Frank Schaeffer, Derrick Ashong, and A.N.T. Adaptive

A short post to pull together a few things that have been on my mind lately. Yesterday, I did another first: I phone banked for the Obama campaign calling Obama supporters in Louisiana to remind them to vote. I've always been terrified of talking to strangers on phones, but this was unexpectedly addictive--the feeling of connection with these good, ordinary people, calling in a state that I have an ancestral connection. I let my voice slip in to the slightest hint of the Southern accent that comes when I visit my grandparents who live near Alexandria, Louisiana.... "Hi, my name is [Talatu-Carmen]. I'm calling from Barack Obama's presidential campaign. How ya doin' today? I'm just callin' to see if you've voted yet today in the Loooziana's Democratic primary?" I talked to lot of children, "Momma, she wants to know if you voted? Yeah, she did" and a lot of answering machines with "God bless" at the end. It felt like calling home.

I only had one person who hung up on me, and everyone else said that, yes, they had voted. The most touching moments were the old people (at least they sounded old on the phone). One old man said that he was doing all right; he was just heading to the shower, but, yes, he had voted." An old woman with a Caribbean accent told me that she was at the poll right now. "I just love him. He's my boy." We talked a few minutes about how much we loved Obama, and she seemed almost disappointed when I said goodbye. After 40 calls (many of which had not gone through), I decided I better get back to my dissertation proposal, which I ended up emailing to my advisor around 12:45am.

I have, admittedly, been obsessed with American politics for the past couple of weeks, in part procrastination technique against finishing my proposal and in part fascination with what will go down in history as a very significant primary season, but I have been disturbed by the implication of those who are not supporting Obama that that those of us who do are merely supporting him because of insubstantial emotional reasons. That we support him because we get a high from his inspiring speeches or because "we've drunk the Kool-Aid" to quote Fred--and not because we have done any research on his positions. There is this assumption that Hillary (or McCain or whoever else) is naturally the most qualified candidate, but that Obama's charisma has disguised his inexperience and inability to lead. I've seen these condescending accusations both by Hillary supporters and in acquaintances who are hard-core Republicans. And to be fair to these people, there are plenty of folks going around saying they are inspired, who have not done their research. However, I am not one of those people, and neither are a great many of Obama supporters. (NOTE 8:17pm, See, for instance, this blogger's reasonable and well-thought out take on why he is voting for Obama and the possible drawbacks to Obama's candidacy.) On this blog, I have praised Obama's (and Oprah's) rhetorical abilities. I think such an ability is admirable and a good quality in a leader. It is one reason I am supporting him, yes, but it is certainly NOT the ONLY reason. It would be a patently BAD reason to vote if I didn't have other good reasons. To see his position on issues, see here. I don't stoop to insulting Hillary's supporters saying that they are supporting her only because she is a woman. Why is there this assumption that Obama supporters must have such simplistic reasons?

I do not agree with Obama on everything. I do not think he is the Messiah. I think he will make mistakes, as any president does. And I am worried when I hear certain supporters talking as if once he is president all will be well. All will not be well--not in this global climate--especially not after the past 8 years of irresponsible and even criminal leadership. There are long-standing structural inequalities both within the nation and within the world that need serious attention, thought, and change. And, as Obama has pointed out plenty of times, he can not effect change by himself. He will need his supporters to continue their activism after the election, to continue their volunteerism and their sense of civic duty. Obama, by himself, won't accomplish anything, but I do believe that Obama as the leader of an informed and impassioned populace, a candidate who embraces nuance and who is willing to consider multiple perspectives on a situation, will be able to help shepherd this complex and contradictory country in a new, more positive direction. I believe that he, more than any of the other candidates in this race, will be able to accomplish this.

Some of the things that have fascinated me are the often very intelligent debates going on online--and debates that allow for the discussion of far more complexity than I've remembered in past presidential campaigns where positions of candidates often seemed to be summed up in soundbites. You can't do that with Obama. The reason people think he is a lightweight is because they are only listening to the soundbites. If they actually went online and looked at his positions, If they read his books and the legislation that he has worked on, it would be difficult for them to make such easy accusations. (And here is a remarkable clip of a young Obama supporter (Ghanaian-American musician and actor), Derrick Ashong, who completely bowled over one of those condescending critics who thought he was going to interview "your typical emotional Obama supporter." Completely off the cuff, Ashong responded to this "reporter's" questions about Obama's health care plan showing that he not only had a good reason to support Obama but that he understood the issue far better than the reporter did. I only wish I could be so eloquent.This is a MUST watch. )

I have also been impressed by the multiple facebook discussions on the Obama site. In just one example, there has been a serious and nuanced discussion on abortion on Obama's site--including plenty of Catholics who are pro-choice, athiests who are pro-life, McCain, Huckabee, and Clintons supporters and every imaginable position in between. Of course there are the people who try to shut the discussion down with slogans and cliches, but the discussion has not been shut down.

In part this has less to do with Obama than it has to do with the internet. I think part of the genius of his campaign is that his young supporters have taken advantage of their experience on the internet to campaign in revolutionary new ways from the viral Black Eyed Peas song to the grassroots fundraising of 32 million in one month from 224,000 new voters (including myself) to the 472,947 supporters (and counting, there seem to be about a 100 new sign ups every minute when I'm on there) on Facebook (compared to the 108,485 supporters [and counting much slower] for Hillary). The internet savviness of Obama's supporters compared to the others point to the the way Obama has appealed to a younger generation, while the older candidates practice politics as usual. Clinton has taken a few cues on internet fundraising from Obama's success, although not before she had to loan herself 5 million. (Did anyone else find that rather embarrassing?) The closest comparison in this change of political climate which coincides with new technology and generation I can think of is the televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon---there we go with the old JFK reference again....

Generational variances might also be seen in the widespread support of young evangelical (or other) Christians for Obama. Previously on this blog, I have expressed my frustration with the way evangelical Christians have been objectified and stereotyped in the past by so-called "neoliberals." Well, no longer. We are a populace as complicated as any other. We are also a population that is disillusioned with the way the previous generation fell in line behind ideologues like James Dobson, who conflates being Christian with holding certain cultural and political positions, and politicians who cynically used the "values" vote to gain power and became even more corrupt than those they replaced. We still hold to many of those core values, such as having serious ethical questions about the consumer society of America--a society that thinks it is all right to manipulate human life in such a way as to dispose of or create embryos on demand. I am one of these Christians, who has maintained my belief but disposed of the "evangelical" label because it has lost its meaning. I am one of those Christians who are disturbed by the ethical implications of abortion, stem cell research, cloning, and, yes, even in vitro fertilization, but also the callous way that politico-evangelicals have treated issues of poverty, war, class, human rights, have promoted xenophobia over compassion, profit over care of creation. I am one of those Christians who have realized we cannot afford to vote on a single issue, but who sees in Obama someone who encourages an open space where we can meet together with those who do not agree with us and try to find some common ground. This is the more practical position, much more so than standing at two opposite ends of a room and yelling at each other, which is what the previous partisan politics has felt like. Obama is not perfect, but, in opening that space for dialogue, I think he is our best option. Frank Schaeffer, the son of the legendary Francis Schaeffer and the filmmaker who made those documentaries about abortion with the endless pans of plastic dolls (had to watch them in an ethics class in high school), puts it much better than I could in his essay, "Why I'm Pro-life and Pro-Obama."

This post has turned much longer than I intended, but one last note. One does not expect to find the best hiphop one has recently heard in church, but that's what happened today. One of the musicians in our church today performed his testimony, and I had to go buy his cd (A.N.T. Adaptive) immediately after church. It was timely, relevant, and amazingly good. I have been hitting replay on the cd for the rest of the day. Take for example part of this lyric from the opening song "Ready."

