British and African Literature in Transnational Context (review)

In a series of "contrapuntal" readings of African and British writers, Simon Lewis demonstrates much of the diversity on both sides of the divide between black and white, European and African, colonizer and colonized. The opening chapter begins with "probably the most obvious point for looking at Anglo-African literature," the contrast between Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad. Writing about Heart of Darkness, Achebe called Conrad a "bloody racist." But, Lewis notes, Achebe's Things Fall Apart has also influenced Western readers to think in black-white, Europe-(West) Africa terms. The chapter ends with an analysis of Buchi Emecheta, whose work "unpicks Achebe's poetics of indigenism, national identity, and racial authenticity" (36). Emecheta's novels express a feminist viewpoint and what Lewis calls a "Black Atlantic affiliationist poetics" (39).

Chapter two discusses Abdulrazak Gurnah, a writer of Arab descent from Zanzibar who now lives in England. Lewis notes that for most non-Africans, ideas about the continent are based on sub-Saharan West Africa, as in Conrad and Achebe. But Gurnah and East Africa complicate matters through Islam and "the history of the Indian Ocean world" (51). In novels such as Dottie (1990) and By the Sea (2001), like Lewis himself, Gurnah "is as suspicious of potentially racist and sexist African nationalism as he is critical of its racist and sexist colonialist antecedent" (54).

The next two chapters, which might have been combined into one, feature British writers William Boyd (An Ice-cream War) and Alan Hollinghust (The Swimming Pool Library). Like Conrad, "Boyd fails to represent Africans as properly articulate and rational" (84). Hollinghurst's "gay novel" illustrates "colonial desire" through the protagonist's "absolute adoration of black people" (qtd. 100) while it critiques British racism and classism.

Chapter five contrasts three very different plays, T. S. Eliot's A Cocktail Party, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine. In the last two chapters, Lewis turns to writers from South Africa and Zimbabwe. These chapters cover much postapartheid South African fiction. The contrast between two novels by J. M. Coetzee versus K. Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents and Chris Van Wyk's memoir Shirley, Goodness and Mercy is especially interesting. Duiker and Van Wyk are both grounded in black (and "coloured") South African cultures and locations, while Coetzee—who today resides in Australia—is abstract and metaphysical. The final chapter turns to Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera and "Southern African" "coloured" writers Yette Christiansë amd Zoë Wicomb, with an aside to Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions). Vera's Nehanda features a Shona priestess and heroine of an 1890s anticolonialist rebellion, while Christiansë (Castaway) and Wicomb (David's Story) produce feminist literature that cannot easily be categorized in national or racial terms. All three contest standard assumptions—both European and (male) African—of what it means to be African. Lewis's work is an erudite, well-written study that will be of interest to all postcolonialists and scholars of African literature.