The Camoes prize for the Mozambican Paulina Chiziane, the Goncourt and the Neustadt for the Senegalese Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and Boubacar Boris Diop, the Booker for the South African Damon Galgut. And, of course, the Nobel prize that went to the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah. A varied representation of African writers has won the main literary awards of the year within a few weeks, both in Portuguese, English and French. Chance or trend? Experts and authors explain the reasons for this blazing success, but perhaps not so unexpected.
On June 23, Timba Béma, a Cameroonian writer living in Switzerland, published an article with a certain premonitory appearance in the digital magazine African Literary Chronicles titled Towards a boom in African literature in France? with some significant question marks. In it he wondered if the literary creation of the continent could explode and take a quantitative leap as the Spanish-American literature did in the 60s thanks, according to Béma, not only to the enormous talent of the García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Neruda or Octavio Paz, but rather to the commitment of the Spanish publishing sector at that time to open up to new voices, audiences and markets.
However, even acknowledging the existence of certain signs such as the vitality of African authors in the French language, Béma answered his question that “the phenomenon we are witnessing is not the herald of a boom”. Half a year later, after the award of the Nobel Prize to Gurnah or the Grand Prize for French Letters to Mbougar Sarr, the critic Béma has not changed his mind. In his opinion, there are two criteria that are not met: “The actors in the book chain do not think that African authors are contributing something new and in Africa there is no transnational book market.” Even so, he is optimistic about the future “because the talent has always been there” and believes that the revolution to come passes through “the de-ghettoization of the narratives and the insertion of the authors in the publishing machinery, including the juries of the most prestigious awards ”.
“For me we are facing a mere coincidence”, assures the laureate Boubacar Boris Diop from Dakar, “for it not to be, there would have to be a certain coordination between the different awards, and in reality they have nothing to do with each other”. The author of Murambi, the book of bones, which declares its admiration for Latin American literature, and specifically for Ernesto Sábato, recognizes a certain “maturity” of African literature in French, but puts on the table a fundamental difference with Latin America: the language in which the production is expressed literary.
“Deep down, the cultural origin of Latin American authors is Spain, they are Spaniards who live in a different, mestizo, violent and magical society that has made it possible to produce a literature that has impressed the entire world. Borges and all his Western scholarship are a good example. They write in their mother tongue, Spanish. However, in African societies, French is a strange language that came from the north. Authors who write in a foreign language cannot have the same fluency or performance as those who write in their mother tongue, ”says Diop.
The literary blogger Gangoueus, responsible for African Literary Chronicles and The Gangoueus Readings, among other platforms, also uses the word “coincidence” to explain the conjunction of awards to African writers in 2021, but qualifies it. “We are dealing with authors of different generations and with different realities and languages, although not everything is the result of chance.” In his opinion, one of the challenges for this success to be consolidated is for African countries to develop ecosystems favorable to books and reading, something that already exists in English-speaking countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya or Ghana but to a much lesser extent in the French-speaking part, with the exception, says Gangeous, from Senegal.
Sonia Fernández, author of the blog in Spanish Literature and co-founder of the collection Baobab books, which translates African authors, highlights the enormous quality and power of the continent’s literatures. Not now, but for years. “There are very great authors with very long literary careers, in fact many of them ring out every year when the Nobel is going to fail and yet they are not recognized. In 2021 the circumstances have arisen for them to receive all those awards and perhaps it is a great coincidence. Well, we are happy, because that means that more translations will be done. But it’s a bit sad that there has to be a prize to make African literatures visible ”, he says.
“We cannot lose sight of the fact that these awards do not bear witness to Renaissance of the literature of the continent, “adds from the United States Luis Madureira, professor of African Literatures and Cultural Studies and director of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,” but they are a recognition due to African authors who for time they are showing their strength, the robustness of their production and the deserved place that is owed to them in the panorama of universal letters ”.
“I think what we are witnessing in our global context is a greater openness to recognize those trajectories, a more careful approach that allows the voices of African literatures to be amplified. And perhaps that is what is changing: the will to diversify and make the literary universe more visible that is validated as paradigmatic “, adds Madureira, for whom the problem goes beyond literature:” Traditionally what has happened, not only with African literatures but with Africa in general, is that from the European point of view they only begin to exist when Europe realizes that they exist, when Europe perceives them and incorporates them into its imaginary ”.
In the opinion of this expert, “African literatures exist, they have existed for centuries and they have writers of extraordinary talent. They are diverse literatures like the continent itself, and full of extremely interesting topics that we should not afford to ignore. The strength and creativity that erupted in the first decades of independence are not being reborn after having fallen asleep, but have continued their course until today, strengthening at every step, either in the original continent or in the diaspora. And the well-deserved recognition of African writers that we are witnessing should not be content with opening loopholes … it has to break down the locks and leave the doors open once and for all ”.
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