Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  Awoonor does not have Ouologuem’s access to savagery. Instead of glorying in the sun and the tears it forces upon us, Awoonor’s hero says he hates the sun, and finds ease in images of spooky shelter: “Darkness peopled by ghosts in purple velvets shrieks abandoned by fireplaces by the eaves of the thatched hut in rain falling falling falling as the water whitened by cornflour is poured on the sogged earth for the benevolent ones to drink to quench their thirst in the land beyond the field where trees are green and the grove is dark.” The interior monologues put us in mind of Eliot’s remark (apropos of Ulysses) that “this new method of giving the psychology … doesn’t tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells.” Viewed externally, Amamu is not very impressive or dynamic, and his fate is less tragic than damply sad, a shadow melting back into shadows. Yet the novel’s strength is its refusal to be spectacular, to feign anger it doesn’t feel, or to present Ghanian life as anything much more than a fumbling, disheartened extension of colonial rule, a blurred carbon. Humanity is not, as it rather is in Bound to Violence, locked out; there are pages of faithful, inconsequential dialogue, with a lilt never heard in the West, and perhaps it is this sense of voice and voices that makes This Earth, My Brother … amiable, despite its allegorical grimace.

  Ezekiel Mphahlele’s The Wanderers is the longest and least sophisticated novel of the three. His English is not always sure. His characters say unsayable things to each other, like “Aren’t we happier when our love activates things in people than when it founders on passive ground?” Some sentences are untidy wastebaskets overflowing with words:

  Maybe all these factors checked the downhill thump and roll and leap of the boulder of passion before it could plunge into the placid fountain down there with a horrendous splash before anchoring under its own weight, for good or for bad.

  On the other hand, there are some lucky hits a more practiced writer wouldn’t have brought off:

  Always for that distance, one’s mind seemed to see things in blue and yellow: colors that seemed to have been yoked violently together by some inevitable force that wanted to have fun.

  Her figure was the kind that never looked overripe or bitten into. The language adequately moves its freight—an ambitious panoramic story of wandering exiles, black and white, from South Africa. The South African episodes are the most vivid and affectionate; the polychrome peculiarities of this deplorable state, with its “colored” and Indian minorities as well as blacks, are rendered in a sharp sequence of vignettes and accents. Mr. Mphahlele, whose black characters talk a little like stage Englishmen, hears peculiar speech everywhere. Here is an Indian shopkeeper:

  “What you peepel want prom Hindians, eh? Ewery person in dis worl’ sweat to eat.… It is not enough we Hindians we are removed by gowermint out of town and we looss too much property too much bissness and den you peepel put our shops on pire?”

  Here is an Afrikaans woman, at a Promethean extreme of racism:

  “Look at me. You lucky you can see your god like me and Master and Master Van Zyl. I cannot see my god, I cannot reach him he is far, far away. Sometime I t’ink he does not listen. But I only know he is listening and he knows dat the government is doing everyt’ing right to make you heppy, like dey are your fathers and mothers.… You heppy, not like ourself, the white people beecoss we have to look after both ourself and you. You know sometime the father and mother must be unheppy so that their children are heppy. I am right, eh? You must keep laughing.”

  When Timi Tabane, a black schoolteacher exiled for writing newspaper articles about a slave system of penal labor, travels to London, the colony of exiled South Africans there seems to him pathetic; the “South African English accent the whites spoke … irritated him as it had never done in his home country.” And in Nigeria, after his initial exhilaration at being freed from South Africa’s tyranny of passbooks and police, he is irritated by the effeminate way Nigerians slap at each other, and urges them to hit with fists, in good South African style. Prostitution and idleness are also new to him. One of the friends he makes there, in a small circle of intellectuals and mixed marriages, is named Awoonor (another is “an American historian, John Galbraith”), and, whether or not this means Kofi Awoonor, The Wanderers moves into the dispirited terrain of This Earth, My Brother.… Timi’s problems become those of the free: a sense of futility, elusive responsibilities, a meagre security. He and his wife agonize over the ethics of hiring a servant. Awoonor lectures them on the duties of mastership. “You see, you have to be a master or none at all, you must be seen to be one. You’ve got to talk like one. If you’re soft, a steward thinks Ah, na he be tenth-rate master. He wants a first-rate master.” Morally compromised, unhappy among the post-colonial anti-climaxes of Nigeria and Kenya, they are faced with that ultimate Western luxury, a generation gap. Their son, Felang, after obstinately non-coöperating with the Anglophile school establishment, runs away, joins an African nationalist guerrilla army, and is fed to crocodiles by white farmers.

