Chimurenga Session

This month Chimurenga is at the New Museum as part of Museum as Hub program doing groundwork for a residency later in the year.

We’ll also be presenting a Chimurenga Session on Saturday, March 16 at 3pm at the New Museum Theater, Bowery Street, New York.

Join us for a discussion on Chimurenga, its past, present and future projects, including The Chronic, a weekly online and quarterly pan African print gazette- out now-now.

New York–based Chimurenga contributors including Vivek Narayanan (poet and editor of Almost Island), Sean Jacobs (Chronic Gaming editor and head honcho of Africa is a Country), and Harmony Holiday (poet and choreographer) will be joining the discussion and presenting work.

More here.

A 48-page newspaper and 40-page stand-alone books review magazine featuring writing, art and photography inflected by the workings of innovation, creativity and resistance.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Binyanvanga Wainaina, Dominique Malaquais, Mahmood Mamdani, Andile Mngxitama, Gwen Ansell, Patrice Nganang, Achal Prabhala, Rustum Kostain, Karen Press, Niq Mhlongo, Paula Akugizibwe, Tolu Ogunlesi, Sean Jacobs, Harmony Holiday, Howard French, Billy Kahora are a few of its many contributors from around the world.

Stories range from investigations into the business of moving corpses to the rhetoric of land theft and loss; from latent tensions between Africa’s most powerful nations to the soft power of the biggest satellite television provider; and from the unspoken history of Rushdie’s “word crimes” to the unwritten history of PAGAD. It also investigates crime writing in Nigeria, Kenya and India, takes score of the media’s muted response to the ‘artistry’ of the World’s No1 Test batsman, rocks to the new sound of Zambia’s Copper Belt and tells the story on one man’s mission to take down colonialisms monumental history.

Order the print edition from one of our stockists or direct from our online shop.

We woke on Tuesday 25 September, 2012 to the crushing news of the passing of our beautiful sister, friend and longtime colleague Liepollo.

Our heartfelt condolences to her many friends.

For all of us, Lieopollo embodied life at its most fragile and resilient. We remember her for her intelligence, her beauty,  her passionate belief in the dignity and equality of all people and her dedication, persistence and strength… but also for her joy – the uninterrupted flow of laughter, experiences, observations and memories that we shared with her in day-to-day living.

Please join us in remembering a dear friend and colleague and in celebrating her life on Wed, 3rd October 2012 at 6.30pm at Chimurenga, 3rd floor Pan African Market, 76 Long Street, Cape Town.

The funeral will be held in Maseru, Lesotho on 06 October. Should you want more information about the funeral, please contact the Chimurenga office on the 3rd floor of the Pan African Market, 76 Long Street or on 021 4224168, or info@chimurenga.co.za. Friends and colleagues from Cape Town will attend, and will be taking memories, photographs and condolences to Liepollo’s family. You are welcome to bring words, letters, pictures, sounds on Wednesday for us to take, or to write in a blank book we will have available to leave messages in.

For more info visit facebook or call (021) 422-4168 or email info@chimurenga.co.za

Warmly, Chimu team

In October last year we launched the Chimurenga Chronic, a speculative newspaper set in May 2008, with The Forest and the Zoo – a Blue Notes tribute concert at the Drill Hall in Joburg.

Under the direction of composer/trumpeter Marcus Wyatt, some of Johannesburg’s leading jazz musicians explored Chimurenga Chronic themes such as history, exile and memory in their tribute to the freedom and prolific musical imagination of South African jazz legends, the Blue Notes.

Once the musicians came together to rehearse they soon realized the importance of keeping this project alive, and now they’re planning further explorations.

Check out the video from the event.

And get more info here.

Call for Proposals

Deadline: September 1, 2012

portal9journal.org

Part 1: Giving Shape to One’s Universe
I wrote most of my first novel, Waiting for an Angel, in Lagos, Nigeria, and if you have been to Lagos the fractured, discontinuous style of the narration would make sense to you immediately. Lagos in the 1990s, under the military dictatorship, was a large, sprawling suburb of hell – this is not an exaggeration. There were dead bodies lying for days by the roadside; there were traffic jams that went on for hours trapping you in old, overcrowded molue buses, pinned between sweaty bodies as you hung on to the top railing for balance with one hand and with the other hand you held on tightly to your wallet. Do I need to mention that when you finally got home from work, sometimes around 9 pm, it was guaranteed that there would be no electricity? In my particular neighbourhood of Ketu we had had no power for months, at exactly the time I was writing my novel. Chinua Achebe, asked at a reading to say something about Lagos, said that his only advice to anyone who found himself in Lagos was to get out as soon as he could.

