The Mumpsimus

Though I decided at the last minute not to join the third annual Caine Prize Blogathon after having  participated in the first two, I am still interested in the Prize, its effect(s), and its complex relationship to the idea of "African literature". Thus, I read with great interest an article about recent reactions to the Caine Prize that has been published in the latest issue of the venerable journal Research in African Literatures . The article, "The Caine Prize and Contemporary African Writing" by Lizzy Attree , includes a discussion of the first year of the Caine Prize blogathon, a discussion which at first was very exciting for me, because it's nice to have an endeavor you've participated in noticed. Once I actually read all of what Attree had written, though, I became annoyed. The trouble is, I don't really recognize  the actual discussion  in the discussion that Attree says we had. Or, rather, I recognize parts of it, but because Attree foc...

For the third year in a row, Aaron Bady has organized the Caine Prize Blogathon , but this year I have decided, after being invited to contribute again, not to do so. I'm enjoying reading what the other participants have written so far, but my feelings about the Caine Prize are too conflicted, and my feelings about my own position to speak about it even more so, that I just haven't been able to write anything that seems to me intellectually valid, despite a few days of trying. But you should definitely keep your eyes on the discussion of the stories. Here's what's been posted so far, all on the first story in the line-up,  "Miracle" by Tope Folarin (PDF) . Beverley Nambozo Veronica Nkwocha Kola Tubosun Ainehi Edoro Aaron Bady Keguro Macharia Scott Ross Ben Laden Aaron will be doing some retrospective posts with links to all the others; probably the best way to keep up is to follow him on Twitter (but you should be doing that al...

According to the Caine Prize on Twitter , the winner of this year's award is Rotimi Babatunde for "Bombay's Republic". You can read the story as a PDF via the Prize website. It was the first of this year's nominees that I wrote about as part of the Caine Prize Blogathon, and my post also has links to other bloggers' (quite varied) takes on the story. It was certainly among the top of the stories for me, though I'm glad I didn't have to make the choice, as this year's group of nominees was generally impressive overall . Congratulations to everyone involved!

This is my fourth post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.) With 2 stories remaining for our Caine Prize Blogathon of Wonder, I fell behind. Thus, this post will be about the last two stories, "La Salle de Départ" by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo and "Hunter Emmanuel" by Constance Myburgh . Both are solid stories with their own virtues and are, much to the jurors' credit, utterly different from each other.

This is my third post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.)  My initial response to "Love on Trial" by Stanley Kenani (PDF) was: This is a terrible story. Preachy, obvious, awkward, tedious. But then I thought about a letter I wrote to one of my college teachers back in the '90s, when people still wrote letters.

This is my second post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.) I'm coming a little late to Billy Kahora's story "Urban Zoning" (PDF) because it was finals week at one school where I teach and the last week of classes at another, so I haven't had much spare time, and then when I did finally start writing this it kept growing, and I disagreed with myself frequently, and I couldn't make anything cohere, and finally I gave up and just tried to salvage some of the maelstrom of questions and doubts that plagued me as I wrote. There are some thorough and excellent posts about this story up now, so I highly recommend following some of the links to them, which this week I will put first rather than last, because really if you do want to know about the story, you should read those... Other writers' posts about "Urban Zoning" by Billy Kahora: Black Balloon Stephen Derwent Partington The Reading Life Backslas...

This is my first post in this year's Caine Prize for African Writing blogathon, organized by the ever-awesome Aaron Bady ( Zunguzungu ). Our participant numbers have grown exponentially this year, which is very exciting. If you don't remember from last year , the basic idea is that a bunch of us bloggery people write weekly posts about each of the short stories nominated for the Caine Prize, so helpfully provided in PDF form to anyone who wants to read them at the Caine Prize website . We will do our best to keep our posts updated with links to each others' posts, creating a giant hyperlinked conversation. The virtues of this are many — none of us feels obliged to be comprehensive about the stories, there's the potential for extremely different viewpoints to be offered, and, no matter what, a bunch of people are writing and reading about African short fiction. I'll post the links so far at the end of this post, and keep it updated as more appear over the next fe...

I've voiced my qualms about the Caine Prize for African Literature before, particularly in terms of the stories that often end up winning the award, and so I found this statement by this year's Chair of Judges, Bernardine Evaristo , encouraging: I’m looking for stories about Africa that enlarge our concept of the continent beyond the familiar images that dominate the media: War-torn Africa, Starving Africa, Corrupt Africa — in short: The Tragic Continent. I’ve been banging on about this for years because while we are all aware of these negative realities, and some African writers have written great novels along these lines (as was necessary, crucial), isn’t it time now to move on? Or rather, for other kinds of African novels to be internationally celebrated. What other aspects of this most heterogeneous of continents are being explored through the imaginations of writers? I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with individual Tragic Continent stories — I ...

At Gukira, Keguro has posted some provocative thoughts on "report realism" in Kenyan fiction : Over the past 15 years and more specifically the past ten years or so, Kenyan writing has been shaped by NGO demands: the “report” has become the dominant aesthetic foundation. Whether personal and confessional or empirical and factual or creative and imaginative, report-based writing privileges donors’ desires: to help, but not too much; to save, but not too fast; to uplift, but never to foster equality. One can imagine how these aims meld with traditional modes of realism and naturalism and also speak to modernist truncations and postmodern undecidability. However, report realism names a more historically accurate way to name a genre indebted (very literally) to NGOS in Kenya. The report aesthetic goes beyond citing NGO facts and figures. It is concerned, above all, with a search for truth and accuracy and is threatened by imaginative labor. I cannot comment on the specific a...

The winner of this year's Caine Prize for African Writing is NoViolet Bulawayo for her story "Hitting Budapest" , originally published by Boston Review . "Hitting Budapest" was the first story we wrote about for the Caine Prize blogathon, and it's held up better in my memory than I expected it would. Despite my qualms about some aspects of it, there's a vividness to the language that gives it some freshness. Were I on the jury, it wouldn't have been my first choice (that would be "The Mistress's Dog" ), but it might have been second, or tied for second with "In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata" , though that's a story that, unlike "Hitting Budapest", has diminished in my memory.

(This is the last in a weekly series of posts about the short stories nominated for this year's Caine Prize for African Writing . For more information, see my introductory post . Special thanks to Aaron Bady for coming up with the idea for this blogathon. Check out Aaron's post on this story for an updated list of other writers' responses , or follow #cainepr on Twitter.) David Medalie's "The Mistress's Dog" (PDF) is a subtle, quiet, and profoundly sad story, easily the highlight of the Caine Prize nominees for me. It's a story in which nearly all the events have happened before the time of the first sentence, and this is what allows it a classic iceberg effect -- the story benefits from the characters' lifetimes of experience, yet takes place over the course of only a day and a half. Of the characters, only one has a name -- Nola, the protagonist. The other characters are named by Nola's perception of them: the powerful man, the mistr...

(This is the latest in a weekly series of posts about the short stories nominated for this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. For more information, see my introductory post . The other posts about this story so far can be read at: Method to the Madness , Zunguzungu , and The Oncoming Hope . To keep up with it all, follow the Twitter hashtag #cainepr .) Lauri Kubuitsile's "In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata" (PDF)  is a delightful little story about, among other things, sex. The story is written in the style and manner of a comic folktale, its characters cartoonish and its situations amusingly absurd. Though sex is the topic of the story, at its heart this is a tale of equilibrium lost and regained -- just about the most surefire and time-tested template for comedy. I'm wary of saying much about this one, because it would feel a bit like trying to explain a joke, and explaining jokes is the quickest way to kill them. Certainly, there's a bit to say about...

(This is the latest in a weekly series of posts about the short stories nominated for this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. For more information, see my  introductory post . The other posts about this story so far can be read at: Method to the Madness , Africa is a Country , and The Oncoming Hope . To keep up with it all,  follow the Twitter hashtag  #cainepr .) Tim Keegan's  "What Molly Knew" (PDF)  tempts us toward reading it as allegory -- indeed, some of the other bloggers have read the story that way, and I expect it is its allegorical possibilities that landed it a nomination for the prize (it has few other distinguishing virtues that I can see), but I resist granting it many layers of meaning because I find the unallegorized story and its characters clunky, forced, and utterly unconvincing. It may be that Tim Keegan intended his characters to stand for various tendencies within South African society and history; this would at least partly ...

(This is the latest in a weekly series of posts about the short stories nominated for this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. For more information, see my introductory post . To read what the other Caine Prize bloggers have written, see the post on this story at Zunguzungu , which is being updated as they come in, or follow the Twitter hashtag #cainepr .) Reading  "Butterfly Dreams" by Beatrice Lamwaka (PDF) , I had constantly mixed feelings. Lamwaka is a Ugandan who has worked with  FEMWRITE , a wonderful organization from what some of its members have told me, and so I went into the story really really wanting to like it. Certain elements caused me some problems, however, and I ended up with very mixed feelings about the story overall, though admiring some elements of it considerably. From the first sentence ("Labalpiny read out your name on Mega FM."), it's clear the story is addressed to another character, making the narration almost an  apostro...

This post is part of a series initiated by Aaron Bady of Zunguzungu in which various bloggers will write about the five short stories nominated for this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. For more information, see my introductory post . I think Aaron is right to say that NoViolet Bulawayo's "Hitting Budapest" fits into a genre of African writing (fiction and memoir): "the story of children left behind by their society, either running wild in perverse and monstrous ways (as in the child soldier narrative, in particular) or festering in horrible ignorance and social pathology" -- and genre  is a pretty good word for it, because such stories vary considerably in quality and effect while displaying some common features. It's a genre the Caine Prize is particularly welcoming toward, as I noted in my review of the anniversary anthology of Caine winners. The paragraph about "Jungfrau" in that review applies pretty equally to "Hitting B...

Aaron Bady has come up with a great idea : since the Caine Prize for African Writing will be awarded in five weeks, and there are five short stories nominated, why not write about one story a week until the award? I'm going to throw myself into this, because I think the Caine Prize is important, and the exercise could be fun. I hope lots of other folks will join in. Here are the nominated stories, all available online as PDFs: NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) ‘Hitting Budapest’ from ‘The Boston Review’ Vol 35, no. 6 - Nov/Dec 2010  [or direct link to the story at Boston Review ] Beatrice Lamwaka (Uganda) ‘Butterfly dreams’ from ‘Butterfly Dreams and Other New Short Stories from Uganda’ published by Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, Nottingham, 2010 Tim Keegan (South Africa) ‘What Molly Knew’ from ‘Bad Company’ published by Pan Macmillan SA, 2008 Lauri Kubuitsile (Botswana) ‘In the spirit of McPhineas Lata’ from ‘The Bed Book of Short Stories’ published by ...