On the Many Beginnings of African Literature: An Interview with Dr ...

Tag : steel box spring
Dr. Charles Cantalupo, Professor of English Literature, ComparativeLiterature and African Studies at the Pennsylvania StateUniversity, Schuylkill Campus, gave a one-day workshop in Asmara,Eritrea, while he was here to work on a new project: thepublication of a collection of short stories by Eritrean writers inTigrinya, Tigre and Arabic. The workshop took place to commemoratethe 50th anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebes firstbook, Things Fall Apart. Dr. Cantalupo, who is also a writer, apoet and a translator is one of the Organizing Chairs of theAgainst All Odds Conference, African Literatures and Languages intothe 21st Century, which took place in Asmara, January 1-7, 2000. Heaccepted an invitation to talk about the main points of hispresentation and discuss his most recent projects.

Q: Why did you choose that particular subject for yourpresentation?

CC: In 2008 we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of thepublication of Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. It is a hugeachievement  11 million copies sold and translations in 45languages. Achebes novel is often considered a beginning ofAfrican literature, more precisely of modern African literature,which is undeniable in light of the popularity and the high qualityof the novel, written by a young man of 28. But I also wanted tostress in my talk that African literature has many beginnings,similar to the way that human beings can identify many beginningsin their own lives or in the life of a country. Take, for example,Eritrea. Which beginning is to be considered the beginning: 1961,when Awate led the first upraising against the Ethiopian occupiers,or 1991 when Asmara was finally liberated, or the plebiscite in1993, or must we go back to ancient Adulis and the archeologicaldiscoveries that are taking place even now as we speak?

In my presentation I limited myself to five beginnings in Africanliterature, yet also including several beginnings from Eritreanliterature. Of course, there are many more. I began by consideringthe work of Achebe, and then I looked at that of Ngugi wa Thiongo.Next, I discussed the Against All Odds conference, which took placein Asmara in 2000. It was a hugely successful gathering, and itsmost important outcome, the Asmara Declaration on AfricanLanguages and Literature, clearly is a new beginning for Africanliterature. I proceeded to consider more beginnings within anEritrean context: the historic and ancient sites of Segheneyti,Kohaito and the stele of Belew Kelew with its inscriptions, which Itranslate, quite freely I must say, as follows:

The oldest example
Of our language
Inscribes a stele
In a field below.
I translate:

strug l agains al od s wi

Stands out
With the sun
And a quarter moon 
Adulite.
Join here and write.*

The last beginning my workshop focused on was another example fromEritrea. In the last year I have been fortunate to work with mydear colleague, Dr. Ghirmai Negash, on some translations ofEritrean traditional, oral poetry, including the popular ballad, orwhat some have called a mini-epic, Negusse Negusse. Whiletranslating the poem, we eventually came to the conclusion that itcouldnt be more timely since it coincided with the 50thanniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, and the poemand the novel shared the same theme: the passing of an old orderand the fear and wonder over what might take its place. Therefore,we titled our translation, Negusse, Negusse  The World FallsApart.

Q: When talking about the work of Ngugi wa Thiongo, you madereference to several of his concepts that you consider important.One of them is Decolonizing the African mind. Does the Against AllOdds conference adhere to this line of thought?

CC: Against All Odds follows Ngugi in advocating the renaissanceand the use of African languages in African countries. Going backto Achebe, in my workshop I noted a distinction he made in hisessay, African Writers and the English Language, between what hecalled national and ethnic literature: meaning that a country couldhave two kinds of literature; ethnic, which would be in indigenouslanguages, and national, which would probably be in Europeanlanguages, unless the language is very widely spoken, like Swahili.Achebe honestly admits that he cannot speak most of the languagesthat are spoken in Nigeria. In fact, he wrote his book in highlydistinctive and heavily styled English, contending that throughEnglish he would be communicating with most of his countrymen andwomen, regardless of their ethnic or local languages.

Ngugi wa Thiongo, who is also one of the organizers of the AgainstAll Odds conference, believes that national and ethnic languagesare not mutually exclusive. When both are fully used, they can feedeach other, and an ethnic language can be the national literature,even if in translation. Such a position exemplifies the ideas ofthe Against All Odds conference, which we further developed inwriting the Asmara Declaration on African Languages andLiterature. Now, almost ten years later, the Asmara Declaration isthe subject of widespread scholarly discussion and debate. It is aliving document.