  Where can the Timi Tabanes of the world turn? Tabane rejects the Christianity that enveloped his education. He speaks of “African humanism,” but the African wisdom he cites is a Stone Age survival manual: nothing belongs to you but what you have eaten, food is nothing but decayed matter that sticks in the teeth, a woman is like a calabash—do not kick it around. For soul comfort, Tabane turns to his American records, to the music of John Coltrane and Big Bill Broonzy, of Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington. He asks, “How can I make my children understand we have all wandered away from something—all of us blacks,” and gets no answer. He laughs when an elderly white Kenyan says he is going back to Canada: “I’ve done Africa—eighteen years now—and I must think of my children’s future. Africa’s no more for us whites.” Africa is no more for whites, yet not yet for blacks. Tabane tells himself, “We must move.… Where to? Certainly out of Africa, stay out until we can feel needed.… I love Africa but … I’ll serve the country that needs me—more than that, wants me.” The jacket flap states that Mr. Mphahlele now lives in the United States, an associate professor of English at the University of Denver. Whereas Kofi Awoonor teaches African literature at the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York. Yambo Ouologuem makes his home in Paris.

  Now, the generalizations. Africa is enormous and pluralistic. Muslimized, impoverished Mali is a continent removed from the many-layered, prosperous police state of South Africa. Even between Nigeria and Kenya The Wanderers notes significant differences in tone, prospects, and make-up. So expectations of an “African” literary mode are perhaps as fatuous as talk of an “American” literature that would include, along with the United States’ classics, the annals of the conquistadors, Hawaiian war chants, and the cosmopolitan avant gardes of Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Indeed, these three African novels show a deficiency not only of continental self-consciousness but of national identification; the governments, white or black, are uniformly deplored, even if Ouologuem does, perversely, seek illumination in the centuries-long bloodbath of Saif rule. Timi Tabane and Amamu feel homesick for narrow scenes—a riverside, a crowded courtyard. Modernism, while it has crushed the tribes, has not produced an emotionally credible substitute.

  Of the three novels, only The Wanderers demonstrates any pronounced resentment of white colonialism. Bound to Violence presents the white colonialists as dupes, along with the “niggertrash,” of the demonic Nakem nobility. This Earth, My Brother … remembers colonial rule with a kind of numb affection. And even The Wanderers shows the English-speaking whites (but not the Afrikaners) as people who, like the blacks, are unequally matched against the vast, murderous inertia that is Africa. Steve Cartwright, for instance, Timi’s best white friend, is killed, a few pages after Felang himself is killed, in another squalid skirmish. Naledi, Steve’s widow, a black woman, announces in the novel’s last paragraph her intention to stay in London and study nutrition, supported by her white father-in-law. The book’s last word is “sympathy.” There is less Fano
nesque fury in these novels than one might expect; if their authors are a fair sampling, young Africans do not share their American brothers’ sensation of a magical white omnipotence malevolently applied to ring them in. Rather, there is bewilderment at vastness, a sense of ungraspable forces and inutile liberty, reminiscent of New World fiction from Fenimore Cooper to Faulkner.

