Article

Narrative Moment and Self-Anthropologizing Discourse
Author(s): Amatoritsero Ede

Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Fall 2015), pp. 112-129
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.46.3.112
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Narrative Moment and
Self-Anthropologizing Discourse
AMATORITSERO EDE
Carleton University
esulaalu@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
After the decline of the “writing back” paradigm as a global exchange value
in African literature in the 1970s and 1980s, the metropolitan circulation of
new African writing has increasingly depended on an unconscious demand
by transnational publishers for that old and habitual discursive idea of
Africa as a negative spectacle, in spite of the idea of the modern. Some new
African writing responds to a resurgent metropolitan market demand for
an exotic Africa through an investment in a self-anthropologizing rhetorical
style, thereby succumbing to millennial stereotypes about the “dark conti-
nent.” However, even while such texts ironically appear to “self-demonize,”
they achieve literary agency and consecration in their responses. This leads
to a certain, if minor, rearrangement of the power dynamic within global
literary canon formation—even if an ambivalent political position in the
new writer is also a simultaneous result.
INTRODUCTION
T
he modern emergence of African literature in the wake of European colonial-
ism on the continent has resulted in the subordination of Africa’s “literary
space” (Casanova 13) and its cultural production to global loci of cultural
and print capital such as London, Paris, New York, Frankfurt, Brussels, and so on
(Ibid. 127, 164).1 As a consequence, African writing constitutes a minor literature
(Ibid. 175) that is “dominated” by metropolitan institutional validating protocols
and mechanisms (Casanova 83; Deleuze, Guattari, and Maclean; JanMohammed
and Lloyd). These are overseen by Western prize-awarding bodies and critical
and transnational publishing industries. Graham Huggan refers to those cultural
valuing bodies as “neocolonial market forces” in his seminal study of the effect of
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Fall 2015)
AM ATORITSERO EDE 113
northern market demands on literary production in the Global South, Postcolonial

Exotic: Marketing the Margins (viii; see also English 298).
While globalizing processes have created a market for postcolonial literature,
African writing subsists in the margins from which contemporary writers try to
emerge by fashioning their work to satisfy metropolitan market values. This is
understandable, considering that “postcolonial products function, at least in part,
as cultural commodities that move back and forth within an economy regulated
largely by Western metropolitan demand” (Huggan 30). However, and in reem-
phasizing Huggan’s cautionary notes, it would be simplistic to subordinate the
contemporary African writers’ agency to the whims of the global market and
metropolitan consumption alone. African writers’ literary negotiation of the global
cultural economy proceeds with an awareness of colonial historical and cultural
dependency and the limitations it foists on them. Some members of the previous
two generations of writers, like Obi Egbuna, Atukwei Okai, and Kole Omotosho,
have even protested the overwhelming Western institutional control over their
craft (Ibid. 35–36).
However, contemporary African writers, now commonly referred to as the
“third generation,” are ever more obliged to the metropolis.2 “Third generation”
is a critical rubric that has come to separate that group of contemporary intel-
lectuals from the previous two based on a historical demarcation of colonialism,
which these new writers never witnessed or experienced directly (Adesanmi
and Dunton, “Colonialism” 270). Nevertheless, the effects of colonialism are
culturally pervasive in the present, given that Western literary patronage has
become “a means of sustaining less overtly and directly the old patterns of impe-
rial control over symbolic economies and hence over [African] cultural practice
itself” (English 298). That is to be expected, since the transnational institutional
and market limitations (Peterson) imposed on the production of new African
literature derive from the fact that it is a modern form “created by [Western]
publishing, pedagogical and critical practices” (Julien 685). It is largely dependent
on European semiotics and metropolitan technological processes and readership
for its self-constitution.3
New writers are “contemporary” because they do not “write back” to the
West in the classic postcolonial studies’ sense, in which most first and second
generation writers do or did. They are also stylistically positioned at a temporal
distance from the thematic and ideological concerns of foundational modern Afri-
can texts. I am concerned here only with recent African works written from 1980
beyond. The 1980s is the decade in which the contemporary generation of African
writers came of age and began to publish (see Raji; Nwosu).
In “The Extroverted African Novel,” Eileen Julien demonstrates the depen-
dence of African writing on, and its appeal for and to, Western patronage through
the concept of “extroversion,” that is, its “condition of being turned outwards” to
target a metropolitan audience (681). She notes, for example, that “[w]hat the liter-
ary and academic establishments both within and beyond African nations dub
the ‘African Novel’ is the canonical, extroverted novel that speaks . . . to a nation’s
‘others’ and elites in terms (which is to say, about issues and in a language and
style) they have come to expect” (683). And what the West has come to expect of
the continent’s writing is that it should, at some level and in spite of modernity
and globalization, signify that age-old monolithic textual construction of Africa
114 RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 3
as a “dark continent” (Hochschild 1; Hammond and Jablow) and as a perpetual

