Literature: the growing visibility of African letters
Author Abdulrazak Gurnah receiving his Nobel Prize for Literature in London, December 6, 2021. © ADRIAN DENNIS / AFP
Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
5 mins
Literary Africa is on the rise.
Its writers have garnered some of the great literary awards in the Western world this year, including the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature which honored Anglo-Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah.
These distinctions give greater visibility to African literature, long underestimated, or even ignored.
Advertising
Read more
African literature is in the spotlight in Stockholm at the start of the week, with the Nobel Prize ceremony on the program. But pandemic obliges, the winners of this year will not go to Stockholm to receive their prizes. It was in London that the novelist
Abdulrazak Gurnah
, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, was presented on Monday 6 December from the hands of the Swedish Ambassador to the United Kingdom, his medal and his diploma. It was from London that he delivered his reception speech this Tuesday, December 7, which was
broadcast live
on the Nobel Foundation website.
Nobel's speech is a long-awaited, important moment in the life of a Nobel Prize-winning writer, who uses this platform to look back on his life, his work, his art, his vision of the world. Gurnah who was born in Zanzibar in 1948, has lived for more than half a century in England, where he took refuge fleeing the turbulence in his country at the end of colonization. He is the author of ten novels and numerous short stories, the themes of which revolve around the question of immigration and identity. According to the Nobel jury, he was awarded for his “
empathetic and uncompromising narration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees caught between cultures and continents
”.
For its French editor
Emmanuelle Collas
who published two novels by Gurnah1 in France, it is his writing situated at the crossroads of myth and history, while remaining in phase with the major questions of our time, which is the strength of world stories of this outstanding storyteller.
“
He is a writer who has made his work a place of reflection on migrants and asylum seekers,”
emphasizes Emmanuelle Colas.
The particularity of Abdulrazak Gurnah's work is to explore individual destinies, interweaving them with a past or present story.
All this, moreover, is part of a collective memory that stirs up myths.
This is what I loved, what I still love about what this novelist writes
.
"
A prosperous year
2021 has been a prosperous year for African authors. Besides the Nobel, African writers have won several major prizes this year, including the Goncourt, won by
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
and the Booker Prize, by
David Diop
.
There has been talk of a "collective
shooting of European prices
".
It is a tremendous recognition.
The fact remains that it is a belated recognition.
Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr after winning the Prix Goncourt in Paris on November 4, 2021 Bertrand GUAY / AFP
The great forgotten literary prizes on the French-speaking side are called Senghor, Césaire,
Ahmadou Kourouma,
Sony Labou Tansi, to name a few. The concealment of these great founders of African letters constitutes an error in judgment, as argued by the Indian scholar Kusum Aggarwal, a great specialist in African literature. “
This recognition comes with a lot of delay,
” she fumed
. Africans have been writing for a while and it was time for writers to be recognized, and for their voices to be heard and for the invisibilization that the African continent has long suffered from, comes to an end. Especially since it is often very innovative literature, with a diversity of themes and genres.
"
Speaking, the Togolese novelist
Sami Tchak
recalls for his part that the African writers who have been distinguished belong for the most part to the diaspora. “
African literatures as we perceive them in the world,”
he continues, “
are literatures produced by Africans for the most part living outside the African continent and published mainly by Western publishing houses. Very little is known about all the literatures that occur on the continent. It is only when the author is published outside the African continent that one ends up spotting him and integrating him into what is called
"African literature" ”.
However, late as it may be, this recognition necessarily has an impact on the reception of African literatures.
It is true that the prices change the way we look at the award-winning author and his country of origin.
They also change the expectations of readers.
For a long time, readers in the West have read African novels as anthropological or sociological accounts of African societies.
By awarding the Goncourt Prize this year to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr who made his literary quest the theme of his award-winning novel, the Parisian jury privileged the aesthetic and imaginative dimension of this literature.
The Congo school on both sides
Finally, as Sami Tchak reminds us, with an increasingly large literary offer, there is also an awareness of the diversity of African literary traditions. The essayist compares the literary productions of Senegal to those of the Congo. “
In Senegal
,” underlines the novelist,
there was a great influence from Senghor and Cheikh Hamidou Kane. It is therefore hardly surprising that Senegalese writers demonstrate a certain classicism at the level of the language as at the level of the narration. Their writings are not comparable to those of a Sony Labou Tansi or a Fiston Mwanza Mujila who have a much more colorful writing, closer to the rhythms of Congolese rumba music. We can speak of a Congo school on both shores. The authors of this school are less in intellectualism and more in image and musicality
”.
Africa is not a country, but a continent, the second largest continent in the world.
Consequently, its traditions, its literatures are conjugated in the plural.
This awareness is perhaps the main achievement of this prosperous year for African literatures.
Near the Sea
(2006) and
Adieu Zanzibar
(2009).
Newsletter
Receive all international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_FR
Literature
Culture Africa
Culture
On the same subject
LITERATURE
Abdulrazak Gurnah, novelist of uprooting and exile
Writing paths
A journey into the world of migrants and exiles, with the Nobel Prize for Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah
The 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah