Chapter 10 - Against Ethnography

Summary

African writers often bemoan Western readers’ tendency to view their work “anthropologically,” which is to say as a transparent reflection of a culture of origin. This ethnographic approach partly derives from African literary studies’ relationship to African Studies, writ large, with its roots in the social sciences and area expertise. But it is also sustained by the difficulty of placing African writers within Western pedagogical frameworks. This challenge is most apparent when Africans – obviously the majority population on the continent – are minoritized by Western curricular categories. There are also subtler questions at stake. On what scale (regional, national, continental, or global) are contemporary African writers best read as negotiating the relationship of social affiliation to aesthetic representation? How does African literature register in a Western classroom comprising students from disparate and often culturally variegated backgrounds, some of which reflexively minoritize Black and Brown writers, and some of which do not? Finally, what are some interpretive and pedagogical alternatives to seeing literary representation by Africans as necessarily representative of broader African social and cultural dynamics? This chapter draws on my own experience teaching African writing in a US university context to propose a criterion of reading for “the weird” as an alternative to reading for culture. In prioritizing African texts that are boldly unrepresentative of broader literary and cultural trends – as in the chapter’s main example of Ghanaian writer Martin Egblewogbe’s wry and existential short fiction – this approach breaks free from the aesthetic limitations of “minority literature” while introducing truly novel forms and voices to the English literature curriculum. As a result, it urges students toward a sense of curricular decolonization as an essential tool for foregrounding radical aesthetic idiosyncrasy.

If people who write about African literature were to agree on one thing, it would be the inadequacy – or just flat-out wrongness – of every larger category into which African literature has been subsumed across its entwined academic and publishing histories. This includes even the seemingly basic designation “African,” which, like more obvious offenders such as “postcolonial,” “Third World,” and “global anglophone,” has often been accused of effacing heterogeneity of all kinds in the name of tokenistic inclusion.¹ Some of these critiques have been more hard-hitting than others, and the terms of complaint have evolved, broadly speaking, across the past half century or so from advocacy for “Otherness” to frustration with its lingering reinforcement. What all such categorical chafing tends to share is a difficulty positing what African literature is, or at least how it should be presented given the practical constraints of selling books and building university curricula. With the aim of beginning to fill this gap, this chapter suggests that a culturally minimalist approach to teaching African literature in the American university offers one way of furthering a culturally maximalist conception of intellectual decolonization. By teaching African works that wear their cultural locations lightly, that is, in order to foreground their cosmic and/or existential engagements, we may get closer to disinvesting from the persistent and often racist cause of fictional representativeness.

It is important to set a few contextual parameters at the outset, given the broad reach of this volume’s concerns. First, the “we” I refer to here includes scholars and teachers of African literature in American and British universities, as well as others in the Anglosphere where “African” signifies a minority position. While some of my observations will be applicable to academies where that is not the case (parts of South Africa’s, for example), I will leave it to the reader to make those connections. Second, the pedagogical tack I propose here should be taken as one piece in a larger toolkit for decolonizing non-Africa-based students’ African literature curricula; it is not meant to be exclusive of teaching or scholarship that takes texts’ cultural or historical dimensions as their main point of entry. And, finally, I see the politics of the English literature classroom in this setting as being in variable and unfixed relation to politics of a more concrete sort. By this I mean that I do not assume a fluid translation between concepts as they are mobilized for reading and teaching – including signal terms such as “identity” or “liberation” – and concepts as they anchor adjacent social and institutional debates. This distinction bears repeating in the present context because African literature has been so foundationally and explicitly conjoined to the goal of cultural restitution, for better and worse. Indeed, the history of the field can be powerfully narrated as a series of assertions and rejections of African literature’s value as a proxy for “culture,” a back-and-forth from which I hope here to break free.