  Un-New World, however, is the dispirited air of these novels. The African bourgeoisie, and the intellectual class within it, seem to have been born discouraged; they have inherited Western consciousness on the downswing. The otherworldly faiths have faded, and the earthly paradises—of Marxism, of industrial capitalism—have been debunked by partially coming true. Modernity’s birthday party is over. At the dedication of a new hospital, pagan dancers from the highland make music with tin cans and stones; all Timi Tabane hears is the “grim note of defeat”—“like the doleful song of southern black warriors when they have lost the battle.” True, what is there to do but build hospitals, import technology, invent constitutions, mitigate corruption and poverty, take wives and betray them, raise children and lose them—to play the sedulous ape, in short, to the West’s aging, diseased Faust? Of course literature can afford to be cynical. It generally is. Our own first masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, is scarcely a paean to the past, and Moby Dick shares with Bound to Violence a rococo pessimism. Yet one listens in vain in these African works for an echo of Emerson’s and Whitman’s confident sense of national audience. For whom are these works written, in the languages of departed occupiers? Not for the “niggertrash” still sunk in the tribal dream and the struggle for sustenance. Or for the African whites, ever more anachronistically clinging to their plantations and prerogatives and the 19th-century credos that justified them. At the moment, the black African artist, from his niche in American colleges or continental salons, seems a voice without an auditorium, a sensibility between worlds.

  Shades of Black

  THE GREAT PONDS, by Elechi Amadi. 217 pp. John Day, 1973.

  IN THE FOG OF THE SEASON’S END, by Alex La Guma. 181 pp. The Third Press, 1973.

  AGATHA MOUDIO’S SON, by Francis Bebey, translated from the French by Joyce A. Hutchison. 154 pp. Lawrence Hill, 1973.

  Three novels from Africa, all now published in the United States, suggest, without being especially long or ambitious, that certain artistic advantages reside with the writers of that continent, in comparison with their overpublicized and overprogrammed counterparts in the West. The Great Ponds, by Elechi Amadi, not only gives a Homeric nobility to the tiny war between two Nigerian villages but recovers, in its acceptance of magic as a fact, the power the Greek dramatists had—of making mental acts seem momentous. In the Fog of the Season’s End, by the exiled South African Alex La Guma, delivers, through its portrait of a few hunted blacks attempting to subvert the brutal regime of apartheid, a social protest reminiscent, in its closely detailed texture and level indignation, of Dreiser and Zola. And Agatha Moudio’s Son, by the Cameroonian Francis Bebey, gracefully propounds an all but forgotten equation—that between the spirit of comedy and the spirit of forgiveness.

  The black African moved to literary expression confronts choices a Westerner need not make. First, he must choose his language—the European language, with its alien tradition and colonial associations, or the tribal language, with its oral tradition and minuscule reading audience. Unless his mother and father came from different tribes and used a European tongue as the lingua franca of the home, his heart first learned to listen in the tribal language, which will forever then be more pungent and nuancé; but English and French command the far broader audience, across Africa and throughout the world. So he must choose his audience: foreigners and the minority of his countrymen educated in white ways, or the majority of his fellow-tribesmen, who can be addressed chiefly through recited poetry and theatrical performance. Television, of course, somewhat widens this latter possibility, and a good deal of the intellectual energy of Ghana goes into it, publication in this impoverished, politically edgy country being practically limited to Nkrumah’s bound works. In all of equatorial Africa, only the market towns of Nigeria and Ghana provide enough audience for written English to engender a popular literature—Christian melodramas and self-help fables not much different from the penny dreadfuls consumed by the urban masses of London and New York a century ago. The sales of a classic like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart lean preponderantly on the schools, which use it as a text for the teaching of English. And these texts arrive by way of English publishing houses, whose editors and readers can scarcely help prizing an “Africanness” of exotic primitivism and docile quaintness. Hence, in reaction, the aggressive sophistication and anti-“negritude” of such creative black expatriates as Yambo Ouologuem and Wole Soyinka. The African writer must consciously choose not only his language, audience, and tone but his reality. A village-born, mission-taught, Oxford-anointed African has lived a synopsis of human history. He has outgrown prehistory so quickly that nothing has had time to die; the village gods, the Christian God, and the modern absence of God coexist in him, along with several languages and the madly multiplied number of styles, truths, slants, and stances that the global compression brings tangent to an alert mind. What is truth? At a symposium in Lagos a year ago, I heard a dazzling variety of literary tactics enunciated by a dozen Nigerian writers and critics. Elechi Amadi (addressed as “Captain Amadi,” in deference to the Army years of his varied career) put forward with an arresting earnestness the opinion that supernatural reality should play its part in a narrative whose characters believe in magic. The first question from the audience challenged this notion, or, rather, asked that it be clarified to mean that such belief should be shown to be subjectively influencing the characters. Captain Amadi, a slender, gracious, and handsome figure in a white robe, appeared to consent to the modification, there in the juju-proof setting of the university auditorium, amid the steel chairs and the flex-necked microphones and the beaming pink faces of U.S.I.S. officials, with the metropolis of Lagos clattering beyond the windows. But it seemed to me that Captain Amadi did not in fact mean anything quite so reasonable as the proposition that believers believe, but something more supernatural, and his novel confirms my impression.

