General Area.
Gibbs, James
M. Keith Booker. The African Novel in English: An Introduction.
Portsmouth, N.H. / Oxford, Eng. Heinemann/Currey. 1998. xi + 227 pages.
$24. ISBN 0-325-00030-1/0-85255-552-0.
Over the years, M. Keith Booker of the University of Arkansas has
offered an impressive range of courses, including literary theory,
British literature, world literature, and postcolonial fiction. Lest it
be thought that he has simply cast his intellectual net wide, he has
concentrated sufficiently on Joyce, Bakhtin, and dystopian fiction to
publish books in those areas. The ten chapters of his new volume, The
African Novel in English, look very much like lectures and course
material. Taken together, they suggest a conscientious teacher eager to
support students who have opted for a difficult course.
After introductory chapters titled "Reading the African
Novel" and "A Brief Historical Survey of the African
Novel," Booker devotes a chapter to each of the eight books he has
selected for close study: Things Fall Apart, The Joys of Motherhood, The
Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Our Sister Killjoy, Burger's
Daughter, In the Fog of the Season's End, Devil on the Cross, and
Nervous Conditions. The introductory chapters show an easy familiarity
with critical theory and a particular reliance on the work of Bakhtin,
Fredric Jameson, and Abdul JanMohamed. However, Booker sometimes pulls
his punches when writing of African critics, treating with exaggerated
respect the work of Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu
Madubuike. Within each of the eight chapters devoted to the novels, a
critical introduction drawing in material from specialist critics is
followed by sections of, first, historical and then biographical
background.
The critical work is essentially a synthesis: Booker has read
widely and quotes extensively. He rarely expresses personal opinions,
and he is resolutely evenhanded. His (rather dusty) selection of novels
(nothing from the nineties) carefully balances the writing of male and
female authors and is more concerned to ease new students into the field
of African literature than to stretch or challenge them.
The background material has been patiently put together; facts have
been digested and are regurgitated conveniently for imagined readers
whom one comes to think of as young and unenterprising. The entries on
history, written in passionless prose, contain the sort of information
one would expect to find in an encyclopedia.
In preparing the pages for the "Biographical Background"
sections, Booker recycles material that has been effectively handled
elsewhere. In this case, he recapitulates information from reference
books containing literary biographies. Perhaps inevitably, he is no more
accurate than his sources, and he produces a number of misleading
statements. Sometimes the source of the confusion is apparent; sometimes
it can only be guessed at. He describes the Nigerian Biyi
Bandele(-Thomas) as a Ghanaian and refers to the Sudanese Taban lo
Liyong as a Ugandan. Ama Ata Aidoo, we read, was born in "what is
now central Ghana" when, in fact, she was born in the Central
Region-a region that is, despite its name, on the coast, not
"central" in the sense of being in the middle of the country.
In order to understand Aidoo's position in the cultural
configuration of West Africa, her coastal origin must be taken into
consideration. Booker marks Aidoo's "debut as an author"
as 1965, the year in which Dilemma of a Ghost was published. I would
argue that, for her career and development, an earlier date, that of the
play's first production, was more important. For a playwright, a
premiere can be a debut and often has more significance than the
appearance of a print-run. In writing about Ayi Kwei Armah, Booker
confuses Achimota College with Achimota School.
There are excuses for some of these mistakes, but detail is
important in a book that, moving between the scholarly and the critical,
attempts to "place" a selection of postcolonial texts. One
would have hoped that professorial humility and the use of the material
with curious, critical, questioning students prior to publication would
have eliminated factual errors. Unfortunately, vigorous questioning is
almost the last response that one would expect from the kind of target
audience Booker seems to have had in mind. His book is characterized by
an even-handed, guarded pose, by a balancing of pro with con, by a
reluctance either to reveal his own responses or to point to weaknesses.
He regularly informs but he rarely excites.
James Gibbs
University of the West of England
