hi moses
i'll have to read this a bit later, to offer a proper response. but in the meanwhile, i wonder if it is possible to identify those who were duped. i don't want to make this an impossible request, but are there particular figures, who are well enough known, in that camp?
i don't mean those who were reading his fiction and analyzing it; that is a different question. i mean those who were responding to his speeches, indicating their acceptance of his claims.
i'm running late, so, more later
ken

On 1/9/14 5:56 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:

Ken, thanks for your perspective. If as you say white liberal humanitarian types are not duped by fantastical stories of gore and heroic escapes from hellholes in Africa, why was there no critique, probing, or questions about Abani's claims until Nigerian writers and commentators on this and other lists exposed the lies, incongruities, and inventions? Abani's invented biography--replete with nailed down penises and other horrors--was actually well received by his white liberal admirers and handlers, who neither bordered to verify these claims nor probed Abani further on these patently farcical claims. Even a cursory inquiry into dates, events, and other rudimentary metrics of contemporary Nigerian history would have debunked these stories from the get to, but--and this is my point--Abani's white liberal authenticators, schooled in the art of finding tragedies to solve or lament in Africa, saw his stories as completely plausible, believable. Their credulity in such matters, I'd argue, was shaped by widespread Western stereotyping of Africa as the land of horrors where anything, including Abani's penis being nailed to a chair, was possible. One must locate the prior lack of scrutiny in this cultural context. Instead of scrutiny, Abani was canonized, and his alleged suffering in violent Nigeria/Africa became his ticket to credibility and recognition in white liberal literary circles. Despite the effort of this and other lists to expose this blatant fraud, Abani has continued to ride the literary aura that his fantasies secured for him, parlaying that initial moment of white liberal sympathy and curiosity into more lucrative, if less bizarre, gigs in America.

I think that the Abani saga is a window into the more important and consequential issue of how Western imaginaries of Africa as well as Western aesthetic tastes for particular types of African stories constrain us in our story telling, in our narration of Africa and its realities. Sometimes the process works subconsciously, but the audience or imagined (Western) audience certainly inflects the kind of Africa that comes through in our writings. We sometime pander to this audience wittingly or unwittingly, aware of the attention that the bizarre and the exotic can get when it comes to Africa. White liberal audiences want to read about two Africas simultaneously or separately; an Africa that is mired in extreme tragedy, sorrow, and sadness and/or an Africa that is inexplicably bubbly and full of happy revelry. An Africa that is neither of these does not appeal to them. An Africa that is diverse along a spectrum with many realities in between the two extremes of happy Africa and hopeless Africa is usually too nuanced for white liberal audiences, especially the do good naive humanitarian types. Even in scholarship the audience of white liberal Africaphiles inflects the way we talk about Africa. It works in subtle but discernible ways.

It is more sinister and deliberate with the fiction writers, in my opinion, because it seems to me that Western audiences of African fiction have trained their tastes to appreciate the stories of dysfunction. Abani knew this. He knew the currency and capital that came with being seen as an African writer who is a native informant--who, to use his own language, is a curator of alleged African tragedies and horrors. He may not have made this tired genre the center of his literary outputs but he was smart enough to pander to a preexisting Western obsession with it by inventing a backstory for his art that confirms and reinforces the worst stereotypes of African horror. Look where he is today, feted and celebrated as a Nigerian anthropological source for every bad and horrible about Nigeria.

This genre also works in a deliberate and sinister manner when African asylum seekers, aware of the Western appetite for African horror stories, invent their own fantastical tales of dangers and threats that await them in Africa. If as you argue, the Western audience of these African storytellers are very discerning, why do these fictional horrors about Africa find this kind of reception? White conservatives, with the exception of some Evangelical types, often don't care about the hapless African undocumented immigrant with a sob story, but white liberals, motivated by a desire to do good and help an African escape the alleged danger of genital mutilation and ritual sacrifice, lap such stories up. Why was Abani not found out until we cried out, and why is he still, despite our efforts, respected as a heroic survivor of African horror?

