Nervous Conditions and Stories on Demand

Nervous Conditions is a bildungsroman about Tambu’s intellectual development within the context of the guerilla war in southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) that pitted the Zimbabwe African People Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) against the white minority government led by Ian Smith during the late 1960s and 1970s. This white settler society had emerged from the defeat by the British South Africa Company of the Shona and Ndebele people in the 1890s (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 8). In the wake of decolonization across Africa, which saw the independence of Southern Rhodesia’s neighbors—Malawi and Zambia—in the 1960s, Smith proclaimed the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) to forestall a Black African majority government. The ZAPU- and ZANU-led second chimurenga—the war for freedom—ended with a negotiated settlement that resulted in democratic elections in 1980, bringing Robert Mugabe to power as prime minister. Nervous Conditions is the first novel in a trilogy that “responds to Zimbabwe’s ever-intensifying crises of war, institutional racism, and viciously rigged colonial-turned-postcolonial variety of capitalism” (Gulick 464).Footnote ¹ The novel established Dangarembga as a major voice in the African literary tradition.

In both its relationship to the nationalist project and its representation of the city, Nervous Conditions sidesteps many common characteristics of the Zimbabwean novel, which “is inseparable from the construction of a postcolonial national literary project” (Primorac 12). The novel has been hailed for foregrounding female subjectivities, a feat that Dangarembga accomplishes by centering the experiences of the protagonist and narrator Tambu and her female relatives instead of the nationalist discourse that characterizes African literature of this period. As Susan Z. Andrade puts it, Dangarembga’s achievement lies in “rendering full and complex female characters against a literary background populated by Mother Africa and prostitute figures” (138). Except for a few references, masculine military projects, such as the UDI and the war, are absent from the text. But readers soon learn that the personal is political: Tambu’s education is interrupted because her family cannot pay for both her and her brother’s schooling, and they choose to prioritize her brother. Determined to be educated, Tambu requests that her family provide maize seeds for cultivation so she can raise funds for her tuition. Her father initially demurs, asking Tambu if she can cook education for her future husband, but eventually he relents, believing that the venture will fail and Tambu will realize the futility of her ambition. Invoking her grandmother, who taught her crop husbandry and the history of the land, Tambu embarks on market gardening to support her pursuit. This quest for education and her experience with formal learning constitute the core of the novel. Unsurprisingly, scholars have tended to focus on the novel’s work of Bildung and its gender dynamics.Footnote ² Joseph R. Slaughter, for instance, has explored how the “material connection between the cultivation of land and the cultivation of personality … serves as a leitmotif that links plots of land to plots of development and to the narrative act of plotting” in the text (233). I want to foreground Tambu’s brief maize business and quick trip to the city, marginal in the novel and in the scholarly preoccupation with Tambu’s development, for the new light it sheds on the narrative.

The novel’s brief depiction of Umtali complicates traditional urban representations in Zimbabwean literature, or what Ranka Primorac characterizes as the tendency to build plots “around the theme of a big city’s potential to destroy innocence and beauty” (13). Dangarembga’s urban register is refreshing for revising this “well-established motif in Zimbabwean literature: the city as a hotbed of moral decay” (Kellerer 100). Neither the urban nor the rural is romanticized in the novel.

Tambu’s teacher, Mr. Matimba, serves as the conduit between both domains. Tambu plans to sell her maize locally until he recommends traveling to town instead:

Tambu is shocked. “Nobody had that much money,” she thinks. But Mr. Matimba convinces her otherwise: “If you took your green mealies to town,” “you might make enough for a couple of terms’ fees” (24).

The urban space of “town” is not only far away geographically—“I cannot get to town,” Tambu tells Mr. Matimba—but also set apart economically from Tambu’s countryside (24). It is a place where a cob can fetch sixpence, an outrageous amount to the young Tambu, struggling to pay her tuition. That the town is a site of economic inflation is clear from the conversation between teacher and student, but there is much more. The urban sphere does not just want any cob, it has a specification: green, fat, heavy. To succeed in the town, to earn an inflated urban return, the cob must be of a certain prized, inflated nature itself. Dangarembga’s novel is highlighting the extractive core of the city, its libidinal consumption cycle that cannibalizes the rural domain. The city wants corn that is fat and green in the same way that it often siphons human labor from the countryside. The desire for greenness—read as freshness, potential, youth, naivete—underscores the city’s exploitative inclination.

What does this have to do with literature? In the dialogue between Tambu and Mr. Matimba, the maize anticipates the narrativization process for the urban space, where narrative must be designed to meet certain expectations. Paying attention to the maize sheds light on the narrative demand of the city in Nervous Conditions. By following the maize, one arrives at Dangarembga’s poetics for the city.

The historical and legal backdrop to Dangarembga’s narrative is the patchwork of colonial-era policies aimed at controlling who has access to land, urban space, and mobility. The history of urbanization in Southern Rhodesia is a story of contestation over urban spaces between the colonizers and Africans who sought the “right to the city,” to cite David Harvey. One study of Southern Rhodesia locates a “rapid increase in the urban African population … at the foundation of the present problem” in the colony (Ibbotson 75). To control African migration to the city, pass laws and other exclusionary policies were put in place. Policies such as the Native Urban Areas Act, the Salisbury African Labor Exchange, the Land Apportionment Act of 1931 (amended in 1941), and the 1960 Vagrancy Act were designed to enforce African population control while privileging Europeans in the distribution of land and urban access. As of 1960, “62% of the [European] population lived in one of the three main centres: Salisbury, Bulawayo and Umtali” (McEwan 430). Whereas these Europeans needed the cheap labor provided by Black Africans to serve their economic interests, colonial anxieties about proximity to Africans and fear of insurrection required that their urban habitation be controlled. Africans actively and passively resisted urban exclusionary practices and made lives—even if precarious—in colonial urban areas while maintaining ties with their rural communities.

This exclusionary geography impresses Tambu with its novelty when she arrives in Umtali. The vehicles and road infrastructure dazzle her. Mr. Matimba explains that Umtali is the third largest town in Rhodesia, smaller only than Salisbury and Bulawayo, amazing the youngster with stories of urban power: the lights at night sparkling like hundreds of stars, traffic lights with intricate technological workings. Tambu’s greenness in the urban space is accentuated by her wonder.

That urban wonder is interrupted when they finally approach a white woman in Umtali to sell Tambu’s maize:

A crowd quickly gathers, creating an urban spectacle. But what matters here is that Doris has not left room for Matimba or Tambu to speak. She poses the question, but her superciliousness will not permit a response. Instead she fills in the gap, creating a narrative fitting her image of Africa, of Black Africans from the country: child labor, slavery, rags, tears.

When Doris finally does allow Mr. Matimba to speak, his response is striking: “He spoke most sorrowfully and most beseechingly” (29). The response must have moved her, because readers learn that “Doris darkened like a chameleon,” and “money changed hands” (29). But she does not take the maize. She buys instead the story that Mr. Matimba offers, which he explains to Tambu on their way home: “He had told her that I was an orphan, taken in by my father’s brother but, being the thirteenth child under their roof, had not been sent to school for lack of fees. He had said that I was very clever, very hardworking and was selling mealies to raise my school fees with his assistance” (29).

In place of maize, Matimba sells a story within a story, and that story makes all the difference—Doris donates ten pounds. The scene of Matimba’s instruction in the countryside becomes relevant again: he had used his urban sensibilities to advise the young woman on the kind of maize that is prized in Umtali. It is tempting to say that he fails, but only if one ignores how the same inflationary characteristics apply to the story he sells to Doris. Tambu is selling maize to raise tuition, but the real story is not affective (or effective) enough; it does not meet the generic demand of the urban space. Like the maize, the story designed for urban Rhodesia needs fattening, and the teacher Matimba rises to the task with embellishments: dead parents and numerous children. As Bishupal Limbu states in his work on human rights narratives, “this spectacle of appalling violence and unspeakable suffering is meant to arouse the reader’s sympathy” (83). In this call-and-response, an urban call and country response, to be precise, Doris begins with a narrative of child labor and slavery while Matimba completes the cycle of African stereotype by adding orphanhood and African reproductive irresponsibility. Matimba recognizes Doris as a customer in need of what Amatoritsero Ede terms “self-anthropologizing discourse”—that is, “a conscious or unconscious self-negation due to external existential or ideological pressures” (114). Matimba capitalizes on and reroutes the demand for a racialized story to new ends in a market setting.

I remarked above on the presentation of the city as a site of self-invention in the scholarship on the subject. I can add here that the urban space is a site not just of economic inflation but also of narrative inflation. To be acceptable to the urban world, the story from the countryside, like its agricultural produce, must be hyperbolic. Tambu returns to school because Mr. Matimba understands urban genres, so that even when their original plan—selling maize at an inflationary price—fails, he quickly responds with plan B. Adopting the urban quality of improvisation, he rises to the occasion by transfiguring Tambu’s story into a compelling urban form. With his inventive short story, laced with what Graham Huggan would describe as the “postcolonial exotic,” Mr. Matimba fashions an inflationary poetics for the city.

Nervous Conditions illuminates the two central elements of poetics for the city—narrative inflation and evacuation of agency. Narrative inflation may have facilitated Tambu’s return to school, but she is also marginalized in Umtali. Not only is her life story and lifeworld distorted, she is left out as Mr. Matimba and Doris (the white woman saving the Black woman from a Black man) ignore her. Whereas her first-person account carries firsthand authoritative weight in other parts of the novel, she defers here to Mr. Matimba’s explanation—“he had told her,” “he had said”—to understand and relay what transpired. Already amplified in this early passage from the novel is what Carli Coetzee terms “the many forms of deletion, frustration and destruction that go into the making of a Black girl self” (444). I return to the loss of agency in the representational process in the following section on Mda’s The Heart of Redness, and in the conclusion.

The Heart of Redness and the Refusal of Urban Demand

Like Nervous Conditions, Mda’s novel centers a countryside, Qolorha-by-Sea, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, home of the Xhosa people. It tells the story of the nineteenth-century cattle killing in the Eastern Cape, precipitated by the fifteen-year-old prophetess Nongqawuse, raised by Mhlakaza, whose father was a councilor to the Xhosa king.Footnote ³ In April 1856, Nongqawuse reported an encounter with spirits of her ancestors who, she claimed, asked the Xhosa people to destroy their crops and cattle in return for new cattle and crops and the annihilation of the British colonizers. The anticolonial thrust of the prophecy made it attractive to the Xhosa people, who were desperate to curb the incursions of the Cape Colony. But the prophecy went unfulfilled, and a famine ensued that drove the Xhosa into other communities and into the British wage-labor economy for survival. The prophecy also destroyed familial and communal relationships, pitting those who carried out the killings against relatives who rejected Nongqawuse’s salvific claims.

Mda’s novel dramatizes what Grant Farred describes as the “double splitting of the amaXhosa, first into Believers and Unbelievers and then into observant and unobservant Believers” (106). In the novel, the division is crystallized by twins who choose different camps, and the novel examines the lingering impact of this breach among their descendants in the South African present. With its “competing ethics of retrospection,” as Jennifer Wenzel terms it, the novel dwells on such themes as conservation, development, and the question of sustainable futurity (179). Byron Caminero-Santangelo moreover has called it a bioregional novel because of its accentuation of Qolorha-by-Sea, but the novel is also attuned to the city of Johannesburg. Of interest is the extroverted nature of the novel’s rural setting—namely, its consistent pattern of embracing developmental opportunities and welcoming outsiders as tourists.

The novel’s central character Camagu is emblematic in this respect. In Johannesburg (and on the verge of returning to the United States after failing to achieve the promise of economic freedom following the dismantling of apartheid), Camagu meets NomaRussia, a woman who has come from Qolorha-by-Sea to find a childhood friend. After learning that her friend, Twin, has died, the woman sings at his wake, where Camagu is enraptured by her voice. Urban narratives often tilt toward the transnational, and Camagu’s story appears similarly poised. That is, until he switches gears and follows a rural itinerary that brings him to Qolorha-by-Sea in search of NomaRussia. As Wenzel puts it, in Qolorha-by-Sea, “Camagu finds utopian promise in a different kind of exile from the nation-state: within the local scale of the village” (185). Rural affectation reshapes Camagu’s trajectory in The Heart of Redness.

