Read Living in Hope and History for Free Online Page B

media, including the dominant cultural medium of our time, television, that literature in Africa not only has to express the lives of the people but also has to assert the beauty and interest of this reality against megasubculture—the new opium of the people . . .
    Surely the powers of the imagination of our writers can be exerted to attract our people away from the soporific sitcom, surely the great adventures that writers explore in life can offer a child something as exciting in image and word as the cumbersome battle between Japanese turtles? We in Africa don’t want cultural freedom hijacked by the rush of international sub-literature into the space for growth hard-won by ourselvesin the defeat of colonial culture. That is perhaps the greatest hazard facing us as we turn the page of African literature and write the heading: twenty-first century.
    â€”
UNESCO Symposium
Harare, Zimbabwe, 1992

REFERENCES:
THE CODES OF CULTURE

    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    W hen I am asked that interviewer’s stock-in-trade, ‘For whom do you write?’, I reply irritatedly, ‘For anyone who reads me.’
    The question is crass, giving away the media’s assumption that a writer, like itself, presumes ‘readership potential’. It seems typical of the anti-art tenet of commercialism: give the public what they know. But writers—artists of all kinds—exist to break up the paving of habit and breach the railings that confine sensibility; free imaginative response to spring up like grass. We are convinced that we are able to release the vital commonality of the human psyche, our reach limited only by the measure of our talent. After all, isn’t this what we ourselves have received at the touch of other writers? If we are not manufacturing for Mills and Boon, if we are not writing political tracts disguised as works of the imagination, we do not have in mind a shadow company of heads out there, the chat-show groupies or the Party supporters.
    But for some time, now, I have felt a certain unease when I snap, ‘Anyone who reads me.’ The echo comes: ‘Oh really? My, my!’ I begin to think there
is
a question to be asked, but it is not ‘For whom do we write?’ It is ‘For whom
can
we write?’ Is there not such a thing as writer potential, perhaps? The postulate reversed? And may I dismiss that one high-handedly? These doubts—or more accurately suggestions—have come about in my particular case less from readings in literary theory over the years than as a result of experience out there in the world among—not ordinary people, to a writer no-one is ordinary—among non-literary people. Which does not imply that they do not read, only that their reading does not take place in the matrix of culture most literature presupposes.
    And here there must be a self-correction again. The suggestions are raised as much by the contradictions between literary theory—which, of course, is concerned with the reader’s perceptions as well as the writer’s conscious and subconscious intentions—and the actual life experience of the man or woman on the receiving end of all these deliberations: the generic reader. For the generic reader surely must be the one I have in mind when I answer that I write for ‘anyone who reads me’?
    More than twenty years ago, we were all entranced by or sceptical of (or both at once) the discoveries of structuralism and its analysis of our art and our relationship to the reader. The Freudian explanations we had gone by seemed simplistic and speculative by comparison. The subconscious was ectoplasm in contrast with the precise methodology of a work such as, say, Roland Barthes’ S/Z, published in 1970 on the basis of work done in the sixties. The whole emphasis of literature passed from writer to reader. Barthes’ goal was ‘to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text’, of ‘what