Lagos is a much saner, better organized place now, but this is now and that was then. Living in Lagos then, I found it hopeless to try to write my novel in a linear, continuous way – I just couldn’t see that far into the future. Every day had to be lived fully, to be brought to a closure because there was no guarantee it wouldn’t be the last day. So I wrote my book as a series of autonomous but structurally and thematically linked short stories; each story was also a chapter in the novel. Writing mostly at night by candle light, I wrote each self-contained chapter as quickly as I could, putting yet one more day and one more chapter to bed, and going to bed myself at three or four in the morning with a sense of achievement, a sense of closure. At least for that day.  I am not saying that each story in the book took exactly a day to write, but each took a bearably shorter time to write than a novel would. Years later, after my book was published, reviewers and critics would often comment about my deliberate use of fragmented narrative style as a tool for capturing the urban chaos that was Lagos, and Nigeria, in the 1990s. A style described as ‘typically postcolonial’ or ‘postmodern’.  As if I had sat down in a state of Wordsworthian tranquility or visited an arty coffee house and decided to structure my book like I did.  All I wanted was to finish my book as painlessly as possible.

Form, which at a basic level can be described as the structuring of narrative, or, as Edith Wharton puts it in her succinct style in The Writing of Fiction, ‘the order in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped’, can be circumstantial, dependent on the time, place, or situation the author happens to be in when he or she is writing the book. If I had written my novel in Bauchi, where I used to live before moving to Lagos, and where life is more tranquil and more predictable, it is doubtful whether the book would have ended up in the form it is in now. Certainly Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and her other Stream of Consciousness novels couldn’t have been written before World War I, or set anywhere else but in post WW I London. A modernist novel can’t be written before the advent of modernity.  Art, and most especially the novel, is always a product of its time and place. The omniscient, minutely detailed and linear style of the Victorians was a reflection of their worldview, their simple, agrarian life style. I call these the external or even accidental influences that do sometimes determine the form or shape of a novel. They are presences hovering by the writing table, guiding your hand, and most of the time you are powerless against them.

This is especially true with earlier works, when the writer isn’t yet skilled enough to be intentional, to force his design on his work regardless of the situation.  Often, sitting in my room, writing, I felt as if only the circumference described by my candle light existed, while the real world, everything outside that was shadows. There was a feeling of blind terror, for I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I wrote by instinct, without thinking too much. A lot of writing coaches do encourage this kind of writing, especially for the first draft. Write, they tell you, just get everything down on paper. Don’t think. This is good advice, especially with longer pieces, like a novel. I felt my way through my characters and my instinct for conflict; I let character interact with character, always making sure not to resolve conflicts too soon, delaying, always delaying the payoff moment. But gradually the circumference of light expanded as each character developed. Perhaps it helped that I didn’t sit down to write with a lot of answers, but with questions. In a way writing a novel is about articulating for oneself what one already senses through experience and instinct, but the truth of which one is still not sure about.  In giving shape to a novel one is also giving shape to one’s universe.

But, as much as I acknowledge how much circumstance and the accident of my being in Lagos helped me to get a form for my novel, it is not always that chance and serendipity work to give a book the desired shape. A well written story is an artificial thing, a made thing. Talent and instinct and empathy can only take you so far, and no more. The beauty of the novel is that it gives you the space, within a single story, to evolve and grow, from ignorance to awareness, especially since some novels take years to write.  After a few drafts, I knew which chapter had to follow which, and I decided on arranging the stories in reverse chronological order because it strengthened the theme of confusion and uncertainty I was aiming for. The silences and spaces between chapters also worked out well for me as each silent space that surrounds each story seemed to mirror the gaps felt in a country on its knees, a country where information is limited and repressed, where people are beaten for knowing things, where people simply disappear for knowing things. The dead bodies I saw every day by the roadside, well, one of them could be the youth I depict running from a mob and who is bludgeoned and set on fire. Without a history, he appears and dies. We know nothing more.  Nabokov said somewhere, there is no reading a book, only re-reading it, in the same way I believe there is no writing a story, only re-writing it. In revision everything becomes clearer.

