Getting to know literature by Anglophone African writers
I have been at this column for over a year now, and still, every month I learn something new from the people I interview for it, not just about the subject matter itself, the literature we happen to be discussing each month, but also about that way in which we look at literature and the myriad ways there are to interpret it.
With his first email to me, David Nandi Odhiambo, who teaches English at the University of Hawai’i – West O’ahu, and whose four award-winning novels are unlike any I’ve previously read, points me in a direction new to me: He writes of “minoritarian” and “majoritarian” literature. I do some Googling. “Minoritarian literature,” various sources tell me, is often used in conjunction with “postcolonial” literature. This I understand, but I am eager to hear from Odhiambo exactly what he thinks of it.
Right away, Odhiambo tells me that the canon shouldn’t be thought of as monolithic: It’s flexy, he says, moving through time and culture, and this movement is objective, depending on who’s in power. “One of the things that I ended up doing,” says Odhiambo, “was then looking at something known as the minoritarian, which is not a response to the majoritarian but [the majoritarian] language. Minoritarian literature is literature written by minorities in the dominant language. I was really interested in thinking about what that meant, having (1958). And there you have someone who’s attempting very much to say, OK, there are these models of representation that aren’t consistent with the experience I have as an African. There was a movement to having that voice, the African voice, speak of their own experiences.”