  The Great Ponds tells, in a fine quick style airy with unadorned dialogue, of the contest between two villages, Chiolu and Aliakoro, over fishing rights in the Great Ponds, particularly the very rich Pond of Wagabe. The last of a series of wars evidently settled the ownership in favor of Chiolu, but Aliakoro maintains that it possesses a still older claim, and for years its men have poached unchallenged. Now a party of poachers is ambushed, and several of them are held for ransom. In retaliation, Aliakoro kidnaps several Chiolu women, and the conflict escalates to total predation and terror on both sides:

  Death lurked behind every bush. At night the pale moonlight cast dubious shadows which none but the brave dared investigate. When there was no moon the curtain of charcoal-black darkness instilled as much fear into people’s minds as if it was one vast insubstantial ubiquitous enemy ready to slay any who left the security of the closely guarded houses.

  Even animals began to feel the effects of the deadly conflict. No longer was the arena strewn with white drowsy sheep lured by the moonlight.… Every path was watched by men whose one desire was to kill.… There were no children playing anywhere. Reception halls, the haunts of old men, were deserted; the empty three-legged chairs in them seemed to stare back … in protest.

  The ceremonious parleys and judicious assemblies whereby this disastrous condition is achieved are related with humorous care and an eye, certainly, on the global wars of the century. Timeless is the mechanism whereby honorable men acting measuredly in what they construe to be self-defense perpetrate ruin. The warfare, performed with arrows and with machetes that behead an enemy at a stroke, is described as in the old chronicles, with a simplicity that leaves the sufferer some dignity without excusing us from fear and pity:

  Sparks f
lew from their knives as they parried each other’s blows. Ikechi did not seem to care much for his safety. The possibility of dying did not occur to him. He fought relentlessly with the singleness of purpose of a child. He exhibited the carelessness of inexperience too, now and then leaving openings which might have been fatal if his opponent had been strong enough to exploit them. But he was not. He was a middle-aged man and he weakened under the remorseless attacks of his much younger assailant. His knees began to wobble, his eyes grew dim as he panted. Now there was a plea in his eyes, but he had no breath to translate this plea into words.

  Ikechi, unseeing in his mad fury, did not heed this plea as his able hands worked his machete this way and that. Parrying a particularly heavy blow the man sank to his knees. Before he could recover it was all over with him.

  There are no bad men in this story, only men. Though the reader is placed nearer in sympathy to the village of Chiolu, Aliakoro is visited, and its eze (chief), its dibia (medicine man), and its foremost warrior are characterized as interestingly as their opposite numbers in Chiolu. Indeed, Wago “the leopard-killer,” the Aliakoro warrior who is fanatical about the ponds, and Igwu the reluctant magic-worker, who is indifferent about the ponds but who is pushed by his villagers into the most demonic kind of sorcery, are rather more interesting than their Chiolu counterparts, Olumba and Achichi; Captain Amadi imitates Homer in making the Trojans loom in a way that the Greeks do not. His dozens of characters within the two villages are all distinct. As the war becomes devastating, the book’s microcosm expands, and an intercessory force is revealed: the entire Erekwi clan, whose villages are now threatened by the breach of peace. All the ezes meet in splendid panoply and put the dispute up to the gods; a representative from one warring village is to “swear.” Olumba of Chiolu volunteers, and the elders of Aliakoro nominate the god Ogbunabali, the god of night. The “swearing” is a simple rite; Olumba recites: