It's now more than a year since Faber published the anthology edited by the Nigerian poet Chinweizu, Voices from Twentieth Century Africa, priced at £6.95 for more than 400 pages. The introduction argues that what is usually described as African Literature is in fact a twentieth century appendage to European Literature, produced by those African writers who have digested a European tradition. The true African tradition extends back beyond the European and Hellenic literatures, reaching at least as far as the Egyptian pyramid texts. Academic critics have defined African Literature in a way that not only denies this ancient tradition, but ignores or adopts patronising stances towards the greater part of contemporary African culture which connects with it:-
Eurocentric literary academics, in and outside Africa, have long been prejudiced against oral works; against works in African languages; against works by anonymous authors; against works by and for the non-elite "folk"; against works of "impure" or "applied" literature which address themselves to social issues of the moment. On the other hand, they have a strong prejudice in favour of written works; in favour of works in European languages; in favour of works by named individuals; in favour of works by and for members of an elite; in favour of works of "pure" literature which are said to divorce themselves from "local" and "social" issues and aspire to "universality"; in favour of works which supply material for detached aesthetic contemplation by the isolated scholar; and particularly in favour of works which conform to the aesthetic and thematic criteria of Euromodernism - criteria that embody the anti-popular, anti-scientific, and anti-industrial animus of the Europ-ean Romantic movement of the last two centuries.
Chinweizu indicates his own set of guidlines in choosing the anthology's contents: firstly of any work, it be recognised that "Its production and consumption are acts within the social history of its originating community"; that though works may originate as self-expression, "literary works are an integral part of public conversation"; that a good work of literature is "a moving or memorable utterance which touches the reader or hearer emotionally, intellectually, morally, or aesthetically" - it being the better the more moving or memorable it is; that the core of African Literature is works by Africans for Africans, in African languages; that the Literature of Arab as well as European conquerors and "campfollowers" be excluded; that the emphasis be on "letting the reader into the twentieth-century African conversation about the African experience of life" - therefore works such as fables and epics from the past which still enjoy "a twentieth century African audience" be included, as well as "parables, fables, myths, songs, boasts, satires, dirges, epigrams;" finally, that the anthology only include material which has translated well into English.
The contents are under three main headings: The Arena of Public Affairs, The Local and Intimate Turf, and Fields of Wonder. These are subdivided into sections with titles such as Men and Women, Work and Play, Rulers and Ruled. About half the book is from traditional anonymous sources composed in African languages, the ethnic group with country of origin being given. This poem "The Locust" for instance, is simply ascribed to the Malagasy of Madagascar:
What is a locust?
Its head, a grain of corn; its neck, the hinge of a knife;
Its horns, a bit of thread; its chest is smooth and burnished;
Its body is like a knife-handle;
Its hock, a saw; its spittle, ink;
Its underwings, clothing for the dead.
On the ground - it is laying eggs;
In flight - it is like the clouds.
Approaching the ground, it is rain glittering in the sun;
Lighting on a plant, it becomes a pair of scissors;
Walking, it becomes a razor;
Desolation walks with it.
That's from the third section of the book. From the first comes a "Protest against Councillors" attributed to the Igbo, Nigeria. Translated by Chinweizu himself, it ends thus:-
Government made a promise at the beginning;
If a man in a ditch holds out his hand
A share of government services shall reach his hand.
Enzinihitte, a king among towns, has held out his hand;
A share of government services is now due.
Don't we belong to the party at Enugu?
No big road leads to our market;
No piped water touches our lips.
Alas!
This census count isn't clear to us.
The second main part of the book, The Local and Intimate Turf, includes this from the Acholi of Uganda, translated by Okot p'Bitek:-
The guns of Langalanga
Who fires them?
We fire them, we fire them, we fire them, bang bang;
The guns of Langalanga
Who fires them?
We fire them, we fire them, we fire them, bang bang;
Bang, bang, bang, bang;
Big bang;
Bang, bang, bang, bang,
Big bang.
And this creation myth, "How the World was Created from a Drop of Milk", attributed to the Fulani, from Mali, is again from the third section of the book, Fields of Wonder:-
In the beginning there was a huge drop of milk.
Then Doondari came and he created the stone.
Then the stone created iron;
And iron created fire;
And fire created water;
And water created air.
Then Doondari descended the second time. And he took the five
elements.
And he shaped them into man.
But man was proud.
Then Doondari created blindness and blindness defeated man.
But when blindness became too proud,
Doondari created sleep, and sleep defeated blindness;
But when sleep became too proud,
Doondari created worry, and worry defeated sleep;
But when worry became too proud,
Doondari created death, and death defeated worry;
But when death became too proud,
Doondari descended for the third time,
And he came as Gueno, the eternal one,
And Gueno defeated death.
The prose and poetry does include work attributed to specific authors, some of international reputation such as Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutuola. But of the anonymous traditional prose works, this Bini tale from Nigeria, "Why the Sky is Far Away", is of quotable length and contemporary ecological resonance:
In the beginning, the sky was very close to the earth. In those days men did not have to till the ground, because whenever they felt hungry they simply cut off a piece of the sky and ate it. But the sky grew angry, because often they cut off more than they could eat, and threw the left-overs on the rubbish heap. The sky did not want to be thrown on the rubbish heap, and so he warned men that if they were not more careful in future he would move far away.
For a while everyone paid attention to his warning. But one day a greedy woman cut off an enormous piece of the sky. She ate as much as she could, but was unable to finish it. Frightened, she called her husband, but he too could not finish it. They called the entire village to help, but they could not finish it. In the end they had to throw the remainder on the rubbish heap. Then the sky became very angry indeed, and rose up high above the earth, far beyond the reach of men. And from then on men have had to work for their living.
Voices from Twentieth Century Africa is an important anthology, and Chinweizu's introduction is itself a significant contribution to the debate about who owns Literature, and what it is. Critically it links beyond Africa to a tradition that would include Lukacs and the Tolstoy of What is Art?. Chinweizu is anti- experimental, his views on individual originality being summed up in his own three-liner "Originality?" included in the contents:-
He who must do
Something altogether new
Let him swallow his own head.
He attacks Wole Soyinka, comparing unfavourably two of Soyinka's poems with anonymous traditional pieces showing greater force, clarity and narrative comprehensibility. Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize a year before the introduction was written, is cited as representative of a Nigerian "coterie" of poets who suffer from something called "Hopkins Disease". To unravel fully what this is one has to go to a previous book Chinweizu wrote with Onchuwaka Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Towards the Decolonisation of African Literature (KPI 1985). There "Hopkins Disease" is described as an illness of the Nigerian poetic coterie in which "there is an abundance of such Hopkinsian infelicities as atrocious punctuation, word order deliberately scrambled to produce ambiguities, syntactic jugglery with suppression of auxiliary verbs and articles, the specious and contorted cadences of sprung rhythm, the heavy use of alliterations and assonances within a line, and the cliched use of double and triple barreled neologisms." This is recast in a sneering "seven easy steps" to writing "Hopkins Disease" poetry, the third of which is "Take each line and juggle the word order, breaking as many punctuation and syntactic rules as possible."
Hopkins, a poet who died of the disease typhoid partially induced by overwork, and who died before any of his poetry was ever published and more than a quarter of a century before a book appeared with his name on its cover, is an unlikely candidate for archetype of the Inauthentic. But Chinwiezu's authoritarian identification with the prescriptive punctuation and grammar which Hopkins is supposed to have "broken" is the key to his critical position and choice of the word "disease" itself.
A tradition in criticism, sometimes socialist-realist (though Chinweizu sees Marxism as just another foreign adulteration of African tradition) has it that narrative sequence is the primal building block of literary art, the tone row is that of music, and these are fundamentally connected with universal basic processes of human synaptic function. These processes are "natural" as the art processes presumed to exteriorise them are "natural" and "healthy". Artists who deliberately disrupt these fundamentals tend to be unhealthy artists displaying unhealthy processes.
The crux is a technical matter around which a lot of irrelevant argument often goes on amongst people who don't see the technical matter that divides them. The matter that divides, and has divided much of twentieth century Western Literature, is whether punctuation and syntax are objective aids for the organisation of words into areas of meaning, or are writer-chosen descriptive aids to enunciation and articulation. Whether a colon for instance functions "to divide two sentences where the latter illustrates or elaborates the former", or whether it has the single or additional function of indicating a pause that is longer than a semicolon and longer again than a comma. Sometimes this argument over punctuation masquerades under under titles such as the "cooked" versus the "raw". At this point it is necessary to speak of the American poet Jerome Rothenberg.
