Lennon, Brian. "From Tutuola to Tadjo." Review of Under African Skies: Modern African Stories, ed. Charles R. Larson. The Boston Book Review 4.7 (September 1997): 40.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

"To talk of a typical form or pattern for African fiction... is almost an impossibility. There are simply too many varieties---Africa is very large." This near-pedantic remark, taken from Charles R. Larson's 1972 study The Emergence of African Fiction, might seem to militate either for or against, as it were, any either bounded or limited anthology of continentally African literature. While assembling such collections (of which this is Larson's third) explicitly for an extra-African and inexpert "Western" audience, Larson has resisted the tendency, always ready to hand, to present the cultures of the feared and fascinating "dark continent" as inimitably Other. Forsaking the gnostic and prophetic prerogatives of such demi-critical vision, Larson chooses rather to pack as much illustrative diversity as possible into the materially limited space of a book. The result is, we might say, necessarily unsystematic, certainly decentered, sometimes even apparently random; but it is undoubtedly critically realistic, to the extent that realism must consist in the recognition of finitude.

Larson's The Emergence of African Fiction, a seminal work of extra-African criticism of the form of the novel, attempted to extricate African literature from the reductive and appropriative tendencies of (largely sympathetic) extra-African Anglophone reviewers of the 1950s and 1960s, whose assessments clove to the extra-African anthropological semiotic of the African novel, while overdetermining its literarity through the conventions of Euro-Atlantic forms. Despite its interventionist stance, Larson's study is conceived in the spirit of contact, and closes with a paean to the extraordinary formal and topical diversity that is a result of (among other things) the accelerated evolution of the novel in Africa:

What the Western novel became in a leisurely course of three hundred years, the African novel was forced to become in a mere generation and a half. And the novels which were once thought so typical of African fiction---The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Things Fall Apart, even Mine Boy---are now beginning to seem a part of the past. For the felt experiences of African life have gone far beyond the pictures presented in these works to encompass entirely new perspectives in societies which in a few short years have moved from analphabetic to literate, from largely rural to increasingly urban, from communal to individual. And the fiction itself has mirrored these evolutions in its own patterns.

In the Introduction to Under African Skies and the notes introducing each author, Larson continues to celebrate the syncretistic and diasporic evolution of African literature. Often, however, he sounds a gloomier note: "And yet all is not well on the African literary scene, nor has it ever been." This refers to two recent catastrophes in Nigeria, a traditionally comparatively affluent nation home to a disproportionate number of the continental authors (Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka) to have reached, so to speak, substantial readerships off-continent. The first is the collapse of the Nigerian economy, which decimated a once-thriving market for literature; the second is the execution in 1995 of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an event which, in Larson's words, "sent shock waves through the intellectual community which will take years to subside." Then, too (and perhaps most explicitly in contrast with the exuberant optimism of The Emergence of African Fi[text missing]

Much of this remains editorial gloss. None of the stories assembled in Under African Skies address the difficulty of life as a creative writer (in Africa or elsewhere), and while more than a few (including Saro-Wiwa's "Africa Kills Her Sun") sustain a dialogue, either direct or oblique, on developmentalist cultural censorship and repression, on the whole, these selections might better be said to be chosen to illustrate Larson's thematic taxonomy, offered in The Emergence of African Fiction, including "five general areas" around which African fiction "tends to cluster." These five areas are: fiction about an African society's initial contact with the West (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1958); fiction addressing the African's encounter with Western systems of education; fiction responding to urbanization (the popular novels of the "Onitsha Market Writers" of pre-civil war Nigeria); fiction concerned with the problems of colonial or post-colonial politics or "nation-building" (Achebe, A Man of the People); fiction that dramatizes the conflict of [text missing]

"The Complete Gentleman," excerpted from Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), appears here as the ostensible exception. Arguably, it was precisely in and because of its apparent ahistoricity that Tutuola's "spontaneous surrealism" was the first to capture the imagination of extra-African critics. (Dylan Thomas famously described Tutuola's language as "young English"---an example, Larson notes, of the benevolent condescension of the friendliest Eurocentrist reviewers of the African novel.) Alone among the stories in Under African Skies, Tutuola's tale contains nothing which might be construed, by an inexpert Western reader, as a response to African contact with the West. By contrast, the Sembene Ousmane's "Black Girl," about the suicidal isolation of a domestic servant in France, and Armah's "The Offal Kind," with a similar theme, offer accounts of a young woman's unplea[text missing]

There are "new" concerns reflected here as well, as Larson notes in his Introduction. Mandla Langa and Sindiwe Magona address the adjustments of black and white South Africans to the dissolution of the apartheid system that many had hoped and feared might endure. Ben Okri's "A Prayer from the Living," which appeared in 1993 on the op-ed page of The New York Times, is a response to the famine in Somalia and subsequent United States "intervention." Alexander Kanengoni's "Effortless Tears" is the only story in this anthology to deal with AIDS.

--end--