This is an extract from a longer essay forthcoming in Writing a First Novel edited by Karen Stevens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

This article was first published in The Star.

Polish your intention. Why are you writing? What do you really want to achieve? I once picked up a book of poems by Les Murray and the dedication said, “To the Glory of God”.  Other writers feel that they are bearing witness or that they are born story-tellers or that they are activists, entertainers, reformers, artists  or that they want to challenge perceptions or shine a torch into a dark cave of wonders.  There is no harm in starting out with the highest of intentions – if luck strikes it will keep you grounded and when disappointment hits you can still keep your head up high because you had picked up your pen for the sincerest of causes.

Write about anything, what you know and what you’re curious to find out; what you understand and what you want to figure out. The subject matter doesn’t really matter. What is crucial is your own fascination, your own angle, what keeps you awake at night, those words that can’t stay inside you anymore, those feeling that must take shape, that scene you’re itching to draw, that journey that needs to be mapped. Write about anything and everything but write with love and sharp eyes.

Surprise your reader. Agents, editors and competition judges have read all the books worth reading and watched all the films worth watching. On bad days they are jaded and on good days they want to be blown away. So startle them, provoke them, pull the carpet from under their feet.  Children are sweet so give them Satan toddling in a nappy. Rapists are evil so tell them about the one who saved the life of a puppy. Play around with the clichés – money can’t buy happiness, mothers love their children. And if this sounds too crude for you then sting them with the truth, dazzle them with innocence, sing, juggle and make them laugh or tell a story that has never been put into words before.

Gather your strength for sitting. A writer writes and a writer reads and this means hours and hours on a chair (preferably a good one). Look after your eyesight; be kind to your spine.  Walk every day and strengthen your upper body. Watch your posture; relax your neck. Stretch. This might all seem mundane but unless you’re aiming for the flash in the pan one book wonder, you want to be in for the long haul. Thousands and thousands of words, days banging the keyboard, hours of editing and reading require stamina, a certain kind of body power that needs to be developed.

Close your ears. Let the voices of your characters rise above that of the people around you. Your story is more important that the breaking news. Your novel is more valid than the latest research discovery. Your fictional world is more accurate that what the experts have discovered… at least until you’ve finished your novel.

Milk time. I wrote whole paragraphs of my first novel in my head at the kitchen sink. Then I would rush afterwards to write it all down on the first piece of paper I could find. Housework does not require our full attention, nor does exercise, nor does shopping, neither do certain office jobs. Apparently Naguib Mahfouz used to edit his writing while he was at his civil servant post. On the bus and the train, waiting in a queue, sitting in the dentist’s chair you can still be working on your writing without need for a pen or a keyboard. Think about your characters, draw them close to you and know them better. Mull the opening of your next chapter, worry about that particular plot weakness.  The next time you sit down to write, you will find yourself either full of more material or clearer in your vision.

Never worry that your readers will think that your protagonists are you. Once you start to care about your personal image, you are self-censoring. At the end of the day, the story is more important than the personal life of the writer. And if you’re worried that your friends or relatives will discover themselves in your novel then in addition to changing their name, alter at least two of the following:  their relationship to the protagonist, their nationality, gender, address or occupation.

Back out of dead ends. I have found that the quickest way to deal with a block in my writing is to simply delete a few lines, a paragraph or a whole chapter and then take my novel in another direction.

Read to become a better writer. This sounds like “eat to become stronger” and in a way reading is the food of the creative process. Read for all the reasons a reader reads but also read for inspiration, read to be influenced, read in order to pick up tricks and techniques, read in order to answer the questions, “How on earth did the author pull this off? How on earth did he/she get away with this?” Writing is an extension of reading and the quality of your reading will be reflected into your writing.

Be humble when receiving critical feedback from editors and other professionals. Be less humble when listening to family members and friends. But always keep an open mind. After all, you need readers and you want your work to be read. Be willing to redraft. Put your work aside and then examine it with fresh eyes. You will find weaknesses and errors, many things that you want to change. If time is tight, keep writing new material and only revise what you have written days ago. Consider the suggestions you hear, but remember that the final judgment is yours. No one knows these characters, this setting, the ins and outs of this fictional world as well as you do.

