Reviews

Margaret Doyle. the A-Z of Non-Sexist Language, 1st edition 1995112 pp. ISBN 0 7043 4430 O. London: The Women's Press Ltd. Pric~£6,99

War-affected Children in Three African Short Stories: Finding Sanctuary within the Space of Placelessness

In short stories by three postcolonial African authors depicting war-affected children – Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera’s “The Camp” (1994, written in 1986), Nigerian Ben Okri’s “Laughter beneath the Bridge” (1986) and Ethiopian Maaza Mengiste’s “A Good Soldier” (2012) – the child protagonists are displaced and exist in precarious spaces of unbelonging. The conditions vividly evoked from these war-affected African children’s perspectives indicate that the unaccommodating “places” where the children find themselves propel them into terrifyingly featureless, engulfing and unrecognizable “non-places,” in need of sanctuary as a place of safety. Yet even in such places of desperation, the children somehow retain or find precarious shelter in “places” of love, tenderness and loyalty. war-affected children, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ethiopia, displacement, sanctuar

Male ‘Somaliness’ in diasporic contexts: Somali authors’ evaluative evocations

Addressing five texts by four Somali authors—Nuruddin Farah’s Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (2000) and North of Dawn (2018) in juxtaposition with three novels by female Somali authors, i.e. Safi Abdi’s Offspring of Paradise (2003), Cristina Ali Farah’s Little Mother (201; Italian original 2007) and Igiaba Scego’s Adua (English translation 2017, Italian original 2015)—this article assesses the work these texts do to enhance contemporary understanding of the complex, evolving phenomenon that is the diasporic Somali presence in Western Europe, focusing on Somali men. How do the authors portray and (implicitly or overtly) evaluate how diasporic male Somalis cope in foreign, non-Muslim and culturally Western environments—against the backdrop of Somalia’s state collapse and social disintegration? Somali men’s experiences have generally been given less attention than those of their female counterparts, hence the focus here on male-gendered characters. This focus serves to link the two Nuruddin Farah texts and the three novels by Somali women—a textual grouping and focus not previously attempted in critical studies of Farah’s work. This brief essay assesses the five texts’ respective combinations of evaluative evocation, affective intensity and epistemological detail, approaching these works as complementing social science researchers’ efforts in depicting diasporic Somali men’s lives. By deepening understanding of the impact of the diaspora on individual Somali men, the five texts convey significant psychological, social and moral insights into lives of Somali men in foreign contexts

Women Writing Nationhood Differently: Affiliative Critique in Novels by Foma, Atta and Farrah

 The focus of this article is on a discernible trend in contemporary African writing, which is the fiction by mainly [though not exclusively] diasporic African women authors either explicitly or implicitly claiming their nation for its women by highlighting the roles that women play in reimagining the (often shattered, or scattered) nation, or the society and land from which they have been separated. The article uses the concept of “affiliative critique” to indicate that these women writers hold the nation to account even as they indicate their continuing allegiance to it in their texts – despite the authors’ physical relocation to other countries and continents. The element of critique is strongly gender-inflected and indicates that gender injustice can be seen as one of the causes as well as one of the symptoms of broader failures of the nation state in the African country of the authors’ origins. The essay juxtaposes novels by three of the newer writers, viz. Aminatta Forna (focusing on Ancestor Stones, 2007); Sefi Atta (for Swallow, 2010) and Cristina Ali Farah (for Madre Piccola 2007 – using here the English translation titled Little Mother, 2011) – texts that focus, respectively, on Sierra Leone; Nigeria and Somalia. While sufficiently different in what they portray, these novels serve as examples of the powerful and vividly imagined delineations of their troubled nations contemporary African authors provide and are fine illustrations of the discerning social analysis, searing critique and self-criticism, and ethical insights that the continent’s trend-setting women writers are producing

Eastern African women writers’ ‘national epics’: A new force in creative fiction?

