Stephanie Newell, West African Literatures: ways of reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press (pb £18.00 – 978 0 19927 397 3; hb £43.00 – 978 0 19929 887 7). 2006, 259 pp.
Newell's book offers several distinct features. First, it is remarkably organized. Each of the fourteen chapters is carefully structured, introduced with a quotation and summarized in a sentence. Key authors and texts are selected and classifications appear flexible enough to avoid dogmatism and encourage new approaches. An index, a comprehensive bibliography and a 15-page timeline covering the development of literature alongside historical, political and cultural events since 300 AD complete the work, facilitating its study and scholarly use.
It all starts with an interrogation – ‘Where is West Africa?’ – that sets the tone, announcing a questioning of traditional readings of West African literature, an exploration (an often repeated word) of marginal and poorly researched authors or genres while offering a distinctly fresh point of view and new ways into best-sellers like Things Fall Apart, object of an entire chapter. The introduction challenges readers to redefine boundaries, while presenting the region as a ‘radically open space’ (p. 23) defined by its plurality and mobility.
The book is both solidly rooted in history and planetary in scope, gliding through time and space, revealing constant interaction and long-term currents of influence between writing and orality, tradition and modernity, across continents and within West Africa. Griot performances, epics and songs of abuse, powerful weapons of popular expression, reveal the overwhelming presence of orality in the region. Chapter 2, devoted to Negritude, considers the impact of the movement, deemed ‘one of the most influential and yet controversial movements to be inspired by West African intellectuals’ (p. 43), illustrated here by Senghor. The book also reveals Achebe's formidable influence on the literary scene as a trend-setter and a figurehead, and the seminal impact of his first novel. This chosen approach has inevitably led to some summarizing and limited the number of writers studied, yet still explores less trodden avenues, attracting readers’ attention to overlooked local publications. The title of Chapter 5, ‘Lost and found in translation’, could be applied to the whole book, which crosses linguistic and cultural barriers, bringing to light many publications in French and African languages while promoting the case of a vast popular literature usually left out.
Breaking out of linear models to consider a selection of the region's literature, Newell interweaves the analysis of fiction, drama and poetry with an exploration of the broader contexts within which writers operate. Replaced in their regional context, literary works reveal their plural and complex nature and the diversity of literary currents within each country. This is definitely the main quality of a book that brings together authors, genres and countries usually considered separately and rated differently, simultaneously addressing oral, popular, religious and ‘vernacular’ literatures and linking West Africa with its diaspora. For the author, popular literatures, with their self-help or religious pamphlets, and popular fiction produced locally and sold daily to an avid readership, merit a place beside the more canonical works of literature.
The third chapter, devoted to Islam and identity in the region, examines the way it generates distinctive forms of literature linking West Africa to the rest of the Islamic world. Chapter 12, on the other hand, explores the reasons why younger diasporan writers, while remaining African in their choice of settings, characters and themes, moved away from overtly political and realist modes of writing and into unconventional genres. The works of this ‘coherent avant-garde which has taken many critics by surprise’ (p. 183) are surveyed, revealing hybrid styles, a renewed approach to the anguish of migration and cultural intermingling, and critics’ unease highlighted in the various labels applied to their texts. The following chapter pursues the controversial approach of three female writers – Tadjo, Liking and Beyala – and their perceived quest for new subjectivities outside conventional gender codes.
A chapter focusing on feminist theories considers a very heterogeneous production, from Nwapa's Efuru to Adichie's first novel, offering a glimpse of Nigeria's rich literary harvest. Exploring the direct impact of the Biafran war on female behaviour in those novels, Newell presents the war as ‘a formative (and traumatic) moment in Nigerian literature, often endowed with far greater significance to Nigerian history and private life than colonialism’ (p. 157). This thought-provoking observation is typical of the freshness and panache with which Newell presents her subject.
