The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to several authors in English from sub-Saharan Africa—including Abdulrazak Gurnah, Doris Lessing, J. M. Coetzee, Wolé Soyinka, and Naguib Mahfouz. How do these writers resist colonial oppression in their work? The NYU SPS PALA course, Five African Nobel Laureates, will examine this question as well as uncover some of the problems and ironies of writing the nation, and engage with the aesthetics of contemporary narrative. Adjunct instructor Nicholas Birns will be teaching the course, which starts on March 14, 2023. We had the chance to talk to Birns about the seminal work of each of these authors, and why he feels this literature course is important.
Read on below for Birns’ course overview.
Why do you feel this literature course is important to teach?
NB: There are still not too many courses in literature departments specifically on African literature, in general, as opposed to one or two African novels being put in a world literature seminar. The award of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah presented an opportunity to develop a course on African Nobel Laureates that would be a way to focus on the entire body of African fiction as well as to further diversify and decolonize the literature curriculum. People in the United States, still know far too little about Africa, and reading these books is a way for us to learn more.
What is notable about each Laureate’s work?
Abdelrazak Gurnah
NB: Abdelrazak Gurnah has been living in Britain for many years, where he taught as a literature professor, but is ultimately from the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar. Zanzibar is now part of the nation of Tanzania, but have an independent history from the mainland, formerly Tanganyika, having far more Arab and Middle Eastern influence. Gurnah both excavates this distinct history and, in novels such as Gravel Heart, explores what it is to live in exile from it, and his work is set equally in the homeland and diaspora. Even when he deals, as he often does and does incisively, with personal or emotional relationships, it is always against this cultural background.
Doris Lessing
NB: Doris Lessing is famous as a writer of feminist fiction, such as The Golden Notebook, and speculative fiction, such as her Canopus in Argos series. But she started out as a writer about white settler colonialism in Southern Africa using predominantly social-realist and psychological modes. She grew up in what is now Zimbabwe and her first six novels are partially or entirely set there. We study her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which is a searing portrait of a marriage gone wrong but also an examination of what it is to be a white person in Africa. At once a crime novel and a portrait of people in a landscape, Lessing’s first novel is a compressed nightmare of squandered possibility.
J.M. Coetzee
NB: J. M. Coetzee became known as a writer who excavated the injustices of the apartheid system in South Africa. In his later work, he has explored issues such as displacement, animal rights, contemporary global capitalism, and how a writer can meaningfully speak in a way that is both creative and socially responsible. Disgrace is a hinge book between those two phases. Its protagonist, David Lurie, is an academic who loses his job after a disastrous love affair with a student and then goes out to the South African countryside to live with his adult daughter. When the two are victims of a violent crime, the protagonist finds that he has to adjust to the new realities of a decolonized Africa, and to take the true measure of himself as a person. That was a short novel, it is one of the texts I have taught that is most generative of discussion; every student has something to say about it, and very few will remain unaffected by its power.
Wolé Soyinka
NB: Soyinka has been a presence on the Nigerian literary scene almost as long as his country has been independent. His early poem “Telephone Conversation” memorably captures the racism facing an African student in London, and his plays, especially Death of the King’s Horsemen, and memoirs have been acclaimed worldwide. He is perhaps less famous as a novelist, but his recent novel (published at the age of 87!) Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, shows he is supremely accomplished in that form as well. This book is a scalding satire of corruption in contemporary Africa which also offers some hope that people will continue to strive for honor and dignity. It is a book as funny as it is prophetic.
Naguib Mahfouz
NB: Mahfouz was the great novelist of modern Egypt and especially the city of Cairo. But early in his career he also wrote some novels about ancient Egypt which I think broadened his sense of how people, cultures, and communities interrelate. We study his short novel Midaq Alley, in which the entire neighborhood the book depicts acts as a sort of protagonist. Midaq Alley as a community is a compassionate place which takes in outcasts and strangers, but also is a poor and marginal ghetto that some young people will pay any price to leave. Mahfouz deftly juxtaposes his ensemble of characters with the background of changing times in an Egypt on the verge of true national independence to bring a particular place vividly alive.
What do you hope students will take away from this course?
NB: A sense that African writers participate both in the literary cultures, in their nations and regions, but also in world literature. Something I have emphasized is that these writers are very critical of European colonization, but also do not shrink from challenging their own governments, and those in power in the postcolonial situation; this is particularly true of Soyinka and Gurnah. The writer is not a cheerleader for a given political configuration but an independent voice of conscience who can assume a long-term ethical perspective. There is no set of traits that define an African novel, but we see in this course several different visions which will give the student a picture of the building blocks of contemporary African literature.
Sign up for the Spring 2023 course, Five African Nobel Laureates.