civilizational Other (Miller).
With respect to the foregoing, my concept of “self-anthropologizing” is then
grounded firstly in contemporary African writing’s extroversion—a situation
in which it largely targets a Western reading public—and secondly in its need,
anchored in extroversion, to satisfy popular Western habits of reading Africa. It
is therefore marked by a kind of narratology that bears traces of the traditional
Western anthropological Othering of Africa as uncanny and as a repository of the
“postcolonial exotic,” in Huggan’s terminology. It is for this reason that I focus on
contemporary variations of extroverted African writing in this essay. They still
consciously “tend . . . to explain Africa to the world, especially, to a hegemonic
West” and are “the canonical African [writing] taught in schools on the continent
and abroad” (Julien 695).
The condition of self-anthopologizing is a conscious or unconscious self-
negation due to external existential or ideological pressures—in this case, the
pressure to build a literary career in the face of the negative commodity fetish-
ism that is still attached to African cultural products. According to Olu Oguibe
in The Culture Game, “[a]t the turn of the twenty-first century, the truth remains
that exoticism of the most pristine kind shadows Western perspectives on non-
Western contemporaneity” (xiv). I posit that some contemporary African writers,
in responding to popular metropolitan commodity fetishism, adopt a rhetoric
that aligns with the old-fashioned Western view of Africa as a place of negation
in order, mostly, to subvert power relationships within the metropolitan literary
canon. That behavior is at the heart of a phenomenon that Huggan describes as
“strategic exoticism.”4 It is “the means by which postcolonial writers/thinkers,
working from within exoticist [Western] codes of representation, either manage to
subvert those codes . . . or succeed in redeploying them for the purposes of uncov-
ering differential relations of power” (32). While the first and second generation of
African writers “redeployed” those codes and engaged in an emancipatory politics,
some contemporary writers subvert them to achieve literary consecration only to
become entangled in the dilemma of a complicity in perpetuating the exotic values
they nevertheless succeed in subverting.
It is precisely because of the history of African literature’s dependence on
metropolitan patronage that contemporary writing mostly succumbs to Western
market demands. For example, the category of African writing most privileged in
the metropolis, the African novel, is an admixture of modern and traditional rhe-
torical motifs and tropes sustained and shaped by Western institutional patronage
(Irele 10–11, 23–24). Distinct from other genres such as popular fiction—romances,
thrillers, and writing in African languages—that are targeted at local audiences
(Julien 686–87), the modern African novel is a hybrid commodity, largely address-
ing the metropolitan reader due, among other reasons, to its reactionary formative
impulse in the early twentieth century (Irele; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin).
I proceed by discussing those thematic and narrative strategies adopted
by some new African writers of the third generation in their striving for global
consecration. It is worth repeating that while they never witnessed colonialism,
they are however influenced by the aftermath of the colonial experience—in this
instance, in that African authorship is mediated by a hegemonic neocolonial global
cultural economy that was put in place long before they were born. Through a
close reading of a sample of third generation writing, specifically Beast of No Nation

(Iweala), A Long Way Gone (Beah), and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Caine Prize–winning
short story, “Hitting Budapest,” I will exemplify how some new writers navigate
a heavily contested field of global cultural production by subverting metropolitan
canonical power relations at an ideological cost. A reading of Bulawayo’s 2013
Booker Prize–nominated novel, We Need New Names, against the grain of “Hitting
Budapest,” from which it developed, will consolidate my arguments about self-
anthropologizing discourse.
NARRATIVE MOMENT
With their accompanying evocations of horror and human degradation, the subject
of war and the child soldier phenomenon have become two of the most beloved
themes of strategic exoticism. This is due to the intersection of a phenomenon I
describe as a “narrative moment” with anthropology and stereotyping. It is a self-
anthropologizing discursive space that can be inhabited by the African writer and
Western readership for the different reasons discussed above.
A narrative moment consists of a “narratable” event or events and cultural
phenomena that take on the nature of “events” as well. My concept of narrative
moment (in both singular and plural senses) is simply one made up of a historical
or contemporary event or series of events of large or small import in the public
or private sphere, affecting individuals or collectives, that can inspire (especially)
fictional or factional narratives or even, in a personal sense, the memoir or autobi-
ography. It is important to note that events might have the potential for narration
but that narrative moments yield their promise only when actually textualized or
rendered into other representational forms.5
The hallmark of a narrative moment is its uniqueness or its being rendered
as unique. Such events have nothing to do with ethics; they are simply events,
which are remarkable for ill or good and which press on the creative senses the
need to be recorded as history or transformed as creative text or as artistic or
cinematic work. In a manner of speaking, then, the real is a place suffused with
such moments in different configurations and on periodic bases—daily, monthly,
yearly, or measured in epochs and in millennia.6 When a narrative moment recurs
in a certain pattern within a given geographical space and becomes, through the
force of repetition, the means or only way for (mis)understanding the character
of that space, it exhibits tendencies of a negative anthropology and of stereotyp-
ing. In teasing out the intersection between narrative moment, anthropology, and
stereotype, I will borrow M. M. Bakhtin’s concept of the literary chronotope.
Bakhtin defines a chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and
spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). His space-
time equation, borrowed from Einstein’s relativity theory, apprehends plot and
its duration and/or trajectory—that is, its time of narration—as space and time,
respectively. Based on the relationship of those two categories and depending on
genre, he exemplifies how both categories result in a unified and recurrent nar-
rative and structural coherence in particular types of novels—for example, in the
romance (84–95). In this structuralist way he shows that the essential difference
between all romances or particular novels belonging to a similar genre is only a
sum of the variation in their respective chronotopes; their essential features are
repetitive and predictable. In my understanding of the Western reading of African