Chorus:
Get ready,
it's about to drop so heavy.
Bumpin in the Lex or the Chevy.
Make sure
every
system got this song on blast,
cause only the truth gone last.
X2

The truth is
my nation is under attack
but not just because of the oil that's under Iraq
because of the fact that a lot of Latinos and blacks
will end up in jail maybe layin' flat on their backs.

The truth is
the rich get richer while the picture for the poor
is sitting there on the bottom floor.
No more health care. We can't get no health there.
Actin' like the sick people chose to put themselves there.

The truth is,
sex sales
so well that it has men buying sex from little girls with pigtails
Maxin' out their credit cards, surfin the net for porn
and the crazy thing is it's been accepted as a norm

The truth is
some kids don't eat every day but your dog do
I ain't tryin to dog you
I thought to address it from the booth
now ask yourself am I telling the truth?
Then holla at the youth...

Chorus:
Get ready, it's about to drop so heavy.
Bumpin in the Lex or the Chevy.
Make sure
every
system got this song on blast,
cause only the truth gone last.
2X

The truth is
too many single moms seen the struggle
Gotta work all day and keep the kids outta trouble
while their baby daddy chillin' with his other baby mommas
Can we learn how to live without all this crazy drama?

The truth is
Martin Luther King had a dream
Racism is alive and well, just behind the scenes
Only forty-five years removed from civil rights
Even Rosa in her death sayin' we still gotta fight

The truth is
are you a Republican or Democrat, homo or hetero,
I'm asking you, you better know, Christian or athiest
I love you, now I'm hatin this.
Can't we come together, it seems like we're still debatin' this.
Throwin up a peace sign or maybe you can raise a fist
and kill all the injustice they get paid to miss,
like being locked up when you're innocent
looked at as guilty
the system is filthy

Chorus:
Get ready,
it's about to drop so heavy.
Bumpin in the Lex or the Chevy.
Make sure
every
system got this song on blast,
cause only the truth gone last.

etc. I don't want to quote the whole thing, but go to the website and listen to it/buy it. I wish the song he performed in church "This is my Story" were on the website, but it's even better than this one...

His performance is just one of those little reminders I have from day to day, whether reading theory on storytelling, listening to 2-Pac, or listening to those old speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. that make me alternately thoughtful and delighted in my faith. The inspiration may not be anything specifically religious but it suddenly strikes me as TRUTH--something that helps me understand God better and reminds me of the purpose of my own life--how it fits into the larger pattern.

What more do we need in a president?

He can speak, he can imagine, he can inspire.... he can dance and sing.... what more does America need...?

Barack OBollywood

Oprah Winfrey and Toni Morrison on the Creative Imagination

I'm not a bit Oprah groupie, but this was an amazing speech.

"For the first time, we can vote as we believe, and we can do that because that is what the struggle was for.... I have been a woman my whole life, and every part of me believes in the empowerment of women, but the truth is I'm a FREE woman ... and being free means you get to think for yourself and you get to decide for yourself what to do. I am not a traitor [to my gender], I'm just following my own truth, and that truth has led me to Barack Obama."

To those who accuse her of voting on race, she says, "I say that, too , was insulting to me. Don't play me small. I'm not that small... I would never vote for anyone based on gender OR race. I'm not voting for Barack Obama because he's black . I'm voting for Barack Obama because he's BRILLIANT."

Her quotation of Toni Morrison's letter (and I'm a big Toni Morrison fan) sent me to google to read the letter, which I am copying here. I copied the letter from where it was posted on the New York Observer:
http://www.observer.com/2008/toni-morrisons-letter-barack-obama


Dear Senator Obama,

This letter represents a first for me--a public endorsement of a Presidential candidate. I feel driven to let you know why I am writing it. One reason is it may help gather other supporters; another is that this is one of those singular moments that nations ignore at their peril. I will not rehearse the multiple crises facing us, but of one thing I am certain: this opportunity for a national evolution (even revolution) will not come again soon, and I am convinced you are the person to capture it.

May I describe to you my thoughts?

I have admired Senator Clinton for years. Her knowledge always seemed to me exhaustive; her negotiation of politics expert. However I am more compelled by the quality of mind (as far as I can measure it) of a candidate. I cared little for her gender as a source of my admiration, and the little I did care was based on the fact that no liberal woman has ever ruled in America. Only conservative or "new-centrist" ones are allowed into that realm. Nor do I care very much for your race[s]. I would not support you if that was all you had to offer or because it might make me "proud."

In thinking carefully about the strengths of the candidates, I stunned myself when I came to the following conclusion: that in addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it. Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace--that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom.

When, I wondered, was the last time this country was guided by such a leader? Someone whose moral center was un-embargoed? Someone with courage instead of mere ambition? Someone who truly thinks of his country's citizens as "we," not "they"? Someone who understands what it will take to help America realize the virtues it fancies about itself, what it desperately needs to become in the world?

Our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities. Yet unleashing the glory of that future will require a difficult labor, and some may be so frightened of its birth they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb.

There have been a few prescient leaders in our past, but you are the man for this time.

Good luck to you and to us.

Toni Morrison

Ousmane Sembene on Nigerian video films

I have spent all day reading articles on Nigerian film that I realized I had not yet read and needed to do so speedily before finishing my proposal. Via my library link I was able to get access to a fabulous issue of Film International (2007) 5:4. Most of the articles seem to have gotten beyond the cliched and simplistic haranguing of Nigerian films for not fulfilling some "universal" standard of "quality," and instead delve into the complex and revolutionary contributions Nigerian film is making to world cinema.

However, when I finished reading John McCall's article “The Pan-Africanism we Have: Nollywood’s invention of Africa”, I had to post his postscript, which described what tha Ousmane Sembene, (may he rest in peace), often proclaimed the "Father" of African cinema, recently said about the Nigerian film industry:

I quote from John McCall:
"A few years ago I was fortunate to be among a group of American scholars gathered in Dakar for an NEH Institute to discuss the current state of African cinema. Over the course of the Institute, the question of whether Nollywood movies should be taken seriously became a point of heated discussion. One day we were fortunate to have Ousmane Sembene as a guest speaker. When he completed his presentation, the first question he was asked was what he thought of the new Nigerian video movies. We were all eager to hear what the venerable father of African cinema had to say on this subject. Sembene smiled just a bit, removed the ever-present pipe from his mouth, and said that the Nigerians had found a way to reach the African audience--and that, he acknowledged--was a very great accomplishment. A true revolutionary, Sembene said that the Nigerians had shown the way to reach the African audience, and that African film-makers should rethink their devotion to celluloid film and recognize that video was better suited to the vital task at hand" (McCall 96).

McCall, John C. “The Pan-Africanism we Have: Nollywood’s invention of Africa.” Film International. 5:4 (2007): 92-97.

And, so, my brothers and sisters, I stand vindicated for, in a recent paper, comparing the farcical portrayal of a neocolonial elite in Sembene's film Xala to the farcical portrayal of said elite in Kingsley Ogoro's Osuofia in London, (for those who have seen it think of the "mirror scene" in which the British-Nigerian lawyer begins to lose his accent). I rest my case....

Just for the record.... drumroll... T-C endorses Barack Obama for president!

Ok, just to get this on the record before I go on another media fast (since I am obsessively following the presidential campaign rather than writing my dissertation proposal, which I've GOT to turn in early next week)... If it has not already been obvious (and to those who are friends on facebook, where I post a new Obama article every hour or so, it's pretty obvious), I'm voting for Barack Obama in the upcoming primaries. I'll try to write more on my reasoning later, but here are two firsts for me.

1) I made my first ever political contribution last week--to the Obama campaign, thus apparently becoming one of the 170,000 new donors to his campaign this month.


2) I am an independent (morally so--disliking the partisanship of American politics I've seen my whole life), so I have never voted in a primary presidential election before. But next week, I'm going to go in and file my absentee vote for the primary (I don't live in one of the Super Tuesday states, and I don't have to register for a party--although I would if I had to).


I watched the debate tonight and thought it was a very pleasant conversation. (And isn't that a great photo...?)Hillary would probably do fine, as a president, and I actually enjoyed hearing her speak tonight. But Obama has a rare fire, and the charisma both (paradoxically) to unify and to shake up the status quo. This is not your everyday candidate...


I'm impressed and moved by how he has built up a grassroots support of independent voters and youth. I support his policy of not taking money from federal lobbysts and his committment to a "clean" and positive campaign. I also am impressed with his experience with grassroots level community activism, and I believe that he, more than Hillary Clinton, can actually rally young voters to continue their activism during his administration. While initially I had hoped that he might have more experience Washington before he ran, I find convincing his argument that being a Washington newcomer is an advantage. While Hillary Clinton has been moving in political circles for the past 20 years or so (and would be yet another dynastic succession should she win the nomination), he has recently been a community activist and had experience at a local level. (The other counter argument, of course, might be that GWB did not come into the White House with much experience...and we don't want a repeat of that. But then again, WHAT exactly was GWB doing before he was a governor? Managing a failing baseball team? Why did people vote for him--was it--perhaps because they looked nostalgically back to his father's time in office and thought that his father's advisors might do a good job helping him lead the country?) And finally (and perhaps this should not be the last reason), I also agree with Barack Obama's positions on the environment, on immigration (more than I agree with Hillary--ie. drivers liscences), his plans to make health care affordable, on his desire to bring a new international diplomacy to the White House.



So, my underlying idealism (always there, deep down) has burst my educated veneer of cynicism about politics and for the first time in my life, I am voting for someone I am excited about, rather than for someone I dislike less than the other guy/gal (and it IS good to have, for the first time, such a strong female candidate, though I'm not voting for her) running. He has made me hopeful about politics--has introduced the startling idea that politics can actually be practiced to bring about positive change, which is, believe me, a transformation from the way I've ever thought about politics before. And this perhaps is at the root of the youth movement behind him. The media has this truism about how youth don't come out to vote. Perhaps the REASON behind this is that for our whole lives (or at least the time we've had to vote) there has been nothing really to rally behind, other than, perhaps, trying to unseat Bush, which is not really a positive reason to vote. It's been the same old politics as usual--always nasty, always partisan, always predictable. Barack Obama represents something new and exciting.

I like him so much I fear to see what American politics will do to him and, of course, I dread the inevitable letdown that people who have claimed him as a kind of messiah will feel when he gets into office and they discover that he is a human being who makes mistakes, but I think the dream he offers is one worth following. Will he establish peace on earth and good will toward men? No. Let me not be blasphemous.

Will he be able to do what he's promised? Probably not altogether. Not by himself, but if enough youth continue the grassroots movement they've begun to elect him, we might be able to bring about some serious change. Maybe. It's worth hoping for, anyway--and it's worth my vote.

random blurbs

outside sleet chases hail at a 45 degree angle interspersed with random snowflakes that float above the fray. Above the snow-dusted roof the tips of skeletal trees sway, and curtains of snow sweep from the gutters.

on my cd player, Issa Bagayogo croons to a writable beat, followed by Brenda Fassie.

i attempt to induce my brain to begin labour of a dissertation proposal.

And I wonder about the mandatory charity tax imposed by shari'a in Bauchi....

last night i tried to listen to the state of union address while simultanously skimming a dissertation someone else finished in 2005. I could only make it about half way through the address before my annoyance superseded my desire to be an informed citizen. who were all those idiots applauding and cheering? and has there ever been a president of this country that sounds as absolutely unintelligent as GWB?

Film reviews of Bye, Bye Africa; Keita: the Heritage of the Griot; and Yeelen

I have just posted three of the reviews I wrote on films last year on my other blog.

Yeelen (Mali) directed by Souleymane Cissé










Keita: the Heritage of the Griot (Burkina Faso) directed by Dani Kouyate














Bye, Bye Africa (Chad) directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Barack Obama Speaks at Dr. King's Church

"Hope is not blind optimism. Hope is not ignorance of the barriers and hurdles and hazards that stand in the way.... [It's] imagining and then fighting and then struggling for and sometimes dying for what didn't seem possible before... Change doesn't happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up." (21:30, 24:48, etc).

Review of Measuring Time and Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila

Coming up for a gulp of air and then down again into the fetid swamp of studying for prelims [comprehensive exams for the PhD]. In addition to typing up old class notes, cramming theory anthologies and seminal books I should have read far before I reached this point in my career, I have been going over various papers I've written so as to remind myself of charachter names and events in all the novels and films and theoretical works I'm supposed to know well enough to write a couple of "robust" essays on next Wednesday and Friday. I re-read this review I wrote of Measuring Time last November alongside the interview I did. But I don't think I ever posted it here.... If you are in Nigeria, you can buy the Cassava Republic Nigerian editions of the novels at any of these venues. I note that Jos is not on the list, despite it being the home of Habila's alma mater, but if you are in Jos, I found copies of Waiting for an Angel at Castro Books across from Modern Bookshop; hopefully, they have Measuring Time there now too. Enjoy:

If you’ve never read anything by the Caine and Commonwealth prize winning author Helon Habila, the first thing to know is that his use of language is exquisite. The second thing to know is that he makes generous use of irony. Although he is a clearly political writer, he questions over-easy assumptions and political binaries. In his latest novel, Measuring Time, Habila continues the project he began in his debut novel Waiting for an Angel—that is to tell history through the eyes of ordinary people.

Waiting for an Angel opens in a prison setting. The imprisoned journalist Lomba is engaged in a battle of wits with the prison superintendent who is extorting poetry from his prisoner in an attempt to impress a woman. If Lomba’s story were told in a straight line, the way it might appear in his prison file, it would be the story of a failure: a student who drops out of university, who loses friends to madness and military violence and the women he loves to other men, a writer who never finishes his novel and whose journalistic career is cut short by his arrest in the slums of Lagos. However, this is not the story that Habila tells. By breaking up and rearranging the linear story of Lomba’s life, he wrests control of the narrative away from an environment-determined fate. The novel starts at the end of the chronological sequence and then circles back to gather stories of other characters in Lomba’s Lagos: a young boy banished from his home in Jos for smoking Indian hemp, an abandoned out-of-wedlock mother, an intellectual in a tragic love affair with a former student turned prostitute, the daughter of a general whose mother is dying of cancer, a disillusioned woman who runs a neighborhood eatery, a man who defies the soldiers on the night of Abacha’s coup, an editor pursued by the police who refuses to go into exile, a legless tailor who dreams of bidding poverty goodbye.

While the form of Waiting for an Angel reflects the frenetic beat of life in Lagos, the small town setting of Habila’s second novel Measuring Time allows for a more meandering pace. Mamo and LaMamo are twins growing up in the middlebelt town of Keti, and they hate their father, a womanizing businessman with political ambitions. They hate him for breaking their mother’s heart before she died giving birth to them, and they hate him for his long absences and his neglect. The twins’ simultaneous desire for revenge and quest for fame ends in their separation. When LaMamo runs away in search of adventure as a mercenary soldier, Mamo’s sickle cell anemia forces him to stay at home, spending more and more time in his imagination. The narrative of Mamo’s day to day life in Keti is rhythmically punctuated by adventure-filled letters from LaMamo as he travels around West Africa. Mamo reimagines events in Nigerian history: the poet Christopher Okigbo did not die in Biafra but instead lay down his gun to travel around Africa with Mamo’s Uncle Haruna. LaMamo enacts Mamo’s imagined story, becoming a soldier-poet who reports from the Liberian war front, and his words capture the spiritual horror and the boredom of war as it is rarely recorded in international news. The twins long for the other: while Mamo imagines adventures beyond the borders of his small town, LaMamo constantly searches for reminders of home in foreign lands.

