Dr. Charles Cantalupo, Professor of English Literature, Comparative Literature and African Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, Schuylkill Campus, gave a one-day workshop in Asmara, Eritrea, while he was here to work on a new project: the publication of a collection of short stories by Eritrean writers in Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic. The workshop took place to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s first book, Things Fall Apart. Dr. Cantalupo, who is also a writer, a poet and a translator is one of the Organizing Chairs of the Against All Odds Conference, African Literatures and Languages into the 21st Century, which took place in Asmara, January 1-7, 2000. He accepted an invitation to talk about the main points of his presentation and discuss his most recent projects.
Q: Why did you choose that particular subject for your presentation?
CC: In 2008 we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. It is a huge achievement – 11 million copies sold and translations in 45 languages. Achebe’s novel is often considered a beginning of African literature, more precisely of modern African literature, which is undeniable in light of the popularity and the high quality of the novel, written by a young man of 28. But I also wanted to stress in my talk that African literature has many beginnings, similar to the way that human beings can identify many beginnings in their own lives or in the life of a country. Take, for example, Eritrea. Which beginning is to be considered the beginning: 1961, when Awate led the first upraising against the Ethiopian occupiers, or 1991 when Asmara was finally liberated, or the plebiscite in 1993, or must we go back to ancient Adulis and the archeological discoveries that are taking place even now as we speak?
In my presentation I limited myself to five beginnings in African literature, yet also including several beginnings from Eritrean literature. Of course, there are many more. I began by considering the work of Achebe, and then I looked at that of Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Next, I discussed the Against All Odds conference, which took place in Asmara in 2000. It was a hugely successful gathering, and its most important outcome, the “Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literature,” clearly is a new beginning for African literature. I proceeded to consider more beginnings within an Eritrean context: the historic and ancient sites of Segheneyti, Kohaito and the stele of Belew Kelew with its inscriptions, which I translate, quite freely I must say, as follows:
The oldest example
Of our language
Inscribes a stele
In a field below.
I translate:
strug l agains al od s wi
Stands out
With the sun
And a quarter moon –
Adulite.
Join here and write.*
The last beginning my workshop focused on was another example from Eritrea. In the last year I have been fortunate to work with my dear colleague, Dr. Ghirmai Negash, on some translations of Eritrean traditional, oral poetry, including the popular ballad, or what some have called a mini-epic, Negusse Negusse. While translating the poem, we eventually came to the conclusion that it couldn’t be more timely since it coincided with the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, and the poem and the novel shared the same theme: the passing of an old order and the fear and wonder over what might take its place. Therefore, we titled our translation, “Negusse, Negusse – The World Falls Apart.”
Q: When talking about the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, you made reference to several of his concepts that you consider important. One of them is Decolonizing the African mind. Does the Against All Odds conference adhere to this line of thought?
CC: Against All Odds follows Ngugi in advocating the renaissance and the use of African languages in African countries. Going back to Achebe, in my workshop I noted a distinction he made in his essay, “African Writers and the English Language,” between what he called national and ethnic literature: meaning that a country could have two kinds of literature; ethnic, which would be in indigenous languages, and national, which would probably be in European languages, unless the language is very widely spoken, like Swahili. Achebe honestly admits that he cannot speak most of the languages that are spoken in Nigeria. In fact, he wrote his book in highly distinctive and heavily styled English, contending that through English he would be communicating with most of his countrymen and women, regardless of their ethnic or local languages.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who is also one of the organizers of the Against All Odds conference, believes that national and ethnic languages are not mutually exclusive. When both are fully used, they can feed each other, and an ethnic language can be the national literature, even if in translation. Such a position exemplifies the ideas of the Against All Odds conference, which we further developed in writing the “Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literature.” Now, almost ten years later, the Asmara Declaration is the subject of widespread scholarly discussion and debate. It is a living document.
Q: You have just finished writing a book of memoirs about your literary experiences in Africa. The book begins in 1985 and ends, very specifically, in Massawa, one early morning of July 2005. Can you tell us more?
CC: I must confess that I have been writing about Eritrea since 1995, when I first came here. An early long poem called “Eritrea” was published in 2004 in a collection of my poems called Light The Lights, recounting in a fast moving, part kaleidoscopic and part documentary way what I experienced and felt in Asmara and other parts of the country back then. Here is a brief excerpt that recounts my first impressions on visiting medeber.
From a distance such conversations drum
Heavy drums. They drum music and fear: a music
Of drumming fear until the place exists no more
And comes closer and closer like a labyrinth all around
With nothing wasted or new under the sun
And anything of use before in metamorphosis
Now with a fuller value and made new by the mockery
Of material lasting longer than flesh transformed
Once and for all, yet again and again once and for all,
And still no blacker or whiter with the retelling.
Sweaty work and hard bargains make this drumming song.
It joins blowtorches, saws, hammers, a dip of the head
And a bow of the shoulders to a heavy-duty snip,
Sanders, solder, steel wool, stain and polish rags
And the rest of poetry to serve the body drum
With the transformations of where war was
Into a peace cannibalizing its throwaway
Of us and the midst of miles and miles of graveyard
Tanks, troop carriers and artillery melting down
To their datable deaths and at our free hands.
I stopped writing poetry about Eritrea in the late 90s when I became deeply involved in the Against All Odds project. After Against All Odds, however, I wanted to write about the project itself, not so much in a critical, academic way but more in a storytelling mode, including a variety of incidents – sad, humorous, pathetic what have you – that took place during the four years it took to plan and implement the project. The material, although poetic at times, simply did not lend itself to poetry, but I still wanted to write about the experience.
At the same time, I was also starting to work on translations of Eritrean poetry from Tigrinya to English, and now there are three books of them: We Have Our Voice (2000), We Invented the Wheel (2002), and Who Needs a Story (2006). Some of the more recent translations, which I also produced with Dr. Ghirmai Negash, are on the web, too: for example, @ (http://www.fascicle.com/issue03/main/issue03_frameset.htm). Ten years ago if one searched the internet for the combination of words, “Eritrea” and “poets” or “poetry,” only a few websites would appear. Google it now, and there are thousands.
Writing about my experience in Eritrea in prose form, I have employed a genre that goes by the name of creative non-fiction, although now that I am approaching the end of the project, I realize that it is really a memoir. Yet I must say that one of the distinct pleasures of writing a memoir is to be able to say things about my experience of writing in Africa that I could not say in poetry. In fact, half of the book is about my experience here in Eritrea since my first visit in 1995. The book is called Joining Africa.** There’s an excerpt from it on the web @
http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/brev24/cantalupo_wonder.htm, telling the story of when I met Stevie Wonder in Dakar. Here’s another brief excerpt, again recounting my first visit to medeber, but now in prose instead of poetry. It should illustrate what I mean about how writing in prose offers a different kind of opportunity to describe an experience.
I came to a towering brick gate, crowned by three arches and a balustrade through which the blue sky poured while a tight flow of trucks clogged and squeezed into the gate below. From behind the gate, the drumming expanded louder and louder into one all-out, deafening pounding that would imperceptibly fall apart into a thousand different rhythms washed over by the huge diesel engines of the trucks and their grinding gears. Two palm trees on either side of the gate exuded an unthreatened sense of harmony and order, whatever might be heard.
