a novel that would best give an understanding of Africa, and the flattered bookseller (often book browsers believe they know what they are looking for, so if they approach you, you feel distinct or bothered, but definitely flattered) often takes them to Things Fall Apart.

“Thank you so much for this. I want to know what I’m getting myself into before I go. Have you been to Africa?” the reader might say.

“Me? Africa? I haven’t even been to Modesto. But this is a book most prospective travelors to Africa buy,” says the bookseller, whose eye lights when he remembers another title, which is hard to get but happens to have been special-ordered for the store because of an event. ” You can also find House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera interesting.”

“House of Hunger? It talks about Africa too?” asked the reader.

Dah, thinks the bookseller, who walks the customer to the shelf. Indeed, the book also talks about Africa. So if one looks hard, one might find quite a few books about Africa, but today’s budget will only allow the purchase of one book.

“So which one would you recommend, if someone is only looking to buy one?”

“Things Fall Apart for sure; that’s the one most people say is the best representation of Africa.”

Deal. The reader walks to the cash register. She more places to stop by before finalizing plans for the trip.

The scenario demonstrates one of a few cases where readers willingly enter the world of another literature with the intention to understand how a different society works. Often, such misinformed self-emersion tend to disappoint as anyone who had read Things Fall Apart lately will attest to the fact that it is not be best tool to give you a “clear picture” of Africa today. These readers will encounter a world of the 1800 hundreds and imagine it as today’s Nigeria, only to be disappointed, or uplifted, when they reach Lagos one day; that is, if the touristic reader was travelling to Nigeria; most of these readers who are encouraged to read Things Fall Apart by their travel advisors are often visiting countries like Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and sometimes Zimbabwe.

My point then?

Readers of world literature (and there is no other literature) must be willing (as long as they know they are willing) to enter the world of literature to relate and live. Readers come in different shapes and convictions, and there are those who have to make reading literature their purpose on earth through the attainment of literature degrees and certificates; these have not excuse but to understand (as long as they are aware they understand) the principle upon which literature is anchored: the willingness to read and relate, realizing that in order to relate, they have to be intact selves.

Not too long ago (in January), I joined a few African writers in expression our dissatisfaction with a publisher’s reference to Africa as a country in the “Foreword” of an anthology of stories by African authors. The publisher (Author-Me.com) and the editor (Winona Rasheed) apologized for the error and promised to reissue the books with corrections. Still, both Author-Me and Rasheed, in their correspondence, managed to throw in the word “nation” in reference to all of Africa, and we left it at that; at least two publications were going to be corrected.

Since then, I have somehow been carrying out these internal debates, thinking about the history of Africa, thinking that perhaps Winona Rasheed does not (deep down) care so much about the imperialistic demarcations that led to the Africa map as we know it today; that somewhere in the discourse on Africa, does an argument by an Africa author defending the state of Africa as a continent end up self-defeating when one considers the made-up, often divisive and conflict-infested boundaries imposed by outsiders on Africa? Anyway, that Authorme-Rasheed incident left me thinking and searching for clues as to how this argument may be made to make sense; I usually seek clues in literature first.

And Ernest Hemingway, a writer I have always not had time to read, is no help.  Listen to him in ”The Snows of Kilimanjaro”:

“I love it. I’ve loved Africa… I’ve loved the country.”

“I love it too.”

Do I hear someone saying: So?

Well, “All these years I’ve thought Hemingway was not Rider Haggard.” I can’t bring in Joseph Conrad yet; I’m still entranced by that well-crafted nightmare  “Heart of Darkness.”  

But wait until I speed through Green Hills of Africa!

Valerie Tagwira’s first novel, Uncertainty of Hope, has won the NAMA award for best fiction. The awards ceremony, held on February 13 at the 7 Arts Theatre in Harare, Zimbabwe brought together seasoned and new artists.

