I announced in my first post as writer-in-residence here at Necessary Fiction that I wanted to focus this month on global fiction. Today I’m going to explore why this subject has been on my mind the last few years.

In my early twenties I spent several years living in Chile and Ecuador; soon those places began to show up as settings in my work. But it was in graduate school when an interest in global fiction really took hold. One bone-chilling Boston winter, I was drawn into Nigerian writer Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road, a frenetic, meandering novel of magical realism in which the ‘scumscapes’ of Lagos, where a boy named Azaro lives in abject poverty, are permeated by the dazzling images and machinations of the spirit world. I later learned that the title The Famished Road alludes to a poem by Wole Soyinka (which is, in turn, indebted to a proverb): “The right foot for joy, the left, dread/ And the mother prayed, Child/ May you never walk/ When the road waits, famished.”

A few years later, I managed to swing a creative writing Fulbright grant to Nigeria, where I lived for a year and a half, attempting to immerse myself in the literature and the lives. But as I began writing stories and essays set in Nigeria, a country I had come to know and love, I ran into obstacles. How could I use this setting, use my experiences with the people there, to write in a way that didn’t patronize, exoticize, or simplify the complex world of West Africa? The African publishing industry, which was fairly strong in the 60s and 70s, producing important magazines like Black Orpheas and dozens of books in Heinneman’s Afican Writer’s Series, is almost non-existent today—and so the fact that the majority of my audience would be western also complicated what I included in my writing. It is a sad truth that we, as Americans, tend to know so little about the history and culture of the entire African continent. How did I explain the context of my setting and characters without bogging down the narrative with exposition, without turning my stories into history and geography lessons?

So, I did what I always do when I have a problem. I read up on it. And what I found was a tragic history of western writers distorting Africa, mytholozing it in very damaging ways that served the purposes of the West.

Chinua Achebe, Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart among many other novels, has written much in condemnation of one particular book set in Nigeria, Mister Johnson, by the Irish writer Joyce Cary. He’s even said that the reading of this text was one of the events that propelled him to embark on his career as a writer; it was the moment he understood that the story of his country and of his life was under “attack.” It’s not difficult to understand why he felt this way when you read the book’s following description of Nigerians: “…the demonic appearance of the naked dancers, grinning, shrieking, scowling, or with faces which seemed entirely dislocated, senseless and unhuman, like twisted bags of lard, or burst bladders.” In 1952, when the novel came out, Time Magazine did a cover on Joyce Cary describing the book as “the best novel ever written about Africa.”

But these problems of outsider representation are still with us. In 2005, The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainana wrote a satirical guide entitled “How to Write About Africa in Five Easy Steps,” which was published by Granta. Here are some excerpts:

…. Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts—use these….
Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless there is a death involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.
Your African characters must include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendor. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with…
…. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the “real Africa” and you want that on your dust jacket.

Obviously, I didn’t want to be that kind of writer. But it turned out to be more difficult than I thought. As literary theorist Edward Said asks in his classic text Orientalism, “How can one study other cultures and peoples from a … non-repressive and non-manipulative, perspective?” Because it’s also dangerous to avoid the dark side. Poverty and malaria and corruption are huge problems in Africa. That’s the truth.

In Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” he argues that writers like Joseph Conrad, no matter their literary skill, should be unequivocally rejected because of the false representation their books give of the developing world. But what would an entirely true representation look like? Is there an author in the world without bias? Where do we draw the line between subjectivity and racism?

And being a member of the oppressed does not exempt you from insensitivity and even racism against your fellow oppressed. V.S. Naipaul’s novels sometimes treat Africa, India and the West Indies as backward and often peopled by cruel, ridiculous savages; whereas, his work tends to hold European civilization in reverence.

So, if everyone is partially contaminated, who has the right to speak and from which positions? Aesthetic apartheid—wherein only black Africans can write about black Africa—could do more harm than good by only serving to entrench the binary of center and periphery. Said warns again in “Orientalism Revisited” that a “double kind of possessive exclusivism could set in: the sense of being an excluding insider by virtue of experience (only women can write for and about women, and only literature that treats women or Orientals well is good literature), ….”

Eventually, I ran across one potential strategy that theorist Abdul JanMohamed comes up with to the problem of how the westerner, like myself, can overcome, at least partially, his or her westerness. His answer is: self-reflexivity. Henrik Ibsen famously pronounced that, “To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.” And so I looked for examples of this in contemporary literature. One of my favorites is J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, wherein the author retells Robinson Crusoe except this time there is a woman and she brings the slave Friday back to England. But Friday cannot tell his own story of the island because, before the woman arrived, his tongue had been cut out. To me, the novel is a meditation on how subjugated peoples are often deprived of the voice to tell their own stories. But while Coetzee, a white South African, cannot give Friday back his tongue, at least he can finally recognize the ways in which he is implicated in the horror and sadness of its loss.

I’ve begun to attempt this idea of “self-reflexivity” in my own writing about Nigeria. I can’t pretend my characters aren’t saddled with the, comparatively light, baggage of privilige, but I can have them struggle with what that means. Here’s an excerpt from a piece I published in The New York Times

In the mornings I watched Againye and his friends playing soccer in front of the dilapidated primary school, a field that would soon be dotted with bovine waste from the annual Christmas cow auction. I loved watching him move. The man had amazing genes: naturally broad shoulders set over a small waist and muscular legs. Quick, lithe, competitive, he challenged the other team with a good-natured roar. In moments like this I felt hypnotized but also uncomfortable — the woman on the sidelines, the white woman objectifying the body of her black man. But what else do lovers do, I thought.

And here is another piece from my novel-in-progress:

She remembered when two men were digging a ditch for a sewer pipeline behind her house in Nigeria, and she watched them from her kitchen window. They were waist-deep in the hole, scooping out black dirt with shovels. Not wearing shirts, their torsos glistened with sweat, smooth and hairless as newborns; wiry and chiseled; darkest, shiniest obsidian she’d ever laid eyes on. At that moment Flannery was a redneck who whistles obscenely from his truck. Or she was Lorca writing Spanish poems about gypsy women.

In both of these examples, I’m attempting to show a white woman watching the “other” while aslo examining her own potential motives and biases. She wonders if she is the offensive redneck who makes unwanted catcalls? Or is she Lorca appreciating, and perhaps romanticisng, the exotic sight in front of her? And how can she escape these positions? Is it even possible?

The importance of these questions is why I’ve chosen to explore global fiction during my residency here at Necessary Fiction. Stay tuned for interviews with other writers about how they approach the challenges of global fiction as well as more global fiction itself.