We are the results of letters unfinished
When someone immortalized an idea, etchings on paper
Hands cuffed in mid-word
We were born to only half the story
Blaming someone else for telling our history
And we go to fight once in a while
But we stop and think maybe we should sing instead of our stinking present and the blinging future we would like to have

For the worst words we could have heard were the truncated hand-me-downs of leaders cut down in their prime
Once proud baobabs over whom the woodcutter stands, axe in hand, black mask on white face and past and present and no future and emergence of us

The generation whose senses have been lulled by shiny things and skinny people

We are the results of books unread
Because anything that does not bring immediate gratification is not worth our quick-time texting apple-software instant-messaging quicker-than-fast-food moments
We are the children who were not taught to pause
Writhing-crawling-walking-running
Never stopping
And now we will not fight because we have not used that pause to think things over
Our tongues run over words quicker than you thought we could say them
We will leave you the hearer of words unsaid
We are after all the results of wisdom unheard
Comforters of tears unshed
Fighters in a war
That will not fight itself
Murderers of the silence that only wanted to scream
STOPWAIT

Pause
Bloody knife in hand
Heart racing faster than I have been running all my life
You are dead
And I am your child, the survivor
Of patience unfulfilled
Demons not exorcised

Angerhatefrustration
Rage

I am the result of that letter you did not finish

© A Quarcoopome

The black horde was coming and you were afraid
Afraid you pushed and pushed and grunted as you did so
So you held them back long enough to feel the strength in your own arms
Arms that had tried eight times to drown that accursed black kitten

But then the black horde came anyway
Surging into the streets, across the big roads that divided
Them from
Others
Into the towns of the nation
And they came, some chanting, some singing
But all dancing, because that it what black people do
Long black fingers clawed at your throat
Would not stop choking until you stopped pushing
So you sighed and said, 'I surrender'
And showed your hands—although stuffed with money—to prove that you had stopped pushing

And the angry black horde drew back.

Now it is hanging back in shadows as dark as itself
A little smaller now (some of its number has been emancipated) but only a little
Agitated, but only enough to hurt itself
With delicate wrist flicks of knife wielding hands
And angry pressure on triggers meant for the past struggle

Struggle. Past.

I am the black horde come again
No one struggles with me
Or if they do, they hide
And I am the only one among the horde
But even my eyes are averted…inward?

The black horde is waiting again
For another couple of centuries of pushing

African love stories? Is that an anomaly? We are tempted to ask this with Ama Ata Aidoo of the book that she edits. As we ask, we wonder what will happen to us if we step into this world. Will we meet the people we expect to meet: the drunken, cheating husbands and the cowed, abused wives? The stereotypes?

Leave your expectations aside. Bring with you nothing but a healthy amount of curiosity. For stretching from Sudan to South Africa, with Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and much of Africa in-between, we see love in the most diverse ways imaginable.

We meet the beautiful Sudanese bride-to-be of a Scottish man with whom she would love to ride off into the sunset. But she must first obtain a visa. We meet Mrs Mensah, whose marriage is threatened by her niece. We congratulate Moriyike, the defiant love child of a union that is never legitimised. We follow two Ugandan girls, Anyango and Sanyu, whose love for each other forces them apart.

From interracial unions and queer relationships to unrequited love and extra-marital affairs, we begin to see just how multi-faceted African love is. But if the themes are diverse, the authors and their writing styles are even more so.

Ama Ata Aidoo puts her own short story in her introduction to the anthology, giving this unconventional and surprising love story a deadpan tone in simple but effective language.

Chimamanda Adichie comes with her own combination of everyday actions accompanied by deep reflection. Sefi Atta brings to her own tale a slight obscurity that makes us have to work to figure out how it fits in with the overarching theme of love. Tomi Adeaga’s conversational style draws us in, Pidgin English, German and all.

And the superb cast of writers, some well known and others upcoming, give the reader different experiences until we get to Helen Oyeyemi’s 'The Telltale Heart', and here we must stop.