Q: You have just finished writing a book of memoirs about yourliterary experiences in Africa. The book begins in 1985 and ends,very specifically, in Massawa, one early morning of July 2005. Canyou tell us more?

CC: I must confess that I have been writing about Eritrea since1995, when I first came here. An early long poem called Eritreawas published in 2004 in a collection of my poems called Light TheLights, recounting in a fast moving, part kaleidoscopic and partdocumentary way what I experienced and felt in Asmara and otherparts of the country back then. Here is a brief excerpt thatrecounts my first impressions on visiting medeber.

From a distance such conversations drum
Heavy drums. They drum music and fear: a music
Of drumming fear until the place exists no more
And comes closer and closer like a labyrinth all around
With nothing wasted or new under the sun
And anything of use before in metamorphosis
Now with a fuller value and made new by the mockery
Of material lasting longer than flesh transformed
Once and for all, yet again and again once and for all,
And still no blacker or whiter with the retelling.
Sweaty work and hard bargains make this drumming song.
It joins blowtorches, saws, hammers, a dip of the head
And a bow of the shoulders to a heavy-duty snip,
Sanders, solder, steel wool, stain and polish rags
And the rest of poetry to serve the body drum
With the transformations of where war was
Into a peace cannibalizing its throwaway
Of us and the midst of miles and miles of graveyard
Tanks, troop carriers and artillery melting down
To their datable deaths and at our free hands.

I stopped writing poetry about Eritrea in the late 90s when Ibecame deeply involved in the Against All Odds project. AfterAgainst All Odds, however, I wanted to write about the projectitself, not so much in a critical, academic way but more in astorytelling mode, including a variety of incidents  sad,humorous, pathetic what have you  that took place during the fouryears it took to plan and implement the project. The material,although poetic at times, simply did not lend itself to poetry, butI still wanted to write about the experience.

At the same time, I was also starting to work on translations ofEritrean poetry from Tigrinya to English, and now there are threebooks of them: We Have Our Voice (2000), We Invented the Wheel(2002), and Who Needs a Story (2006). Some of the more recenttranslations, which I also produced with Dr. Ghirmai Negash, are onthe web, too: for example, @(http://www.fascicle.com/issue03/main/issue03_frameset.htm). Tenyears ago if one searched the internet for the combination ofwords, Eritrea and poets or poetry, only a few websites wouldappear. Google it now, and there are thousands.

Writing about my experience in Eritrea in prose form, I haveemployed a genre that goes by the name of creative non-fiction,although now that I am approaching the end of the project, Irealize that it is really a memoir. Yet I must say that one of thedistinct pleasures of writing a memoir is to be able to say thingsabout my experience of writing in Africa that I could not say inpoetry. In fact, half of the book is about my experience here inEritrea since my first visit in 1995. The book is called JoiningAfrica.** Theres an excerpt from it on the web @
http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/brev24/cantalupo_wonder.htm,telling the story of when I met Stevie Wonder in Dakar. Heresanother brief excerpt, again recounting my first visit to medeber,but now in prose instead of poetry. It should illustrate what Imean about how writing in prose offers a different kind ofopportunity to describe an experience.

I came to a towering brick gate, crowned by three arches and abalustrade through which the blue sky poured while a tight flow oftrucks clogged and squeezed into the gate below. From behind thegate, the drumming expanded louder and louder into one all-out,deafening pounding that would imperceptibly fall apart into athousand different rhythms washed over by the huge diesel enginesof the trucks and their grinding gears. Two palm trees on eitherside of the gate exuded an unthreatened sense of harmony and order,whatever might be heard.

