BOOKPATHS

The Congo, Africa

Jeffrey Brown talks with Lynn Nottage about her Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined.

It's set in a small bar in the Congo, but Lynn Nottage's recent Pulitzer Prize-winning play, 'Ruined,' tells an epic story about the ravages of war, especially its impact on women. Nottage traveled from her Brooklyn home to refugee camps in Uganda, seeking a rounded portrait of lives caught up in a civil war in the Congo that's dragged on for several decades. – from News Hour Website

Africa

Chinua Achebe “is to advise Penguin on a new series of books which aims to publish the very best in African writing.

Achebe hopes the series will bring new energy to African literature, and will help it reach a wider audience. ‘This is really what I personally want to see – writers from all over Africa contributing to a definition of themselves, writing ourselves and our stories into history,’ he said. ‘One of the greatest things literature does is allow us to imagine; to identify with situations and people who live in completely different circumstances, in countries all over the world. Through this series, the creative exploration of those issues and experiences that are unique to the African consciousness will be given a platform, not only throughout Africa, but also beyond its shores.’ – from The Guardian

Africa

Read or listen to Chinua Achebe’s thoughts on “Africa 50 years after Things Fall Apart.”

JEFFREY BROWN: Where is the balance now? Are you satisfied with the development of an authentic African voice?

CHINUA ACHEBE: Well, it's only the beginning. It will take more time. But more people must get into it, and they are getting into it.

In fact, after my novel, "Things Fall Apart", was published, it just looked as if people had been waiting everywhere, in Africa, in Nigeria, in Ibo-land, to tell their own version of their story, as if something was holding them before. And it seems to me that that's a very good thing, indeed. – from The News Hour, PBS, Website

The Congo River, Africa

Tim Butcher, author of Blood River : a Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart, chooses his “top 10 books about Congo.”

Africa

Stephen Moss talks with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose novel about the Biafra war, Half of a Yellow Sun, recently won the Orange prize.

“She is determined to show an Africa that isn't one huge refugee camp - a continent with many diverse stories, not a single story of suffering and dependency. 'People forget that Africa is a place in which class exists,"' she says. ‘It's as if Africans are not allowed to have class, that somehow authenticity is synonymous with poverty and demands your pity and your sympathy. Africa is seen as the place where the westerner goes to sort out his morality issues. We see it in films and in lots of books about Africa, and it's very troubling to me.’" – from “Madonna’s Not Our Saviour,” by Stephen Moss, The Guardian

Africa

Edward Guthmann talks with Uzodinma Iweala about his novel, Beasts of No Nation, “the harrowing tale of Agu, a child warrior in an unnamed African country.”

“Iweala says he didn't know much about child warriors until he saw an article in Newsweek in his senior year of high school. ‘I was really disturbed by what I read. I wrote a short story. ... Then in college I had the chance to speak to a former child soldier (from Uganda), China Keitetsi. Listening to her speak with such passion about what happened to her inspired me to do more research, and try writing about the topic again. The novel came from that.’” – from “A Child Warrior’s Journey Through Hell Comes Alive on the Page – Courtest of a Young American,” by Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle

Africa

In the Guardian, Maya Jaggi writes about fiction’s role in telling “truths about Africa that no news report can fully convey.”

“…literature's imaginative focus on individual lives, and through them on what binds us all, makes it one of the most powerful means of shifting perceptions, evoking empathy, and grasping the other's humanity. Politics is seen through its impact on daily lives and emotions, and family dilemmas.” – from “A Continent is Illuminated,” by Maya Jaggi, The Guardian