The narrative of Measuring Time is frequently interrupted by folktales told by Mamo’s Auntie Marina, letters from LaMamo and a professor in Uganda who becomes Mamo’s mentor, excerpts from the memoir of the first missionary in Keti, his wife’s diary, and colonial reports, and the oral histories told by other characters. One of the most remarkable aspects of Habila’s prose is this inclusion of multiple genres alongside a continuous pattern of tributes to preexisting literary works. In Waiting for an Angel, he borrows the character of the prison superintendent from Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and gives him some of the associations of the folkloric dodo, a dim-witted monster who is often outwitted by the youth he kidnaps. Throughout the rest of Waiting for an Angel he references writers as varied as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ousmane Sembene, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Franz Kafka, John Donne, and Sappho. Similarly in Measuring Time, he bundles together Plutarch, Christopher Okigbo, William Shakespeare, Wole Soyinka, Alex La Guma, the Arabian Nights and Faust legends, as well as references to oral tales and Nigerian video films. The effect of these competing voices is to open up the boundaries between his fiction and other fictions and historical accounts that lie outside the novel. The illusion of a smooth, progressive, and abbreviated history, such as the Brief History of West Africa that is brought to Lomba in prison (as the Letters of Queen Victoria had been brought to Soyinka in prison) is a false one. Habila’s fictional histories play a function similar to the colonial history the Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in which the district commissioner writes only a paragraph on a man who has been the subject of Achebe’s entire novel. Habila parallels Achebe’s fictional colonial text in Measuring Time with the missionary text A Brief History of the People’s of Keti by Reverend Drinkwater.

It is with these “brief histories” that Habila’s project in both Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time becomes clear. Mamo is determined to write a history that does not “cut details” as the colonial histories had—a history that tells the stories of “individuals, ordinary people who toil and dream and suffer” (MT 180). The traditional ruler’s story he has been hired to write, Mamo states, is “simply a part of the other biographies…. [that he would] eventually compile to form a biographical history of Keti. That’s what history really is, people and their lives, no matter how we try to manipulate it. It is the story of real people with real weaknesses and strengths and… not about some founding fathers and … even if we want to write about the founding fathers we shouldn’t privilege them, we should place them on par with other ordinary folks…” (225). In Mamo’s subsequent “biographical history,” he writes of his father the failed politician, and his aunt the divorced wife, placing their stories alongside the less than glorious history of the mai, the traditional ruler, of Keti. Every story has its own place alongside the others. When LaMamo returns with a revolutionary fervour reminiscent of Ngugi’s Matigari, the separate lives of the twins blend and become one—LaMamo’s panAfrican experience and his soon to be born child are given into Mamo’s safekeeping and for recording into Mamo’s history of Keti.

Such a history is not merely a radical rewrite of racist colonial histories but an empathetic window into the lives of even the unpleasant characters. The characterization of the prison superintendent in Waiting for an Angel follows Soyinka’s original caricature, but the man is given a more complex psychology. He is a man grieving for his dead wife, a father of a young son. As Lomba realizes when he meets the superintendent’s girlfriend, “The superintendent had a name, and a history, maybe even a soul” (WfA 37). While in Measuring Time, the sleepy-eyed traditional ruler of Keti and his evil vizier take on the typed characteristics of folktale or a video film, most of the characters in Measuring Time are treated with complexity and compassion. When LaMamo calls the old widows who had pursued their father all his life “shameless old women,” Mamo reminds him that “they weren’t so bad… People are just people” (MT 343). And although the missionary Reverend Drinkwater may have misrepresented the history of Keti, his family has become a part of the history of the town. The missionary’s daughters, now old women, live in Keti, tending their parents’ graves. Although they are not Nigerian, they belong in Keti. It is the only life they have ever known.

This concern with multiple perspectives on history is behind what at first glance might seem to be an editorial flaw in Habila’s two novels. When reconstructed in both novels, time doesn’t quite add up. According to the chronology given in “Mamo’s notes toward a biography of the Mai,” the number of years between the installation of the first mai by the British and the current mai should be about thirty two or three years, yet the time period is stretched from 1918 up to the 1980s (MT 238-240). The year-long planning period for the celebration of the mai’s tenth anniversary seems to turn into three. Similarly in Waiting for an Angel, the time between Lomba’s stay at the university and his imprisonment seem much longer than the actual historical tenure of Abacha’s regime. He supposedly meets and falls back in love with an old girlfriend some time after he becomes a journalist. Yet, two weeks before he is arrested (after he has worked at the Dial for two years), another girlfriend, with whom he has lived for a year, leaves him. The times between the two love affairs don’t quite seem to add up.

Placing the novels side by side gives a hint to what Habila is doing here. In Waiting for an Angel, Habila gathers up historical events that happened along a spectrum of ten years and bundles them into the space of a week. Although Nigeria is kicked out of the Commonwealth in November 1995, in the novel, a week after this event, Dele Giwa, the editor of Newswatch Magazine, is assassinated by a parcel bomb on the same day that Kudirat Abiola is assassinated by gunmen. Of course, historically, the two activists were killed ten years apart: Dele Giwa during the Babangida regime in October 1986 and Kudirat Abiola during the Abacha regime in June 1996. The quickening rhythm of disaster in this chapter of Waiting for an Angel parallels the last quarter of the Measuring Time in which Mamo falls into the hard-partying lifestyle of corrupt politicians, religious riots break out, and the quiet town of Keti goes up in flames. Time here is not a mathematical iambic pentameter that can be measured with a clock, but a living fluctuating force that lags behind and loops around to find the stories of multiple characters. It reminds me of the way time acts in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or in oral tales and epics. It cannot be diagramed into a dry progression of events such as those found in A Brief History of West Africa or A Brief History of the Peoples of Keti but instead can only be mediated through the memories of those who experienced it. In his afterward to Waiting for an Angel, Habila acknowledges the liberties he has taken with the chronological order of events, “[N]ot all of the above events are represented with strict regard to time and place—I did not feel obliged to do that; that would be mere historicity. My concern was for the story, that above everything else” (WfA 229).

Mamo’s story of Keti, like the story of Lomba in Waiting for an Angel, becomes in miniature the story of Nigeria—not that it can represent all the complex and multi-faceted stories of the nation, but that it offers an example of what can be written: the individual stories of ordinary people living in extraordinary times. Habila layers his work onto that of older writers such as Achebe and Ngugi who rewrote colonial history in their early works, and joins other contemporary Nigerian writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole whose writing seems similarly concerned with providing entry points into historical events as lived by ordinary people. Measuring Time ends with the performance of a play by church women’s group, both celebrating and mocking the appearance of the missionary Reverend Drinkwater into Keti history. Mamo realizes that through their caricatured performance, they are telling the story on their own terms, invoking a way of life much older than the colonial encounter: “They were celebrating because they had had the good sense to take whatever was good from another culture and add it to whatever was good in theirs: they had done this before when they first met the Komda, and many times before that in their travels and migrations, in times earlier than even the oldest among them could remember. This was their wisdom, the secret of their survival. This was why they were still able to laugh… each generation would bring to this play its own interpretation” (MT 382). This at root is the power of Habila’s work—the ability of humanity to laugh in the face of tragedy—the ability to undermine stories that have been told for you by telling them yourself.

(Update 10 April 2012): To buy the books reviewed here, click on the links below:

Kenyan Electoral Crisis

On the ongoing crisis in Kenya: here is a link to a Reuter's article on the Kenyan electoral crisis. Here is a petition created by Wangui wa Goro, Firoze Manji, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Ronald Elly Wanda, King Omoga, Cenya Ciyendi and written by Firoze Manji.

Here is an article written by Ngugi wa Thiong'o about the elections before the election. And here is an article about how PNU party members harassed and violently intimidated Njeeri wa Ngugi, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's wife, and Ngugi's children before Christmas.

Denzel Washington tells it...

I was taking a little break from my prelims studying a few minutes ago to make some rice and gumbo to eat for the rest of the week, and I turned on NPR to listen to the news, while I was cooking. After the news, Fresh Air with Terry Gross came on. She was interviewing Denzel Washington about his new film The Great Debaters. You can listen to the interview here.

At one point in the interview (around time code 27:10) , she asks him about growing up with a father who was a Pentecostal pastor. Then she asked him if he still belonged to the church (Church of God in Christ [COGIC]), which he affirmed.

Terry Gross then says (around time code 29:00), "I'm wondering if that has even more meaning because you were so brought up in it... since your father---""

And he says, "No it has meaning because it has meaning. Because I believe in the scriptures. I'm a God fearing man who believes what he reads in the Bible, and that has meaning. The meaning that it has is the effect that it has on me, on him [his father] and has on thousands if not millions of other followers. It is our faith in God and our belief in these commandments and in the stories in the Bible...I've read the Bible a couple of times, and I'm working through it again.... I'm now in the book of Romans and listening to the examples and teachings of Paul. The perserverance and the faith that he had in spite of what he was up against... And I'm inspired by those teachings of Paul, of Luke, of all of the apostles, and the great leaders of the Old Testament, as well, obviously, Abraham, Moses..."

Later he says, (around 31:00) "You have to understand. Everything that I've done in my career, and hopefully in my life, is a reflection of my spiritual upbringing and cultivation. I'm not saying I've been an angel all my life. Heaven knows, I haven't.... But you learn. Because I had to go to church, I rebelled against the church, and probably many people out there have gone through that based on whatever negative experiences they may have had. But I can say this to you, whatever success I have, has been a direct result of my faith and the grace of God in my life. period. It's not hanging out with the right people, and it's not studying at some school, or training at some acting school. It's a gift from God, I recognize that. We all have it.

"So, the question is not what you have or what you're going to do with what you have, but recognizing that we all have that gift. It is the grace of God and the gift of God. For some it's acting. Some, it's radio. Whatever your ministry, as they say, is. Understand where it comes from and don't be ashamed of it. If you've had negative experiences in church, (because I'm talking about spirituality and not religion. You know, religion is where man gets ahold of it, and, Lord knows, that's where the problems begin), but if there is something still tugging at your heart, and you're not satisfied, and you feel that there is something there, there IS something there. And don't be ashamed or afraid to continue that search. It led me through all kinds of religions.... One of my favourite books is Siddhartha, you know Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, because it is the journey. And the journey has led me back to the Bible[....]"

Because I need to get back to my books, I won't transcribe the rest of the interview here, but it's a great listen. If you're interested, you can go to the website and listen to it.

What an unexpected blessing and encouragement in a long day of studying!

(And I'm planning to stay away from blogging for the next couple of weeks before my prelims, but I was so touched by this interview that I had to post.)

For the photo credit (Entertainment Weekly, 20-Dec-2002, DETAILS: Best of 2002 featuring Denzel Washington as Entertainer of the Year [photo by Norman Jean Roy]) and bio of the actor, see NNDB.

Never fly United Airlines if you can help it

Christmas Eve. Sitting in my apartment on the phone with a computer that enjoys hanging up on me. Flight to Los Angeles has been cancelled now twice. They called me the first time at 6am this morning and rescheduled my flight for 10am tomorrow. I prided myself on being extra nice, since I knew that most customers on the cancelled flight were probably pretty irate. I didn't mind the extra day because most of my family is flying in tomorrow anyway.

The second cancellation they didn't call me. I just went to check online before going to bed so I could get some sleep before my 1am taxi to take the 2:20am bus to get to the airport I need to fly out of, and noticed that it said "cancelled" before my flight, and that the new time was 8pm tomorrow, to arrive at 10:30pm.... and the trip to the airport from where my brother and cousin live is at least an hour. Since then, I have talked to a variety of agents, one of whom kept giggling and sounded like he was on pot. Have been hung up on at least 10 times. The first person I talked to confirmed that this was a "crew" problem, not a weather problem. So, when I asked if there was some sort of compensation, she talked to her supervisor, and they told me I could get a $25 voucher on United. "For two days worth of cancellations!?" I ask her incredulously. "That's the best we can do, maam," she says. "All right," I say, "I know it's not your fault. Have a Merry Christmas...." My brother tells me I should call back and insist that they put me on another airline. My dad tells me that I should insist on talking to supervisors if they can't help me. And thus continues the saga (great swell of organ and piano on the staticky "hold" music)...

Now, if this last agent can't help me, I'll take it as a sign from God that I am supposed to spend Christmas studying for my prelims....

......

So, (and I type this live) I finally talk with this very nice agent, who tells me that THAT flight, apparently in the few minutes in which I had been trying to change to an earlier flight, has ALSO been cancelled due to "crew" problems (THIRD flight cancellation today), and that the only flight she can get me on is an American Airlines flight that will get into Los Angeles at 11:10pm. I take it, along with another $100 voucher. But, do I dare ever actually use the vouchers?

I look forward to American Airlines...

I don't think I shall ever fly United again if I can help it....

So, Christmas prelims studying... here I come...

At least I'm at home and not in the airport. We thank God for small blessings...


My conversations with the computer tonight (recorded from memory) at 1800-United1:

Welcome to United Airlines. Please listen carefully. Press 1 to make a reservation. Press 2 if you already have a reservation." If you need time, please say, "please wait," if you don't know it, say "I don't know" Please say the reservation number, since some numbers like B or V are hard to tell apart, please use them with common first names such as "M" as in "Mary."

I have a "v" in my confirmation, so try "v" as in "valentine." They don't get it. I think of names with "v." "Vera?" "Violet?" "Van Damme?"

Got it. What's the first and last name of the passenger. Would you like to confirm the trip, change it, request seats, request a wheel chair, or speak to an agent.

After the 10th time, I consider requesting a wheelchair.

Let me get a reservations agent for you. I'll make sure the agent gets the information you've already given me. Thank you for calling United Airlines, we apologize for the delay. Please stay on the line....

I am on hold for about two minutes and then I hear a polite canned voice (for the upteenth time)

I'm sorry for the difficulty. Rather than take up any more of your time, I'm going to go ahead and end your call....

So be it.... and so ends my relationship with United Airlines.

Photo Credits: http://www.bloggossip.com/index.php?cat=160

Global connections in Music Video objectification of Women: adhiambo sinda

Ok, so, as I'm studying linguistics today... watch for visual motifs in this Kenyan song alongside the Sean Paul and Dare Art Alade that I posted a few weeks ago. I must say this one and Dare Art Alade are "funner" than Sean Paul's.

And what the heck is Che doing in the background. Is that Bruce Lee beside him? Any swahilli speakers out there who could shed some light on this?

"In Defence of the Films We Have Made" by Odia Ofeimun

When I'm writing a paper, I have such a hard time stopping myself from reading and actually starting to write. There is just so much to read, and I love feeling my mind growing and expanding--of learning--devouring knowledge. Today, I sat down on my couch while the snow fell outside and hand wrote an extended outline, so as to keep myself from turning on my computer and getting distracted, and then instead of turning on the computer and starting to write, I had to read one more thing.

The thing I chose to re-read (having first read it about a year and a half ago) was "In Defence of the Films we have made" the keynote address given by Odia Ofeimun at the 2nd National Film Festival in Lagos on 27 November 2003. Both celebratory and thoughtful, It is simply the best essay I have ever read on the Nigerian film industry, both placing it within a historical context and theorizing towards the future. I have been reading it from issue 8 of Chimurenga (2005), which some friends of mine in South Africa sent me, but when I searched for it online, I see that it has also been published by West Africa Review Issue 5 (2004), so I'll cut and paste a few passages from that.


"In Defence of the Films We Have Made"
by Odia Ofeimun

Excerpt 1:

"Needless to say, the home-video has become the hegemonic means of defining the Nigerian film sense. Whatever is said about any other way of making stories on screen, it is the video film that will necessarily for the foreseeable future dominate the Nigerian film festival. For every day of the year, three new video films are unloaded upon the Nigerian market. Every year in the past half decade, about 200,000 to 300,000 new hands have been lifted from the throes of unemployment and underemployment by the gloss and glitter of the small screen. Conjointly, they generate about five billion Naira annually. Stranded artists, areas boys and area fathers, authors, dramatists, actors and closet fabulists have found their niche in the pack. Actors who had run away from the penury that haunted the stage have been brought back to life! Though they were dead now they are a vibrant part of a community that literally bubbles. Devotees of the stage who had been reduced to breaching their talents, and living near derelict lives, wondering what kind of society leaves her artists to suffer in so many distracting sectors, have acquired the gravitas of an established community. No longer are they among the artists who are sneered at by other moneyed professionals who are no better than what used to be called agbero bourgeoisie because they merely load other people’s wagons. Now the home video artist is not lumped with other artists who are ritually blamed for not being business-oriented. Within the norm of the home video, it is enough to be a scriptwriter, actor, dramatist, cameraman, director or singer although professionalism is still far away.

If you look at our hunger-besotted slums and our beleaguered villages, you find that many, so many, are finding their feet because of a trade that removes the duller moments from the depression of our neglected, unmanaged and generally manager-less towns and cities. Authors displaced by the collapse of the publishing industry have made a detour from the usual haunts in favour of the home-video turf. One look at any home video film, and the gushy life that it carries, brings a sense of how much of our society was dead and dying without finding a time to bloom. As such, gratitude must well up in the hearts of those enamoured of artistes who had given so much to the arts and are only just being saved for a season of eternity in the company of a vibrant younger generation by the home video films. This is to say that what appeared in the beginning as merely making do has opened floodgates to the peculiar Nigerian genius for creativity and enterprise. The burst of social energy that it has unleashed has very few parallels in any other areas of our national life except perhaps in the parallel growth of Pentecostal churches which it has serviced in many cities and which in an uncanny way services it."

....

Excerpt 2
"The avalanche of issues that films have covered bear testimony to unparalleled creativity which should make and have been making Hollywood buffs take notice. The sheer volume is unprecedented even if repetitious and not always obedient to the laws of professional decorum or excellence. For this reason, I would concede that the video films run the danger of merely supplying Hollywood with the raw materials to re-claim our shores in the not too distant future. But for now, in spite of a ritualistic slapdashness, there is so much energy and creativity that older motion picture industries have something to learn from. From boardroom struggles to political power play, military adventurism and godfatherism in politics, ritual murder, drug abuse and the rehabilitation of drug abusers, witchcraft and churchcraft, high living and low life, prostitution and AIDS, the home videos are brashly, even if self-consciously, seductive. They are turning out the Nigerian story in a no-holds-barred fashion which leaves no room for anybody to hide. In this, they recall the sass of junk journalism and, in a sense, what was called guerilla journalism under the military. Undeniably, they reveal an enormous lot about us and our society that is not beautiful. Not infrequently, they themselves are not beautiful or passable. But why judge an artistic culture by its commercial pulp rather than its outstanding performances. It is like the misbegotten booboo in literary criticism which takes the motley of self-published, poorly edited works, as basis for judging the vibrancy of Nigerian literature. In such situations, it is the judges who, inadvertently, are judging themselves."

To read the whole essay, see West Africa Review.

Ron Eglash on Fractals in Africa: art, design, and philosophy

Ok, Dr. Eglash is definitely talking to a Western audience, but his subject is absolutely fascinating!

Global connections in Music Video objectification of Women: Dare Art Alade's "Fuji Music"

YES, I'm studying....

Note the visual connections between Dare Art Alade's music video "Fuji Music" and Sean Paul's "Ever Blazing," which should appear below this post.

Both songs feature obsessively catchy rhythms and "obscenely" shaking booty...

There is another paper waiting to be written here...

Global connections in Music Video objectification of Women: Sean Paul's "Ever Blazing"

Gidan Iko: House of Power

Em, so, I'm in the midst of studying for prelims.... and preparing for a film paper...

One of these days, I'm going to write a paper on the genre of the Hausa film trailer (and perhaps its use on YouTube), which becomes in itself a mini-film, woven together by the chorus of one of the film's catchiest songs and dances. Note here framing and composition (especially in that opening shot), use of colour, the rhythmic graphic matching in the editing. Through the use of the song to weave together significant moments of the film, we see a concern with the power structures of the nation, alongside the crowd pleasing rhymes about love.

And to make this relevant to my prelims studying, note the magnificent examples of linguistic code switching. I love being a scholar of popular culture! {-;

And to link this to my other research, here is a very bad video I took on my digital camera in Kano last year in an open-air theatre of Abbas Sadiq and Zainab Idris (the dancers seen in the video here) dancing to the playback version of this song "Gidan Iko." (I have heard that this open air theatre may have since been destroyed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTqD6GQx0q0
Apparently the lyrics of this song are by Adam Zango (Usher), the artist and musician currently imprisoned for trying to market his music video "BaHaushiya", that had not been censored, during the film ban in Kano. (According to his critics, he was defaming Hausa women by calling a song where a woman dances provocatively "BaHaushiya" (Hausa woman).

Warm Fuzzy teaching moments

So, one wouldn't think, after my post of a couple of days ago, that I would write something like this. But after having taken a couple of days break from grading (too much other stuff to do) I'm back at it, and this time getting warm fuzzies. What is exciting (now that I've gotten past the initial bad papers--I'm sure there are more to come) is to see students learning and writing about things that interest them. We gave them a variety of paper topics and the option to do what they are interested in rather than the "formula" paper, and, although I'm nervous about grading our "creative options" (I've set those aside for last), it's such a joy to read those few stellar papers that are almost perfect: well written, well-researched, intelligently thought out, engaging.... I just wrote on one paper, "I've been reading dozens of papers tonight, and it's so pleasurable to come across a paper that I not only enjoy reading but from which I learn something. You write very well..." On another (a student I know was just accepted into grad school), I wrote "You already sound like a graduate student!"

This is why we teach, I suppose, for those brief moments of joy when we see students synthesizing and connecting with what they are learning. You see all those sources in their works cited, and you think, "They know this now." This is now a part of their knowledge. Perhaps they will bring up the points they've cited in this paper in conversation with family and friends in related conversations.... And in the exceptional papers, you think "I just learned something new." And that is exciting.

I also have students post a comment or question on the readings or lectures to an email listserve once a week, and, despite a few mid-semester evaluation grumbles (most like it; a few don't), it always gets progressively better throughout the semester. I love seeing them think through things and using the tools they've learned to better analyze what they are reading and hearing.