In this article, I bring five recent, substantial novels by Eastern African women writers together for the first time in a study regarding the texts as modern ‘national epics’, analysing some of their shared characteristics in foregrounding local participation in the making of East African ethno-national histories. I trace the novelists’ implicit, open-eyed moral evaluation of their leaders and peoples, neither sentimentalising nor deriding the often terrible struggles of their peoples against both inside and outside powers that seek to keep them in subjugation. The texts eschew traditional heroic portrayal of single, male leaders in national epics and allow us to grasp diverse, communal contributions to the growth of nationhood, while giving larger, often central roles to women. The texts earn the epithet ‘epic’ by authoritatively demonstrating that their embodied, localised histories matter, testifying to the wide human spectrum of the peoples they portray; as novelistic acts they are impressive and moving bids for recognition. As post-colonial endeavours, the texts effectively decentre colonial interventions. While the chosen novels are shown to be relatable, their individual power of portrayal and aesthetic achievements are scrupulously differentiated

Buried hurts and colliding dreams in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning = Feridas escondidas e sonhos conflitantes em Butterfly Burning de Yvonne Vera

Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning (1998) depicts anintense and tragically concluded love relationship between a middle-aged colonised male labourer, Fumbatha, and an idealistic and much younger woman, Phephelaphi. The context is the ghetto adjoining the city of Bulawayo in late colonial Southern Rhodesia. The articleemploys the concepts of genealogies and of transmodernity to delineate Vera’s reinscription of colonised African men and women in her illocutionary, densely poetic account of the growth of modernity in Africa, tragic because (despite similar, buried hurts) theprotagonists’ dreams are at odds.O romance Butterfly Burning (1998), da autora zimbabuana Yvonne Veramostra o relacionamento amoroso, intenso e trágico, entre Fumbatha, um trabalhador colonizado de meia idade, e Phephelaphi, uma mulher jovem e idealista. O contexto do enredo é o gueto perto da cidade de Bulawayo na ex-colônia da Rodésia do Sul. O artigo emprega os conceitos de genealogias e da transmodernidade para delinear as re-inscrições dos africanos e africanas colonizados em sua narração ilocucionária, profundamente poética, do desenvolvimento da modernidade na África. É também trágica (apesar da semelhança dasferidas escondidas) pela não-coincidência dos sonhos dos protagonistas

Ice-Candy-Man and In the Country of Men : the politics of cruelty and the witnessing child

CITATION: Gagiano, A. 2010. Ice-Candy-Man and In the Country of Men : the politics of cruelty and the witnessing child. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 39:25-39, doi:10.5774/39-0-2.The original publication is available at http://spil.journals.ac.zaUsing two novels employing child narrators as observers of atrocities by which they are not only profoundly affected, but in which they become implicated (respectively by a Pakistani and a Libyan author), the article sets out to try and discover how the technique of mediation by a child witness and commentator affects the reader's perception of the Partition of Pakistan from India and the early rule of Gen. Quaddafi [or Gaddafi] in Libya, North Africa. The children are pre-pubescent, but intensely aware of sexual politics and emotional cross-currents in their familial, domestic, neighbourly and social contexts as the harsh and terrible political realities of their time and setting either filter into or impact violently upon their own lives. The offered reading is contextualized by considerations of postcolonial texts (as both Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man [also known by the American title of Cracking India] and Matar's In the Country of Men are, broadly speaking) as writings that can serve inter-cultural and trans-modern 'translation' purposes –  not only by their publication in English (neither author's first language), but by using each of their child narrators to make cultural 'differences' (inter-)accessible to their readers. The emphasis in both texts on non-Western cultures nevertheless does not (in either case) allow stereotypical concepts concerning members of those cultures (e.g. as being inexplicably inclined to cruelty or violence) to prevail. The profoundly affective power of the descriptions of atrocities in both books (intensified by being observed in relatively unideological and unfiltered ways) become ethical challenges to the reader. The comparative reading techniques employed in the essay are used to sharpen the focus on how each of the children is ineluctably affected by what she or he witnesses and to indicate how both of them are 'betrayed into betrayal'.https://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/2Publisher’s versio