Who is the African Writer?

An ‘African writer’ can either be an African writer or a writer from Africa. One may conflate these terms but the two are distinct. While the former refers to a writer who affirms their African-ness as the source of their art, the latter refers to origin, a writer from Africa.

Written by Anifowoshe Ibrahim

Jan 17, 2020

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. GEORGE TORODE

The story of Michael Derrick Hudson is a story with familiar themes of cultural appropriation and affirmative action. It begins with Michael submitting (under his real name) his poem, ‘The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve’, 40 times to be greeted with repeated rejections. Michael then switched his identity to a Chinese-American woman named Yi-fen Chou. As Yi-fen, the poem was rejected nine times before Prairie Schooner accepted it. The poem later got published in The Best American Poetry 2015 anthology. In reflection, Michael said, in light-hearted praise for himself, ‘I’m nothing if not persistent’.

What Michael had done was not unprecedented. In fact, it had a long history among white male writers who thought it was towards their choice of what identity should be read and heard that literature should move. John Howard Griffin had dyed his skin black and lived as a ‘black man’. After spending a considerable period of time passing as a black man, he wrote Black Like Me, a 1961 book aimed at white Americans and portraying the unflinching hardship of the Jim Crow South. The book was critically acclaimed, with Pulitzer prize-winner, Studs Terkel, describing Howard as, ‘… just one of those guys that comes along once or twice in a century and lifts the hearts of the rest of us.’

The relevance of these twin stories is the scandalization of the term ‘African Writer’. Established African authors, especially those living in the West, are often asked if they’re truly an ‘African Writer’. This is prompted by the knowledge that, because a person is African, their literary success is tied to their identity. That to be Yi-Fen Chou gives you a better chance to be published, as it does for Tochukwu. Or that your writing only qualifies as African Writing when a publisher in the West deems it the authentic African writing just as Hudson did for the struggles of black people. Both cases raise the question: Who is the African Writer? And What is African Writing?

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About the Author

Anifowoshe Ibrahim

is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist based in Lagos, Nigeria. His works have appeared in Kalahari Review, African Writer, The Portalist, Agbowo, The Republic. He's been translated to Italian. He writes the ‘It's Not Your Business’ newsletter on Substack.

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Who is the African Writer?