Rothenberg is a poet and anthologer whose areas of interest in his anthologies of tribal and oral poetry from the five continents led to his devising the term "ethnopoetics" several decades ago. Despite what some others since connected with the term have done, Rothenberg does not write laid back iterative litanies to pre-industrial landscapes, or poetry of what I have called elsewhere the trout-and-beans-under-the-moon mentality. His explorations are too genuine to be centred on the Lonely Pioneering Male baloney.
In contrast to the anti-experimentalist stance of Chinweizu, Rothenberg writes in his preface to the anthology of North American Indian poetry, Shaking the Pumpkin:-
...the range of the tribal poets was even more impressive if one avoided a closed, European definition of "poem" & worked empirically or by analogy to contemporary, limit-smashing experiments (as with concrete poetry, sound poetry, intermedia, happenings etc.) Since tribal poetry was almost always part of a larger situation (i.e. was truly intermedia), there was no more reason to present the words alone as independent structures than the ritual-events, say, or the pictographs arising from the same source.
Tribal poetry was always part of a wholeness of ritual and event that should not be ignored in its literary presentation, because this would be to misrepresent it as "literary" in a way that it wasn't. From Technicians of the Sacred (A range of poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania) this one example of an arrangement by Rothenberg of an aboriginal fertility cult "ritual event" from Arnhem Land, Australia.
SIGHTINGS: KUNAPIPI
(1st set)
1 The musk of her
red-walled vagina
inviting coitus
2 Her skin soft like fur
3 She is shy at first, but soon they laugh together
4 Laughing-together
Clitoris
Soft-inside-of-the-vagina
5 Removing her pubic cloth
opening
her legs
lying between them &
coming
6 And copulating for a child
7 Fire Fire
Flame Ashes
8 fire sticks &
flames are
flaring
sparks
are flying
9 Urination
Testes
Urination
10 Loincloth
(red)
Loincloth
(white)
Loincloth
(black)
(2nd set)
1 "penis" incisure incisure
penis penis semen
2 Semen white like the mist
3 with penis erect
the kangaroo
moves its buttocks
4 step by step
(she) walks away from coitus
her back to them
5 the catfish swimming
& singing
6 the bullroarer's string
7 The nipples of the young girl's breasts portrude -
& the musk of her vagina -
8 creek
moving
"creek"
9 mist covering
the river
10 cypress branches
cypress cone
seeds of the cone
Rothenberg believes in attempting what he calls "total translation" - "a term I use for translation that takes into account any or all elements of the original beyond the words." He first became interested in the idea during the sixties when attempting translations from the Navajo and Seneca tribes. An essay on the translation process of 1969 puts his position like this:-
The big question, which I was immediately aware of with both poetries, was if & how to handle those elements that weren't translatable literally. As with most Indian poetry, the voice carried many sounds that weren't, strictly speaking, "words". These tended to disappear or be attenuated in translation, as if they weren't really there. But they were there & were at least as important as the words themselves. In both Navajo and Seneca many songs consisted of nothing but those "meaningless" vocables (not free "scat" either but fixed sounds recurring from performance to performance).
Rothenberg, who stayed on a Seneca reservation for two years, learned that such "meaningless" sounds were often the key to a song's structure. The problem was that "..we, as translators & poets, had been taking a rich oral poetry & translating it to be read primarily for meaning, thus denuding it to say the least." This is in contrast to Chinweizu's approach to translation:
...what gets lost in translation tends to be such language-specific features as rhyme, rhythm, assonance and metric patterns which may or may not be reproducible in a language with different resources. On the other hand, much gets conveyed by competent translators, particularly the sense and force of a passage. A good example of this is the spectacular case of the Bible, which has been translated into virtually every language in the world. If what comes across is memorable, felicitous and moving, and if it retains the sense and something of the style of the original, then the result, I believe, is as good as can be had.
Bodied behind this question of translation from one language to another then is that of from language as written to language as spoken: pushing the matter further, from language as spoken to language as thought. This is what that well known linguist Josef Stalin had to say in his Marxism and Some Problems of Linguistics:-
It is said that thoughts arise in the mind of man prior to their being expressed in speech, that they arise without linguistic material, without linguistic integument, in, so to say, a naked form. But that is absolutely wrong. Whatever thoughts arise in the human mind and at whatever moment, they can arise and exist only on the basis of the linguistic material, on the basis of language terms and phrases. Bare thoughts, free of the linguistic material, free of the "natural matter" of language, do not exist. 'Language is the immediate reality of thought' (Marx). The reality of thought is manifested in language.
