Tag: African Literature

This year’s #ReadingAfrica Week has sort of turned into #ReadingAfrica Month. That’s due to a few factors. One, we’re a small team and each year gets bigger and bigger, and we sometime can’t keep up. Two, life gets in the way, and things you’d hoped would be done by one date, gets shifted to another. Catalyst Press might be a brand, but the behind-the-scenes is a group of people, and we get sick, our kids get sick, or our work load suddenly increases. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s to extend grace and kindness to everyone because you truly never know what’s going on in the background. And three, one of our events was rudely interrupted by trolls who we guess wanted to send the week out with a bang (a joke that any of you who were at the panel on translation last Friday will no doubt understand).

But because of those delays, we just may have a few other surprises to share with you this month. Stay tuned!

Of our planned and off-without-a-hitch, programming, we— if we may be so bold— knocked it out of the park. Yes, we’re a tiny team, but we’re a mighty one, and we couldn’t be prouder with how this year’s event turned out. Keep reading for a run-down of #ReadingAfrica Week 2023

Since we had an unofficial theme of borders this year, we asked writers to share some of their thoughts about borders, displacement, migration, and art. It’s no small task to write a short statement about something so huge, but they were up to the task.

We sprinkled a few of those statements throughout our posts, but wanted to put them all in one place. These are brilliant thinkers and writers, so be sure to support them!

I (and by “I,” I mean me, Ashawnta Jackson, part of Catalyst’s marketing and publicity team, don’t get too personal on this blog. Usually, there’s no reason to; this whole site is about our amazing authors and illustrators, and the public-facing work that Jessica, our founder, and SarahBelle, our South African office head do. I’m am happily behind-the-scenes. I thrive in anonymity. But when we decided to add diasporic writers to this year’s #ReadingAfrica Week celebration, I realized that it was going to be hard to be as anonymous as I usually am. That’s because when I think about borders and home and belonging, it brings up so many feelings.

This (and by “this,” I mean the USA) is the only home I’ve ever known. I don’t have deep connections to far away places. I have here. This piece of the Earth that I didn’t choose, but claim nonetheless. Being part of the African diaspora, to me, sometimes feels both expansive and limiting. Expansive because I am a part of a community that stretches across the globe, each of us holding on to our traditions and meanings despite many (many!) efforts to wrest those away from us. Limiting because even as part of that community, I know that there are pieces of me that I won’t ever and can’t ever know. That is a border that was erased for me long ago. I may be borderless, but I am not without a home. For me, home is the smell of my mother’s gumbo simmering on a cold day. It’s the lilt in my father’s voice, generations of Louisiana making it musical. It’s the taste of sugar cane at my grandfather’s farm.

And it is also reading the works of people like me, but not like me. My heritage reflected back in samba, soca, jazz. In peas and rice, pikliz, and chow-chow. And of course, in the amazing literary traditions of the diaspora.

To say that Catalyst founder, Jessica Powers, is familiar with southern Africa would be the understatement of the year. Through her studies, fellowships, and frequent visits, she’s not only developed a love for the region—particularly South Africa— she’s created a second home there. A home complete with family, friends, and memories. The love of this region is partly what led to the creation of Catalyst Press. She wanted to share the writing she’d fallen in love with with as many people as possible.

Though we’ve expanded our offerings to go beyond the southern region, we’ll always remember where it all started. Over the years, we’ve developed a strong presence in South Africa, building a strong network of writers, literary organizations, and schools (and we have a physical presence in the country with our talented South African office manager, SarahBelle and our literary liaison, Izak.)

Today we focus on West Africa. We begin with a short statement from Aba Amissah Asibon, a Ghanaian writer and an SSDA Inkubator Fellow whose work will be appearing in our forthcoming release, Captive: New Short Fiction from Africa.

Storytelling is a constant reminder that borders are merely arbitrary constructs meant to perpetuate separation and otherness. At the core of it all, there is a shared human experience that drives narratives around the world. It is always such a thrill to know that no matter where a reader is from, they can pick up my writing and see a piece of themselves in it. As a writer, my ultimate goal is to have the reader identify with my characters’ triumphs and shortcomings regardless of tribe, race or nationality. —Aba Amissah Asibon

Working with Short Story Day Africa on two anthologies has been a wonderful opportunity for us to both bring more African voices to more readers, but as readers ourselves, to explore the continent through its emerging writers.

For further reading:
“The four generations: Nigerian literature, the Booker Prize and beyond” The Booker Prize has a great long read by Gazelle Mba on Nigeria’s literary past, present, and future: “Nigerian literature is in dialogue with itself, with its own fraught past, in a concerted effort to understand the nation from which it originates.  Nigeria is a nation of deep, seemingly irresolvable contradictions; and its writers appear to be enamoured of the same impossible task: write to discover the truth of who we are as a nation.”