But it is not Camagu’s narrative that interests me. I am interested in the urban itinerary of the minor character Twin, who dies penniless and unknown in the city. Twin, a descendant of one of the twins who experienced the cattle-killing movement, had left Qolorha-by-Sea hoping to find renown as an artist in Johannesburg and economic fortune in its mines. The novel dramatizes the persistence of the tortuous past by pitting the present-day Twin’s family against the descendants of the ancestral twin brother, Twin-Twin.

Johannesburg, “the edgy city,” as Loren Kruger describes it, or the “superfluous city,” in Achille Mbembe’s register, is the magnetic lure of southern Africa for its mines. Since the discovery of gold that transformed the city in 1886, men have come from all over southern Africa and beyond to work in the mines. Within a decade of starting production, Johannesburg had emerged as the world’s largest producer of gold (Harrison and Zack). But lowering men into the earth to mine gold endangered them and the environment: “South Africa’s mines are the deepest in the world, and the construction of the shaft is the first point of access in mining. Cutting down vertically into the earth to create the shaft is an ear-splitting, dangerous and physically demanding task” (Gaule 132). Adverse effects of mining are not restricted to mine workers. Mining operations produce toxic waste that imperils humans and the ecological system. Studies conducted around tailing dumps have shown dangerous levels of heavy metals and other pollutants. The danger of acid mine drainage persists even when old mines close or are abandoned, threatening the lives of South Africans—often poor and Black—who live in proximity to mine dumps because of the housing shortage (Naicker et al.; Chetty et al.). Yet the economic benefits of mines have dwindled over the years for workers, even as corporate executives and their government collaborators are enriched from the spoils of extraction.

In addition to its health implications, mining also disrupts familial and communal ties. In a move that concretizes urban alienation as a theme of the novel, Twin disconnects from his family as soon as he leaves for Johannesburg. They learn about him afterward only from the rumor mill. Twin is not unique in this regard; the narrative repeatedly describes lonely women whose husbands “toil in the mines of Johannesburg” (Mda, Heart 117). The mining economy even makes a brief appearance in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, where Tambu’s grandmother describes her separation from her husband who “managed to escape to glittering gold mines in the south” following the dispossession of the land in colonial Rhodesia (18). That is the last readers hear of Tambu’s grandfather in Nervous Conditions. In both novels, the city’s mining economy strains familial relations, burdening women like Tambu’s grandmother and the women in Mda’s novel with raising children alone.

Besides the shared trope of familial disruption caused by urban mining, both novels also describe a creative economy that implicates the urban sphere as an exploiter of the countryside. In addition to the short story that Matimba sells to Doris in Nervous Conditions, Twin’s artistic career in The Heart of Redness is also worth examining, since it unravels notions of artistic autonomy and sheds light on the artistic expectation of the city. With its depiction of Twin, The Heart of Redness joins other works by Mda, including The Whale Caller, that portray characters invested in artistic vocations. The reader is informed early on that Twin is a gifted artist who “liked to do carvings from woods. He made bottlelike figures with turbaned heads” (Mda, Heart 42). Twin brings art to life and is preoccupied with artistic invention, structure, and form. Dalton, a British-descended merchant, encourages him to create realistic images, which Dalton then buys and sells to tourists in his shop: “he explained to Twin how he should carve the arms, hands, legs, and feet, and how he could make the face more realistic by carving detailed ears, eyes, noses, and mouths” (42). Dalton is the mediator between village and city, a role that Mr. Matimba plays in Nervous Conditions. While it seems that Dalton’s recommendation works in the village, it flops in the city:

It is quickly obvious that Twin’s expectation of artistic success is thwarted in the city. Again, the urban, be it a town or a city, has its generic demand of artistic invention, of visual language, of creativity. Recall Mr. Matimba’s specification of fat and heavy cobs and the instantiation in the story he sells to Doris; a similar logic is at work when the distortion of reality becomes the favored mode of artistic expression in Mda’s Johannesburg. Whereas Mr. Matimba offers such distortion to gain Doris’s patronage, Twin refuses the urban demand. The concise sentences in the passage contrast with the exaggeration that the city requires. The visual appearance of the syntax rebels against the narrative inflation—the excess figuration—that is expected of Twin.

