What Could Be?
Late night thoughts by Derek Workman
(To fully confess from the beginning, it is 11:17pm on a Thursday night in Botswana. Some sundowners with good friends were had — followed by a lone trip to dinner and two more drinks. Any grammtical or spelling errors are blamed on: 1st my dyslexia — 2nd my rush to write this before it escapes me…and perhaps towards the end the drinks.)
(Second confession — Although I am the editor of a African literary magazine. I am not African. I carry an American passport. I come from white parentage. My family moved to Eldoret, Kenya when I was 3 — we left when I was 15. I moved to Botswana when I was 26. I have been here ever since — I am now 36. I am 185cm and currently about 120kgs. Over the last several years I have been told by some african writers, some American academics, all young white Americans here to save Africa that I have no business or right talking about any of this — so feel free to take what follows below with a grain of salt.)
I came home after my night out and settled into read before bed. I had gotten through a large stack of submissions the KR recieved this week so, I went through my “virtual stack” of pleasure reading. (Via Pocket — if you don’t use it you’re truely missing out.) I flicked through and started rereading Pwaangulongii Dauod’s “How to write about Northern Nigeria.” (From BrittlePaper, which if you are reading this you should know already— but is probably the best reading source about the African writing scene.)
The piece is a wonderful echo and regionally focused enhancement of Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to write about Africa”. As I read it — it made me both sad and then angry.
A little over six year go, I wanted to read something that I could not find. I wanted to go somewhere and pick up or go online and find a big publication full of African writing — short stories, poetry, essays and nonfiction pieces. I looked around for about a year and couldn’t find it. (Now I know there were some great publications doing some of this work, Kwani, Saraba, Prufrock, SSDA, the previous mentioned Brittle Paper — to name a few. And since then more have come through including the great Enkare Review, Expound, Jalada. Apologize to those I left out.)
Long story longer…I decided to establish The Kalahari Review. Five year after establishing it — countless hours and thousands of dollars later…it has grown over time into something I am sometimes happy about — for instance this last week we had a great collection of poetry, short fiction, a book review and a great essay. But that is not every week.
It is most of the time, still not what I myself want to read. Not the Africa I see around me. The mission of the KR was from the start — by Africans for Africans. Yet the vast majority of the submissions that come into our inbox everyday follow the exact guidelines that Pwaangulongii Dauod’s and Binyavanga Wainaina’s essays warn against (I.E. The Western Narrative).
The amount of senseless — and frankly nonsensical death I read about everyday…people always say life is cheap in Africa — and according to a lot of African writers it is — they create loads of characters just to kill them in the next 2000–6000 words. Speak nothing of the HIV, waterless villages, sexual assults and other horrors. (Also an astonishing amount of accounts of sexual assult of woman from the woman perspective written by men — this is one of my particular hatreds.)
(Don’t get me started on poetry — I have seen roughly 1,737,383 poems titled “Mother Africa”)
The indulging in stereotypes is just as bad — I can’t begin to go into all the examples.
The most disturbing part is this — the writers bios nearly always read in some varation of the following: “Hi I am ________. I grew up in _(Insert major city)__. I was/am being educated at __(Insert major university)__. I am a__(Doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, nurse, banker, professor…etc)__. Here is my story/poems about a very poor person induring a terrible plight in a far flung village.”
Where are the stories about the people around them…or about them..their famlies…their friends? There are days I would kill for a great story about the agnst of a middle class couple dealing with their jobs, or trying to put their kids in the right schools or just a character piece of them having a date night or maybe their attempt to separate themselves from their famlies lives and morals…etc. (In other words — the things I hear my friends talk about all the time.)
I will admit the KR has been gulity at times of publishing some of these stories. But that is not what it was begun for — it was built under the hope of driving the African narrative forward — allowing it a place to expand. At the moment I don’t know how we do that. There are so many publications now — with great editorial staffs — but we are still having the same contential conversation and then blaming the outside for it. What could be if we started looking around and talking ourselves and our lives?
I want to read better Africa. I want to hear about the rest of it. I am pretty tired of the rest of it.
(There is a strong chance I will regret this in the morning and it will be the death of The KR — but hopefully even if it does it, moves things forward regardless.)
Good night and good luck, D