For Stalin, grammar is "the collection of rules governing the modification of words and their combination into sentences. It is therefore thanks to grammar that it becomes possible for language to invest man's thoughts in a material linguistic tegument." The quoted paragraph tends to an atomistic identification between word and thought, and it is important to examine whether the word "governing " is then slipped in prescriptively: that the laws of nature are therefore not a generative base of potentialities but are what the police - linguistic or otherwise - decide is natural. If the living body is excluded from the equation then the scope for generation is somewhat reduced. Rothenberg is a long way from the thought police in his interview of 1979, replying to a question about what his own poetry tries to challenge:-
I think the challenge of the poetry is the breaking down of the notion of simple truths, the literalness of the word, the notion of fixed command-ments of behaviour and morality sent down from heaven, the notion of an exclusive culture that can dominate another, the divine right of kings and the not so divine rights of the affluent and comfortable, the notion that God is with us and that these divine revelations we hold to be self-evident are equally true for others. The only absolutes for poetry are diversity and change (and the freedom to pursue these): and the only purpose, over the long run, is to raise questions, to raise doubts, to put people into alternative, sometimes uncomfortable situations, to raise questions but not necessarily to answer them, or to jump ahead with other questions, to challenge the most widely held of preconceptions in our culture, that "Western man" is the culmination of the evolutionary human process.
With the last sentiment Chinweizu would agree, if not with what went before. But despite their differences, the kind of largeness of vision in Rothenberg's critical theory Chinweizu shows in his own ideas of the universities transformed:
Imagine that the gates of Africa's universities are thrown open, and that master singers, story-tellers, poets, orators and theatre groups from Africa's villages and towns take over the lecture hall, auditoriums and begin to recite, read and perform in the languages spoken by Africans. Imagine that they are joined by the handful of African story-tellers, poets and drama troupers from within the univ-ersities, who carry on in the languages imposed on Africans by foreign conquerors. Imagine that, in a drawn-out literary festival, they present works commemorating national and continental events; works for social ceremonies like births, weddings, deaths, planting and harvesting; and that, every evening, they entertain and instruct their audiences with plays, fables, epics, adventure stories and tales of all sorts. Imagine that their audiences are drawn from the entire society, including villagers, townsfolk, and campus intellectuals. Imagine also that the best of the works presented are chosen by the votes of the assembled populace, and are then put together into a book.
Voices From Twentieth Century Africa was published a month after the completion in manuscript of the introduction to my own anthology Radical Renfrew. That introduction does not state criteria for inclusion, preferring instead to list the sundry criteria for exclusion that had seen the bulk of the contents ignored for a hundred years. The ideas behind the book's compilation would certainly accord with the Chinweizu of the last paragraph, or the Rothenberg of such statements as "The past is what it is - or was - but it is also something we discover and create through a desire to know what it is to be human, anywhere."
That Rothenberg statement chimes with a quote I added to the dedicatory page of Radical Renfrew then withdrew as upsetting the tone of other material there.The quote is from Frederick Copleston writing about the philosopher Duns Scotus and his use of the word "haeccitas". That word alone says something to me about criteria, the recovery from the past of specific humans revealed in their specificness:-
It is not so easy to understand exactly what this haeccitas or entitatis singularis vel individualis or ultima realitas entis actually is. It is, as we have seen, neither matter nor form nor the composite thing; but it is a positive entity, the final reality of matter, form and the composite thing. A human being, for instance, is this composite being, composed of this matter and this form... it seems to be implied that a thing has haeccitas or "thisness" by the fact that it exists.
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CHINWEIZU: Voices from Twentieth Century Africa Faber 1988; Toward the Decolonisation of African Literature (with O.Jemie & I Madubuike) KPI 1980; JEROME ROTHENBERG: Technicians of the Sacred (A range of poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania) 1968, rev. 1985 California U.P.; Shaking the Pumpkin (traditional poetry of the Indian North Americas) 1971, rev. 1986, Alfred Van der Mark, New York A Big Jewish Book (Poems and other visions of the Jews from tribal times to present) 1971, revised & retitled Exiled in the Word Doubleday 1989; Symposium of the Whole (A Range of Discourses towards an Ethnopoetics) with Diane Rothenberg, 1983 California U.P.; Pre-Faces & other writings (1980), New Selected Poems 1970-85, Khurbn & other poems 1989: each pub. New Directions.