narrative moments, that predictability is a form of “stereotyping.”
A narrative moment shares something of “predictability” through the force
of its repetition. But it is only ideology, which renders that repetition as a negative
stereotype in the way that a romance novel beside one hundred other romance
novels with similar chronotypes in different combinations is not stereotypical.
That ideology is the force of an Othering anthropology as it is applied to African
narrative moments. While the phenomenon of the narrative moment is neither geo-
specific nor necessarily limited to Africa, its manifestations on the continent—in
the form of, for example, corrupt governments, wars, or traditional cultural phe-
nomena such as polygamy—have been discursively and unhistorically mapped
in the Western media as Africa-essential.
That African exceptionalism can also be attributed to the continent’s mod-
ern “crisis of consciousness” (Onoge), which is informed by a series of permanent
African narrative moments in the global unconscious in overarching terms—slav-
ery, colonialism, sociopolitical and economic dependency, internal strife, hunger,
poverty, conflict, dictatorships, ad infinitum. These diachronic “narratable” accre-
tions, reinforced by decontextualized Western media representations, lead to a
synchronic Western internalization of Africa as a place of “ravages” (Adesanmi
and Dunton, “Third Generation” 111). As mentioned earlier, it also results in
Western stereotypical reading strategies and a fetishsized mimetic expectation
from contemporary writers.
BEASTS OF NO NATION
Notable works, among others, with the war-cum-child soldier motif are, again,
Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, Ishmeal Beah’s A Long Way Gone, as well
as Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Dulue Mbachu’s War Games, or
Chris Abani’s Song for Night. Although older writers have produced narratives
with the same theme—examples include Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land or the
oeuvre of Nurrudin Farrah—the emphasis here is on a younger generation of
African writers.
Iweala’s work is a sweeping allegory of a war-torn continent with its retinue
of child soldiers. Due to the absence of a specific geographical setting, the whole of
Africa becomes a war zone and is symbolic of conflict—especially war at its most
bestial, considering the ghoulish boy-narrator’s automatic, almost psychopathic
killing instincts. This points to an important characteristic of strategic exoticism,
namely that it is not the subject matter but the manner of narration that performs
stereotypes. Any subject is a legitimate province for art depending on narrative
strategy and discursive trajectory; otherwise, strategic exoticism easily reduces a
particular work to an anthropological window into the “darkest” Africa. The work
under review is one such window.
Beasts of No Nation is comparable to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) in
its demonization of Africa. Without elaborating on his very remarkable observa-
tion that the novel infantilizes the young narrator, Agu, Obi Nwakanma glosses
the former’s imposed inarticulacy (13). But it is a similar phenomenon, namely the
rendering of African characters speechless, as displayed in Conrad’s novel, which
is central to Chinua Achebe’s polemical and much-debated reference to Conrad
as a “bloody racist” and to the latter’s work as a patronizing sentimentality (“An

Image” 9). Beasts of No Nation replicates that African inarticulacy in Agu, who is
given, instead of proper speech, “a violent babble of uncouth sounds” much like
Conrad’s black characters in Heart of Darkness (Conrad 84). Of course it can be
argued that any kind of characterization in the novel serves to foreground the plot
within a fictional context only. Nevertheless the subtext of Beasts of No Nation sug-
gests that its narrative strategy does not merely serve purposes of verisimilitude
in the work, given its ignoring of cultural context.
Nigeria alone has over 250 languages, apart from a universal Pidgin English
spoken by the uneducated mass across indigenous language barriers. In such
a context, Agu’s inarticulacy becomes symbolic of “a return to origins.” This is
because it is not explained by plot or yoked to any important narrative insight
more than to the fact that this boy-soldier is uneducated and even incapable of the
simplest thought in clear pidgin, a language so universal that every child and most
uneducated adults take refuge in it. Nor could Agu speak his own native tongue.
Instead he descends into a Conradian incoherence, alleviated by a “gerunding”: “It
is starting like this . . . I am opening my eyes and there is light all around me coming
into the dark through hole in the roof, crossing like net above my body. Then I am
feeling my body crunched up like one small mouse in the corner when the light is
coming on” (1, emphasis added). All that, even though he says, “I am learning how
to read very early in my life from my mother and my father” (24, emphasis added).
And this child-soldier who sings, “Soldier Soldier / Kill Kill Kill. / That is how you
live. / That is how you die” (31), in order to remind himself of his fate, motivate
himself against remorse, does indeed seem to understand the difference between
a verb and a gerund after all. Iweala interrupts the characterization of Agu as an
imbecile and breaks away from narrative consistence in reverting to almost proper
English in “that is how you live / that is how you die” (Ibid.) It is clear that this
character is a sensationalized caricature, projecting the Western stereotype of a
barbaric continent of brutish child soldiers. Agu’s journey through life is much
like that of Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, traveling up the course of the Congo River
through unmediated nightmarish human barbarity.
Like other narratives of child soldiering, such as Abani’s Song for Night, with
no clearly identifiable geographical setting, Beast of No Nation directly allegorizes
Africa generally as a continent principally of child-soldiers and of war and pesti-
lence, of beasts; a good selling point for Western consumers of the dark continent.7
The incessant brutality in this allegory exists for its own sake. The main character,
a child-soldier, is not developed beyond his personification of a figure out of Dante
Alighieri’s hell. All over, it is “the horror, the horror!” (Conrad 147).
A LONG WAY GONE

Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone is ostensibly the true account of a very recent
and important narrative moment in the African socious—the gruesome Sierra
Leonean civil war of 1991 to 2002. The memoir recounts the wartime encounters
and travails of six children between the ages of twelve and thirteen, including the
author-narrator, who are internally displaced and trapped in the Sierra Leonean
civil war. The other boys and Beah are eventually conscripted into the army and
forced to become brutish, drug-crazed boy soldiers and killing machines on the
federal side opposed to the rebels. Eventual liberation through the intervention
of UNICEF and Beah’s relocation to New York forms the concluding strand of this
gruesome story.
The minute detail with which the “horror” of that conflict is narrated dis-
plays a feat of perfect recall incredible in a child-witness—and especially one who
largely experienced the conflict in a constantly drugged and presumably trauma-
tized and mind-numbed state. At the beginning of the story, Beah and his friends
trek across a village toward a recently rebel-sacked Mogbwemo, his homestead,
with the hope of finding dislocated family members. They encounter refugees
fleeing Mogbwemo. He recounts:
more people passed through the village. One man carried his dead son. He
thought the boy was still alive. The father was covered with his son’s blood, and
as he ran he kept saying, “I will get you to the hospital, my boy, and everything
will be fine.” . . . A group of men and women who had been pierced by stray
bullets came running next. The skin that hung from their bodies still contained
fresh blood. Some of them didn’t notice that they were wounded until they
stopped and people pointed to their wounds. Some fainted or vomited. (13)
The above “realistic” details are succeeded by a dream sequence deploying the
same kind of powerful and emotive language a few pages along: “I am pushing
a rusty wheelbarrow in a town where the air smells of blood and burnt flesh. The
breeze brings the faint cries of those whose last breaths are leaving their mangled
bodies. I walk past them. Their arms and legs are missing; their intestines spill
out through the bullet holes in their stomachs; brain matter comes out of their
noses and ears” (18).
It is important to consider for a moment that the narration in A Long Way Gone
is supposed to draw from actual events. However, the dream-language proffered
above is the same deployed for real events, as exemplified previously. There is no
difference between fantasy and reality or between fiction and facts. Furthermore,
it is difficult in the first place to imagine that children would run toward a war
front from which adults are fleeing (10, 27). Narrative accuracy is further com-
promised by an account describing the mayhem on the heels of fleeing refugees:
“. . . a Volkswagen roared in the distance and all the people walking on the road
ran into the nearby bushes. We ran too, but didn’t go that far. . . . As we, and the
others, emerged from the bushes, we saw a man run from the driver’s seat to the
side-walk, where he vomited blood” (12). While the compound word “side-walk”
would be accurate in describing a road in a large and urban city, such diction is an
exaggeration when applied to tracks, clearings, or footpaths in a forested village,
namely “Kabati, grandmother’s village” in this instance (Ibid.). The instability of
A Long Way Gone as a text is further corroborated by its problem of chronology.
The narrator notes, “the first time that I was touched by war I was twelve. It was
in January of 1993” (6). However, eyewitness accounts suggest, according to Peter
Wilson, that “Beah was in school in 1993 and 1994, when he claims to have been
a refugee and a child soldier” (par. 2). This “fiction” was first noted in a series of
journalistic exposés in the January 2008 edition of The Austalian, one year after the
work was published as a memoir.8
A Long Way Gone is clearly a strategic exotic work promoting an image of