To do this I will start with a discussion of “representativeness” and its strictures. Then, I turn to a Ghanaian short story collection whose critical reception has been tellingly sparse: Martin Egblewogbe’s Mr. Happy and the Hammer of God & Other Stories (2012). The text features stories whose Ghanaian origins are identifiable but not definitive; their “Africanness,” while by no means disavowed, is simply taken for granted as they home in on essential experiences of disorientation. A far cry from earlier, more culturally assertive approaches to literary decolonization, this strategy also departs from what has become a common brand of opposition to cultural representativeness that privileges (usually realist) world-building and immersion. Instead, Egblewogbe rebuffs representative readings with his choice of socially dislocative content conveyed by the marginal form of the short story. These are profoundly and existentially self-minoritizing rather than only social-minoritarian works, in the sense that they do not speak for any position that finds commonality through culture or even location. Instead, Egblewogbe’s stories serve as a useful example of cultural transcendence achieved not through individual complexity but through cosmic anonymity, thereby confounding both ethnographic and limitingly counterethnographic pedagogical approaches to African writing.

The Same Not-Single Story

Many of the most-cited figures and venues in the recent African cultural landscape have, with good reason, focused on transforming Africa in the global imaginary from an abstract signifier to a complex set of particulars. Chimamanda Adichie’s 2009 TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” has reached legendary status, with tens of millions of views on YouTube alone. Adichie, like the cheeky name of the popular African commentary website Africa Is a Country, links Africa’s economic disempowerment in the world to the long-standing flatness of its image in Western literature and media. Their pique is with single Africans and African situations being made to stand in for the continent writ large, often with pernicious implications. “It would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans,” Adichie says. And then, famously, “to insist on [only negative] stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” Literary discourse on Africa is united across popular and academic registers by its wariness of an African orientalism of sorts, whereby tropes like “the White savior” and “the starving African” drive genres such as “poverty porn.” Binyavanga Wainaina’s Granta Magazine piece “How to Write about Africa” has driven countless classroom conversations about such cliches since its 2005 publication, satirically goading students to acknowledge that Africa is in fact a complex place.

Such rejections of reductiveness have been intimately linked to a frustration with African literary texts being read for their ethnographic (or really, pseudoethnographic) insights in particular. As the literary scholar and Brittle Paper website founder Ainehi Edoro attests in a 2016 essay for the Guardian, this implicit bias has a long history rooted in the explicit practice of reading African novels as anthropological texts. After summarizing the would-be “scientific” reception of Thomas Mofolo’s novel Chaka around the time of its English publication in 1931, she bemoans the fact that “African fiction is invisible except when it is reflected on a mirror of social ills, cultural themes and political concerns.” This sense of being deaestheticized has been widely echoed by contemporary African writers. Taiye Selasi, the “Afropolitan” novelist partly responsible for the popularization of that term, leveled the charge in the same paper that African writers were evaluated not in terms of craft but rather “assumed to be or accused of writing for the west, producing explanatory ethnographic texts dolled up as literary fiction.” In this way, the accusation of writing merely to convey a cultural perspective has become as loaded (and as common) as the accusation of reading for one. Suspicion of the term “African writer” is now a critical trope in its own right, surfacing in nearly every discussion of the field. A recent interview with the debut novelist Ayo Tamakloe-Garr is a strong case in point. The first question that the website Flash Fiction Ghana asks him is, “Do you have a conception of who a Ghanaian writer is? Would you accept being categorized as a Ghanaian writer?” Tamakloe-Garr responds that while he does not personally mind the label, he finds it a “limiting” way to imagine himself.²

Some of this reluctance to identify as an African writer is an understandable reaction against decades of not only Western critics’, but also some African writers’ and intellectuals’ postcolonial attachment to African literature’s culturally restitutive value. As Biodun Jeyifo described the field in 1990, the works first institutionalized as “African” in, especially, British and American universities were lauded as “powerful, exemplary texts of nationalist contestation of colonialist myths and distortions of Africa and Africans” (51). He places Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka within a postindependence wave of literary “demythologization” (52), whereby “the writer or critic speaks to, or for, or in the name of the post-independence nation-state, the regional or continental community, the pan-ethnic, racial or cultural agglomeration of homelands and diasporas” (53). Achebe here is on what we might call the softer end of such cultural reassertion; elsewhere, Jeyifo takes issue with the dubious ontologization of culture by early decolonial critics such as Chinweizu, author of books such as Decolonising the African Mind from 1987.³ Regardless of the vigor or exclusivity of any given African writer’s “reassertion or reinvention of traditions which colonialism … had sought to destroy or devalue” (53), cultural representation by default performed a representative role when the field of African literature was in its institutional infancy. The postcolonial African writer was thus faced with what seems like a binary choice between accepting or refusing that role, with Dambudzo Marechera standing as the best-known example of the latter position. His self-styling as the photo negative of the “African writer” as cultural arbiter entails an insistently abject and disarrayed subjectivity, what his most recent biographer Tinashe Mushakavanhu calls alternately his “black heretic,” “dissident,” and “outsider” standing (8–9).