So, even though I have about 50 more papers to grade and even though I'm stressed out of my mind because my prelims dates have been set for January 16 and 18 (sooner than I was planning--I'm not at all ready), I'm happy, sitting here at my kitchen table with papers all around me--sorted into various grades. I'm happy because I have 70+ students, who I really like even if I do still forget their names sometimes, most of whom are smart and interested in Africa. And if some of them still use the word "tribe" and "native," well, hopefully they'll remember my comments on their papers.... WWWD.

stylee

so... i'm trying to prepare for a short lecture on African popular culture tomorrow before showing Djibril Diop Mambety's film...and...

WWWD: What would Wainaina do....

So, I'm in the midst of grading some 70+ papers and finding myself making loud growling noises--I SWEAR if I see "native Africans" or "tribal" or "nation" (for the continent of Africa) used one more time after I sent an explicit email to my students outlining my peeviest of pet peeves.... And after one dear child ends her otherwise insightful paper about the mis-uses of humanitarian aid in Africa with the phrase "we will start to see a country coming out of the darkness and into the light," I find myself writing: "What would Binyavanga Wainaina say?"

Because, you see, they had to read that Binyavanga Wainaina essay "How to Write About Africa" at the beginning of the semester, and he is my reference point whenever I think the dang textbook Understanding Contemporary Africa (a rather bad textbook trying to condense "understanding" all of Africa [politics, economics, religion, literature, history, etc] to about 200 pages) is over-generalizing, which is most of the time--or we see an old cliched documentary in lecture.... or someone asks in class how "we" can "save" Africa....

"What would Wainaina say?" I ask... WWWS

So, I FINALLY get to teach a film (Mambety) this week and Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions next week--back to African voices--thank GOD! After a semester teaching an African Studies introductory survey course, I am grateful that I chose to follow literature and film and spend the rest of my life teaching what African writers have had to say for themselves rather than what other people have to say for them.... I open each discussion section with a poem by an African writer--whether we are studying economics or politics, and whether it totally relates or not... Just my own little way of trying to remind the students that those voices do exist...

Photo Credit: Creative Writing @ EMU

The Heroism of Ordinary People: An Interview with Helon Habila

Thanksgiving day in America... a cornbread dressing in the tradition of my Louisiana grandmother is in the oven and a pumpkin pie is done and cooling on the counter. I'm going to my advisor's house later for dinner to celebrate with some other African students. My interview with Helon Habila was published this week. I am thankful:

This is the 1000 word (ie. gutted) version of an interview with Helon Habila I conducted via telephone last Tuesday before he left for his book tour in Nigeria. (The easy part was transcribing. I spent hours cutting it to get it to 1000 words... ughh...) The story of the interview itself is a longer one, which perhaps I will post about sometime, but Habila was one of the most gracious people I have met via telephone.... The following was published in Leadership this past Monday, 19 November 2007. Unfortunately, the link is no longer up, but this is how it appeared in the newspaper. (In an interesting aside, my dad met him today after the reading at the University of Jos.) Perhaps I'll post the entire interview on my other blog when I have a chance to edit it properly; it will be published in the journal Abiku early next year. But here is the short version:

"The Heroism of Ordinary People: An Interview with Helon Habila"

Award winning novelist Helon Habila grew up in Gombe State. After earning his BA in English at the University of Jos in 1995, he taught at the Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi. Moving to Lagos in 1999, he became the arts editor at the Vanguard and wrote a novel, published as Waiting for An Angel in 2002, which won the Caine Prize for African Fiction in 2001 and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2003. Habila has published stories, articles, and poems in journals world-wide and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia. After a stint as the first Chinua Achebe fellow at Bard College in New York, Habila took a position at George Mason University where he teaches creative writing. He is in Nigeria from November 17 to November 24 to promote his second novel Measuring Time. In this interview on behalf of LEADERSHIP, he speaks with Talatu-Carmen [my real name used in the publication; i suppose i should stop this ridiculous attempt to protect my identity--pretty much everybody who reads this blog knows who I am], a PhD student at a university in the USA, about his writing.

Talatu-Carmen: I was wondering what your creative process is like. Where do your stories come from?

HABILA: I really cannot say exactly, but I am really inspired by books. Sometimes I write in reaction to books I have read. Then there is also my experience: Measuring Time has a lot of that—my experiences as a child growing up. There was a time when I realised that I wanted to write about my hometown. From that moment whatever I did I viewed it through the eyes of fiction, thinking of how to represent the people I met, the things I did, the places I saw. I was thinking of them as already a part of my book that I was going to write. I was going to write Measuring Time even before I started writing Waiting for an Angel.

In both of your novels the act of writing itself seems to take on a political significance. What, to you, is the political responsibility of the writer?

Well, quite a lot, especially as an African writer. I think there is that tradition which started from the first generation of African writers. They were writing against the whole colonial system, which was very repressive, very racist, very dictatorial. They actually used to have congresses where they would discuss the best way to write fiction in a way that would address the political issues of the day. Even before that, in traditional African society, from the folk tales, there’s always a kind of moral lesson, a kind of didacticism that is seen as an aesthetic part of that story. So politics more or less becomes an aesthetic in African fiction. There are no boundaries between what is purely political and what is art. Art becomes politics and politics becomes art. So I think people like me who find themselves in that tradition, and have that temperament, that awareness of what is going on, who feel that things shouldn’t be the way they are, have a duty to speak out. It is tradition and it’s also a matter of temperament, because there are definitely writers in Africa who don’t write about politics. They write art for art’s sake, or whatever you want to call it.

Could you say more about the influences of Hausa literature on your writing?

Definitely. I grew up reading the translation of One Thousand and One Nights in Hausa and the works of Abubakar Imam, Magana Jari Ce, Ruwan Bagaja, etc. So there is that magical or folkloric representation of reality, which is very different from pure realism. I was definitely influenced by that. And before that I was also influenced by folktales told to me by women in the compound. So, these Hausa books I discovered later were almost a continuation of that story tradition with the magical elements, spirit figures and things like that.

Both of your novels deal with history. In Measuring Time, the character Mamo wants to write a biographical history. Is this one of your own goals?

Definitely, I think so. Because so much that we have is fast fading away and being taken over by the modern, I see writing itself as cultural conservation. That is exactly what Mamo’s project is, conserving the history of people…, because they were misrepresented by the [missionary] Reverend Drinkwater. If you represent what has been misrepresented, you are putting the records right. And that is what history is supposed be. Taking moments of glory, and also ordinary moments—moments of humanity, of value to the community, and putting it down in books. It doesn’t have to be about generals, it doesn’t have to be about chiefs, it could be about ordinary people, their heroism. That is the whole point of the book, that lives should be celebrated, regardless of what office or what lack of office that person has.

Newton Aduaka, the winner of the Golden Yennenga Stallion at the FESPACO film festival, is making a film based on Waiting for an Angel. How involved have you been with this?

I’m not really involved. I’m just the author of the novel. I see film as being totally different from literature. They are both narrative art forms, but they have different ways of representing their story, their subject. I trust him as an artist. I think my novel is strong enough to stand on its own, even if the movie is a bit different in some of its portrayals.

Have you ever thought of writing a screenplay or becoming involved in film?

I really want to do that some day. Some people approached me to write a movie script. I started writing it and then it became a novel! I’m really enjoying the experience. I don’t know how far it’s going to go, but I’m definitely going to go into movies one of these days. To write, or even direct, if I have the chance. The movie industry is just incredible, and I think this is the moment to get involved.

All right, thank you so much.

Thank you, you’re welcome.

