WRITING AFRICA In Search of “A Balance of Stories” In Home and Exile, Chinua Achebe, the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Literature and Languages at Bard, reflects on the 20th century as the beginning of “‘re-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession,” and expresses his hope that the 21st century will see a “balance of stories.” Achebe played a seminal role in creating a tradition for “writing Africa,” and Kofi Anyidoho, Emmanuel Dongala, Helon Habila, and Caryl Phillips are building on that tradition. The five distinguished writers and educators came together at the College last October to discuss the history of fellowship and conflict between African and African diaspora writers and to address the impact of such issues as pan-Africanism, colonialism, and postcolonialism on their work. Jesse Shipley, director of the Africana Studies Program, moderated the event, which inaugurated the Chinua Achebe Fellowship in Global African Studies at Bard College and was cosponsored by Barnard College’s Literature of the Middle Passage course. Chinua Achebe has taught at Bard since 1990. Originally from Nigeria, the poet, novelist, cultural critic, and essayist is perhaps best known for his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, considered by many the premier work of African literature. In September 2005, he was named one of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine. Helon Habila, also from Nigeria, is the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard. His debut novel, Waiting for an Angel, was published in 2003 and received a Commonwealth Writers Prize. Kofi Anyidoho is a poet, critic, and professor of literature at the University of Ghana, his alma mater. His most recent collection of poetry is PraiseSong for the Land. Emmanuel Dongala, a novelist originally from the Congo Republic, teaches Francophone African literature at the College and is the Richard B. Fisher Chair in Natural Sciences and professor of chemistry at Simon’s Rock College of Bard. Caryl Phillips, a native of St. Kitts who was brought up in Leeds, England, is the author of three books of nonfiction and eight novels, including Dancing in the Dark (2005)
and Crossing the River, which was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize for Fiction. He is a professor of English at Yale University and last fall was a visiting professor at Barnard College. Excerpts of the panelists’ remarks follow.
CARYL PHILLIPS In the 1930s, in Paris, two remarkable men sat down for a series of conversations. One was Léopold Sédar Senghor, a student from Senegal, and the other Aimé Césaire, from Martinique. The young men saw themselves as artists, but they also felt that they had a responsibility to shape the political direction of their respective countries once they had completed their studies. Senghor would eventually return to Senegal and become its president, and Césaire returned to Martinique and became mayor of its capital city. Beyond their obvious like and trust for each other, what bound these men together was their conviction that colonialism was most vigorous and corrosive when it sought, as it inevitably did, to destroy something they understood to be black culture. Neither man could conceive a future for himself in which his efforts achieved validation only when reflected through European eyes. Their philosophy—for after all they were French—came to be known as “Negritude.” It was a
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