I agree with you that white liberals differ from conservatives in their attitudes to these stories but I'd argue that the difference does not lie in their credulity or naivety per se but in the fact that white liberals are driven by their humanitarian instinct to help Africa or a suffering African refugee, one who can write for good measure, while the conservative simply wants to use these African stories of horror to lament African dysfunction and reinforce navel-gazing, self-righteous narratives of African alterity and Western superiority. This difference does not negate the common predilection to treat fantastical African stories as inviolable chronicles and their tellers as heroic, inspirational figures. Have you read Ismail Beah's book on his life as a child soldier during the Sierra Leone civil war? It's full of Abani-esque horror tales of questionable veracity. This genre is well developed, and growing, in the West. There must be a reason for this growth. There must be a receptive audience, appetite, or market for it in the West.

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 8:23 AM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

hi kwabena
the notion that westerners in general salivate at stories about african dysfunctionality, sure. that is absolutely true, and has been true as long as i can remember.
it is less the case, i feel, that a writer can pander to this predilection for pity simply by putting out a shocking or sad story. that's what i should be saying. when it is published, the critical gaze that falls on the text often permits a more discerning critique to emerge, and pandering can be seen for what it is.
abani's writing is not particularly realist in mode, especially his incredible fantasies, Song for Night, or the Virgin of Flames, that impose a more complex reading. he doesn't write reportage; he never wrote a text like Habila's, nothing like Oil on Water, say.
anyway, instead of going on i'd like to comment crosswise on this issue of reading a text by citing the immense popularity of adichie's first book, Purple Hibiscus, which, you will remember, deals with the situation of 2 children dealing with an oppressive paterfamilias. i enjoy her work more and more, but that was a very popular book with my students, and it was about the dysfunctionality of these children's family. i must say i liked it least of all her books, but if we wanted to offer a critique that here is another "single story," you could start with this book.
if i were to chastise some group for purveying the negative images of africa, it wouldn't be african writers. it would be western writers like dave eggert, with his lost boys of sudan book, but even more photographers, and the publishers of images of africans in the press or magazines. they are soo predictable, often sooo pitiful, sooo beauuutiful, sooo exotica, sooo different, sooo "them," sooo...
and add to that movies about africa, popular, commercial movies. can anyone cite any movie they've seen about africa, made in the studios of hollywood or europe, that isn't all those things above?
you have to admit writers are generally much more subtle and complicated in their visions, at least the good writers.
gotta go
ken

On 1/9/14 6:54 AM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena wrote:

Oga Ken writes that Chris Abani "could only be discredited over the long run with this. anyone could understand this; few would imagine westerns are so much dupes as to buy any kind of story; to imagine that there aren't people who might question this." 

 

This is not what Oga Moses meant; certainly, he can defend his take. Absolutely, not every Westerner would believe Abani's narrative of marginality and Africanization of violence. Rather Oga Moses meant, not in a generalized way, that African writers are admired and appreciated  like a newly born Chinese panda in New York zoo whenever they tell stories that add bolts of false validity to the Western mindset of sin, sun, and sex in Africa.

 

Even in everyday life, when an African has something to say with refreshing forcefulness that distills the jaundiced meta-narrative of immemorial Africa s/he can get the elbows-out treatment from her/his Western audience, call them Liberals or Conservatives. I have seen this in my field of research and scholarship and in actuality bruised by that approach. In my roadside conversations with Westerners, "most" of them have been surprised by the fact that not all African children walked barefooted on empty stomachs to primary schools under trees . I am sure that Africans on this listserve have had similar experiences  that mirror mine.

Kwabena 

 

 

---

From:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of kenneth harrow [harrow@msu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2014 10:39 PM
To:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - PEN Ten with Chris Abani

hi moses, et al
i think this is much more bizarre than you are putting it. of course, i don't know abani, i know only his works, and saw the horrible facebook video of his speech. it is too bizarre to mean simply pandering to western appetites. he exposes himself to enormous ridicule and disparagement in doing this; and i want to imagine that his speeches are indicative of a greater disturbance. but i don't know him; i don't know anyone who knows him. i don't know his public persona beyond that speech he gave about penises nailed to board. in the previous thread people on the list made a pretty valiant effort to uncover the circumstances around his imprisonment, and nothing emerged to validate his extravagant claims.
he could only be discredited over the long run with this.
anyone could understand this; few would imagine westerns are so much dupes as to buy any kind of story; to imagine that there aren't people who might question this.
lastly, appealing to people's pity doesn't mean, to me, appealing to sentiments of liberals, as though humanitarian types are more gullible than hardnosed conservatives. their assessment of responsibility differs from that of conservatives, or their willing to act for others is more generous. but i doubt that creates a necessary naivete or willingness to rationalize the discourses of those seeking to prey on their emotions. i can imagine an audience that had heard his speech, and then saw any part of the threads that exposed here on this list would be outraged.
i continue to read and teach his books, but the biography of the author is not going to be evoked, as i would for a saro-wiwa. i have to wonder if he is totally all there.
ken