As I squeezed between the gates left sidewall and a truck piledhigh with metal mattress springs, a hanging wire hooked my shirtand began to pull me. I had to run for a few seconds until thetruck stopped, although I couldnt hear it since the drummingdrowned it out. Pinned to the truck and looking up into the wiry,rusty chaos of the mattress springs, I panicked, ripping the wireout of my shirt and afraid that the truck would start up againwithout my knowing. When it did, and as my palm felt the wirescrape it and let go, I looked into a labyrinth of nothing new orwasted under the sun, and all metal: pounded, sawed, folded,heated, blowtorched, snipped, welded, soldered, sanded, steelwooled and polished into something entirely different from what itwas and new. Tire rims, air ducts, surviving window frames anddoors, wheel-less barrows, car hoods, legible and illegiblebusiness signs, chests of drawers, beams, bailing, presses, guttedcouches, balconies and stairs without buildings, ingots, shields,rails, and an endless supply of shell casings and cartridgesdrummed and drummed by old men and young intent on nothing buthammering swords into ploughshares, in the words of the book ofIsaiah (2:4): a cannon into a bucket, a lamp, a pair of crutchesand a washboard; an ammunition box into a school desk and chair;fuel drums into shiny coffee pots, pans, platters and bowls;sledges, axes, hoes, shovels and a stove out of machine guns.

I listened, my hearing gone, and put my fingers into a three inchdivot of rain water on top of a thick shaven stump used as an anvilas if it held holy water. At the same time, I smelled more thanfire, propylene torches, sweat and the steam off burning metal, asif they still longed for something more. I looked around and saw acircle of stalls with faience beadwork doors, women and children.As I walked closer to one, the drumming quickly subsided, and Ismelled spices. Inside I sat down in the dark amidst bowls of mint,oregano, garlic, nutmeg, almonds, cumin, ten shades of pepper,sunflower seeds and so much more I couldnt name. A laughing womanappeared. She had broken teeth, skin seared like meat and goldenwheels in her ears. She wore a dress the color of spring grass withdeep, blood red and purple folds enclosing patches of sea and sky.I kissed her hand and touched it to my forehead, which made herchildren laugh too. She brought tea with a drop of fermented honey.I bought some oregano.

Q: So what happens next I suppose we will know when we get to readyour book Joining Africa? Could you tell us though what you wouldlike people to know about this book?

CC: I have written Joining Africa for a more general readership,which may not be as interested in my scholarly books and poetryrelating to Africa, and my translations. When Im not in Africa Imeet people all the time who have a healthy curiosity about Africabut not much direct or personal experience of the continent.

Wanting a reader of Joining Africa to picture himself or herself inmy place, I also wrote the book as a kind of everyman or everywomans education in what 21st century Africa might really beabout.

I wanted Joining Africa to tell a different kind of story aboutAfrica. It is not merely the horrors of colonialism andneocolonialism, disease, starvation, corruption, war and genocide,as if the word Africa is practically a synonym for disaster.Nor is my book merely about the other extreme: an Africa evokingromantic images of pyramids, safaris, gorgeous wild animals indramatic landscapes and colorful, exotic, teeming cultures. InsteadJoining Africa tells a story about the vital element of the Africanword.

To sum up Joining Africa in a sentence: my book tries to do forAfrica what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming. Myinconvenient truth  and what the book shows me struggling tolearn  is that the best way to help Africa is by listening to theAfrican word, that is, by listening to what Africans themselveshave to say  over 90% of whom do not speak European languages  intheir own languages, in their own voices.

No amount of foreign aid (close to $600 billion at last count),generous NGO or rock star can compare with the potential of Africanlanguages to provide the simplest, fairest, most democratic,economic, and achievable way to improve African lives andlivelihood through the application of knowledge, education, scienceand technology.

I also want this book to make people think about going to Africaand about how they relate to Africa. Too often peoples interest inAfrica or their studies about Africa can be reduced to a kind ofmodern quest either for racial or ethnic identity or to saveAfrica. I want this book to show that by simply being human, anyonecan naturally have a connection with Africa or for that matter anyplace in the world. For example, when the great cellist Yo-Yo Maplays Bach, we dont say, Look he is Chinese, he plays Bach.Instead, we listen, and we say, this is beautiful. Who caresabout race or ethnic origin, his or Bachs? I care more about whatthe English poet, John Keats called truth and beauty in his Odeon a Grecian Urn: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"  that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Still, Joining Africa tells my unlikely story of a white Americancollege professor who connects with Africa as few non-Africans everhave. An incident from 2005, which is in the preface to JoiningAfrica, might help to better explain what I mean. I had beeninvited to join several Eritrean poets who were reading at the Expofestival. They read their original poems and I followed with sometranslations. When I was leaving the hall, I saw two Americancollege students in the audience whom I had met back at my hotelseveral days before. Their names were Scott and Abrehet, and hereswhat happened.