The nominees of Outstanding Fiction Book were: White Man Crawling - John EppelThe Uncertainty of Hope - Valerie Tagwira

Tears of Water - Christopher Gwata

Valerie Tagwira has touched the hearts of many readers worldwide with her first novel, which has, to use Joyce Carol Oates’s terms, provoked, disturbed, and aroused our emotions about life in contemporary Zimbabwe. Some readers have begun to request that the author start work on a sequel.

VALERIE TAGWIRA TALKS ABOUT THE AWARD

Sigauke: What does this award mean to you, considering that this recognition of your work has come this early into your career?

Tagwira: The award means that The Uncertainty of Hope is being accepted and recognised as an outstanding work of literature. I am pleased and I feel honoured.

I hope that receiving this award will translate into wider readership and distribution. This is important to me because when I set out to write The Uncertainty of Hope, my aim was to highlight a host of issues that affect women and their families in the political, social and economic climate that is prevailing in
Zimbabwe. I also wanted to show how decisions that are made at the top by the authorities can sometimes work against the interests of the ordinary man, woman and child. Hopefully, this award means that the message which drives The Uncertainty of Hope will reach a much wider audience. Also,this award is symbolic to me as a victory for the women who live under very difficult conditions,like the ones around whom The Uncertainty of Hope is centred; women who wake up at 3am and go to bed at midnight, doing back-breaking work just to keep their families fed.

Sigauke: Some readers have shown interest in reading a sequel. Do you think there is a possibility of extending the story into a sequel?

Tagwira: I don’t think I will write a sequel. However, there are themes that I started exploring in The Uncertainty of Hope that I would like to pick up and develop further. There are also characters that I would like to look at again and see if I can tell their stories from another angle.

Sigauke: Although you lead a busy life as a medical doctor, you have extended the scope of your art to include short stories (and poetry). Do you see this trend growing? What can the readers expect from you next?

Tagwira: I am going to continue writing. With the short stories for example, one has been featured in the Dec/Jan 2008 volume of African Writing Online. Another is going to appear in a 2008 anthology by Weaver Press, and I have other short stories that are in various stages of completion.I am also going to keep writing poetry but I am not sure how much of it I will be submitting anywhere because it is the most personal form of writing that I am doing at present.

[Originally published at Munyori Poetry Journal]

Question: Your persona in “Child of the Streets” presents a very interesting angle, all alone and lost among thousands of other city dwellers. Does he perhaps represent your own exile?

Zvisinei Sandi’s Answer: Giggs tends to look rather like a mental image, doesn’t he? Almost like the majestic bull with the evil leprechaun sitting on it’s back. But Giggs is a real person – a lonely, homeless teenager, strong and full of promise, but wasted among Harare’s rubbish pits. I met him a few years ago while interviewing homeless people for my novel, Vagrant Souls. We sat and talked, shared my packed lunch, I gave him the few Zim dollars in my purse, and then he walked away. I never saw him again. “Child of the Streets” is a mixture of what he told me, and the impression I had of him. On whether he reminds me of my own exile… Yes, he does. Rather poignantly.

[Appearing in Munyori Poetry Journal on February 15].

“My name is Winona Rasheed, and I am asking that you please except my sincere apology in referring to Africa as a country instead of the continent that it is. This anthology of African writers will be revised so that it refers to Africa as a continent.”

These words from Winona Rasheed came a few hours after the owner of Author-Me.com, Bruce Cook, left statement on Wordsbody stating that reprints of the Africa anthology containing the error would reflect the correct representation of Africa as a continent. Author-me.com’s apology was timely, as discussions of the error was beginning to spread all over blogosphere, with some speculating that the use of the words may have been poetic, a special use of the word that deviates from convention, an invention; besides, isn’t the word “continent” itself just a made-up signifier, which bears no inherent relationship to the signified?

But, as readers of Wordsbody had inferred, the use of the word was indeed erroneous: “It was not my intentions to offend anyone with my mention of Africa.” Rasheed added, “Regardless of the error, country versus continent, it does not take away from our writers, or any human being who has literary talent.”

In her long statement, Winona Rasheed restated Bruce Cook’s argument that the error does not take away from the value of the work Author-Me-com is doing to promote African writers:
“These books aren’t about Winona Rasheed. These books even with the error in Africa’s description are about the heart of Africa and its people. It is about the talented artists who are making a name for themselves; and yes, I am proud to be able to help them accomplish this goal.”

A passionate promoter of writings from Africa, Rasheed believes that the writers have to be given a chance to showcase their works, even though Africa has many problems. Rasheed wrote, “Would anyone say that Africa is a nation without conflict and turmoil?”

Perhaps someone might argue that such a nation (whatever the word means) does not exist, or, in the interest of artistic promotion, accept the apology and pretend not to have noticed the slipping in of the word “nation.”

The next issue of Munyori will showcase works by these ten poets: Zvisinei Sandi, Prince Mensah, Tim Kahl, Shilla Mutamba, Carol Lyn Grellas, Jerry Barrow, Tad Richard, Jason Viscanti, Gary Beck, and Gu Xie. Three new interviews will feature Zvisinei Sandi, Prince Mensah, and Tim Kahl. As always, Munyori welcomes essays and book reviews.

The owner and publisher of Author-Me-com, Bruce Cook, has claimed primary responsibility for his company’s reference to Africa as a country. In a letter to Wordsbody, the blogger who first exposed this error, Cook said, “I agree that this is quite serious, although I imagine that similar errors occur with many who have not had the opportunity to visit a distant country.”

Author-Me.com has been instrumental in promoting budding writers from African countries, including such award-winning authors as Monica Arac de Nyeko of Uganda and others. Cook told the Nigerian Vanguard in January 2008 that helping African writers was a dream come true for him since he had always wanted to provide a forum for the talent Africa had to offer. So to have his managing editor, Winona Rasheed, make this error must have come as a shock.

“Please permit me to speak in Winona’s behalf here, for I read your blog as an unfair personal bashing of her, with complete failure to recognize her work, ” wrote Cook , adding, “She has worked for author-me.com for over 4 years and has freely (no compensation) devoted at least 20 hours a week to helping African writers and managing an international crew of editors. I believe that judging her person by this one error is unfair.” He admitted that he did not intend, through his defence of Winona Rasheed, to “minimize the importance of the error”, but he acknowledged that “ignorance of Africa and its situation is so prevalent in the USA that it distresses anyone who cares.”

In an effort to address this issue, Bruce Cook has promised to re-issue the books with corrections. “Regretfully, with a book, the issues already sold will contain the error,” he wrote.

Cook has asked Wordsbody and everyone who criticized Rasheed for this error to give her “the credit she deserves for working so hard in behalf of African writers, who deserve to have much greater opportunities in the literary world.”

Wordsbody, clarifying that the attack was not on Rasheed as a person as it was on the mistake, has welcomed Cook’s statement as ” an acceptable way forward on this matter.”

The error appeared in the forewords of the anthologies Africa 2007 and 2008.

When Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart 50 years ago, he did not have any idea that the novel would gain the influence that has made it a towering influence in African literature. The novel has sold over 11 million copies worldwide and has been translated in over a dozen languages. Considered by many a rich introduction to African literature, the novel has touched the lives of many worldwide.

Peter Monaghan, a correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education  covered the event marking the 50th Anniversary in New York City.  Achebe is reported to have said:  “I was alone in my room, scribbling away, and if nobody had paid any attention at all to me, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised.”

“Things Fall Apart does not idealize Nigerians; far from it. In Okonkwo, for example, Achebe depicts courage and nobility but also ignorance and cruelty. The mighty Okonkwo beats his wives and kills a child. Fellow villagers leave twin infants in the bush to die because twins are considered evil, and mutilate the bodies of dead children so that their ogbanje, or spirits, do not return to torment their mothers again,” Monoghan writes.