We stop, not because it’s the final story in the anthology, but because 'The Telltale Heart' is a most striking story. The anthology thus far leaves the reader happy to realise that African love stories are very real, unlike the usual perfect-protagonists, perfect-timing, ride-off-into-the-sunset tales we associate with love stories.

Oyeyemi’s piece is the closest we come to 'unreal', but not in the sense of fake. Instead her powerful imagery take us into a very different realm, that of the surrealist rendering of a story that leaves us wondering why we ever thought love was only about the mundane.

This piece carries us along and wraps us up in words that we have to read twice, three times over only to realise that we cannot form complete images of the characters or the places or the story even.

We cannot rely solely on our imaginations to visualise things, her words must be our crutch if we are to understand the young man born with eyes like a famine and the young woman who must leave her heart in a love shrine, for it is too heavy for her.

'The Telltale Heart' stands out as a strangely oppressive yet beautifully written story that leaves us floating in the abstract clouds of love and pain and death.

And then as we move on to Veronique Tadjo and Chike Unigwe, and eventually close the anthology with Wangui wa Goro, we realise that our notion of 'African love' as existing only in the harsh realities of life is in itself a stereotype.

* Annie Quarcoopome is a student of comparative literture at Williams College in the US.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a controversial man! I read some chapters from his Decolonizing the Mind and it was deeply thought-provoking. It made me think especially about what I want to call myself. Let me explain. Most bloggers consider themselves authors, writers. I call myself a writer. (A soon to be published African writer! Am I?

I suppose the answer to that would depend on how I define an African writer. For me, anyone who writes and is African, is an African writer. We will not go into what it means to be African because that is a whole different kettle of fish. So if I am African but set my story in space with a Marsian protagonist, I am still an African writer. But if Bill Gates wrote a novel set in Accra with a spear-wielding 'native' that would not make him an African writer. I think this explanation would go down well with most. It’s simply a question of geography and/or race. Or is it? Ngugi doesn’t think so. Indeed according to him, I am not an African writer at all!

'…"the whole uncritical acceptance of English and French as the inevitable medium for educated African writing is misdirected, and has no chance of advancing African literature and culture...until African writers accepted that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they would merely be pursuing a dead end."'

This is a quote from Obi Wali who Ngugi agrees with in his book. Ngugi himself says:

'What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?'

So what this means for me, by Ngugi’s assesment of an African who writes in English, is that I am actually an Afro-European writer. As someone who does not identify in any way with Europe, I find this hard to swallow. The implications are a little too disturbing. The category 'African writers' is now reserved for an elite few who can write in their local languages. There is also the practical aspect to consider. How many people can read your local language? For many of us, our languages are not internationally spoken. But Ngugi has stopped writing in English, opting for his mother tongue, Gikuyu. So how does he circumvent the question of practicality? His books are translated. And that is where my problem lies.

Ngugi’s main contention is that language is a carrier of culture. It expresses and communicates ideas in a way in which a foreign language cannot. It also shapes our world view. If there is no word for 'bomb' in your language, chances are you wouldn’t think much about bombs if that was the only language you knew. So clearly the 'African-ness' of your work would be lost if you wrote in English. But think of how much can be lost in translation. Is this all just mental gymnastics then? Is Ngugi talking the talk but not walking the walk? Am I really an African writer, especially since my first language is English? And then there are those writers who would, under my criteria, fall under the category of 'African writer' but say they are not. To what extent does self-definition shape the work you produce?

* Annie Quarcoopome is from Ghana and is studying Comparative Literature in the US. She is a blogger at Blacklooks.org

Farah’s second trilogy, Blood in the Sun, is made up of three works (two of which I know to be excellent) Maps, Secrets and Gifts. Obviously, this is an author interested in concepts. Generally, his works are amazingly lyrical, incorporating such unconventional elements as the use of first, second and third person narrative voices for the same character in the same novel, and the vivid and yet vague recounting of dreams whose meanings are not easy to decipher. The supernatural plays a significant role, but instead of overwhelming us, it draws us deeper into the narrative. I can imagine that many a reader has been found absorbed in this book with furrowed brow, engaging with the musical quality of the language, at the same time trying to find meaning within the text.