Professor, wait a minute, Scott said, in a half joking, halfserious tone. I want to ask you one question. How does an Americanwhite guy get so wrapped up in Africa?

Yeah, Abrehet spoke slowly, and why Eritrea?

I have good friends here, I responded, starting to feelself-conscious. But to answer your question too, Scott? Why did I,or did you say how did I get involved with Africa? Do you rememberthe first line of the poem, Who Needs a Story? that GhirmaiYohannes read tonight? It goes, I needed a story. Around twentyyears ago, when I was in Jericho, in Israel, I began to realizethat I needed a story, too. It led me here.

Q: When asked to give advice to young writers you said there are atleast three basic tenets that you believe in. Can you tell us whatthey are?

CC: Yes, there are three basic tenets that I believe in as awriter. The first one is: read everything and preferably all atonce. But seriously, writing is about finding ones own voice.Paradoxically, one is more likely to find it by experiencing thevoices of others, and the only way one can apprehend those voicesis by reading. A writer has the responsibility not only to read awide range of great writers from his or her language, and his orher country and continent, but also from other languages, countriesand continents. This is a daunting task, and there is no way thatanyone can really do this completely, but it is a lifetime pursuit,and it is the only way to keep ones mind fresh, alive and strongand to find a way to make ones voice worth being heard by others.

The second tenet is the following: writing is an expression ofunresolved conflicts. To me the greatest mark of punctuation is thequestion mark. People constantly and throughout their lives haveunresolved conflicts, things for which they have no answers, or noapparent answers. The answers to these conflicts do not need to bein writing. The answers are in our own lives and in how we live ourlives  in the choices we make. They are individual choices. Forexample, when I read the Bible, or any other spiritual book, I findthat it is like any other book, like an anthology of Middle Easternliterature; it is a book of questions and not a book of answers,and that I think is the Bibles greatest power.

The last tenet is: write about what you think has been left out.This is what spurred Chinua Achebe to write Things Fall Apart. Itarticulated a part of his experience that the great English writershe was reading did not talk about. How could they? Thus he wroteabout what Conrad had left out in Heart of Darkness. One does nothave to be Conrad or Achebe to realize this, and I believe thatevery human being has a unique experience. In a way, my bookJoining Africa is a story about what has been left out  in myeducation and in my interests up to 1985, but also of what I thinkhas been left out by writers, especially non African writers in theworld today

Q: You said during your presentation that poetry is a life long,devotional exercise. What did you mean by that?

CC: I said that because I believe it. In fact I try to live by thatidea. I began writing poetry at the age of 13, and before that Iwas writing protest songs against the Vietnam War. I came up with acombination of words that had so much rhythm and intensity that itgave me a kind of self-elation, and yet I was also able tocommunicate it to the people around me. And then I kept writingthrough graduate school and as a professor. Sometimes now I feeltorn between translating and writing my own poetry  after all, artis long and life is short. But this is a conflict that increases mydevotion to both. Translation is a practice that imposes a uniquediscipline. For example in 17th century England, John Drydentranslated Virgils Aeneid from Latin to English, and to this day Ibelieve it is the best translation that has ever been done of thatwork.

To come back to your question, I said devotion because there isno other way to pursue poetry, at least as I see it written by thebest poets. If there is a religious undertone to this word, so beit. My own growth in writing poetry is linked to my coming toAfrica over the last 20 years, working with African writers, andparticularly in the last 13 years of seeing Eritrea. I have beenfortunate enough to work with people, meet the community and alsoEritrean writers. They have taught me so much, as I hope my bookwill show, and as I hoped my workshop showed. When I translate, Icome to understand more about Eritrea, but also about poetry ingeneral and about the human heart.


* Excerpt from Adulite, Light the Lights (Red Sea Press: Asmaraand Trenton, 2004).
**Joining Africa. Copyright