Living in Hope and History Read Free Page B

Director-General of our host organization, the representative of a cultural foundation funded by one of North America’s multibillionaire dynasties, and France’s Deputy Minister of Culture. The Director-General, the representative of the multibillionaire foundation, and the Deputy Minister each rose and gave an address lasting half an hour; the session, which also was to include some musical performance, was scheduled to close after two hours. An official tiptoed along the backs of our chairs and requested us, the artists, to cut ouraddresses to three minutes. We humbly took up our pens and began to score out what we had to say. When the bureaucrats had finally regained their seats, we were summoned one by one to speak in telegraphese. All did so except the last in line. She was—I name her in homage!—Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer-choreographer from India. She swept to the podium, a beauty in sandals and sari, and announced: ‘I have torn up my speech. The bureaucrats were allowed to speak as long as they pleased; the artists were told that three minutes was time enough for whatever they might have to say. So—we have the answer to the status of the artist in the world today.’
    This experience set me thinking back to another that I have had, on a deeper and more personal level.
    In my Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, given in 1994, which subsequently were published under the title
Writing and Being,
I devoted three of the six lectures to the writing and being each of Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz, and Naguib Mahfouz. Edward Said, himself another writer whose work is important to me, reviewed the book extremely favourably in a leading English paper, while yet taking me to task for my indignant assertion that Mahfouz is not given his rightful place in contemporary world literature, is never mentioned in the company of such names as Umberto Eco, Günter Grass, etc., and certainly is not widely read even by those whom one considers well-read; I know that a number of my friends read his work for the first time as a result of my published lecture.
    Mahfouz neglected?—Edward Said chided me.
    Mahfouz not recognized for his greatness in world literature?
    What world did I define him by, what world did my purview confine
me
to in my assessment? In the literature of Arabic culture, the world of the Arabic language, Mahfouz isfully established in the canon of greatness and, in the populist canon of fame, while controversial, is widely read.
    Edward Said was right. What I was conceiving of as ‘world literature’ in my lecture was in fact that of the Euro-North Americans into which only a few of us foreigners have been admitted. Naguib Mahfouz is recognized as a great writer in the world of Arabic literature, of whose canon I know little or nothing.
    But wait a moment—Said, I saw, had hit intriguingly upon a paradox.
He
was placing the concept of another ‘world literature’ alongside the one I had posited with my eyes fixed on Euro-North America as the literary navel-of-the-world. In the all-encompassing sense of the term ‘world’, can any of our literatures be claimed definitively as ‘world’ literature? Which world? Whose world?
    The lesson Edward Said gave me, along with the lesson provided by Mallika Sarabhai at the gathering in Paris, is a sequence, from the situation of artists in general, on the one hand, to the question of literary canons, on the other, that becomes the naturally relevant introduction to my subject, here among my brother and sister African writers: our status,
specifically as writers
, in the worlds-within-’the world’ we occupy.
    Status. What is status, to us?
    First—it never can go without saying—the primary status must be freedom of expression. That is the oxygen of our creativity. Without it, many talents on our continent have struggled for breath; some have choked; and some have been lost to us in that other