The succinct sentences, moreover, underscore the brevity of Twin’s life and artistic career: he starves and dies a pauper. Does Twin die of starvation, or of the cancer that consistently ravages the bodies of mine workers in Johannesburg, or of both? Mbembe has argued that “as black miners reemerged from the ‘sarcophagus’ with the whitish-gray mine-dust (the silica) upon their clothes and faces, one could hear the damage of silicosis in their coughing and see its effects in frequent funerals” (382). The grotesque that the city requires of rural art seems analogous to the grotesque that it makes of the Black bodies sickened by cancerous growths and tumors from their mine days.

Mda’s novel establishes a strong connection between the extractive practice of mining and the demand for distorted, violent stories of Africa. Both mining and the creative economy distort African lives and stories. The city wants what it wants: fat and heavy in Dangarembga’s novel becomes twisted and grotesque, or folksy and quaint, in Mda’s. Paying attention to poetics for the city in Dangarembga’s and Mda’s novels, it becomes clear that the city’s self-making derives from narrative inflation involving distortion, extraction, and elision of agency of its rural other. To play this game successfully, as Mr. Matimba does, is to strategically center the grotesque—the exotic—in artistic production. It is to accept the logic of narrative inflation.

Country and the City, Africa and the World

The inflationary logic of the country-city relation in Mda’s and Dangarembga’s texts is analogous to the deformed narrative expected of Africa in the global imaginary. The southern African urban sphere—marked as a space facilitating interracial encounters—indexes the global metropolis, with its expectation of certain stories from marginal locales, including Africa. Seen this way, Matimba, as a storyteller, allegorizes the African writer pressured by market demands to produce a simplified kind of Africa, to the detriment of showcasing complex African subjectivities. The story he produces diminishes Tambu’s rich world to meet Doris’s desires. The exploitative inclination of the exchange in Umtali’s market parallels both the extraction of Africa’s resources, in general, and the narratives about Africa in the global marketplace. In addition to its well-explored feminist politics and its innovative rendition of relations between urban and rural domains, Dangarembga’s novel is significant for linking the extractive resource economy in Africa to an exploitative literary economy that makes the continent and its people abject to meet the taste of a metropolitan audience. Mda’s novel, too, posits an allegory for African literary-aesthetic production: the African artist wants to create real people, while the audience demands deformed, grotesque versions of African people.

This logic of narrative inflation returns in the third book of Dangarembga’s trilogy—This Mournable Body—where Tambu’s ecotourism project is predicated on rural exoticization. Tambu struggles in the urban sphere despite her education, and she takes a position at an ecotourism company to improve her economic standing.Footnote ⁴ Between Tambu’s experience in Umtali as a child in Nervous Conditions and as an adult in the later novel, she suffers racial discrimination at Sacred Heart School, attends university, tries her hands at different jobs, and is institutionalized for mental illness. The changes between both novels notwithstanding, the countryside remains a site of narrative inflation in the later work, as seen when Tambu is encouraged by her boss Tracey to lead an ecotourism project in her village: “it’s got to sound like a move to more authenticity. Something to tell the clients they’re going deeper into Africa …” (Dangarembga, This Mournable Body 228). At its conception, there is talk of “real eco values, authenticity, like millet and thatch, milk from the udder” (258). But the European donors know their audience and want more: “they’re talking the rest of it, you know, all those things they say go with villages on … uh, on our landmass, like dancing authentically … minimal, like agh, loincloths, naked … torsos” (258; ellipses in original). Readers have moved very far from Tambu’s narratorial authority in Nervous Conditions to the distance and alienation created by the second-person “you” narratorial voice.Footnote ⁵ The passage presents a monologue, with Tambu sidelined again. Tracey instructs her on the expected ambience in the village, which denies the contemporaneity of the rural inhabitants, instead portraying them primitively—in loincloths and with naked torsos. Again, art is being mobilized for the touristic gaze as the women’s performance enlivens notions of primitive Africa. The ellipses are eloquent in the novel, marking the repression of Tambu and her people, whose complexity is elided to sell a particular image of the countryside.

