Academic literature on the topic 'Ghanaian novelists'

Ghanaian novelists are notorious for their long absences from fiction, and the 1990s have seen the long-awaited return of some major talents. Kofi Awoonor and Ama Ata Aidoo allowed, respectively, 21 and 14 years to pass between the publication of their first and second novels, while 17 years separated the fifth and sixth works of Ayi Kwei Armah, the best-established writer of the three. Meanwhile, each has been active in other genres during the long intervals — poetry, short stories, essays – and none of them have fallen silent. Awoonor indicated, shortly after his experimental poetic first novel, This Earth, My Brother (1971), that he was at work on another, from which a lengthy extract was actually published in a journal in 1975,1 and advance notices of the full version continued apace, even though it did not appear until 1992. Armah allowed it to be known in 1989, in a rare interview, that since The Healers (1978) he had completed three more novels which, for want of a suitable African publishing house, remained in manuscript form.2 In the foreword to her 1991 novel, Aidoo refers to an interview in 1967 in which she stated that she ‘could never write about lovers in Accra because surely in our environment there are more important things to write about’. The very vehemence of the protest suggested at the time, however, that the author's mind was already running along the lines of this subject, which might at some future date receive full fictional treatment.

[First paragraph]African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Anne C. Bailey. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. 289 pp. (Cloth US $ 26.00)Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. Saidiya Hartman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. xi + 270 pp. (Cloth US $ 25.00)In Two Thousand Seasons, the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah describes the effects of centuries of European exploitation and violence in Africa and the alienation and death that separated Ghanaians in 1973 (when the book was published) from those before them. “Pieces cut off from their whole are nothing but dead fragments,” he laments. “From the unending stream of our remembrance the harbingers of death break off meaningless fractions. Their carriers bring us this news of shards. Their message: behold this paltriness; this is all your history” (Armah 1973:2). It is this seeming paltriness, this history of meaningless fractions that Anne C. Bailey and Saidiya Hartman explore in their latest works, identifying and mending shards of memory and written and oral fragments into recognizable and meaningful forms. As with Armah in Two Thousand Seasons, for Bailey and Hartman, “the linking of those gone, ourselves here, those coming ... it is that remembrance that calls us” (Armah 1973:xiii). Both of them, haunted by remembrance and driven by a personal quest for reconciliation with the past and a scholarly desire for the truth, are unwilling to accept the past as passed, or to settle for the scattered silence that so often substitutes for the history of Africans and those of the diaspora.

This article reports on the phenomenon of Arab authors in Israel writing in Hebrew. “Writing in Hebrew” refers to literary works originally written in Hebrew or translated from Arabic to Hebrew. The article examines the status of Arabic for Israeli Arabs, the scale of the phenomenon of writing in Hebrew, the bilingual literary works of Arab authors in Israel, and Israeli society’s acceptance of Arab authors writing in Hebrew. Some ten Arab novelists are currently writing in Hebrew in Israel, an apparently growing trend among Arab authors. The choice of these Arab authors to write in Hebrew is a conscious aesthetic choice and a reflection of their natural gift for writing and mastery of Hebrew. The ten writers are: Anton Shammas, Naim Araidi, Sayed Kashua, Atallah Mansour, Jurays Ṭannūs, Muhammad Ghanaim, Osama Abu-Ghosh, Odeh Basharat, Ayman Siksik, and Salman Natur.

This study explores writing, publishing, and reading practices in West Africa through the lens of one emerging woman writer's experiences. Ghanaian novelist Amma Darko, the author of Beyond the Horizon and The Housemaid, provides an exemplar of the challenges facing women writers in the region today: lack of time and space to write, lack of literary mentors, inadequate access to books written by sister writers on the continent or even in their own countries. Despite these difficulties, Darko has persisted in writing novels that speak vividly to contemporary issues for African women. The dissertation analyzes the daily practices that have enabled her to develop a writing life, the publishing history of her works, and the cultural contexts in which she is read now and may be read in the future at home and abroad. The publishing landscape for African women writers like Darko consists of multinational publishers, small Third World advocacy presses, and struggling indigenous publishing houses. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses in the circle of cultural production. Darko's reputation abroad has been made by the first two; she may become more widely known locally through the third. Although there is evidence of a “book famine” caused by economic crises in West Africa, increasing numbers of West African women do read for pleasure and are hungry for good stories that relate to their lives, whether those are Western bestsellers or African-centered romance fiction. Darko's works, until recently little known in Ghana or the U.S., bridge the gap between the high-culture literature of the classroom and low-culture popular fiction. Amma Darko represents a new generation that is writing its way forward from an existing West African women's literary tradition to new possibilities in themes, styles, and readership. In contrast to the image of African women writers as “silenced,” the appendix identifies 159 West African women who have published novels or short story collections in the last seventy years.