Leila Aboulela’s latest novel Lyrics Alley, set in 1950s Sudan, was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards and short-listed for a Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize. It was long-listed for the Orange Prize as were her previous novels The Translator (a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year) and Minaret. Leila was awarded the Caine Prize for “The Museum” included in her story collection Coloured Lights which went on to be short-listed for the Macmillan/Silver PEN Award. BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays including The Mystic Life and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. Leila’s work has been translated into 13 languages. www.leila-aboulela.com

For every writer the idea for a novel starts in a different place.  Some writers like to begin with a concept, a conundrum or a situation, a what if? Some with a story or plot line. Yet others begin with a character. When people who want to write ask me, as they often do, where my ideas come from I generally say that I start with a character, because I see myself as a character-led writer. That remains largely true, but then you might equally ask where does that character come from? Where does it all begin? From sitting in front of audiences and answering their questions, I have been able to see that every book I have written has started with a spark of life – a moment I can trace my way back to, when an idea that might smoulder for years before catching fire first arrived.

Take my first novel Ancestor Stones. The idea, when it first came to me, started with a voice.  The voice was that of an elderly aunt I was listening to as she told a story about my family’s past for a memoir I was working on. I listened to her, the distinctive patterns and rhythm of her speech, and I thought: I have never heard a voice like that in literature. My aunt’s description of what it had been like to be a young woman in Sierra Leone in the 1920’s, captivated me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the world she described and the fact that nobody else, to my knowledge anyway, had written about it. That was in the year 2000. I published the memoir I was writing in 2002 and talked to my agent about what to do next. Over lunch I gave him several ideas for other non-fiction books – at the time I’d never published any fiction – but he wasn’t very taken with any of them. He’s a good sounding board and I trust his judgement, but I didn’t have anything else to offer. Then he said: “You’ve given me lots of ideas for books and I could go out an sell any of them, but what do you really want to write?” He’d once told me that there were writers who wrote from the head and those who wrote from the heart and that I was the latter. I started to tell him about my aunt, of the idea she had given me. He said simply: “Then that’s what you must write.” Out of my aunt’s voice I created Asana, Hawa, Mariama and Serah.

The Memory of Love was ten years in gestation, from the first spark of life to the moment of publication. I wrote for just three of those years, the rest was, well, waiting for the spark to catch, to see if there was enough there to start a fire. Mostly it’s a subconscious process, chewing the cud of ideas and random thoughts, seeing connections. A lot of it happens in cars, in the passenger seat staring out of the window. The spark of life for The Memory of Love was a conversation with a friend from Argentina whose father had been a university professor during the years of the Dirty War, when thousands of people were killed or disappeared. She told me that she had long suspected her father was, if not actually complicit, then favoured by the regime, because he had become a celebrated historian where so many other intellectuals lost their lives and their freedom. Certainly he never protested the horrors taking place. As a child she’d been too young to understand, but as an adult she hadn’t been able to stop herself reflecting on her father’s success and asking the question: “How can it be?” In a restaurant called The Orangery in Kensington Elias Cole was born. Of course, he wasn’t then Elias Cole but an embryonic clump of cells. His first name was Hector Gonzalez or something like that, because my initial plan was to set the book in Argentina – something that never ceases to surprise audiences at literary events. But then I went back to Sierra Leone after the civil war and I talked to people of a certain generation, I met Elias Cole after Elias Cole, bystanders exculpating themselves of past sins of commission and omission.  I saw the story’s universal truth and that I didn’t have to travel to Argentina to write it. The character of Adrian, a British psychologist working in Sierra Leone who just doesn’t ‘get it’ I took from Ancestor Stones, I thought “I’m not finished with you yet.” I made him sit down and listen to Elias Cole.