As I squeezed between the gate’s left sidewall and a truck piled high with metal mattress springs, a hanging wire hooked my shirt and began to pull me. I had to run for a few seconds until the truck stopped, although I couldn’t hear it since the drumming drowned it out. Pinned to the truck and looking up into the wiry, rusty chaos of the mattress springs, I panicked, ripping the wire out of my shirt and afraid that the truck would start up again without my knowing. When it did, and as my palm felt the wire scrape it and let go, I looked into a labyrinth of nothing new or wasted under the sun, and all metal: pounded, sawed, folded, heated, blowtorched, snipped, welded, soldered, sanded, steel wooled and polished into something entirely different from what it was and new. Tire rims, air ducts, surviving window frames and doors, wheel-less barrows, car hoods, legible and illegible business signs, chests of drawers, beams, bailing, presses, gutted couches, balconies and stairs without buildings, ingots, shields, rails, and an endless supply of shell casings and cartridges drummed and drummed by old men and young intent on nothing but hammering “swords into ploughshares,” in the words of the book of Isaiah (2:4): a cannon into a bucket, a lamp, a pair of crutches and a washboard; an ammunition box into a school desk and chair; fuel drums into shiny coffee pots, pans, platters and bowls; sledges, axes, hoes, shovels and a stove out of machine guns.
I listened, my hearing gone, and put my fingers into a three inch divot of rain water on top of a thick shaven stump used as an anvil as if it held holy water. At the same time, I smelled more than fire, propylene torches, sweat and the steam off burning metal, as if they still longed for something more. I looked around and saw a circle of stalls with faience beadwork doors, women and children. As I walked closer to one, the drumming quickly subsided, and I smelled spices. Inside I sat down in the dark amidst bowls of mint, oregano, garlic, nutmeg, almonds, cumin, ten shades of pepper, sunflower seeds and so much more I couldn’t name. A laughing woman appeared. She had broken teeth, skin seared like meat and golden wheels in her ears. She wore a dress the color of spring grass with deep, blood red and purple folds enclosing patches of sea and sky. I kissed her hand and touched it to my forehead, which made her children laugh too. She brought tea with a drop of fermented honey. I bought some oregano.
Q: So what happens next I suppose we will know when we get to read your book Joining Africa? Could you tell us though what you would like people to know about this book?
CC: I have written Joining Africa for a more general readership, which may not be as interested in my scholarly books and poetry relating to Africa, and my translations. When I’m not in Africa I meet people all the time who have a healthy curiosity about Africa but not much direct or personal experience of the continent.
Wanting a reader of Joining Africa to picture himself or herself in my place, I also wrote the book as a kind of “everyman” or every woman’s education in what 21st century Africa might really be about.
I wanted Joining Africa to tell a different kind of story about Africa. It is not merely the horrors of colonialism and neocolonialism, disease, starvation, corruption, war and genocide, as if the word “Africa” is practically a synonym for “disaster.” Nor is my book merely about the other extreme: an Africa evoking romantic images of pyramids, safaris, gorgeous wild animals in dramatic landscapes and colorful, exotic, teeming cultures. Instead Joining Africa tells a story about the vital element of the African word.
To sum up Joining Africa in a sentence: my book tries to do for Africa what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming. My “inconvenient truth” – and what the book shows me struggling to learn – is that the best way to help Africa is by listening to the African word, that is, by listening to what Africans themselves have to say – over 90% of whom do not speak European languages – in their own languages, in their own voices.
No amount of foreign aid (close to $600 billion at last count), generous NGO or rock star can compare with the potential of African languages to provide the simplest, fairest, most democratic, economic, and achievable way to improve African lives and livelihood through the application of knowledge, education, science and technology.
I also want this book to make people think about going to Africa and about how they relate to Africa. Too often people’s interest in Africa or their studies about Africa can be reduced to a kind of modern quest either for racial or ethnic identity or “to save” Africa. I want this book to show that by simply being human, anyone can naturally have a connection with Africa or for that matter any place in the world. For example, when the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma plays Bach, we don’t say, “Look he is Chinese, he plays Bach.” Instead, we listen, and we say, “this is beautiful.” Who cares about race or ethnic origin, his or Bach’s? I care more about what the English poet, John Keats called “truth and beauty” in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: "’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’" – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Still, Joining Africa tells my unlikely story of a white American college professor who connects with Africa as few non-Africans ever have. An incident from 2005, which is in the preface to Joining Africa, might help to better explain what I mean. I had been invited to join several Eritrean poets who were reading at the Expo festival. They read their original poems and I followed with some translations. When I was leaving the hall, I saw two American college students in the audience whom I had met back at my hotel several days before. Their names were Scott and Abrehet, and here’s what happened.
“Professor, wait a minute,” Scott said, in a half joking, half serious tone. “I want to ask you one question. How does an American white guy get so wrapped up in Africa?”
“Yeah,” Abrehet spoke slowly, “and why Eritrea?”
“I have good friends here,” I responded, starting to feel self-conscious. “But to answer your question too, Scott? Why did I, or did you say how did I get involved with Africa? Do you remember the first line of the poem, ‘Who Needs a Story?’ that Ghirmai Yohannes read tonight? It goes, ‘I needed a story.’ Around twenty years ago, when I was in Jericho, in Israel, I began to realize that I needed a story, too. It led me here.”
Q: When asked to give advice to young writers you said there are at least three basic tenets that you believe in. Can you tell us what they are?
CC: Yes, there are three basic tenets that I believe in as a writer. The first one is: read everything and preferably all at once. But seriously, writing is about finding one’s own voice. Paradoxically, one is more likely to find it by experiencing the voices of others, and the only way one can apprehend those voices is by reading. A writer has the responsibility not only to read a wide range of great writers from his or her language, and his or her country and continent, but also from other languages, countries and continents. This is a daunting task, and there is no way that anyone can really do this completely, but it is a lifetime pursuit, and it is the only way to keep one’s mind fresh, alive and strong and to find a way to make one’s voice worth being heard by others.
The second tenet is the following: writing is an expression of unresolved conflicts. To me the greatest mark of punctuation is the question mark. People constantly and throughout their lives have unresolved conflicts, things for which they have no answers, or no apparent answers. The answers to these conflicts do not need to be in writing. The answers are in our own lives and in how we live our lives – in the choices we make. They are individual choices. For example, when I read the Bible, or any other spiritual book, I find that it is like any other book, like an anthology of Middle Eastern literature; it is a book of questions and not a book of answers, and that I think is the Bible’s greatest power.
The last tenet is: write about what you think has been left out. This is what spurred Chinua Achebe to write Things Fall Apart. It articulated a part of his experience that the great English writers he was reading did not talk about. How could they? Thus he wrote about what Conrad had left out in Heart of Darkness. One does not have to be Conrad or Achebe to realize this, and I believe that every human being has a unique experience. In a way, my book Joining Africa is a story about what has been left out – in my education and in my interests up to 1985, but also of what I think has been left out by writers, especially non African writers in the world today
Q: You said during your presentation that poetry is a life long, devotional exercise. What did you mean by that?
CC: I said that because I believe it. In fact I try to live by that idea. I began writing poetry at the age of 13, and before that I was writing protest songs against the Vietnam War. I came up with a combination of words that had so much rhythm and intensity that it gave me a kind of self-elation, and yet I was also able to communicate it to the people around me. And then I kept writing through graduate school and as a professor. Sometimes now I feel torn between translating and writing my own poetry – after all, art is long and life is short. But this is a conflict that increases my devotion to both. Translation is a practice that imposes a unique discipline. For example in 17th century England, John Dryden translated Virgil’s Aeneid from Latin to English, and to this day I believe it is the best translation that has ever been done of that work.
To come back to your question, I said “devotion” because there is no other way to pursue poetry, at least as I see it written by the best poets. If there is a religious undertone to this word, so be it. My own growth in writing poetry is linked to my coming to Africa over the last 20 years, working with African writers, and particularly in the last 13 years of seeing Eritrea. I have been fortunate enough to work with people, meet the community and also Eritrean writers. They have taught me so much, as I hope my book will show, and as I hoped my workshop showed. When I translate, I come to understand more about Eritrea, but also about poetry in general and about the human heart.
* Excerpt from “Adulite,” Light the Lights (Red Sea Press: Asmara and Trenton, 2004).
**Joining Africa. Copyright © 2008 Charles Cantalupo.
