Research in African Literatures

ABSTRACT:

This essay proposes that the region is a formally and epistemologically distinct scale through which to theorize the African novel. Intra-African migration becomes the trope whereby novels are marked by a regional consciousness; whether or not it is formally manifest, though, depends on what writers can conjure of migration’s concrete realities. Aviation, in particular—and the divisive fact of whether it is central to one’s movement—becomes decisive of whether a work is able to achieve a deep regional poetics. The essay looks to two recent novels published in Cape Town to make this case: Jamala Safari’s debut work The Great Agony and Pure Laughter of the Gods (Umuzi, 2012) and the Afrikaans writer Eben Venter’s Wolf, Wolf (Tafelberg, 2013). Each writer captures a different stock image of the African novel today: Venter experiments with global-technological forms like social media and Internet pornography amid the cosmopolitanism of Cape Town’s gay nightlife, while Safari adopts a more traditional realist treatment of child soldiery and refugee camps. These works’ thematic convergence around regional migration, I suggest, reveals the paradoxical truth that “conservative” forms may be best equipped to capture emergent African realities.