warring Africa made of “Kalashnikov kids” (Faulkner 494).9 Its semblance of
verisimilitude is underwritten by the usual Western media representation of the
continent as a place “populated by irrationally violent and uncivilised peoples”
(Bau 23). This view aids in that media’s “perpetuation of racist myths about Africa
and . . . [in its] concealment of international roles in sustaining conflicts occurring
there” (Ibid.). Deploying hyperbole in language, style, and tone, A Long Way Gone,
according to Keen, is a sensational and self-anthropologizing work unconsciously
promoting metropolitan theories about “the new barbarism” (qtd. in Bau 23). The
work has sold close to one million copies; its author is consecrated among Western
literary establishments as the poster boy for child soldiers despite his controversial
claims.
War and child soldier narratives have become so stereotypical and universal
in the Western imaginary that an anthology of African writing published in the
USA in 2009 was titled Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary
African Writing (Spillman). In celebration of an Africa of ravages, its two defining
substantives (“Gods” and “Soldiers”) symbolize religious irrationality and the
barbarity of war, respectively. The title is exaggerated, anthropologizing, and
ironic, if only because none of the writings in the anthology—but for an excerpt
from Half of a Yellow Sun—is about religion (“Gods”) or war and (child) soldiers.
That Penguin anthology is a collocation of writing by visible older writers
and acclaimed or promising younger ones and does not really need the stereotypes
inherent in its title to market it. Nevertheless, habits of representation and patterns
of the consumption of an exotic Africa in the West have clearly taken over. This is
emphasized by a disorganized structural organization in which much older writ-
ers, like Achebe or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, are juxtaposed with emergent ones in a
work described as “contemporary.” Moreover, this work has no definitive central
organizing rubric in terms of theme, geography, or genre. It is a haphazard selec-
tion of writings from the essay genre to short fiction. What is remarkable about
Gods and Soldiers, edited by someone who is not a trained critic or a specialist
“Africanist,” is that it makes expert claims in its introduction and in its packaging.
In the process, that anthology represents just another allegory recelebrating the
frozen image of a primordial Africa in the Western imagination. Its anthropologi-
cal imperatives become a genuflection to the metropolitan literary establishments’
market requirements for “authentic” African literature.
Narratives about war are often symptoms and inflections of the anthropolog-
ical discursive space inaugurated and maintained by African narrative moments
and their equally sensational representation in the Western media (Kanneh 31).
That discursive space is the reason why some new African writers focalize African
conflicts in a sensational manner.
“HITTING BUDAPEST”
NoViolet Bulawayo’s Caine Prize–wining short story “Hitting Budapest” exem-
plifies the centrality of sensational rhetoric in strategic exotic self-anthropol-
ogizing texts. Work like this has resulted in informal public discussions on
social media about new writers’ ambivalent relationship to the African continent.
Commentators in opposing camps quarrel over whether new literary works are
merely realistic fictional “documentations” of the “unpleasant” facts of everyday
life in Africa, or simply a philistinic ideological conformity to Western stereotypes
of the continent. The latter view is often and most stridently the general consen-
sus. The literary commentator Ikhide Ikheloa is a tireless proponent of that view.
In the context of the annual, heavily contested, and already institutional British
Caine Prize for African Writing, he considers new African writers’ ideological
self-positioning in their work as a betrayal of the continent. His conclusion, in a
review of the 2011 competition, is that “[t]hey [the new writers] are viewing Africa
through a very narrow prism, all in a bid to win the Caine Prize” (“How Not to
Write About Africa”).10
The “narrow prism” Ikheloa refers to is those Western stereotypes, which
new African writing seems to incessantly project every Caine Prize award sea-
son. His essay echoes and alludes to a similar commentary, “How to Write About
Africa,” by Binyanvanga Wainaina published much earlier in 2005 in the British
magazine Granta. Although Wainaina is himself a Caine Prize laureate, he is mor-
ally positioned to launch such a critique since his award-winning short story, “Dis-
covering Home,” cannot be said to be self-anthropologizing in terms of its motifs,
tropes, and narrative approach. “Discovering Home” is the story of a symbolic
self-discovery couched as an internal exile’s literal physical journey across Africa
toward his roots. It is an ideological exception to the general self-anthropologizing
tendency of some Caine Prize–winning fiction. However, the story’s wealth of
sociological facts, its setting of dusty, rugged cityscapes, and its traditional realism
might elicit an exotic Western reading of it. This is because self-anthropologizing
can exist independently of the contemporary African writer’s intentions due to
the discourse of narrative moments.
The postcolonial authorial dilemmas involved in strategic exoticism are
complicated by the question of metropolitan readership as an antiquated inter-
pretive matrix relying on dated but persistent stereotypes about Africa in the
Western popular imagination. As Frederic Jameson rightly observes concerning
metropolitan audiences’ response to familiar and yet strange “third world” texts,
Western readers’ tastes have been formed by “our own [Western] modernisms.”
In such a case African literature is likely to “come before us, not immediately, but
as though already-read” (Jameson 66) through the lenses of those Western mod-
ernist narratives that, in the past, (in)famously misrepresented the Other (Said).
Self-anthropologizing therefore exists at the intersection between postcolonial
authorship and metropolitan readership. For example, as he journeys across the
African landscape, Wainana’s protagonist in “Discovering Home” remarks that:
[t]here is a tradition amongst Masai, that women are released from all domestic
duties a few months after giving birth. The women are allowed to take over the
land and claim to any lovers that they choose. For some reason I don’t quite
understand, this all happens at a particular season—and this season begins
today. I have been warned to keep away from any bands of women wandering
about.
The “anthropologically” suggestive detail of local color in the passage above is

amenable to exoticizing metropolitan interpretation.
“How to Write About Africa,” the Wainaina essay referred to previously, is a

satire on an age-old and still contemporaneous negative Western image and media
representation of Africa. In a tongue-in-cheek manner he addresses the ideological
fixity of the average Western tourist/commentator and advises the imaginary for-
eign chronicler on Africa to “[e]stablish early on that your liberalism is impeccable,
and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love
with the place and can’t live without her.”11 One could say that Ikheloa’s approach
critiques the new African writers’ “complicity” with Wainaina’s foreign chronicler.
According to the former, “The creation of a prize for ‘African writing’ may have
created [sic] the unintended effect of breeding writers willing to stereotype Africa
for glory” (par. 1).
The new African writer’s self-anthropologizing is so formulaic that Ikheloa
could easily predict the winner out of five short-listed stories for 2011, ahead of
the award announcement: “Medalie may not get the Caine Prize. His story is not
African enough. No rapists, no murderers, no poverty. . . . Bulawayo would be my
pick for the prize. She sure can write, unfortunately her muse insists on sniffing
around Africa’s sewers” (par. 4). And indeed, NoViolet Bulawayo did go on to win
the 2011 Caine Prize. This is because, literary quality apart, her story is the most
typically self-anthropologizing of the entries. “Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo
has a fly-ridden piece, Hitting Budapest [sic], about a roaming band of urchins, one
of them impregnated by her grandfather—at age ten” (Ikheola, “How Not,” par. 3).
Although incest is imaginable in the domestic realm, its occurrence would
nevertheless be very unnatural and occasioned by unique contexts deriving from
psychological or psychoanalytic dysfunction (Freud). In her fictional world Bula-
wayo does not provide a context for that curious incidence of incest, the result
of which, apart from being uncanny, is the impregnation of a ten-year-old child,
Chipo. As the street urchins—and the narration—get on their way, all we learn is
the sensational declaration, “Chipo, . . . used to outrun everybody in Paradise but
not anymore because her grandfather made her pregnant” (“Hitting Budapest,”
par. 3). While the narrative economy of “Hitting Budapest” is intrinsic to its aes-
thetic efficacy, this astringent over-contraction could easily result in textual insta-
bility. That could render the work amenable to being interpreted as factual through
a Western imaginary, which reads African fiction as mirrors of the continent in
what Huggan and Ato Quayson have suggested to be an anthropological one-to-
one correspondence between text and world (Quayson 2). According to Huggan,
“the anthropological exotic allows for a reading of African literature as the more
or less transparent window onto a richly detailed and culturally specific, but still
somehow homogeneous—and of course readily marketable—African world” (37).
It is in this way that the stereotypes about the continent are perpetuated through
literary texts.
After winning the Caine Prize with “Hitting Budapest,” Bulawayo has gone
on to expand that original short story into a full-blown novel made up of stylisti-
cally and thematically related short stories. They all have a central organizing
theme of African dystopia and the same central characters—Darling, Bastard,
Chipo, Godknows, Stina, Sbho, and (to a lesser extent) Forgiveness. The same
atmosphere of dispossession, impossibility, hopelessness and misery, which sur-
round these urchins of that ironically named shantytown, “Paradise,” is pervasive
throughout. Desire and hungry ambition is initiated in “Hitting Budapest” when
these “wretched of the earth” seek out the allure of “Budapest,” an affluent neigh-
borhood in the outer perimeters of miserable Paradise. The middle-class promise
of Budapest is a metaphor for progress and freedom from want and existential
angst. That promise is symbolically fulfilled when Darling, the protagonist, even-
tually and luckily migrates to her dream country, the United States. She escapes
that Africa of ravages depicted without qualification in We Need New Names to live
with her aunt, Fostalina, in the USA.
The strategic exotic sub-text of “Hitting Budapest” and, indeed, of the novel
that develops out of it is exposed by a subtle but telling detail of literary produc-
tion. The Caine Prize–winning short story originally published in the Boston
Review has the age of the impregnated child, Chipo, as “ten” years old. In the
novel, We Need New Names, her age is revised upward to eleven. Perhaps the raw-
ness and incredulity of a ten-year-old “African” child being impregnated by her
“African” “grandfather” without any narratological justification dawned on the
author. Authorial anxiety is emphasized by the fact that the novel elides the Bos-
ton Review version of an important detail by euphemistically declaring of Chipo
that, “somebody made her pregnant” (We Need New Names 4). Reference to Chipo’s
grandfather is then deferred to later parts of the novel as innuendo.
The authorial self-editing and -erasure referenced above can only be adduced
to the fact that the sensationalizing details in the earlier version of “Hitting Buda-
pest” has achieved its strategic-exotic global consecrating goal by winning the
Caine Prize and launching a literary career and can thereafter be toned down.
This narrative subterfuge is possible because of that shared discursive invest-
ment by some African writers and the metropolitan reader in continental narra-
tive moments of domestic (unjustified in this case) sociopolitical and existential
dysfunction.
In a metafictional double bind, We Need New Names seems to critique stereo-
types about Africa even though it succumbs in its own narrative strategy to those
same stereotypes of the continent one self-anthopologizing story after the other. In
the piece “How They Lived,” a group of immigrants, of which the narrator is one,
is directly confronted with some of the narrative moments lodged permanently—
through media (mis)representation—in American readers’ minds:
And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances and smiled
the shyness of child brides. They said, Africa? We nodded yes. What part of
Africa? We smiled. Is it that part where vultures wait for famished children to
die? We smiled. Where the life expectancy is thirty-five years? We smiled. Is it
there where dissidents shove Ak-47s between women’s legs? We smiled. Where
people run about naked? We smiled. That part where they massacred each
other? We smiled, is it where the old president rigged the election and people
were tortured and killed and a whole bunch of them put in prison and all, there
where they are dying of Cholera—oh my God, yes, we’ve seen your country; it’s
been on the news. (239–40)
CONCLUSION
The most successful and visible of the new generation of anglophone and franco-
phone African writers live in the literary capitals of the world due, more or less, to
the migrational impulse of the 1990s in search of publishing outlets, among other
existential reasons (Garuba xv; Cazenave and Celerier 97). It is therefore the case
that self-anthropolizing discourse is bolstered by an extratextual migrant identity
politics that particular writers deploy as paratexts to hold up the credibility of their
self-anthropologizing fictional creations, on the one hand, and to draw sympathy
to their personal fortunes as exiles, on the other.12 In a manner of speaking, the
fictional, in such cases, spills out of the pages of the text and colors the writer’s
daily life as a professional prop.
The notable appearance of a younger generation of practicing African writers
in Western metropolises inflects the Euro-American critical rubrics for reading
the new works being produced. As the old themes and styles give way to the
new, so do theoretical exertions seek to apprehend the developments. Identity
politics becomes an important paratextual rubric in the reception of new works.
“[D]isplacement, deracination, exile, alienation, and disapora have become the
[Western] discursive categories with which the modalities of being” of the third
generation writer is interpellated (Adesanmi and Dunton, “Third Generation”
106). Since that transitional reading strategy is often not necessarily textual but
literary-historical or extratextual, it insinuates itself to the migrant writer. The
result is that some of these émigré writers “novelize” their own lives and create
personality cults around themselves.
Identity politics might take the form of a cultivated eccentricity, idiosyn-
crasy, and conscious self-positioning, or an assumed political persona sometimes
anchored on, and couched in, pre-exilic and life-threatening real-political terms.14
Some writers insinuate or directly lay claim to outlandish and fantastic tales of
persecution and endangerment by the postcolonial state, consequent on their
“fleeing” into exile.15 Given the all-too-familiar phenomenon of Africa’s wars and
corrupt postcolonial dictator regimes and their repression of freedom of speech,
such tales of persecution often go unquestioned. This is because they confirm a
preconceived image of Africa by Western literary patrons and audiences and make
for brisk book sales. In other words, some of these migrant and exiled writers, in
their self-anthropologizing, do not only “write blackness,” they perform it. While
such performatitivity might take all kinds of unique forms or shapes, its one
unifying characteristic is its bad faith (Sartre). Simply put, some third generation
émigré writers resurrect a historically familiar metropolitan black persona—the
performing “black face,” an indispensable figure of Black internationalist Paris in
the era of early twentieth-century black primitivism.15
The combination of new textualities with self-anthropologizing themes and
sensational narrative strategies, further “haloed” by extratextual identity politics
based on personal tales of dislocation, has potent market value, a potential for
attracting metropolitan prizes and its resultant consecration and canonizing
status. Observers like Ikheloa have wondered aloud at the seeming naivety of
metropolitan audiences or at the new writers’ “calculation.” It should, however,
not be forgotten that these works and actions, and metropolitan reader responses
to them—even if both might seem conscious at some levels—are discursive and
historically determined. While the third generation writer appears to be a native

