Writing and Africa

Mpalive-Hangson Msiska, Paul Hyland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780582214187
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315505152
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume reflects one of the new areas of English Studies as it broadens to take in non-western literatures, and places more emphasis on the contexts and broader notions of `writing'. In discussing writing from and about Africa, this collection touches on studies in black writing, colonialism and imperialism and cultural development in the third world. It begins by providing a historical introduction to the main regional traditions, and then builds on this to discuss major issues, such as oral tradition, the significance of `literature' as a western import, representations of Africa in western writing, African writing against colonialism and its themes and politics in a post-colonial world, popular writing and the representation of women.

Part I
Writing and History: A Survey

1
North African Writing

Anissa Talahite

North African writing offers a perspective that cannot be strictly confined within the geographical boundaries of North Africa. From a linguistic and cultural point of view, it is part of Arabic literature, a category that includes the literature from the countries both of North Africa and the Middle East. North African writing is therefore determined by the sense of belonging to an Arab nation which shares the same language and culture, and to a certain extent, the same religion. Since North Africa became part of the Arab Muslim empire in the eighth century, the Arabic language and the Muslim religion have symbolised the force bringing the Arab people together in a common destiny. Today, North African writing is largely informed by this common Arab heritage which represents not only a way of connecting with the cultural tradition but also a way of understanding the present. Beyond their denomination as Arab and Muslim, North African countries are also shaped by the Berber culture and language, a tradition that preceded the introduction of Arab culture. In Morocco, for instance, Berber is the mother tongue of nearly half of the population.¹ The Berber oral tradition is an important component of North African culture despite the fact that it has been overshadowed by the dominant position occupied by the written languages. It has, however, recently been the focus of writers who have attempted to give Berber folk stories, songs and poems a more significant place within North African literature.²

The more recent history of North Africa saw the birth of a new literature that originated from the experience of French colonialism in the former colonies of the Maghreb (namely Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia). After some timid attempts to address the ‘native question’ in articles often published in colonial journals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, North African writing in French acquired a more definite shape in the 1950s with the emergence of a greater national consciousness. The French language became a channel through which writers could confront colonial authority. Thus, North African writers started experimenting with narratives and with poetic language as a way of forging a distinct identity. For North African writers, writing in French means reflecting on the relationships between European and indigenous cultures in order to construct a North African voice which would integrate the different cultures inherited from the past.

The North African literary scene shows that it is difficult to regard North African writing as singular and homogeneous. Instead, it seems more appropriate to speak of North African literatures rather than of one literature: a literature in Arabic which extends beyond the confines of North Africa; an age-old Berber oral literature which has survived in certain areas; and a literature in French in the countries that were part of the former French empire. Given the range of North African writing, this survey concentrates only on the written literatures and on particular authors and texts that exemplify the main developments. Arabic and francophone literatures are dealt with in separate sections in order to highlight the importance of language in shaping modern literary forms.

Writing in Arabic

The countries of North Africa, from Morocco to Egypt, share the collective memory of their common Muslim Arab past, which survives today in their language and literature and which plays an important part in the shaping of an Arab identity. Although each country speaks its own variation of Arabic, the Arab world shares one official language (used in schools, the media, etc.) which is distinct from the spoken forms. This language, called ‘fusha’ in Arabic, but which in English is referred to as classical or sometimes literary Arabic, represents the crucible of Arab culture since it brings the Arab nation together as did Arab civilisation in the past. As far as writers are concerned, one of the great advantages of using classical Arabic is that it gives them access to a readership throughout the Arab world. However, modern writers have been increasingly confronted with the issue of bridging the gap between this higher form of Arabic, used by the educated minority, and the ‘dialects’ spoken by the majority.

The transformations of Arab society in the modern period brought about major changes in its literary expression. Arab societies at the beginning of the nineteenth century were faced with the need to reassess the heritage of Arab culture, incorporating technological and social change as well as making sense of the increasing contact of Arab culture with the West. A generation of writers, scholars and politicians started to formulate a debate on their society by exploring the intricacies of cultural transformation, the significance of religion in the face of scientific development and the political implications of social change. Their response to the increasing cultural and political impact of Europe on the Arab world was to redefine Arab culture and to create new forms of self-expression.

In Egypt, the cultural renaissance of the Nahdah in the late 1880s and the early 1900s was significant in shaping modern Arabic thinking as well as in influencing the development of literary forms. The Nahdah originated as an aesthetic movement in Lebanon but took on a political dimension in Egypt because of the particular historical circumstances brought about by the presence of European colonial powers. The invasion of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798 is seen as a crucial point in the modern history of the Arab world as it marks the beginning of increasing contacts between the East and the West. These contacts took the form of a military and cultural hegemony over Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. The military presence of European powers was accompanied by a particular interest in Arab culture: Orientalist scholars, archaeologists and painters identified with an exotic image of the’Orient’ which bore little in common with reality but which served to assert the supremacy of the West over Arab civilisation.³ As a result of the increasing impact of European culture on the Arab way of life through the presence of traders, explorers, technicians and educationalists, a new class of Egyptians emerged, most having received an education in the schools set up by the colonial authorities. The writers who contributed to the cultural awakening of the Nahdah were scholars who were in close contact with European ideas and who had studied in European universities where they had become acquainted with European philosophy and literature. Rifa ah Rafi at-Tahtawi was one of the first modern Egyptian writers to write about European society.

At-Tahtawi and many of his contemporaries saw Europe’s technological advance as a model of development for Arab societies. This idea, however, was not unambiguous and clashed with the Arab image of the past which symbolised, in many respects, civilisational progress. One of the ways in which some thinkers came to terms with this contradiction was to look at technological progress as distinct from moral superiority: the first an attribute of Europe; the second of the Arab world. Some writers tried to go beyond this dichotomy by analysing the changes that were affecting Islamic societies. The Tunisian politician and writer, Khayr ad-Din at-Tunisi provided an argument in favour of cultural borrowing from Europe. In his book, Muqaddima, he advocated a reform of Islamic institutions by arguing that Arab societies should learn from the experiences of European societies, mainly from the Industrial Revolution and from the democratic forms of political representation. His main contention was that, in the same way as the West had benefited from the scientific progress of the Arab world in the Middle Ages, it was now time for the Arabs to acquire knowledge from Europe. Others took a more nationalistic stand against European influence on the Islamic way of life. Although also calling for the need to adapt Islam to the demands of modern life, the leader of the Islamic Reformist movement, the Egyptian writer Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, and later his follower, Muhammad Abduh, stressed the importance of religion in the spiritual life of a nation and the necessity to find strength in one’s own cultural and spiritual heritage. Speaking against the cultural alienation threatening Arab societies, al-Afghani argued that reforms could only come from Islamic roots and not from a superficial imitation of European ways. In the same line of thought, another follower of the Reformist movement, Qasim Amin, suggested that one had to look at Islam itself in order to find a solution to gender inequalities. Arab women, according to him, had no status, not because of religion, but because autocratic rulers had determined a hierarchy whereby women were relegated to the lowest rank. Today, Qasim Amin’s analysis seems to lack the depth of some of the more recent writings on gender in Arab societies by feminist authors, such as Nawal el-Saadawi and Fatima Mernissi. However, his position is to be interpreted in context: Qasim Amin’s prime concern was not to analyse the question of gender but to formulate a critique of the social and symbolic structures in Arab society at a time of transition. The demands created by the economic, technological, social and political changes that were taking place at a very rapid pace forced writers to rethink their own cultural categories. This is clearly reflected in the literary production that has emerged since the Nahdah. The increasing contact with European culture and the internal dynamics of change that Arab societies were experiencing at the beginning of the century resulted in two main developments: the departure from classical poetry and the emergence of new narrative forms.

Arabic poetry, which pre-dates Islam, is the genre par excellence of classical Arabic literature. During the golden years of Arab Muslim civilisation, particularly under the Umayyad dynasty (660 AD), poetry reached the peak of its development and became a central element in the life of the Arabs. It was a means of recording history and celebrating battles and chivalrous rulers. Poetry played an important part in creating a sense of Arab national identity throughout the Arab world. The decline of this poetry in the nineteenth century coincided with the domination by the Ottoman empire and the stifling of Arab culture that resulted from it. One has to wait for the Nabdab in the early twentieth century to see a poetic revival in Arabic literature. The Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi symbolises the new spirit of the beginning of the century and is considered as the first poet who rescued Arabic poetry from decline. In line with the classical tradition of the qasida (the traditional ode with one rhyme), Shawqi’s poetry recreates a harmonious world where the past and the present are one. Although celebrated as the ‘Prince of Poets’, Ahmad Shawqi was soon to be seen as failing to express the turmoil and the sense of displacement brought about by the deep transformations that the Arab world was experiencing. Still relying on the aesthetic conventions of the past, his poetry seemed unable to convey the urgency of the present.

The demands of the new era meant that poets had to find alternative poetic forms to express the deep transformations of Arab societies. The first generation of poets who broke away from the past found their inspiration in the European Romantic poets; but the main impulse came from those Arab poets who had emigrated to North America, the most celebrated of whom is probably the Lebanese-American Gibran Kahlil Gibran. The main contribution of the Mahjar, the literature in exile, was to introduce new techniques into Arabic poetry; namely, prose poems and free verse. The influence of the Mahjar poets was considerable, as in the case of the Tunisian, Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, a prominent figure of avant-garde Arabic poetry in the 1920s, whose romantic lyricism is the expression of a deeper yearning for freedom:

O death, O fate that has no eyes,
Stop where you are! Or turn aside,
Let love and dream sing out for us⁴

Like his contemporaries, al-Shabbi is inspired by a desire to bring change and renewal to the old world. The poetic free flow of emotions is the expression of a need to break free from the constraints of classical poetry. This is made easier by the fact that the aesthetic conventions of Romantic poetry were borrowed from another tradition and therefore did not carry the weight of the Arabic past. Poets could therefore express themselves outside the social, political and aesthetic constraints of their culture.

Whether Arabic poetry in the first half of this century drew heavily on European romanticism, symbolism, or surrealism, it remained rooted in the Arab experience of a rapidly changing world. Technological and cultural changes brought about uncertainties which were to accentuate in the second half of the century with a series of events that affected the Arab world in a major way. The 1948 Palestine conflict, the creation of the state of Israel and the subsequent physical and symbolic displacement of the Palestinian people shattered the consciousness of Arab writers and marked a new turn in the way in which they perceived their place in the modern world. Disillusioned, they could no longer identify with the Romantic mood of the previous generation. Instead, they found an echo of their own gloom in the voices of poets in other parts of the world where people were experiencing similar situations of displacement, such as in the poetry of Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Aragon, Lorca, Neruda, and Hikmat.

After the 1950s, Arabic poetry took on a more vehement tone, denouncing injustice and oppression. This is shown in the writing by the Sudanese-Libyan poet Mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Writing and History: A Survey
• Part II Issues and Problems
• Part III Selected Documents
• Select Bibliography
• Index