Dealing with Evils: Essays on Writing from Africa (review)

Annie Gagiano's collection of essays employs a wide-angle lens to tackle a range of writing, from diverse parts of Africa, writing that employs multiple genres and is preoccupied with varied and different issues and priorities. She is aware, as she states in her preface, that this "vast and varied body of literary work" cannot be defined through any unified perspective (ix). At the same time, Gagiano suggests that the collected essays "do perhaps have some underlying coherences" (ix). This is the challenge of the book, which it achieves in part.

The coherence referred to, is where Gagiano uses "contextualising strategies," such as Shakespeare, or Conrad, through which to read her African texts, which are innovative, precisely because they move beyond older preoccupations and canons in that they exhibit "a border-crossing aesthetic power in their texts" (x). The finest and most original essays in the collection demonstrate how the writers construct this textual interplay between context and border crossing, influence and also innovation. The collection could be summed up by her evocative comment:

That Salih learnt from Shakespeare, whereas Shakespeare is extended by Salih, portrays the onward spiralling of this ultimately communal enterprise.

(154; emphasis added)

For example, the first essay in the collection examines the stories told by the Khoisan man Hendrik, collected as the Dwaalstories, in the context of the vulnerability of Khoisan cultural survival, but more intriguingly, of white Afrikaans culture, and more specifically, of a marginal figure within this culture, Eugene Marais, pariah and morphine addict, who recorded these stories. The "irony and wonder" of the essay's subtitle, is that the survival of these stories, depends on the Afrikaans language of Marais. There is a kind of palimpsest of oppression, languages and cultural vulnerabilities and survivals that makes this essay so riveting.

Likewise, the chapter on Marechera and postmodernism is contextualized through Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and border-crosses in that Marechera parodies, critiques, and overturns Conrad's modernism through a postmodernism that is as radical as it is unclassifiable. Just as Eugene Marais falls between mainstream Afrikanerdom and San vulnerability, so Marechera is "considered both too African for Europe and too European for Africa" (33).

The highlight of the collection for me, one that profoundly illustrates the productiveness of the imbrication between echoes of contextualizing intertexts and boundary-crossing African writers, is the chapter on Tayeb Salih, Shakespeare, and Fanon. Gagiano demonstrates how Salih's Season of Migration to the North explicitly "signifies upon Shakespeare's Othello" (146). Like Marechera's parody of Conrad, Salih, in a feat of genre gymnastics, both echoes the Shakespearean context and also overturns it. Gagiano, herself party to the spiraling communal project, explains in a footnote that this complex device of language, of "signifying" as subversive weapon in the arsenal of black writers, is taken from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his The Signifying Monkey (146). And so, getting to the heart of what gives coherence to the best part of this collection of essays, Gagiano observes that "both Shakespeare and Salih have made important contributions to what Fanon calls 'the world-wide struggle of mankind for his freedom'" (153).

I do not think that this collection particularly focuses on "evil." Rather, it demonstrates this extraordinary human struggle for transcendence, often against horrible odds. This is the profound "communal enterprise" that cuts across time and place. I did feel that a few of the essays were stand-alones that did not particularly make sense in terms of this collection. However, where coherence is not particularly achieved, in terms of a unified perspective for the book, the different essays are always informative, perceptive and full of the humility that insists that a critic should read a text on the terms of the writer of it, and not with a fully scripted already written agenda.