In this way, an interesting tension begins to emerge within the idea of the minority as it pertains to African writing making its way through the world. One version disaggregates “Africa” into its constituent cultural parts, and in theory could achieve a kind of curricular decolonization through the liberal-adjacent means of finding representative writers and/or texts for all of them. Another version (the Marechera one, what Edoro calls the “anarchic” tradition in her blurb for Mushakavanhu’s book) foregrounds the individual writer’s principled refusal of cultural ambassadorship. A decolonized curricular ideal from this vantage point might see Marechera taught alongside other experimental writers from all over. We might think of these alternatives, presented here in exaggerated form, as representative and antirepresentative minoritarianism. The representative path to a more equitable curriculum quickly becomes untenable on a practical level, over and above any criticism of its merits. Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, a cofounder of Nigeria’s independent Cassava Press, argues pointedly that her work in helping to build up Nigeria’s literary field will not be done until “The day we can speak of more than ten Nnedi Okorafors (speculative/fantasy fiction), ten Zaynad Alkalis (oft-cited female writer from the north), ten Olumide Popoolas (writing queer humanity), ten Yemisi Aribisalas (food writer and polemical non-fiction), ten Noo Saro-Wiwas (travel writing), and ten Zulu Sofolas (playwright)” (Mang). By this logic, the unstated goal of more representation is to make representativeness untenable. It is an admirable objective, but even on the single national scale proposed here it quickly exceeds the capacity of a semester-long course, or for that matter of many universities’ whole English curriculum.

There has to be some basis of selection, or African literature risks being squeezed out of the picture as it contends with other minoritized (which is not always to say minority) traditions for space within what are, these days, often-struggling English departments. That underrepresented groups are often implicitly pitted against one another is not a novel or difficult point, but it is worth restating. As Bhakti Shringarpure and Lily Saint demonstrate with their recent survey of African literature professors mainly in the United States and Europe, this often means that writers pushing back against their reduction to a culture or place end up assuming representative roles in their own right. After breaking down the most commonly taught African texts by country and author, they bemoan “the overreliance on a handful of representative canonical writers who are themselves often opposed to having their work deployed in this way,” Adichie chief among them. Often this bolsters an aesthetic premium on realism as it nurtures readerly attachments to psychologically robust individual characters, and by extension, advances an underdeveloped commitment to personal uniqueness as literature’s guiding force.

Aminatta Forna claims, for example, that “writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places.” Selasi goes still further. She counters her sense that Afro-diasporic writing “is subjected to a particular kind of scrutiny; it is forced to play the role of anthropology” by championing Adichie for having “immersed herself fully in the world and the work of her fiction, attending with such care and wisdom to her characters that they cannot possibly be read as representations.” This is an odd line of argument because at its core, realism works precisely along the lines of social representativeness. Virtually every major theorist of realism from Georg Lukács onward has reflected on these mechanics, including the interplay of character and setting to engender an illusion of singularity that distills a social whole.⁴ And as Yoon Sun Lee notes aptly in a 2012 essay for Modern Language Quarterly, “minor” or lesser-taught literatures are often the most deeply marked by the tension between “the standard of truthful representation” and “[defenses of] the autonomy of the artistic work” (416).