Often I try ideas out as a short story first. Adrian appeared in a story called ‘Butterscotch’ which I wrote for BBC Radio. Ever since writing The Memory of Love, I haven’t stopped thinking about Attila, the book’s obese and obtuse Sierra Leonian psychiatrist. A while back an audience member at a literary event commented that they didn’t like him much. I was taken aback, because personally I had become very fond of Attila. “That’s because you don’t know him,” I protested. I felt I must have done him a disservice. Each character in a novel, however minor, comes with an entire history, one which may never be explored on the page, but exists in the writers mind. I have since written two short stories in which the bad-tempered Attila is the central character. I like him more and more; ideas have begun to coalesce around him, a visit to Britain and a former love called Rosie. But it may be another ten years before I know if I have a novel.

Aminatta Forna is the award-winning author of two novels: The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water.  Her most recent novel The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury, April 2010) is a story about friendship, war and obsessive love. The novel was winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best Book Award 2011, short-listed for both the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011 and the Warwick Prize 2011 and nominated for the IMPAC Award 2012.

More about the Kwani? Manuscript Project here.

For at least 60 years the African novel has deconstructed, and even transversed, ideas and imaginaries of self, culture, society and nation across the continent. A self-reflexive continuum, shifting chameleon-like; a receptacle of letters, morphing through the cry of the griot, everyman’s diatribe, madman’s claim of truth or the politician’s manic address. An oracle.

It is the precursor to many contemporary urban African genres and forms. From the ubiquitous FM station, the graffiti of rage, the new painter’s electronic brush, the characters of transnational cable T.V. and the growing fan-tribes of European soccer. The African novel determined Us, created an autonomy of expression and became the said curse of dictators.

To celebrate the African novel and its adaptability and resilience, Kwani Trust announces a one-off new literary prize for African writing. The Kwani? Manuscript Project calls for the submission of unpublished fiction manuscripts from African writers across the continent and in the Diaspora.

Beyond the foundations laid by Soyinka, Ngugi and Mahfouz, in remembrance of Yambo Ouologuem’s pre-colonial quest and Mariama Bâ’s bending of form, to the urban journeys of Meja Mwangi, the precocious post-everything of Kojo Laing and the musical rhythms of Ahmadou Khrouma. This prize seeks to recognize the possibilities of form in an ongoing genre that has re-emerged in the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Alain Mabanckou, The Kwani? Manuscript Project is a conversation, an ill guised attempt at growing its own list. For there is no greater celebration of emergent forms than in publishing our own, thanks to those who have existed before us and helped us believe. We look forward to your submissions

The top 3 manuscripts will be awarded cash prizes:

In addition Kwani? will publish manuscripts from across the shortlist and longlist, including the three winning manuscripts, as well as partnering with regional and global agents and publishing houses to create high profile international publication opportunities.

Click here for deadline details and submission guidelines

Winners will be announced in December 2012 at the Kwani? Litfest.

More here.

Featuring multimedia and text works by contributors from across the pan African world, The PMS Reader highlights the currents and transactions between the physical and the metaphysical, the lustful and the learned, the sensual and confessional and all matters philosophical, sociological and political.

Features include Kola Boof’s heretical tweet verse, Parselelo Kantai’s sadistic fiction, Zackie Achmat’s moffie memoires, Riason Naidoo’s pickled money order, Yemisi Ogbe’s naughty Nollywood kisses, Neo Muyanga’s ‘Sex For Money No Power’ Mixtape and Aryan Kaganof’s wry, deceptively wise new cinematic satire.

Also watch out for Jacob Dlamini on rats, Sandile Dikeni on shoes, Tsitsi Dangarembga on creativity and cannibalism, the Comaroffs on capitalism, Achille Mbembe on the autocrat, Okello Sam on relaxing, DJ Andy Williams on phenomenal women and FOKN Bois on Islamic girls.

Still to come: intimations and intimacies, gestures and jests, lurid lines and luring stanzas by Nick Muwalko, Dominique Malaquais, Kai Friese, Paula Akugizibwe, Binyavanga Wainaina, Rustum Kozain, Taiye Selasi, Zebulon Dread, Chief Boima, Femi Kuti Annie Paul, Djo Tunda Wa Munga, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Keleketla Sound Lab and many, many more.

Visitors to the website are invited to contribute by posting their wildlife wants, secret needs, neediest secrets, porn poems, flash fictions, pen pal letters and other sweet, sweaty, comical and contortionist stuff in the ‘Lonely Hearts’ forum. No unreasonable offer will be turned down.

The PMS Reader is published by Chimurenga and created in collaboration with Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa.