Entre estética y compromiso: La obra de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo (review)

Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo is undoubtedly one of the giants of the literature of Equatorial Guinea. His stature, already evidenced by his own substantial publications, the numerous conference presentations and dissertations on his works, is more than reconfirmed in Joseph-Désiré Otabela's and Ssothène Onomo-Abena's Entre estética y compromiso: La obra de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo. The work is divided into three main sections, prefaced by the authors' own introduction and a prologue by José Domínguez Caparrós.

The introduction—broken down into the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods—is an overview of Donato Ndongo's involvement in and influence on the evolution of Equato-Guinean letters. His remarkable production and the timely collaboration of researchers such as M'bare N'Gom and Marvin Lewis, among others, have brought Equato-Guinean literature into the mainstream: a remarkable feat in view of the numerous dissertations and works produced in neighboring Cameroun and the US, despite the stifling political conditions and minimal publication outlets for writers in the only African-Hispanic country.

Chapter 1, "A Life, an Itinerary," is a condensed biography of Donato Ndongo. The very informative details garnered through extensive interviews with the writer himself (31) make it an invaluable resource for any critic who attempts to base any exegesis of Ndongo's thematic material on his personal life experiences. Of particular interest are his cultural endeavors in Spain and "subversive" political activities that have eventually rendered him a persona non grata in his own native country.

The caption "Writing as Expression of Political Resistance" very accurately sums up the content of the second chapter, in which the authors trace Ndongo's literary journey from his initial days in the Colegio de los Padres Escolapios San José de Colasanz (Valencia, Spain)—where he read his first book by a black author, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart—through his current position as Visiting Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. They conclude that his literary corpus can be delineated as a re-reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "a re-reading that supposes a journey to the origins of the trafficking of Blacks, of slavery, of colonialism and neocolonialism, where coffee, timber, ivory, etc., have made way for petroleum and "coltan" (columbite-tantalite), at the same time that ONGs substitute missionaries, leaving intact the paradigms of a skewed and almost criminal relation which makes Africa deplorably defenseless and unbalanced" (81).

Subsequent to the conclusion are very useful appendices: reproductions of Ndongo's six articles on Frantz Fanon (originally published in Indice) and five of the former's interviews that had appeared in different journals. Equally significant is the bibliography that includes studies currently not catalogued in fundamental databases such as the MLA International Bibliography and Dissertation Abstracts. As Domínguez Caparrós poignantly notes in the prologue, the book will undoubtedly serve as an authoritative reference for future studies on Equato-Guinean literature (10).