I grew up reading books like every other privileged, self-styled academic. It progressed pretty seamlessly from being read to by my mom, to reading picture books on my own, to consuming novels with fewer pictures and more pages. By high school, I was comfortably reading 300-page novels, some with relish and some with a cornucopia of eye-rolling and yawning. In college, I did a BA in English Literature, which confirmed for me that the novel was literature. Sure, we read some poetry, short stories, and Shakespeare (and talked about other playwrights who supposedly mattered, though not enough to read), but the syllabi were dominated by novels. This was fine by me—I’d been training my whole life for this armchair marathon.
During my undergraduate studies, I did a semester abroad in Ghana to study African traditional religion and African literature. In my Ghanaian literature class, I was assigned books which no one knew how to find, and when I finally got my hands on them, I was surprised to find that A) half of them were drama and B) the novels were suspiciously slim. I blew through Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes, Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments. I didn’t complain that they were all under 200 pages because I finished them twice as fast and I was trained to analyze the imagery in novels, not the metadata. I didn’t even question why all these books were originally written in English. I do remember, however, being disappointed by the relatively few Ghanaian novels I could find. I wanted to “discover” a vibrant, local African literary tradition that was like the one I came from, just more colorful.
It’s clear to me now that I went to Ghana looking for the Ghanaian novel, not Ghanaian literature. I had been so indoctrinated by my culture’s definition of literature as the novel that the two were inextricable, interchangeable. It would take several more years in this specific field for me to deconstruct this idea.
The novel’s imperial roots
The truth is that the novel is a weird, arbitrary thing and it hasn’t been with humanity for very long. It specifically arose in late 18th-century England when the middle-class population and literacy rates started to rise, and when commercialization was becoming rampant. This new, literate demographic with disposable incomes created a boom market for print media and created “the author,” someone who could make a living doing nothing but sitting at a desk and churning out pages and pages of prose[1]. Since authors could suddenly write all day every day and demand for written entertainment was growing, books got longer and longer. For the first time in history, it was possible, fashionable, and profitable to write as many huge, monolithic tomes as possible.
Okay, good for England. But as Wendy Griswold asks in her book Bearing Witness, “What does this literary relic of eighteenth-century England have to do with the lives of contemporary West Africans anyway?” How did this weird, local, 18th-century English literary phenomenon pop up all over the world and become the de facto ruler of literary studies in the 20th and 21st centuries?
Unfortunately, the British Empire was a thing. Shortly after the novel was created, the Victorian Era commenced and England took over almost a quarter of the earth, spreading their Victorian values and culture wherever they went. Since they were obsessed with the novel at the time, the British imposed it on everyone else – it was assigned in classrooms in colonies all over the world. This was, of course, enormously advantageous for anyone writing in English, who could now export their writing to British colonies, and indigenous people had basically no choice in what to read if they wanted to pass school and be part of “civilized society.” The folks living under occupation in these colonies caught on to the marketability of the English novel and some of them capitalized on it, some going a step further to “write back to the Empire” as a form of resistance. Some of them are extremely good, and I revel in African novels whenever I get the chance. Still, the novel is an arbitrary mode of writing that just doesn’t fit in most avenues of African society.
The novel displaces culture
The first problem is that the novel is inherently individualistic. Both its creation and consumption are solo—even anti-social—activities. This clashes with the social value of community engagement in cultures across West Africa. Taking Nigeria as an example, Griswold points out that “Nigerian individualism conflicts with communal obligations toward kinsmen, townsmen, and tribe, and it is by no means certain that an individualist orientation is displacing the collective one.” Cloistering oneself in a room somewhere, cutting oneself off from the community, to read or write long fiction seems strange or even offensive to many people.
The second problem is that novels are long. They can take days or weeks of focused reading to finish, which can be awkward in cultures where stories take half an hour to tell. Even today in the UK, the average “literary” novel can easily reach 120,000 words[2], but novels in West Africa tend to be much shorter. According to Griswold, only 14% of Nigerian novels are over 100,000 words, and those tend to be published outside Nigeria. These lengths can be prohibitive and daunting to less educated demographics. The long, heavy, bound, glossy-covered novel I grew up with is also extremely expensive to the majority of Africans. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—perhaps the most famous Kenyan writer—believed that the lower classes should appropriate the novel and noted in Decolonising the Mind that “the novel, at least the form that reached us in Africa, is of bourgeois origins”. Of course, Africans should make and have made the novel their own, and it should be honored and studied on its own terms, but it still remains an awkward, expensive, and classist genre for much of the population.
I still love the novel—I always will—but I have to recognize that it’s a problem in Africa and probably other cultures around the world. Just because it’s a mainstay of my insane literary tradition doesn’t mean I condone forcing it on other literary traditions. I encourage all of us to set down our 400-page preconceptions and expand our understanding of what “literature” is and can be.
Part of
this blog post is taken from my master’s thesis, “The Potential for a
Successful and Sustainable Twi-Language Literary Magazine in Rural Ghana”
[1] Griswold, Wendy. Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria. Princeton University Press, 2000.
[2] Bingham, Harry. “How Many Words Are There in a Novel?” Jericho Writers, https://jerichowriters.com/average-novel-wordcount/. Accessed 29 August 2019.
