Routes of the Roots: Geography and Literature in the English-Speaking Countries (review)

Routes of the Roots: Geography and Literature in the English-Speaking Countries, ed. Isabella Maria Zoppi. Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. 781 pp. ISBN 88-8310-313-X paper.

This compendious volume, with its forty-nine essays covering writers from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Australia, Canada, and Ireland, is the culmination of an Italian-based project to "study [. . .] the representations and interpretations of the relationship between man and place, peoples and spaces expressing the anglophone world" (13). While most of the articles are illuminating, the volume as a whole is disappointing on two counts: first, it fails to include the ethno-anthropologists and geographers said to have provided the project with its impetus; and second, it fails to come to grips with its own roots within the Euro-American institutions of literary study. As a result, the book has a strangely "Orientalist" feel, as a collection of texts about exotic places circulated by and among intellectuals frequently not from or of those places.

On the first charge, while all of the essays make cogent points about place, space, climate, landscape, and topography, remarkably few of them make significant reference to the work of geographers. Their study of "the role of geography within the new literatures in englishes" (13) thus remains bounded largely by the terms and methods of established literary analysis and breaks little fresh ground. For instance, while John Douthwaite's admirably detailed and thorough analysis of No Longer at Ease starts by considering the debate between radical and humanist geographers as to whether geography shapes people or vice versa, the essay finally focuses on the sociological concept of anomie.

On the second count, it is perhaps rather ironic that the opening essay of the book, Titi Adepitan's challenging "Re-centring Literature," fires a broadside at postcolonial theory, which, he says, is frog-marching "even societies which are just beginning to learn to walk [. . .] into a stride with the rest through claims that seek to totalise experience across cultural divides" (24). His call for respect for a more functional literary art is a relatively familiar one in African literature, but is drowned out by the surrounding voices doing exactly what he criticizes, running works of literature from almost every corner of the globe through "the shredding mill of theory" (28).

One or two other essays are a little more self-conscious of their own positionality, considering not just geographical features within texts but the geographical circulation of texts and textual scholars. Thus Gail Fincham opens her essay on Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival with some intriguing comments on the strong response Naipaul's work evokes from students from the Colored community in the Western Cape. Moving on from that response, Fincham argues that Naipaul should not be given up by postcolonial critics simply as a "witness for the prosecution," but that we should recognize the complicated ways in which he is able to expose "the insularity of metropolitan values" (277). By contrast, Bernth Lindfors re-considers the case of Dennis Brutus, a writer we might see as a kind of anti-Naipaul, an internationalist South African whose love for his land has been inadequately reciprocated.

Other essays likely to be of special interest to readers of this journal include Stewart Crehan's excellent piece on white South African writers (weaving together Coetzee's fictional representations of landscape with his critical work in White Writing), a very valuable account of Ken Saro-Wiwa's Adetola Street in Basi and Company, as well as essays on prison writers (including Saro-Wiwa and Mapanje), Ayi Kwei Armah, Nuruddin Farah, André Brink, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, and Thomas Pringle. In sum, while Routes of the Roots contains a good deal of valuable work, readers should not expect the parts to add up to a coherent set of arguments about geography and literature.