The dynamics of asserting and rebuffing African literature’s presumed “Africanness” are, moreover, complicated by the fact that many current debates about literary decolonization take place as a conversation between Western and African locales; most of the writer-theorists mentioned thus far argue against cultural pigeonholing on the basis of their own culturally hybrid biographies. As is so often true in addressing majority–minority dynamics as they evolve across disparate but conversant settings, African literature in the English curriculum finds itself between a rock and a hard place. Slickly packaged versions of cultural fluidity only go so far to issue a substantive challenge to a Euro- and US-centric curriculum, and yet to teach specific writers and texts solely to showcase their minoritization risks reinforcing an unevenly distributed burden of representativeness. It is also difficult to know when decolonization in an American (or other western anglophone) classroom best entails a focus on particular African literary contents, and when it is more a matter of a general effect of disruption or surprise. As the Cambridge anthropologist Adam Branch likewise suggests, “At some UK universities, to simply affirm the existence of African intellectual production against long-standing historical silences, to affirm that the rest of the world has writing and thinkers that should be studied in any curriculum that claims general or global relevance – this can still be a radical idea when students can complete entire classes without reading non-white scholars” (74). As such I often feel in my own university like I am balancing on a seesaw, demanding a larger presence for Africa in our institution’s intellectual life at the same time as I refuse from intellectual wariness to commit to any clear account of what that means.

Riffing on Jeyifo’s term “arrested decolonization,” the overarching challenge in my current position is to keep African literature from getting stuck in the critique of African literature as a category. The heavy weight of past essentialisms means that it is easy to stall out by repeating a series of metadiscursive negations and reassertions. Teaching cultural fluidity to counter cultural cliches invites criticism for overinscribing a certain sort of elite heterogeneity, one that, as many have argued, tends to elevate diasporic narratives of African literature over more emplaced and politically pointed continental versions. By the same token, it is easy to overcorrect this correction by limiting African literature’s decolonizing potential to an overt “decolonial” message. And if African texts are wielded as tools exclusively to decolonize Western curricula in a narrow sense, it seems to me that little has been gained in a broader one. One example of how this tactic falters – and how widely it has, at earlier moments in the discipline – can be found in a 1991 essay from New Literary History, in which Georg M. Gugelberger argues that, “The issue then is not to integrate Third World literary works into the canon but to identify with ‘the wretched of the earth’ and to learn from them – to learn from the Third World writer how to look into what is really going on in the world and why it has been going on and thus to learn about our own limitations” (506). I do not mean to single Gugelberger out but rather to uphold his position in this piece as distillatory of its Third Worldist moment in American English departments, a moment still reeling from furious debates over Fredric Jameson’s 1986 essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”⁵ Whereas Jameson moved to read all literature from the so-called Third World as registering “a life-and-death struggle with first-world cultural imperialism” (68), Gugelberger allows that not all literature from the Third World is “Third World Literature” in any identifiable sense. In this account, Third World writing is an opt-in genre, or perhaps mode, that exists in the geopolitically designated Third World alongside “the literature we associate with the established [Western] canon” (508). The valorization of the former over the latter – a still-familiar preference for really Third World Third World writing – anticipates what I will call the “Adichie fatigue” strain of our present discourse. It is common, on this front, to hear African and other postcolonial literary scholars agitate for what amounts to decolonizing tepid forms of decolonization.⁶

Each of the turns outlined thus far has something to offer the Anglo-American African literature classroom as it retires ethnographic reading practices once and for all: there is still value in reinforcing students’ understanding of African complexity and difference, and there is also value in pointing out the limitations of that gesture by introducing more politically forceful material. All the same, these debates can sometimes feel like a dog chasing its own tail. “Difference” undoes cultural essentialism, radicalism takes aim at the implicit liberalism of difference, and heterogeneity contends with solidarity as the guiding principle of African literature and literary pedagogy. To be “against ethnography” in how African literature is framed and discussed thus raises the question of what one can be for that is both distinctive of literary study and still has the power to redress entrenched curricular injustices. How can African writing be part of decolonizing the English literature curriculum without being reduced in yet another way, to the role of decolonial shock troops? What might really feel different, forcing students to question clichés and counterclichés, easy complexity and political hardship alike? I turn now to some carefully nonrepresentative African short stories in search of an answer.

