Gods and Soldiers
By Samantha Fingerhut
A map of Africa will show that, as of 2009, there are 54 different nations. Roads and borderlines have been drawn and redrawn since the mid-19th century, with European settlers leaving their mark on Africa as muddy ruts and dried rivers.  Meanwhile Africans have always drawn their own paths as they enter a globalized world with keen insight and ripe possibility. Gods and Soldiers, a new anthology of African literature, edited by Rob Spillman of Tin House, captures this colorful reemergence of a continent the West has both influenced and forgotten.
An amalgam of modern and traditional fiction, short stories, and essays, Gods and Soldiers shows that African literature still retains its creative vengeance. Well known authors such as J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace) and Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) join new voices in a collection that addresses gender, the internet, and modern religion, as well as the fight for independence in the aftermath of post-colonial rule. The work selected, separated by region, is only a small sample of what is being produced (what Spillman calls a “mere bucket of sand in the Sahara”). But what has been put forth is inventive, sinewy, and brave. As Spillman says in the introduction, “these were stories that had to be written.”

What makes African literature so immediate, perhaps, is the fact that even in a fast-paced, interconnected world we might stop and contemplate how we’ve moved—or in some ways haven’t moved—from the past. In Patrice Nganang’s essay “The Senghor Complex,” for example, we are given a history of the Senegalese poet and president, Senghor, who was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and black nationalism. Only, “blackness”, Nganang reminds us, is a term that belongs solely to Westerners, and not Africans; and yet it has come to mean something across the Atlantic in Cameroon. With stark brevity and intellectual vigor, Nganang provides a cross-section of Senghor’s concept of “Negritude” as well as the Rwandan genocide and the limits of nationalism.

And while Francophone African literature shows the influence of the past, as well as its relevance for today, West African literature reflects on how one might move forward into the future. In “The African Writer and the English Language,” Chinua Achebe explains why he chooses to use English as opposed to his native language Ibo. With a global conscience Achebe reflects on how audiences might be reached, as well as how to transform some of the negative impositions of colonial rule into something positive; with 800 million people and 2,000 languages, English might be the only way to express, as Achebe says, “the weight of my African experience.” However, it is an English that belongs solely to Africans; a common language that encapsulates a bloody past as well as the chance for a bright future.

Each section—West Africa, Francophone Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Former Portuguese colonies, and Southern Africa—opens with essays such as Nganang’s and Achebe’s, which give insight into the different regions as well as provide context. From there, sections unfold into inventive, sometimes surreal or satirical territory. Each work of fiction gives a rich account of its region, but is powerful enough to stand on its own. In an excerpt from Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s novel The Book of Chameleons, Borges is reborn and a new race of people created; in Abdourahman A. Waberi’s brilliant work of satire, The United States of Africa, Africans, and not Americans, become the imperialists; and in an excerpt from Alain Mabanckou’s novel Broken Glass, we are given an account of Congo President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi in rambling, impressionistic sentences as well as a worldwide account of oppression with candor and wit.

Even more realistic fiction, such as Chris Abani’s excerpt from Becoming Abigail, is teeming with haunting and imaginative allusion. As a young girl remembers her mother’s funeral, a memory becomes uncertain although it’s feeling is palpable and real:

Always in this memory she stood next to her father, a tall whip of blackness like an undecided but upright cobra. And he held her hand in his, another lie. He was silent, but tears ran down his face. It wasn’t the tears that bothered her. It was the way his body shuddered every few moments. Not a sob, it was more like his body was struggling to remember how to breathe, fighting the knowledge that most of him was riding in that coffin sinking into the dark soft loam.

It is in passages such as this that the mission of Gods and Soldiers is fully realized; when prose that cuts like ice has the power to melt the illusions—color, race, country—that we create. The best part about Gods and Soldiers, then, is not only that Africa has much to offer, but also that through written word we might still be able to find a way to express with eloquence and compassion the different lives we lead in a common world.
Samantha Fingerhut is a degree candidate at The New School, NYC

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