On 1/8/14 1:07 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:

Thanks for sharing, Funmi. Abani is such a snippy, witty thinker and writer that it's a shame that he felt the need to build a false biographical premise, a false originary resume if you will, in order to get noticed. It speaks as much to his insecurities and amoral ambition as it does to the Western appetite for certain kinds of stories about and from Africa--an appetite that compels African writers seeking recognition in the West to reinvent and embellish their lives in Africa to satiate the palates of do-good Western liberals and right wing racists alike. The former is motivated by a naive humanitarian impulse, the latter by a belief that Africa is the arena of all evil and that no horror story coming out of Africa is implausible.

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 8:40 PM, Funmi Tofowomo Okelola <cafeafricana1@aol.com> wrote:

http://www.pen.org/interview/pen-ten-chris-abani

PEN Ten with Chris Abani

• By: PEN America
• PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 7, 2014

The PEN Ten is PEN America's biweekly interview series curated by Lauren Cerand. This week Lauren talks to poet and novelist Chris Abani, author of the novels Graceland, Song for Night, and the highly anticipated The Secret History of Las Vegas.  Abani is also a recipient of the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize, and the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award.

When did being a writer begin to inform your sense of identity?

I was lucky enough to figure out that I wanted to be a writer when I was very young. I was ten when I published my first story and sixteen when my first novel was published. So it seems that much of my life, from my adolescence up to now, has been lived as a writer. It is understandably hard for me therefore to separate Chris Abani the person from the writer. Not in the sense of the public personae of the writer, that's an easy separation to make, but in the private sense of it, in the sense that I sometimes struggle to differentiate between living my life and witnessing myself living my life.

Whose work would you steal without attribution or consequence?

There are so many! God, that is a hard one. I'm always in awe of good writing, even that done by my students. But I think Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez would be three that come to mind immediately.

Where is your favorite place to write?

I would say, in my living room, on the couch, watching TV as I work. I like my creature comforts—certain coffee made a certain way, access to snacks and to the very spicy Nigerian food I make. I need to be listening to music or watching a movie or TV. It stimulates me and gives me something to work off, a need to go deep.

Have you ever been arrested? Care to discuss?

Yes I have been arrested but it's a complicated narrative not suited for short answers. But I will also admit to shoplifting chocolate once when I was eight. I got caught. Shame.

Obsessions and influences—what are yours?

I have been pretty much obsessed with humans and spiritual quests since I was a child. That's what the kind of involved Catholicism I lived, as a young person will instill in you. Over time that has evolved into a deep need to understand the entirety of human potential, and the deep urge that gives us language and what it is exactly that we mean for it to articulate about us. I would say that early comic books, Russian novels, movies and most of all, James Baldwin, were influences and in fact remain so.

What's the most daring thing you've ever put into words?

Will you marry me?

What is the responsibility of the writer?

Writers and storytellers as a whole are curators of our common humanity. This is difficult because we curate not just the good, but also the bad, the totality that makes us beautiful. That and surrendering your ego to the story so it finds its way in spite of your limitations.

While the notion of the public intellectual has fallen out of fashion, do you believe writers have a collective purpose?

It is actually contemporary writers that led to the falling out of fashion of the public intellectual. I have many theories about why this is, mainly that we became afraid of the burden of this responsibility. But we do serve a collective purpose; we are the ones who have been charged with the discourse of our common humanity, our shared fragility as beings of reason.

What book would you send to the leader of a government that imprisons writers?

Wole Soyinka's The Man Died.

Where is the line between observation and surveillance?

Well we are all observant beings. Much of how we learn is by observing others. Observations intent is usually mimesis or at its worst, understanding. Surveillance is always driven by a more sinister purpose. Therefore there is an abyss between them. Governments or even institutions can never observe because that kind of collective desire is always weighted with nefarious agend
a

- See more at: http://www.pen.org/interview/pen-ten-chris-abani#sthash.g9bM69AU.QPTdhOfk.dpuf

Funmi Tofowomo Okelola

-The Art of Living and Impermanence

http://www.cafeafricana.com

http://www.indigokafe.com

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