20 authors who’ll always stick with me
List the first twenty you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.” My resultant list, in which I included the books of the authors I loved the most, was not academic but rather the first authors who sprang to mind, whose books I loved or found striking in some way. I wanted to share […]
List the first twenty you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.” My resultant list, in which I included the books of the authors I loved the most, was not academic but rather the first authors who sprang to mind, whose books I loved or found striking in some way. I wanted to share my thoughts on these books here in this column, the twenty split into two weeks, as I think the books one loves can often reveal a lot about how one sees the world. I’m sure my list would be different on a different sitting. There are authors not listed here whom I have elsewhere listed as my favourites. I was rather perturbed that my brain was not casting up more women. I’ve deliberately left academic writers off the list, unless they also write creatively.
1. Chinua Achebe needs no introduction to a Nigerian audience.
Most known worldwide for his Things Fall Apart, my favourite is Anthills of the Savannah, which tells in a setting contemporary to the Lagos of the 1980s (even though Nigeria is thinly disguised as “Kangan”) a tale of “things falling apart” between three old school friends who have found themselves as head of state, minister of information, and the editor of an influential newspaper.
2. William Shakespeare probably needs no introduction to this audience either.
The 16th century British playwright captured the complexity of human experience in all its tragedy and laughter, a combination of “high” and “low” culture, and his plays are still relevant today. One of my favourite plays is his profound comedy Twelfth Night, a gender-bending tale of a girl who takes on her twin brother’s identity as self protection after they have been separated in a shipwreck and the confusion in love that results when everyone falls in love with the wrong person. One of my favourite observations about Shakespeare comes from scholar Benedict Anderson, who in Imagined Communities points out that ““In the seventeenth century Hobbes (1588-1678) was a figure of continental renown because he wrote in the truth-language [Latin]. Shakespeare (1564-1616), on the other hand, composing in the vernacular, was virtually unknown across the Channel. And had English not become, two hundred years later, the pre-eminent world-imperial language, might he not largely have retained his original insular obscurity?” (Revised Ed. 1991), p.18. I think it is useful to think about this when discussing the language debate in African literature. Some of the greatest world literature ever written or performed may come from languages that are at that time considered obscure.
3. British medieval literature professor and novelist, who wrote in England during the 1930s-1960s, C.S. Lewis is one of my favourite Christian thinkers of all time. His book of apologetics Mere Christianity has helped me understand and explain my faith more than any other book of theology, but his seven part children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia, which feature the great lion Aslan and British school children who stumble into an alternate universe, his adult fantasy novel The Great Divorce, and his science fiction trilogy, particularly, Perelandra, have been some of the most influential to me in forming my imagination.
4. Nigerian novelist Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, a stylistically fractured novel that tells the story of Nigeria in the 1990s through the lens of Lomba, the student turned journalist turned prisoner, always makes my top five list of favourite books. When I stumbled across the self-published version of the novel, Prison Stories, at the 2001 Association of Nigerian Authors conference in Port Harcourt, I became a Helon Habila evangelist, pushing the book into the hands of everyone I knew who was interested in African literature. It was the first novel I had read (with perhaps the exception of Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah) that featured a Nigeria I recognized and knew. Since his first novel, he has also written Measuring Time and Oil on Water.
5. The American novelist Toni Morrison writes stories of African American life in the United States with power and lyricism, and a punch that can leave you gasping. Her novel Beloved reimagines the horrors of slavery in mid-19th century America, telling the story of a woman who is so desperate to escape the physical, psychological, and sexual bondage of slavery that she begins killing her children, rather than allow them to be taken back into slavery. The novel shows the powerful dehumanizing effect slavery in America had most of all on the “master” and features a ghost who will never allow anyone to forget.
6. Zimbabwean novelist, psychologist, and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions struck me as a story I felt I already knew. Following Jean-Paul Sartre’s statement “the condition of the native is a nervous condition,” from the introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, she sets the story in pre-independence Rhodesia, telling the story of Tambudzai, who goes to live in the city with her uncle to go to a mission school and of the tension-filled friendship she forms with her cousin Nyasha who has never quite adjusted back to life in Rhodesia after years in England. The novel is followed by a sequel The Book of Not, which I found disappointing, but Nervous Conditions is a must read.
7. I first read American science fiction master Ray Bradbury’s stories and novels on the recommendation of a high school English teacher: the collections of short stories The Martian Chronicles and The Golden Apples of the Sun, and his novels Something Wicked this way Comes and Fahrenheit 451, combine science fiction with subtle warnings about imperialism and being too certain about the morality of the status quo. Perhaps his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451 imagines a dystopian world controlled by a Big Brother like television, in which firemen, rather than putting out fires, raid homes to find and destroy every last book. The protagonist of the novel is a fireman who goes renegade and made it his mission to preserve books.
8. Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino’s Hausa love story In da So da Kauna, about star crossed lovers, the poor Muhammad and the rich Sumayya whose love is thwarted by a corrupt grandmother who accepts bribes from a wealthy scoundrel, was first published in 1991 and sold over 100,000 copies. It also changed my life forever. It was the first Hausa novel I read that made me read because I wanted to know what happened in the story rather than because it was homework, and it was this novel that spurred my research interests in Hausa literature and film. For being so influential in the rapidly developing contemporary Hausa literary movement, it deserves a permanent place in world literature. Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino is a master at dialogue and capturing the rich bantering language of the youth.
9. If In da So da Kauna was what first made me read Hausa literature, Nazir Adam Salih’s novels are the ones you are most likely to catch me reading now. Crime thrillers and spiritual thrillers full of social critique, they read in Hausa like James Hadley Chase does in English, with a fond and humorous sympathy for the downtrodden and outcasts of society. I like Nazir Adam Salih’s thrillers better than James Hadley Chase though, partly because they do not include the ethnocentrism or subtle racism of the American thriller writer. Among my favourites are Aljani ya taka wuta, telling the story of a fearless schoolboy who takes a gamble at a love affair with a jinn, and Murmushin Alkawari which tells the story of a film star who is loved by three women, an actress, a murderer, and an innocent Fulani girl.
10. The Canadian novelist Lucy Maude Montgomery, who wrote in the early 20th century about imaginative girls living mostly on Prince Edward Island, was one of my childhood favourites. My two favourite series included the Emily of New Moon trilogy, which follows the life of an imaginative orphan raised by her unmarried aunts, and the Anne of Green Gables series, which tells of another orphan adopted by an old farmer and his unmarried sister who captures the hearts of the entire community. Though coming from very different places and times, when I first fell in love with Hausa literature it was because the attention to detail and locality, and the humour and sweetness of community life reminded me of this childhood favourite.
(Concluded next week)