Egblewogbe’s Ghanaian Cosmicism

Critics have not known quite what to do with Martin Egblewogbe’s debut story collection Mr. Happy and the Hammer of God & Other Stories (2012). An admired presence in the Ghanaian literary community as a cofounder of the Writers Project of Ghana, recognition has nonetheless eluded him in the lucrative ranks of “global” African writers. Mr. Happy was originally self-published and then later reissued by the small press Ayebia Clarke Publishing; Egblewogbe’s second collection, The Waiting, was released in 2020 by flipped eye publishing, both founded by Ghanaians in England. The palpable influence of Egblewogbe’s background in physics (he is a senior lecturer in the subject at the University of Ghana), along with his often-nameless characters and abstract reveries, make his work difficult to place within African literary debates about culture and representation. The stories, in a word, are weird. Synopses of the work all seem to stop just shy of the term – the back cover of Mr. Happy includes “surreal” and “unsettling” – and some readers have expressed outright hostility to its off-kilter tone. Silindiwe Sibanda, for example, in his review of Mr. Happy calls its “literary exploration of the tangential nature of being” a “clumsy and artless” philosophical exercise (146).

Egblewogbe’s stories do not develop characters or relationships, and their Ghanaian settings, while sometimes highly specified with street names and the like, are largely incidental to the repeated “action” of communicative failure. So what do they offer, exactly? Sibanda’s criticism hints at a certain existential bluntness that makes it difficult to find a pedagogical angle on them. With the longer context of African literature in mind, however, I want to suggest that such ostensibly “pointless” stories are an undervalued kind of classroom material. Egblewogbe’s work often narrates moments of unresolved frustration that could in theory occur almost anywhere, and whose setting is thus meaningful more for its part in generating atmosphere than as a purveyor of cultural information. And while it would be a mistake to completely overlook African literary influences on his writing, he invites readers to foreground historically (and geographically) remote sources of inspiration. When asked about his favorite writers and those he most relates to, Egblewogbe routinely cites European absurdists.⁷ “Let’s put it this way,” he acknowledges to Geoff Ryman in Strange Horizons magazine, “Kafka and Beckett have been very strong influences on me. More than I would say any African writer because of the extent of their imaginings.” His attraction to far-flung traditions of profound existential questioning also recalls many descriptions of “weird” writing. As Kate Marshall argues, that genre depicts human disorientation by minimizing agency and, to some degree, subjectivity itself. By favoring “the modalities of indifference, the cosmic, and external or object agencies” (634), she writes, weirdness foregrounds the inscription of human interiority by an exterior universe that is apathetic at best, hostile at worst.

The second story in Mr. Happy, “Coffee at the Hilltop Café,” is a good case in point. Its first paragraph introduces a cast of characters known only by the pronouns “she” and “I” and the label “the man” before describing two transparent details: the “large glass window” of the titular café and a woman’s laughter rendered as “peals like jewels falling from her lips” (7). Right from the start, the story emphasizes the unelaborated perception of discrete sense objects over the organic intermingling of character and scene. The reader’s focus is then drawn similarly to what at first seem like a clear and precise set of objects that take up the whole of the narrator’s awareness – “the woman,” a “cup of coffee,” and “the view” (7) – but about which Egblewogbe in fact reveals nothing distinctive. This procession of vacant details is punctuated by a pair of localized inflections if one knows where to look. First, the narrator notes that the café “has a tradition for excellence” (7), which we might read as a wry comment on Ghanaian metropolitan achievement culture. Finally, we get a quintessentially but generically Ghanaian description of the businesses occupying the same street as the cafe: a jewelry store, a beauty shop, and a tailor. In a page full of spatial particularization, Egblewogbe grants close to no insight into sociocultural particulars.