Photo credit: Helon Habila with Jeremiah Gyang and Ola Soyinka. Kudus to amazing middlebelt artists! From Naijablog

Helon Habila Tours Nigeria

African Film Conference

Having just returned from an absolutely amazing conference on African film at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I thought I'd share a few photos. In addition to my academic heros, there were representative filmmakers from the continent. Among the academics I was excited to have a chance to talk with further: Abdalla Uba Adamu, Brian Larkin, Matthias Krings, Onookome Okome, Jonathan Haynes, Birgit Meyer, Kenneth Harrow, and many more. "Nollywood" reps: Joke Silva, Madu Chikwendu, Francis Onwochei, Ghanian filmmaker Socrate Safo, and Cameroonian filmmaker Joyce Ashuntantang. Photo 1: Onookome Okome and Abdalla Uba Adamu; Photo 2: Ghanian filmmaker Socrate Safo was passionate about his craft and was a delight to watch "in action" as he grounded the often flighty academic theorizing with practical examples of current issues of technology and practice in the Ghanian film industry; Photo 3: Brian Larkin and Abdalla Uba Adamu on a panel; 4) Socrate Safo presents clips from three of his films; 5) Cameroonian filmmaker and actress Joyce Ashuntantang shows a clip from her film, Potent Secrets, and speaks about her feminist motivations.

One of the best parts of the conference was getting to interact with the filmmakers from Nollywood, Ghana, and Cameroon. Hearing them speak in conjunction with the academic papers, I was particularly struck by their passion and their professionality--the absolutely brilliant business that Nigerian (and Ghanaian) filmmaking has become. But while there were still a few academics who echoed the cliched critiques of "Nollywood" filmmaking being "only about making money," Socrate Safo, Joke Silva, Madu Chikwendu, and Francis Onwochei emphasized (and embodied) the intentionality of the craft. These filmmakers are not greedy amateurs out to just make money (although money is certainly a very practical concern in an artform that is also a business--films cannot be made without money), but artists and performers who love and are passionate about what they do. I was particularly impressed with the few clips I saw of Safo's films--lighting, camera angles, mise en scene, and wonderful use of an original music score.

The main impression I came away from the conference with was that the dichotomy between "African cinema" and the "video film" is a false one, and that while various histories, funding, and technologies must be taken into consideration, films on celluloid and video can and should be put side by side in analysis of African film. This is why (even before this conference) I have been calling Nollywood and Kannywood productions "films" rather than "video films." As digital technology becomes prevalent even among filmmakers coming out of a celluloid training (Jean Pierre Bekolo's Les Saignantes, for example), the technical differentiation between "video" and "film" seems to be a rather useless one. At the conference, the prevalent terms used were "Fespaco films" and "video films;" however, much of the discussion centered around the need to complicate the framework that has so far divided analysis of one from the other.

Rest In Peace Cyprian Ekwensi

This is a little bit late, but a post in honour of the late Cyprian Ekwensi, author of Jagua Nana, Burning Grass, and others. He died at age 86.

Here is a 2006 interview that Basil Okafor conducted with him for the Daily Sun.

Illustration credit: Basil Okafor

Shari'a Court bans satirical play in Kaduna

Shehu Sani's satirical play on the political misuse of shari'a, The Phantom Crescent, has been banned from being performed or circulated by the Kaduna upper shari'a court. According to Shehu Sani the recent "Hiyana" scandal "became an excuse for a new onslaught against artists," spreading out from the ban on film and harsher restrictions on novels to the ban on his play in Kaduna. See the article here.

The Passion of Saint Talatu

3:40am: Why I love Hausa films

It is 3:40am, and I am cutting, cutting, cutting extra words out of a fellowship proposal that is too verbose and too vague, and too BS-y, which is a shame because I know this stuff really well. It's just hard to say when you have to put all the details of research methods, background, argument in 10 pages, when you haven't quite ironed out your dissertation proposal yet.

So, this post is just to say why I love Hausa films. I love Hausa films because I can click on my you tube clips at 3:40am when I am stressed out of my mind and they make me smile. Yes, the editing is corny, and there are mispellings in the subtitles, and the melodrama is sometimes over the top, Yes, they make me laugh here in on my hard chair at 3:45am. But I also love them because there are beautiful compositions, and fast, obsessive, editing, and strong colour motifs that run through the trailers. I love them because the music is so obsessive that I listen to it minimized as I write, and the deep focus shots and the stop motion dances are so mesmerizing that I have to go back and watch the whole thing over again. At 3:46, when I'm stressed because I've overphilosophized my project, I go back to the concrete videos and know I have to keep on, because it is my opportunity to work with artists who make a living from their art. And no matter how denigrated they are, they'll figure out a way to make it work, insha Allah.

No, I don't like censorship, but in some ways, the adaptations people come up with because of censorship makes more creative products. I've been watching early Hollywood pictures that couldn't show violence so came up with creative off-screen sound. I think it will work the same for the Hausa films.

But, oh, I mourn those brilliant song and dances. I hope that the ban on those is lifted--because they encapsulate so much sheer creativity on so many different levels and are at the very heart of what I want to write about.

Because I love it. That's why I'm up at this time, and why I'm in this cold place, stressed out all the time. Because I love it.

cherish the day

Sade makes me lonely. I sit on a hard wooden chair in front of a blinking computer screen. I have been putting off this grant application all weekend. I have gone through half of the anthology of Hausa film essays. I have reread my own past grant applications and those my friends have sent me. I have brainstormed on paper. I have rethought my entire project 10 times. This morning, I went to a one hour mass at the Catholic Church down the street and then came back to lay in my bed, warm under a down comforter. The rain fell outside and the air from the open window was sharp on my face. The radiators clanked and creaked. I lay in bed making myself write the proposal in my head, dream the proposal. I wake to the phone ringing. It is my mother together with my brother, who is back in Nigeria on a preliminary documentary project. We chat until they are interrupted by a Skype from my Dad calling from Khartoum. I eat a quarter bag of chips and salsa at the kitchen table, trying to write down in a notebook the proposal I had dreamed. When I finally go to the other room and lift the screen and try to write, it is dark outside. I watch 20 minutes of the screensaver, my life in photos: weddings, other people’s children, my pregnant cousin, stills from Hausa films and an old black and white German vampire film, graduations, parties, conferences, famous African writers, unflattering close-ups of people I don’t know, and my own solitary self portraits in teapots and distant mirrors. Sade sings a mournful Hallelujah. I tap on the keyboard to face the march of words again.

Barka da sallah!!

To my Muslim Friends,

Barka da sallah! Happy Eid Al-Fitr!! Allah ya ba da albarka!

T-C

(and in other news I went to a Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading and panel discussion tonight, and RANDOMLY bumped into a woman who had been two years ahead of me in high school. She comes up to me and says... you look so familiar... and so we go quickly down fourteen years of life history, where we had overlapped in certain places but not met, till we got to high school in nigeria and that was where it was... what a lovely small world it is...)

Albashi 2 trailer

Today I called my friend Abbas Sadiq, the intense, one-of-a-kind-dressing Hausa actor and director, to see how he is doing during this suspension of the Hausa film industry. "Babu aiki, wallahi," he told me. "kawai muna jira..."

So, one of the things that upsets me so much about the Hausa film wahalla is that thousands of people are out of work. How exactly are they supposed to live now...? And when the suspension is finally lifted will anyone have any money left to make films?

And the dancing and singing has been banned as well (See Ba Haushe Mai Ban Haushi's post on the new censorship guidelines). Wallahi, ina so in kuka da na tunani a kansa."

Not being able to do anything about it really, other than write and rant, I spend the afternoon that I was supposed to be spending writing a grant application, uploading singing and dancing numbers to You Tube....

So, here's the trailer for Abbas Sadiq's Albashi 2, the sequel to Albashi (salary) that I wrote my big paper on that I've given at so many conferences. How can they ban this wonderfully creative dancing and singing? How? Kash! Wayyo! Kaico!