Maps tells the story of a Somali orphan raised by an Ethiopian maid in the highly contested Ogaden region in the Horn of Africa. The question of the map is an intriguing one and important to us all, especially to those of us who have to deal with issues of representation in heterogenous places that need to be made homogenous because of the political structures it is assumed we must strive towards. For democracy sake, different groups of people enclosed within such arbitrarily drawn boundaries as our colonial masters left us with, must find enough commonality to regard themselves as a nation, or at least as a state. But what is most fascinating to me is the recurrent imagery of blood in this text. The macrolevel concept of national identity, especially relevant to the Ogaden whose national identity has alternated between Ethiopian and Somali, is played out in the familial arena. And so blood becomes important. Blood shed is crucial. Bloodlines even more so. And then there Misra, the protagonist’s foster mother, who reads his future in blood…and I am still deciding where to go with that.

Gifts is equally fascinating, if not more so for those who want to extrapolate Farah’s Somali context to cover Africa as a whole. Gifts presents even stronger characters (if this is possible), and I say this because they are characters who remain with me even after I have put the book down, even after I have read other works including Farah’s Links. This narrative is a love story that is completely not sappy. It is a love story in which the act of giving and consequently of receiving are very controversial. Duniya is leery of gifts offered by anyone because she recognizes the power dynamics at play. And yet in her love affair with Bosaaso, one must compromise, because the game of courtship cannot be divorced from the act of giving. It is highly ironic that the power dynamics of benevolence are played out in the arena of courtship, because this novel is really about the “courtship” of Africa by the West and the so-called Asian giants. And so weaving the story around Duniya’s dysfunctional family which includes her children from two previous marriages and an abandoned foundling which her daughter brings home, we see the shamed face of Africa lurking in the wings, arms outstretched, cupped beneath those of our benefactors, our “development aid” givers. They give and we receive, and our “love” affair begins. Issues of dependence, of misuse of “aid” to prop up corrupt, unpopular governments, arise in the setting of a war-ravaged Somalia, a raped continent.

I’m yet to read the final book in the trilogy, but be assured that I will track it down and I will add it to the millions of books and characters and authors, their creators, swimming around in my head. But let me say that one cannot write about Farah without acknowledging his unique take on women, especially as a male, African author. He has apparently received mail addressed to Ms. Farah, Mrs. Farah etc. for who would think that a man would have such a unique understanding of women, of their power, of the hypocritical social tenets that condemn trivialities and gloss over crucial questions of the woman’s place in Somalia, in Africa, in the world!

* Annie Quarcoopome is a student of Comparative Literature at Williams College in the US. She is also a contributor to Black Looks Blog.

* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

To call The Black Insider a novel may be somewhat misleading. It is a loosely autobiographical account of the author’s stay in the “Faculty of Arts,” in time of “war.” Barricaded inside his room in the building he shares with an eclectic group of tenants, Marechera comments on the war without, mirroring excellently the one that rages within. The Black Insider captures the profoundness and insanity that characterise much of this author’s work. Despite his erratic style that has the potential to lose the reader in a morass of philosophical musings, we start to see the relationships between colour and space. We see the complexity of understanding and accepting one’s identity as black or white, and the impatience of the rest of the world with the individual who struggles with this process. And so Marechera creates an inside, and an outside, and blacks and whites and we end up with a black insider on our hands, in our lives, in us even, perhaps. And then in typical fashion, that which makes Marechera arguably the problem child of African literature, there is the element of damning everything to hell.

In the end, we are confronted with the explosive violence that characterise the author’s subject matter, the kind of violence that people generally want to sweep under the rug. The cast of characters is superb and profound, alluding to a well-compiled list of authors, philosophers and scientists. There is something in the Black Insider for all.

• Annie Quarcoopome is a Ghanaian and student of Comparative Literature at Williams College. She also is a contributor the the blog Black Looks.

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org