Gods and Soldiers

My review of Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing has appeared at Scott Esposito’s online magazine The Quarterly Conversation. I’m a bit more critical than other reviewers have been—for instance, noting the absence of writers like Tahar ben Jelloun, Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, M.G. Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nega Mezlekia, Malidoma Patrice Somé, and Aminatta Forna.

Meanwhile, the article ”Clout of Africa” by James Gibbons uses Gods and Soldiers as the centerpiece of an investigation into whether Africa is experiencing a literary boom. If so, he notes, it is a boom marked by displacement and exile. “Nearly all the Francophone writers [in Gods and Soldiers] have settled in France, and the typical English-language writer has an American MFA and professorship.” Like me, Gibbons notes that “the choice of nonfiction is a little scattershot,” and he has his own list of notable omissions, including Ben Okri and Assia Djebar.

Gibbons’ Africa roundup also includes the new collection The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (my own review will be in The Quarterly Conversation), Secret Son by Laila Lalami, and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih.

Gibbons’ article is thoughtful and well-informed, though he refers to the demise of Transition magazine (as of 1992) without mentioning that it was revived in 1991 and has published fifty issues since then. He is able to be quite harsh on certain aspects of a book (”Secret Son can be remarkably lacking in subtlety") while recognizing where it shines ("a narrative logic that is polemical but never overheated or shrill").