Though this publication focuses on more than West African writing, Open Country Magazine was founded by Nigerian journalist Otosirieze Obi-Young and “It takes its name from the new generation of writers, especially in Nigeria, who are pushing back against censorship and leveraging social media and a newfound confidence to speak up and make the world they want to see.

The African Poetry Digital Portal, a a project of the African Poetry Book Fund, is a “gateway, providing access to and details of digital and print book manuscripts, newspapers and periodicals, newsletters, audio recordings, video recordings, websites, and related collections of African poetry written by Africans from antiquity to the present.” Check out their selections of West African poets.

The Imagine Africa Series is a collection “which aims to celebrate the diverse voices and imaginations of the continent of Africa and its diaspora,” and features poems, essays, fiction, conversations, and visual art. There are several volumes of the collection, but we may be partial to volume three, which was edited by Bhakti Shringarpure, one of the panelists on African Languages, Global Audiences: Publishers and Writers on the Art of Translation, one of our three #ReadingAfrica Week panels.

Today is all about Central Africa! We begin with a lovely thought from Sola Njoku. Sola, a Nigerian writer, is one of the contributors to our forthcoming release, Captive: New Short Fiction from Africa.

They say Africa’s internal borders are the straightest you will find on a continental map. Apportioned in a beeline manner in a land grab by those whose interest in the dark continent did not extend to its people. A Western European feast in Berlin that bisected families, clans and villages and rendered them strangers to one other. The aim to distort, estrange and control. Why? Even now, freed, we let these structures stand in our geography and in our imagination –  a testament to how we have been turned against the ties that bind our hearts together to lean on the crutches that restrain our bodies and minds, for we must ideate one way or the other.

But when, awoken, I write and you read, and you write and I read, we gain enlightenment of our commonality and realise that we are all descendants of one undulating civilisation. Thus our shackles of oppression may fall away one mind at a time. So, my compatriot, write Africa, and read it even more. Let our imagination and hearts wander free to places that are truly ours, unrestricted by artificial structures, for have not our gatekeepers kept us apart for long enough? —Sola Njoku

As we mentioned in our post yesterday, we’ve divided each day of this week into regions. Today, we’ll be looking at east Africa. We’ll start this post with a short response on the question of borders from author Caroline Kurtz. We’re proud to publish two of Caroline’s memoirs— A Road Called Down on Both Sides and Today is Tomorrow— the former a recounting of her childhood in rural Ethiopia as the daughter of American missionaries, and the latter revisiting the era that she and her late husband began working with civil war refugees in South Sudan and Kenya. Both are thoughtful examinations of a life straddling cultures, and of the inherent complexities that exist when intentions don’t always match realities.

Borders delineate power, and territorial wars have marked Ethiopia’s history. Italians tried twice to colonize , sandwiched as the country was between Italian Eritrea and Italian Somalia. After fascist dictator Mussolini invaded, he erased the borders between the three countries, and declared a new country: Italian East Africa.

When the war ended, Allied powers broke the three countries up again and federated Eritrea and Ethiopia. But that set in motion a vicious liberation struggle. Eventually, a new Ethiopian constitution gave each state the power of self-determination, up to and including secession. Eritrea promptly seceded. But the two countries disputed a rocky triangle on their border and went to war with each other again.

Around that same time, in what now looks like the wind that created a whirlwind, Ethiopia was internally re-districted along ethnic lines. This has created border disputes throughout the country and has pitted Ethiopians against each other. Even the borders of Addis Ababa are now being disputed in riots by farmers and ethnic radicals in the neighboring state.

Invasions and disputed borders have led to death and war throughout Ethiopia’s history. And the end of her story is not yet written. —Caroline Kurtz, author of Today is Tomorrow and A Road Called Down on Both Sides

Welcome to another #ReadingAfrica Week! Each year, we try to highlight genres because one of the big, huge, flashing-in-neon reasons we do this event is to point out that African literature isn’t a genre. Rather, it’s a huge, diverse world of writing from a huge, diverse continent of voices. But this year, we decided to do something a little different. This year, instead of dividing our daily focus by genre, we decided to do it by region. We’d orient our literary compass and explore the continent book by book.

Sounds easy, right?

Here’s the thing: as we began to divide this massive area into digestible pieces, it felt…. weird? Unethical? Confusing? Where exactly, does one country end and another begin? Wars are being fought over this. Families are being separated over this. Lives are being lost over this. Borders feel cruel, feel arbitrary. But on the other hand, for people screaming to be seen, to be recognized, borders are everything. They are lines—no matter how arbitrary—on a map that say home, that say you belong, that say you are safe here. And in a place as large, as contested, and as vast as Africa, we felt that we needed to acknowledge that these borders have meaning.