In the novel’s climax, as the women dance for the tourists, Tambu’s mother, Mai, charges at one of the European tourists in a move that names and confronts the exoticization: “Me, that’s what you think I am. Not a someone, but that I am whatever you want to put in your picture” (279). Refusing the colonial address even as she initially succumbs to it, Mai diagnoses the logic underpinning rural tourism—the fixing of the other—just as she names Englishness as the source of the malaise affecting her educated relatives at the end of Nervous Conditions. Mai’s objection challenges the simplification of the ellipses; it is her notion of “someone,” of the agentic subject, that is lost in the elliptical gap. Mai recodes the voice that Tambu loses throughout the novel and especially when Tracey articulates a touristic vision for this rural community. Uncomfortable with the arrangement but forced to conform because of her economic precarity, Tambu partakes in the distortion of her people until she walks away following Mai’s confrontation.

It is striking that the metric of success in Dangarembga’s and Mda’s texts is not altogether different from the generic demand of Africa in the contemporary global imagination: both the African urban sphere and the global marketplace expect inflated yet reductive narratives. The demand is for, as Akin Adesokan frames it, “the representation of contemporary Africa as a site of perennial political and humanitarian emergencies” (11). Adesokan examines how contemporary African writers rise to the occasion of portraying “African otherness” as they court a global audience with a certain imagination of the continent (15). In this relation of global and local—of civilized and uncivilized—the country-city relation I have been tracking takes on a global valence. And what does the world, figured as the city, demand of Africa, its signified countryside? Distortion, elision of African agency, and the quintessentially grotesque: narrative inflation.

Although Adesokan includes Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus as an example of new African writing calibrated for a metropolitan audience, her short story “Jumping Monkey Hill” problematizes Western influence on African writing and may be counted among texts that, in David Damrosch’s words, “take the writing and circulation of world literature as an explicit theme” (260). Adichie’s story is set in a resort outside Cape Town and features a writing workshop of emerging writers from across the continent. The workshop is led by Edward, a British expert in African literature, who secured the funding to convene the gathering. In Adichie’s schema, the hierarchical positioning of Edward in relation to the writers demonstrates the power imbalance of the world republic of letters. For all his sophistication, Edward cannot escape the demands of a particular story of Africa. His criteria for a true African story distort the complexity of African experience and silence the Africans, thereby mirroring the demand for rural texts prepared to please the urban sphere in Dangarembga’s and Mda’s novels.

Readers of “Jumping Monkey Hill” will recall its exotic setting, the description of which opens the story, foreshadowing the problematic association of Africa with the wild and barbaric. Although the resort is outside Cape Town, a modern city with a cosmopolitan waterfront, it reifies the idea of an exotic Africa peopled by animals: “The cabins all had thatch roofs. Names like Baboon Lodge and Porcupine Place were hand-painted beside the wooden doors that led out to cobblestone paths, and the windows were left open so that guests woke up to the rustling of the jacaranda leaves and the steady calming crash of the sea waves” (95). Readers learn from Adichie’s central character, Ujunwa, that Edward chose the location, one that fulfills imperial fantasies of Africa: of thatch roofs, animals and plants, a naturalizing of the continent that displaces people in favor of an idyllic landscape.

The story’s setting foreshadows the troublesome politics of African storytelling at the writer’s workshop. When Edward is not depopulating Africa of Africans and erasing the cultural geographies of Cape Town with his choice of location, he is distorting stories of actual Africans to promote a lopsided image of the continent. A pattern soon emerges as the writing workshop gets underway and the participants take turns to present their stories. Narratives based on the writers’ experiences, such as the Senegalese writer’s account of grappling with her queer sexuality and the main character’s delineation of female predicaments in postcolonial Nigeria, are dismissed as inauthentic African stories. For Edward, “homosexual stories of this sort weren’t reflective of Africa, really” (108). “It’s never like that in real life, is it?” he asks Ujunwa about her Nigerian story (113).

Edward—the gatekeeper with the power to promote African writers for a global audience—rejects actual experiences of Africans, what can be called poetics of the city in the context of this essay. In opting for poetics for the city, with its distorted and grotesque image of Africa, he belongs with Doris, Tracey, the tourists in Dangarembga’s novels, and the art patrons in Mda’s work. Edward’s ruralization of Africa significantly alters the picture of contemporary South African society, reducing the southern African country to the countryside, a blank canvas on which the city—the world—can project its fantasies of the other. He traffics in the same kind of narrative inflation that Mr. Matimba exercises and that is required of Tambu and Twin.

Ujunwa follows Twin in rejecting the demands of the city, refusing to pay the price of literary consecration, but other participants play the literary game as Mr. Matimba does in Nervous Conditions. Edward singles out the Tanzanian author who writes about “prurient violence” in the Congo from the perspective of a militiaman, a story that Edward lauds and selects as the lead story in the ensuing publication (109). Edward fancies the grotesque images that reduce the continent and its peoples to a place and practitioners of barbaric violence. In both the marginalization of Africans in the resort setting and the story of the Congo killings, the African space is rid of emotions and feelings; dehumanization evacuates the African people from the human sphere, denying them what Christina Sharpe describes as “the grammar of the profoundly human” (100). It is significant that Ujunwa likens the war story to a piece in The Economist, “with cartoon characters painted in” (Adichie 109). Cartoon characters suggest a stereotype rather than dynamic individuals. The comparison to The Economist, a magazine that in the year 2000 declared Africa “the hopeless continent,” is also striking.Footnote ⁶ In comparing the Tanzanian writer’s story to a piece in The Economist, Ujunwa suggests that the story sacrifices literary depth for journalistic sensationalism.

For Adichie, the response to the Tanzanian writer’s fiction encapsulates the institutionalization of creative writing workshops and a publishing industry controlled by “experts” based outside Africa. Caroline Ritter has written about the “true scramble for African literature” by foreign publishers since colonial times (142). In their role as “both gatekeeper and ‘consecrator’ of African literature,” as Caroline Davis frames it, Western publishers have controlled who gets published and exposed to a broader audience, favoring limiting and limited views of Africa and Africans (5). To be sure, African imprints exist, but they have been hobbled by infrastructural problems and limited funding, making them less attractive to talented writers ambitious for a wider readership beyond their home countries (Zell 188). It is in this context of a weakened local publishing industry unevenly matched against a Western publishing structure controlled by foreigners (such as Edward) that one must understand the Tanzanian writer’s textual attitude at the workshop. In fact, the Tanzanian writer allows readers to apprehend the interplay of the creative writing workshop and publishing ecology for African writing, often controlled by forces external to the continent, and Adichie’s text highlights both the likely rewards of acquiescence to those forces and the cost of resisting them.

Ultimately, Adichie’s story is remarkable for balancing both the validation and the rejection of the city’s narrative demand. While Nervous Conditions witnesses Mr. Matimba’s positive response to urban demand, which Twin declines in The Heart of Redness, Adichie’s allegory of world literature typifies both accession and refusal of the demand. Whereas the Tanzanian writer produces a macabre image of Africa, Ujunwa withdraws from the workshop, leaving readers with a complex record of African life in her story within the story. Adichie’s decision to reproduce Ujunwa’s story in the text offers a counterpoint to Edward’s flattening of African life, a move that echoes Mda’s aestheticization of Qolorha-by-Sea.

Adichie’s story allows for further distinction between poetics of the city and poetics for the city. The former prioritizes the telling of complex African stories from multiple vantage points and is exemplified in Adichie’s short story discussed here, her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, and Abani’s Graceland. Following Emily Apter, one might say that poetics of the city highlights the positive case for worldliness: “World Literature’s deprovincialization of the canon and the way in which, at its best, it draws on translation to deliver surprising cognitive landscapes from inaccessible linguistic folds” (2). In contrast, world literature’s negative value regurgitates the problematic of poetics for the city. Edward, in Adichie’s story, is primarily invested in poetics for the city, with his elevation of exotic otherness. It is appropriate to condemn Edward’s sexism and his colonial attitude, but it is also worth underlining that he is a mere intermediary, like Dalton, Mr. Matimba, and Tracey in the other narratives.

Edward is not responsible for shaping metropolitan taste for an exotic Africa per se; the colonial predilection for an exotic Africa precedes him in literary works such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and artistic depictions of Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all portraying the African as inferior to the civilized European. Like his European forebears, Edward, as a cultural intermediary in the contemporary African space, concentrates on curating Africa in the mold of metropolitan sensibilities. In this representational economy, African agency is demoted for a disfigured image that validates the self-conception of metropolitan readers. African artists and their works have gained global visibility since colonial times, but the continent continues to face a crisis of representation. Its accessibility and legibility to the West often come at the expense of an expansive self-definition.

Dangarembga’s, Mda’s, and Adichie’s texts are useful for reappraising the concept of world literature. In his influential study The Country and the City, Raymond Williams writes that “the relations are not only of ideas and experiences, but of rent and interest, of situation and power” (7). Power dynamics underpin relations between African urban areas and their rural interlocutors and relations between Africa and global metropolises, determining what rural stories fly in urban Africa and what kinds of African stories circulate, and which ones stay grounded, unable to travel. Already in the 1980s, Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions was anticipating what Madhu Krishnan calls “the contours of African literature as a global market category” (2). Both Dangarembga’s and Mda’s novels are also relevant for foreshadowing recent critical appraisals of world literature from the postcolonial margin. One strand of this scholarship laments the exoticization of difference for the Western gaze in successful postcolonial writings, and the hegemony of English in the world’s literary ecology.Footnote ⁷ Rebecca Walkowitz has similarly drawn attention to the “born-translated” features of these texts, which make them easily digestible by readers across the globe. Authorial agency undergirds these proclamations on postcolonial writings, whether it be Walkowitz’s idea of “born-translated” works or the “authorial self-consciousness” that Sarah Brouillette imputes to “author[s] working within an extended literary marketplace for postcolonial products” (7). Mda, Dangarembga, and Adichie, like Brouillette’s authors, are “incorporating into their aesthetic arsenals various kinds of meta-commentary: on the act of writing itself, on the status of literature within culture at large, and on their own careers as authors” (68). In an act of self-reflexivity, the authors critique the demand for certain discourses even as they are beneficiaries of the intelligible frames of the literary marketplace.

Yet, the writerly agency stressed in the scholarship on postcolonial writers in the marketplace may be overinflated, since it does not sufficiently address the plight of emerging writers. Emerging writers, especially from the postcolony, lack the cultural capital of literary celebrities, who are often at the center of ruminations on creative agency. Tambu’s and Twin’s alienation in Dangarembga’s and Mda’s narratives demonstrates their disempowerment in the creative economy, not their authorial agency. Tambu’s and Twin’s experiences, to borrow from Aamir R. Mufti, illuminate “the asymmetrical arrangement of power that structures [world literature] as an apparatus and a field” (5). Mda and Dangarembga clarify the disempowerment arising from loss of narrative agency as the unknown postcolonial writer seeks entry into the global marketplace. In the texts that I have studied here, readers glean both the benefit of meeting the demand of extraversion and the cost—the flattening and erasure of African experiences—especially for the budding writer.Footnote ⁸

Categories such as world literature and global anglophone can be productive. As Debjani Ganguly notes, such terms can be viewed in “post-imperial ways,” as vistas of transculturation, opening space for linguistic diversity and for literatures from marginal cultures to flourish (603). In other words, world literature can be a portal for poetics of the city, accentuating marginal figures and figurations of the margins. In this sense, world literature is an indispensable category. Yet, as I have shown, the positive kind exists alongside a problematic poetics for the city. This kind of world literature that flattens or erases African subjectivities is worth resisting despite the colonial and commercial impulse to do otherwise. To be worthy of the effort and the name, future study of world literature must consider the extent to which a text manifests poetics of the city (of a people and a place) rather than poetics for the city, with its negation of the other.