informant complicit in the demonization of Africa, it is remarkable that his or her
fictional creation is mostly based on real unpleasant facts of the African quotidian,
even when heavily embellished and sensationalized. Moreover it should also be
noted that, due to a “postcolonial amnesia,” the new African writer is ambivalent
as far as ideological commitment to the continent is concerned (Ghandi 4).
The cultural nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s has been overtaken by
lethargy or numbness induced by the failure of the postcolonial state, the com-
prador antics of rogue regimes, and the subsequent fragmentation of the very
idea of nationhood and belonging. Besides, the new writers, in positioning them-
selves as agents within the field of cultural production, are responding to market
forces shaped by the sociopolitical and economic imperatives of postcolonial lack.
Perhaps the ideological problematic of self-anthropologizing texts consists in
their overly simple deployment of verisimilitude without foregrounding fictional
events in surrounding objective sociopolitical and historical contexts. It is, never-
theless, difficult to demand ideological commitment from a generation of writers
that is alienated from its founding history and from the idea of nation. That alien-
ation is complicated by the condition of migrancy and exile, which circumscribes
most successful third generation literary production. “A significant proportion
of [successful] third generation African writers are now located in Euro-America.
Virtually every known producer of Francophone African fiction in the generation
is based in Paris. Nigeria accounts for the highest rate of third generation exile
[from] Anglophone Africa” (Adesanmi and Dunton, “Third Generation” 110). It
is instructive that a good percentage of the new writers now embrace a transna-
tional persona captured in the new-fangled term Afropolitanism.16 I understand
this self-perception to mean “African and cosmopolitan, but more cosmopolitan
than African” (see Mbembe; Eze) and contest the term “African writer” (Adesokan
par. 8, 9–15).
And no matter the seeming naivety of metropolitan audiences, these are very
sophisticated readers, who are simply trapped in millennial media representa-
tions of Africa as “the dark continent.” This is due to an African exceptionalism
in the Western imaginary, which assumes that every piece of African writing,
particularly insofar as it is “dark,” has to be an accurate rather than a fictional or a
“factional” depiction of the postcolony. The existential conditions in those fictional
worlds, exaggerated or not, exist in the metropolis as well in certain degrees; nev-
ertheless a sophisticated reader would understand them as an exception and not
the rule if they were to occur in, say, an American, a British, or a German novel.
Beyond—or precisely because of—foundational anthropological perceptions of
the continent, African exceptionalism has been made possible due to the discourse
of narrative moments.
The larger inference in the above discussion is that most but not all new
(third generation) African writing succumbs to the center’s market demands for
sensationalized narration. However, it must be emphasized that, even while work-
ing within stereotypical requirements for metropolitan canonization, the new
African writer manages to subvert the subordinating literary power dynamics of
the center in three different, mutually reinforcing but conflicting ways. On the
one hand, apparently self-anthropologizing texts actually do perform subversion
in their subtexts, on the other, they consequently rearrange the global canon’s
hierarchies from within. Finally, these texts imbue the new African writer with
literary agency in a highly contested field of global literary production. However,
ideological conflict arises in the sense that, in being globally consecrated, the
third generation, self-anthropologizing writer loses moral and ideological agency.
Whatever the case, new African literature continues to challenge the traditional
global canon just like some postcolonial writing before it. The result is that a new
generation of African writers is being empowered—even if at an ironic and great
ideological price.
NOTES
1. The term print capital echoes Benedict Anderson’s idea of print capitalism. But
the term, as it is used here, is different in the sense that, opposed to cultural capital
or the innate or schooled ability to produce a literary work, print capital is the actual
access to material and human factors of literary production—such as technological
infrastructure as mediated by the figure of the publisher.
2. See Nigerian writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s unabashed New York Times essay
on the complete dependence of new African writers on Western patronage.
3. This dilemma undergirds Huggan’s recalling of another critic’s view on the
matter thus: “[a]s André Lefevere argues . . . , African writers are often caught between
the desire to achieve recognition—and the financial rewards that come with it—with a
wider audience and their awareness of the constraints this might place on their writing
and the ways in which it is received” (35).
4. In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Market Place, Sarah Brouillette’s thesis
is largely in agreement with Huggan’s, namely that Western taste for the exotic dis-
proportionately influences the production of fiction from the Global South, rendering
postcolonial authorship more or less a deliberate and self-conscious act (26).
5. The most remarkable narrative moments on the African continent in recent
times are the bloody civil wars in Rwanda and Liberia. Some of the literary accounts
and life-writing resulting from those events are Eric Irivuzumugabe’s How I Survived
the Rwandan Genocide (2008), Annick Kayitesi’s We Still Exist (2004), and Reverien
Rurangwa’s Genocide (2006). The preceding are witness testimonies. There are antholo-
gies of accounts by perpetrators and victims, such as the trilogy by Jean Hatzfeld: A
Time for Machetes (2008), Into the Quick Life (2008), and The Strategy of Antelopes (2009).
Literary works based on the Rwandan narrative moment include Naomi Benaron’s
Running the Rift (2012) and Uwem Akpan’s short story “My Parents Bedroom” in his
collection Say You Are One of Them (2008). More significant and elaborate fictional works
based on the Rwandan narrative moment are those resulting from the Pan-African
literary workshop “Rwanda: Writing As a Duty of Memory,” which took place in Kigali
in 1998, four years after the genocide. Nine works resulted from the workshop—four
novels, two travel narratives, two essays, and a collection of poetry. The most notable
of these is the novel Murambi: The Book of Bones (2006) by Boubacar Boris Diop. Among
the many texts produced by the Rwandan event are also several comics, graphic nov-
els, and nonfiction works such as that by Romeo Dallaire—The Failure of Humanity in
Rwanda (2003). See Dallaire; Diop and Mukasonga.
6. We can find quick random examples of narrative moments in the World Wars,
in great disasters, or the Jewish holocaust and in public figures whose lives constitute
such moments. Such figures could either be alive or are historical personages who have
had a massive impact in particular spheres—Adolf Hitler, Alexander the Great, Plato,
William Shakespeare, and so on. As an event in contemporary times, the September 11,
2001 attack on the American World Trade Center buildings—the Twin Towers—in New
York constitutes a narrative moment. So do the 2004 Asian tsunamis, which caused so
much destruction and took so many lives. The recent undecided political revolution in
the Middle East, commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring,” is a very good example of
a narrative moment, should it be made the subject of literature, film, art, or any other
form of representation.
7. The irony of such politically self-deprecating “statements” as Beasts of No Nation
is that its author complains of a Western demonization of Africa by the metropolitan
media. Iweala expresses such a complaint in a Washington Post article, “Stop Trying to
Save Africa.”
8. A Long Way Gone’s inconsistencies and contradictions are widely confirmed by
different witnesses, including Beah’s teachers, a fellow “boy soldier,” school records,
a Sierra Leonean priest—father Moses Sao Kailie—who is mentioned in Beah’s narra-
tive, an Australian Priest, and Australian journalists. See Wilson; Rayman; Sherman.
9. While this image is true in part, Africa simply becomes a foil for Western
civilization, which also engaged children in wars in the distant past. Frank Faulkner
avers that “[t]he employment of children in a country’s armed forces is by no means a
twentieth-century phenomenon: history is replete with examples. During the Middle
Ages, young boys were apprenticed as squires to serve knights by under-taking
armouring duties, such as maintaining the knight’s body armour, performing simple
logistical tasks and acting in a general supportive role” (494).
10. This article first appeared in the now defunct Nigerian Next Newspapers in May
2011. It is republished on Ikhide Ikheloa’s online blog. See Ikheloa, “The 2011 Caine
Prize.”
11. See Wainaina, “How to Write About Africa.”
12. For example, Ishmael Beah has created a metropolitan persona of the endan-
gered and brutalized child soldier who was lucky to escape a horrendous fate and death
despite the fictions and fabrications of his story as detailed by journalists and other
participants and eye-witnesses in the same historical event.
13. See Ikheloa’s accusations against Chris Abani in “The Trials of Chris Abani.”
See also Ikheloa, “Chris Abani: Distorting Africa’s History.”
14. Again, the exaggerated claims of Ishmael Beah come to mind. He was forced
into the army as a child soldier for a very short period—about two months—rather
than the several years on which he and his publishers insist.
15. This is exemplified in the symbolic figure of Josephine Baker on the Parisian
stage as a singer and celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s. She embodied an intense French
public obsession with the black body as a racialized and sexualized object of exotic
entertainment. See the chapter “The Black Body” in Lemke.
16. The term Afropolitanism, as a descriptor of the changing self-perception of a
new generation of diasporic Africans as world citizens, first came into use in a 2005 arti-
cle “Bye-Bye Babar” written by Taiye Selasie (as Taiye Tuarkli-Worsonu). This term is
not settled and is hotly debated among writers and cultural commentators in the global
public sphere. While some writers embrace it, some, such as Biyanwanga Wainaina and
Emma Dabiri, have rejected it and still contest its validity as an ideological construct.
See Santana and Dabiri.
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Narrative Moment and Self-Anthropologizing Discourse

Author(s): Amatoritsero Ede

RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Fall 2015)

northern market demands on literary production in the Global South, Postcolonial

as a “dark continent” (Hochschild 1; Hammond and Jablow) and as a perpetual

close reading of a sample of third generation writing, specifically Beast of No Nation

repetitive and predictable. In my understanding of the Western reading of African

as a “bloody racist” and to the latter’s work as a patronizing sentimentality (“An

A LONG WAY GONE

A Long Way Gone is clearly a strategic exotic work promoting an image of

The “anthropologically” suggestive detail of local color in the passage above is

“How to Write About Africa,” the Wainaina essay referred to previously, is a

historically determined. While the third generation writer appears to be a native

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