A Broader Notion of African Literature

For many American children of Wendy Laura Belcher’s generation, Africa was the land of Babar and of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, yodeling “Ungawa!” and swinging through the jungle in small-screen reruns. For Belcher, Africa was as close and as real as her backyard. In fact, it was her backyard. “My first memories are of Ethiopia,” she says. “That’s an extraordinary place to be a child, especially if you’re a reader, which over time I was.”

Belcher, 53, was 4 years old when her father, a doctor, took a job as an assistant professor of medicine at a public-health college in Gondar, once the capital of Ethiopia, and moved the family there. The setting she describes from those early years invokes storybooks and Scripture.

“There were oxen threshing grain like in the Bible, there were monasteries with monks making illuminated manuscripts, there was a castle with a moat in my backyard,” Belcher recalls. “It was a kind of enchanted place.”

It’s also a place with a tradition of written literature that dates back to before the Christian era and persists today. Belcher recalls how on a return trip to the country in 1974, when she was 12, she and her family hiked up to Qwasqwam, a monastery in the country’s highlands, and watched the monks writing with ink on fresh parchment pages. “Highland Ethiopians converted to Christianity in the fourth century, adopted monasticism from Egypt, started making bound books by the sixth century, and have a vast original literature in their language,” Belcher says.

So she was not prepared for the questions she got when, after three years in Ethiopia, then six in Ghana, her family returned permanently to the United States. “These places that I thought of as intellectually effervescent were seen as blank darkness,” she says. “‘Oh, did you live in a tree? Did you have lions in your backyard?’”

“It was a very catalyzing experience at the age of 14,” she says. “Everything has come from that year of trying to explain to people it’s not what you think it is.”

As she later found, even literary scholars haven’t been immune to naïveté about Africa. Many have been slow to recognize that the continent has a long, diverse history of written as well as oral storytelling and record-keeping, and that African ideas have influenced Western writers, even though African writers’ responses to colonialism and its aftermath have gotten the lion’s share of the attention.

Her early experience ultimately led Belcher to the work she’s doing today, with a joint appointment in Princeton University’s comparative-literature department and its Center for African American Studies. In that hybrid position, she is calling attention to the complex history of African literatures, and the longstanding give-and-take between the continent’s storytellers and those elsewhere. It’s a history of mutual influence that stretches back centuries before the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe published his touchstone novel Things Fall Apart in 1958.

Belcher’s academic and professional path took several turns before it led her back to Africa. She did her undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke College, and went on to write a memoir, Honey From the Lion: An African Journey (E.P. Dutton, 1988), about returning to Ghana to work with a literacy group during college. Critics liked it, but one “thought the book was a little politically naïve,” Belcher says. “I thought that was true. I was a little too much the English major, which had been my undergraduate degree. I needed a better understanding of how the world worked and how Africa was inserted into the global system.”

She worked for a number of years as a freelance journalist and editor, and eventually went to graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she did a master’s degree in African studies and another in urban planning, drawn to that program by work being done there on Africa and globalization. She contributed to the university’s African Bibliography Project, and in 2001 went back to earn her doctorate in literature. “That had always been my first love,” she says. “I just needed to do it in a way more informed by the political and economic conditions of African literature.” She pursued the Ph.D. while holding down a job as the executive editor at the university’s Chicano Studies Research Center.

For her Ph.D., Belcher opted to concentrate in 18th-century British literature, motivated partly by a sense that there weren’t many jobs to be had in African literature.

Even with her personal experience of Africa, Belcher says, she discovered that she had fallen into the prevailing assumption that African literature really began with Things Fall Apart. Like many Westerners, she picked up most readily on how Africans reacted to European ideas rather than how influence ran in the opposite direction. “It’s easy to see yourself in the other,” she says. “It’s harder to see the other in yourself.”

Her doctoral program called her attention to earlier writers like Olaudah Equiano, an 18th-century Nigerian author who wrote an English-language autobiography of his life before and after he was sold into slavery. “Once I’d seen Equiano, my brain could open up and I could say ‘OK, there must be others. What happens if I go and look for them?”

But it was Samuel Johnson, a mainstay of 18th-century British literary studies, who led Belcher back to her African roots and the study of African literary production. Writing about influences on Johnson, Belcher became intrigued by his interest in Jesuit accounts of their attempts to convert Ethiopians to “true” Christianity.

“He had every book ever published about Ethiopians in his library,” she says. “And he thought it would make money, which was not true, to translate one of these travel accounts.”

The book he chose to translate was A Voyage to Abyssinia by the Portuguese missionary Jeronimo Lobo. Johnson undertook the work during what Belcher calls “a difficult period” of malaise and spiritual uncertainty, which may have made him especially open to Ethiopian concepts recorded in the book.

In her 2012 book, Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author (Oxford University Press), Belcher explores how Johnson’s engagement with Ethiopia by way of the Jesuits infiltrated his own work, most obviously The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia but other works as well.