Part of this story’s minimalism in situating itself in a culturally “thick” as opposed to spatially immediate sense can be explained by the fact that Egblewogbe has a mainly Ghanaian audience. He likely feels no pressure to “seem African” in a way that will register to a broad transnational readership looking to expand its multicultural bona fides, but nor does he expend effort on resisting Africanity. His market nonrepresentativeness works in concert with, not simply as an explanation for, the cultural nonrepresentativeness of his prose: both his readership and his style take his location as given, using it as a springboard to a geographically transposable sense of not quite apprehending life’s purpose. As “Coffee at the Hilltop Café” continues for two more pages, the narrator grows more and more focused on maintaining existential equilibrium in the face of a minor disturbance to his routine: usually he (or perhaps she) drinks coffee alone, and the presence of the unnamed couple at the cafe threatens this anonymity. To the degree that the story is “about” anything, then, it is the precariousness of atmosphere itself, with even the narrator playing a supporting role. The story charts the restoration of perceptual peace by turning its narratorial gaze to “The whole western horizon … tainted a mellow, mature purple, with the sun, a purple-gold orb, sinking majestically behind the tree-crowned hills” (8). Brief mention of “an evangelist from another town” (9) visiting the narrator’s nearby church might again offer some cultural context to students who know how heavy the evangelical Christian presence is in much of Ghana. But it is neither here nor there in terms of the story’s development from a steady existential rhythm, through reckoning with its disruption, and finally toward a state of carefully calibrated sensory repose. “I open my Bible but I do not read,” it concludes. “I close my eyes and listen to the music. It is beautiful” (9).

Even this brief example conveys Egblewogbe’s interest in narrating the experience of moving intentionally through life when life might go askew at any moment. In the case of “Coffee at the Hilltop Café,” beauty is restored by a focus on universal atmospheric effects: light interacting with shadows, or pavement illuminated by lamps (9). In other stories, the luster revealed by disturbance to shine beneath the surface of routine is replaced by a grimmer kind of estrangement from habitual observation. In “Pharmaceutical Intervention,” an unwanted pregnancy is depicted but not named as foreboding embryonic development, “a clot steadily thickening, thickening at an astonishing speed” (11). That story, too, forgoes nuanced representation in favor of cosmic-cum-religious sensation: Egblewogbe renders a medically induced abortion through a dialogue between the patient and “voices crossed over from the other side” (15), which may or may not be psychological projections. The book’s fourth story, the cryptic and evocative “Down Wind,” begins with a man calling his doctor from a phone booth to describe a vague feeling of pain. It quickly escalates through a series of frantic phone calls with anonymous speakers during which the caller is accused of some unnamed transgression, at the same time as the phone booth starts to stink and an epic storm gathers outside. Communication comes in fits and starts across the unreliable phone line until it finally fails altogether (28). Again, the story concludes by invoking the unknowable part of life – be it heaven or void – as experienced by the lonely people groping their way through it. “Behind him the telephone booth stood,” we read, “yellow, solitary, dark and deserted: a strange aural terminal to the rest of the world” (29). It is difficult to have any idea what has happened in “Down Wind,” other than the gathering of tension through panicked, erratic speech and then its eerie release into light.

The stories in Mr. Happy and the Hammer of God are disorienting and rich with a cosmic suggestiveness that goes largely unfulfilled as anything more concrete. Brought into an American literature classroom full of students who are interested mainly in learning about African cultures either for personal or professional reasons (their parents are from Lagos, say, or they plan to spend a summer volunteering abroad), the fact that Egblewogbe’s work is so heavy on atmosphere and so light on ethnographic content is a good thing. It offers something approaching a blank slate for discussion of African writing; teaching such material asks students to build their understanding of that term’s possibilities from the ground up, regardless of what stereotypes or counterstereotypes they may have brought into the room. In this way, cosmic or existential stories such as Egblewogbe’s (or Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s collection The Prophet of Zongo Street, or the South African Henrietta Rose Innes’s Homing, to name just two more examples) estrange on both a metadisciplinary and formally local level. Rather than baptize students into an unrelenting chain of reactivity, nonrepresentative texts ask them to start from a place of terminological suspension. They then face the task, elemental in the best sense, of trying to describe the how of their unsettlement: the rhythm, mood, and instrumentation of its source. Minority literature can be a beginning to many ends, finally permitted to mark its own time.