In her analyses of Johnson and in other writings, Belcher has been developing a concept she calls “discursive possession": how ideas from one culture enter and animate (a verb Belcher particularly likes) the literature of another, in this case African ideas in the Western canon. The idea builds on work done by Simon Gikandi, a professor of English at Princeton; in his 1996 book, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (Columbia University Press), he asked why there hadn’t been more work done on how non-Europeans influenced Europe.

In her analysis of Samuel Johnson’s work, Belcher noted how the English author picked up on a recurring theme in Ethiopian writing: what she calls the “Ethiopians’ magnificent lie that they could control the Nile and ruin Egypt by cutting it off.” He incorporated that into the character of the astronomer in Rasselas and into shorter fables, and Ethiopians’ representations of their land as a place of mountain paradises and mystical wells and rivers “emerged repeatedly in Johnson’s fiction,” she says. And Ethiopian women who loom large in the Jesuits’ accounts — and in the history of Ethiopians’ resistance to attempts to be converted to the foreigners’ version of Christianity — found a second life in the female characters in Rasselas.

Belcher is not the only literature scholar who has attempted to call greater attention to the interplay among Western and African texts. She and a few other like-minded researchers say that the long history of African literature gets more attention and is taken more seriously in fields like history, anthropology, and folklore than in literary studies. The African Literature Association, founded in 1974 to study and promote African literary and cultural work, rarely features papers on pre-20th-century African literature, Belcher says, adding that few scholars write about it, even though prominent scholars such as Albert S. Gérard, Abena Busia, and Thomas A. Hale have called for more research on the topic.

“She’s absolutely right,” says Hale, an emeritus professor of African, French, and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. He’s a founder and past president of the African Literature Association. He recalls that a few years ago, when he wanted to organize a panel on early African literature at the association’s annual meeting, Belcher was the only person who responded. “Nobody’s interested,” he says.

The debate over how much is being studied, and by whom, extends to contemporary African literature. Last year, Aaron Bady, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, took Wai Chee Dimock, a professor of English at Yale University, to task in a Chronicle blog post for being surprised by how many recent job candidates had a specialty in African literature. Bady and Dimock, along with Belcher, will appear on a panel about global African literatures at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association early next year.

Even when scholars and students are interested in broader investigations of African literary history, they don’t always have the means to pursue them. Anthonia C. Kalu, a professor of African-American and African studies at Ohio State University and another past president of the African Literature Association, is about to take a job as a professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Riverside. According to Kalu, courses on African literature tend to get shunted into the category of international or global literature, often one of several courses that students can take to satisfy general-education requirements. She says, “When you finish that, there’s nothing to move up to”; there are few advanced courses, for instance.

In order to get jobs, then, scholars have had to adopt more marketable specializations. “In the past couple of decades the focus has been on postcolonial theory, and postcolonial theory does not lend itself to ancient African literary anything,” Kalu says. The effect “has been to discourage any in-depth discussion of the African condition itself.”

Access to older written material can also be a hurdle. The places where scholars might go to look for intriguing literary texts — libraries and mission archives scattered around the continent, for instance — are often vulnerable to wars and political instability or are just difficult to get to, especially for researchers lacking funds or local language skills.

And not enough African literature, particularly the older material that interests Belcher, is available in translation, though there have been anthologies and series published sporadically over the last 30 years or so. Two lingering issues continue to hinder scholarship on African literature, according to Tejumola Olaniyan: What’s available that scholars can read, and what counts as literature?

Olaniyan, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and current president of the African Literature Association, points to a handful of works that have tried to fill the gap. Those include Gérard’s African Language Literatures: An Introduction to the Literary History of Sub-Saharan Africa (Longman, 1981), S.E. Ogude’s Genius in Bondage: A Study of the Origins of African Literature in English (University of Ife Press, 1983), and The Rienner Anthology of African Literature, edited by Kalu (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007).

Belcher “is doing excellent work — in the tradition of Gérard and others — in expanding the narrow definition of what is currently popularly known as ‘literature’ to include a variety of writings such as sermons, hymns, court chronicles, and so on,” Olaniyan says by email. “Many scholars don’t yet think of African literature in this way, but the problem is because of the inaccessibility of those materials either in print or in the languages in which they are written,” he says. “European languages are, after all, the languages of education and social mobility in much of Africa.”

For a scholar like Anthonia Kalu, that complicates Belcher’s picture of written literature produced in Africa. “Writing by Africans about African narrative traditions does not take off in the way that we’re talking about it here until toward the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” Kalu says. Before that, other than writings in Egypt and in the Ethiopian highlands, most of what one finds “is going to be written in Arabic by converts, or in European languages.”

Eileen Julien has been thinking about the swirl and scope of African linguistic and literary traditions as part of the editorial team preparing a four-volume history of world literature, under contract to Blackwell. Julien, a professor of comparative literature and African studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, directs the university’s Institute for Advanced Study.

She gives a quick tour of some of the historical and geographical hot spots that mark Africa’s literary landscape, though their significance isn’t always appreciated. For instance, ancient Egypt, with its rich written culture, “has been spirited away from the continent,” she says; she’d like to see it re-examined as a major influence on the rest of Africa as well as on the Middle East. “There’s also literature on the Swahili coast, and there’s an incredible amount of Arabic literature, once the Arabs invade and conquer North Africa,” she says.

As Arabs moved further into the continent, Arabic script traveled with them and was widely adapted as a tool for writing down local languages. “Basically we don’t know that material because we are all very much invested in and schooled in the postcolonial tradition, and we don’t look much beyond that,” Julien says. “What really interests us is the moment when Europe conquers Africa.”

Julien also mentions Ethiopia and “the incredible body of language in Ge‘ez,” or Ethiopic, a precursor of modern Amharic. It’s still used as liturgical language in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, as the Ethiopian church is usually known, and is the language of the illustrated manuscripts that Belcher first saw as a child and that she’s returned to as a scholar.

Belcher’s current project, “The Black Queen of Sheba: The Global History of an Idea,” examines medieval and early-modern Ethiopian retellings of the story of Solomon and Sheba. According to Belcher, the legend of an African Queen of Sheba ultimately produced a 14th-century novel, the Kebra Nagast. “Its African Christian portrayal of the Queen of Sheba differs radically from other versions in depicting a queen wiser, purer, and more powerful than any man, one so strong she could take the Ark of the Covenant from King Solomon,” Belcher says. She makes the case that the book stands as one of the most important medieval texts, one whose impact can be seen in the development of Rastafarianism, in the stories of H. Rider Haggard, and in the Indiana Jones movies.

Belcher has also been consumed by Ethiopian hagiographies, written versions of saints’ lives that date back as far as the late 1300s and that also feature a number of powerful women. Recently Belcher spent a year in Ethiopia on a Fulbright scholarship, visiting monasteries and examining the texts firsthand. Most are still part of the working life of the religious communities that have housed and preserved them for centuries.

Belcher claims that her Ge‘ez skills are “primitive.” That’s not the kind of admission that a more traditional comparative-literature scholar would be likely to make, but it says something about how the field needs to adapt and become more collaborative as it becomes more global in range and pulls in hitherto understudied languages and literatures. She’s built a team of colleagues with whom she works on translations. Her collaborators include Selamawit Mecca, an assistant professor of Ethiopian languages and literature at Addis Ababa University, whose research specialty is female saints.

With Michael Kleiner, a translator who lives in Germany, Belcher has prepared a translation of The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A 17th-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman, forthcoming this year from Princeton University Press. Walatta Petros (1592-1642) was a member of the Ethiopian nobility who became a nun. She was one of several high-born women who fought the Portuguese Jesuits’ attempts to convert Ethiopians to their version of Christianity (the episode in Ethiopian history that fascinated Samuel Johnson). Written by an Ethiopian monk 30 years after her death, the book could be the first biography of an African woman written by an African, according to Belcher.

Beyond inviting Western scholars to expand their definition of African literature, Belcher’s work challenges some Ethiopian cultural assumptions as well. As she and Kleiner worked on their translation of the Walatta Petros hagiography, for instance, they encountered a scene that puzzled them. The monk-biographer recounts how, in a conversation with her abbot, Walatta Petros describes having seen some nuns making a commotion. The word she uses to describe the action wasn’t clear to Belcher and Kleiner. After comparing different versions of the manuscript, they concluded that the word they’d first translated as “shoving” was actually one that means “being lustful.” The nuns weren’t fighting but being romantic.

That idea is anathema in the Ethiopian church, “which is on record as saying that homosexuality is a Western import and that it doesn’t exist in these texts,” Belcher says. When she gave a talk about the episode at UCLA, she says, some Ethiopians in the audience approached her. “They were very unhappy. They were polite. But one of them said, ‘May God forgive you your blasphemy.’” That’s not something most comparative literature scholars ever hear.

Belcher’s unusual background and combination of academic interests might have left her without a natural academic home. Instead she’s found two at Princeton. Sandra L. Bermann, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton, was the chair of the department when Belcher was hired. “We were looking for someone who would be able to bring African studies into the department,” Bermann says. That fits with what she sees as a renewed interest in expanding the field beyond a European focus. The idea goes back to Goethe, “but it got lost in the mix,” she says. “There’s an attempt not to remain Eurocentric in our teaching and in our scholarship.”

Belcher’s courses are popular with undergraduates, Bermann says. And though Belcher downplays her Ge‘ez skills, she has organized a Ge‘ez class as well as setting an example of the kind of collaborative scholarship that’s more and more necessary in the field. “She’s encouraged a lot of language learning even if she doesn’t present herself as an expert,” Bermann says. (She also thinks Belcher’s Ge‘ez is better than she lets on.)

Eddie Glaude Jr., a professor of religion and African-American studies, directs Princeton’s Center for African American Studies, where Belcher also holds an appointment. Ethiopian hagiographies might seem far removed from the center’s focus, but Glaude says that African-American studies looks beyond the United States: Diaspora and the interplay of cultures run through it. “We’re building in this area, and we think we can create some really wonderful African studies,” he says. “Wendy’s work is absolutely central to what we do.”

From that perspective, Belcher’s brand of hybrid scholarship looks not idiosyncratic but like the wave of the future.